by Ann Packer
Ryan’s hair reached his shoulders, and his eyes were deeply, startlingly blue. He could go longer without something to occupy him than anyone else she knew. When he was younger, about nine or ten, their mother had told him one day with some irritation that idle hands were the devil’s tools, and he was so hurt that he went to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Rebecca tried to console him, but it wasn’t easy to console someone who wasn’t crying or even talking—who was just lying there. She lay with him, face-to-face. And—this came to her from nowhere—she had her period; she recalled the thick cottony wad between her legs and the sudden gush of blood that meant she should go to the bathroom and change pads soon. That meant she’d been at least twelve, so Ryan would have been at least ten. How strange that Ryan at ten had been that much smaller, that much more fragile, than James was now; and also that much more perceptive.
The TV blared, and Rebecca jumped off the bed and raced for the front room. There was James, standing on the couch with his arms in the air as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. “James,” she cried, hurrying to turn off the TV. “Stop it! We leave you for one minute!”
“Arghh-grrrr-gahhhh,” James cried, and he lunged at Rebecca, screaming, fists flying. He was a torrent of noise and motion, his feet, his arms, his legs: all flailing.
“James!” she shrieked.
Ryan ran in from the kitchen and threw himself between them.
“James,” Rebecca screamed again, because now James was hitting Ryan. “James, stop it.”
Ryan lay on the carpet with his forearms in front of his face. “No, no, no, no, no,” James cried as he kept hitting.
“James!” Rebecca said. “Stop! Grandpa’s resting!”
Abruptly James stopped hitting Ryan and dove to the carpet, where he rolled from side to side and sobbed. “No, no, no, no, no,” he cried again.
“James,” Ryan said. He knelt next to his brother. He’d been struck once on his face, above the eye, but it stung only a little and his arms were fine. “Baby honey,” he murmured to James. “Honey boy.”
James curled up on his side. His face was streaked with tears, his mouth contorted into a deep, open-lipped frown that revealed the tops of his lower teeth. He made a high-pitched keening noise.
“James,” Ryan said. “Come on, let’s do something. Let’s play Yahtzee.”
James looked at Rebecca and hissed.
“How about just you and me? Rebecca was doing homework anyway.”
Rebecca returned to her room. All was quiet in the house, but she couldn’t imagine that her grandfather had stayed asleep. She was worried about her grandfather, mostly because she thought her father was worried about him: he’d been watching her grandfather closely ever since they arrived.
She wasn’t exactly babysitting, but she felt responsible for the noise, and as this feeling grew, she began to wish she hadn’t reacted so dramatically. She should have spoken gently in the first place, and if James had gotten upset anyway, she should have soothed him instead of provoking him further.
She heard the TV go on again, softly. From the sound—a serious, droning voice—it seemed the news was on. She returned to the front room. The boys sat cross-legged on the floor watching. On the screen, a newscaster sat at his desk, behind him a light blue map of South America with a small finger near the top highlighted in black. Immediately Rebecca knew what this was—the country of Guyana. Hundreds of Americans had died there over the previous weekend, a mass suicide. She didn’t want either of her brothers to watch, though they knew about it—everyone did. It had started when Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented the district north of Portola Valley, went to investigate a cult.
“Officials say the original figure of four hundred nine is far lower than the actual number of dead,” said the announcer. “Reports today suggest the death toll could be as high as seven or eight hundred.”
All three of them watched the screen. The picture switched to a black-and-white photo of the cult leader, wearing a cleric’s collar under a sport jacket.
“He looks like Dad,” James said.
Rebecca was appalled but kept her voice steady. “James, he does not.”
“In the newspaper picture.”
She knew the picture he meant: years ago their father had been photographed at a local elementary school on career day, giving a group of students a chance to take turns with his stethoscope. Normally he looked nothing like Jim Jones, but in that one picture—in his mouth and perhaps a little in his shiny black hair—she had to admit there was a real resemblance.
Now it was back to the map, this time a close-up of the country of Guyana with a dot for Jonestown and another for Georgetown, the capital.
“The kids took it first,” Ryan said. “Then the parents.”
“It had to be that way,” Rebecca said. “If the parents drank theirs first and the kids decided not to drink it, what would they do? Where would they go? Who would help them? The parents were protecting their kids by having them go first.” At school she’d heard teachers discussing it, and this was what one of them had said. She hadn’t asked her father for his opinion. At home on the night they found out he said, “Some things are just too horrible to contemplate.”
“Is Grandpa awake?” Ryan said.
“He’s still resting. We should turn this off.”
James said, “Jim Jones was lucky he found Jonestown to live in.”
Rebecca and Ryan exchanged a look.
“He didn’t find it, he founded it,” Rebecca said.
“He named it after himself,” Ryan said.
The map disappeared and was replaced by a different photograph, this one a high aerial shot of a field that appeared to be strewn with garbage, only Rebecca knew it wasn’t garbage. She stepped past the boys and turned off the TV.
“Hey, we were watching that,” James said.
“Is anyone thirsty? I want something to drink.”
“Kool-Aid?” James said with a smirk.
“James,” Ryan said.
“Hey,” James said, scrambling to his feet. “Congressman Ryan. Get it? You were shot, Ryan. Pow-pow-blam!” On “blam” James raised his hands to mimic holding a rifle and took aim at Ryan.
“James,” Rebecca said. She understood that she had a chance to do better than before, and not just to keep from disturbing their grandfather. She wanted to do better because it would be better. She said, “I want you to put the gun down now, James.”
This caught James’s attention. He kept his right hand near his face, his left arm fully extended with the fingers of his left hand curled.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, “if you put it down now.”
James didn’t know if he was excited or scared. He brought his eye closer to the scope and said, “Are you talking to me?”
She held her hands out, palms up. “I’m not armed,” she said. “You’re in control.”
“Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?”
“Why is he saying that?” Ryan said.
“It’s a line from a movie,” Rebecca said. “Taxi Driver. James, you didn’t see that, did you?”
James was confused. He felt like he might do something.
“Put your hands out,” Rebecca told Ryan. “Show him you aren’t armed.”
Ryan extended his hands, and then slowly, watching each other, they both raised their hands over their heads.
“What do you want to do now?” she asked James. “It’s up to you.”
James held a serious look and then burst out laughing. “I got you guys!” he crowed.
Rebecca said, “Shhh, quietly.” Then: “You sure did.”
“That was funny,” he said. “What was in the Kool-Aid, anyway? What flavor was it?”
“Some kind of poison,” Rebecca said.
“Why didn’t they just pretend to drink i
t? You could hold your cup to your mouth”—he pantomimed this, tipping his head back—“and then you could just act poisoned.” He bent over and staggered around, then made a strangled noise and collapsed to the carpet. As a final touch, he stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes back in his head.
Ryan had had enough. He went into the bathroom and locked the door. His head hurt, and he sat on the edge of the tub and tried to forget James and his pretend rifle. He tried to banish the image of the dead people on the grass. Why were they all lying facedown? Had they lain that way as soon as they’d drunk the poison, so they’d be in orderly rows when their bodies were found? Or had someone moved them—and if so, who would have done that? Would the last person have stood at the end of the last row, drunk his poison, and then gotten down on the ground to die?
He turned on the bathwater. Leaving his clothes on the floor, he lowered himself into the tub and lay back until the ends of his hair got wet. At Sand Hill Day, snacks and meals were served to the youngest children first, which meant that Ryan, now one of the oldest, sometimes waited five or ten minutes for a sandwich or a cup of juice. He wondered what he would do if, standing at the end of the line, he watched as his schoolmates fell to the floor and died, one after another. Would he stay and have the juice, too? His closest friend at school was a girl named Sierra, a tall green-eyed beauty with a blond waterfall of hair that reached her waist. Most days Ryan brushed her hair for her, and then she brushed his, and afterward they pulled the hairs from the brush—hers pale, his sandy—and stuffed the mass of them into a pillow they were making together. This had started over a year earlier, and the pillow was nearly full. “Ryan, come on,” she said each morning when she saw him. He always went. If she wanted to drink the juice and said “Ryan, come on,” he would drink it, too. Tears ran down his cheeks and dropped into the bathwater. No one else in his family would do this—only he. This knowledge made him yearn for his parents and for the house in Portola Valley. They had another day and a half in Sacramento, though, and his shoulders began to shake.
Someone knocked at the door. “Ryan?” It was Rebecca. “Are you in there?”
“Yes.” He slid down lower and let the water cover his face, then sat up and reached for the soap. “I’m almost done.”
“Are you taking a bath?”
“I’m almost done,” he repeated.
He soaped his body, slowing as he approached his penis and at the last moment choosing to go around it. If he got into rubbing it, he might forget what he’d been feeling, the sadness and terror, and it seemed important that he remember them.
Because he slept in the front room, his suitcase and all of his clothes were in his parents’ bedroom. He wrapped himself in a towel and went down the hall. His grandfather’s door was still closed, and Ryan closed his parents’ door. Their bed here was very small, much smaller than the one they had at home.
He dressed and went into the kitchen. James sat at the table in front of a huge piece of crumpled tinfoil, inside of which was the leftover turkey, which he was browsing for bits of skin. “Want some?” he asked Ryan.
Ryan shook his head and sat opposite James. After a moment he reached over and helped himself to a piece of white meat.
“Sorry,” James said.
“What for?”
“Because I shot you.”
• • •
The house began to fill again. Grandpa Greenway returned to the front room, and Rebecca sat on the couch with a book. Bill and Robert arrived home just ahead of Penny and her mother.
In the garage looking for the Christmas-tree stand, Robert noticed a stack of games and puzzles, at the top of which was a plain white box labeled “Your Jigsaw Puzzle—1,000 Pieces Guaranteed.” Once the tree was up in the front room, he and Rebecca cleared the dining room table and got to work. The subject of the puzzle was a mystery as there was no picture on the box, but they both thought a thousand-piece puzzle was as good a way as any to while away the hours.
Penny walked past them late in the afternoon, took a look at the box, and said, “Oh, no. Not that.”
“What?”
“Nothing. You’ll see.”
The border came together slowly, the colors of the puzzle pieces varying only in their shade of gray. The inside took even longer and was far enough from finished at bedtime that Robert was tempted to break apart what they’d done and put the pieces back in the box so they wouldn’t have to continue in the morning. He didn’t suggest it, though. Rebecca would never quit.
He got into bed, his brothers on the couch nearby, and realized he hadn’t called Gina. Partly it was because they’d never talked long-distance before. They didn’t talk on the phone much at all, and when they did it was because she’d called him; after several minutes, fearing he was boring her, he’d say, “I should get going.” This was an improvement on their first few phone conversations, which he’d cut short by saying, “I’m going to go now.” He might have gone on that way forever had she not pointed out that in putting it that way, he essentially left her no option but to say, “Okay, bye.” When he asked her to elaborate, she said, “If you say ‘I should go now’ instead of ‘I’m going to go now’ then I can say ‘Really?’ or ‘Wait, I want to tell you one more thing’ or even just ‘Oh, okay’ and then maybe we’d get a few more minutes out of it.” It was this last—her assumption that they both wanted to get a few more minutes out of it—that cemented his adoration of her.
“Why are we still here?” he asked Rebecca as they worked on the puzzle the next morning. “Why do we stay till Sunday every year? I have a lot of homework.”
“I brought mine with me.”
“Well, so did I, but I don’t have a private room.”
“Unlike some people,” she said, and they both smiled and then smiled again at the unexpected camaraderie. “Do you miss Gina?” she said, and he nodded.
It was almost noon, and the house was quiet. Bill had gone out, Ryan and James were playing cards with their grandfather, and Penny was in her parents’ bedroom with her mother, the two of them ostensibly folding laundry together but in fact covering, in hushed voices, the same conversational territory they’d covered while grocery shopping the day before.
“Those kids need you in the house when they get home from school.”
“They’re fine. They’re learning how to be independent.”
“You should be there when they walk in.”
“They know where I am. They can always come down.”
Audrey shook her head and set a folded white undershirt on a pile of folded white undershirts and then pressed the entire stack flat, as she did each time she added to it. Penny understood that her mother’s point of view came from an earlier era, but she couldn’t get over the inherent unfairness of being judged by the mother of a single child: a docile girl.
As opposed to a pack of kids led by a brilliant and demanding boy, complicated by a headstrong girl with no gift at all for the arts, softened and therefore confounded by a meek and dreamy boy, and finally overwhelmed by a miniature wild man.
“Do they?” her mother said.
“What?”
“Go down to your studio.”
“Ryan sometimes does,” Penny said, thinking of a day when Ryan’s school was dismissed early and he spent the afternoon in the studio with her, making coil pots with leftover bits of clay. She’d had several bowls ready for glazing, and the two of them had fun using squeeze bottles to squirt spirals and zigzags of glaze on the bowls.
“What about James?” her mother said.
“No, thank goodness.”
“Penny, honestly.”
“Oh, he’s fine. He’s doing a lot better in school this year. I’ve only gotten one phone call.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” her mother said, “but Dad heard an awful commotion yesterday afternoon. It got him out of bed and all the
way to the door—he was afraid he’d have to go in and break it up. James yelling and screaming and from the sound of it punching, too.”
“Really?” Penny said. “He doesn’t—”
“Penny, that boy needs more discipline. Bill can’t see past his healthy body, so it’s going to have to be you.”
“What can I do?”
“The carrot and the stick, Penny, the carrot and the stick.”
“We don’t strike our children!” Penny spoke as if from outrage, but she felt something closer to satisfaction at her mother’s apparent agreement with her on the subject of spanking. It wasn’t that Penny advocated anything like hard hitting, but she did think a light swat on the behind could be useful to get a child’s attention. Bill absolutely disagreed, and he made her feel bad by calling it “corporal punishment.” He had no idea what it was like at the end of a long afternoon to cope with a child who was cranky and determined to misbehave. Though to be fair to herself, she hadn’t swatted James in years. He was too big, for one thing.
She said something about making lunch and left her mother with the laundry. In the dining room, the puzzle was coming in mostly from the top right, where an indistinct tree was taking shape; and the bottom left, where a banister held a shrub at bay. Within an hour or two, the subject of the photo would be revealed, and she would have to endure the sight of herself being the person she had only barely escaped being.
“You’re still sitting here?” she said to Robert and Rebecca. “Don’t you want to do something constructive?”
“How much more constructive can you get,” Robert said, “than putting together a jigsaw puzzle?”
“Where’s your father?” she said, but she didn’t wait for a reply and wandered down the hall to the small room she and Bill were sharing. She knew where he was; she’d asked the kids in order to raise the question in their minds, since she wanted them to recognize that even he needed a break sometimes.