“Come on, it’s cute,” he says, smacking me lightly with a leotard.
“I guess,” I say, shrugging. “Seems kinda young to be so in love.”
I catch what might be a look of disappointment flash across Caleb’s face, but he covers it quickly. “You’re too young to be such a cynic, you know.”
“I’m not a cynic! I prefer to think of myself as a realist.”
I start layering the folded piles of clothes into Mom’s suitcase. Caleb sits down on the bed, gingerly so as not to disturb my piles.
“So what’s the realist’s problem with young love, then? This optimist would like to know.” He folds his arms and looks at me expectantly, like it’s going to take a good dose of logic to convince him.
“I don’t have a problem with it. I just don’t know—I guess I think, you might think you’re in love when you’re twenty or whatever, but if you haven’t been through something with the person that’s really hard—life stuff—then I’m not sure you know what love is. Not for real.”
He’s quiet for a minute. “Sometimes you bust out with things that you have no business knowing about, HD.”
I laugh. “What? I know about love. I know about my parents. My dad certainly didn’t see this coming.” I gesture around the room, as if Huntington’s is in the air. “And he’s stuck around. That’s love.”
“That’s crazy love,” Caleb agrees.
“I’m just saying that I think the love he has for my mom now is not the same as what he had when they were in college.”
“Of course it’s not the same. That doesn’t mean what they had then wasn’t for real,” he says. “I think young love is kind of—I don’t know—it’s its own thing. It’s special. Yeah, okay, maybe it’s cheesy, but it’s cool. It’s lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
I shrug. “I guess I’ve never thought of falling in love as lucky. It seems like a big risk, to me.”
“And that makes it a bad thing?” Caleb shakes his head at me. “You’re a massive pain, you know that?”
“What? I am not!” I toss a pointe shoe at him.
“So what are we, then?” he asks, his tone suddenly serious. He leans back on the bed and props himself up on his elbows. I take the shoe back and press it down into the suitcase with its torn satin mate.
“We’re just—us.”
He gives me a sort of bemused look, like he knows this conversation isn’t going where he wants it to go. “You need help with that thing?” He points at the overstuffed suitcase that I’m now trying unsuccessfully to zip.
“Yes, please.”
“You’re not a realist when it comes to packing, I see.” He leans over the suitcase, pressing down hard with both hands. “Zip, come on.”
I drag the zipper closed, almost all the way until it catches at a spot where the suitcase’s two halves haven’t come together evenly. Caleb shifts the top half of the case, then presses down again. This time it closes.
“Voilà,” I say. “Now, I hope I don’t need to add anything to that after you’ve left.”
“Guess you’re on your own from now on.”
Bending over the stuffed suitcase, our faces are just inches apart. His breath smells like peppermint, even though he’s not chewing any gum.
This time, when we kiss, it’s not like any of the other times. For a moment it’s tentative, but then suddenly it feels urgent, hungrier, like we can’t kiss each other fast enough. At first he cups my face in his hands, and I grip his shoulders, but then our hands drift down, unbuttoning things and roving around each other’s bodies. We crawl back onto the bed and he runs his fingers along the base of my spine and then up under my shirt. His hand grazing my skin makes me feel like every nerve ending in my body is at attention.
He kisses my neck, behind my hair, along the edge of my ear. For a split second he slips the tip of his tongue right into my ear and it’s such a weird feeling that I pull away suddenly.
“What?” he whispers.
“Sorry,” I say, giggling. “That’s weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Like tongue-in-ear weird. Sorry.”
He laughs. “My bad. I got lost in the moment.” He takes his glasses off, puts them on the bedside table, and pulls me into a hug. Then he starts kissing the base of my neck. “Neck okay?”
“Neck okay,” I confirm. We stay there for a moment, not moving on the bed. The room’s getting darker as the sun goes down.
“You have an early flight tomorrow?” he asks.
“Sort of.”
“I should go. You probably want to hang out with your folks before the epic journey.”
“Guess so, yeah.” But we keep lying there, our hands tucked in secret places—mine in his back pockets and his resting right on the bare skin of my hip bones.
“What do I look like without your glasses on?” I ask after a moment.
He squints at me. “You look like an elderly black man. Like my grandfather.”
I swat his arm. “Shut up.”
“You look like you. Only blurrier.” He kisses my nose, then pulls away.
“Okay,” I say finally, getting up and buttoning my jeans. “I guess you should go now, for real.”
I follow Caleb downstairs, and at the front door, he turns to me again. “Do come back from the epic journey, HD. Don’t join a hippie commune in San Francisco.”
I smile. “I don’t think they have those anymore.”
“Fine. Then don’t become a Scientologist.”
“Fair enough. I promise not to become a Scientologist.”
A breeze sneaks through the cracked door and I shiver, even though I’m not really cold. Caleb pulls me to his chest. He’s like a human heater.
I strain up on tiptoe to be closer to his height and kiss him again. He turns me around and pushes me up against the doorframe, not forcefully but not gently either. We’re still making out when there’s a rustling behind us. We pull away quickly, looking around, but there’s no one there. Caleb slips his fingers through the belt loops of my jeans and pulls my hips toward his. We bump against each other and he smiles at me.
“It’s more fun to be an optimist. Trust me.”
My lips feel almost swollen and a little numb, so I can barely string together a response. I push the door closed after him and lock it. That’s when I hear more shuffling in the next room. Turning, I see Mom, emerging from the shadows of the darkened dining room, shoving a walker in front of her like she does more and more around the house now.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“Wanted a sssnack,” she mumbles.
She shuffles toward the stairs, crumbs adorning the front of her robe. As she passes me, she pauses and leans in close to my face. “You’re allowed,” she whispers. Then she settles herself in her stair lift and takes off, leaving me standing there by the door.
* * *
It’s drizzling the next morning when I drag my suitcase down the stairs, much too early. Mom is sitting in her wheelchair by the window. She’s not up for me; she’s always up at the crack of dawn now.
I leave my suitcase by the door and go to her, perching on the ottoman closest to the window. “I’m out, Ma.” She ignores me for a minute. “Love you.”
“Wwwhere are you going?” she asks, spinning her chair around to face me. “Where” sounds like it has twice as many syllables as it should, the way she slurs now. It still takes me by surprise, how everything keeps getting worse. I should be used to it by now, the progression—I know how it works—but still it never fails to surprise me that she wakes up a little bit harder to understand, a little bit less capable of caring for herself, than she was the day before. Even if the changes are almost imperceptible from day to day, they’re constant.
“I’m going to San Francisco. For the audition. At The Pacific Coast College of the Arts. Remember?”
She nods slowly, which is more like an exaggerated version of what her head does on its own the
se days. “Obviously. I knew that.”
“I’m taking the train. The Zephyr, from Chicago.”
She blinks several times, hard, staring at me. “The Zzzephyr,” she repeats, slowly.
“I told you I was going to take the train. It was my birthday present. You told me it’s the most beautiful ride in the country.”
“I didn’t tell you to take the train.”
So we’re not going to have a pleasant, easy farewell this morning. “No,” I say, taking a breath and trying to be patient. “You told me it’s the most beautiful ride in the country. I have to go to San Francisco, for this audition. I want to take the train. It was a birthday present.”
“You said that already.” She glares at me. “It’s my train.”
Last night, she seemed so good. That last moment before she went upstairs, sharing a secret with me, it almost felt like she was normal again. Clearly, we’re back to reality now.
The stairs creak and Gram appears in the front hall. “Are you ready, Rose? Your dad’s just looking for his keys.” I look from Gram to Mom and back to Gram, trying to clue her in on the impending outburst.
“It’s not. Your. Train,” Mom says, excruciatingly slowly, her volume rising.
“El,” Gram starts, coming into the room, “Rose is taking one of the trains on your map. You want her to take this train, remember?” Gram has patience with Mom that I can’t even comprehend. Or if she doesn’t, you’d never know from the tone she musters.
Dad comes downstairs with his coat and hat, all ready to go, not yet recognizing the familiar, building tension in the room. “Tally ho, ladies. Rose, your chariot awaits.”
Mom’s reddening face and increasingly jerking head and extremities mean she’s getting worked up. Then it all explodes.
“It’s not your train! It’s my train! My train! You’re always trying to sssteal my fucking things!”
Gram chuckles, as if Mom’s just kidding. “Well, technically it’s not your train either, is it, El? Unless you’re the bloody CEO of Amtrak.” She’s trying to lighten the mood, but I can tell Mom’s already too far gone to be brought back with humor.
“El, come on.” Dad puts what he intends as a calming hand on each of Mom’s shoulders. Sometimes it works, but not this time. She shakes him off violently.
“Just ssstop treating me like a child!” she growls. “You”—she points at me—“you have no right to make my life … your life.”
I don’t even know what to say anymore. If only she still understood irony, she’d hear the ridiculousness of what just came out of her mouth. As if, under any circumstances, I would want to make her life my own. If there were anything I could possibly do to avoid that, believe me, I’d be doing it. Unfortunately, that’s a choice I don’t have.
“Mom, I’m going,” I tell her, not giving an inch to the rage boiling in my gut. “Bye. Love you, Gram, I’ll call you from the road. Or track, or whatever.” I plant a quick kiss on my grandmother’s cheek, grab my suitcase, and make for the car. By the time I get buckled in and see Dad heading out after me, closing the front door behind him, I’ve already wiped the tears from my cheeks and taken a deep breath. Done. Ready to go.
Twenty
The long-distance Amtrak waiting room is in the basement of Chicago’s Union Station, an unfortunate, low-ceilinged room hiding under what is a quite majestic train station upstairs. The floor is lined with threadbare blue carpet, and big luggage lockers line one whole wall. There are a lot of bored-looking people waiting for their trains with their feet propped up on coolers and suitcases.
Lena, Caleb, and Dad booked me what Amtrak calls a Superliner Roomette, which is the smallest of the sleeping compartments. When they call “All aboard” for the Zephyr—and they actually do call “All aboard”—a woman in a navy vest and hat directs me to the first car on my left, and a man in the same uniform takes my ticket at the door and points me up a staircase barely wide enough for Mom’s suitcase, to room number three on the upper level.
The California Zephyr isn’t exactly the old-fashioned Orient Express—complete with a steam engine and red velvet seats—that I was picturing for my epic train ride. “Room three,” it turns out, is basically two single seats facing each other with barely a foot of floor space between them, and a silver door with a glass panel that slides closed just to the right of the seats. In other words, a closet with two seats stuffed in. But there’s a big window, and a table that folds out from the wall, and since there’s only one of me I can prop my suitcase on the backward-facing seat and sit facing forward. There’s a tiny bottle of water resting by each seat, and I noticed coming in that there’s also a selection of juice and a coffee pot right by the bathroom at the top of the stairs. Not too shabby, this Amtrak thing.
By the time I get settled in my compartment, I’ve almost cleared my head of the exchange with my mother. Almost. Dad and I drove pretty much in silence to the airport. As we pulled off the exit ramp for Logan’s Terminal B, he said out of nowhere, “It’s the disease. It’s not her.”
“I know. Obviously. I get it.”
“I’m sorry, Ro. That’s not how I wanted you to start this adventure.”
“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “It’s the disease, remember.”
He pulled over by the American Airlines entrance. “You’re a good kid. I love you.”
“You’re a cheeseball. Love you too.”
Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially irritated about the particular genetic mishap that may or may not have happened to me before my birth, I remember that Dad didn’t even inherit this crappy luck. He married it. And you can’t divorce the woman with Huntington’s disease, even if you want to, because that makes you a massive jackass. Not that I think he wants to leave her—but maybe sometimes, I guess. It has to be enticing, to think that you could just put it all behind you and start over.
I click a few pictures of my temporary home with my phone. Just on the other side of the narrow corridor, an older woman with a slight hunchback is getting situated.
“Hiya,” says the woman, calling over to me. Midwestern. “This your first time on the Zephyr?” I nod. “Mine too. I’m going to Sacramento. Where you headed?”
“All the way to the end. San Francisco.”
“Oh, wonderful,” says the woman, dreamily. “Are you all by your lonesome over there?”
Actually, now that I’m getting settled in the roomette, it does feel a little strange to be alone. Which is unexpected. I figured it’d be like last summer, when I went to a two-month summer program at New York City Ballet. I was away from home by myself for a lot longer than three days. But that time, my parents delivered me right to the dorm, helped me get my bags upstairs, and put sheets on the bed. Not that I can’t put sheets on my own bed. I can. But still, it’s nice to have your parents do it for you, sometimes.
“By my lonesome,” I say with a smile.
“Me too,” she says, returning the smile, but she looks almost concerned.
“My grandparents are picking me up on the other end.” I don’t know why I tell the lie. Just to make this stranger feel better I guess, like my life is all good. It’s normal.
The same Amtrak-uniformed man who directed me to my compartment appears in the corridor. He introduces himself as Jay.
“Rose,” I say, shaking his hand, which swallows mine. He’s handsome, in spite of the unflattering polyester he’s forced to wear, dark-haired, with the most incredibly well-coiffed beard I’ve ever seen—every strand looks like it’s been individually combed and placed exactly where it is on his chin. He doesn’t speak with an accent, but his English is textbook-precise in a way that makes me think he learned it in school, not at home. He explains where the lounge car is, and that the dining car attendant will be around just after departure to take our preferred dinner reservations (really, reservations), and that he’ll be around to fold down our beds any time after dinner until eleven o’clock.
“That’s when I turn in for the n
ight. I’m right here in room one if you need anything in the meantime.”
At two o’clock on the dot, the train pulls slowly out of the station, and I watch the tracks coast by out my window. I text Dad first, to let him know I’m off, and then send Lena and Caleb the first few pictures I’ve taken. Within fifteen minutes, the high rises and shabby, boarded-up brick buildings of train-track-adjacent Chicago give way to flat, dry cornfields, and we’re on our way.
* * *
They make big states in the middle of the country. Sounds obvious, I know, but I’m used to being able to drive across Massachusetts in three hours or less. In the middle of the country, we spend hours passing through shifting landscapes without crossing state lines. The flat land goes on for ages. It’s beautiful in its own way, dead brown cornstalks for miles—it isn’t really corn season yet, I guess—and dotted with tiny towns along the train tracks, ranch houses, above-ground pools, churches and schools with American flags flapping out front, scrap yards and recycling centers. And flatness.
Once we’re moving, I explore the train from end to end: My sleeping car is the last on the train, followed by three other sleepers, the dining car, the observation car, with windows stretching to the ceiling, and three coach cars. The coach cars in particular are full of uncertain smells, each one slightly different from the last—one like someone’s McDonald’s hamburger, the next like disinfectant, the next like the toilet’s not quite working. A few passengers are trying to sleep, even in the middle of the day, with T-shirts or masks draped over their eyes, which strikes me as a little defeatist, considering that the ride has only just started and there’s plenty of interesting stuff to check out. At the end of one of the coach cars, a group of scruffy twentysomethings are sitting on the floor, wearing pajama bottoms and drinking Sierra Mist. One of them strums an acoustic guitar quietly, which strangely doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone sitting nearby.
Somewhere still in Illinois but hours from Chicago, the Zephyr stops long enough that passengers who are continuing on are allowed to get off the train and stretch our legs—a smoke stop, they call it. I step outside and jog up and down the platform a few times. I guess I can’t really blame Lena and Caleb for not considering that fifty-two hours in a tin can wouldn’t do wonders for my pre-audition body, because honestly I didn’t think about it either. I’d pictured a sleeping compartment big enough to stretch on the floor, but the reality allows no such thing. So on the platform, I mark out a short combination we learned last week in class, trying to ignore the stares from Jay and my fellow passengers.
Rules for 50/50 Chances Page 18