Rules for 50/50 Chances (31 page)

I indulge Lena's curiosity. “Can we talk about condoms and how they're more complicated than advertised?”

“We
could
talk about that,” Lena says, “but it would be the most boring conversation on the topic of sex that we could possibly have.”

“At least it would be an honest one. More complicated than advertised, you heard it here first.”

“Thank you for that public service announcement,” she says, smirking at me. “So have you guys said the L-word yet?”

“As in, lesbian? Literal? Lugubrious?

“I don't even know what that means. You know the L-word to which I am referring.”

Obviously. Her powers of intuition are eerily good sometimes.

“Not yet,” I say, wanting to avoid the conversation in which I tell Lena that Caleb said it and I haven't said it back, and that that's what he's really upset about. It has to be possible to let yourself care about a person, and want to be with that person, and still not feel ready to tell that person that you love them. Right? Because love is, like, a big deal. Love is like—you're my person, and I'm your person—and that means you need to be ready to be anyone's person other than your own. And you have to trust that, you know, neither of you is going to regret it. That it's not going to blow up in your face.

 

 

After Lena goes home, I stretch on the floor of my bedroom and stare at my phone, willing Caleb to call. Or text. Or something. He doesn't. Finally I give in and dial his number.

“Hi, you,” he answers.

“Hey.”

“What's up?”

“I'm sorry about before,” I blurt out. I'm not even sure what exactly I'm apologizing for.

“Don't be sorry.” Calmness settles back over my body. “Look, I'm just nervous about RISD.” He sighs.

“You're getting into RISD.”

“Your vote of confidence is appreciated, but considering that you can't tell a Rothko from one of my sisters' finger paintings, I'm not sure you're the most reliable judge.”

“Point taken.”

“Anyway, we'll see. I guess I just keep thinking, if I can't even get into art school, I have no business hoping for an actual
career
as an artist. Who am I kidding? But I can't imagine myself doing anything else. I mean, would you want me as your doctor? Or your dentist?”

“You do have steady hands,” I offer.

“Chuckle, chuckle,” he says, wryly. “But you know what I mean, right? I have to paint. There's nothing else. You get that.”

“Yeah.” I used to. I'm not so sure anymore. But I keep that thought to myself, because I know Caleb doesn't want to hear it, and let the silence hang between us for a minute. “All right,” I say finally. “I should go. I didn't get any homework done this afternoon.”

I hang up and look back at my missed-call log. There it is, staring me in the face, just like it has been all afternoon. Unknown. I click on the voice mail and bring the phone to my ear.

“Hi Rose, this is Roxanna. Give me a call when you get a chance and we can set up a time to have coffee.” Then she repeats her number, twice.

At first, I struggle to wrap my head around why Roxanna would think I would want to have coffee with her—isn't that a violation of some professional code of conduct? But then I remember that she warned me that she'd leave an “ambiguous” message if she reached my voice mail. It's protocol, apparently, not to identify the genetic counseling clinic in a voice mail so that the patients' privacy is protected. I told her it was my cell number, that no one would listen to it but me, but she said it was
protocol
. I can tell Roxanna is the kind of person who takes protocols very seriously. Maybe that's a prerequisite for her job.

I start to hit Roxanna's number to call her back, but then I stop myself. I'll do it later.

 

 

There's a soft knock on my door maybe an hour later, when I've finally forced myself to turn my attention to the introduction for my English paper. As usual, Dad pokes his head in without waiting for a response. He doesn't ever seem to worry that I might be buck naked, or making out with my boyfriend, or doing any number of other things he definitely doesn't want to see his daughter doing.

“Dinner's ready, Ro,” he says. He seems a little off—worried, or tired or something. Like he has been a lot lately, I guess. Only more so.

“I'll be right down. Everything okay?”

“Fine, fine. Just come on down.” He disappears and pulls the door shut behind him. I save my English essay and close my laptop, shooting a quick IM to Lena first: “Dinner. Dad's acting weird.”

“Weird like Chico Lederkranz?” she replies, referring to a card she gave me years ago for my birthday with a ridiculous poem about some weird guy named Chico Lederkranz. It had a cartoon picture of a skinny old man making a stupid face, and it became one of those jokes between us—“you're weird like Chico Lederkranz”—mostly because it meant nothing at all. No one else thinks it's funny, but it cracks us up every time.

Downstairs, my parents and Gram are already sitting around the table, passing slices of pizza around. As usual, “dinner's ready” really means “dinner has been removed from its takeout vessels.”

I slip into my seat and Dad passes me a slice of mushroom and peppers without asking or even making eye contact. He looks watery, like he's been teary-eyed recently, and I glance from him to Mom to Gram to see if I can gauge what's actually going on here. Everybody just looks strange. Uncomfortable or something. Worried.

I take two bites of pizza, chew, swallow, drink some water, and look around again. No one says anything.

“Okay. What's up? Why are you being weird?” Chico Lederkranz flashes through my mind again, but now I know whatever this is, it isn't going to be funny.

Dad looks hard at Mom, who is shakily sipping water through a straw. “El, I think you should tell her.”

“Tell me what?” My heart's pounding now, making that kind of fuzzy white noise in my ears. “What is going on?”

“S-s-sweetheart. I've made a d-d-decision. I'm g-g-g-going to make a-a-arrange-m-m-ments. For l-l-long-term c-c-care.”

My mind goes blank for a split second, like a TV at the moment the picture disappears. I've been turned off.

“Wait—what does that even mean?” I look from her to Dad. Mom gestures awkwardly at him, telling him to explain further in words that form more easily than hers do.

“It just means she's chosen a facility that she likes. And we're going to make the arrangements. Now. No one's moving anywhere just yet,” Dad says. “Just yet,” he says—but what I hear is that Dad's promise to keep Mom at home, the one we've both now made to her—was a lie.

“Okay, but when? When will you move?”

“We'll just wait and see how things progress—” Dad says, but Mom cuts him off.

“When I s-s-say so.”

I stare at her. She's coherent. She doesn't need a feeding tube. She doesn't need round-the-clock care. Sure, she's been getting worse—she needs her wheelchair now more often than not, she can't bathe herself safely, and the chorea is more pronounced than it was a year ago. And yeah, I suppose those outbursts, the moments when she loses control, lashes out at one of us, are more frequent than they used to be. But she's not a danger to herself. She's not a danger to us. It made me angry when the woman on the Downeaster spouted that bullshit. It makes me furious that my own parents are now, apparently, doing the same thing.

“It's absurd,” I say. “You can't. You're not dying.”

“Rose, this is your mom's decision,” Dad says. He hasn't touched his pizza. I can see the cheese congealing on his plate, getting that cold, dull look.

“No it isn't. This is a family! That's a family decision. She doesn't just get to decide to leave us!”

Gram reaches across the table to touch my arm, but I pull away. “She's not leaving us, Ro. Even when she does move, you'll still see her whenever you want.”

“That's BS, Gram, and you know it.”

Mom raises one arm awkwardly in the air and slams her hand down on the table, shutting us all up. My glass rattles.

“H-h-hey!” Mom says. “Hey.”

I meet her eyes with mine and force myself to hold them there.

“I want to d-d-do this, f-f-for you. I w-w-want you to g-g-go to c-c-college and not worry about m-m-me.”

Mom tugs her napkin from her shirt collar, where it's tucked like a bib on a two-year-old, and turns her wheelchair away from the table. In the threshold between the dining room and the living room, she turns her chair back around to face us again.

“I'm s-s-still your
mother
.
I
get to d-d-decide what's best f-f-for you, one l-l-last t-t-time.” Then she buzzes out of the dining room. I hear her shift herself into the stair lift. Gram, Dad and I sit in silence until we hear the bedroom door click quietly closed upstairs.

“Don't be selfish about this, Rose. She really does think this is the best thing for you,” Dad says after a moment.

“
I'm
being selfish? You're the one who just let her spring this on me.”

“Babe, this is for the future. She's not going anywhere yet. It could be months, hell, it could be years before she actually makes the move.”

“That's not what it sounds like to me. It sounds like she's decided on a place, and that's it. How am I supposed to react to this?”

“You're supposed to say, ‘I love you and support whatever decision you make for how you wish to live the remainder of your life.' She wants to be in control of this. You and I might not understand that or like it but we have to respect it.”

Like Mom, I push my chair back from the table and leave them sitting there. Maybe I am being selfish, if that's what you call this, this not wanting my mother to give up on her life before it's really over—this. If that's selfish, then I guess I am.

Twenty-eight

Petrilli gives us a unit test on the Wednesday afternoon that I'm supposed to hear back from UVPA. Coupled with Mom's announcement, this is a less than ideal combination of events in terms of my ability to focus on calculus (or anything, really). As we wait for our classmates to get settled, Lena glances at my knee, which is bouncing rather conspicuously up and down under my desk.

“What is your problem, dude?”

“It's the thirtieth,
dude
.”

Lena looks at me, clueless. She got her acceptance to NYU last week, like I knew she would. Caleb got into RISD. And I got into Cunningham, with a nice financial aid package, too, which felt like more of relief than I expected it to. Still, UVPA is UVPA. It's everything I should want.

“UVPA decisions are out today,” I whisper loudly.

“Oh shit!” Lena practically yells.

Petrilli looks up. “Come on, Lena. Seriously?” That's the kind of teacher Mr. P. is. No detention for swearing, not even a “that kind of language isn't tolerated in my classroom”—just a deadpanned, “Seriously?” That's why we love the guy.

“Sorry, Mr. P.” She turns back to me, whispering again. “Shit, I forgot. You're so getting in.”

“All right,” Petrilli says, clearing his throat. “Got a quiz today, no open book, no open notes.” He passes a stack of scribbled papers—Petrilli always handwrites his tests—to the kid in the front row with unfortunate white-boy dreadlocks whose name I always forget. “Good luck and thanks for playin'.”

 

 

Finally, after slogging through Petrilli's test and the rest of the afternoon, the blaring fire alarm masquerading as our bell system announces that it's two thirty. My stomach rolls over itself a few times as I make my way to the public library. It's a slightly more anonymous locale than the computer lab or the school library, better for checking the admissions decision, no matter what the outcome is. Earlier I was feeling grateful that Lena had volleyball practice and couldn't come with me—I have a direct order to send her a text message once I find out the verdict—but now I sort of wish she were here. Or Caleb, obviously.

I check my phone. Caleb sent me a text about thirty minutes ago: “Fingers crossed. Let me know ASAP.”

The thing is, I don't know what my own fingers are crossed for. I've thought this thing through and through, and I still don't know what I want the decision to be. I guess I'll just be relieved to know one way or the other.

I sign up quickly for an Internet station and log in. My fingers are barely functioning properly as I open my e-mail. Sure enough, there's a message there saying that the decisions are now available online, with a link to my personal outcomes page.

What if they mess up the links and you get a URL to someone else's decision? Like that woman whose book got nominated for some huge prize and then they realized, oops, we confused your book with some other/better book with a similar title. Too bad for you.

I click the link. The library computer is a little slow, and it takes about five seconds longer than I think I can stand to open the page.

“Rose Alexander Levenson,” it reads at the top—good, they haven't messed me up with someone else, I guess—“Congratulations! You have been admitted to the University of the Visual and Performing Arts Dual BFA/Ballet of the Pacific Coast Apprenticeship Program!”

Admitted. In. I'm in. I feel a kind of numbness all through my extremities. A split second of joy and relief washes over me and then passes, replaced with a fresh wave of nerves: what about the money? The scholarship information isn't there on the same page, but scanning the letter I find another link down at the bottom:
For more information about your scholarship and financial aid decisions, please click here.

My phone vibrates loudly against the wooden desk. Caleb. “Don't leave a sickle cell hanging.” I click the link to the scholarship page and find what looks like a generic financial aid profile with all the possible funding sources listed, alongside the amounts I've been offered—most of which are zero, because they're scholarships I didn't qualify for, like one for minority students from California and several other in-state-only things. I see that I haven't been offered any need-based aid, which hardly seems fair, considering that Mom can't work and her medical expenses are pretty ridiculous.