She offered to make him whatever he wanted. Finally he said he wouldn’t mind a banana cream pie. It seemed so random—banana cream pie! She’d never seen him eat a banana in his life. But after she made the pie, throwing out her first attempt at the crust because it was a bit too soggy, she watched him eat it with pleasure, every forkful a confirmation that she was doing something right. She didn’t want to comment on the sudden shift in their dynamic. Scott was like a flighty cat—the slightest thing would send him scurrying back under the desk. And what would she say, anyway? Gee, isn’t this nice? You and I are finally acting like mother and son! He’d sneer.
She listened to him breathing evenly as he slept in his old bedroom. It was the same thing she did when he was a little boy, hovering over his soft, twisted shape, wondering who he was, what the first eighteen months of his life had been like before she’d come along. Those eighteen months worried her, certainly; there were plenty of things that could happen to a child in that span of time that could affect them for life. Why had his mother given him up, ultimately? Had it been the right thing to do to not ask to know anything about her, beyond that she was healthy and living across the country? Scott was brought to them by plane; Sylvie had stood with James and Charles at the airport gate, her stomach jumping nervously as two adoption coordinators stepped off the Jetway dragging a baby carrier, a fold-up stroller, a bunch of cloth bags, and, finally, a stroller containing Scott. “Oh,” Sylvie had cried, clutching her hands at her breastbone when she saw him, those round, shiny eyes, that small dewdrop of a mouth, those fat cheeks. He was such a little person, so different than she was. It wasn’t the same having him in the house as it had been when Charles was a baby; she never had an intuitive, maternal sense of what he might do next. When he cried and cried, she had no idea what he wanted. Because she wasn’t his coauthor, because he hadn’t sprung from her, he would always be impenetrable and alien. Sylvie sometimes fretted that there might be a more suitable mother out there for Scott who would understand him instinctively and automatically, bringing him what he needed, instantly hushing him when he sobbed.
When Scott was about seven, he took piano lessons from the same woman Charles did: Rose, an African-American woman who taught out of her home. It didn’t take long for Rose to become smitten with Scott and Scott to become smitten with her. While she assigned Charles Chopin and Beethoven pieces, she taught Scott jazz standards, The Entertainer. “I can tell he’ll be a tough one, and I want to make it fun for him,” Rose explained to Sylvie. “I want to make sure he keeps coming to lessons.” Once, Sylvie arrived to pick Scott up from his lesson a little early and heard the two of them talking in the piano room, giggling and pressing keys. Her heart felt sore; she resented Rose for her easy rapport with Scott. Why couldn’t Scott be this way at home with her, his own mother? A year later, Rose announced that she was moving to Georgia to be with her mother, who’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Sylvie taught the boys piano herself for a while, drawing from her ten years of lessons, but Scott immediately lost interest.
And now, standing over his bed, she wished she could look inside his head. Because that was the thing—if Sylvie thought she didn’t understand him when he was a toddler or a seven-year-old or even a teenager, he was thick, cinder-block wall to her now. She hadn’t realized how good she’d had it, how much he used to let her in. But as she gazed down at him, one side of her wished she could know, truly, what had happened with the wrestlers. But at the same time, knowing for sure scared her. What if he had done something? Could she bear to have him under this same roof? Could she ever look at him in the same way again?
She sat outside his room one night, her head pressed up against the door to James’s office, wondering if there really was a mythical document inside the filing cabinet that bore the woman’s name. She really had nothing to go by except instinct. That and the fact that James had always locked his office, meaning he may have hidden more in there than just the bracelet. Really, she had no idea what James kept in those cabinets—documents about the boys, copies of their car insurance and titles, copies upon copies of things they also kept in a safe deposit box. She wondered which outcome would be worse: going in there and finding some evidence of who the woman might have been, or going in there and finding nothing but old credit card statements, pay stubs, the titles to their homes and cars. What was better, knowing or not knowing? What would make her suffer less?
On Friday afternoon, Michael Tayson had called Sylvie and told her that Scott would be meeting with the teachers on Monday. “Just so you know,” he said. She asked whom the meeting would be with, but he wouldn’t tell her. “Have they gotten the autopsy back?” she asked, but Tayson didn’t know that, either. “Sometimes autopsies take a long time” was his answer.