Free The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

medicine practice, I’m the doctor new patients request most frequently (a statistic I did not seek out; such is the state of managed care that gathering data like these has become an integral part of our operation). According to our scheduling staff, people are always calling and saying, “I saw Dr. Blair when my regular doctor was out, and I want to switch” or “I’ve heard Dr. Blair really cares. ”
    And yet. How do you care without feeling each grim diagnosis, each death, as a drop of grief making its way through your bloodstream? How do you continue to care?
    For two decades I was all kindness and concern, and then suddenly, as I hit my mid-forties, I wasn’t. I dawdled over charts in my office while the sickest of my patients waited for me; I postponedphone calls to deliver bad news for hours or even days, berating myself the longer I waited but unable to pick up the phone. I didn’t know what was wrong. I felt I had lost my feelings. A broken heart can masquerade as a cold one.
    At home, I avoided my wife and our two boys. I thought I was very, very tired, and I took naps before dinner, after weekend breakfasts, on holiday afternoons. I used my fatigue to justify all kinds of low behavior. I snapped, I growled, I sank into silence. The boys fought over which of them had caused my bad moods. “You yelled and woke him up!” “Well, you didn’t try your cauliflower!” Jen scowled at me when they weren’t looking, but after a few months, when nothing had changed, she slipped a mask over her expressive features and presented me with a single multipurpose half-smile. “Daddy isn’t going with us this time,” she would say to the boys without asking me. It was true. Daddy wasn’t really going anywhere.
    This might have gone on indefinitely had James not shown up unexpectedly. He was living in Eugene, Oregon, the only one of us not to settle on the Peninsula—though the truth was, he hadn’t settled anywhere. After dropping out of college—just seven months shy of getting his degree, which was so typical—he began drifting from one job to another, one life to another; and now, at thirty-eight, if he wasn’t actually drifting, he was nevertheless living what seemed to the rest of us to be a pretty unstable life.
    He arrived on a Friday night, knocking on Rebecca’s door without advance notice or explanation, and within days he’d established a kind of pattern, dropping by my house every second or third evening for dinner, or at eight in the morning so he could “keep the boys company at breakfast,” his term of art for freeloading.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. That first Sunday, Rebecca and her husband had us all over for brunch: me, Jen, and our boys; Ryan and his wife and daughter; and of course James. The house was ona shady street in north Palo Alto, all unfinished concrete walls and steel railings, the yard full of river stones and carefully managed wild grasses. Jen said the house was as elegant and severe as Rebecca herself, not exactly a compliment but I knew what she meant.
    James came to the door in his boxers that morning, unshaved, hair matted. “What?” he said as I looked him over. “I’m not ready.”
    I gave this the response it deserved.
    The boys pushed past me to their uncle, and he held out his palm so they could give him some skin. No matter how long it had been since they’d last seen him, they were always ready for some James-style fun, and he always delivered. It was easy enough for him, I suppose; he was still a child himself.
    Rebecca and Walt were in the kitchen setting out fruit and bagels. The boys went for a pink bakery box, Jen poured herself coffee, and I shook hands with Walt because we always shook hands, even if it had been only a day or two since we’d seen each other. James followed behind us and helped himself to a slice of cantaloupe. I tried to get a notion from Rebecca of how things were going with him, but she stayed busy with the fruit, fanning