The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  “I’m not getting sick yet,” she said quickly. “It’s just the taste.”

  James had forgotten—if he’d ever known—that mushrooms made you sick. He slipped the mushroom into his pocket while she wasn’t looking. Then he put his hand to his mouth and made chewing motions. “It’s not that bad,” he said, swallowing air.

  She shuddered and took a last bite of the apple. “I’m better,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would be so nasty.”

  Ryan turned her gently and pointed to the edge of the meadow. “James is right,” he said. “Walk over and back. You’ll feel better.”

  “I already do.”

  “But even more,” he said. “You’ll feel good.”

  She shrugged and took off, walking normally for a few paces and then beginning to skip. She knew this was silly, obviously not the drug, but she felt like doing it. When she reached the edge of the meadow, she turned around and couldn’t see Ryan and James.

  “Hellooooo,” she called.

  “Hellooooo,” she heard back, but she couldn’t tell which of them had spoken.

  “Hellooooo,” she called again.

  “Hellooooo,” she heard.

  For the last six months, since Ryan had left for Santa Cruz, she had felt an agitation under the skin that sometimes woke her in the middle of the night and almost always found her in the sinkhole of four p.m. On the days she worked at Sand Hill Day, four was the hour when the teachers finished tidying the classrooms and sat together in the Big Room for tea and review. She had imagined she’d enjoy these sessions, but she found them excruciating in the way they forced her to imagine the incessant sensitivity the same teachers had felt in relation to her needs when she was a student there.

  Sex helped with the agitation, and so did driving: when she got out of the car in Santa Cruz, she felt a welcome deadness in her legs and shoulders that was almost as good as the Valium she once tried. Being with her mother made the agitation worse.

  She began skipping again, straight back to Ryan and James. She’d heard the first hour or so could be kind of scary, and she thought that if she got her body into a playful state, perhaps her mind would follow.

  “Baby,” Ryan said, opening his arms for her.

  “Did you eat yours?”

  “Pretty bad. But I had some apple.”

  “How are we going to get that bottle open? We’ve got to have something to drink.”

  “Baby, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. We’re just at the beginning.”

  And so they were—or she was, the unwitting soloist in their psilocybin adventure. James knew she was the only one, whereas Ryan believed both she and James had partaken until about two hours in, by which point Sierra had vomited, complained that she was freezing, wept over the problem of the ginger ale, giggled madly about the idea of James going to the Priory (“the Priory,” “the Priory,” she kept saying between shrieks of laughter), and finally begged Ryan to massage her shoulders. At last, she took her blanket to the edge of the meadow and lay on her back looking at the trees.

  “You didn’t do it, did you?” Ryan said to James.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can tell.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “But I told you. You didn’t tell me.”

  James shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it. Let’s walk around.”

  They walked without talking, Ryan thinking the whole thing had been a mistake and James recalling a story a friend had told him about babysitting his older sister while she was on an acid trip. James’s friend had said the main thing was that it was incredibly boring, but James hadn’t understood this until now. He had imagined that the person tripping would be describing hallucinations so intense it would be almost as if the person hearing about it were tripping, too. But if Sierra had started hallucinating, she hadn’t said anything. At one point she had become incredibly drowsy and stopped talking, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover her asleep.

  “Sorry she was laughing about the Priory,” Ryan said.

  James pressed his fingertips to the outline of the cross in his pocket.

  “But it’s not like you want to go there anyway.”

  They’d strolled across the meadow and back, and James flopped onto the blanket and lay on his back. It was almost midnight and very cold. Ryan gathered a couple of apples and the Oriental snack mix and went to Sierra. She looked into his eyes and smiled, but she didn’t say anything. “Hey, baby,” he said. He sat down and felt in the bag for some of the wasabi peas she liked. “Hungry?”

  She didn’t speak. After what felt like a long time, she lifted her hand and passed it over the length of her face, closing her eyes in the process as if she were both the mortician and the deceased. “Lie with me,” she said, her voice deep and faraway.

  He lay down next to her.

  “Did you ever realize,” she said wonderingly, “that the branches of trees are threads in a tapestry?”

  “Huh,” he said. “Tell me more.”

  She was silent for a long time, and he wondered if she’d fallen asleep or passed into a hallucination from which he wouldn’t be able to retrieve her. He twisted around and tried to make out James through the dark, but he couldn’t.

  “It’s warp and woof,” she said. “Like yin and yang.”

  “Opposites,” he said, relieved that he could follow some logic.

  “Threads,” she said, “are the paint of a tapestry. Trees are the threads of the forest.”

  “There’s also wax and wane,” he said. “Hey, where’d the moon go?”

  “Lie down with me.”

  “I am.”

  “Lie on top of me.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “James—”

  “Don’t you feel so beautiful?”

  “You’re the beautiful one.”

  “No, I’m not beautiful, I feel beautiful. My feelings are beautiful. Are yours? The trees are threads. The world is a loom. Lie on top of me. This could be the best sex we’ve ever had.”

  “We don’t rank it, do we?”

  “I’m not even sure I feel my skin anymore. Please?”

  He slid his hand under her shirt and stroked her belly. “Baby, James is right over there.”

  “He won’t mind.”

  Ryan knew he had put James through some awkward times because of the thinness of the wall between Robert’s room and the room where James slept alone. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Hooomp,” she whimpered.

  “We didn’t think of this. I wish we’d talked about it.”

  “Just touch me.”

  He unbuttoned her jeans and slipped his hand down until his fingertips reached the silky band of her panties. He paused there and then continued until he got to her pubic hair.

  “Please,” she said.

  His middle finger found her spot. When they had to name it, they called it her spot, never her clit. “Clit” sounded rude.

  “I’m going to come so fast,” she said. “Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I just think I will.”

  “Don’t mind me,” James called. In the moonlight he’d been able to see Ryan’s progress, from sitting to lying to fondling. Or he thought he could, which amounted to the same thing.

  Ryan kissed Sierra’s cheek and stood up. “Be right back,” he said, and he crossed to where James was now sitting cross-legged, holding an apple by its stem and banging the fruit lightly against his mouth.

  “Is this going to take five more hours?” James said. “It’s after midnight. I’m starving.”

  “I don’t know if we can move her.”

  “She didn’t break her neck.”

  Ryan went to get Sierra while James folded the blankets. He wished he’d stayed home; he would’ve found something to do eventually, or he could’ve watched TV with his da
d, big-time fun for a Friday night. He thought of Mr. Calhoun, the man at the Priory, saying they were looking for the best in every young man who went there. If he went, if he wore the dorky shirt and tie, might he become a young man in whom the best could be found? He imagined seeing his family only on holidays: he’d show up and everyone would be incredibly impressed by how mature he was—so impressed, and he’d be so mature, there’d be no need to talk about it.

  “Don’t you feel amazing?” Sierra said, surging toward James with her arms out. “Everything is so beautiful. You’re so beautiful.”

  “I’m a guy.”

  “You’re a beautiful guy. You have a beautiful animal inside you.”

  James exchanged a glance with Ryan.

  “ ‘Thank you,’ ” Ryan said. “Right, James? ‘Thank you, Sierra.’ ”

  It was slow going down from the meadow. “Look at the trees,” Sierra kept saying, stopping and gazing around. “They’re actually threads. There’s a secret tapestry covering the world.”

  When they got to the car it was almost two a.m. James and Ryan were both exhausted. Ryan urged Sierra into the backseat and got behind the wheel. As they drove past the Priory, James said, “I think I’ll go there.”

  “Ha.”

  “No, really. They find the best in every young man.”

  “The best in you isn’t lost, J.”

  They drove on, the Beetle’s headlights illuminating the empty road. Ryan glanced into the backseat; Sierra was staring vacantly out the window and didn’t notice him. On the driveway he tried to be extra gentle with the gears to keep the sound low. He parked next to the Accord and cut the engine. “Phew,” he said softly.

  James slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out the cross. He tossed it onto the dashboard and said, “I stole that.”

  Ryan looked surprised. “At the Priory?”

  James considered correcting him but didn’t. They sat side by side, Ryan looking at the evidence of James’s bad character, James nearly holding his breath, he was so nervous about what Ryan would say. He was expecting to be yelled at, but Ryan never did that.

  “James,” Ryan said softly. “It’s okay. You can take it back.”

  “You don’t think I’ll burn in hell?”

  “We don’t believe in hell. That’s the beauty.”

  There was a gasp from the backseat. They both turned around, and Sierra was smiling rapturously. She clapped her hands together three times and then leaned forward and rested her forearms on their seat backs. “That’s why he stopped me,” she said. “That’s why.”

  Ryan didn’t say anything, but James felt him tense up.

  “Martin Degenhart.” She dug in her back pocket and withdrew a worn leather wallet from which she took a business card that had been fondled so much its edges were soft. She held out the card. “It’s the difference between beauty and beautiful. He stopped me because of beauty.”

  Ryan looked at his lap.

  “It’s not being a beautiful girl,” she said. “It’s being a girl who has beauty. The trees are threads. They have beauty.”

  James couldn’t take any more, and he grabbed the cross and got out of the car. The night had gotten clearer, the moon brighter. Father, guide me, he thought. But he wasn’t sure if he meant his dad or God, and he felt like an idiot and kicked at the gravel.

  Ryan and Sierra were out of the car, too. They all started toward the laundry room, but after a few paces Sierra stopped and said, “There’s the oak tree.”

  Each of them looked at the thick twisting branches, heavy ink brushstrokes on charcoal canvas. “I love that tree,” she said. “And if you think about it, Martin Degenhart is a funny name. He’s famous. I told you that, right, baby? That he’s famous?”

  “Aren’t you coming down a little?” Ryan said. “I am. James, are you?”

  Sierra held up her arms and began to goose-step, like a child doing Frankenstein. “Degen Martinhart. That’s what his name should be. His hair is so straight. He takes pictures for Vogue.”

  “Let’s not talk about him right now,” Ryan said. “I think we should go inside.”

  And to his surprise and relief, she dropped her arms and let him take her hand. The hidden key was exactly where it was supposed to be, and he slid it quietly into the lock and opened the laundry room door.

  “Where are we going?” Sierra said, but she said it in a whisper, and Ryan thought she might be coming down—she was making more sense of the world, or just making more sense.

  He opened the door to Robert’s room and turned on the light, and there, asleep in his childhood bed, was Robert.

  What followed was five minutes of hushed confusion, with Robert quick to awaken but slow to figure out where he was and why Ryan had come into his room, and James taking on the very new job of reminding everyone else to be quiet so they wouldn’t wake their father. Earlier in the evening, Robert had driven down from the city on the spur of the moment, a single decision that had delivered effective treatment for two separate cases of loneliness. He and Bill had spent the evening talking about his career plans, and he’d had the opportunity to slip into the conversation a humorous remark about his stubborn case of medical student’s disease. In five minutes, his father had put his mind at ease on both the groin pain and the cough.

  Finally Ryan and Sierra settled in Rebecca’s room. Sierra was dazed and a little nervous again, and she jerked involuntarily each time a floorboard creaked in another room or the toilet flushed. She didn’t want sex anymore, and she didn’t want to go to sleep, so they lay awake together, Ryan drifting and bringing himself back, and drifting and bringing himself back, over and over. He watched the numerals on Rebecca’s clock flip toward morning. At one point Sierra whispered that she was “egg smooth,” and he saw a giant egg hovering above him in the dark. He blinked and it was still there, and he wondered what it had been like for her, up in the meadow hallucinating. He was going to have to tell her he hadn’t eaten his mushroom, but he wondered if he had to tell her about James. She wouldn’t like the idea of having been the only one.

  • • •

  Early in the morning Bill rose and found all three children’s bedrooms occupied. He knew Rebecca always got up first thing Saturday morning to start her laundry, so he called and said, “Everyone’s here. Let me come get you. We’ll have a big breakfast.” Waiting for him in front of her dorm, she looked like an out-of-place adult among the few bleary late-adolescents who were up early on a weekend morning. Or up very, very late on a Friday night.

  There were a few exceptions. “See that girl?” Rebecca said, taking her seat in the Accord and leaning over to kiss her father.

  A young Indian woman walked purposefully along the sidewalk, a Stanford sweatshirt half covering a pale yellow sari.

  “She got a Rhodes Scholarship. She’s going to study astrophysics.”

  “I guess it’s true what they say about the early bird.”

  “She’s the early airplane.”

  They headed home past the Stanford driving range and along the shaded road that ran between Hole 7 and Hole 9 of the golf course. They passed runners sweating in the cool March air. Rebecca had spent the evening with a psychology grad student named Ben, and as she sat beside her father she thought she should trust her instincts more and say no when people asked her out. Ben was a guy she’d sort of known for a couple of years—he’d been a TA in her first psych class, though not her TA—and late in the afternoon he’d approached her in the library and invited her to go with him to First Friday, a monthly psychology department gathering for faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate majors. Rebecca had agreed because the last time she’d gone, in December, she’d gotten involved in a very interesting conversation about cross-fostered rhesus monkeys and what happened when an anxious baby was raised by a calm mother and vice versa. This time Ben kept trying to steer her to his
dissertation adviser, a musty senior professor whose research was about memory or learning, she wasn’t sure which—either she didn’t remember or she’d never learned, ha ha. She was polite to Ben, but it had gotten tiring, slipping away and then seeing him approach yet again from across the room. “I keep losing you,” he said, and she thought: No, I keep trying to lose you.

  Robert was in the kitchen when they arrived. The three of them got to work, one cracking eggs, another halving oranges for juice, the third pulling apart bacon slices and laying them in a frying pan.

  “Isn’t this great?” Bill said. “It’s only been a week or so since we were together for Ryan’s birthday.”

  “And Robert’s is coming up,” Rebecca said. “And then mine in April.”

  “When I was a kid,” Robert said, “it really bugged me that our birthdays weren’t in the right order. I thought mine should’ve been in January, Rebecca’s in February, Ryan’s in March, and James’s in April.”

  “Imagine James,” Rebecca said, “if he’d had the last birthday on top of everything else.” She paused and looked at Bill. “So what happened at the Priory?”

  “Bit of a bust. I’ll let James tell you about it. Or better yet, don’t ask.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s water under the bridge. By the time your mother went down to the shed last night, she’d forgotten about it and was talking about a new piece she’s working on.”

  The truth was that Bill wished he hadn’t allowed the Priory thing to go so far. He should’ve stopped Penny before she ever called to set up the appointment, and failing that he should have told James he didn’t have to go with her. Accompanying them had been a form of acquiescence, even collusion.

  “Should I go tell her about breakfast?” Robert said.

  “Certainly.”

  “That’s funny,” Rebecca said. “I thought Robert was asking if he should go tell her now, but you answered as if he’d asked whether we should tell her at all.”

  “Did I?” Bill said, feeling caught out and trying to conceal his guilt behind a veneer of curiosity.

  “That’s what ‘certainly’ sounds like,” Rebecca said. “If you’d said, ‘Sure, go ahead,’ it would’ve sounded more like, ‘Yeah, now’s a good time.’ ”