Rules for 50/50 Chances (23 page)

“Hey, HD?”

“Hey, Sickle Cell?”

“I could sit up here all night with you,” he says.

He must have been reading my mind. “I thought you said you were starving.”

“I am starving, that is true. But I'd never get bored. I could watch paint dry with you and I wouldn't get bored.”

“You could watch paint dry with me? That sounds delightful,” I say.

“I'm making a point here! Paint drying is about the most boring thing I can think of to watch, and I would enjoy doing it with you.”

I want to say something nice back to him—I really do. I want to tell him how I feel. My heart thuds so fast I figure he must be able to feel it thwacking against my chest. I'm pretty sure that heartbeat is the only sound, the only movement in the whole theater right now. But I can't make my mouth form the words.

Finally Caleb puts an arm around me and kisses the top of my head. I know he wants to make me think it's totally fine that I can't seem to express my feelings in the same way he can, but I feel him sigh in the dark. I wonder how long he'll wait.

Nineteen

In twenty-four hours, I'll be winding my way across the western half of the country, toward California.

My flight to Chicago is tomorrow at nine a.m. I land by early afternoon, and then I'll take the blue line to Clinton, and walk about three blocks, take a right, walk one block, and then I'll reach Union Station. Where I'll board the Zephyr.

I've laid out everything I might need across the bed—leotards, ballet slippers and pointe shoes, warm-up clothes, snacks for the fifty-two-plus-hour ride: trail mix, pistachios, almonds, peanuts.

(“What are you, nuts?” Dad said with a little chuckle, when he saw me pile all the snacks on the conveyor belt at Star Market over the weekend.)

Dad comes in with Mom's medium-size suitcase. My parents have matching luggage sets, which were apparently once pretty nice but are now frayed around the edges, patched in places, and showing the wear and tear of the decade of traveling my parents did together when they were young and had a life before me.

“Check out what I found in your mother's suitcase,” Dad says. He holds up a wrinkled postcard. “Prepare to be impressed with your father's romancing skills.”

The postcard is to Mom, from Dad, sent from Scotland, according to the postmark. I know Dad spent a semester at St. Andrews when he and Mom were undergraduates. He must've sent this then.

His handwriting hasn't changed much over the years, unlike Mom's, which has gone from tidy, almost clipped little letters to a sprawling, looping mess.

“Dear El,” my undergrad dad wrote, “Greetings from the Land o' Scots, once again! Where the weather is dreary, the people are beasts, and the golf courses are plentiful. I still couldn't hit a golf ball if my life depended on it, and you're still the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Don't abandon me for Steve Branahan. He's a jackass. I miss you, I love you. Yours.”

He sounds like himself, already. Like a just slightly less grown-up version of himself. And it makes me smile, because “jackass” is my favorite insult. I didn't realize I got it from Dad.

“Who's Steve Branahan?”

“Your mother's other suitor. He tried to make a play for her while I was studying abroad, but he had nothin' on me.”

I hear muffled voices and laughter coming up the stairs, and Caleb appears in the doorway. “I've come to say farewell before the epic journey.”

“Well, on that note, I'll leave you kids alone,” Dad says.

Caleb flops down on my bed as Dad slips out the door. “So. Here's the thing. I don't trust that you're going to come back. I think you might just jump off in Utah and set up shop.”

“Would I have to convert to Mormonism?” I ask.

“Nah,” says Caleb. “You could just hang with them. I think Mormons and Jews get along.”

“I'm only a half Jew.”

“I'm sure Mormons and half Jews get along, too.” He gestures at the postcard, which I'm still clutching. “What's that?”

I hand it to him and let him read it for himself. His eyes get wide and his mouth spreads into a sly smile.

“All right, Dave,” he says, grinning enthusiastically. “Way to play it with the ladies.”

“Really, that's uncalled for,” I say, grabbing the postcard back.

“I didn't know your folks were college sweethearts.”

“Well, they were. I mean, I knew they were together back then, but I didn't realize they were that serious. Jeez.”

“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 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 goes on waxing poetic. “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, and then changes the subject. “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.

“Voil
à
,” 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 s-s-snack,” 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 a-a-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.”

“W-w-where are you g-g-going?” she asks, spinning her chair around to face me. “Where” sounds like it has twice as many syllables as it should. 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 University of the Visual and Performing Arts. Remember?”

She nods slowly, which is more like an exaggerated version of what her head does on its own these days. “O-b-b-b-viously. I knew that.”

“I'm taking the train. The Zephyr, from Chicago.”

She blinks several times, hard, staring at me. “The Z-z-zephyr,” 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 t-t-tell you to t-t-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
t-t-train.”

Last night, she was 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. T-t-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.