“Look, I just don’t want to be buried with your family, all right?” James finally spat out. “It’s bad enough I have to live here among your grandfather’s things. It’s bad enough I have to sit at his desk when I’m at home, in his old chair, at his old dinner table. It’s bad enough that it feels like he’s judging me every day of my life—can’t we be alone in death?”
He had been building up to that outburst, she knew. It had been welling up inside him for a long time, maybe since that first Thanksgiving with her family. He’d expected something from them, but they hadn’t delivered. Maybe he’d thought they’d passed him over, deemed him subpar. Whatever it was, his respect for them had withered away until it was only resentment.
A little piece of Sylvie’s heart broke loose. He could hate most of her family for all she cared, but her grandfather? Hadn’t Sylvie conveyed how important he’d been in her life? Didn’t James understand what a good man he was? “Get your own desk, if it means that much to you,” she’d growled. “I didn’t realize it mattered so much.” “I will,” James said. And he did. He’d spent almost $10,000 redecorating that office, replacing her grandfather’s gorgeous old desk with that hideous glass thing that didn’t match the house in the slightest.
Sylvie obsessed over their argument and what it had revealed. It was the same year that she had decided to run for the Swithin board. If she couldn’t be buried there in death, she could be remembered there in life. After she was elected, she filled her days with Swithin goings-on. When she found out she was pregnant, she resolved to emphasize to the baby from a very early age what her grandfather meant to this world. If James didn’t understand, then she’d make sure the baby did.
When Charles was born, Sylvie didn’t let him out of her sight. She practically didn’t let James near him. When James held him, she hovered nervously a few feet away. In the middle of the night, if she woke up and found he wasn’t in bed beside her, she fought the urge to spring up and search through the house for him. She felt guilty for those moments—what did she think he was doing, corrupting Charles? Whispering nasty things about her grandfather? He’s your husband, she kept telling herself, but she felt so protective, as though she was the only one who knew what was best for Charles. She told Charles from an early age, probably before he could really comprehend things, that he was going to Swithin, where Mommy went and that his great-grandfather had rebuilt. James never argued, but after a while, he participated less and less.
It was no wonder Charles had grown up so sensitive and overprotected. It explained, too, why James lost interest in Charles and, on a subconscious level, turned to Scott, who was in no way Sylvie’s—a clean break from Bates blood. And perhaps it was why he’d momentarily lost interest in Sylvie.
The worst of it was that after James had died, his lawyer discussed his burial wishes with Sylvie, and in James’s will, he had stated that wherever Sylvie wanted them buried was fine with him. She was astonished. After all that, James secretly didn’t care? It made her feel even more confused. She’d based the entire shape of their life on an issue that didn’t even matter to him. And really, so James wasn’t crazy about her family! So he had a chip on his shoulder! Why had she fought it so much? Why hadn’t she tried harder to understand where he was coming from?
When she’d stood over James’s hospital bed before his surgery, watching his heart monitor spike and trough, she’d felt as cold and alone as when she was a new freshman at Swarthmore, her grandfather just having abandoned her. She looked down at James’s bruised face. His eyes were taped shut, and there was a tube stuffed down his throat. Who was to say she hadn’t caused this aneurysm? He’d said he was tired the night before and didn’t want to go to the party, but she’d made him. She’d pushed him; she’d hissed at him; she’d worked him up. Who was to say this wasn’t her doing? These feelings only compounded after the operation failed and Sylvie found herself standing over James’s cold, inert body again, this time with Charles and Scott by her side. This is your fault, a voice prodded her. She vowed not to show the boys what she was thinking or feeling, terrified they would know that she had somehow brought this on.