Everything We Ever Wanted. Sara Shepard
her, and sucked.
That first night, when she just thought James wasn’t coming home, when she figured it was retaliation for what she’d brought up the night before, she’d taken off this ring and buried it at the bottom of her jewelry box, hating what it meant. Then she’d gone into James’s office and looked hard at the room. James’s infuriatingly clean desk, the stack of blank computer paper next to the printer, the Lucite plaques on the bookshelf. She’d walked in and touched the bare spot on the bookshelf where she’d found the little box that held the bracelet. A film of pale gray dust had stuck to the pad on her finger.
The ring tasted like cold metal. Maybe it was primal, like a child sucking on a pacifier. Only after Sylvie let the stone click against her teeth and press on her tongue did her pulse begin to settle down.
In no time Sylvie found herself pulling up the hill to Swithin, the school resplendent at the top. The guard at the gate recognized her right away. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Bates-McAllister!’ he cried. ‘So nice to see you!’ He waved her right through.
Sylvie loved this drive up the Swithin lane, how the school rose up before her, all stone and brick, with its spires and bell tower and flags and dazzling green fields beyond. There wasn’t a tree branch out of place. The steps and windowsills and sidewalks were swept twice a day. One of Sylvie’s earliest memories was of her grandfather bringing her into the library and showing her the rare books. ‘These were almost lost forever,’ he told her. And then he wove the tale of the fire, how it had caught in the east wing classrooms and spread into the gymnasium horribly fast, burning half the school to the ground before the firefighters even arrived at the scene. When her grandfather surveyed the damage the day after, he sobbed. ‘It was just so sad,’ he told Sylvie. ‘I felt like the school was calling out to me, Please don’t let me go.’ Whenever he got to that part of the story, tears always welled in Sylvie’s eyes.
Since it was the Depression and no one had any money to spare, Charlie Roderick Bates financed rebuilding Swithin with his own money and resources. He used materials from the countless limestone quarries and brick foundries he owned to pour the new foundation and rebrick the walls. Recreating the school from scratch provided a lot of jobs, so he was a hero several times over, hiring Polish and Italian crews to do the construction, even providing duties for people in the black neighborhoods. ‘But we had to make great sacrifices during that time,’ he told Sylvie. ‘I paid everyone’s wages. I bought all the materials.’ ‘Did you have to move out of your house, Charlie Roderick?’ Sylvie asked – her grandfather got a kick out of her calling him by both his names. He shook his head and told her that no, they were able to remain in the house, but Sylvie’s father, who was a young child at the time, wasn’t allowed new riding gear. His wife, Sylvie’s grandmother, couldn’t travel to Paris. They didn’t have their annual Christmas party. ‘Did you still have a tree?’ Sylvie asked. He nodded, patting her head, ‘Yes, of course. We still had a tree.’
Those afternoons with her grandfather were filled with peppermint tea and chocolate chip cookies on the estate’s enormous back porch. They watched the swans in the pond, which were probably the grandparents or great-grandparents of the swans that lived there now. They sat at the Steinway baby grand piano that was still in the music room today. He played Chopin for her, his fingers kissing the keys. When Sylvie saw her mother’s car wending up the driveway, her heart would plummet. Her own house was dark, the blinds pulled tight. Doors in different wings eased quietly shut; her parents rarely spent any time together except for meals. Sylvie hated eating with her parents most of all; they never spoke during those taut dinners, the only sounds the clinking forks and the scraping plates and the chewing. When Sylvie couldn’t stand another second of silence, she’d burst out with something her grandfather told her that day, even though her parents had heard the stories plenty of times before. ‘Did you know Charlie Roderick let some of the people who worked on Swithin stay at his house?’ she’d crow. ‘Did you know he worked even on his birthday?’ But this just angered her mother, Clara, even more, and she often wearily snapped, ‘Your grandfather isn’t the messiah you think he is. Those people who rebuilt the school? The ones he let stay at his house? Fat chance he let their children go to Swithin. Even if they’d scrimped and saved all their money, he never let those kinds of kids in.’
And then Clara would glance at Sylvie’s father, Theodore, as if daring him to scold her for saying such things about his family. Sylvie’s father never took the bait, though, his eyes fixed on his Wall Street Journal, his jaw working his food.
Sylvie didn’t understand what her mother meant by those kinds of kids. It wasn’t until she was in middle school and heard a few other similar rumors that she finally worked out what her mother was implying, but by then she refused to believe it. Everyone was jealous of the Bates family, including Sylvie’s mother, who had come from a good family, but not as good. And anyway, her mother was bitter and meanspirited about everything and everyone. It was obvious why Sylvie’s father was around increasingly less and less, conducting most of his business out of New York – Sylvie would have escaped to New York, too, forever avoiding those crypt-quiet dinners, her mother’s inimical remarks, all those heaving sighs through her nose. Her mother had once been more involved in Sylvie’s life, for Sylvie remembered how she’d given Sylvie a dollhouse for Christmas when she was six. She’d even helped Sylvie to select more furniture for it from a big, glossy dollhouse catalogue. And Sylvie used to slip her hand into her mother’s when they walked through the revolving doors at the Strawbridge & Clothier department store in Philadelphia, snug and secure in her mother’s grip. Something had happened to her mother in the years between, though, something that seemingly couldn’t be reversed.
When she was about thirteen, Sylvie called her father at the hotel he usually stayed at in New York, wanting to know if she could take the train up and visit him. She thought that once outside their dour house, her father would be more like his father, the great Charlie Roderick Bates. The hotel concierge connected Sylvie to her father’s room. A woman answered. Sylvie said she must’ve dialed the wrong room and went to hang up. ‘Are you looking for Teddy?’ the woman asked. ‘Who?’ Sylvie said. ‘Theodore,’ the woman corrected. ‘He’s in the shower.’
Sylvie put the phone back into its cradle, her heart beating fast. Teddy. She couldn’t imagine her father being called that. It seemed weak, childish, a stuffed bear flung on a bed.
After that, Sylvie drifted from both her parents. Whenever anyone teased her at school, she sobbed into her grandfather’s lap, feeling like he was the only person in the world who liked her, who made time for her. ‘Don’t worry about any of them,’ he said softly. ‘You’re different than everyone. You’re better. Someday, all this will be yours.’
‘All what?’ Sylvie had asked. But he hadn’t elaborated. Perhaps he meant the house, knowing even then that he would bequeath it to her, skipping right over his only son. Or maybe Charlie meant the school. Maybe he meant the whole world.
Now, Sylvie parked her car and turned off the engine. Her heels clicked across the parking lot. The flag in the middle of the lot was at half-staff, and there was a small, red ribbon tied around the pole, although she wasn’t sure what it signified. She looked for other evidence of the boy’s death – a picture of him on one of the glass-paned doors that led to the lobby, for instance, or a collection plate in his memory on the arched, wooden sign-in desk, but there was nothing else. Photographs of the class officers hung next to the flag. A large stuffed hawk, the school mascot, sat on top of the secretary’s desk. There was a big poster for an upcoming school play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Inside the auditorium, she heard a piano, then someone singing, probably a late choir practice. There was no scrawled, accusatory graffiti about wrestlers and hazing and suicide across the lobby walls. There were no We Miss You, Christian flyers strewn across the lobby couches and chairs. The song in the auditorium didn’t sound funereal, either, but something Sylvie vaguely recognized from a Rogers & Hammerstein musical.
The others were already in the library. They were sitting on the leather couches, a pot of tea on the large, low coffee table. When they saw her, they stood.
‘Sylvie.’ Daniel Girard held out his