Everything We Ever Wanted. Sara Shepard

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СКАЧАТЬ Joanna glanced at Charles again, but his eyes were fixed stubbornly on the rental magazine.

      ‘And we’ll need so many supplies,’ Sylvie added. She grabbed a Land’s End catalogue from the bottom of the pile. ‘I’ve marked lots of things.’ She turned to a page that displayed flashlights, travel mugs, a fondue pot. ‘We could make s’mores on the beach,’ she crowed gaily. ‘Wouldn’t that be fun?’

      ‘Huh,’ Charles murmured vaguely.

      Sylvie folded her hands over the magazine. ‘How is work, by the way?’

      Charles shrugged. ‘Busy. You know.’

      ‘Dealing with any interesting clients?’

      There was an abrupt, fuzzy thud next door, and then a faster-paced song. Joanna flinched, but she didn’t bother glancing at Charles again. He was obviously ignoring it.

      ‘Not really,’ Charles spoke over the noise. ‘Same ones.’

      ‘And Joanna?’ Sylvie turned politely to face her daughter-in-law. ‘How’s the new house coming along?’

      Joanna smiled. ‘Good. Lots of boxes still to unpack, though.’

      ‘Have you met any neighbors?’

      She looked down. ‘Uh, no one yet. But I’m sure we will soon.’

      Sylvie nodded. Joanna could tell she was searching for something more specific she could ask her about – a hobby, maybe – but was coming up with nothing. ‘Excellent,’ she finally said. And then, ‘Goodness. The bread.’

      She scampered to the oven, slid on two mitts, and pulled the banana bread pan from the tray. Steam curled around her face, fogging her small, wire-framed glasses. She carried the pan over, removed one of her oven mitts with her teeth, and set it on the table. Then she placed the pan on top of the mitt. The knife slid easily against the sides of the pan, and more steam gushed out. She pushed the pan to Charles and he cut himself a thick slice and put it on his plate. He used the side of his fork to cut off a bite.

      Joanna waited and waited. Just as he was about to put the bite in his mouth, she touched his arm and said in a voice far whinier than she intended, ‘Charles?’

      He looked up; she nudged her chin toward the pan. He lowered his fork. ‘Oh. Sorry.’

      He began cutting her a piece, but she changed her mind and waved him away. ‘I’ll be back,’ she muttered, standing.

      ‘Joanna,’ Charles protested. ‘I didn’t know you wanted any. You don’t usually eat dessert.’

      ‘It’s fine,’ she said loudly, wheeling out of the room. ‘I just…the bathroom.’ She rounded the corner into the hall.

      It was probably silly to feel slighted over banana bread. More than that, Joanna just felt too weird sitting there, looking at vacation houses, chatting about work, ignoring what was obvious, especially with Scott fiddling about with the stereo one wall away. Nothing seemed to ever get to the Bates-McAllisters, though. Joanna certainly hadn’t been raised like this. If Scott was her brother and her parents were faced with such a scandal – and if her parents were still together – at least they would confront the problem head-on. Her mother would be a hurricane of panic, making sweeping what-will-the-neighbors-think-of-us statements. Her father would be smacking a fist into an open palm, declaring he’d never wanted to live in such an arrogant, stick-up-your-ass part of Pennsylvania in the first place – he was from the western part of the state, where what one drove and where one shopped and the way one pronounced certain vowels didn’t matter as much. His anger would just make her mother panic more – If only you would’ve tried harder to fit in, Craig, this might not have happened, she might say – and that, in turn, would stoke his fury, and they’d circle each other like two worked-up dogs, their bad energies becoming so toxic that a bite was inevitable.

      Joanna walked down the house’s grand hall, which was lined on both sides by heavy, gold-framed oil paintings of scenic vistas of foxhunts, Scottish moors, and generals on horseback. Charles had first brought her to Roderick to meet his family two Julys ago, and though she’d been building up the Bates-McAllisters and their estate in her mind long before she and Charles met – though Charles didn’t know anything about that – the house had lived up to every one of her expectations. Sylvie’s assiduously tended-to garden had been abloom, the tiki lamps by the pool cast soft shadows across the slate patio, and there was a full moon over the roof, so perfectly centered that it was as though Sylvie and James had commissioned it to hang there for them alone.

      She’d been blind to the house’s imperfections for a long time afterward, too. She didn’t notice the wet wood smell. She didn’t see the chips in the leaded glass or the stains on the intricate woodwork or the large brown patch on the ceiling from a previous leak. It didn’t occur to her that the highboy was water-warped or that the oil paintings needed a professional cleaning or that the chandeliers were missing many of their crystals. And so what if one of the rooms was filled with nothing but piles of papers, old, cloth-wrapped paintings and a piano with chipped, yellowed ivory keys? So what if the library had a mouse hole the size of Joanna’s fist? So what if the oil painting of Charles Roderick Bates, Charles’s great-grandfather, which hung over the stairs, freaked Joanna out every time she passed by it? All old aristocratic homes had charming idiosyncrasies. And this was Roderick.

      But lately, something in her had changed, and she’d begun to see the house as, well…old. Unkempt, even. The rooms were always too cold, especially the bathrooms. The cushions on the living room couch were kind of uncomfortable, a sharp spring managing to press into her butt no matter which position she tried. Some of the unused rooms smelled overwhelmingly like mothballs, others like sour milk, and there were visible gaps amidst many of the bathroom floor tiles, desperate for grout. The most unsettling thing, though, was that when Joanna walked into certain rooms, it was as if someone – or something – was following her. The house and everything in it seemed human, if she really got down to it. And not like a sprightly young girl, either, but a crotchety, elderly man. The pipes rattled like creaky bones and joints. When she sat down in a chair – any chair – there was an abrupt huffing sound, like a tired laborer collapsing from a long day’s work. The radiators wheezed and coughed, and even spat out strange hints of smells that seemed to be coming from the house’s human core. A whisper of soapy jasmine seeped from its plaster skin. An odor of ham and cloves belched out of an esophageal vent.

      She stepped down the hall now, gazing at the black-and-white photographs that lined the walls. Sylvie had taken the pictures during a trip to the beach when the children were young. In some of them, Charles and Scott, probably about eight and six, were flying a kite. Charles had such a look of concentration as he held the kite’s string, as if a judging committee was watching. Scott was looking disdainfully off toward the waves. In the pictures of them in the ocean, Scott ran happily toward the waves, his arms and legs outstretched like a starfish, his skin so dark against the white sand. It was startling to see a photo of Scott so young and carefree, enjoying the same simple pleasures everyone loved. James skipped out to the ocean, too, equally exuberant, but Charles hung back, his expression timid and penitent. The last photo in the row was a close-up of the three of them. Scott and their father were soaked, but Charles’s hair still neatlycombed, bone-dry. Two smiles were genuine, the third seemed forced.

      ‘See anything interesting?’

      Joanna jumped. Scott stood at the bottom of the stairs. His hands were hidden in his sweatshirt pouch. His eyes glowed, like she’d turned a flashlight on some wild animal in the woods.

      Joanna СКАЧАТЬ