Everything We Ever Wanted

And then he began to wonder what his brother was doing. And his mother, knocking around in that big house, passing under that picture of Charlie Roderick Bates. He wondered what his apartment had been converted into, and if the same rusty patio furniture was on the back deck, and if his mother was planting the same exact configuration of flowers in the garden, recreating her childhood anew every spring. It wasn’t with nostalgia that he thought about this, not at first, but more with weary guilt. All this time, he’d told himself that they probably weren’t wondering about him, or if they were, it was in a tight-assed, bitter sort of way—look what all we did for him, and this is how he repays us, the piece of shit. But all of a sudden, he wondered if they weren’t as cruel as he thought. And he wanted to see that house. See if it matched up to the house in his memory and his dreams, so everything would make sense again.



…



They had expected more from him, though. That was what Scott also began to realize, driving back to the east coast. That was the thought that had begun to trickle in uninvited. It was in the secret his father had made him keep. It was in the silence he’d made him promise to fulfill.



His father had found him the day Scott had seen them together, after Bronwyn had left. “It’s not what you think,” he’d tried to explain.



But Scott knew what he saw. There had been the silence in the room, serious and intimate. There had been their expressions when they turned and saw him standing there, for he’d been too stunned to slip away unnoticed.



“Please,” his father said, crouching down next to Scott’s bed, curling his finger tight around the wooden bedpost. Scott’s room had been filthy, boxers strewn everywhere, drawers flung open, rotting food in the trash can, but his father hadn’t complained. He probably hadn’t noticed the mess at all. “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said. “It’s not something I can explain. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?”



In the end, Scott didn’t do it to please his father. He told him as much, too. He did it because there seemed nothing worse than his mother finding this out. His brother, too. He wiped it from his memory, pretending he’d never seen it and it hadn’t happened. But it forced him to wipe away his father, too.



You can have any of your father’s clothes , his mother had said. And, he was a good man. She didn’t know. She had never known. And that was partly because of him. His brother had never known it about Bronwyn, either—although he wondered if Charles finally had found out, the day Scott left home. Joanna had suggested they were meeting, and then there was the look on Charles’s face when Scott crossed his path at the house. The look that the rug had been pulled out from under him. Everything he thought was true was suddenly suspect.



There were countless times Scott wondered if he should have just said something, if it was worse that he was keeping it quiet, if perhaps this was why he was given all he’d been given—all the leeway, the suite, the car, the spending money. Then again, he’d willingly taken it. He’d willingly been a part of his father’s lie, though he didn’t have to. He could have left a long time ago. Just like he could have sloughed off the identity they’d pinned on him, from whatever guidelines and whatever sources, so early on. They assumed what they assumed about him partly because he’d let them. Partly because it was easier to. But he might have had a choice.



R oderick was only a few miles away from the motel, so after Scott took a shower, changed, and watched a few hours worth of crap television, he finally felt that he was ready to go. It would be a trial run, he decided, a drive-by. He got into the car and started the engine. Every inch of the road was familiar, every leaf on the trees. When he rounded the turn toward his house, he held his breath. The trees blurred past. There was the farm with the split-rail fence and the endlessly identical white woolen sheep. There was the little red house set precariously close to the road, the one Scott and Charles used to joke about in the back of the car that would get mowed in half if a car accidentally swerved into it. And then, the light hitting the tops of the trees, the road curving just so, and there was the big black mailbox.



Except there was a gate at the end of the driveway now. A big metal gate that was ajar but that had a large lock dangling from a hinge. There was a sign on the gate, too. roderick. est. 1922. tours available.



Also on the sign was a list of hours of operation, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on weekdays and 12 p.m.-4 p.m. on saturdays, closed sundays. Scott’s brain was so scrambled for a moment that he couldn’t recall what day it was, and when he looked at the glowing numbers of the clock on the dashboard—4:23—he wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon. And then he wondered if he was on a different road entirely, in front of a different house, another house also coincidentally named Roderick.



When he heard a tap on his window, he jumped and looked over. It was a woman he didn’t recognize, with blonde hair and a long face. She bent over halfway, smiling toothily into the car. Her mouth moved, saying something Scott couldn’t hear. He rolled down the window. “What was that?” he said.



“Are you here for a tour?” she asked. “I was just closing up. We close officially in about a half hour.”



He blinked at her. “People tour this place?”



She smiled cheerfully. “It was just added to the Pennsylvania registry of historical homes. This house is very significant to the area. Gorgeous gardens. A lot of priceless antiques. A real treasure.”



She had cupped her hand over the lip of his window. He could smell her floral perfume. She didn’t recognize who he was. She had no idea what it meant that he was here. She probably knew nothing about this house beyond its facts and figures, the types of flowers in the gardens, the craftsmen of the furniture in the living room, the artists of the paintings on the walls. She was probably just a bored Main Line wife, busying herself with something she considered culturally significant.



Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror, a car wanting to get around. Scott looked at the woman. “It’s okay,” he said after a moment. “Another time, maybe.”



She smiled and raised a finger in the air. “Here,” she said, reaching into her cardigan pocket. She pulled out a long, thin pamphlet and passed it through the open window. “This’ll give you an idea of what’s inside.”



“Thanks,” Scott said, barely feeling the pamphlet between his fingers. And then he cut the wheel left to turn back onto the road. He drove back to the motel, parked the car, and walked up the metal steps to his room. He slipped off his shoes and turned on the television, settling down on the bed, his arms straight at his sides, his feet pointed to the ceiling. The AC was on too high, and the tip of his nose felt cold. Shivers ran up and down his spine.



He should have asked the woman how this house had been turned over to the registry. Why had his mother done it? Where did she go? Where could she go? All Scott’s life his mother hadn’t as much as replaced a dish … and now she was gone? It gave him an odd, prickly sensation that almost bordered on panic. All the time he’d spent wondering about how his family was getting on without him, it had never occurred to him that they might change. They’d always been so static, so unwilling to deviate an inch one way or another. Scott wasn’t sure he’d ever been so surprised in his life. It made him sit up, swing his legs over the bed, and put his hands on his knees, smiling vacantly toward the carpet, utterly mystified. This house is a prison, he’d told his mother the last time he’d seen her. A great stone jail. Maybe in the end, she agreed with him. Maybe he didn’t understand her as much as he thought he did. What he saw of her was his projection, not exactly the truth.



The pamphlet for the house sat on the little wooden table by the window, and he was able to reach for it without getting off the bed. Roderick, said the cover. Historic Pennsylvania Home. And there was his house. There was his front yard where he and his dad had carved their names into one of the sycamore tree trunks. There was his bedroom window. There was the roundabout driveway where he’d parked his car. Inside he saw that sad old kitchen, that fussy dining room, the chandelier above the entranceway. That crazy grand staircase that seemed better suited for a Southern plantation house. The stained-glass windows and the old four-poster beds in every bedroom and the window seats and the secret passageway that led from the guest bedroom down to the kitchen, probably once meant for servants. Scott used to play in that secret staircase, which wasn’t really a secret at all, as his parents knew full well it was there, but they pretended it was his and only his. Once he wrote a message that said SOS, I am from another planet, who are you? and left it on the stairs, hoping someone—Charles, especially—would find it and write back. Every day he checked. He even hinted to his brother that there was something strange on the staircase, but Charles never took the bait, never cared. A few days later, a new slip of paper appeared, lifting Scott’s heart. My name is Mom, said the message. Welcome, extraterrestrial! Would you like to come for dinner? We feed all kinds from all planets.



Scott leafed through every page of the pamphlet until he got to the very back, which listed the phone number, hours of operation, and showed a picture of the house’s gift shop. And to his astonishment—although he realized just a few seconds later that he shouldn’t be surprised at all, for it made complete sense—the gift shop was where his apartment used to be. They’d cleaned up the water damage, smoothed the splintering wood floor, and ripped up the kitchenette, and now there were small tables of books, t-shirts, stickers, and other knickknacks. Squinting at the inset photos of the featured items for sale, the things sold in the gift shop had no significance to the house at all. Little animal finger puppets for kids. A heavy ceramic frog paperweight. A book of Pennsylvania Dutch recipes.



It wasn’t really his house anymore. It wasn’t really any of theirs, and maybe it never had been.



He hugged his knees to his chest and then looked at his cell phone. When he moved to Tucson, he’d changed over his number to one with a 520 area code, but he’d keyed in all his contacts from his old phone from Pennsylvania, including everyone in his family. Even though he’d staunchly told himself that he wanted nothing to do with them, some part of his brain told him to keep their numbers safe. Maybe his mother hadn’t changed her cell phone number. Maybe his brother lived in that same development. There were ways of finding them.



A car rumbled past outside. The air smelled like sweet, Pennsylvania spring, a sharp contrast to the dusty, gritty, baked smell that permeated Tucson. But he liked it there. He liked it a lot. It felt like an epiphany, admitting that. It felt like the first time he’d conceded to liking anything.



The cell phone’s interior light glowed a dull, ice-pop blue. He scrolled through his contact numbers and pressed Send. As he listened to the phone ringing, he felt lighter and lighter, a balloon rising higher into the sky. There were lots of things he liked. There were a lot of things left to do. It was possible that if he pestered the adoption agency enough, they would tell him something. It was possible that he could be what Veronica wanted him to be. At least he could try for her.