by Ann Packer
Ryan was obvious about his inner life; his eyes mapped his emotions perfectly. He was a dreamy boy given to long periods of contentment, disturbed every now and then by a very adult sadness. In the kitchen he told his father that he had gone to the top of the trail and then stopped.
“Honey,” his father said, “you are not responsible for James. And listen. When you make a mistake, you grow. The next time around, you know better. James is five now. Do you think he’ll ever sit in poison oak again?”
Ryan brought his fingertips to his lips to cover the beginnings of a smile.
“Oh, dear,” his father said. “I see your point.”
“I’ll remind him,” Ryan said. “But Dad?”
“Yes?”
Ryan had planned to mention how sad James was going to be about missing school, but instead he said, “Are you very tired?”
“I am,” his father said. “But ‘very’ isn’t so terribly much, is it? Is ‘very’ more than ‘really’?”
“It’s not more more,” Ryan said. “But it’s more serious.”
His father smiled. “Do you know who we sound like?”
Ryan shook his head.
“Rebecca.”
The idea that he sounded like Rebecca made Ryan happy. If Rebecca had been a boy, she would have been the one person in the world, aside from Ryan’s father, whom he’d most want to resemble. He knew it should have been Robert.
“James has to stay home today,” he said.
“Yes, I suppose he does.”
“Does Mom know?”
“Not yet, Ry.”
“Do you want me to tell her for you?”
“Oh, Ryan.” His father squatted so they were eye to eye. “You don’t need to worry about that, okay?”
“I’m not,” Ryan said, but he resolved that once Robert and Rebecca were at school, he and James would do some more brainstorming on things that might interest their mother.
James was too unhappy, though. The day passed with Ryan trailing after their mother as she ministered to James in small, intense bursts—icy washcloths, Popsicles, brief bouts of reading aloud. As suddenly, she disappeared, and the two boys lay on their beds, James woozy with antihistamines but unable to sleep.
When Robert and Rebecca got home, Ryan brought up the list, but Robert was in a dark mood and Rebecca had her first homework of the year and wanted to get started right away.
James recovered and returned to school, where Miss McKinley led the boys and girls in a song to welcome him back. They stood in rows on the indoor/outdoor carpeting, and James, sitting on a small painted chair at the front of the room, hoped there might be a place for him once he was no longer special. Ryan returned to Sand Hill Day with such joy that his father—who entertained the occasional doubt about the wisdom of sending his middle son to private school when the others seemed fine where they were—resolved to banish his doubts for the rest of Ryan’s elementary education.
It had been his idea. Three years earlier Ryan had started at the same school as his older siblings, but by November he had disappeared inside a boy who resembled Ryan superficially but lacked Ryan’s spirit, his soul, his essence—that quality of sweet, lively tenderness that Bill had never seen in another human being. The new Ryan even moved differently, without the old Ryan’s bashful grace. Penny, at that time busy chasing the toddler James around the house, was concerned about having to drive to two different schools, but Bill cajoled her into giving it a try, and once Ryan had switched, she found that the extra driving helped fill up the long hours she now spent alone with James.
At Sand Hill Day the children were divided into groups not according to age or interests or abilities but almost at random, because one of the founding principles of the school was the idea that everyone should learn how to get along with everyone else. The makeup of the groups changed every few months, on a timetable that was also almost random; a teacher or two might raise the possibility at a staff meeting, discussion would ensue, and as likely as not a reshuffling would take place in the next week or so.
That early fall, Ryan was in Mountain—the other groups at that point being Ocean, River, Desert, and Valley—but soon the groups were adjusted and he was in Marigold. On his first morning in the new circle, he looked around at the other children and thought that the trick to finding something his mother would like to do with the family might be less a matter of thinking up the right thing than of finding a different way for the family to be organized. Now the breakdown was according to age: his father and mother, Robert and Rebecca, himself and James. But what if that changed? If his mother were paired with someone else, mightn’t she want to join in? The problem was that his father and mother were too different. Just the day before, his father had suggested a drive to the boardwalk at Santa Cruz as if that were something his mother would want to do. But she didn’t like cotton candy and she didn’t like rides. And she didn’t like the drive! Of course she wouldn’t want to go to Santa Cruz.
Ryan thought that of everyone in the family, he would be the best match for her, but he wasn’t sure who should pair with their father, Robert or Rebecca. He considered asking them, but whoever didn’t would have to be with James, and he didn’t like to think about neither of them wanting that.
He decided not to mention it. The point was not the small parts but the bigger whole. He was in Marigold—not Zinnia or Sunflower—but he and everyone else at his school were all part of Sand Hill Day.
Just before dinner one day, he asked Rebecca what had happened to the crusade. They were in her room, Ryan sitting on the floor while she played “We Have No Secrets” from her Carly Simon album over and over again, lifting the needle and repositioning it at the beginning of the song before the final chords had faded.
“We can still have it,” she said. She had thought of the crusade herself, on and off, but doubted that any of the items on the list were likely to succeed, so she’d let it drop. The piece of paper was in her desk drawer, in a folder on which she’d written “Our Crusade” in her best cursive.
“When?” Ryan said.
“It’s not something you really do. I mean, it has to be subtle. She can’t know.”
“But don’t we want her to—”
“We want her to want to.” She was about to lift the needle off the record but stopped and said, “That could almost be a palindrome! We want her to . . . want her . . . her want . . .”
“What?”
“It would be like ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba,’ but with words, not letters. A something-else-drome.”
“I don’t know where James is,” Ryan said, getting to his feet. He didn’t like palindromes and things like that, and he started for the door.
“You don’t have to go. I’ll let you choose the next song. You want ‘You’re So Vain’?”
“She says ‘vine.’ ”
Rebecca nodded eagerly and sang, “You’re so vine. I’ll bet you think this song is about you, you’re so VINE.” She was all set to play it, but Ryan slipped out the door, and she knew she’d lost him for the afternoon. Softer now, she took up the song again: “You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself guffaw.” It was actually “gavotte,” but she had thought it was “guffaw” at first and liked to sing it that way.
There was a mirror on the inside of her closet door. She had some Magic Markers on her desk, and she clutched a handful and sang into them, watching herself dip and sway. She tried to look like a star, but she wasn’t very convincing. She was extremely ordinary, if “ordinary” could even have a modifier like “extremely.” In her class, she was the exact middle in height, the exact middle in weight, and the exact middle in hair color if you put blond on one end and black on the other. The only thing she wasn’t the middle of was grades. Mrs. House posted points every Friday, and Rebecca was routinely at the top. She didn’t like the postings and felt sorry for the people
at the bottom, Leanne Mack and Rodney Deetjen. Rodney was a mean boy, and “Rodney” was a terrible name, which made it doubly bad that Rebecca once mentioned it as one of the R names James could adopt when he turned eighteen if he was still upset about being the only non-R among the kids. “Rodney?” Robert had said, and she’d started giggling, and all of a sudden James was crying. She hadn’t known it would upset him. That wasn’t quite true, but the small part of her that had known it might upset him belonged to the small part of her that wasn’t very kind, and she tried to make it go away.
Leanne was another story—not mean but pitiful. Her smell wasn’t body odor but more a bean-soup smell, as if she kept all her clothes in the kitchen and her mother made the same thing for dinner every night. She couldn’t spell, and Rebecca wasn’t absolutely sure she could read. And she went to a different room for math, a small room off the library where she and a few kids from other grades met with a “specialist.” Rebecca was used to thinking of specialists as certain kinds of doctors, like cancer doctors or heart doctors, and whenever she pictured the kids sitting in that little room she pictured someone in a white coat with them.
Rebecca worked hard not to be mean to Leanne, always letting her go through the door first if they got there at the same time, passing up easy opportunities to trip her, which somehow presented themselves all the time and were seized eagerly by the other girls. Rebecca couldn’t believe how immature they were. They giggled in class when Leanne couldn’t answer a question, and they made a big show of stepping away from her if she got too close.
For a while it had been enough for Rebecca to keep herself neutral, in between kind and unkind, but lately the dividing line seemed to have moved, and neutrality began to seem malicious.
And then today. After school Leanne was walking by herself as always, and Rebecca, a few feet behind her in the company of two friends, noticed a tear in her top—the sleeve was pulling away from the back, revealing an oval of Leanne’s pale, plump shoulder. Rebecca’s friends noticed at the same moment and began giggling.
“Nice shirt,” Marie said.
“I think her mom made it,” Debbie said.
“You guys,” Rebecca said. “Don’t.”
Debbie gave her an impatient look. They had been best friends for four years, ever since the first day of first grade, but lately Debbie seemed more attracted to Marie, who had a capacity for frenzy that Rebecca lacked. Rebecca missed Debbie but also felt relieved—of the pressure to get wound up.
“Anyway, her mom didn’t make it,” Marie said. “She’s crazy.”
“You don’t know that,” Rebecca said.
“I do. She’s mental. My mom told me.”
“Wait a sec,” Debbie said, crouching to tie her shoe, and Marie waited, and Rebecca kept walking, pretending she hadn’t heard. Some boys were riding their bicycles on the playground, which wasn’t allowed on school days, and suddenly they rode directly across Leanne’s path, cutting so close she had to stop short to avoid a collision. Rebecca looked at Leanne, standing there in her torn plaid top, wearing kneesocks that didn’t quite match: both white but one cabled and a couple inches shorter than the other. Leanne’s shoulders sagged, and she bowed her head. Then she glanced back, and Rebecca felt pinned by her hurt, watchful eyes.
At dinner Rebecca used her talking time to tell her family that she was planning to do her fifth-grade science experiment on the electrical charge in fruits and vegetables. She said she was going to need to buy an amp meter and a pair of probes, but she was really thinking about Leanne, and she decided to ask her father what she should do.
But he was busy—getting James ready for bed and then helping Robert with his math. Rebecca didn’t feel like listening to music, and she was ahead in her schoolwork, so there was no homework for her to do. She went off in search of Ryan and found him in the mud pantry with their mother, looking at a cigar box Penny had decorated with shells from the beach at Sea Ranch.
“Rebecca, look,” Ryan said. “Isn’t it pretty?”
It was pretty, and she said so. “Come on. Let’s do something.”
“Stay,” Penny said. “I’ve got a lot more shells. You guys can each make one if you want.”
“Why would we need three?” Rebecca said.
“Very funny. You might enjoy it.”
“I think I’ll read instead.”
Penny looked at Ryan. “Will you stay?”
Ryan said he would, and as Rebecca walked away Penny wished for a moment that her one daughter were more like her. Then again, she hadn’t been much like her mother. As a child, Penny had pretended sometimes that she was a changeling whose real parents were English nobility. She thought Royal Doulton was the name of a family rather than a china, and in school, when her teacher wasn’t looking, she practiced writing “Penny Doulton” in fancy handwriting on the flyleaf of her grammar book. She wanted to be royalty and was wounded when she heard her mother criticizing a neighbor for putting on airs.
“Look at these,” she said to Ryan, pulling out a bucket of shells. “Aren’t they nice?”
Ryan leaned close. “They still smell like the ocean.”
They knelt together and Ryan poked through the shells. Penny loved the colors at Sea Ranch, the smoky gray-brown of the houses and the straw of the summer grasses. The ocean green and black. On a walk one afternoon she had come upon an older man near the edge of the cliffs, sitting on a folding chair in front of an easel. He was holding a palette with dabs of color on it, painting a picture of the sea and the sky. She stopped and watched and they began to talk. “How did you learn to paint?” she asked him, and he smiled and said, “I haven’t yet.” She puzzled over that for days afterward, wondering what he’d meant.
“Where are the cigar boxes?” Ryan said.
“I don’t have any more right now, but you start by laying the shells on the counter anyway. Choose some, I’ll show you. You can try out different arrangements if you don’t like the first one.”
“But I would like it if I did it.”
“Half the fun is trying a lot of different possibilities. You’ll see.”
Ryan picked out a dozen shells and set them on the counter in three rows of four. He couldn’t help noticing that they were all about the same brown and all had about the same white speckles. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so he moved them around and then moved them around again.
“Look,” she said. “See how the darker one looks good in the corner?” She slid one of the shells out of the middle row and repositioned it. “Then you probably want the next darkest one down near the opposite corner.”
“Not in the opposite corner?”
“No, near is better, see? I’ll get some more cigar boxes tomorrow.”
“I’ll smoke some cigars tomorrow!”
There was James, wearing his red cowboy pajamas and a maniac smile. Exultant over his escape from bed, he leaped into the air, reaching for the lintel though it was several feet above his head. “I’ll go with you, okay? To the cigar store, right? Can I get Red Hots? Can we go out for lunch, too?” Then, diving for the shells: “What’re these? Are these from Sea Ranch? Remember the kelp? Pee-you!”
“James,” Penny said, “you were supposed to be in bed half an hour ago.”
“I was, but I got back up! See, here I am!”
“No,” Penny said. “No and no.”
“Did you have trouble falling asleep?” Ryan suggested.
“Yeah, I had trouble falling asleep. I couldn’t fall asleep, it was too hard!”
“Get up from there,” Penny said, trying to lift him by his arm. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“James, come on,” Ryan said. “I’ll take him.”
“Have Rebecca sit with him. You come back.”
Ignoring both of them, James poked through the shells. He’d helped his mother collect them, and he wondered if any of
the shells in the bucket were ones he’d found. He’d had the best time at Sea Ranch, where every morning his father took him out to stomp the trails that crisscrossed the meadows so they’d still be there next summer.
“Maybe Dog can help you sleep,” Ryan said.
“Dog’s a frog,” James said. “Dog’s dead.”
Dog had been on a shelf below the window for weeks, and it upset Ryan that James thought of him as dead rather than resting or waiting. Ryan remembered the day in September when his mother pointed out the picture of James holding Dog with his eyes squeezed shut, and he thought James really did love Dog but needed to be reminded.
At last James let Ryan take his hand. Ryan passed him on to Rebecca, and Rebecca got him a glass of water and followed him into his and Ryan’s room.
“I’m not tired,” he said.
“You will be.”
“I’ll never be tired again. I’m wide-awake man! Are you sleeping here? Where’s Ryan going to sleep?”
Finally he gave up and got into bed. Not trusting him to stay there, Rebecca sat at Ryan’s desk. Down the hall, her father was helping Robert, and she heard him say, very clearly, “I think they’re both important—the concepts and the practice.” This meant they were having yet another conversation about how Robert liked to solve problems before taking the time to understand them. Their father always said he sympathized with this because of his work: when he saw a child in terrible pain, or feverish and limp, he wanted to relieve the child’s misery immediately, but he couldn’t do that until he figured out what was going on. A high fever could mean a number of different things, so you had to go through the differential diagnosis. Then you came up with a treatment plan. Dx before Tx.
James sighed and rolled over, and Rebecca reached for Ryan’s badger. The fur was worn away in places, and she recalled a conversation between her father and the mother of one of Ryan’s friends. This woman said she was worried because her younger son had worn a hole straight through his security blanket from rubbing the same spot over and over, and Rebecca’s father told her not to worry. He said, “I always tell parents, just be glad he has so much love in him.”