The Children's Crusade (45 page)

Before leaving, he went to look at the remains of the shed. The walls lay in pieces, surrounded by bits of the life they’d contained—a metal handle from a cabinet door, the spigot of the sink installed in 1974. The remodel that had converted the shed from an eight-by-ten box into a twelve-by-sixteen structure with plumbing and electricity had taken several weeks and cost twenty-five hundred dollars, which now seemed like a pretty good deal but at the time had seemed a vast sum, proof that his father loved his mother—which perhaps meant that he, Robert, had been wondering. He spotted a piece of pottery and kicked aside a board, exposing about three quarters of a ceramic bowl that Ryan and Marielle must have missed when they
packed. Sections of foundation lay here and there, and he began to explore with his toe, sliding pieces of wall out of the way, turning chunks of concrete upside down. He noticed marks, carvings, in one of the pieces—something etched before the concrete had dried, a design of some kind. He squatted and found a second piece, similarly etched. He lined them up and saw that they fit together. Someone had scratched into the wet concrete a single letter of the alphabet, three times in a row: RRR.

“It’s on the foundation,” Bill had said to Penny on a January night when James’s birth had temporarily put Ryan in Robert’s room. Robert, unable to sleep and therefore entering his parents’ bedroom at a time when they believed themselves to be alone, had overheard this. “What is?” he said, and, thinking quickly, Bill told him he was talking about a spare key, a fib that caused Robert some trouble on a summer afternoon when he was ten years old.

Robert didn’t remember this, but something made him look at his watch and he saw that he should be heading home. Yet he lingered, turning over piece after piece of concrete, increasingly certain that no matter how much he searched he would not find the letter J.

And this helped him. When his daughter was born a week later, he felt, along with great joy, a slight shift in the hovering presence that was his father, who apparently had not planned for James—though, Robert reflected, could anyone have planned for
James
? Regardless, by becoming in this small way less than perfect, the Bill of Robert’s imagination also became gentler and more compassionate. Without knowing why or really even noticing, Robert began to breathe more easily.

It helped that Jen was doing exceptionally well. She’d anticipated a difficult delivery, like the ones she’d had with Sammy and Luke, but this one had gone quickly, and she joked that she finally understood the pioneer women who were up making dinner an hour or
two after pushing out their babies.

“Not that I want you to send away the pans of lasagna,” she said.

“There aren’t any more,” Robert told her, adding to his mental list of chores for the day the purchase of something easy to serve for dinner.

“People,” Jen said with a sigh. “Having a newborn is harder when you’ve got other kids at home, but that whole ‘takes a village’ thing just disappears.”

“I could send out an email to your friends. ‘Jen is furious. She expected better of you.’ ”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea, though I’d want to rewrite it. ‘Jen is so grateful to everyone for continuing with food deliveries while we adjust to life with the new baby.’ That would get them moving.”

“God, you’re good.”

“Child’s play.”

This conversation took place a few days after the baby was born. School had started that morning for Sammy and Luke, and Robert had been surprised to find Lisa Vincent in the parking lot at drop-off. Daphne was in Sammy’s class—returning to public school on the recommendation of her therapist. And the Vincents were calling her Laurel now; Robert had gotten an earful from Lisa.

“She said the last school was too small,” he reported to Jen. “Socially unworkable, quote unquote.”

“Oh,” Jen said. “Mean girls.”

“Plus the tuition.”

“Please.”

“No, she actually mentioned it. ‘We’ve got to tighten our belts.’ And then she gave me this look like
Thanks to you
.”

Jen laughed. The house had sold for so much more than any of them had imagined it would. $3.9 million. After subtracting for several minor repairs and the Realtor’s percentage, each of the four
Blair children cleared $469,325. Jen didn’t trust the stock market, but Robert told her she was being silly and divided his share among a few different mutual funds, which he hoped would do well enough to allow him and Jen to do something different—something great—when he retired. Late in 2008, just twenty months after the close of escrow, his portfolio would lose half its value, but by then his outlook would be so greatly improved that he would tell himself there was plenty of time for his holdings to regain their value—and he would almost believe it.

With her share, Rebecca put $100,000 into a trust for each of her nephews and nieces, made a sizable contribution to her SEP IRA, and invited Walt to go to Europe, a trip she’d wanted to make since high school but had always deferred because of how much time it would take from her work. Vienna and London were the cities she was most eager to see.

Ryan planned to use his share to buy a house. Everyone expected him to do so immediately, to move directly from the shed into whatever new place he and Marielle and Katya would eventually call home, but he was too flummoxed to be able to move quickly. He wanted to be sure that whatever place they bought would be a place that would make them happy for a very long time, so for now they were in a cramped two-bedroom rental in a not great part of Redwood City. Rebecca had a feeling he was exercising some magical thinking, delaying the purchase of a new house so that if somehow the Vincents changed their minds he’d be able to pick up where he’d left off, in the safest, snuggest home a person could ever want. Meanwhile, he and Marielle and Katya were a ten-minute walk from Kmart, where Katya begged to go every few days so she could ride the mechanical spaceship in front of the entrance. Ryan hated Kmart, but he didn’t want to give up any opportunities for family togetherness, so he always went along, bracing himself each time the
automatic doors whooshed open for an overwhelming blaze of terrible harsh colors and plastic smells.

And then there was James. As he waited through the escrow period for his check to come, he thought about how best to spend his share of the money. His apartment in Springfield was as depressing as ever, and he considered moving across the river to Eugene, maybe even putting a down payment on a small bungalow, but recent history had him a little gunshy about using the money for housing. He decided he had the rest of his life to figure out how to spend the money—or simply to spend it, forget figuring it out—so for now he just bought an amazing bike. Joe Rankin and Greg O’Sullivan helped him choose, during a long afternoon at REI, and it was definitely the most beautiful thing he’d ever owned. He and Joe rode together every Monday morning, and he joined the Rankin-O’Sullivans for dinner every Friday evening. He was still the Blair, still single, but he felt deeply rooted in the Barn and in each Barn family—except Celia’s.

Which was to be expected. By the time he arrived in Eugene from Taos, he had decided that he and Celia couldn’t be together. That—for real this time—they had to stop. What he hadn’t reckoned on was how much she would try to change his mind and how hard it would be for him to resist. He had never been able to exercise self-control, to act for the greater good, but something had enabled this, and the only explanation he could come up with was Celia herself. “Great,” she said the second-to-last time they were alone together, sitting on a park bench because he’d refused a more intimate setting. “Because I love you, you can stop loving me.”

“Never,” he said, and then he couldn’t speak.

The last time they were alone together, over coffee at a busy café, she told him she and David were talking about moving to Portland. Not because of James—she hadn’t told David about James and
wasn’t going to—but because they’d agreed that a change would be good for them. Hearing this, James felt the loss of her all over again, but also, disconcertingly, a hint of relief, a little flicker of hope that it might get easier, life without her—that the monthly meetings could be fun again, the workdays uncomplicated, the Barnboard a place to comment on ideas or accept offers of home-grown strawberries rather than a minefield strewn with her name.

But they didn’t move, and it wasn’t easy. He passed her picking up his dinner basket, he ran into her and Cesar at the library, he helped her and Terri Batchelor show the younger kids how to transfer seedlings into peat pots. He arrived at a method for dealing with it: he said hello, he smiled warmly, he moved on. It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done.

He hardly recognized himself, partly because of his willpower but also partly because of something he’d gotten in Taos that was more like the absence of a thing, the Penny-shaped grievance he’d lugged around for most of his life. Maybe it wasn’t entirely gone, but it was fading. He’d gotten an actual thing, too, a small souvenir, pocketed while Penny was out of the studio for a moment. After she made her blunt remark about the two of them ruining things, she seemed to feel a need to make amends and went out to her car to get him some Life Savers for the drive. And while she was gone, he had just enough time to pocket the TV head with his moon face on it. He’d made his own little wire stick figure, and he’d attached the head to the body with Crazy Glue. Finally, he’d fashioned a harness for it and hung it from the handlebars of his new bike. When he sped down a hill, the little figure appeared to be flying.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the following for their thoughtful readings of early drafts of this novel: Sylvia Brownrigg, Harriet Scott Chessman, Ann Cummins, Steve Harris, Jamie Mandelbaum, Lisa Michaels, Cornelia Nixon, Ron Nyren, Angela Pneuman, Sarah Stone, Vendela Vida, Ayelet Waldman, Ted Weinstein, Meg Wolitzer, Steve Willis, and Diana Young. For answering technical questions or pointing me to those who could: Jane Aaron, Sylvie Blumstein, Monica Corman, Bonnie Friedman, Michael Groethe, Sina Khasani, Michelle Oppenheimer, Heidi Pucel, Tania Tour-Sarkissian, and Patti Yanklowitz.

For their warmth and hard work, I’m very grateful to everyone at Scribner, especially Kate Lloyd, Kara Watson, and Nan Graham, whose early enthusiasm and keen editorial eye made all the difference. Finally, abiding gratitude to my agent, Geri Thoma.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-1045-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-1047-1 (ebook)

Excerpts from “Disobedience,” from
When We Were Very Young
by A. A. Milne, copyright 1924 by E. P. Dutton, renewed 1952 by A. A. Milne. Used by permission of Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.