“I feel like I’m in trouble.” I gave a little laugh, but it was true. I had never actually been called into his office when I was a student there, but it still had that effect on me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I rarely give my parents detention.” We both smiled, but I felt his eyes taking in the stud in my nose, the eyebrow ring, the tattoo that ran around my left wrist, the tight jeans and worn T-shirt I was wearing, and I felt eleven years old again. Only a lot less confident than I was back when I was eleven and a total teacher’s pet.
I cleared my throat. “It’s about Noah,” I said. As if he hadn’t guessed. “He was pretty upset about something that happened in PE.”
“Yes,” Dr. Wilson said. Every time he spoke, I could practically see a subtitle floating in front of him. His “yes” was really I’m well aware of the problems your son has been causing in our PE class.
“I know he’s not the best athlete—”
“We don’t care about that,” he said calmly. It’s his attitude that concerns us. “All we ask is that our students engage and make an effort to enjoy themselves.”
“He’s trying,” I said. “But it’s hard for him. He’s so small and he has this autoimmune disease—”
“The PE coaches are all aware of Noah’s health issues,” he said. “As am I.” He leaned back in his chair. He was wearing a dark wool suit with a tie. I had been acquainted with Dr. Wilson for close to two decades and had never seen him without a jacket and tie. “They take that into account when they’re working with his class.” Trust me, we don’t want any lawsuits.
“Not always.” In an effort to look relaxed, I crossed my own legs, but that exposed the hummingbird tattoo on my right ankle and I quickly uncrossed them. “Yesterday he said that the coach—the new guy—had made him run up and down a flight of stairs a bunch of times, and it was just too much for him.”
“Hmm,” he said. “He found that difficult?”
His skepticism angered me, which was good: my anger buoyed me up, made me less afraid of this man who had been the ultimate authority throughout my childhood. “Noah told me he was so tired he had to crawl up the stairs and some of the other kids started kicking him. And the coach let them.”
Dr. Wilson contemplated me, eyes narrowed. “You’re sure about this?”
“It’s what he told me.”
For a moment he studied my face hard, like he was trying to probe through to my brain to see if there was any deception going on in there. Then he sighed, stood up, and opened his office door. “Barb?” he said to his assistant. “Would you please locate Coach Andrew and have him come right to my office?”
He closed the door. I had risen to my feet when he had, so we were face to face when he turned around again.
I dropped my eyes first.
“How are your parents?” he asked abruptly.
“They’re fine.” I realized I was fidgeting like a little kid, shifting from one foot to the other. I forced myself to stop.
“I’ll be seeing your mother next week at the board of trustees meeting,” he said. “It’s such a pleasure working with her.”
“Oh, good,” I said and kind of meant it. My mother was president of the board, which made her, in a certain sense, Louis Wilson’s boss. I wondered if Dr. Wilson was thinking about that now. I hoped so.
“Excuse me,” he said. He wandered over to his desk and shuffled through a few papers while I rocked on my heels and looked around the room. There were a bunch of plaques on the wall, including one my mother had designed that said, FROM THE SIXTH-GRADE CLASS OF 1998, which was my class.
“It feels like yesterday to me,” Dr. Wilson said from over by the desk, looking up.
“It feels like forever ago to me.”
“Time passes more quickly at my age. Too quickly.” He went back to the papers on his desk.
There was a knock on the door, and the coach came in. He was wearing sweatpants and a blue T-shirt and a baseball cap. He looked younger than I expected. His shoulders were slightly stooped and he was more skinny than muscular. “You wanted to see me?” he said, addressing Dr. Wilson but glancing at me, clearly trying to place me—I didn’t look like the kind of teacher Dr. Wilson was likely to hire but I didn’t look much like a parent, either.
“Andrew,” Dr. Wilson said, with a brisk clearing of his throat, “this is Noah Allen’s mother. Rickie Allen.”
“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “Hi. Nice to meet you.” He held out his hand and, as we shook, his eyes strayed to the tattoo on my wrist. As he raised them again to my face, I could see they were dark—almost black—and unreadable. “So what’s up?” He looked back and forth between us.
“Rickie?” said Dr. Wilson with a gallant little “go ahead” kind of a gesture. You wanted to complain. So complain.
I swallowed. I wasn’t a confrontational kind of person. I was more of a hide-in-your-room-and-sulk kind of person. But I was Noah’s mom and dealing with this was just something I had to do. I raised my chin. “Noah said you made him crawl up the stairs and let the other kids kick him.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Coach Andrew said, putting his palms up. “I don’t let anyone kick anyone in my class.”
“He said kids were kicking him.”
“They weren’t,” he said emphatically. “I was right there at the foot of the stairs, watching. No one was kicking anybody. But it is true that Noah chose to crawl up the steps, even after I asked him to stop, and it’s possible someone might have bumped him by accident on their way back down.”
“He said he was too weak to climb anymore. He’s not very strong—he’s got an autoimmune disease.”
“I know. The school nurse said it shouldn’t affect his ability to keep up.”
“It obviously did the other day.”
“Noah needs to run around more,” he said. “Build up his stamina. He’s not weak because of his disease, he’s weak because he doesn’t get enough exercise.”
Could he have been any less sympathetic? “You don’t know anything about his health or how much he does or doesn’t exercise,” I said tightly. “You pushed him too hard. And when he tried to tell you it was too much, you wouldn’t even listen and let the other kids make fun of him. He was still crying about it when I picked him up.”
Dr. Wilson had been watching our exchange with his arms crossed as if he were hoping we would work it all out without him, but now he said with patronizing gentleness, “Noah does resort to tears fairly often, Rickie, which sometimes makes it hard to know how seriously to take them.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear it right then. “Whatever,” I said. “I just don’t think PE class is working for him right now. Can’t he go to the library or something while the rest of the kids run up stairs and beat each other up for exercise?”
“You can’t take him out of PE,” the coach said. “Noah needs more exercise, not less. The more he can keep up, the more fun he’ll have.”
“Oh, right, because climbing stairs is such fun.”
He flushed. “We were a little restricted yesterday because we didn’t have access to the field. But the other kids liked it—we made a game out of seeing how many times they could go up and down.”
I turned to Dr. Wilson. “How about we make a deal? I’ll make sure Noah climbs a flight of stairs five times a day if you let him skip PE.”
The principal shook his head. “As long as Noah goes to Fenwick, he’ll take PE with his class. It would be doing him a disservice to single him out by excusing him.”
I stepped back, flinging up my hands in disgust. “So, in other words, nothing is going to change.”
“I’m not ignoring this, Rickie,” Dr. Wilson said. Years of managing parents had made him smooth as silk; anger slid right off of him. “We’ll put our heads together and figure out some way to offer Noah some extra support during class. Right, Andrew?”
His face was impassive. “Of course.”
I looked back and forth between the two of
them. Dr. Wilson was smiling his bland fixer smile at me, and the coach wouldn’t even meet my eyes. I wasn’t going to get anything more out of either of them. “Fine,” I said. I grabbed my bag and left the office.
3.
When I brought Noah home from school a few hours later, Melanie’s car was parked in front of our house. It often was those days. A few months earlier, when she and Gabriel had first separated, they agreed that their kids’ lives should be disrupted as little as possible. So instead of uprooting Nicole and Cameron or making them shuttle back and forth between two homes, they took turns living with them in their old house.
My mother invited Melanie to stay with us on the nights Gabriel was with the kids, and Melanie gratefully moved some clothes in and took over my mother’s office. Mom carried her desk and files down to the family room. Mel kept saying that she was going to find an apartment, that she shouldn’t impose, but we had the space and her heart wasn’t in the search, which was probably just as well. She needed company to distract her from worrying about whether Gabriel had remembered to give Nicole her antibiotics or to pack Cameron a sack lunch for his field trip and stuff like that.
She kept her cell phone on and within reach at all times and dove on it the second it rang.
If you passed by her room at the kids’ bedtime, you’d see her all curled up around her phone, singing and chanting her way through some bedtime ritual with them.
When she was away from her own kids, she poured a lot of her frustrated maternal impulses into Noah. She’d spend hours baking gluten-free cookies for him and searching out books at the library she thought he’d like.
Noah wasn’t the kind of kid to go around saying “I love you,” but if he had been, I think he’d have said it to Mel way before he’d have said it to me or even to my mother, whose relationship with him was always a little distant, a little judgmental. “He’s your child,” she liked to say whenever a decision had to be made about something to do with Noah.
I don’t know why she felt the need to remind me of that so often. I certainly never thought of him as anything else.
Sometimes it struck me as ironic that both Melanie and I had ended up living at home with my parents. It was clear why I was once again living in my childhood bedroom. But Melanie had done everything right—gone to a good school, taught at a school for kids with special needs, married a guy whom we all adored, and then devoted herself to raising two of the sweetest, most lovable kids known to mankind—so why was she, like me, unhappily wandering my parents’ hallways at two in the morning?
You’d think I’d have felt a touch of satisfaction in our ending up in the same place. I mean, Mel was the family golden girl and my whole childhood was spent watching her soak up admiration and love and attention. I should have been delighted to see her brought down to my level, right? But that just wasn’t how things were with me and her.
It probably helped that we didn’t actually grow up together. She mostly lived with her mother and only visited us on the weekends, and I was still pretty young when she went off to college. So we never had to fight over rooms or toys or who got the car or anything like that. No sibling rivalry because there was no reason for any.
But it wasn’t just that.
When I was a little tiny girl and Melanie was a teenager, she’d come over to our house and curl up with me on the bed and read book after book after book—whichever one I put in her hand, she’d read to me. If she got bored, she never said so. I remember carefully piling up all my picture books the moment I heard her voice downstairs, getting them all ready to present to her because she never said “Enough” or “Leave me alone.”
When I was the teenager and she was in her twenties, she’d let me come stay at her apartment whenever I wanted, which was a lot because I often felt like I was going to explode under my mother’s constant scrutiny. On days when the world of cruel girls and indifferent boys was too much with me, I’d call Melanie and she’d say, “Come stay with me this weekend,” and then all weekend long there would be popcorn and manicures and stupid girly movies and no questions asked—which was why I always ended up telling her everything, all about the cruel girls and indifferent boys. “It sucks now,” she would say, “but I promise you, Rickie, it gets better,” and I’d believe her because she wasn’t old like my parents or stupid like everyone else in the whole world.
When Noah was born, she left her toddler daughter and husband at home together so she could spend the night at the hospital with me, curled up on the hard, narrow fold-out chair that was meant to be used by the new baby’s father, whispering to me whenever I woke up that Noah was the cutest, the sweetest, the best little boy who had ever been born and that we were going to have so much fun bringing him up together.
She kept me from being alone when it would have hurt the most.
So you see, there was no way I could ever resent Melanie or rejoice in her marriage falling apart or anything like that.
All I could do was love her.
Melanie was waiting for me and Noah in the kitchen with a beautifully arranged plate of cut-up fruit. Noah grabbed a handful of grapes off the plate and left, probably to go play on the computer, which he wasn’t supposed to do until he’d finished his homework, but on days when I wanted a break I followed a strict “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
That was most days, admittedly.
“How was your meeting with Dr. Wilson?” Mel asked. As far as I knew, she had never had to meet with the principal about either of her kids.
I described it to her and she said all the right sympathetic things but then ruined her supportive streak by adding, “They might have a point, though, Rickie—I mean, about Noah’s needing to get stronger. He can’t keep up with Cameron on the scooter and Cameron’s a year younger. He always complains when he has to walk a block, and he never wants to run around or play a game outside. If he stopped doing PE, he wouldn’t be getting any exercise at all and—”
I waved my hand impatiently, cutting her off. “I know, I know.” I edged toward the doorway. “I’m going to go run and check my e-mail. We have to leave again in half an hour.”
“Where to?”
“Noah has a doctor’s appointment. Blood test.”
“Want me to go with you?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
“You sure?” She looked crushed. Melanie never had anything but time on her hands when the kids were with Gabriel. My mother kept saying she should get a job, for her own sake, but Dad said to give her more time.
Seeing her disappointment, I quickly added, “But it would be nice to have company.”
Her face lit up.
It went badly. Sometimes it just does. First they kept us waiting forty minutes, which gave Noah time to work himself up into a state of anxiety over the blood test. But that wasn’t the bad part. That came in the examining room when the nurse couldn’t find the vein right away and had to keep wiggling the needle around under Noah’s skin. He was sitting on my lap—the good thing about his being small for his age was that he still fit there—and I tried to hold him steady, but, god, it looked like it hurt. He had been so brave at first, too, resigned as the needle went in, just intent on reminding me that I owed him a treat afterwards, but then when the nurse started poking around for the vein, he turned pale, then he moaned and then he screamed and the scream ended in a sob. I looked at Melanie, who was standing across the room, and there were tears in her eyes but she mouthed, “It’s okay,” like I was the one close to crying. I just nodded and held Noah’s clammy, shaking body against my chest and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the sharp tip of the needle moving around under his skin and murmured over and over again, “I know it hurts but it helps, I know it hurts but it helps” until the words didn’t mean anything to me at all.
Mom was cooking something on the stove when we got back. “How’d it go?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at us, still stirring.
“They couldn’t find the vein,” I said.
“Had to go into the second arm. Took a while with that one, too.”
Noah held up his arms to show her the gauze and Band-Aids on the inside of both elbows and Mom clucked sympathetically. “It’ll bruise,” he told her. He was calm now, having informed me in the car that he would never submit to another blood test. I didn’t bother arguing the point. When he had to, he would. “Mom got me candy,” he added. “Two kinds because it hurt even more than usual.”
“I can see that,” Mom said. “There’s chocolate all over your mouth. And something blue.”
“That was Fun Dip.” He turned to me. “Can I play on the computer?”
“Get your homework done first.”
He groaned and headed out of the kitchen.
“Dinner will be ready in about half an hour,” Mom called after him.
“I’m not hungry,” he said over his shoulder. “I had candy.” He left the kitchen and I sank into a chair. Eleanor Roosevelt was lying under the table, snoring. I absently rubbed my foot against her shoulder and she thumped her tail against the floor without opening her eyes.
“That new nurse is awful,” Melanie said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. I told the doctor she wasn’t allowed to take Noah’s blood again ever.” She went to the sink and washed her hands. “Want me to make a salad, Laurel?”
“That would be great,” Mom said. “There’s lettuce and carrots and red peppers.”
“Don’t put peppers in,” I said. “I hate them.”
Mom said, “I know. You can pick them out.”
“How about she just doesn’t put them in?”
“The rest of us like red peppers,” my mother said. “You can pick them out.”
“Noah doesn’t like them either.”
“Noah doesn’t eat salad.”
“I’m just saying it’s not true the rest of the family likes them.”
“Your logic is unassailable,” my mother said dryly. “But I still want peppers in my salad.”
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