you later?’
The receiver was limp in her hands. She tugged on her sweater sleeve so suddenly and with such force that she heard a seam rip. ‘Don’t bother,’ she snapped.
And then he hung up. Joanna sat upright on the couch, her back pressed into the cushions, her calves at right angles to her thighs, waiting for him to call back, but he didn’t. She felt silly for wasting his time. To Charles, she was the one at fault, she was the one who’d broken some kind of social contract and was now being whiny and impatient. And where was the sympathy for her? Again she thought of Bronwyn. Again she tried to imagine what Charles was referring to two nights ago, but it was like trying to bake a cake without any of the ingredients.
She stared blankly at the mantel across the room. The only thing they’d put there so far was a framed photo from their wedding, Joanna in her long and simple strapless gown, Charles holding her waist just as the photographer ordered. They stood in Roderick’s garden, where the wedding had taken place, grinning at one another. Joanna squinted at the photo until their faces blurred.
On the day of their wedding, Catherine had arrived at Roderick in a long red dress that dragged on the floor, almost like a wedding train. Her posture was very poised and upright, Joanna could tell she was trying very, very hard to act as though she’d visited Roderick many times, but whenever Catherine thought no one was looking, she stole long glances at the stained glass on the second floor, or the labyrinth and wading fountain over at the other side of the grounds, or at the opulent yellow diamond Sylvie had recently begun wearing. It was early fall, the air growing crisp, and some of the guests wore furs. Catherine gaped at those, too.
‘A garden wedding,’ Catherine had sighed romantically, listing into Joanna. She spied a man with a camera over her shoulder and gripped Joanna’s arm. ‘Who do you think he is?’ she whispered. Her breath already smelled like gin; she’d been making good use of the open bar, probably due to nerves. ‘Maybe from the Inquirer? Or the Main Line Times? This is just the kind of thing that would make it into that.’
‘He’s just the wedding photographer,’ Joanna said, shrugging.
‘Nonsense,’ Catherine said, craning her neck at other guests. ‘I’m sure he’s from the Main Line Times. I think I recognize him. And oh! I just met Charles’s brother, Scott. So unusual looking. And such a flirt!’
Joanna craned her neck to see where Scott was. Charles had chosen not to include him in his small wedding party – ‘It’s not like he’d do it, anyway,’ he’d said – and Scott had been a ghost at the ceremony. Joanna had definitely taken notice of the thin, beautiful, dark-skinned girl he’d brought as his date – Queenie, or Quinta, something with a Q, anyway. As she walked through the crowd earlier, wanting to get a look at the cocktail hour appetizers, the crowd had quickly parted. It was as if the other guests were slightly afraid of her.
Catherine inspected Joanna carefully. She reached out and brushed a few strands of hair out of Joanna’s eyes. ‘Why do you look so pissed off? You should see yourself. It’s like you’ve swallowed a wasp. Your pictures in the Main Line Times are going to be terrible.’
‘Mom, the Main Line Times isn’t here, okay?’ Joanna snapped. And then her mother’s face fell, and Joanna clenched inside. Okay, so she was pissed off. A sour, irksome feeling had infected her in the last hour, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on the cause. Catherine, most definitely, but that wasn’t all of it. Was she irritated about the band not showing up on time? Was it because the bustier beneath her dress was digging into her ribs? Certainly, but she was also just the tiniest bit rueful about a particular entry in an old journal she’d kept when living alone in Philly she’d come upon a few days ago when cleaning out her things. The entry described Joanna’s ideal wedding: it would be barefoot on a beach on a mid-summer night with only a handful of guests, culminating in a clam-bake on a patio and a lot of dance songs like ‘Come on Eileen’. It was a silly idea, and she never would’ve shared it with Charles, but that was the thing – she hadn’t been able to share any ideas with Charles. The details for the wedding at Roderick had been in place more than likely before they’d gotten engaged – more than likely before Charles was born.
‘You’d better start smiling,’ Catherine whispered through clenched teeth, nudging Joanna’s elbow. ‘Don’t screw this up. You probably don’t even realize what you have here.’
Joanna took stock of Catherine’s words and finally understood. Her mother’s reservations weren’t about Joanna not knowing how to hang pants on a hanger or how to properly set a table. Catherine thought Joanna didn’t deserve this marriage – she did. Catherine was the one who had wanted, who had worked, who had strove, but Joanna had swooped in and taken, taken, taken.
Joanna had pushed her hand over the top of her head, feeling a mess of bobby pins. She walked away from her mother, not dignifying her with a response. As she spun back toward Charles, who was sitting with his groomsman, having danced his one and only dance of the wedding and therefore fulfilled his duties, a sharp pain prodded her side. She suddenly felt dizzy and thirsty and on display. When the photographer grinned at her from behind his camera, she was afraid he was secretly laughing. What if Catherine was right? What if she didn’t deserve Charles? Was that what was niggling at her?
It wasn’t possible. What she’d just felt was wedding jitters, that was all. And underneath that, a fizz of excitement. Excitement that her life was about to change. Excitement for it to be all she’d anticipated it would be. In fact, no – more than that. Excitement that it was going to be better than she’d ever imagined.
A horrible idea had begun to form in Sylvie’s mind.
It was a torturous idea, an enticing idea. Her fellow board members said yesterday where the boy had lived. They’d dangled it out there, a worm on a fishing line. She knew where the apartment complex was – everyone knew where it was, even though everyone pretended places like it didn’t exist. She could remain anonymous enough and just go and see.
No, she told herself, as though she was a bad dog. No. She tried to garden, to do a crossword puzzle. She read the first few pages of her grandfather’s copy of The House of Mirth, one of his favorite ‘guilty pleasure’ books. He wrote notes in the margins, chicken-scratched nonsensicals she could barely decipher. She went into James’s office and stared at the filing cabinet. It was so infuriatingly stoic. She looked again at the blank spot on the bookcase where the jewelry box had been. She turned her diamond ring around and around her finger.
To stave off the idea, she called Hector, the lawyer who had handled James’s will. She described the situation at the school to him in dainty, unworried tones. Just if you have a couple minutes to chat. Just if you have an opinion. Hector passed her to another lawyer, one who ‘handled cases like this’. Sylvie wanted to ask what he meant by that – maybe he could fill her in. But then he added, ‘I just handle tax law and estate planning, Mrs Bates-McAllister.’
The second lawyer’s name was Ace. He sounded about nineteen years old. Uncomfortably, Sylvie explained what she knew all over again – that Scott had coached this boy, that there was a rumor floating around, that the coaches might’ve been negligent or even encouraged the hazing. ‘Though I can’t imagine how,’ she added. ‘Certainly the coaches wouldn’t be stupid enough to whisper terrible things into boys’ ears, just to see if they’ll do them. Boys look up to their coaches, sometimes even more than their parents.’
But then she looked down at her hands. She’d picked the skin on the side of her thumb clean off. Could Scott have used his power as a coach to turn these boys into monsters? Could Scott have put the hazing ideas into their malleable little heads?
Ace-the-lawyer let out a long sigh and waited almost ten whole seconds before speaking again. ‘Well, if his parents choose to fault the school for negligence, since your son