Everything We Ever Wanted (2 page)

Scott raised his chin, gazing at her unflinchingly. Perhaps he knew what was going through her mind, what she was trying to figure out. She dared to peek back. He looked the same as he always did—disheveled and self-assured, lazily handsome. He obviously looked nothing like the other Bates-McAllisters, with their wide eyes and thin lips and ears that stuck out slightly. While Charles and Sylvie’s skin were pale, Scott’s was more of an olive tone, easily tanned and never blotchy. His facial features a curious, intriguing mix of cultures. It was one of the many things the family never talked about—that Scott wasn’t white. It both was and wasn’t an issue for them. They acted as though it didn’t matter, yet Joanna wondered if, subconsciously, it affected their every reaction.
Scott didn’t seem any different in the wake of the boy’s death. Certainly not weighted down or guilty about anything. If he was hiding something, the shame would be written all over his face, wouldn’t it?
Joanna lowered her eyes, realizing she’d been staring at him too long. “I should …” she said, ducking her head and teetering, idiotically, toward the kitchen.
“Leaving because of me?” he teased. When he smiled, he showed off long, wolflike teeth.
“Um, no. No!” Joanna sputtered. Her face felt hot. She scrambled for a pressing reason to be back in the kitchen but came up with nothing.
Scott stepped forward until he was just inches from her. He remained there, appraising Joanna, making up his mind about something. He was close enough that Joanna could smell cigarettes and soap on him, so close he might kiss her. She could see the V-shaped fibers in his sweatshirt and that the drawstring for his hood was tipped with silvery metal. He breathed in and out. She barely breathed at all. She felt so small and vulnerable next to him. Hummingbird-frail.
“Boo,” Scott whispered.
“Ha!” Joanna exclaimed, like she thought it was a joke, jumping a little.
Scott quickly receded. In seconds, he was at the front door. Once his back was to her, he held a dismissive hand over his head. “Later.”
The door banged shut. Joanna listened to his footsteps walking down the flagstone path. A car door slammed, the tires screeched. The heat kicked on, and an unsavory mix of dust, clove cigarettes, and varnish wafted through the vents. She remained in the hallway for a moment, raking her fingernails up and down her bare arms. There was a wet prickle of sweat on the back of her neck. Her skin felt flushed.
Boo.
When Joanna returned to the kitchen, she expected Charles and Sylvie to look up, instantly aware that something about her was askew. But their heads were pressed together close, whispering.
“But, Mom,” Charles was saying. “The call. Don’t you think—”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Sylvie interrupted.
Joanna took a step back and slid behind the wall. They hadn’t seen her.
“Still. You should call a lawyer. Just in case.” Charles hissed.
Joanna widened her eyes. So he did think a lawyer idea was a good idea.
There was the sound of rustling papers. “What would be the point of that?” Sylvie asked.
“Protection, obviously. It could mitigate things.”
Sylvie murmured something Joanna couldn’t hear. Then Charles sighed. “But what about what happened at the graduation party?” he whispered. “Remember? The fight in front of Bronwyn? Do you think that could be a link to this thing with Scott and the boys?”
“No,” his mother interrupted fast. “There’s no link between this and that.”
“How can you be so sure?” he pressed. Sylvie didn’t answer.
Joanna couldn’t stand it anymore. She tiptoed back to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, opened the sink taps the whole way so that Charles and Sylvie would hear them gushing. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her mouth was a small, crinkled O. Her skin was pallid, almost yellowish.
What had happened at the graduation party? Did Scott attack Charles? He’d never told her that.
She shut off the taps. And then she clomped across the living room, shaking the tension out of her hands. She even feigned a cough, as if all those other sounds weren’t enough. Sylvie and Charles were already snapped back to their cheerful selves by the time she walked through the doorway. They were waiting for her, smiling welcomingly.
“Everything all right?” Sylvie asked.
“Of course.” Joanna sat down, pulled an L.L. Bean catalog toward her, and whipped through the pages. Travel alarm clocks! Monogrammed tote bags! Pictures of vacationing families, all of them guileless and trouble-free!
So Charles and his mother were worried about Scott, but they were leaving Joanna out of it. Maybe because she wasn’t family, maybe because she wouldn’t understand, or maybe because she wasn’t important enough to know. There were so many possibilities. Joanna tried to conceal the mix of hurt and disappointment she felt as best she could, leaning over the pages, chuckling when they got to the travel section for pets. The manufacturer made a dog travel bed that could fold up to the size of a hackey sack. Imagine that.

F ischer Custom Editorial had been planned out carefully by designers and architects, perhaps even sociologists and psychiatrists. Individual workstations were private and quiet,

whereas the meeting rooms were bright, vivid, and provocative, overlooking Philadelphia’s City Hall. All the bathrooms were equidistant from where everyone sat. Even the items in the vending machines had probably been chosen after months of careful research—enough lowcalorie treats for dieters, enough Snickers and Milky Ways for bingers. Things with nuts and things without nuts. An assortment of teas and gourmet coffees. There was always wine and beer in the full-size fridge, and they had parties at 4 p.m. every Friday to boost morale.

Charles Bates-McAllister sat in his boss’s office with a few others, staring at a pamphlet which lay on the glass table. The photo on the front was of a couple standing in a field, the man with a long beard and wild hair, the fresh-faced woman in a long dress and an apron. It reminded Charles of the famous American Gothic painting, except that the man had an earring and a tattoo on his neck that peeked out from under his plaid shirt, and the woman looked way too refreshed and delighted to have spent all her life working the fields. “Back to the Land,” said the caption, in large yellow block letters.

“So this is the idea,” his boss, Jake, said. “For one year, people give up their lives. They quit their jobs, they leave their homes—maybe they sell their homes—they come to central Pennsylvania and build a house from scratch, out of logs, moss, and whatever else. While they’re building their house, they have to live in a tent. Even if it’s winter. They build their own furniture and grow their own food. If they eat meat they shoot and prepare it. They’re mostly given some livestock and sheep, and they make their own clothes. They can choose to be in a community and have a specialized job, or they can live in the wilderness. Of course, the wilderness isn’t really that far from civilization. A hospital is only twenty minutes away. If they need a telephone, they can find one.”

The whole table stared at him. “And people do this?” Jessica, the photo editor, finally asked.
“A lot of people,” Jake answered. “You wouldn’t believe how many people.”
“It sounds like a cult,” Steven from the art department murmured.
Jake shrugged. “Some people see it as a vacation, I guess. I know, I don’t get it, either.”
“And you have to pay for this?” Steven asked.
Jake nodded. “You pay for the land you live on. I think it’s thirty thousand dollars a year. And they provide training so that you won’t die out there.”
“Thirty thousand dollars?” Jessica whispered.
“And some people stay for more than a year,” Jake said. “They see it as an escape. Freedom.”
Everyone was silent. “Maybe in this day and age, with the economy tanking, terrorists blowing up hotels, and the housing market crashing, this is what people want,” Becky, a fellow editor, suggested.
Charles looked at the photo again. The couple did look happy. But he figured it was a kooky kind of happiness reserved for the same kinds of people who meditated and spoke to plants.
“They want us to do a magazine feature about their community,” Jake explained, “to drum up business. I know it’s a little unusual and not the normal kind of account we typically accept, but we’re hurting for money. And maybe this will be an opportunity for all of you to stretch your skills a little.”
Charles shifted. Stretching their skills was a euphemism for putting aside all judgments about this kind of endeavor and making the best possible product he could. Then again, it wasn’t that different from the slightly contradictory messages he was encouraged to ignore about Fischer’s other clients. Like the car manufacturer that asked him to write an article about their brand-new SUV and just “tone down” the fact that the car got terrible highway and city gas mileage. Or the credit card company that suggested Charles write a story encouraging shoestring-budget families to charge thousands of dollars more on their Visa, so that they would accrue enough rewards points to buy a handheld shoulder massager or an iPod docking system.
Perhaps Jake had selected Charles and the rest of his colleagues for this particular project because they were all the least likely to say no. Steven was unabashedly Christian; spiritual songs were always floating out from his office, and at last year’s Christmas party, he’d earnestly asked one of the junior designers to check out his church. He never refused anything that was given to him, as if it wouldnm, acet be Jesuslike to do so. Jessica was at risk for being fired—she had been egregiously late with shots for another magazine, and another photo editor had to step in and bail her out. Becky always did whatever anyone asked of her, without complaint. Charles was somewhat the same—he never voiced a moral obligation to anything they wrote about or stood behind. Whenever he felt tempted to whine, he saw himself at eight years old, running frantically behind his brother into the ocean. When a wave took him down and tossed him back to shore, his father stood over him on the beach. What’s the matter with you? You’re alive. You’re fine. Your brother can do it, and he’s two years younger. Stop crying.
Charles had been fresh out of journalism school when he was hired by Jake three years ago. His dad had gotten Charles the interview without asking him if he wanted it—Finn, a colleague at the investment firm, had a wife who was high up at Fischer, and if Charles wanted a job as an editor, he could have one. At first, Charles blurted that it didn’t sound like type of job he was looking for; it seemed an awful lot like advertising. His dad’s face had clouded. “Finn didn’t have to talk to his wife, you know,” he said. “Not every job can be the New York Times.”
Realizing his mistake, Charles had backpedaled and thanked his dad for thinking of him. The night before the interview he had dinner with his parents and his father asked him when the interview was and spoke about how it was a decent company, how Charles would probably get farther working for a company like Fischer than slaving as a beat reporter at a fledgling local newspaper. “You and your dad could meet up for lunch!” His mother added wistfully, because Charles’s office would only be four blocks from his father’s. Charles had nodded along, simply trying to keep the peace. Scott had sat at the table, too, snickering. No one asked him what was funny. All their father did was glance benignly at Scott, a hopeful smile on his face, desperate to amend whatever he’d done wrong. Eventually, Scott laid down his fork and scraped back his chair and left the table, as if he’d suddenly realized they all thought he was willingly participating in a family event.
After the interview, Charles drove back to his parents’ house and triumphantly told them that he got the job. His father looked at him blankly, and then guffawed. “Well of course you got it. Finn promised me you would. That interview was just a formality.” And then he went back to his newspaper.
That was three years ago. Charles always thought he’d be at a different point in his career by this age. Traveling the world, reporting on famines, bombings, and assassinations. Sneaking into trials and interviewing the wrongfully accused. Possibly ghostwriting a book about a senator with secrets. His mother had told him that by the time his great-grandfather was thirty-one, he’d had a private meeting with Nelson Rockefeller. The most influential person Charles had ever met was a hostess of a television quiz show whose program was being converted into a game that a certain cell phone provider’s customers could play on their BlackBerries. And though Jake promised that Charles would get a lot of opportunities to write, usually he passed Charles over for assignments, giving them to his freelancer friends instead.
Every so often Charles would glance through the paper for entrylevel newspaper jobs, but they didn’t seem to exist. Newspapers were disappearing across the country and with all the bloggers, Twitterers, and iReporters, journalists were becoming extinct as well. Though starting over seemed exhausting, and he had to stand on his own two feet. It was bad enough that he’d had to draw from his trust fund for the house’s down payment. His mother had always told him not to feel bad from using money from the trust. It was his, there was no use feeling ashamed. But Charles couldn’t help it—everything made him feel ashamed. Every choice seemed incorrect. What w ould his life have been like if he’d gone to law school? Where would he be now if he’d taken that job at the local newspaper in that little town in Montana? The one he’d applied for on a whim and been hired at sight unseen?
And there were other choices, ones that quietly dogged him. Where would he be now if he and Scott hadn’t gotten into that fight the day of his graduation? What would be happening now if he could take back what he had said? Would he still be with his high-school girlfriend, Bronwyn? Would she still be speaking to him at least? And would this business with Scott and the wrestlers have even happened?
Maybe it was foolish to think like that. One episode couldn’t have altered Scott’s entire trajectory. Scott was who he was before Charles had said what he said. The past was the past, and the best thing Charles could do was put it out of his mind.

B y the time the meeting ended, the editorial team had decided the story lineup for the Back to the Land promotional feature. There would be a short piece about the land the organization had annexed for the community in central Pennsylvania, a valley rife with deer and rabbits for shooting, streams for drinking, and hearty trees for log cabins. Charles had no idea how a plot of land in the middle of Pennsylvania could be desolate and remote enough to trick people into thinking they were truly alone. Sure, parts of the state were quieter than others, but evidence of modern civilization was everywhere. It was in the smell of a factory, the roar of a truck, the itchy tag on the back of a T-shirt. Or would the people of Back to the Land make their own T-shirts? Would they mix up their own medication, resort to Native American-style poultices and inhalants?
And yet, the literature said people thrived living this way, even

chronically sick people with cancer and diabetes and autoimmune diseases. That was another story for the lineup: an interview with a doctor who had treated several people before they moved to Back to the Land and then tested them again once they’d been living there for a year. The improvements were amazing. Allegedly the lifestyle’s simplicity and lack of commercial pollutants had remarkable healing powers. But it had to be a placebo effect, Charles thought. They got better because they wanted to. He didn’t believe in any of that New Age nonsense. The power of positive thought couldn’t save you. Circumstance was circumstance, and you had to make due with what you were dealt.

After the meeting, Charles went outside to get some air. He took the elevator eleven flights down and walked through the marble lobby, exiting onto Market Street. There was a traffic jam outside the building; the cars wedged at odd angles, honking. Suburban Station loomed across the avenue. A hot dog and a pretzel cart lined the sidewalk. Two cleaning women in pink smocks and white athletic shoes paused at the corner, talking animatedly with their hands.

The meeting had been especially difficult to sit through and not just because he found the concept ridiculous; his mind couldn’t stay focused on work. He kept returning to what was happening, what might be happening, what his brother might have done. All he could think of were the worst case scenarios: a secret society of sorts, a band of boys abusing one another for kicks, for power, with Scott at the helm. Not that he had any proof that this was happening—he hadn’t been able to get any details out of his mother, and it was possible that even she didn’t know. It was unclear whether Scott even understood the magnitude of the situation. It only took a few bad decisions to ruin everything. But reputation meant nothing to Scott. Neither did history nor tradition. Or, well, family. Charles recalled how, long ago, he’d been ordered to look after Scott at one of their parents’ Fourth of July parties. Scott, then about six, grabbed a pack of matches teetering on the side of the grill and struck one. He waved it near the old trellises, threatening to set them on fire. “You can’t do that to the house,” Charles hissed, appalled. It was the equivalent of harming an old relative.

Scott struck the match anyway, a cruel smile on his face. The trellises rotted; their brittle timber just waiting for an excuse to burn. Their father blamed Charles for not watching his brother more carefully, and Charles, frustrated and confused, said, “I tried to stop him, but he didn’t care.” And then, after a moment, “It’s because he’s adopted, right? Because he’s not one of us?”

His father flinched. Even today, at thirty-one years old, Charles could still conjure up his dad’s red, looming face in his mind. “Don’t you ever say that again,” his father growled.

And now, almost certainly because of the conversation he’d had with his mother last night, Charles’s old girlfriend, Bronwyn, was on his mind, too. Various images of her had been flashing through his mind all morning—Bronwyn on the living room couch, outlining the type of cummerbund Charles must wear with his tux so it would match her prom dress. Bronwyn standing on the patio next to the grill, trying to make small talk with Scott when his brother had unwittingly arrived home when Charles was entertaining a group of friends. Diplomatic and eager for everyone to get along, Bronwyn always tried to invite Scott into the conversation. It’s not going to get you anywhere, Charles tried to tell her. He chooses to be an outcast.

And, of course, Charles envisioned Bronwyn in the mud room, standing behind Charles as he held Scott by the throat, all those hideous things spewing from his mouth. He would hear her gasp until the end of his days.

“Charles?” He raised his head now. “Charles?” the voice said again. Caroline Silver was striding across the courtyard. She worked in the marketing department for Jefferson Hospital, and Charles edited their promotional magazine for donors. The magazine only came out biannually, so Charles hadn’t seen her or talked to her in a while.