When Sylvie woke up, the roads looked icy. But once she was out of the shower, the thermometer James had hung up outside the kitchen window said it had warmed to almost 30 degrees Fahrenheit. After a while, the sun came out and the ice began to melt. Sylvie poured the remains of her coffee down the drain and looked out the window.
Scott’s car still wasn’t there. She hadn’t heard from him yesterday or today, and he hadn’t slept at home. She still had no idea what he’d said in the meeting with the teachers or even if he’d gone. Perhaps he was making himself scarce because he was avoiding the conversation. Perhaps he really did have something to feel guilty about. There were bruises on the boy’s body, Tayson had said. Scott was running from this as he avoided everything. Though now it kind of was beside the point.
At 7:30, she knew what she wanted to do. By 7:31, she’d changed her mind. People were talking, yes. Parents were worried, yes. This thing was beginning to break out of its hermetic seal. If Christian’s father could somehow be kept at bay, it would just … fade away. Unless, of course, you find a way to resolve this yourself, Michael Tayson had told her.
And there it was. Without saying it outright, he had given Sylvie her orders. This is your mess, so clean it up. You know how. It’s in your genes, after all.
It was the way things had always worked, she just now realized. Only up until this point, she’d remained outside of all that. She’d left someone else to take care of those types of problems, the few that had come along. While she pretended that they didn’t exist.
If she didn’t do anything about this, if she stolidly insisted that the hazing was all a ridiculous rumor and that Scott was blameless, Sylvie risked more and more parents coming to Michael Tayson. She risked more kids talking. And worst, she risked the father taking action, the newspapers being called, court cases starting, the school’s name being tarnished, admissions dropping for the next year, and who knew what else.
Doing nothing could cause a domino effect.
On the other hand, she could resign. It was another way to cover it up. Her family was, in essence, responsible for his son’s death, and her absence—as well as Scott’s—might be justice enough. They could settle out of court on an undisclosed but ridiculously high figure and all would be well.
Resigning, however, would show Scott that she believed the rumors wholeheartedly.
For it was what she believed. She didn’t want to think it was possible, but she was done being naive. It could have happened. She knew what it felt like to have so much pent-up anger inside, rage she had no idea what to do with. It broke her heart to finally realize that Scott could have had something to do with it. He was her son, a boy she had raised, so what did that say about her?
And she hated the idea of her resignation sending a message to everyone else at Swithin that she, too, figured Scott was guilty. She could imagine them chuckling, drunk with Schadenfreude, over the old Bates family finally getting the comeuppance they’d long deserved.
She went upstairs and looked at James’s clothes on the bedroom floor, the ones Scott had tried on a few days ago. She hadn’t been able to pick them up. I should have left a long time ago, Scott had said. He’d smirked when she’d insisted that James was a good man. Do you really believe that? But he couldn’t know. It certainly couldn’t be why he’d wanted nothing to do with James all these years. Perhaps Scott suspected infidelity, but why would it matter to him? Scott had been James’s chosen one; why would Scott turn away from him and side with his mother?
The year after Sylvie and James were married, James had brought up burial plots. He said he’d reserved spots for the two of them in the private Protestant cemetery a ten-minute drive from their home. Sylvie had blinked, blindsided. All her life, she’d assumed she would be buried with her grandfather and the other Bateses in the little cemetery near the Swithin grounds. “Yes, but it’s not Presbyterian,” James argued. Sylvie laughed. “You’re not Presbyterian.” “My family is,” he said. “Has been for generations. And that’s important to me.”
This was also a choosing of sides. The idea of being buried next to her grandfather comforted her, she told him. “You’re going to be dead,” James protested, raising his hands. “It’s not like it’s going to make a difference.” “Ha!” she pointed at him, enraged. “If you were truly Presbyterian, you’d believe in heaven! If you think we’re just … rotting away down there … then why do you care where we are?”