The Children's Crusade (38 page)

And to his surprise and relief, she dropped her arms and let him take her hand. The hidden key was exactly where it was supposed to be, and he slid it quietly into the lock and opened the laundry room door.

“Where are we going?” Sierra said, but she said it in a whisper, and Ryan thought she
might
be coming down—she was making more sense of the world, or just making more sense.

He opened the door to Robert’s room and turned on the light, and there, asleep in his childhood bed, was Robert.

What followed was five minutes of hushed confusion, with Robert quick to awaken but slow to figure out where he was and why Ryan had come into his room, and James taking on the very new job of reminding everyone else to be quiet so they wouldn’t wake their
father. Earlier in the evening, Robert had driven down from the city on the spur of the moment, a single decision that had delivered effective treatment for two separate cases of loneliness. He and Bill had spent the evening talking about his career plans, and he’d had the opportunity to slip into the conversation a humorous remark about his stubborn case of medical student’s disease. In five minutes, his father had put his mind at ease on both the groin pain and the cough.

Finally Ryan and Sierra settled in Rebecca’s room. Sierra was dazed and a little nervous again, and she jerked involuntarily each time a floorboard creaked in another room or the toilet flushed. She didn’t want sex anymore, and she didn’t want to go to sleep, so they lay awake together, Ryan drifting and bringing himself back, and drifting and bringing himself back, over and over. He watched the numerals on Rebecca’s clock flip toward morning. At one point Sierra whispered that she was “egg smooth,” and he saw a giant egg hovering above him in the dark. He blinked and it was still there, and he wondered what it had been like for her, up in the meadow hallucinating. He was going to have to tell her he hadn’t eaten his mushroom, but he wondered if he had to tell her about James. She wouldn’t like the idea of having been the only one.

• • •

Early in the morning Bill rose and found all three children’s bedrooms occupied. He knew Rebecca always got up first thing Saturday morning to start her laundry, so he called and said, “Everyone’s here. Let me come get you. We’ll have a big breakfast.” Waiting for him in front of her dorm, she looked like an out-of-place adult among the few bleary late-adolescents who were up early on a weekend morning. Or up very, very late on a Friday night.

There were a few exceptions. “See that girl?” Rebecca said, taking her seat in the Accord and leaning over to kiss her father.

A young Indian woman walked purposefully along the sidewalk, a Stanford sweatshirt half covering a pale yellow sari.

“She got a Rhodes Scholarship. She’s going to study astrophysics.”

“I guess it’s true what they say about the early bird.”

“She’s the early airplane.”

They headed home past the Stanford driving range and along the shaded road that ran between Hole 7 and Hole 9 of the golf course. They passed runners sweating in the cool March air. Rebecca had spent the evening with a psychology grad student named Ben, and as she sat beside her father she thought she should trust her instincts more and say no when people asked her out. Ben was a guy she’d sort of known for a couple of years—he’d been a TA in her first psych class, though not her TA—and late in the afternoon he’d approached her in the library and invited her to go with him to First Friday, a monthly psychology department gathering for faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate majors. Rebecca had agreed because the last time she’d gone, in December, she’d gotten involved in a very interesting conversation about cross-fostered rhesus monkeys and what happened when an anxious baby was raised by a calm mother and vice versa. This time Ben kept trying to steer her to his dissertation adviser, a musty senior professor whose research was about memory or learning, she wasn’t sure which—either she didn’t remember or she’d never learned, ha ha. She was polite to Ben, but it had gotten tiring, slipping away and then seeing him approach yet again from across the room. “I keep losing you,” he said, and she thought: No, I keep trying to lose you.

Robert was in the kitchen when they arrived. The three of them got to work, one cracking eggs, another halving oranges for juice, the third pulling apart bacon slices and laying them in a frying pan.

“Isn’t this great?” Bill said. “It’s only been a week or so since we were together for Ryan’s birthday.”

“And Robert’s is coming up,” Rebecca said. “And then mine in April.”

“When I was a kid,” Robert said, “it really bugged me that our birthdays weren’t in the right order. I thought mine should’ve been in January, Rebecca’s in February, Ryan’s in March, and James’s in April.”

“Imagine James,” Rebecca said, “if he’d had the last birthday on top of everything else.” She paused and looked at Bill. “So what happened at the Priory?”

“Bit of a bust. I’ll let James tell you about it. Or better yet, don’t ask.”

“Why?”

“It’s water under the bridge. By the time your mother went down to the shed last night, she’d forgotten about it and was talking about a new piece she’s working on.”

The truth was that Bill wished he hadn’t allowed the Priory thing to go so far. He should’ve stopped Penny before she ever called to set up the appointment, and failing that he should have told James he didn’t have to go with her. Accompanying them had been a form of acquiescence, even collusion.

“Should I go tell her about breakfast?” Robert said.

“Certainly.”

“That’s funny,” Rebecca said. “I thought Robert was asking if he should go tell her
now,
but you answered as if he’d asked whether we should tell her
at all
.”

“Did I?” Bill said, feeling caught out and trying to conceal his guilt behind a veneer of curiosity.

“That’s what ‘certainly’ sounds like,” Rebecca said. “If you’d said, ‘Sure, go ahead,’ it would’ve sounded more like, ‘Yeah, now’s a good time.’ ”

“Remember,” Robert said, “how we tried to think of ways to get her to do stuff with us?”

“Oh, my God!” Rebecca exclaimed. “I haven’t thought of that in so long.” She turned to Bill. “We had a crusade. We brainstormed things we thought she’d like and wrote them down. I’ll bet I still have the piece of paper somewhere.”

“Was bacon on the list?” Bill said, but he was distinctly uncomfortable and busied himself at the juicer, pressing hard on each orange half as, behind him, Robert and Rebecca exchanged uneasy glances. For the first time—though hardly the last; she would puzzle over this for years, until the question itself became the story—Rebecca wondered if her mother’s protracted withdrawal from the family could be seen as a response to some behavior or attitude in her father.
It was an equal and opposite reaction,
she imagined explaining to someone, and then she tried to remember if there was a concept in physics that meant
You started it.

Robert felt bad, too, and he struggled for something to say. “Have you both realized,” he began, uncertain where he was going, “that in a few years,” and then it came to him, “if the three of us are waiting somewhere together, whoever comes to get us will say, ‘Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair, and Dr. Blair’?”

“Hey, you’re right,” Rebecca said, and Bill looked over his shoulder and said, “That’s pretty nifty,” and all three of them began to feel better.

Bill said he’d wake the kids and suggested Rebecca start cooking the bacon and Robert head for the shed.

It was gorgeous out, and Robert went down the driveway slowly, thinking both that he should get back to the city to study and that he would very much like to spend the whole day in Portola Valley, maybe the whole weekend, especially if he could convince Rebecca to stick around for a while.

“Mom,” he called as he passed his car, parked at the shed last night because he’d looked in on her when he first arrived. “Yoo-hoo.”

She came out and waved. “Perfect timing!” She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before and looked as if she hadn’t slept: hair still in its braid but wild and mussed around her face.

“We’re making breakfast,” he said, but as soon as the words were out he was close enough to see into the shed, and he stopped short. Behind her, leaning against her worktable, was a new assemblage. He gaped at it. “No way.”

She looked over her shoulder and then faced him again. “I need your help. It’s too heavy to carry, I want you to drive it up.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“What?”

“James will—”

“Oh, don’t be silly, he won’t care. Can you give me a hand? I think I’ve made a real breakthrough, I want everyone to see it.”

By then Bill was back in the kitchen with Rebecca, and James was in the shower, but Ryan and Sierra were moving slowly, Ryan sitting naked at Rebecca’s desk while Sierra lay naked on the sheets and tried to explain what she’d learned on her trip and why Ryan shouldn’t be sad about her decision to call Martin Degenhart and tell him she was ready for the plane ticket to New York that he’d offered her. “I won’t be gone that long,” she said. “And if I don’t go, I’ll be like the planted seed that never sprouted.”

“You figured it out,” he said.

“What?”

“That I didn’t eat my mushroom.”

“No, baby, no, I just need to do this. Look at you at Santa Cruz. I—Wait, you didn’t eat your mushroom?” Slowly, she sat up and looked at him. Her breasts were sweet and full, her nipples with the same flat, satiny smoothness and deep rose color as her mouth.

He shook his head. “I wanted to take care of you.”

“Oh, my God, Ryan. Now I
really
have to go.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I thought you were getting it last night, I thought you were
with
me. Beauty is different from—”

“I was. You feel beauty instead of you are beautiful. I do get it. You think that guy—”

“Martin—”

“—stopped you because of something in you, not just your looks.”

“That’s sort of it,” she said. “But Ryan, you lied.”

“It was dark up there. James was in a weird mood. You won’t be the unsprouted seed, I promise. You are sprouted.”

“I’ll come back. Or you’ll come with me. You can meet me there this summer.”

“You’re talking about
now
?” He began to cry, and after a moment so did she. They lay down together and salted each other’s skin. Sierra had been approached by Martin Degenhart on a Tuesday in October, and while she listened politely to a straight-haired stranger in a leather jacket tell her he could make her famous, Ryan sat innocently in a lecture hall at UC Santa Cruz with no idea that sixty miles away an assault was being launched against his life.

“Guys,” Rebecca said from the hallway, knocking lightly. “Are you coming?”

There was no way for them to pull apart and get dressed, not until they’d made love, and so they began, their fingertips and palms and lips and tongues traveling routes so familiar that the ground had scarcely to be touched before the destinations were reached. Sierra was in a state of exquisite sensitivity, and she came three, four, five times, until the hallucinations of the night before seemed never to have stopped and the tapestry of trees that had revealed itself to her in the meadow draped over her again like a heavy and gorgeous blanket.

Ryan left her sleeping. He went into the bathroom and was wash
ing his face when James appeared in the open doorway. “What’s the matter?” James said.

Ryan looked in the mirror. His eyes were red, and despite the washing his face looked blotchy. “Nothing. Sierra might go to New York.”

“Change is cool,” James said. “I’m going to the Priory.”

“Come on.”

“No, really.”

They made their way toward the kitchen. The front door was open, and their mother was standing just outside with Robert and Rebecca.

“What are they doing?” James said.

“Boys,” their father said, coming out of the kitchen. “I just put biscuits in the oven. Where’s Sierra?”

Rebecca spun around and held up her hand. “Stop.”

But James wasn’t going to be ordered around, and Ryan and Bill kept pace with him, and in a moment they were all looking at Penny’s new assemblage, larger than any she’d ever done, a four-by-six-foot open box with a cellophane egg noodle bag thumbtacked at the top, an ancient nursing brassiere dangling nearby, a bent wire hanger suspended from a teacup hook, a crumpled cookbook page held in place by a safety pin, a plastic Halloween witch’s mask hanging from an elastic thread, and a handful of Christmas tree tinsel clumped around a rusty nail. There was more, much more, but the thing that had everyone’s attention was at the center of the piece, held in place by four poultry trussing needles. It was Dog.

“Mom,” Ryan gasped.

James barked out a laugh, but his face was burning.

“It’s okay,” Ryan said to Penny. “Just take him out and give him back.”

“It’s not like I care,” James said.

“Of course you care,” Ryan said. “He’s your dog.”

Bill was dumbfounded, but at last he found his voice. “Penny, this is outrageous. It’s beyond the pale. What were you thinking?”

She stared at him for a long moment. “You want to know what I was thinking? Do you kids believe he really wants to know what I was thinking?”

No one had a response. Robert felt guilty about having helped her get the piece up to the house, and the guilt made him angry, and the anger made him wish he’d stayed in San Francisco or even in Michigan with Julie Anne—in some place that felt like home. Rebecca remembered that “beyond the pale” referred to the part of Ireland that was beyond the area controlled by the English, and then, almost but not quite aware that she was intentionally distracting herself, she distracted herself further by wondering if the nursing bra was one her mother had actually worn and saved or if she’d bought it at Goodwill. Ryan looked at the thumbtacks and imagined a picture of Sierra on the cover of a magazine and how thousands and thousands of copies of that picture could end up pinned to the walls of thousands and thousands of men.