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Sylvie’s mother cornered her in the pantry right before dinner, the ice in her gimlet rattling. “I guess congratulations are in order,” she said coolly. “But really, he’s the one I should congratulate. I bet he thinks he hit the jackpot. ”
Sylvie tried not to take it personally. Her mother had been drinking all day; she had said nasty things to everyone. The second after the last bite of pumpkin pie had been swallowed, Sylvie’s dad—who by then was living almost exclusively in New York but had made an appearance at the old house for tradition’s sake—promptly stood up and announced he had a big meeting in the morning, telling everyone good-bye except his wife. Her mother screamed out, “You don’t have a meeting, you dumb shit. You’re going back to the city to fuck that whore in the ass and everyone here knows it. ” Years later, Sylvie would learn that her mother had found out about the metastatic lump in her breast the day before, which might have explained her behavior. Her mother would keep the lump a secret from the rest of the family, though, even long after the disease had spread to her bones.
Later, when Sylvie and James were driving back to Swarthmore, they stopped for gas. When Sylvie looked over, she saw her father’s Lincoln across the parking lot, its lights off. Her father was just sitting there in the car, staring straight ahead. After filling up the tank, James got back into the car and followed her anxious gaze. His eyes lit up. “Would you mind if I went over and talked to him for a minute?”
Sylvie let out a nervous chuckle, certain James was kidding, but James shrugged, his face open, earnest, and hopeful. Sylvie realized then how little she knew him.
“I don’t think now’s a good time,” she said slowly.
James’s gaze lingered on her father for a little longer, and then he hunched his shoulders. Sylvie still didn’t know what he was thinking, and her heart began to beat faster. After a while, he turned to her. “It’s just, I thought he’d offer me a job tonight. You know, since we’re getting married and all. ”
“He runs my grandfather’s quarries and brickyards,” she cried out. “You certainly don’t want to do that. It’s worse than plaster. ”
“No, I meant … something else. Like an executive job. ”
Sylvie’s family business was far out of her control, something she’d never been involved in. And she had no pull over her father; she hadn’t for some time. More than that, her father might flat-out refuse. He was bitter, she knew, that she’d gotten the house instead of him—why should he toss her new fiance a cushy job?
“I think Cousin Paul’s idea was a better one,” she said finally. “Finance. That sounds exciting. ”
A look of embarrassment crossed James’s face. “Well,” he said. “Forget I said anything. ”
He started the car, drove her back to Swarthmore, and pecked her good-bye impersonally on the cheek. Days passed and he didn’t call. She tried reaching him in Boston, but he didn’t answer. What had gone wrong? What had he expected of her? Had her mother been righttherI bet he thinks he hit the jackpot?
Then, eight days after Thanksgiving, she found a message slip under her door saying he was on his way down to the city and could she please meet him at 30th Street Station. She found him standing in front of a flower stand, holding a single pink rose. He’d found a job at Janney Montgomery Scott, he said. He was moving to Philly the following week. He’d rented an apartment on Pine Street, and he would live there until they were married.
Authority had been restored in him. The crackling, unstable insecurity she’d seen in the car on Thanksgiving night was gone. Sylvie was so relieved that she didn’t bring up her annoyance over his weeklong chilly silence … or what it meant.
N ow Sylvie squared her shoulders and got out of the car. The air was cool and soggy, and dew had collected on the grass. Wind blew the edges of her hair. She’d picked up a cup of coffee at a drivethrough Burger King a few miles back, and steam swirled around her face. She would be a woman out for a leisurely stroll with a cup of coffee, a woman alone with her thoughts.
Far away she heard a car alarm and then two people screaming at each other. There was an upended garbage can across the path; McDonald’s hamburger wrappers, bottles of beer, and a soiled diaper spilled out onto the scrubby grass. On second thought, the idea of her coming here to be meditative was ridiculous. This wasn’t an idyllic park, a nature trail. People didn’t perambulate around places like this.
And then Sylvie saw it, under a tree just twenty feet away: a bunch of flowers, a lit candle, a photo. It was the same photo of Christian they’d had at the board meeting, his sour expression, those innocent freckles, that green hair. The photo was eight by ten, cut out from a contact sheet. When Sylvie circled the tree—looking over her shoulder again, pricking up her ears to listen for snaps of cameras or gasps of onlookers—she saw that someone had stuck the photo to the tree trunk with a wad of fluorescent-yellow gum.
She stared at Christian’s picture. She’d recognized him instantly the other day; she always noticed boys like him. Not long before James died, Sylvie had been driving home from the mall one weekend and noticed two boys standing at the edge of a yard near an intersection. One boy looked normal enough; Sylvie barely noticed him. But the boy next to him had that green hair. He’d painted his face white. There was heavy eye shadow around his eyes and red lipstick sloppily applied to his mouth, so one corner of his mouth was an exaggerated grin, stretching up to his cheekbone. His face had almost caused her to crash. But he was talking to the other boy as if he looked perfectly acceptable, almost as if he was daring people to think otherwise.
The Joker , she’d realized later. From Batman. That’s who he was dressed as. But it had been nowhere near Halloween.
She next saw him marching with the Swithin team at one of Scott’s wrestling meets. Someone must have made Christian wash the hair dye out, though tinges of green still showed at his scalp. This time, he wore a cape. Or perhaps cloak was a better word; the thing was brown, possibly made of a potato sack. A ripple went through the crowd, followed by a few giggles and jeers. Christian was trying to dress like someone or something this time, too?a character from a Tolkien book or a creature from a sci-fi movie. Sylvie quickly searched for Scott, who was standing by the line of chairs set up for the wrestlers, watching them march in. Scott clearly saw Christian, but his expression hadn’t changed. He seemed neither intrigued nor annoyed by the boy. It was almost as though he didn’t see him at all.
In a funny way, Christian reminded her of Scott. Not that Scott dressed in costumes, but he had his way of challenging who and what he was expected to be. At the match, Sylvie wished she knew who Christian’s parents were. She wanted to ask if it was hard for them to have a son who didn’t act like everyone else. You give them so much, you send them to the best school, and they just spit it all back in your face, she would say. Do you feel that way, too?
Sylvie gazed at Feverview’s square, dirty windows, trying to imagine Warren Givens waking up this morning, the reality of his son’s death raw and unrelenting. Passing by the bathroom where he found him. Or perhaps it had been in the bedroom or maybe at the bottom of a dingy stairwell. Wherever it had happened, it was probably somewhere Mr. Givens had to see every day.
Maybe he still held conversations with his son. Maybe he was able to forget the negative things about Christian, all of that irrelevant after death. Maybe he could now say all the things to Christian he hadn’t been able to get out when the boy was alive. Maybe he made all the wrongs right, misunderstandings understood. Maybe the father’s leaden heart lifted when he found something personal of Christian’s—a torn-off note wedged inside a book he was reading or an inscription on a mix CD left in the downstairs stereo. Maybe he would find warning signs, too, indications of deep, unspoken torment. A quickly scribbled poem mentioning names of all those who hurt him, including the name of a consenting adult. A name that was recognizable, hyphenated.
A door to the apartment complex opened, and a man
paused under the awning. He wore a gray Windbreaker and shabby blue pants. When he noticed the collection of items by the tree, he winced, but then settled down on a bench nearby.
At once, Sylvie knew. She didn’t know how, she just did. She had nothing to go by except instinct. No pictures, no memory of him at any of the school functions, where she and the other board members were supposed to say hello to all the parents but usually concentrated on a select, deep-pocketed few, and yet, she was sure. It was in the way he slowly trudged along. It was in how his fingers nervously played with the lapel of his jacket.
Warren Givens leaned against the back of the bench, his face jowly and creased. Sylvie oscillated between wanting to hide and wanting to inspect him closer. She tried to imagine this man taking green-haired Christian out to dinner, balking as everyone stared at his son’s cloak, his clown-white skin, his lipstick. She got it, she could tell him. She could recount the times she’d entertained people in the dining room, and although—or maybe because—she always begged Scott to stay in his bedroom, he inevitably rolled past, not saying hello, not being even remotely polite to her guests, looking like such a hoodlum.
It was that he exchanged was for were, despite the fact that they’d sent him to private school and where she knew, definitely, that he’d learned simple grammar and tense, despite the fact that they’d gotten him a tutor for ninth-grade English and tenth-grade geometry and eleventh-grade history, English again, and economics, and in twelfth grade just throwing in the towel and crossing their fingers and toes that he did well enough to squeak by and graduate. It was the fact that he sucked his teeth and walked like a gorilla, all hunched over with his arms swinging low, his eyes flickering here and there, as if looking for—what? An assailant? Someone in a different gang? But, was he in a gang? What drugs was he using? There had been marijuana, she knew; she smelled it on his jackets when he used to come in from hanging out with his nameless, faceless, empty-voices-on-the-answering-machine friends. She’d sent James to talk with him about it, but nothing had been achieved. She read books about how marijuana was a gateway drug; the terminology made her think of Scott boarding a train made of hemp leaves, riding it express to a carved-out tunnel full of crack pipes. And yet what could she do? She wasn’t equipped to talk to him. All she knew how to do was to huddle—anxious and obsessive, rifling through the possibilities and what-ifs.
“Are you doing this to make a statement?” Sylvie had asked Scott after a dinner party. “Am I doing what?” Scott retorted. “Acting the way you do,” she tried. She felt so clumsy. Nothing was coming out right. “Acting like what?” he said. “Dressing like, like … that,” she fumbled, pointing to his oversize, untucked T-shirt. “This?” he pointed. “There’s nothing wrong with dressing like this. This is who I am. Sorry I don’t wear loafers and rugby shirts and I don’t shop at Brooks Brothers. ” His face pinched with each word, like the store and attire were curses.