“What’s up?” she says, smiling at me.
“I have news,” I say. “About next year.”
“Okay.” She waits for me to say more, but I can’t tell if she really understands what I’m referring to, or if she even remembers about PCCA in the first place.
“So, you remember how I auditioned for the scholarship at PCCA? In San Francisco?”
“Of course I remember that. I’m not sssenial, you know.” But from the way her eyes flicker when she says it, I can tell she doesn’t quite believe it herself.
“I got in.”
Mom’s face lights up. “I knew you would. See, I told you ssso. Didn’t I?”
I don’t remember her telling me so anytime recently, but maybe she’s right in the global sense. All my life, in one way or another, she told me so.
“Yeah. You did. But, Mom—the thing is…” I trail off, afraid to see her obvious pleasure turn to disappointment.
“What’s the thhhhing?”
“I don’t want to go.”
She struggles to prop herself up on one arm, so she can get a good look at me. The left side of her face twitches as she stares me down, just like she used to when I was little and she wanted to know if I was telling the truth. “Are you still worried that my plane is going to crash?” she’d ask before leaving for a business trip, and then she’d give me that deep stare-down until I’d admit that yes, I was still worried about her plane going down in a field. Then she’d take me straight to the Internet and show me all the statistics on how many planes fly safely every year, to calm my fears.
She’s still trying to be that mother now, even as her body is betraying her.
“You don’t want to?”
I shake my head. “No. I want to go to Cunningham. Remember, where we saw that dance show last year?”
She closes her eyes, maybe trying to bring back the memory.
“Are you sssure? That’s what you really want?”
“Yes. Really.” Saying it again, to Mom, makes me feel even more certain. That I won’t have a six-hour flight—or a two-day train ride—between us is a bonus.
“Okay, then. Did your fffather order dinner?”
* * *
On Saturday, Dad makes me invite Lena and Caleb over for what he calls a “celebratory dinner for talented people.” I humor him. In exchange, he actually grills, like he used to all the time.
“I’d like to raise a glass to all of you completely amazing youths. Here’s to big things!” He raises his pint glass with one hand and reaches over to squeeze Mom’s shoulder with the other, as he blinks back predictably sentimental tears.
“Hear, hear!” Gram adds, hoisting her beer. Gram rarely drinks alcohol, but tonight she said it was an occasion worthy of a “fine ale.”
“So you’re making a shift toward vegetarianism, I see,” Lena says, surveying the spread of chicken, steak tips, and sausages.
“You only live once, Lena,” Dad says. “Might as well enjoy your meals.”
I wonder if Dad’s new gospel of living in the moment has anything to do with Mom’s decision to reserve herself a place in a care home, and the newfound glimpse it offers into the life she’s headed for—sitting in a wheelchair in a room that smells like urine faintly disguised by disinfectant, smearing soft food across her face, playing “games” with aides in pink smocks and other people in varying, withering states of incapacity. (Or at least that’s how I’m imagining it. Dr. Howard says it’s not really like that.)
“YOLO, Dave,” Lena says, clinking her iced tea against his Guinness.
“What what, Lena?”
“Never mind, Dave.” Under the table, where our knees brush up against each other, Caleb squeezes my leg.
When Lena leaves, Caleb and I manage to extricate ourselves from the rest of my family and slip upstairs. I close the door behind us, shove him back on the bed, and straddle his lap, pulling my shirt over my head at the same time. He looks pleasantly surprised, but also a little concerned, glancing toward the door.
“Whatever,” I say, kissing his neck. “We’ll just be quiet.” I open my laptop and turn up the volume on iTunes. If they hear anything, they’ll hear Adele, and maybe they’ll wonder, but I don’t even care. He runs his hands down my torso to my waist and kisses me back.
* * *
Afterward, we lie on my bed, on top of the covers, not doing or saying much of anything. I lean against his chest, and every now and then he twists a strand of my hair around a finger.
“I’m doing the right thing, right?” I say after a few minutes. “About school?”
“You know what I think.”
“You think I should do what I want.”
He nods.
“But that’s just you being a good human being. I want to know what you really think.”
Caleb sighs. “That is what I really think. I can’t tell you what to do. Do I know what I would do in the same situation? Yes. But that’s me.”
“You would take the scholarship and go to PCCA.”
“Hell yeah, I would go. I can’t imagine just giving up on the thing you love.”
I lean against his chest and press myself up so I can see his face. “I’m not giving it up, though. I’m choosing something else. And I can still dance at Cunningham.”
He nods, thinking. “I know. That’s what you’re telling yourself. Are you sure you’re not just scared?”
“Why would I be scared?”
“I mean, you’ve been waffling about this from the beginning, from before you even auditioned. Don’t you think that’s about something else?”
“No. I think I’m making a choice, which you’ve been pushing me to do for months, and now you just don’t understand that choice so you’re being weird.”
“You asked for my opinion. I’m just giving it to you. Ballet is your life. You have a chance to do it at the best place in the country, for free. So no, I don’t get not going. I didn’t get a scholarship to RISD and I’m going anyway, because it’s the right thing for me.”
“And because you can,” I remind him. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I shouldn’t have said them. But he can’t possibly think our situations are the same: his parents can afford to send him wherever he wants. His eyes harden and he pulls away from me, ever so slightly but I notice it anyway.
“Yeah. Because I can. Do you want me to apologize for that, Rose?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Because, you know, you’ve been asking me for a lot of apologies lately. Apologies for not having my family’s illness, apologies for not having to worry about money, apologies for having what you seem to think is an easy, uncomplicated life.”
I sit up on my knees, alarmed by how quickly this conversation has taken a turn. “Hey, I never said that.”
I know Caleb worries about his family, that their illness weighs on him. I’ve never doubted that, but now it’s creeping into my head that maybe I haven’t said that out loud to him very often. Or ever, really.
“Come on. You’ve been competitive about whose life is harder right from the beginning. Let me ask you this. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘twice as good’?” He folds his arms across his bare chest. “Have your parents ever had that talk with you? You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
I have no idea. I just stare at him.
“Yeah, because white kids don’t get that talk,” he goes on.
“Wait, when did this become a conversation about race?”
“We’re not talking about race, Rose. We’re talking about us. I’m trying to tell you something about me, and you don’t want to listen.”
“How are you allowed to lump me in with white kids in general and then claim we’re not talking about race? I don’t lump you in with black kids all the time.”
Caleb laughs then—not his good laugh, the one that makes me smile, but a different one, distant and cold. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. This isn’t about ‘lumping in.
’ This is about our different experiences. And you always thinking my life is so pristine. But since when do you even ask me about my life?”
With that, I’m silenced. I swallow, hard, and feel my face heating up. Warm tears are already spilling down my cheeks but I don’t wipe them away.
“I’m just saying, Rose—as you told me from the train, we all have our own ‘stuff.’”
He puts air quotes around “stuff” in a way that bugs me, but I don’t say anything, just wait for him to go on, which he does.
“And you were right. We do all have our stuff. When I was eight, my father sat me down and told me not to run in white neighborhoods, including our own. Get that? Then when I was fourteen, he explained to me how to behave around cops, which I can assure you is not the same way you can behave around cops. At work, my mother had to publish more articles and teach more hours than any of her colleagues before she got tenure. And she’s done it with a chronic illness, which, although it is not Huntington’s, as you’ve pointed out many times, is still pretty freakin’ bad. Okay? You got a tough hand, sure. You didn’t get a monopoly on struggle.”
He finally pauses, exhaling deeply and threading his hands together behind his neck. Wiping my face, I swallow hard enough to speak, even though I barely trust myself to get a coherent sentence out. “I didn’t—I don’t think I have a monopoly. I get that we all have our own … complications. Okay? But you have to also accept that I might deal with my particular set of complicating factors differently from how you would.”
Caleb nods, a vaguely skeptical look on his face, and chuckles again, mostly to himself.
“And we’re all supposed to just excuse you for everything as a result of these complications, right? It’s always complicated with you, Rose.”
Well, yeah. It is. I’m sorry if that’s new information for him. The realization that he’s just been rolling his eyes at me this whole time is ice cold as it slithers through me. And the coldness pushes me to say the thing I’ve been holding in, the thing I’ve known and haven’t wanted to accuse him of.
“You don’t get this, okay? You don’t get what it’s like to not know. You don’t know what it feels like to have this big dark thing hanging over your head.”
“I get it, Rose! I have a family of sick people too, remember? Just because our sick isn’t as bad as your sick on your continuum of suffering, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand pain.”
“Watching other people be sick is not the same as living with the possibility of being sick,” I say. “I don’t get what it’s like to be black in this country? Okay, you’re right. Obviously I do not. I’m sorry about that. Maybe you shouldn’t date a white girl if you want to be with someone who automatically understands how you have to act around cops. But you don’t get what it’s like to be at risk for this disease. So you don’t get to sit around judging me.”
Abruptly, Caleb pushes himself upright on my bed and disentangles himself from the pillows. “Yup, that’s what I’m doing. Judging you. That’s what this is. Sure. You want to know what I think?”
He’s raised his voice now. If my family didn’t hear us hooking up before, they’re definitely hearing us fight now. Caleb looks like he’s about to cry, or yell, I’m not sure which. He pulls his jeans on and moves toward the door. “You make this huge thing about how you don’t know what your future holds, and it makes your life so hard.” He tugs his sweatshirt over his head. “So go get your stupid test results! You’ve been talking about ‘taking control’ for months now.” He does the air quotes around “taking control,” like it’s a joke to him. “But the information is there for you to take and you’re just waiting. So go do it. Otherwise you’re just floundering in the dark, all the time, and it clearly is not working for you. Or us.”
It’s the “us” that stings, even more than the implication that this is all just me being some silly, high-maintenance girl. This is exactly why I wasn’t supposed to have a boyfriend to begin with. Because I knew a boyfriend wouldn’t get it, that he’d think I was just being needy, and then someone would get hurt.
“And you know what really gets me?” he says, more quietly now, running a hand over his head and exhaling hard. “You’re always pulling away, and I’m all in. If that test comes back positive, I just want to be there for you. But you won’t let me.”
“Is that what you want, then? For me to find out I have it, so you can be the perfect hero boyfriend?”
I can’t get the words back. They land with what might as well be an audible thud on my bedroom floor.
“Okay,” he says, completely evenly. “I’m done.” He closes the door softly behind him as he leaves.
I want to stop him, but I don’t know how, so I don’t even try. I hear him on the stairs and then going out the front. He starts the car and idles in the driveway, maybe giving me a chance to come down and fix this, but I don’t move, and after a minute he drives away.
I sit on my bed in the same position for what feels like a year and a half, thinking that Caleb and I just fought about so many things at once that I can’t even remember what we were really fighting about. A soft knock interrupts the crazed thoughts that are hamster-wheeling around in my head. Gram pokes her head in.
“Well, that was bloody dramatic.”
“You heard us?” I ask.
“It’s a small house.” She doesn’t come in, just hovers there in the doorway. “You all right?”
I nod.
“Right then,” she says, ever matter-of-fact. She looks like she’s about to turn and close the door, but then she stops and gives me a hard stare for a minute, buying time.
“You know, every choice you make to share yourself, every time, it’s a risk. No matter what. People get sick, they get scared, they get stroppy…” She trails off and laughs, like a memory has just floated through her head. “My point is, you don’t know. There are no guarantees in this life, about anything. Full stop.”
It means “period”—full stop. It’s the British term, so much better than ours. Period makes you think of the obvious unpleasant things. And it doesn’t mean anything. Full stop says exactly what it means. This is the end of a thought. Full stop.
“Okay,” I say, not sure how else to respond.
“I have learned a thing or two over the years, you know. You’re not the only old soul around here.” She winks at me. “Goodnight, Rosie girl.”
When Gram leaves, shutting the door behind her, I dig a quarter out of my backpack. “That’s how you know how you really feel,” Mom used to say. I toss the coin into the air and let it fall to the floor. It spins on the hardwood for a few seconds before toppling over. Heads. I check for my automatic, natural response, and then I go to my desk and pull Roxanna’s business card from the mess of random papers in the top drawer. I know it’s too late to talk to a human being, but I dial the office number anyway and leave a message.
Twenty-nine
Three days. That’s how long it’s been since Caleb walked out of my room, and he hasn’t returned my calls or my texts since. The last time he went MIA, it was because his sister was in the hospital—and I realized how silly I’d been for thinking it was about us. This time, I know it’s about us. And it terrifies me to care as much as I do.
The McClaren House isn’t as bad as I’d imagined it—it smells like a hospital, like too much cleaning and not terribly good food, but it doesn’t look that much like one. Mom and Dad went to see a bunch of these places, but McClaren is the one she chose, so now she wants me to see it, too.
According to Dr. Howard, most Huntington’s patients stay at home until their behavioral symptoms become too much for their families to cope with. He says most families—most families, like this is a common problem, like there are a lot of families like ours—find it easier to deal with the deteriorating physical symptoms of the disease than the emotional ones. Apparently it’s easier to cope with your mom losing the ability to swallow than her ability to not lash out at the people she loves. I guess I
can understand that, based on the previews I’ve seen—the words “ungrateful bitch” come to mind. But I still feel like even being here for a visit is a betrayal. We said we’d take care of her at home. We promised.
Celeste is the family liaison assigned to show us around McClaren and answer our questions—to convince us, essentially, that McClaren is a halfway decent place for my mother to die. But even so, I like her right away. She’s not overly chipper and she doesn’t make it seem like this is going to be super fun for all of us. She’s basically like, well, this sucks for you. Let me try to make it the least sucky it can possibly be. Which I appreciate.
On the first floor, she shows us the main recreation room, which looks like a big living room filled with old people. Dr. Howard warned us that because McClaren doesn’t specialize in Huntington’s, most of the patients would be much older than Mom. It’s hard to imagine her sitting here with these people. These people are debilitated.
Nonetheless, the recreation room itself is pretty decent, bright and painted a cheerful yellow, instead of some awful industrial puke color. There’s a fireplace (probably just for show; I’m pretty sure it’s considered a best practice to keep people with advanced dementia away from open flames), and several bookcases, a few round wooden tables, and lots of comfortable-looking seating options. I note that any sharp edges have clear, padded covers over them. Subtle.
“And we have morning yoga classes,” Celeste is saying, “and art and music therapists. Weekly movie nights, and of course there’s a library with books and DVDs you can borrow anytime.”
It all looks and sounds like a souped-up bed and breakfast for sick people, which I suppose is more or less what it is. I tune Celeste out. There are patients—“residents,” as Celeste carefully refers to them—scattered around the common areas, playing games or sitting by themselves, looking out the windows or just staring off into space.
“Look, Rose, they have Sccccrabble,” Mom says, pointing to an old guy and a girl a couple years older than me—I can’t tell if she’s an aide or his granddaughter—who are playing at a nearby table. I inch a little closer, careful not to make it obvious that I’m watching them. When I’m close enough to see their Scrabble tiles splayed out on the table, I realize that the words the old guy is spelling out aren’t words at all; they’re just a jumble of letters. The girl doesn’t say anything, just lets him put down whatever nonsense he comes up with. I like to think I’ll have that kind of patience when Mom loses it completely, but the truth is I’m not sure. I’m not sure Mom would want me to let her come up with nonsense words, anyway.
Rules for 50/50 Chances Page 25