If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now (3 page)

I looked over at the nurse, who was sitting in her desk chair watching us. “Did he tell you this?”

She nodded and smiled complacently. “I reminded him that he should only eat the food you pack him.”

“He’s
six
,” I said. “He believed Caleb.”

“He’ll be all right,” she said calmly. “He already looks a lot better.”

“Why did it take you so long?” Noah said to me. “I’ve been here forever.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear my phone.”

“You
never
hear your phone!” He burst into tears. For some reason, eating gluten not only made him sick to his stomach, it also made
him emotionally fragile. I hugged him, not bothering to argue the point, just wishing he didn’t have to deal with this thing.

It hadn’t occurred to me for the first few years of Noah’s life that there was something weird about how small he was until
Melanie gently pointed out that he was still wearing size two clothing at the age of four and said that maybe I should make
sure he was okay. I checked with the pediatrician and, long (miserable, painful, boring) story short, a few months later Noah
was diagnosed with celiac disease. The GI doctor said that he’d make up all the height he’d lost so long as we kept him on
a strict gluten-free diet, but here we were, two years later, and he was still really small for his age. It was possible
I wasn’t careful enough about his diet. Or that he was simply doomed by his genes to be a ninety-nine-pound weakling.

I mean, by the genes he got from
me
, since I was a shrimp. But his dad was pretty tall. We used to joke about how his too-tall genes and my too-short genes would
cancel each other out and our children would be normal.

“Normal” was the last thing anyone would call Noah.

The worst of it was that because Noah went to this exclusive private school that my parents insisted on (and paid for)—and,
yes, the same one that I had gone to not that long ago
and
the same one that his cousins currently went to—all the other kids were like these huge athletic beasts. I don’t know what
parents fed their kids on the Westside of LA, but it was clearly high in nutrients. Or human growth hormone. The infamous
Caleb was the worst, a kid who could already be described as “hulking” at the age of six, and who managed, through an apparently
irresistible combination of charisma and brute force, to convince half the boys in the class to join him in torturing the
other half.

A few weeks earlier Noah had come home crying because Caleb and his friends hadn’t let him sit at their activity table during
class free time, so I asked his teacher if she could do something about their behavior. Ms. Hayashi’s response was to ask
me if I’d been adequately “encouraging” Noah to make more friends. “You’d be surprised at what a difference it can make for
a child to feel like he’s made a connection or two in his class,” she said. “You really should try to set up more playdates.”

Like it was my fault the kid was ostracized. Like it had something to do with the fact that his mother was at least a decade
younger than all the other moms and didn’t have a single friend among them, that she dropped him off quickly
in the morning and picked him up even more quickly in the afternoon and never talked to any of the other mothers or made plans
with them or scheduled playdates with their kids. Like
that
had something to do with Noah’s problems.

Personally, I blamed Caleb.

I always kept a plastic bag or two in my car. Noah was so sensitive to gluten that the smallest crumb made him throw up a
half hour later, so he frequently vomited on the way home from restaurants. We were both so used to it that it didn’t faze
either of us—he’d just ask for the Bag and I’d toss it back at him and he’d throw up into it and that would be that.

I asked him as we got in the car if he needed the Bag, but he shook his head. “Nah. I’m done barfing.”

“Good to know.” I started the car.

“Can I watch TV when I get home?” he asked as we drove off.

“Not until your homework’s done.” He had a few minutes of homework every night, usually a worksheet and a list of vocabulary
words to study for each Friday’s spelling test.

“But I’m sick.”

“You’re not sick,” I said. “You ate some gluten and that made you throw up.”

“The brownie was GF. Caleb told me so, so I think I might have the flu.”

“Caleb was lying.”

“No, he wasn’t. I think the brownie was GF and I threw up because I’m a little sick.”

“You’re not sick. Caleb tricked you into eating something he knew you weren’t supposed to have.”

“No, he didn’t,” Noah said. “Caleb’s my friend.”

“Caleb is a little—” I stopped, realizing that anything I said would only make Noah feel worse.

He knew as well as I did that Caleb was no friend to him and that he had been the butt of a mean prank. But if it made him
feel better to pretend otherwise, I didn’t have the heart to take that away from him.

To my frustration, he was crying
again
two days later when I picked him up in car pool. The teacher who was helping him get into the car leaned forward and whispered
to me, “I don’t know what’s wrong. He wouldn’t tell me,” before cheerily singing out, “Have a good one!” and closing the door.

As Noah struggled to buckle his seat belt through his tears, I twisted in my seat so I could look back at him. His nose was
running and his hair was sticking up with sweat. His T-shirt was on backwards; I hadn’t noticed it that morning when I’d dropped
him off, but we’d both slept late and had been rushing.

All around us were perfect moms with perfect hairdos picking up their strong and happy little kids and their playdate friends
and hauling them off to play at a park or have private tennis lessons—and then there was Noah and me.

I sighed and shifted the car into Drive. “So what’s up, Noey?”

“It’s all Coach Andrew’s fault. The whole class was mean to me and it was all his fault.”

I was about to swing the car out of the car-pool lane when some woman in a black Mercedes tried to pull in front of me, cutting
the line and breaking all the school rules. There wasn’t enough room for her car so she got stuck at an angle, which left
me just as stuck until the cars up ahead moved out of the way. I suppressed the urge to swear at her and contented myself
with a glare. She blithely played with a strand of her blond hair and stared blankly off into the distance, like she had no
idea someone in my car wanted her to die. “Coach Andrew?” I repeated through gritted teeth. “Who’s that?”

“God, Mom. He’s the new PE coach. Don’t you even know that?”

“Sorry.” I didn’t keep up with much at school. “So what did he do?”

“He was making our class run up and down the stairs because the sixth-graders were using the field. He said we had to do it
ten times. It was so hard.” Noah’s voice got uneven. “I did it a couple of times but then I couldn’t even breathe anymore
and I told him so, but he just pointed up the stairs and said I had to keep going. I started crying and then everyone made
fun of me and he let them.”

My stomach hurt. The driver in front of me inched forward with a lurch and then braked hard again. I was still blocked from
moving. God, I hated the rich blond women at that school. They all thought they owned the universe and taught their big blond
kids to think so too. I took a deep breath. “How did they make fun of you, Noey?”

“I had to crawl up the stairs because I couldn’t walk anymore and they called me a baby and then some of the kids started
kicking me.” A strangled sob. “But Coach Andrew didn’t care. He just said I’d have to go see Dr. Wilson if I stopped trying.”
Dr. Wilson was the school director, a tall, angular man in his mid-sixties with gray hair, whose vaguely humorous geniality
toward the kids did nothing to diminish their terror of him. “The other kids were kicking me and he didn’t say
they’d
have to see Dr. Wilson, just
me
. It wasn’t fair.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Had the coach really let the other kids kick him? Noah could be overly dramatic. But his misery
seemed genuine. And I’d believe that Caleb and his pals were capable of anything.

“You have to write a note, Mom. Please. Please write a note saying I don’t have to do PE ever again.
Please
, Mom.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. Wilson about it,” I said. “He’s very smart about these things.”

“Maybe he’ll fire Coach Andrew,” Noah said hopefully.

Louis Wilson sat in an armchair at a forty-five-degree angle from where I was sitting in another, lower armchair, and smiled
his careful smile. “I must say, there’s something very moving to me about seeing you in here as a parent, Rickie.”

“I feel like I’m in trouble.” I gave a little laugh, but it was true. I had never actually been called into his office when
I was a student there, but it still had that effect on me.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I rarely give my parents detention.” We both smiled, but I felt his eyes taking in the stud in my
nose, the eyebrow ring, the tattoo that ran around my left wrist, the tight jeans and worn T-shirt I was wearing, and I felt
eleven years old again. Only a lot less confident than I was back when I was eleven and a total teacher’s pet.

I cleared my throat. “It’s about Noah,” I said. As if he hadn’t guessed. “He was pretty upset about something that happened
in PE.”

“Yes,” Dr. Wilson said. Every time he spoke, I could practically see a subtitle floating in front of him. His “yes” was really
I’m well aware of the problems your son has been causing in our PE class.

“I know he’s not the best athlete—”

“We don’t care about that,” he said calmly.
It’s his attitude that concerns us.
“All we ask is that our students engage and make an effort to enjoy themselves.”

“He’s trying,” I said. “But it’s hard for him. He’s so small and he has this autoimmune disease—”

“The PE coaches are all aware of Noah’s health issues,” he said. “As am I.” He leaned back in his chair. He was wearing a
dark wool suit with a tie. I had been acquainted with Dr. Wilson for close to two decades and had never seen him without a
jacket and tie. “They take that into account when they’re working with his class.”
Trust me, we don’t want any lawsuits.

“Not always.” In an effort to look relaxed, I crossed my own legs, but that exposed the hummingbird tattoo on my right ankle
and I quickly uncrossed them. “Yesterday he said that the coach—the new guy—had made him run up and down a flight of stairs
a bunch of times, and it was just too much for him.”

“Hmm,” he said. “He found that difficult?”

His skepticism angered me, which was good: my anger buoyed me up, made me less afraid of this man who had been the ultimate
authority throughout my childhood. “Noah told me he was so tired he had to crawl up the stairs and some of the other kids
started kicking him. And the coach
let
them.”

Dr. Wilson contemplated me, eyes narrowed. “You’re sure about this?”

“It’s what he told me.”

For a moment he studied my face hard, like he was trying to probe through to my brain to see if there was any deception going
on in there. Then he sighed, stood up, and opened his office door. “Barb?” he said to his assistant. “Would you please locate
Coach Andrew and have him come right to my office?”

He closed the door. I had risen to my feet when he had, so we were face to face when he turned around again.

I dropped my eyes first.

“How are your parents?” he asked abruptly.

“They’re fine.” I realized I was fidgeting like a little kid, shifting from one foot to the other. I forced myself to stop.

“I’ll be seeing your mother next week at the board of trustees meeting,” he said. “It’s such a pleasure working with her.”

“Oh, good,” I said and kind of meant it. My mother was president of the board, which made her, in a certain sense, Louis Wilson’s
boss. I wondered if Dr. Wilson was thinking about that now. I hoped so.

“Excuse me,” he said. He wandered over to his desk and shuffled through a few papers while I rocked on my heels and looked
around the room. There were a bunch of plaques on the wall, including one my mother had designed that said,
FROM THE SIXTH-GRADE CLASS OF 1998,
which was my class.

“It feels like yesterday to me,” Dr. Wilson said from over by the desk, looking up.

“It feels like forever ago to me.”

“Time passes more quickly at my age. Too quickly.” He went back to the papers on his desk.

There was a knock on the door, and the coach came in. He was wearing sweatpants and a blue T-shirt and a baseball cap. He
looked younger than I expected. His shoulders were slightly stooped and he was more skinny than muscular. “You wanted to see
me?” he said, addressing Dr. Wilson but glancing at me, clearly trying to place me—I didn’t look like the kind of teacher
Dr. Wilson was likely to hire but I didn’t look much like a parent, either.

“Andrew,” Dr. Wilson said, with a brisk clearing of his throat, “this is Noah Allen’s mother. Rickie Allen.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “Hi. Nice to meet you.” He held out his hand and, as we shook, his eyes strayed to the tattoo on my
wrist. As he raised them again to my face, I could see they
were dark—almost black—and unreadable. “So what’s up?” He looked back and forth between us.

“Rickie?” said Dr. Wilson with a gallant little “go ahead” kind of a gesture.
You wanted to complain. So complain.

I swallowed. I wasn’t a confrontational kind of person. I was more of a hide-in-your-room-and-sulk kind of person. But I was
Noah’s mom and dealing with this was just something I had to do. I raised my chin. “Noah said you made him crawl up the stairs
and let the other kids kick him.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Coach Andrew said, putting his palms up. “I don’t let anyone kick anyone in my class.”

“He said kids were kicking him.”

“They weren’t,” he said emphatically. “I was right there at the foot of the stairs, watching. No one was kicking anybody.
But it is true that Noah chose to crawl up the steps, even after I asked him to stop, and it’s possible someone might have
bumped him by accident on their way back down.”