The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  “Actually, there are three Ts,” Robert said. “Triquetrum.”

  “So there are.”

  “Like there are three Rs in our family. What would be a mnemonic for us?”

  “I would never need a mnemonic for you,” his father said, but then he smiled.

  “What?”

  “I thought, ‘Run, Run, Run, Jump.’ And speak of the devil.”

  Ryan and James arrived, slightly breathless, James leading the way and moving so fast that when he flung his arms around his father, his father had to take a step back for balance. “When’s it going to be over?” James cried. “Mommy still isn’t here.”

  Robert went back outside and saw Rebecca talking to a strange-looking little girl, something not quite right about her head or her body, either her head was too big or her body was too small.

  “Have you seen Mom?” Robert asked Rebecca.

  “I’m kind of talking.”

  “Sorry, but have you?”

  “This is my brother,” Rebecca said to the girl. “Robert, the oldest. Remember I told you I have three brothers?”

  The girl nodded but didn’t speak, and now Robert really looked at her. She was a head shorter than Rebecca, but her body seemed like that of an even younger child, her skin a damp ivory.

  “Cassie is ten,” Rebecca said to Robert. “Like me for one more week.”

  “Hi,” Robert said, toward but not exactly to the girl. “You still haven’t said if you’ve seen Mom.”

  “I haven’t.” Rebecca glared at him and turned back to the girl. “Do you want to go in with me? I’m taking Cassie in,” she told Robert, and she put her hand behind Cassie’s elbow as if to help her, though Robert couldn’t tell if Cassie needed it or not.

  Rebecca wasn’t absolutely sure herself, but she thought it better to err on the side of too much help than too little. It was tricky, though. She’d seen Cassie standing alone on the driveway looking very sad, and she’d gone right over and then realized she couldn’t say what she was thinking. What’s the matter? How can I help you? But she also couldn’t just say hi as if it hadn’t occurred to her that something might be a little bit wrong. She had settled on a generic “Hi, my name is Rebecca,” but delivered in a voice that offered solace or sympathy or whatever might be required.

  Cassie had gotten separated from her mother, but Rebecca thought that was only part of it, and that Cassie was sad not because she was alone but because her odd appearance meant people were reluctant to approach her.

  Rebecca looked around the entry hall until she saw her father. She guided Cassie through the crowd and asked him to help. He crouched so his head was level with Cassie’s and told her his name, saying she might have noticed that he was on the tall side, which was useful if you wanted to see over people’s heads in a crowded room. He asked Cassie to describe her mother, and after each thing Cassie said, he nodded and repeated it back to her with a question tacked on at the end. “Brown hair? How long?” “Glasses? Are they wire-rimmed?” It was such a leisurely conversation that Rebecca began to get impatient. She thought her father could get Cassie to her mother faster, but he just moseyed along, and in a little while she noticed Cassie looked less sad.

  “I think I see her over there,” he said. “Does she smile a lot? And tap her lips?” He brought two fingers to his own mouth.

  Cassie nodded happily.

  “There you go, Rebecca,” her father said, putting a hand between Rebecca’s shoulder blades. “Your path is behind the man with the white hair, around the family of redheads, and along that wall where the painting of the horse is. And she’s just below the horse’s front legs.”

  Robert was still outside. Earlier, he’d noticed a large sculpture at the far end of the flagstone terrace, and he went to investigate. It was solid black and not in the shape of anything he could recognize, unless it was a large egg with the insides missing and the shell pulled away in irregular shards. He imagined climbing into it and looking out at all the guests as if he were a monkey in a cage.

  The woman in the patterned jumpsuit came over. “Do you like it?” she said. “It’s bronze—my grandmother commissioned it. You can touch it if you want.”

  Robert didn’t like it but didn’t want to be rude. He touched it and found it surprisingly cold. He wondered if it was difficult to carve bronze. Back in fourth grade, Mr. Gleason had told the class that it took Michelangelo over two years to carve the David, but it was marble and probably the hardest material to carve.

  “I guess you’d start with a chisel,” Robert said.

  “Bronze is cast,” she said. “Melted and poured. We went to the foundry and watched. They heat the bronze to two thousand degrees and then pour it into a ceramic mold.”

  He was embarrassed and said quickly, “I guess you’d need a pot holder for that,” and now she smiled.

  “Is your family inside waiting? If we don’t let people sit down soon there’s going to be a riot. A very polite riot—instead of tear gas people would spray perfume, and they’d hit each other with fountain pens. Your father is handsome,” she added.

  “My father?”

  “He looks like a movie star.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Okay, have it your way. He doesn’t.”

  “Actually, I have to find my mother,” he said, and he took off at a quick walk that became a trot when he had some distance from her. He found it weird that she’d commented on his father’s looks and even weirder that she thought he looked like a movie star. His father was ordinary-looking, with extra-long earlobes and hands that bulged with blue veins at the end of the day.

  Dr. Lawson and a couple of guests lingered at the front door, but the driveway was deserted. Robert decided he’d intercept his mother to make sure she saw the bronze on her way in. He wanted to ask if she’d ever been to a foundry. She took her clay pieces to a store with a kiln and then went back a few days later to pick them up, and he thought she might enjoy a visit to a foundry, where you could see the action. In fact, this could be it, the very thing that would bring her back to the family or take the rest of them to her. The crusade had been his idea in the first place, and now he’d come up with the perfect solution.

  He made his way out to the street and turned toward where they’d parked. He walked past other parked cars, past other houses, farther than he’d remembered coming, far enough that he reached a corner and had to cross the street. Yet they hadn’t crossed a street, had they? He wondered if he’d somehow gone the wrong way. He stood at an intersection with a high boxwood hedge on one corner and a row of palm trees on another, and he understood that his mother had taken the car and left them.

  Dr. Mallon gave the Blairs a ride home. They sat quietly on the leather seats of his shiny black BMW and felt, each of them, a separate and private shame. Only James was spared, because he was so young, but even he knew not to talk and instead sat in the backseat between his brothers and kept as still as he could. Rebecca was squished with her father into the front passenger seat. She knew she should keep things in perspective—she didn’t have it nearly as bad as Cassie—and she wished she could be as calming as her father.

  Her mother was walled off: she was inside a large circle of fence, a corral, and Rebecca moved across the landscape and made her small and then smaller.

  Robert was furious and Ryan was heartbroken. As the car moved along the leafy lanes of Atherton, they stayed angled toward their respective windows and thought about what it would be like to see her at home.

  For that’s where she was. Bill had ascertained this—he had telephoned, and she had answered. She had “changed her mind.” Bill hadn’t known what to do but convey this to the children, and so he simply told them, straight out. She changed her mind. They accepted this as the incomplete story it was and asked no questions, but when he offered them the option of staying for the recital, they said no
in a single voice.

  Enraged though he was, Robert imagined a great act of forgiveness. He would find her, in the mud pantry or the kitchen or her bedroom, and he would describe the sculpture. He would explain that bronze was cast, that you melted it to 2000 degrees and then poured it into a ceramic mold, and he would give her time to picture this and then unfurl his great idea, his invitation.

  Or else he wouldn’t. He had already learned that his plans collapsed sometimes, and he was familiar with the dismay of realizing he’d done exactly what he’d decided not to do, or not done what he’d set out to do. At home, in just a little while, he would pardon her and ennoble himself with the gift, to the entire family, of a brilliant, restorative scheme. Or he would sulk. It was no use deciding now, it would go how it would go.

  Ryan drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. He rested his head against the car door and knew he would cry when he saw her. He didn’t fight the knowledge, just as at home he wouldn’t fight the tears. After some time had passed, he would sit near her on the couch. This was less a plan than a prophecy. He attached a near-magical power to the simple act of sitting near another person on a couch and would continue to do so for the rest of his life.

  “Dad,” Rebecca whispered, twisting around so she could look up into her father’s eyes.

  “Rebeck?”

  “Do you think she has a condition?”

  “Your mother?”

  “Cassie, Dad. My friend.”

  “I don’t know, honey. I suspect she might.”

  “But do you think she’ll be okay?”

  Bill felt Rebecca’s shoulder digging into his upper arm. He would have liked to wrap her in a hug, but the constraint of John Mallon’s leather bucket seats and the sadness emanating from the backseat left him unable to move.

  “Do you, Dad?”

  “You have a wise heart, Rebecca. And a kind heart. You’ll never want for friends.”

  The station wagon was in the driveway, at an angle to the steps and several yards short of its usual place next to the Valiant: less parked than abandoned. John Mallon stopped but didn’t cut the engine. It was rare for him to do anyone a favor, and he found himself overtaken by a powerful feeling that he mistook for concern for the Blair children when in fact it was a desire to be extravagantly thanked. What he received of gratitude was heartfelt but inevitably truncated, and twelve years later, as an attending at UCSF, he would take a powerful dislike to a serious dark-haired medical student named Robert Blair and seek to make the young man’s orthopedics rotation as difficult as possible, without ever becoming aware of the connection.

  James was the first out of the car. Unencumbered by so much as a tiny layer of propriety, he scrambled over Robert and was up the steps and banging on the front door before the others had set both feet on the ground. He pounded with the flat of his hand and then turned the knob and was inside. “Mommy,” he shouted. “Mommeeeeeee!”

  The house was empty: the kitchen and mud pantry as they’d been before the recital, the living room sunny and quiet, his parents’ bedroom darkened by the drawn curtains and betraying an indentation on the bedspread but no human form anywhere. Their bathroom—empty, too.

  “Mommy,” he shouted as he barreled down the bedroom hallway, past the children’s bathroom, and into the laundry room. By then the others had come inside, and James rejoined them at the front door and waited while they saw for themselves.

  “Where is she?” Rebecca said. She was the only one who could make it a question and not merely a lament. “Where on earth is she?”

  “I think I might know,” their father said. He glanced through the window next to the door—reflexively verifying that John Mallon had departed—and then led the way down the driveway with the children trailing behind and to his sides like the wake of a motorboat, until he reached the spur that led to the storage shed.

  And there she was, standing with her hands on her hips, twenty or thirty yards away. She was facing the shed and didn’t turn around, though she must have heard them; she must have heard John Mallon’s car, for that matter. She’d changed into blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and her hair in its single braid hung down her back.

  “Penny,” he called.

  She turned.

  “What—” he began, but he found he couldn’t put into a meaningful group of words the hurt he felt on behalf of his children. He couldn’t speak, and so he held his arms out wide in a gesture that could have indicated confusion and could possibly have indicated forgiveness but that Penny took to be a reference to Jesus on the cross.

  And so she laughed.

  “Mom,” Ryan whimpered.

  “Why is she laughing?” Rebecca asked.

  “She’s happy we found her,” Robert said, going for sarcasm but landing considerably short of his target.

  “There’s my mommy!” James shouted.

  He ran down the spur, and the other children followed, and Bill watched them crowd around her: Ryan crying, Robert tapping her shoulder intently. Only Rebecca remained at a slight remove, but even she seemed primed for engagement: head tilted to the side, her trademark announcement that she was thinking hard and would soon have something to say.

  Bill saw that the children were defining the moment as a rescue operation rather than the act of capture it actually was.

  Penny watched him approach, each step a concession she knew he didn’t want to make. He was obviously angry, and she wished she had it in her to apologize, but she was too caught up in the thing that had drawn her away from the recital in the first place: her realization that the path to happiness she’d thought she might never find was an actual path that lay a mere hundred yards from her house.

  The shed was going to be her salvation.

  “Don’t say anything,” she said when he reached her and the children. “Don’t say anything. I shouldn’t have left and I’m sorry, but did you know there are many kinds of emergencies? Children, did you? There are all the normal kinds of emergency, the medical kinds, but an idea can be an emergency, too. You can have an idea that is so important, you have to act on it or you’ll . . . you’ll die. Not really, but the part of you that thought of it and that was so excited—that part will die just a little bit. And that’s your soul, children. That’s the creative, beautiful, mysterious thing we all have inside of us, and if it doesn’t get what it wants, if it doesn’t get air, it begins to shrivel. What good would I be to you if I began to shrivel? I have to keep myself alive so I can help you live. It’s not just doctors who do that.”

  “Mom, what is it?” Ryan said. He wanted to put his hands on her face, to smooth her eyebrows. “What’s your idea?”

  “I have an idea,” Robert said.

  “And I have a hammer!” James exclaimed.

  “Shut up, James,” Robert said, stomping his foot.

  “I hammer in the morning! I hammer in the evening! I hammer in the afternoon! I hammer at night!”

  “James,” Ryan said. “That’s not how it goes.”

  “I always wonder about that song,” Rebecca said. “Why is it ‘I’d hammer out danger’ and then ‘I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters’? Danger is bad, so you’re hammering it out, right? But then why do you want to hammer out love?”

  “I have something to say,” Penny cried.

  “Oh, goodness,” Bill said. “Let’s all take a deep breath.”

  “It’s not a medical emergency,” Penny said. “We don’t need deep breaths!”

  “But you said ideas need air,” Rebecca said.

  “No!” Penny cried. “Please!”

  She hadn’t wanted it to be like this: she had wanted everyone to admire her idea, to see how it would help her and thereby help them all. But it had gone very quickly from promising to muddled, like so many other moments of family life. She said, “This is what I can’t ta
ke, this is what I can’t stand!”

  Everyone fell silent. Bill put his hand to his mouth, as if her words had not yet been uttered and he might prevent them by suggestion; but they were far from speaking with a single voice. At times he viewed himself as a kind of diplomat/translator for her and the children, and after she said something hostile or confusing he tried to convert it into a sweeter, clearer statement. But he was dry now.

  “I need a place,” she said. “For my supplies, my arts and crafts. For me. And we’ve got this shed down here going to waste. I mean, why do we have a rowboat? Why don’t we have a kiln?”

  Robert had been holding back, reserving his beautiful foundry trip for just the right moment, and now he saw it sailing past, departing without him. “But wait,” he said. “There was this sculpture—”

  “And if we’re going to clear it out and make windows,” his mother continued, with a glance in his direction that seemed to convey censure, forgiveness, and apology all at once, “we might as well go the extra step and make it a little bigger, since there’s plenty of level ground off to the side here. And we could put in a small bathroom just to save me time, so I wouldn’t have to go up and down to the house all day. Just a toilet and a sink. I’d need a sink anyway, so really the only extra would be the toilet. You can spare me a toilet, can’t you, Bill?”

  All this time, the children had thought she was speaking to all of them, but now they understood it was only their father she was addressing. She wanted something from him.

  “Mom,” Ryan said. “You aren’t moving down here, are you?”

  “No, of course not,” Bill said. “Of course she isn’t.”

  5

  REBECCA

  People have always asked how it was for me, being the only girl in a family of boys, but I never felt we were a family of boys. We didn’t have the kind of household in which the brothers set the tone with roughhousing and smelly socks, and my brothers didn’t gang up on me or put slugs in my bed, which happened regularly at my friend Joyce’s house, where there were only two boys and a far warmer and more watchful mother to boot. My brothers shared a room at Sea Ranch, where we spent a week each summer, but even there I was never the odd one out. In fact, Ryan and I were particularly close during those vacations. Arriving late on a Friday evening, after a four-hour drive that always seemed even longer, we’d grab flashlights and make our way across the meadow to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. We’d stand close together under the thick stars and listen to the waves pounding the rocks. This was the Pacific as wild beast, and we loved it. We loved the harsh air and the glints of moonlight far out on the water. If we weren’t too cold or tired, we would hike to the piece of driftwood someone had set like a bench overlooking the scrap of beach where we would have our salty lunches the next day. “We’re back!” we would yell at the ocean. “We’re back!”