Rules for 50/50 Chances (30 page)

“I'll call you later, friend.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Love you, friend.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she repeats, lying back on the grass again and crossing her arms over her chest.

I grab my bag and hustle across the field toward the street, completely certain that I'm doing the right thing. If I can't tell Caleb how I feel, I can show him.

I wait until I'm already on the Red Line before I text him back.

“On my way.”

 

 

It's my second hospital visit in as many days, and the two places couldn't be more different, as far as hospitals go. The lobby of Children's is almost convincingly disguised as someplace fun. The walls are splashed with bright colors and jungle animals, and there's a huge kinetic sculpture that looks like it belongs in a science museum. I duck into the gift shop, thinking I'll buy something for the girls, and quickly realize that I might as well be shopping at FAO Schwarz. I hunt around the section near the checkout counter, where there are tall plastic bins of small items—Super Balls, figurines, magic wands. There a lot of kids in this place who could use those wands. But Ella and Nina seem too old for magic—or at least too world-weary for it—so I pick glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty instead, in purple and green.

The hallways are as colorful as the lobby, with bright symbols painted along the walls and on the overhanging signs—a purple moon, a green boat, a blue fish—to help guests navigate the abyss of the hospital complex. Caleb told me to follow the fish, so I do, finding my way up to hematology.

I loop around the floor, trying not to stare too hard into the patient rooms. The place is at once buzzing with a kind of sugarcoated cheerfulness, the nurses bubbly in their purple scrubs and roller-skate sneakers, and also oppressive. It's hard to believe there are enough sick children in the whole world to fill this space, and this is just one wing of one floor.

I can hear Caleb's family before I see them—Ella's room has to be the one with raucous laughter coming from it. Sure enough, when I poke my head around the door, I see the whole slew of them—Valerie and Charles, Ella propped up in the bed and Nina lying next to her on top of the covers, Caleb, and a purple-clad nurse, all cracking up over something. Even here, the Franklins manage to make it look like they're having fun.

Valerie spots me first. “Hello, gorgeous,” she says, waving me into the room. “You're so good to come by.”

“Hey, ladies.” I give the girls each a high-five. “How you feeling?” I ask Ella. She shrugs. Ella's completely dwarfed by the hospital bed—you'd think they'd have littler beds here—but otherwise she looks more or less the same as usual.

Caleb tugs me away and gives me a quick kiss, sending his sisters into a fit of giggles.

“All right, all right. Nothing to see here,” he says, slipping his hand into mine and pulling into the hallway. Away from the prying eyes of his family, he gives me a longer, better kiss. It feels different than our old kisses, somehow. “Thanks for coming.”

“Obviously,” I say. “No thanks required.” I dig in my pocket for the Silly Putty. “I come bearing gifts.”

“Silly Putty, my favorite! You shouldn't have.” He snatches the green plastic egg from my hands and tosses it once in the air.

“Oh, was I supposed to get you one of your own? I didn't realize,” I say, grabbing it back. “How's Ella doing?”

Caleb bites his lip. “She's all right. They're strong kids.”

“I guess they must be kind of used to this, huh?”

His demeanor shifts, subtly but unmistakably. “Does your mom get used to losing her motor control?”

“Um,
no
.”

“Okay. Well, my sisters don't get used to being in chronic pain either. It's not really the kind of thing you get used to, you know.” He turns away from me and chuckles to himself, like he can't believe my idiocy.

“I wasn't downplaying it, Caleb. I just meant…”

“Forget it. Sorry. I didn't get enough sleep last night.” He shakes his hands and face like he's trying to release the tension of the day, but I can tell he's still annoyed. “Anyway. Are you as good at Monopoly as you are at Scrabble?”

“Um, there's not really skill involved in Monopoly, per se. It's a very different ballgame.”

“
There's not really skill involved?
Oh man. Clearly, you have never played with the Franklins before.”

 

 

The six of us play Monopoly for over an hour with the board spread out at the foot of Ella's enormous bed, and Caleb's right—apparently there is skill involved, and it has nothing to do with the skills involved in Scrabble. When I've been wiped clean of cash by a mean hotel-packed stretch owned entirely by Nina, I offer to go down to the cafeteria and retrieve some snacks. As I leave the room, I glance back over my shoulder at them, gathered there around the bed. They're the perfect family, never mind what their genes say.

I return twenty minutes later, carrying as many Sun Chips, chocolate chip cookies, green apples and bottles of water as I can hold, to a very different scene.

Ella is on her back, writhing on the flattened bed and crying in pain while a nurse fills one of her intravenous lines with something that I can only assume is killer pain medicine. On one side of the bed, Valerie grips Ella's shoulder with one hand and strokes her hair with the other, whispering something in her ear that I can't hear. Charles holds her legs against the bed, massaging them. Across the room, Caleb is holding Nina, who has buried her head in his shoulder. Monopoly pieces are scattered across the floor. I step on a purple fifty-dollar bill as another nurse pushes past me into the room.

I meet Caleb's eyes and then retreat out the door and into the hallway. He follows me, still carrying Nina.

“Hey,” he says to both of us. “What do you say we check out the playroom down the hall? Sound good?”

Nina nods, wiping her snot on Caleb's sweater. “Um, thanks for that,” he adds.

“What happened?” I ask in a low voice, once we're settled in the otherwise empty playroom and Nina is investigating the collection of DVDs.

He shakes his head. “Pain flare-up. They needed to adjust her meds.”

“So what'd they give her?”

“What don't they give her?” he says. “They have to get this under control before they send her home, obviously.” His eyes follow Nina, on the other side of the playroom. She looks like she's missing something without her twin next to her. “Ella's worse than Nina. They're looking at a stem cell transplant for her.”

“A stem cell transplant? Seriously?” I had no idea that was a possible treatment for sickle cell.

“Yes, Rose. Sickle cell isn't a freakin' day at the beach, you know.” Like before, his tone turns suddenly harsh.

“I didn't say it was. I just didn't know, Caleb. I didn't know you could do that for sickle cell.”

“Well, yeah. There's a lot you don't know about sickle cell.” He's right, but it still cuts. I know Caleb's stressed, and tired—I get it—but I don't like it that he's taking it out on me, especially today, after everything.

“So tell me. Who would donate?”

His face relaxes a bit. “Siblings are ideal donors, but of course Nina's affected too, so that's out. I might, if they decide to go that route, or it's possible they'll be able to use her own stem cells.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know.” I had no idea.

“He takes my hand in his and squeezes it. Then he squeezes harder and harder until I let out a yelp.

“Ow! Excuse me. What was that for?”

“It was a love squeeze.”

A love squeeze. I wonder if it's deliberate, his use of the word—a reminder for me that I still owe him something. I squeeze his hand back, but I don't say anything, and I see the disappointment flicker across his face.

Nina trots over to us with a DVD of the
Annie
remake.

“You have that at home,” Caleb says.

“But we're here right now and I don't have it with me.”

Caleb turns to me. “I don't know why I bother arguing with her.”

“Neither do I,” I agree.

“Neither do
I
,” Nina says. “Put the DVD in, please.”

Nina and I get comfortable on the undoubtedly germ-infested sofa while Caleb turns the television on and gets the movie set up. When he sits down next to me, Nina crawls over me to squeeze between the two of us. Caleb sneaks his arm behind her and finds my hand on the couch. His fingers intertwined through mine feel normal and solid. But something has shifted between us, and I'm not sure when or how I'll get it back.

Twenty-seven

“If I don't get in to NYU, I'm going to take a year off and try again,” Lena says, flipping through a
National Geographic
on my bed without paying attention to the words on any of the pages. She and Caleb came over to “do homework,” but it turns out that it's true: seniors in high school don't feel much like doing homework by the time spring rolls around.

“You are so not going to do that,” I say. “What would you do all year?”

She looks up from the magazine and wrinkles her forehead. “Get an internship at some design agency. Work night shifts at the Town Diner? I don't know—something like that. I'm desperate. Seriously.”

Lena fell into a deep and irrepressible love affair with NYU when she went to visit last year. She said it spoke to her “major metropolitan soul.” It's true that Cambridge, even all of Boston, has always seemed too small to hold Lena.

“What about you?” Lena asks, chucking a balled-up pair of socks from my pile of freshly folded laundry at Caleb's head. “Any word from RISD yet?” Most of the admissions announcements are due in two days, but there were rumors at school that some of them were coming out early.

Caleb catches the socks. “Nothing yet. My parents are about to burst an aneurism.”

I shoot him a look. He knows I hate expressions like that. They're just begging the universe to screw with you.

My phone buzzes against the desk. Unknown. I let it go to voice mail.

“Well, UVPA won't tell me until the end of the month,” I say. “So you can all go off partying together while I'm still at home obsessing.”

Caleb mutters something to himself.

“What?” I say.

He throws the balled socks up toward the ceiling and catches them, twice. “Nothing, Rose. Nada.” Then he tosses the socks back into the laundry basket and goes back to the tattered copy of
Moby-Dick
he's been working his way through at the rate of approximately one-half page per hour.

“What?” I repeat. I don't even know why I'm pushing. Lena's face tells me to stop, and I want to, but I cannot do it. It's been a week since Ella came home from the hospital. Caleb and I have hung out like we normally would, but nothing has been quite normal since.

“Yes, you're going to be at home obsessing,” he says. “Your favorite pastime.”

“Excuse me. I only obsess over things that are worth obsessing over.”

He laughs. “Rose, if you were a country, obsessing would be the national sport. Overthinking is to Rose as baseball is to America.”

“You don't get it,” I say.

Lena shifts her weight on my bed and pulls her cell phone out of her pocket. She focuses closely on what I strongly suspect is a fake text message.

“
I
don't get it?” Caleb asks. “I think you're the one who doesn't get it.”

“That's not fair.” I stare at him, hard, challenging him to push me further, but he doesn't.

“I gotta go,” he says finally. “Lena, you need a ride?”

She shakes her head. “Thanks, though.”

Caleb gives me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, but I don't turn my face to him to offer him anything more. “Later,” he says.

When we hear the front door squeak closed, Lena tosses her phone aside. “Well,
that
wasn't at all awkward for me. What's got his shorts in a knot?”

I'm afraid if I speak the hotness in my cheeks and the back of my throat will turn into a total meltdown. It wasn't a fight, not really. But I know what Caleb's really upset about, and it certainly isn't whether or not I'm going to go to UVPA.

“He's just … I don't know,” I say, swallowing back the lump in my throat. “He doesn't like that I'm not as sure about everything in my life as he is about everything in his. He thinks I'm exhausting.”

Lena considers this for a moment, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “You're not exhausting, friend. But…”

“But, what?” I ask, when she doesn't finish her sentence.

“Well. You know, it's just that … you're not the only person who has hard choices to make. Maybe Caleb feels like you don't really acknowledge that enough.”

We sit in silence for a minute. Finally, Lena reaches out and touches my arm. “I'm not saying that to be a bitch. You know I love you. I'm just being honest.”

“I know.” I don't know what else to say to her. Sometimes, she's the only person who can get away with speaking the truth to me. I hate her and love her for it.

“Can we talk about something else?” I say, climbing up onto the bed next to Lena, our backs leaning against my pillows.

“Please. Let's. How about, how's the s-e-x part going?” she asks.

Caleb and I have had sex exactly three more times. No one has bothered to tell me to leave the door open when he's here, or any of the other conventional things adults say to children to keep them from having sex. I'm not sure if that's because the adults in my family are smart enough to realize that saying those conventional things doesn't make any difference, or if they're just too distracted to notice, or if they notice but figure they have bigger problems to deal with than my burgeoning promiscuity.