The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

hundred miles away. Something’s up, mark my words.”
    “Robert,” Ryan began, “these last few months—”
    I cut him off. “You have no idea how hard it is to treat old people. It’s one thing after another, the hypertension, the bone weakness, the intestinal distress, the TIAs . . . and each time they come in with a new complaint, they express all this consternation, as if it isn’t the best-case scenario that their bodies are giving out. I want to tell them, Either you’re declining or you’re already dead. I mean, I don’t want to want to . . . I actually want to keep them in the dark, which, you know, I despise about myself. The dishonesty. My God, James was right. My entire life is a deception. Dad never had to go through this. He had CF, muscular dystrophy, childhood cancers, but that was the exception, not the rule. No wonder he was always in such a fucking good mood. He got to heal his patients.”
    “This is about Dad?” Ryan said.
    “There is no ‘this,’ ” I said. “Relax.”
    Marielle turned to Ryan and said, “Did you just hear Katya?” and in a moment she was slipping through the door, leaving her husband to deal with his brother.
    “Rob,” Ryan said. “Have you thought of taking some time off? We could stay with the boys, you and Jen could go away.”
    He was so kind I couldn’t stand it, and I pushed myself up from the chair. I knew what it was to be James, the temptation to burn bridges nearly overwhelming.
    Ryan followed me to the door. “I’m going to call Jen,” he said as I headed toward my car, and while he might have meant he wanted to give her the same suggestion he’d given me—that the two of us should go away and he and Marielle would babysit—I took it as a threat and gave him the finger as I unlocked my car.
    I should have gone home, but I drove back up to the big house. Maybe half an hour had gone by; there were fewer windows lit. I returned to the front door and sat down. In under ten hours I had to be at work, where I would see something in the neighborhood of twenty-five patients. And I needed to wade through the stack of applications we’d received for the position of office manager, a task better suited to an office manager, but ours had fractured her elbow ice-skating and decided, since she couldn’t work anyway, that she would take a year to reassess her priorities.
    Why had I gone on and on with Ryan about treating the elderly? What monstrousness I’d introduced into that little house, visions of illness and coldness combined. I wondered how he and Marielle were restoring peace. Maybe they were just sitting on the love seat together again, drinking from those terrible mugs. Our mother had favored earthy colors for her pottery, glazes that fired to glossy shades of tan and brown. Surveying the fruits of her labor one day when he was thirteen or fourteen, James had pointed out that she’d gone to a lot of trouble to produce a bunch of stuff that looked likeshellacked shit.
    I got up and brushed off the seat of my pants. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees since I’d left home, and I took the steps down to the driveway two at a time. I had a jacket in the trunk of my car, and I got it out as quietly as I could, carefully lowering the trunk lid until, with an inch to go, I pressed it closed.
    Above me, another light in the house went off. I imagined the CEO and his wife getting ready for bed. By now Jen would be worried, though more so if Ryan had called, or less? She and I had spent a week in the house once, early in our marriage, when my father was away visiting my errant mother in Taos and wanted someone to water the plants and fill the bird feeder. Jen assumed we’d take the master bedroom, but it was too weird for me, so we slept in Rebecca’s room, where there was a double bed. Thinking about this now—the strange nights in Rebecca’s old bed, being wakened over and over by the creaking trees outside the uncurtained window—I