If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now (4 page)

“He said he was too weak to climb anymore. He’s not very strong—he’s got an autoimmune disease.”

“I know. The school nurse said it shouldn’t affect his ability to keep up.”

“It obviously did the other day.”

“Noah needs to run around more,” he said. “Build up his stamina. He’s not weak because of his disease, he’s weak because he
doesn’t get enough exercise.”

Could he have been any less sympathetic? “You don’t know anything about his health or how much he does or doesn’t exercise,”
I said tightly. “You pushed him too hard. And when he tried to tell you it was too much, you wouldn’t even listen and let
the other kids make fun of him. He was still crying about it when I picked him up.”

Dr. Wilson had been watching our exchange with his arms
crossed as if he were hoping we would work it all out without him, but now he said with patronizing gentleness, “Noah
does
resort to tears fairly often, Rickie, which sometimes makes it hard to know how seriously to take them.”

He had a point, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear it right then. “Whatever,” I said. “I just don’t think PE class is working
for him right now. Can’t he go to the library or something while the rest of the kids run up stairs and beat each other up
for exercise?”

“You can’t take him out of PE,” the coach said. “Noah needs more exercise, not less. The more he can keep up, the more fun
he’ll have.”

“Oh, right, because climbing stairs is such fun.”

He flushed. “We were a little restricted yesterday because we didn’t have access to the field. But the other kids liked it—we
made a game out of seeing how many times they could go up and down.”

I turned to Dr. Wilson. “How about we make a deal? I’ll make sure Noah climbs a flight of stairs five times a day if you let
him skip PE.”

The principal shook his head. “As long as Noah goes to Fenwick, he’ll take PE with his class. It would be doing him a disservice
to single him out by excusing him.”

I stepped back, flinging up my hands in disgust. “So, in other words, nothing is going to change.”

“I’m not ignoring this, Rickie,” Dr. Wilson said. Years of managing parents had made him smooth as silk; anger slid right
off of him. “We’ll put our heads together and figure out some way to offer Noah some extra support during class. Right, Andrew?”

His face was impassive. “Of course.”

I looked back and forth between the two of them. Dr.
Wilson was smiling his bland fixer smile at me, and the coach wouldn’t even meet my eyes. I wasn’t going to get anything more
out of either of them. “Fine,” I said. I grabbed my bag and left the office.

W
hen I brought Noah home from school a few hours later, Melanie’s car was parked in front of our house. It often was those
days. A few months earlier, when she and Gabriel had first separated, they agreed that their kids’ lives should be disrupted
as little as possible. So instead of uprooting Nicole and Cameron or making them shuttle back and forth between two homes,
they took turns living with them in their old house.

My mother invited Melanie to stay with us on the nights Gabriel was with the kids, and Melanie gratefully moved some clothes
in and took over my mother’s office. Mom carried her desk and files down to the family room. Mel kept saying that she was
going to find an apartment, that she shouldn’t impose, but we had the space and her heart wasn’t in the search, which was
probably just as well. She needed company to distract her from worrying about whether Gabriel had remembered to give Nicole
her antibiotics or to pack Cameron a sack lunch for his field trip and stuff like that.

She kept her cell phone on and within reach at all times and dove on it the second it rang.

If you passed by her room at the kids’ bedtime, you’d see her all curled up around her phone, singing and chanting her way
through some bedtime ritual with them.

When she was away from her own kids, she poured a lot of her frustrated maternal impulses into Noah. She’d spend hours baking
gluten-free cookies for him and searching out books at the library she thought he’d like.

Noah wasn’t the kind of kid to go around saying “I love you,” but if he had been, I think he’d have said it to Mel way before
he’d have said it to me or even to my mother, whose relationship with him was always a little distant, a little judgmental.
“He’s
your
child,” she liked to say whenever a decision had to be made about something to do with Noah.

I don’t know why she felt the need to remind me of that so often. I certainly never thought of him as anything else.

Sometimes it struck me as ironic that both Melanie and I had ended up living at home with my parents. It was clear why
I
was once again living in my childhood bedroom. But Melanie had done everything right—gone to a good school, taught at a school
for kids with special needs, married a guy whom we all adored, and then devoted herself to raising two of the sweetest, most
lovable kids known to mankind—so why was she, like me, unhappily wandering my parents’ hallways at two in the morning?

You’d think I’d have felt a touch of satisfaction in our ending up in the same place. I mean, Mel was the family golden girl
and my whole childhood was spent watching her soak up admiration and love and attention. I should have been delighted to see
her brought down to my level, right? But that just wasn’t how things were with me and her.

It probably helped that we didn’t actually grow up together. She mostly lived with her mother and only visited us on the weekends,
and I was still pretty young when she went off to college. So we never had to fight over rooms or toys or who got the car
or anything like that. No sibling rivalry because there was no reason for any.

But it wasn’t just that.

When I was a little tiny girl and Melanie was a teenager, she’d come over to our house and curl up with me on the bed and
read book after book after book—whichever one I put in her hand, she’d read to me. If she got bored, she never said so. I
remember carefully piling up all my picture books the moment I heard her voice downstairs, getting them all ready to present
to her because she never said “Enough” or “Leave me alone.”

When I was the teenager and she was in her twenties, she’d let me come stay at her apartment whenever I wanted, which was
a lot because I often felt like I was going to explode under my mother’s constant scrutiny. On days when the world of cruel
girls and indifferent boys was too much with me, I’d call Melanie and she’d say, “Come stay with me this weekend,” and then
all weekend long there would be popcorn and manicures and stupid girly movies and no questions asked—which was why I always
ended up telling her everything, all about the cruel girls and indifferent boys. “It sucks now,” she would say, “but I promise
you, Rickie, it gets better,” and I’d believe her because she wasn’t old like my parents or stupid like everyone else in the
whole world.

When Noah was born, she left her toddler daughter and husband at home together so she could spend the night at the hospital
with me, curled up on the hard, narrow fold-out chair that was meant to be used by the new baby’s father, whispering to me
whenever I woke up that Noah was the cutest, the sweetest, the best little boy who had ever been born and that we were going
to have so much fun bringing him up together.

She kept me from being alone when it would have hurt the most.

So you see, there was no way I could ever resent Melanie or rejoice in her marriage falling apart or anything like that.

All I could do was love her.

Melanie was waiting for me and Noah in the kitchen with a beautifully arranged plate of cut-up fruit. Noah grabbed a handful
of grapes off the plate and left, probably to go play on the computer, which he wasn’t supposed to do until he’d finished
his homework, but on days when I wanted a break I followed a strict “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

That was most days, admittedly.

“How was your meeting with Dr. Wilson?” Mel asked. As far as I knew, she had never had to meet with the principal about either
of her kids.

I described it to her and she said all the right sympathetic things but then ruined her supportive streak by adding, “They
might have a point, though, Rickie—I mean, about Noah’s needing to get stronger. He can’t keep up with Cameron on the scooter
and Cameron’s a year younger. He always complains when he has to walk a block, and he never wants to run around or play a
game outside. If he stopped doing PE, he wouldn’t be getting any exercise at all and—”

I waved my hand impatiently, cutting her off. “I know, I know.” I edged toward the doorway. “I’m going to go run and check
my e-mail. We have to leave again in half an hour.”

“Where to?”

“Noah has a doctor’s appointment. Blood test.”

“Want me to go with you?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“You sure?” She looked crushed. Melanie never had anything but time on her hands when the kids were with Gabriel.
My mother kept saying she should get a job, for her own sake, but Dad said to give her more time.

Seeing her disappointment, I quickly added, “But it would be nice to have company.”

Her face lit up.

It went badly. Sometimes it just does. First they kept us waiting forty minutes, which gave Noah time to work himself up into
a state of anxiety over the blood test. But that wasn’t the bad part. That came in the examining room when the nurse couldn’t
find the vein right away and had to keep wiggling the needle around under Noah’s skin. He was sitting on my lap—the good thing
about his being small for his age was that he still fit there—and I tried to hold him steady, but, god, it looked like it
hurt. He had been so brave at first, too, resigned as the needle went in, just intent on reminding me that I owed him a treat
afterwards, but then when the nurse started poking around for the vein, he turned pale, then he moaned and then he screamed
and the scream ended in a sob. I looked at Melanie, who was standing across the room, and there were tears in her eyes but
she mouthed, “It’s okay,” like
I
was the one close to crying. I just nodded and held Noah’s clammy, shaking body against my chest and closed my eyes so I
wouldn’t have to see the sharp tip of the needle moving around under his skin and murmured over and over again, “I know it
hurts but it helps, I know it hurts but it helps” until the words didn’t mean anything to me at all.

Mom was cooking something on the stove when we got back. “How’d it go?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at us, still
stirring.

“They couldn’t find the vein,” I said. “Had to go into the second arm. Took a while with that one, too.”

Noah held up his arms to show her the gauze and Band-Aids on the inside of both elbows and Mom clucked sympathetically. “It’ll
bruise,” he told her. He was calm now, having informed me in the car that he would never submit to another blood test. I didn’t
bother arguing the point. When he had to, he would. “Mom got me candy,” he added. “Two kinds because it hurt even more than
usual.”

“I can see that,” Mom said. “There’s chocolate all over your mouth. And something blue.”

“That was Fun Dip.” He turned to me. “Can I play on the computer?”

“Get your homework done first.”

He groaned and headed out of the kitchen.

“Dinner will be ready in about half an hour,” Mom called after him.

“I’m not hungry,” he said over his shoulder. “I had
candy
.” He left the kitchen and I sank into a chair. Eleanor Roosevelt was lying under the table, snoring. I absently rubbed my
foot against her shoulder and she thumped her tail against the floor without opening her eyes.

“That new nurse is awful,” Melanie said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. I told the doctor she wasn’t allowed to take
Noah’s blood again ever.” She went to the sink and washed her hands. “Want me to make a salad, Laurel?”

“That would be great,” Mom said. “There’s lettuce and carrots and red peppers.”

“Don’t put peppers in,” I said. “I hate them.”

Mom said, “I know. You can pick them out.”

“How about she just doesn’t put them in?”

“The rest of us like red peppers,” my mother said. “You can pick them out.”

“Noah doesn’t like them either.”

“Noah doesn’t eat salad.”

“I’m just saying it’s not true the rest of the family likes them.”

“Your logic is unassailable,” my mother said dryly. “But I still want peppers in my salad.”

“And it’s your house, so you win.”

“Not everything is a war, Rickie.”

“
Now
she tells me.” I got up and left the kitchen and went upstairs and checked on Noah, who wasn’t doing his homework, although
to be fair it wasn’t like he was doing anything else. He was just sitting on the edge of my bed, fingering a tiny hole in
his pant leg, gazing down at it with eyes that had gone dreamy and unfocused.

He didn’t even notice when I came in. I said sharply, “Noah? What are you doing?” and he started nervously and looked up at
me.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

I believed him.

When Mom called us down to dinner half an hour later, the table was set and Melanie was putting down a vase filled with freshly
cut roses. “Aren’t they pretty?” she said with a satisfied sigh. “They’re just starting to bloom again.”

“They’re beautiful,” said Dad, who had just come into the kitchen. He made a slight noise as he sat down. He seemed to be
doing that more and more: grunting every time he sat down or stood up. He had gained a lot of weight over the last ten years,
and I suspected it put a strain on his back, but he wasn’t the type to complain. Or to go on a diet.

“There’s a bug in there,” Noah said, pointing to the center of one of the flowers.

“Oh, sorry.” Melanie grabbed a tissue from the box on the counter and brought it down toward the bug.

“Leave it alone!” Noah said, grabbing her arm. “It’s just a beetle. It won’t hurt us or anything. Leave it alone.”

“On the dinner table?” said my mother as she put down a dish of polenta.