The Children's Crusade (44 page)

“Because she was getting ready for a show? Please.”

“Emotionally. She couldn’t manage it.”

“That’s what I mean,” Ryan said. “She’s mellowed.”

“Wines mellow,” Robert said. “Then they turn into vinegar.”

“She’s less defended,” Rebecca said.

I was only half listening, focused instead on the albums and what a little ham I was in every picture, striking a silly pose or making a face. The rest of the family was of a piece, even my mom with her distracted or sour look, and then there was James: blond, big-boned, bursting. I was the kid who entered your house at a run and knocked over the crystal vase on the sideboard without a backward glance. If you left an important document out, I found a Magic Marker and scribbled all over it. If I wanted a Popsicle, I took the last one, left the empty box in the freezer, and ran off without closing the door. A misfit if a misfit had no idea he was a misfit.

But I knew. I knew.

“You know,” I said to my mom, looking from her to Carver and Todd and back, “thanks to you, my whole childhood was a narcissistic blow.”

She began to cough. “Oh,” she gasped, “oh,” and she reached for her water. “Sorry, wrong pipe.” She pressed her napkin to her lips and hurried from the table.

“Oh, dear,” Carver said.

“Families,” Todd said.

“We’re very fond of your mother,” Carver said.

“I’m glad someone is.”

She was gone for a long time. Carver and Todd worked to keep a conversation going, but as soon as she returned they said it was time to call it a night. She signaled for the check. It was after eight, and I was beyond exhausted. The airport in Albuquerque was two hours away, and I was torn. Should I make the drive tonight so I could sleep in, or find a place to stay in Taos and set an alarm for five a.m.?

“I’m not upset by what you said,” she told me once we’d settled in her car. “I had a good time tonight. Thanks for coming.”

“You’re not upset but you’re also not sorry.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. For all the good that’ll do you.”

“You’re not exactly saying it.”

“I’m sorry about my . . . distraction.”

“Your distraction? You despised me!”

She looked at me through the dark. “James. I didn’t despise you.”

“Let’s not talk anymore.”

We made our way to the main road, and she turned in the direction of her studio. I realized I didn’t even know where she lived.

I said, “So you’ll sell the house?”

“Of course. Nothing’s changed, I want my own place, just like three years ago. I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry when I told Rebecca I wanted to see you first.”

We continued in silence. In under twenty-four hours I’d be in Eugene, settling back in, counting the minutes until I could see Celia. Talking to her on the phone from the airport in Phoenix, I’d felt enveloped with relief that the last six months, the deception, would soon be over. I knew it would be hard on Theo and Cesar, but what Rebecca had said about trauma had stuck with me. Celia and I would watch them carefully and get them help if they needed it.

We pulled into the parking lot and my mom cut the engine. “It
hasn’t been so awful, has it?” she said. “You’re good company. You’re very funny.”

“It hasn’t been so awful.”

“That was all I wanted. For it to be not so awful.”

“Lofty goals,” I said, and she smiled. “Show me your stuff,” I said impulsively. “Before I take off.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

The studio was very cold, and she turned on the lights but didn’t bother with the thermostat, saying it would take too long for the place to heat up. She had an electric kettle, and she turned it on, for mugs of tea that would warm our hands while she showed me around.

“At first,” she said, “it was really about the wire. I did things like this, pretty small-scale but occasionally bigger and more complex.” She was walking me from one small sculpture to the next, basically loose balls of wire twisted in different ways.

“They kind of look like Brillo pads,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t get as far away from your old stuff as you thought.”

She smiled. “Then a couple years ago I started moving away from pure abstraction. Here’s a piece I made last winter.”

It was a small wire swing set with delicate wire people, the three-dimensional equivalent of stick figures. Triangles on legs, they were obviously women. In place of a head each was topped by a tiny plastic television set the size of a sugar cube, its screen occupied by an image of a woman’s face.

“Whoa, this is weird,” I said. “Did you make this little TV set? It’s so perfect.”

“Dollhouse furniture. I did a series of these and they sold so fast.”

“I kind of love it.”

She looked pleased. Her hair was shoulder-length and com
pletely gray, and because of the light fixture hanging from the high ceiling, I could see how much it had thinned. “Look,” she said, “this is what happens when they get bigger.” She led me to a large piece with a central braided trunk resting on three heavy-gauge wire feet, and a canopy that looked like a giant bird’s nest. I stared up into the canopy: there were hundreds of figures like the ones in the small sculpture, wire women with tiny television heads. Each screen displayed the face of a woman from another age, with a stiff hairdo and dark lipstick and an intense look of pleasure or pain.

The kettle whistled, and she poured water into hand-thrown mugs. I thought of her ceramics and how fascinated I’d been by the kiln she got when I was in first grade. Whenever I was home alone with her I wanted her to take me to the shed, and she said only if I stayed quiet and didn’t touch anything—neither of which was remotely possible.

“I’m not sure how you’ll feel about this,” she said, “but I’m working on something new. I haven’t even decided if I like it myself.”

She led me to a table that was scattered with tiny television sets, dozens of them, most with tiny black-and-white photographs glued to their screens. Here was Rebecca’s sixth-grade school picture, the first in which she wore glasses and as far as I knew the only picture of her in existence that had made her cry. There was Ryan standing in his crib; my mom had cropped out everything but his face, but I knew the photograph so well that I could see the crib. Robert gazed dolefully from a missing piano in one and smiled up from an absent bathtub in another. The table was heaped with photos, familiar shots from our family albums but smaller and in black and white, many with their fingernail-size faces already cut out. Beyond the pictures was a row of little wire stick figures, still headless.

“So they’re going to go like this?” I said, sliding a TV with a picture of Ryan to a wire boy.

“I didn’t do you yet,” she said. “I didn’t know how you’d feel. Actually, what am I saying, I did. If you don’t like it, I won’t use it. I may not use these at all. People like the women. They want the facial expressions explained, though, and they want titles.”

“Mom.”

She opened a covered Tupperware, took out another tiny TV, and laid it on the table. There I was at about age four, squeezing my eyes shut and smiling a huge fake smile. I knew the photo: just outside the cropping I was holding Dog. It was a picture I’d always disliked, my face moonlike and empty.

“Well,” I said, “you definitely get points for courage.”

“Does it bother you?”

“No, it’s fine. But I should probably hit the road.”

“James, really, I won’t use it if you don’t want me to. It was stupid, what I did with your dog. Heartless. I’ve always felt really bad about it.”

I sighed.

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said, “I’m just telling you. Should I throw this away?”

“I don’t care,” I said. And I didn’t. I slid the cube over to the others, so that my little moon face was in a crowd of images of my siblings. I couldn’t imagine the patience she would need to make the things, cutting out the tiny faces, gluing them to the TVs. It would take a kind of concentration I’d never had in my life.

“Your group sounds wonderful,” she said. “The Barn. Why is it called the Barn?”

“I guess because there’s room for a lot of us.”

“You know what I was thinking at the restaurant? You finally got your Jamestown.”

“Oh, my God. What a thing to remember.”

“Didn’t Rebecca?”

“I didn’t tell her about the Barn. Didn’t tell any of them.”

I thought she was going to say something about how strange it was to be receiving a confidence from me, but instead she shook her head and said, “My God, those years. You were such a little maniac.”

“Guilty.”

“That’s what you said when Carver asked if you were single.”

“I guess I did. Thing is, I’m about to be unsingle. But first I’m going to be a home-wrecker.”

And then, exhausted and freezing, I told her the whole story of me and Celia. I told her more than I’d told any of my siblings—more than I’d told all of them combined. She nodded every now and then but stayed silent.

“Everyone in Portola Valley is appalled,” I concluded. “Robert in particular. You know what Dad always said. ‘Children deserve care.’ ”

She gave me a thin smile. “Yes, he always had firm notions about that. It was like he was on a mission. A crusade.”

I thought of our crusade, wondered how she’d react to hearing about it.
We wanted you with us.
We had, for a time.

I said, “Well, it’s not wrong.”

“What about adults? They don’t deserve care? Clearly I didn’t.”

Toward the end of Ryan and Marielle’s wedding weekend, I tracked my dad down in the garage and found him alone, just sitting there on a small wooden bench. He asked if I would reconsider my refusal to talk to my mom, and I told him I didn’t understand why he cared. “You’re not talking to her that much, either,” I said, and he told me it was different; she didn’t
want
to talk to him: “She’d still be living here if she did.”

I looked at her, curious now. “Wasn’t the whole thing mutual?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Didn’t he deserve your care?”

“You don’t understand. He was a doctor, it was a one-way street.”

“Robert’s a doctor, and I think Jen—”

“He was a certain
kind
of doctor. And when we met, I was so young.”

“Twenty-two.”

“But I was really younger than that. And he was older than twenty-eight.”

“Because of the war.”

“Who knows? Whatever the reason, he didn’t want care from me. He wanted babies.”

I was too tired to pursue it any further and said I had to go. There was a little bathroom tucked into one corner of the studio, barely big enough to house a toilet, and I went in for a pit stop before I hit the road.

“You’re so worried about Celia’s children,” my mom said when I came out. “What about the Barn?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Aren’t you worried about what will happen to the Barn when you and Celia get together?”

“We’re going to lose it. We know that. We’ve talked about it.”

“No, not what’ll happen to you, what’ll happen to
it.
Aren’t you afraid you’ll ruin it?”

“How would we ruin it?”

Her fingers went to her throat, and she found the piece of turquoise. She said, “Isn’t that what we have in common, you and I? That we ruin things?”

10

THE HOUSE

T
he excavator came on a Thursday in late July, making its slow, noisy way up the driveway at 7:50 a.m., ten minutes prior to the official start time. The Blair children—Sammy, Luke, and Katya—had been promised the opportunity to watch the giant yellow machine at work and were disappointed when they arrived too late to see the first blows it delivered to the house where their fathers had grown up. By the time they got there, the huge bucketlike thing at the end of the enormous mechanical arm was bashing the part of the roof that covered the kitchen. Standing safely back in their protective goggles, they debated whether it was clawing like a giant hand or biting like a giant mouth.

Ryan hadn’t wanted Katya to be there, but she was determined to do whatever her cousins did, and Marielle had convinced him it wasn’t the same as watching the destruction of her own little house, scheduled for a few days hence.

The excavation contractor walked over and stood with Ryan and the kids. He was strongly built, with Popeye arms. “You don’t want to film it?” he said. “It’s pretty fun to watch speeded up.”

The boys pleaded with Ryan. Couldn’t they run home and get their dad’s video camera? Couldn’t Ryan, while they stayed and watched?

“You know the best kind of movie?” Ryan said.

“If you say memory, I’m going to be really mad,” Sammy said.

“Got me.”

“Let’s call my mom. She’ll bring it.”

“Let’s not bother her,” Ryan said. “She’s pretty tired these days.”

Jen was eight months pregnant, surprisingly happy to be expecting another baby but embarrassed to have wound up in this situation by accident. It was a birth-control failure of a type you really couldn’t tell other people, so she was saying it was caused by a switch from condoms to the minipill, which had to be taken at the exact same time every day, a task well within Jen’s abilities, but no one was going to subject the story to that much scrutiny.

In fact, the pregnancy had resulted from a failure of the failure method. For a long time Robert couldn’t stay hard, and so when they fooled around they were really only just fooling—until suddenly one night.

“Friends of the Vincents?” the contractor asked, and Ryan said yes, pretty much.

By midmorning it was clear to the three kids that the entire house would come down and also that it would take some time and not get any more entertaining as the minutes ticked by. But Ryan was reluctant to leave. He kept fearing a new gash would reveal something that shouldn’t be destroyed, like a room that had somehow survived the final emptying of the house and still contained furniture and lamps and clothes—even people. He wanted to be there so he could signal to the operator that he should stop.

Finally they all waved goodbye—to the contractor and the machine operator and the house and the big oak tree—and got into his car and drove to the beach. They spent the next few hours building a phenomenal sand castle, using a huge supply of empty plastic containers that Ryan had borrowed from Sand Hill Day. When they were finished—all four of them wet and cold and hungry—they sat on a piece of driftwood and made up a song about the sand castle and its inhabitants. Then they drove down the coast to the town of
Pescadero, where they each ate a large bowl of artichoke soup and a slice of olallieberry pie.

“I just have sand in my eyes,” Ryan said when they wanted to know what was wrong. “And wind.”

“Wind can’t stay in your eyes,” Luke said.

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?”

But it did stay in his eyes—something did—and a few days later he called Rebecca and said he wanted to get together. “Just us,” he said, “if that’s okay.”

They met for breakfast at the same café where they’d sat with Robert and James just before Halloween, almost a year earlier. It had been a long time since the two of them had been alone together, and for a while they talked about how long. Ryan thought he remembered a quick upbeat conversation over coffee during some recent Christmas, probably 2005 because it wasn’t last year and he didn’t think it was 2004, the first Christmas without Bill. Rebecca thought it was 2003, just before Bill’s GI emergency, and that they’d been alone together since then, just after Bill died, the two of them out for a walk on a cold January morning. She remembered a mist hanging in the trees, making the neighbors’ houses seem ghostly.

She said, “I guess the thing is, it’s been a long time.”

“Do you remember the last time you were alone with Dad?”

“Besides at the hospital? Probably a few days before that Christmas. I did his shopping for him and took the gifts up so he could see them before they were wrapped.”

“You don’t hold it, though,” Ryan said.

“Hold it?”

“As a thing.”

“No, I guess not. You hold yours?”

Ryan put his face in his hands.

“Honey.”

His last time alone with Bill had been on the day after Katya’s first birthday—almost five months before Bill’s death. Ryan clung to this because it wasn’t enough. The family had had dinner at the big house, with the requisite cake for Katya to palm into her mouth, and Ryan had gone up the next morning to fetch some things he’d left behind. Bill was at the kitchen table, dressed in his summer uniform of an ironed shirt and crisp chinos. Ryan sat with him. They talked about Katya; that was what they always talked about. “Glorious” was the word Bill used. Ryan felt so full and proud, he didn’t realize until later in the day that he’d forgotten to thank his father for hosting. His father didn’t want to be thanked—he’d said so many times, said “It’s your house, too” to all four of them, over and over—but still, Ryan wished he’d thanked him. More, he wished he’d said something to him about the kind of father he’d been, and how much that was guiding the kind of father Ryan was trying to be. Next time we’re alone together, he thought as he fell asleep that night, I’ll tell him, but it never happened—Marielle and Katya were always with him, or else Rebecca was there, or Robert and Jen and the boys. Sitting with Robert and Rebecca in the waiting room while Bill was in surgery, all Ryan could think was that he was going to make the time, create time alone with his father as soon as he was home from the hospital, so he could say all the things he wanted to say. What made this so painful to remember was that Ryan wasn’t the kind of person who had trouble telling people what he felt about them. He told his students every day how much he valued them, appreciated them, learned from them. He’d told his father, throughout his life, what he felt. Nothing was a mystery, nothing a secret. He just wished for a better last time alone together.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” he asked Rebecca. “I get so sad. Do you think I need therapy?”

“What would therapy look like?”

“Sitting in your office talking to you.”

She gave him her quiet, sympathetic smile, and he started to feel a little better. Rebecca at forty-four had a wisdom he associated with the elderly. Sometimes, picturing her, he gave her more gray hairs than she had in life.

“Are you really worried?” she said.

He shook his head.

“Adjustment disorder.”

“What?”

“That’s the diagnosis I’d give you. You’re under stress, not surprising given the huge change in your life.”

“You mean the shed.”

“And the house,” she said. “The house, too. And Dad.”

“That was almost four years ago.”

“Exactly. Not long at all.”

“You still haven’t been up to look at the demolition?”

“No.”

She’d spent a good deal of time thinking about it, what it would mean if she went and what it would mean if she didn’t, aware all the while that she was trying to protect herself from being pierced—this was the word she settled on—by grief. “And what’s so bad about that?” her analyst asked her. “It’s painful,” she said, and her analyst said, “No, not what’s so bad about being pierced by grief. What’s so bad about avoiding it?”

Two children in Rebecca’s care had died in recent months. The boy with leukemia, and a girl who was killed in a car accident along with her entire family. These were two very different kinds of death, Rebecca explained to Walt a few days after her coffee with Ryan.

“Expected versus unexpected?”

She said she meant something different having to do with her relationship with each child: how death had been in the background
all along with the boy, whereas it wasn’t part of the landscape with the girl.

“I’m not sure I see the difference,” Walt said, “between that dichotomy and the one expressed by expected versus unexpected.”

She tried again, saying she probably never would have treated the boy if he hadn’t had the illness that ultimately killed him, whereas her treatment of the girl had come about because of a sleep phobia, and the girl’s physical health—her life—had never been in question. “Now do you see the difference?”

Walt said he didn’t, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. He said he wanted to hear more and patted the space next to him on the couch, urging her to join him. She had a feeling that if she moved, she would lose her train of thought. “With the boy I had a part to play in his death, whereas with the girl it was much more, I don’t know, innocent.”

“Innocent like the opposite of guilty? You were supposed to save him?”

“Like the opposite of corrupt.”

“Death is corrupt?”

“I’m not sure.”

Walt patted the couch cushion again, and now she sat next to him. He’d turned sixty a month earlier; she had married an old man. “Is that good or bad?” she imagined her analyst saying, and she smiled at how she used the introjected figure of her analyst to challenge herself to think further. “You like to keep me close,” her analyst said to that, and Rebecca made an effort to quiet that conversation for the moment.

Staring at the painting, she thought about her father’s story of the day he first saw the land. It was September, hot and gold, and he had just turned twenty-six. He lay on the ground under the oak tree and looked up between its snaking branches at the bits of startling
blue. He wanted to figure out a way to live under that sky without forgetting the other sky, halfway around the world, that for two years had seemed always gray and always to bear down on the land and sea, no matter the season and no matter the weather. Both skies were empty of heaven; both were governed by phenomena that he sometimes understood and that also were beyond comprehension. Lying on his back, he spread his arms wide and his elbow came down on a fallen leaf, dry enough that its spikes bit into his skin. He brushed the offending leaf from his arm. A short-sleeved shirt—that was his answer to Rebecca’s question of what he was wearing. She wanted to be able to picture it accurately. White with blue checks. Sitting up, he no longer had to contend with the sky, and that was when he began to imagine children, laughing and shouting. “Not us, though, Dad, right?” Rebecca said. He said, “No, not you. I could say it was you, but I want you to be able to trust me. I want you to know I’ll always tell the truth. Of course it wasn’t you. But they were children in the abstract, and they helped me.”

On a Sunday in August, Robert drove up to take a look at the house, or the absence thereof. He knew the Vincents had offered their contractor a bonus for finishing ahead of schedule, but he was surprised by what he found. The shed was still rubble, awaiting removal, but everything else was utterly changed. The driveway had been widened, and many of the trees that had climbed alongside it were missing. Every trace of the house was gone, and a new foundation was being built, the original footprint vanished and irrelevant. A bulldozer had cleared an area just down the hill from the house, creating a space that would be used for a swimming pool. And the oak tree was gone.

The afternoon was hot and quiet. Robert had offered to bring the boys, but they wanted to stay home with Jen, hoarding her last days before the baby was born. The baby was a girl, to be named Mar
garet for Bill’s mother, but they would call her Greta because this was Silicon Valley in the year 2007, and “Margaret” was traditional without the necessary additional quality of being charming.

From the site of the future swimming pool, Robert could not at first find the remaining bit of trail down to the tree house. Logic said it should be at about the midpoint of the newly denuded and flattened area, but logic apparently misremembered the placement of trees that no longer existed, so Robert decided to bushwhack. Squeezing between shrubs, he found he was only twenty feet up from the tree house, which also seemed altered. The changes were behind him, but the abundant light made the tree house look pitiful, like a treasure trunk of jewels found by moonlight that in daytime reveals itself to be a mere cardboard box containing a cheap trinket or two.

He didn’t want it left for the Vincents to find, but he also didn’t want to spend the day dismantling it. The nearby fence dividing the property from the lot next door was in a state of repair almost worse than the tree house, with the strands of barbed wire only intermittently in contact with the wooden stakes meant to support them, and the stakes leaning over so drastically they were nearly lying on the ground. The fence, Robert thought, was exhausted. He saw that with very little trouble he could detach the wire from a few stakes, which he could then move ten feet onto his family’s former land, creating a property line that would exclude the tree house. It would also cost the Vincents something like twenty square feet of prime real estate in Portola Valley, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

Not that he would do this. Maybe, with the terrace and pool construction most likely on a slower timetable than the house, it would be a while before anyone found the tree house. Or maybe they already had. It occurred to him that the appraisal of the house—
executed back in December during the tumult of the holidays, and finding out Jen was pregnant, and negotiating with the Vincents over a sale price—most likely required the appraiser to walk the perimeter of the property. Wouldn’t he have been obliged to report the existence of the tree house?

For all Robert knew, the Vincent girls played here. He wondered if the younger one was still having a hard time, and he thought maybe it would be therapeutic, this tiny retreat from luxury. Which was relative, he knew: he lived in luxury compared with Ryan, who lived in luxury compared with . . . well, no one Robert knew personally. Still, he was hurting no one by seeing the Vincents as exemplars of a new kind of wealth, even if it really wasn’t all that new or all that wealthy. Shaking hands with Lewis when they finally agreed on a purchase price, Robert had found himself grateful for the first time in months, maybe years, for his modest primary care medical practice and his modest goal to supply a very nice and yet modest living for his family. People he’d known who’d gone into dermatology, plastic surgery—in some way they lived less satisfying lives because they were closer to true wealth, where distress seemed to collect like dust on the surface of his desk at home, these days rarely used.