The Children's Crusade (29 page)

By the time I got home, Lisa’s silver sedan was parked just past the turnoff for the spur. The main room of the shed was crowded, with Marielle, Susanna, and an older teenage girl all standing at the door to the side room.

Lisa leaned over Katya’s bed. “Please stop, please stop,” she was saying to Daphne. “Please, please, please.” Then she turned and saw me. “What should I do? Lewis is out of town. What should I do?”

Daphne lay on her side with her knees drawn up and held close to her chest. She was making a noise I couldn’t decipher, not quite speech but close. I leaned down. “Daphne, honey, what’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?” The sound she was making turned into the word “no,” but it was more of a chant or a hum, like a yoga teacher saying “Om” at the end of class.

“ ‘No’ what, Daphne? Can you help me understand?”

She clutched her knees tighter and shook her head.

I went back into the main room and Lisa followed me. “What should I do? What should I do?” She began to weep, and Marielle led her outside. Susanna sat down with Katya, and the two of them began coloring together. Only the teenage girl and I remained standing in the room.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“I went to the bathroom. I wasn’t ignoring her.”

On some level I knew the situation was critical only because everyone was so worried, not because of Daphne’s behavior. But I still felt anxious.

“Ryan,” Susanna said from the floor.

I looked over at her.

“Just tell her she has to leave.”

Katya came over, and I lifted her and held her on my hip. Lisa came back inside. Her blond eyebrows looked especially pale because of how red her face was.

I said, “What do you want to do, Lisa? Can she just stay here until she’s ready to go? She will be eventually, you know. Sooner or later. We can give her a snack and bring her up to the house.”

“No.” Lisa shook her head vehemently. “I can’t let that happen. That’s not okay.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just not.”

“Let’s step outside,” I said. “All of us.”

I waited for everyone to go and then carried Katya out. Deep in the woods as we were, it seemed evening would begin any second.

“I think there are two possibilities,” I told Lisa. “You leave her here and go up to the house and wait, or I carry her up to the house. Actually, no, I can’t do that, I don’t want to do that. The thing is, I
don’t think everyone waiting here is a good idea.” I looked at Marielle. “What do you think, love?”

“Leave her,” she said to Lisa. “At least for a bit. Lewis’s flight lands soon,
non
? Go. You’ll be happier calling him from home. The other girls can stay if you like.”

The babysitter looked uneasy. “I kind of have to get home? Soon?”

“I’ll drive you,” Marielle said. “Are you close? Katya, do you want to go for a ride?”

At last everyone had something to do. Lisa and Susanna headed up the spur, Marielle knelt on the backseat of the Jetta buckling Katya into her car seat, the babysitter settled herself in the front seat, and I went back inside.

I moved around the main room, wanting to let Daphne know that someone was nearby but not about to confront her again. After a few minutes I heard a noise and turned around. There she was: cheeks flushed, like a child just awakened from a fever. She said, “Where is everyone?”

“Your mom went back up to the house. How are you doing?”

“Fine.” She shrugged. “I was tired.”

“Would you like something to drink?”

She went over to the love seat. She wore a denim skirt and her legs were bare, with red patches behind the knees that looked like eczema. Sitting down, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest and stared straight ahead.

I filled a mug with water and took it to her.

“Actually, I just want to go home.”

She kept a distance of several feet between us as we walked. At the driveway she said she would go the rest of the way by herself, but I said I wanted to go with her. It was almost dark.

The house came into view and she stopped. “My mom’s here?”

“Yes.”

“What about my babysitter?”

“Marielle and Katya drove her home.”

“And my sister?”

“Here, as far as I know.”

Daphne stared at the house. “I’m not ready to go in.”

“Okay.”

“Where’s my dad?”

“On his way home from Chicago. I think Chicago.”

“It’ll take about a year.”

“What’s that?”

“Crashing the house down and building a big one. Okay, I’m ready now.”

We climbed the steps, my mind lagging as I thought about what she’d just said. No wonder she’d had such a hard week. Not only was she dealing with whatever tension her parents had about the house, she was also probably worried about where she was going to live during the construction, if it happened.

We’d reached the top step, and Daphne looked at me expectantly. I knocked.

There were footsteps, and Lisa swept open the door. Relief flooded her face, as if she had not been sure Daphne would survive. I realized I should have called her to say we were on our way.

“Oh, my God. Daphne. Ryan. Come in, come in,” she urged, beckoning me forward with one hand while with the other she pulled Daphne close.

I hadn’t been inside the house in months—not since an afternoon in late summer when Susanna asked if she could babysit at home rather than at the shed so she and Katya could play with her Barbies.

Susanna appeared from the bedroom hallway. I waved at her and she waved back. She stared at her sister. After a long moment she turned and headed away.

“What am I going to do with you?” Lisa said to Daphne.

I saw some form of heartbreak pass across Daphne’s face, and I turned away and stared into the living room. Something about it was different. I tried to remember it from the summer, and of course it was nighttime, and fall, and the curtains were drawn across the windows, but that didn’t seem to be it. Was there a new couch? Then I got it. An end table was gone. The end table. In its place was a floor lamp with too much space around its base, and indentations in the rug where the table legs had been. I felt sick with pity for Daphne, and I said I had to get home and hurried out. At the top of the steps, I waited for my heartbeat to slow down.

• • •

It started raining again the next day, and it was still raining Sunday morning. Katya had slept in the Murphy bed with Marielle and me, and she and I stayed under the covers while Marielle got up and made our café au lait—or, in Katya’s case, just plain lait. We got a call from Mémé and Pépé, our names for Marielle’s parents. They were a big part of our lives: we visited them every summer and they spent a week in California every January. In contrast, Katya had met Penny only twice, and she had no memory of either occasion. We’d shown her photos of herself in Penny’s arms, but they seemed to confuse her. She understood the idea of grandparents—Mémé was Mama’s mama and Pépé was Mama’s daddy—but she couldn’t make sense of a grandmother she didn’t know.

It was different with my father. She claimed to remember him, but I thought it more likely that she just wanted to remember him because we all talked about him so much, and Sammy and Luke remembered him, and we lived down the hill from his house. I’d wanted her to have the house as a tie to him; I’d wanted that for all three of his grandchildren.

Late in the afternoon we headed to Robert and Jen’s house for an early dinner. Much of the ground floor was taken up by a giant family-room-and-kitchen combination, with couches and easy chairs at one end and a long reclaimed pine table in the middle and, at the other end, a kitchen outfitted with a six-burner stove, an island with a prep sink and a heavy-duty stand mixer, and a massive wood-fired oven. As soon as we arrived, Katya raced through the kitchen and dove onto the couch where Sammy and Luke were watching cartoons.

“Katya, no,” Luke cried, “don’t, you’re not allowed,” and Jen quickly apologized and said she’d turn it off, and Marielle explained for the tenth or twentieth time that it was fine with us, TV at other people’s houses.

“You’re not going to be able to do it, you know,” Robert said, twisting off the cap of a beer.

“What’s that?” I said.

“The TV thing. You’re going to have to get one.”

“To put where?” Marielle said, our usual response to comments like this, but then she glanced my way, and all at once it occurred to me: if we moved we would no longer have space constraints to explain our not having a TV. We would no longer have space constraints to keep us from buying bags upon bags of groceries at a time, inevitably resulting in waste. We would no longer have space constraints to keep us from accumulating toys and games and puzzles at the high-speed rate of most parents we knew, who didn’t seem to notice that the more their kids had, the more they wanted. We would no longer have space constraints to help us live the way we wanted to live.

I said, “Well, it looks like we’re going to get the chance to rethink a lot of things.”

“I don’t get it!” Robert exclaimed. “Why aren’t you more pissed off?”

“I’m just not.”

Jen called for the boys to turn off the TV anyway, and Robert asked me to give him a hand getting wood for the oven, which Jen was going to use for homemade pizzas. The garage was very tidy, with Jen’s minivan on one side and Robert’s Saab on the other and the family’s four bicycles parked in a careful line, each with the forward wheel turned to the right.

“You’re your father’s son,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “What, the garage? Jen keeps it like this, not me. In fact, I’ve been thinking lately that I’m my mother’s son.”

“Rob, are you okay?”

“How could I possibly be okay? Our idiot brother shows up out of the blue mooning over some woman and we’re supposed to drop everything and sell our house?” He sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. Can you imagine what Dad would say about all of this, though? Adultery with kids involved? He’d be appalled.”

I wasn’t so sure. “He’d be concerned,” I said, “but I think he’d also be curious. He’d want to know what James loves about her.”

Robert shook his head impatiently. “Aren’t you the good little hagiographer. Dad was plenty moralistic.”

“For himself. Not so much for other people.”

“You think he didn’t give Penny massive shit for abandoning the family? Not that she didn’t deserve it. And do
not
say he pushed her away.”

“I never said that. I said maybe she
felt
he pushed her away. Rebecca thinks—”

“Rebecca thinks it’s complicated!” Robert said. “What does Rebecca not think is complicated? Ask her name and she’ll equivocate. Come on, let’s deal with the wood.”

Back in the house, Rebecca and Walt and James had arrived. James was with the kids—all three of them talking at once, clamor
ing for his attention—while Rebecca, Walt, and Marielle stood in the kitchen with Jen.

“Daddy,” Katya called.

I waved at her. “Hi, baby.”

“What do you see?”

“I see a girl with her two cousins and her uncle, sitting inside on a rainy day.”

Katya got up from the couch she’d been sharing with Luke and climbed under a square wooden end table. “Now look. Now what do you see?”

I glanced at Marielle, who was also watching. “I see a girl under a table.”

“But who do you see? Who am I being?”

“Who are you being?”

“You have to guess.”

“Are you being Katya hiding?”

“I’m not hiding. You can see me. Who am I being
lik
e
?”

“You’re being like Daphne,” Marielle said. “Aren’t you?”

“But I’m not stuck. I can come out if I want. Should I come out?”

“If you want,” I said. “You’re okay under there. You’re safe.”

“What’s going on?” Robert said.

I realized that everyone was watching now. “The Vincents’ younger daughter,” I said, explaining what had happened.

“Really?” Jen said with a frown.

“The EMTs had to turn the table over,” Marielle said. “If that hadn’t worked they were going to take it apart.”

“And then on Friday,” I said, “she came down to the shed and got into Katya’s bed. And wouldn’t leave.”

“Are you talking about that kid?” James called. He made his way to where we were all standing. “Vince’s daughter? The little one?”

I nodded. Glancing over my shoulder, I motioned for everyone to gather closer so the kids wouldn’t be able to hear us. I said, “I kept wishing I could consult you, Rebecca. She was just lying in Katya’s bed, saying no over and over again.”

“Rebecca and I saw this,” James said. He looked over at her. “Don’t you remember? She got under a table in the living room and her mom was
pissed
. You don’t remember?”

“No, I do,” Rebecca said.

I turned to Rebecca. “Wait, you guys saw the same thing? With the table?”

“We saw something,” Rebecca said.

“When? What did you think she was doing?”

“Maybe Wednesday? I thought she was . . . saying something. Without words. But I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

“Speculate,” Robert said. “This is interesting.”

“But not appropriate.”

“She’s not your patient, is she?”

“I’m not comfortable with it.”

“Exercising good boundaries?”

“Good sense,” Walt said.

Rebecca’s expression didn’t change, but I thought she must love it, the way he came to her aid. I liked the word “helpmeet” as a synonym for spouse or partner. It sounded Shakespearean, but I’d used it in conversation with a Sand Hill Day parent a month or so earlier and learned it was a biblical term. People on the religious right used it to justify the idea that women should serve their husbands. Too bad, because to me it described so nicely what marriage was about, though going in both directions. Walt was a good helpmeet for Rebecca. Though Robert found him boring, I saw a man who only appeared colorless but whose blood was a deep, rich red.

“We felt bad for her,” Marielle said. “Well, for both of them. Daphne and Lisa. When she got into Katya’s bed . . .”

“It was hard,” I said.

“But you did just the right thing, love. He sent everyone away and just waited for her to get up.”