I’m halfway through the blog post when a red Facebook notification pops up on my screen. “Caleb Franklin has added you.”
My stomach lurches. So he was serious about the Internet stalking. I accept him as a friend and click over to his profile to see what’s on offer, when a chat message appears in the corner.
Caleb Franklin: Ah, HD girl. Is it really you?
Me: Indeed. You found me. Stalker.
Caleb Franklin: Yup. I warned you.
Me: Next you’re going to lure me into the woods?
Caleb Franklin: Considering it. Just out of curiosity, which woods would you suggest in the greater Boston area?
Me: Fresh Pond?
Caleb Franklin: Too many dog walkers.
Me: Walden Pond?
Caleb Franklin: It would be a little crass to stash a body in Henry Thoreau’s place of peace and solitude, wouldn’t it?
Me: Fair enough.
Caleb Franklin: In that case, I suppose we could skip the woods-luring stage of our relationship. All right?
I’m so thrown by his casual use of the phrase “our relationship” that I don’t respond immediately to his message. Fortunately, he changes the subject right away.
Caleb Franklin: So what’s on your docket this evening?
Me: My “docket,” huh?
Caleb Franklin: Mock away, HD girl. Mock away …
My cheeks flush. I glance over my shoulder at my open bedroom door, just to see if Dad or Gram is hovering. Not that I’m doing anything wrong, but somehow the conversation feels private.
Me: History paper.
Caleb Franklin: Anything interesting?
Me: I guess. It’s a women’s history elective, so it’s not bad. I’m writing about the early history of reproductive choice advocacy. Margaret Sanger, birth control, you know. Etc.
I can’t believe I just said “birth control” to Caleb Franklin.
Caleb Franklin: Cool. So the whole medical thing is a big interest for you?
Me: “The whole medical thing” is sort of broad …
Caleb Franklin: Genes, birth control, etc.
Me: Fair enough. Sort of comes with the genetic-disorder-in-the-family territory, don’t you think?
Caleb Franklin: You’re a nerd, basically.
Me: Hey!
Caleb Franklin: Hey, I’m a major nerd. I like nerds.
By which he means … he likes this nerd? At the very least, he’s still talking to me. Suddenly I want to tell Lena every word that Caleb Franklin has said to me to date, and let her dissect them all with me. I never thought I’d be that person, but here I am.
Me: So I did some research. You were right. The HD test’s not that expensive.
Caleb Franklin: Oh yeah?
Me: I can take it once I turn eighteen. This February.
Caleb Franklin: Wow. What are you thinking?
If only I knew what I was thinking, Caleb Franklin. If only I knew. I hesitate before settling on a response. I want Caleb to think I’m self-assured, clever, confident—like he is. But there’s no way to sound clever and confident about something so completely uncertain.
Me: It’s complicated.
Caleb Franklin: Indeed.
Me: My HD status is this piece of information that hangs over literally EVERYTHING I do. Every choice I make about my future, about how I want to live, about the things I want to experience. You know? I had been going along with the idea that I wouldn’t know one way or another for a long time. You kind of threw a wrench in that.
Caleb Franklin: Sorry about that. ☺
Me: Don’t be. It’s just opened things up for me. Possibilities. A positive result might make me … do things differently.
Caleb Franklin (after a long-ish pause): So might a negative result, right?
Me (after another long-ish pause): Yeah. I guess it would.
Caleb Franklin: Do you have to decide now? Maybe you’re overthinking this at this stage.
I let out a snort at the computer. Caleb already knows his genetic lot. Some of us don’t have that luxury. He might understand what it’s like to live with sick people, but he doesn’t get what it’s like to have your whole life held hostage by one fifty-fifty chance.
Me: Maybe, Caleb Franklin. Or maybe not. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
After Caleb and I say goodnight a few minutes later—“Hasta la vista,” he says, which makes me feel weirdly hopeful that I will “see him later”—I pull my phone out. I text Lena the words I know will make her call immediately: “I think I met a noteworthy boy.”
Sure enough, her face pops up on my phone screen within seconds.
“Yell-o,” I say. “What’s up?”
“What’s up?” she says. “What is up with the text you just sent me?” I can barely hear her—it sounds like there are people yelling in the background.
“Where are you?”
“Supermarket with my mother. Hold on,” she says. “I don’t care, Ma, chicken is fine.” She sounds muffled, like she’s holding the phone away from her ear. “I have to talk to Rose. She met a boy!”
“Lena!” I yell into the phone. “Please do not tell your mother about this! It’s so not a big deal!” Lena tells her mother everything. They’ve been like that ever since her dad died, even after her mother got remarried. I can see how the disappearance of one parent can forge a kind of superglued bond with the other, but I can’t imagine telling my father all the stuff Lena tells her mom.
Lena comes back on the line, with less background noise. “Sorry. I just went out to the car. So, wait. What?”
I tell her about the walk—she squeals at the part when Caleb brings me the small T-shirt—and then about our online conversation just now. When I finish, there’s a long pause.
“Are you still there?” I ask.
“Mmm-hmm,” she says. “Rose. I think this is a thing.”
I stretch my legs out in front of me on my bedroom floor and lean out over them, pressing my face to my knees. I inhale and exhale twice before I roll back up to respond.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
* * *
After I hang up with Lena, I go down to the kitchen and find my mother trying to make a cup of tea. We still have the knobs on the stove, but it’s one of the things Dr. Howard says we’re going to need to “deal with” soon. We’re going to have to Mom-proof the house so she doesn’t hurt herself or light us all on fire, in other words.
I stand in the doorway, watching her fumble with the kettle. She tries to get her index finger to engage properly with the trigger for the spout, but misses. Tries again, another miss. She sets the kettle down and takes a slow, shallow breath. The third time, she gets the spout open, and pours the boiling water to the left of the mug she’s set on the counter. It splashes off the counter and splatters her hand.
“Dammit!” The kettle clatters to the floor, and Mom shakes her burnt wrist.
“Let me,” I say. If she were normal, she would hear the slight edge in my voice and tell me not to be so impatient.
“I can make a goddamn cup of tea.”
“You burned yourself, Mom. Here, run it under cold water.”
I turn the tap on and hold her jerking arm under the running water. “Hold it there for five minutes.” That’s what Dad said the last time she burned herself trying to make tea.
“Fffive minutes is a long fffucking time.”
She never used to swear in front of me. I can’t tell if it’s her frustration or her declining inhibition that makes curses come so easily from her mouth these days.
“Just do it, Mom. It’ll feel better.”
I let go of her wrist and watch as she makes an effort to keep it steady under the water. I pick up the kettle and drop a dish towel over the puddle on the tiles.
Quietly, her voice clearer than before, she asks, “Rose, cccan you make me a cup of tea?”
Gram appears in the kitchen doorway and just hovers there, assessing the situation. She looks from me to Mom with
a slight crinkle at the edges of her eyes.
“She spilled the water for tea. She’s fine,” I say.
“I’m fffine,” says Mom, her words slurring again. It’s hard for her to concentrate on two things at once: keeping her arm under the running water, articulating her words clearly.
“Let me see.” Gram reaches for Mom’s arm and looks at the red splash across her wrist. “We should put some butter on this.”
“No one puts butter on burns anymore, Gram. That’s a myth.” My grandmother also still thinks you get a cold from not buttoning your coat up all the way.
“All right, Rose. Do it your way.” She turns on her heel and disappears.
Even a year ago, Mom would’ve snapped at me for talking back to Gram (even though I’m right—butter on burns? Come on). Now I don’t think she can bother making the effort to be annoyed with me, if she even notices my snippy tone at all.
I don’t mean to be short with my grandmother. It just slips out. She’s a good grandma, and I’m pretty sure she did not see her life turning out like this. She had her three kids—two girls and my dad—and then my grandfather split, leaving her to navigate a foreign country and childrearing on her own. She got a degree in library science and once all the kids were out of the house, she picked up and moved back to England. She ended up in Stanmore, a little Jewish neighborhood in northwest London where she could be close to the sisters and cousins she’d left behind when she married the apparently quite dashing (and unfaithful) American who was my grandfather and followed him across the pond.
And then her only son, my dad, calls her up from the States one day and says, Hey, Ma, so the woman I married—you know, the not-Jewish one you didn’t want me to marry in the first place—she’s got this wacko genetic disease, and she’s just going to keep getting worse, so can you give up your days doing crosswords and watching mysteries on the BBC and move back across the ocean to the country you thought you were done with, to play nurse/babysitter for a while? Possibly until she dies? Thanks.
I miss her sometimes—the grandmother she was before she was this person, in my space all the time, trying to take care of Mom and take her place at the same time. She used to be kind of funny. She’d come visit from London with bags of British things—P.G. Tips tea and HobNobs and huge, crispy Lion Bars. She’d say “poor yoooou” whenever I’d complain about one dance injury or another, but she didn’t mean it sarcastically, the way an American would. She meant it for real: poor you.
I told Dad we could deal on our own, take care of Mom; it’s a slow-moving beast, Huntington’s. But Dad didn’t want me to be the nurse. I was twelve when she was diagnosed; he saw adolescence looming, full of text messages and first boyfriends and AP classes. (In reality, of course, I’ve got the AP classes and the text messages—from Lena, anyway. Not so much the boyfriends. Of course, Dad couldn’t have known that I’d be too neurotic to ever go on a date.) Anyway, about a year after the guillotine fell on Mom’s head—I imagined her diagnosis like that—Dad called Gram, and she came, because that’s what mothers are supposed to do.
I put another kettle on and wait for it to boil, standing guard by it so Mom won’t bother trying to fix it herself. Maybe it’s time to take the knobs off the stove after all.
Mom sits at the kitchen table with a wet dishrag draped over her wrist. “How’s dance?” she asks after a moment—again, focused, her words almost clear.
“Fine. Usual.”
“Usual?”
I sigh. “Everyone’s a little weird right now because of next year, I guess. There are a couple companies some of the girls in my year are auditioning for, with like one spot for every bijillion dancers or whatever. So maybe that’s why they’re all acting a little cagey.”
I say this to the tea kettle, more or less, and when I look up at Mom, I realize that I’d almost forgotten who I was really talking to. Every now and then I talk to Mom like she’s still the same person she used to be. It’s nice when it happens; I should do it more, that’s what Dr. Howard says—he’s always reminding me that she is the same person. I should keep acting as normal as I can with her, when I can. But it’s easier said than done.
Mom’s working hard at listening to me and processing my words, ignoring the dishrag that has now slipped from her wrist to the kitchen floor. This is what she does now, focuses extra hard on the tasks she really wants to do right. I pick up the dishrag and rinse it with cold water, wringing out the excess before I place it back over her hand.
“How are your college applications?” she asks slowly, chewing each word carefully before spitting it out.
We visited colleges last spring. One of them—Cunningham, in upstate New York—was sort of appealing. Their dance program is well known, at least for a liberal arts school without a conservatory program. Other than that, all the colleges blurred together. The truth is, there’s only one school I’ve ever really imagined myself at, even though I’ve never visited. But it seems pretty unrealistic at this point—if I could even get in.
“Nonexistent, so far,” I confess.
“Rose—don’t put this off.”
“Well, I’m guessing Dad won’t like the idea of me doing a dance program. And I don’t know what else I want to do.”
Mom contorts her face into a smile. She used to be a great dancer, too. She never danced professionally, but she probably could have if she’d wanted to. She took ballet for a long time growing up, and when I was ten, she started going back to class occasionally, just for fun. Of course, that didn’t last long.
“Your dad has two left fffeet. He doesn’t get it.”
I do a little impression of Dad’s dance moves, an offbeat collection of disconnected twists and kicks, and Mom snorts out a laugh. She’s right—I don’t think Dad understands having a real passion for something creative. He’s just more practical. He thinks I should learn something marketable, something I can turn into a reliable career path, like, I don’t know, real estate. My father is a realtor. I like watching House Hunters with Mom, but I can’t really see myself selling houses for a living.
“Just make a chhhoice, Rose,” Mom says, suddenly serious again. “For next year. It’ll be okay.”
* * *
Back upstairs, I return to my laptop and open a new web page. The address comes up automatically after I type just a few letters, evidence of how many times I’ve visited this site. The Pacific Coast College of the Arts. One of the few—and certainly the best—combined ballet BFA/apprenticeship programs in the country. Here in Boston, I can dance or I can go to college, but there’s no school like PCCA, where I can get that level of professional ballet training and a college degree at the same time.
I’ve had my eye on PCCA since probably sixth grade. As usual, I go to their admissions page and review the information one more time—not that anything has changed. They need all the standard stuff—transcripts, SAT scores, recommendations, a personal statement—plus you have to send them an audition video, or schedule an in-person audition. I haven’t done either. It costs almost $50,000 a year to go there, never mind the flights back and forth. And it’s on the other side of the country—from everything.
Caleb Franklin might be right: I might be overthinking the Huntington’s test. Maybe my status shouldn’t matter so much, and I should just continue living my life the way I was before I knew the test was a real possibility. It’s just that now, when I consider how I want to spend the next years of my life—going to college, dancing, becoming a legitimate grownup human being and whatever else that entails—I can’t help but think: What if I knew?
Five
Caleb Franklin’s Facebook message a week later says, “Can I lure you out for coffee? In a public place, of course.” I can’t seem to shake the jittery, flushed feeling I have whenever his name pops up on my screen. Every time I remember sitting next to him on the Common, eating caramel popcorn and talking like we’d known each other for years, I feel the same rush of warmth mixed with anxiety. It’s almost sickenin
g, but I can’t help it. I want more.
So I agree to meet him “for coffee”—even though I don’t really drink coffee—at the bookstore in Porter Square late the next Saturday afternoon. I’m rushing, of course, after a full day of dance classes, and my hair is still damp from the two-minute shower I jumped in and out of. Through the swirled purple and yellow lettering on the window advertising ginger lemonade, I spot a huge book called Information and Ethics in the Age of Genetic Medicine propped up, masking its reader’s face. I have to laugh.
“A little light reading?” I ask, as soon as I walk through the door.
He looks up from the book and shrugs. “I like to keep up with the latest research. You know.”
“Mmm-hmmm. Okay.” I fold my arms across my chest.
“Or maybe I just find that oversize scientific textbooks with long titles impress the ladies.”
I laugh. “Oh, I see. So that’s what this is. Do you really think that has the effect you’re going for? I suspect most girls don’t find genetics textbooks particularly impressive.”
He flips the giant textbook closed and pushes it aside. “Indeed, you make a valid point. But you’re not most girls, are you, HD?”
Color and heat rush to my cheeks, and I don’t know how to respond, so I just stand there, awkwardly. It’s nice to see Caleb again in person, but I’m only now realizing that in spite of the fact that we’ve chatted about some pretty personal stuff, we barely know each other. I look him over more closely, reacquainting myself with his face. His eyes, behind his thick glasses, are pure dark brown, not flecked with gray like mine, indecisive brown.
“So, um, do you want to stay here?” he goes on. “I don’t actually drink coffee.”
“Me neither,” I admit.
“Ice cream instead?” he asks, his eyes flickering hopefully. “It’s not too cold for that yet, right?”
“It’s never too cold for ice cream. That’s one of my dad’s rules.”
“He sounds like my kind of guy, then.”
We cross the parking lot of the shopping center, headed for the ice cream shop tucked in a tiny corner unit next to the drugstore. It’s takeout only, so we get our orders—coffee frappe for me, mint chip in a waffle cone for him—and sit outside. The cars on Mass. Ave. rush by and the breeze serves as a chilly reminder that sitting-outside-weather won’t last long.
Rules for 50/50 Chances Page 5
