Why had she said it? She should have said No, mothers are never bad, mothers are always good! But she was still so raw from what had just happened in the house. She couldn’t bear the thought that Charles might believe what James had just implied. What James often implied. That’s not the way you throw a baseball. Do it like this. Like this. It’s not like it’s hard. What are you thinking about, just sitting there? You’re daydreaming? Men don’t daydream, Charlie. That’s girly. And, Why do you need a night-light? Being afraid of the dark is for babies. She saw Charles’s face crumble every time James corrected him. She didn’t want Charles to ever think he was inferior, that he was anything less than perfect.
A look of intrigue sparkled through Charles’s eyes, and the idea took hold. The first few times she caught Charles stating matter-of-factly that Scott’s real parents were poor poop-heads who’d given him up, she tried to correct him, but Charles would always look at Sylvie quizzically—she was the one who had told him this. And then James would cluck his tongue as if he understood that she had perpetuated it. Sometimes she felt like Scott knew she’d planted the idea, too. Even as a little boy, she’d noticed how he stared at her sometimes, his dark, round little eyes derisive, his pink mouth a flat line. Judging, seething. Sylvie thought Charles would eventually forget what she’d told him and accept Scott as his brother, but as the boys grew older, their relationship deteriorated. That Christmas card of them pulling sleds up the hill never came to fruition.
Sylvie told Ace the lawyer thank you and good-bye. She couldn’t ask Scott outright; nor could she ask the lawyer if what she wanted to do—the idea that had begun to grow—was wise. She already knew his answer. But there was so much she’d lost this year, so much she’d given up. The lawyer had said it himself: When some people lose a loved one, they look for someone—or something—to blame. They lose sight of everything important. Imagining her life without the school seemed inconceivable. It was a second heart beating inside her; she wasn’t sure who she was without it.
Resigned, she opened the closet and pulled out James’s tan trench coat. The last time he’d worn it was on a trip they’d taken to France, when the boys were little. It was too big on her, the sleeves hung well past her hands, but she’d taken to wearing it often, pushing her hands into the deep—and empty, she’d checked—pockets, feeling the smooth, large buttons, knotting the belt tighter and tighter. But when she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she didn’t see a glimmer of James, as she’d hoped. All she saw was a middle-aged woman in a man’s coat that didn’t remotely fit.
The apartment complex was in one of the unimproved parts of the county. It loomed behind a shopping mall that housed a dollar store, a Salvation Army, and a facility called Payday Advance. FEVERVIEW DWELLINGS, an old tan sign said at the entrance. A faded starburst in the corner crowed RENTALS AVAILABLE! The complex consisted of a cluster of buildings joined by crumbling walkways. Some of the cars in the parking lots had the beginnings of rust and unrepaired dents. One of the apartment windows was covered with a trash bag. The strip mall’s enormous parking lights towered over the trees; it never got truly dark here at night.
As Sylvie pulled into a parking space, she looked around. A curtain fluttered behind a window. A shadow shifted behind a tree. Even though Tayson said everything would remain hushed up, this could have gotten out somehow—and maybe Sylvie wasn’t as anonymous as she thought she was. She’d watched enough news programs to know how ruthless the press could be when they got hold of a story, especially one that featured an injustice between the rich and the poor. When she walked to her car to drive here, she thought the flowerbeds in the garden looked unusually tamped-down, as if someone had been standing in them, peering through the kitchen window. And a lid to one of the garbage cans she kept outside the garage had blown off. Or maybe it had been removed. The garbage bags were still intact, though, the trash not rooted through. And when she turned off her car in the Feverview lot, she wondered if an investigative unit might be crouched in the bushes near the entrance. Maybe a reporter was rehearsing his script right now, ready to go in front of the camera and speculate why she was here and what she was doing. Paying her respects? Striking some kind of deal? Admitting that she knew something?