Rules for 50/50 Chances (28 page)

“There's like three hundred and forty more to go. We can skip to the highlights if you want.”

“No.”

So we paw through picture after picture, even the ones that mostly look the same. I try to make up interesting details to help the narration. “When I took this one, I was talking to the French couple,” or “This is when I was eating lunch—the veggie burger was shockingly good!”

It feels good, hanging out with Mom—sometimes, she still seems like the parent in the equation, and it's like a balm on everything else going through my brain right now. Once we've finished going through the pictures, I turn on the TV and find us some
House Hunters International
. In the current episode, a young, hip American woman has moved to Paris to be with her French boyfriend, and now they're looking for an apartment in the eleventh
arrondissement
, which apparently used to be run-down and precisely for that reason is now the place where all the young, hip people want to move.

It seems like Mom's body is more committed to a project of constant motion than it was less than a week ago. Or maybe a few days away just makes it that much more obvious to me. The skin on the pads of her thumb and forefinger is raw from the way she constantly rubs them over each other. Her limbs, her head, everything looks like it's on vibrate all the time, with the mild vibrations punctuated by more violent movements. I know this is the chorea advancing—Dr. Howard has been honest with us about how this would happen—but it doesn't look anything like a dance. That part was a lie.

Grunting at the television, Mom shakes her head with great effort (the irony being, of course, that her head shakes on its own with no effort at all when she doesn't want it to). “It's always the s-s-s-same,” she says. “Some g-g-g-girl g-g-gives up her life … for a m-m-m-man.”

It's a fair point, really. By now we've seen countless episodes of this show that involve American women moving overseas to be with their foreign boyfriends/husbands. And somehow the boyfriends/husbands always seem to get what they want in a house, while the women are inevitably like, “Oh, I'd really like to be near the city because this is my first time living abroad, but okay, Francois / Alejandro / Baz, you're probably right that we'll get more for our money in this rundown suburb where you can easily commute to work in your Smart car / motorbike / Segway and I'll be stuck forty minutes by public transport from the city center.” You can sort of see the unraveling of their relationships before it even happens.

Sure enough, the second house the realtor shows this particular young woman and her particular French boyfriend is a bigger, cheaper place in the suburbs, and I don't have to watch the next twenty minutes to know how it's going to end.

“Rose. Listen,” Mom says over a commercial. “D-d-don't ever g-g-give up your life for a m-m-man.”

“Okay, Mom.” If only she knew what just happened with Caleb. Throwing myself too far, too fast into a relationship probably needn't be at the top of her list of worries for me.

“Or for m-m-me,” she goes on. “I d-d-don't want you to p-p-put your life on h-h-h-hold, for me.”

I put my hands over hers on the couch. They stop moving, fluttering gently to a halt like a butterfly you've cupped in your hands. “I won't, Mom. Really.”

She doesn't say anything else, and we turn back to the show.

“Ma,” I say when the episode ends (spoiler alert: they take the place in the 'burbs), “you know we'll take care of you at home, right? No matter what?” Dr. Howard has warned us that this is almost impossible, but I'm sure Dad has said it to her a thousand times anyway. I don't know if I ever have.

“Babe,” she says, her head quivering continuously, “one d-d-day soon, I won't even … be myself.”

My face gets hot and a lump forms in the back of my throat, solid and painful. I don't say anything. I can't.

Mom shakes her head determinedly, forcing it to move the way she wants it to for once, instead of its own way. “I want you to live b-b-better.”

With that, she takes my hand and pushes herself up off the couch with a grunt. I help her into her chair, and she buzzes off toward the kitchen, leaving me alone in the living room with her cryptic message and an ensuing marathon of
Love It or List It
.

Twenty-five

On Monday morning, when I'd like to be catching up on my sleep—school's out for some kind of professional development day—Dad bangs loudly on my door. “Rose, I need a favor!” he says, busting straight in, per usual.

“What the—Dad, what?” I come to, trying to orient myself to the day and time. I've been home from San Francisco for two days, and my body is basically clueless as to the time zone. When I find my cell phone, I see that it's barely eight o'clock.

“Sorry to wake you. I'm late for work. Gram has a headache and wants to stay in bed and your mother has an appointment for physio at ten. I need you to take her. Sorry, babe.”

I groan and force my eyes all the way open. “Okay. Fine.”

“You're the best, love you, ten o'clock, don't forget, bye!” He closes the door behind him.

An hour and ten minutes later, I've got Mom situated in the car, her wheelchair folded up in the back, and we're headed to Mass General, to her physical therapist's office.

“Thanks for t-t-taking me. It's your d-d-day off.” She must've told herself that ten times before she got in the car, so she'd remember to mention it. I know that's what she does now, studies the things she wants to talk about ahead of time, memorizes them like every conversation is a quiz. Soon even that won't help.

“It's okay. I don't have any plans today.” That's not totally true—I was hoping to see Caleb, but we haven't talked since the other night. I'm not sure he wants to see me.

“G-g-good. I don't want to be a b-b-b-bother.”

“Okay, Mom. You're not.” I don't know why it exasperates me when she says stuff like that. I know she's being genuine, but for some reason it irks me. I don't like the idea of her being some saintly sick person. It doesn't feel like Mom, the saintly or the sick.

“What do you do in physio, anyway?” I ask her, to head off any more maudlin comments.

“B-b-bullshit. Pick things up. P-p-p-put them down.”

I laugh and she joins me. Even though her speech is slurred now, her laugh hasn't changed that much.

“Hey!” She jabs my right arm. “Let's p-p-p-play hooky.”

“From physio? No way. Dad'll kill me.”

“Come on! D-d-don't be a spoilsport.”

I know that Dad
will
kill me. But I also know that it won't kill Mom to miss a physio appointment. One might ask what is the point of them, period. They're not actually making her better. I suppose they make Dad feel like we're doing something other than watching her deteriorate.

“Where would we go instead?”

Mom doesn't say anything for a minute. She looks like she's concentrating really hard.

“The theater?” she says finally. “The b-b-b-ballet?”

I shake my head. “It's Monday. No shows. Anyway no matinees, for sure.”

“Oh r-r-right.” She pauses again. I'm mulling it over too. Where could Mom and I go, where we could have fun? Fun like we used to have. Not shopping—I can't remember ever enjoying shopping with Mom. Something special and unusual that only she and I would want to do together. Then I remember the signs they've got plastered all over the subway stations.

“Hey, Mom—we could take the train to Maine.”

That's what the signs say—“Take the Train to Maine.” They're ads for the Downeaster, Amtrak's service from Boston to Brunswick. There's a picture of a train skimming a coastline, a couple seagulls, a lighthouse in the distance.

Mom grins at me, and in that moment, smiling at me across the car, her eyes asking for trouble, she doesn't even look sick.

Which is how we find ourselves at North Station twenty minutes later, stashing the car in an overpriced, all-day parking lot and buying two round-trip tickets on the next train to Portland, which departs at eleven thirty-five.

The Amtrak agent situates us at one end of the car, where there's extra space to accommodate Mom's chair. But she doesn't actually want to sit in the wheelchair—“l-l-looking like a damn invalid”—so after the agent secures the chair to the wall and disappears with a sympathetic, uncomfortable smile, she gets out and crosses to the empty blue seat beside me.

“Should we tell Dad now, or later?” I ask as the train pulls slowly out of the station. No turning back now—we're on our way.

Mom laughs. “Later. D-d-d-definitely. Later.”

 

 

The Downeaster travels north out of Boston, through the ugly backsides of industrial Massachusetts mill towns. The non-pine trees—the deciduous ones, I think, the word coming back to me from eighth grade—are bare still except for a few early buds. Thirty minutes or so goes by with not much to see. I was expecting the train to run along the coast all the way, but we're going through the woods most of the time. Every now and then there's a break in the trees as we pass through a little trailer park.

I glance over at Mom. Her eyes are closed, but I can tell she's not sleeping. She has a little smile on her face, uneven because her muscle control is better on the right than the left.

“What are you smiling about?” I ask. She opens her eyes.

“Foamers.”

“Huh?”

“Foamers. I r-r-remembered. That's what they c-c-call them.”

“Who calls who? What are you talking about?” I wonder for a moment if she's confused, thinking of something else, or if maybe I actually did wake her from a dream and she's not sure where she is.

“R-r-r-rail folk. Foamers. Train fans who f-f-foam.” She gestures to her mouth.

“Like foam at the mouth?”

Mom nods.

“That's what they're called? That's gross.”

She smiles and puts a hand over mine, gripping it as forcefully as I think she's capable of.

“Well, I don't get where the water is. I thought this was supposed to be a coastal ride. Scenic,” I say.

Mom points awkwardly out the window, toward a rusty smoke stack. “That's scenic.”

“Yeah. Lovely, Mom.”

“Child.”
She always used to call me “child,” just like she used to call Dad “husband.” She hasn't done either in a while. “Trains are about s-s-seeing things d-d-d-differently. It's not all p-p-p-pretty.”

“I know, I know. It's about the journey.” I roll my eyes—she's like a broken record, figuratively and kind of literally now, too, her brain stuck on the same things. But then I think of those empty crossroads in the middle of Colorado, with their worn-out motels with half-lit cable TV signs and dust rolling by in the shadow of the mountains, and all the people between here and there and the other side. And I know she's right.

Mom smiles. “See? You l-l-l-earned some-th-th-thing from your old m-m-mother.”

We sit in silence for a while, watching the North Shore become southern New Hampshire. More pines, more unpleasant scenery. This isn't the Zephyr, that's for sure. But it is a train, and Mom's on it, and I feel like we've done well.

Outside Durham, I lean into Mom's shoulder, like I used to when I was little. I can't distinguish between the movement of the train and the movement of Huntington's rippling through her.

“Hey, Mom? Can I tell you something?”

“You c-c-can tell me anything,” she says.

“I did something without telling you and Dad.” It's like Russian roulette, telling my mother this. If she remembers, she'll tell Dad. If she doesn't, she won't. Who knows which way the day will go.

“Mmm-hmm,” she says.

“I took the test for the Huntington's gene.”

She twists her body as much as she can to look at me. “Why d-d-didn't you tell me?”

“Dad and I had a fight about it, a while ago. I didn't want to repeat that, with him or you. So I just did it. I wanted to know my status before I make any decisions about next year. About school, and dance. And just in general, for my life. I wanted to know.”

“You c-c-could have told m-m-me. You think I'm n-n-not still your m-m-m-mother?”

She's still my mother, but not in the talk-through-your-problems, make-you-feel-better kind of way. Not in the protect-you-from-the-ills-of-the-world kind of way. I think I've learned pretty well that no one, not even my mother, has that power.

“I'm telling you now. Will you not tell Dad? Please? I just want to tell him myself.”

She stares at me, kind of sad, searching. She must take this personally—how can she not? I'm basically saying, I want to know if I'm going to end up like you before I decide how to live my life. In not so many words.

But then she doesn't say anything else, and after a few minutes I hear a halting snore come from her, and I see that she's fallen asleep. I stare out the window at the depressing views, waiting for the water to show up. Finally, when we're practically to Portland—Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where we used to come in the summers to play miniature golf—I catch a glimpse of the ocean through the pastel motels, not yet open for the season.

“Mom, look,” I say, nudging her gently. “Finally, some ocean!”

I can see the kitschy boardwalk, too, where I used to beg my parents to let me play arcade games and eat cotton candy. Mom and I would do skeeball tournaments until I'd have enough of those little tickets to turn in for some stuffed animal that crinkled when you hugged it, like it was filled with newspaper. And there was the Ferris wheel, which rose up so high that all you could see around you was water and sky.

“Mom, you're missing the view.” I nudge her again. Then I feel her jerk awake, next to me.