“I’m here for a little while this time. There’ll be time for more.”
“Good.” I curled up against him so I could nuzzle at his neck.
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” Ryan asked, pushing me away so he could look at my face. “Every time I come back to town, I think, ‘This time Rickie will be with someone.’ ”
“Are you relieved or disappointed when I’m not?”
“Do you really have to ask?” He pushed my overgrown hair back over my shoulder and studied the effect. “From a purely selfish standpoint, I’m thrilled you’re available. But as your sort-of-not-really older brother, I worry about you.”
“Don’t. I’m fine. And please don’t refer to yourself as my brother when we’re still in bed together.”
“You should be doing more with your life,” he said. “That’s how you meet people. When are you going to go back to school?”
“I take classes online.” Only one easy course at a time, but I always kept myself enrolled so I could tell people I was working on getting my bachelor’s degree. Otherwise, they acted all judgmental—like Ryan was right now.
Unfortunately, he had heard that line too many times. “Oh, please. That doesn’t get you out and meeting people. If you’re not going to get serious about your education, then you should get a job. How long are you going to keep mooching off your parents, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How long are you going to keep living like a college student and running away to other countries to avoid making any long-term decisions about your life?”
“Ten more years,” he said calmly. “At least.”
“You’ll be over forty by then.”
“So? And you still haven’t answered my question. Do you think about the future at all, Rickie?”
I rolled onto my back and glared at the ceiling. “Leave me alone, will you?”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“Don’t need help,” I said. “Sex. I need sex.” I sat up and made a grab for him. He caught my hand in his.
“Give me a few more minutes,” he said. “I’m not as young as I used to be. Let me recharge.”
“Now that’s romantic,” I said and sat back against the headboard with a pout.
“So how’s Melanie doing?” he asked, playing with my hand a little. “She okay?”
“Not really. I could kill your brother.”
He dropped my hand. “It’s hardly all his fault.”
“He cheated on her,” I said. “With that stupid actress. How is that not all his fault?”
“She didn’t have to throw him out so quickly. She could have given him another chance. People sometimes do things that they regret. They don’t deserve to have their lives ruined because of one bad moment.”
I pulled the blanket up over my body and pinned it across my chest with my arms. “You probably don’t know this because you’ve been away and Gabriel’s not going to rush to tell you, but he’s been going around publicly with that woman and totally throwing it in poor Mel’s face that he’s in love with someone younger and prettier. He doesn’t give a shit about saving the marriage.”
“You’re wrong,” Ryan said. “Melanie broke his heart when she threw him out.”
“He cheated on her.”
“She could have forgiven him.”
“Some things are unforgivable.”
“Nothing’s unforgivable.”
I scowled. “That’s what cheaters always say.”
“I’ve never cheated on anyone in my life.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t cheat when you don’t commit.”
He gave an indifferent shrug. “Maybe. But my point still stands: your sister could have saved the marriage if she’d wanted to.”
“God, I hate men!” I slid out of the bed and reached down for my underpants, which were still caught in my jeans. “You can behave like total assholes and then find a way to pin the blame on everyone but you.”
“You’re not listening to me,” Ryan said. “And why are you getting dressed already?”
I turned to him, wearing only my underwear. “Because Melanie is the only truly decent person I know, and your brother screwed her over and broke her heart and you’re defending him.”
He put his hands up. “I’m sorry. Look, I don’t want to fight with you, Rickie.”
“I know,” I said dully. “You want to have sex with me.”
“Right. Is that so bad?”
I considered for a moment and then I sighed. “Nah. That’s why I’m here.” I crawled back into the bed next to him. “But let’s not talk about them anymore, okay? We’re not going to agree on this one and it makes me too angry.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said. He held out his arms and I moved into them and against his chest. He gently rubbed my arm and my shoulder, and then his hand slid down to cover my left breast. He cupped it in his hand while his thumb lightly played with the nipple until I made a little involuntary noise of pleasure. “There,” he said. “Now are we back in sync?”
“Depends,” I said. “Are you recharged?”
“Getting there,” he said with a grin. “Definitely getting there.”
“I’m hungry,” Ryan said a little while later. “You want to grab something?”
I sat up and looked at my watch, which was the only thing I was wearing at that particular moment. It was a good one, too, a vintage Hamilton that my parents had given me for my twenty-fifth birthday. I had taken it as my mother’s not-so-subtle way of suggesting I keep to a schedule. “I should get going.”
“What time is it?” he asked with a yawn. “I’m still so jet-lagged I never know whether it’s morning or night.”
“It’s past two-thirty. I have to pick Noah up from school at three.”
Ryan propped a pillow under his head. “How is the little guy doing, anyway?” he said in the affable but remote tone he always used when the subject of Noah came up.
I leaned over the side of the bed to snatch up my clothes. “He’s fine.”
That satisfied him: it wasn’t like he really cared. “Great. Hey, there’s this new place about three blocks away I want to try. I think it’s Lebanese. Something Middle Eastern, anyway. You sure you don’t have time to just run over for a few minutes?”
“I’m worried about traffic.”
“What would happen if you were a couple of minutes late? I mean, they don’t throw him out on the street, right?”
I shook my head. “He freaks if I’m late.”
“Too bad. I really wanted to try this place with you.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was bummed too. It would have been nice to have lazily gotten dressed and wandered out to that restaurant and eaten there; we probably would have had the place to ourselves at this time of day. Instead I’d be fighting traffic all the way back to the Westside just to sit in car pool for half an hour with my little car heating up in the sun and people cutting me off with their enormous SUVs and Noah complaining as soon as he got in the car about something his teacher or one of the other kids had said to him that had hurt his feelings and ruined his day, his week, his month, his year…
“Maybe we can have dinner one night next week,” Ryan said.
“I’ll have to check with my parents.” I made a face. “And beg them to babysit. You know how I love to owe them favors.”
He yawned again. “No wonder you don’t get out much.”
“Yeah.” I got off the bed and pulled on my pants. “Having a kid at nineteen really screws up your dating life,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted about it.
“Well,” he said, closing his eyes sleepily, “you’ll always have me.”
2.
On my way back down the stairs, I fished my cell phone out of my purse and saw, with a sick feeling of guilt, that I had missed a couple of calls from Noah’s school. This couldn’t be good. I called back and was immediately forwarded to the nurse, who informed me that I should come as soon as possible because Noah wasn’t f
eeling well. “Don’t worry, Mom,” she said in a carefully cheerful voice that meant he was in the room with her. “He’s fine.” I resisted a familiar urge to point out I wasn’t her mom and told her I’d be there as soon as I could.
The drive across town felt endless. Traffic was bad, and even when it cleared up for a few blocks, I’d get stuck behind someone slow.
Car pool had already begun by the time I got to school. I parked out on the street and raced inside, taking the stairs three at a time as I headed up to the administrative offices on the top floor, where the nurse’s office was. Noah was sitting on the edge of her sofa, his shoulders hunched forward and his arms folded tight across his stomach like he had to protect it from an incoming fist.
“Mom!” he said, raising his head as I ran over to him. “Where were you? We were calling and calling.” His face was pale and he had dark circles under his eyes.
“You okay?” I asked. He shook his head. I knelt down on the floor next to him, holding my arms out, and he collapsed against my shoulder. “What happened?”
“Caleb gave me a brownie,” he said into my neck.
“And you ate it?”
“He said it was gluten free.”
“Noah—”
“Really, Mom!” He sat up and looked at me with big, earnest eyes. “He asked me if I wanted a brownie and I said I’m not allowed to eat it unless it’s gluten free and he said it was and that his mom got it specially for me. So I ate it and then my stomach hurt and then I threw up and he started laughing and so did the other boys. They high-fived him.”
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 And
rew?” 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.”