Rules for 50/50 Chances (33 page)

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 grabs his sweatshirt 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.

“L-l-look, Rose, they have Sc-c-c-crabble,” 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.

Celeste takes us to a model bedroom. They call it a “studio apartment,” but that's a joke because it doesn't have a kitchen or a living room or a dining room. It's a room with a bed at one end and a couch and two armchairs at the other end. There's a matching wardrobe and bureau, from IKEA I think, and a flat-screen television (with cable, Celeste notes) mounted to the wall.

“Most of our residents make their apartments very homey. Lots of artwork on the walls, family pictures. You can bring a quilt from home if you'd like,” Celeste says, smiling gently at Mom. “We encourage you to do whatever you want to make this place feel as much as like your own as possible. We know it's only the second best thing,” she adds, glancing at me, “but we hope it can be a close second.”

“N-n-nice,” Mom says, surveying the room, the way she used to when we'd go to open houses on the weekends. Even though we weren't looking to move, Mom would go online, find some open houses nearby, and take me with her to check them out. (“It's like a free pass to snoop in someone else's house, Rose. Think of
Rear Window
.”) As an architect, she always loved looking at other people's homes, and she passed her curiosity along to me through those visits to grand old mansard Victorians and pastel-painted Colonials all over Cambridge. Of course, the real Mom would
not
have found this place up to her standards. It's basically a white box with some furniture—none of the character Mom loves, or used to love, anyway. No crown molding, no quirky nooks or built-in shelves or anything, and the floor is clearly laminate, not real wood.

“Ch-ch-check out the view,” Mom says to me over her shoulder. I push her chair over to the window and we survey the backyard gardens.

“This is just a model unit, Mom. Your view might not be this nice.” Dad shoots me a look, but I'm not saying it to be mean. It just seems like they shouldn't make the model unit have the nicest view in the whole place. It's manipulative.

“C-c-can I request a r-r-r-room with a v-v-view?” Mom asks Celeste.

“You can. We'll do our best to accommodate your preferences. Of course it depends what's available when you … uh…” She trails off. It's the first time I've seen Celeste search for the right words. Like she hasn't rehearsed this part, or she's forgotten her lines. “Whenever you make the decision. To transition.”