Part 2 (1/2)

”I'll talk to him alone. He may be more responsive if his parents aren't in the room. And if you take him to visit a variety of schools, he'll get a feeling for what's right for him.”

”I'll be taking him,” Mike said.

Rather than have the seniors miss cla.s.s to visit colleges, the school adds a Senior Travel Day to the long weekend in October. Mike had already announced to me that he would take Zack to his college visits. Clearly he didn't trust me to do it.

The two of us headed down one of the paths that skirted the old mansion in which the high-school students took their cla.s.ses. Mike was shuffling through the brochures Travis had given us.

”It's hard to get excited about these schools,” he said. ”I've never heard of half of them.”

”But a really big or really compet.i.tive school-the ones we have heard of-might not be right for Zack.”

”He's doing so well now. He can handle anything.”

”He is doing great,” I said. ”But if he gets in an environment where he's just one of six thousand, he may find it hard to keep motivated. He has this burden of years of underperformance. He still struggles with that. It could drag him down.”

”Like it does you.”

”What?” I stopped in the middle of the path. How dare he say that? How dare he? ”I hope you aren't saying that I am underperforming.”

I am an advanced-practice nurse with a specialty in intensive care. I have a master's degree. I am one of the most respected nurses at a major teaching hospital. I was not underperforming.

”Not now. Of course not. But when you were his age, you were. You know you were.” He took a breath. ”Darcy, when you and the counselor were talking about Zack and this coach who usually works with the ADD kids, you said something- Are you ADD?”

I started walking again. It wasn't politically correct to say that someone was ADD. Attention deficit disorder was something you had, not something you were. ”I don't see that it's any of your business, Mike.”

”When did you find out? Why didn't you tell me? Are you taking those pills?”

I didn't answer.

”Darcy, come on. After we split up, you started getting places on time; you were making lists and not losing them . . . is it because you're taking pills?”

I still didn't answer. Of course I had ADD.

It was ironic, wasn't it? For years and years we'd been testing Zack to see if he had ADD. I'd researched the medications, but I hadn't read much about the diagnostic criteria.

Then, when he had been applying to Alden, the admissions counselor had said that he had some habits similar to-and this phrase seared through me-”even modeled on” ADD behavior. Whose behavior would he have modeled but mine? I borrowed a book from the counselor. I started paging through it on the way to the car. Ten minutes later, still in the parking lot, I knew that I was the one who needed to be tested.

I made an appointment with the educational psychologist who'd tested Zack. My parents had kept all my elementary-school report cards, and the psychologist later said that he'd almost been willing to diagnosis me from the evidence they provided. But he had me take the computerized test. The results were unquestionable, and so I, a woman in her forties, got a prescription for Ritalin.

I was already seeing my nice mom-type therapist, and she had been important. She'd helped me identify the behaviors I had wanted to change and craft a regime to implement those changes, but actually sticking with that regime day in, day out, that had needed Ritalin. The Ritalin alone wouldn't have been enough, but the therapy alone wouldn't have been either.

”Why didn't you tell me?” Mike was close now, his shoulder just behind mine, and his mouth close to my ear. ”I thought we were making progress.”

I jerked away from him. ”I know what you're thinking-the medication *fixed' me, and I would have been worthy of your return. Well, it didn't *fix' me. Yes, it made me a better housewife. It made me better able to stay on task while I complete routine ch.o.r.es.”

I didn't need Ritalin at work. The intense atmosphere of the ICU kept me focused in a way that unloading a dishwasher didn't.

”But I'm still the same person,” I continued, ”and even more important, you were totally the same person. You would have found something else to criticize about me. The laundry would have been done, the cabinet doors would have been closed, but you would have found something wrong.”

”Darcy, why didn't you tell me? We were still trying to work things out.”

”No, I was still trying. You had stopped.”

”Oh, the therapist.” He didn't have a good answer for that.

”My being diagnosed would have fed into your myth that I and only I was the problem. You hadn't learned anything. You hadn't changed. That wasn't good enough.”

”You didn't even give me a chance. Why didn't you say something?”

Because I was too angry. And I was tired of being that angry. And tired of feeling that all the choices were yours, that I had no control. Not telling you gave me power.

The pointless, stupid power of a two-year-old.

We were in the parking lot now and had to stop talking. There were three women standing by the side of a car, talking. One of them was leaning against the car; another had set her purse on the hood. They must have been talking for a while. Two more women came out of the middle-school building and went to join the conversation.

I did not understand how women could stand around a parking lot, talking for so long. What did they talk about? After ”you bring the juice, I'll bring the cupcakes,” what was there?

I.

like my work schedule. I work three straight twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts; then I have four days off. The patients benefit from this schedule. I provide better care if I see them three days in a row. Many of them have multiorgan failure and it takes a while to master all the information on their charts. Their families also like seeing a familiar face; it comforts them. My own family had benefited because on my days off I was completely available to the boys.

But when I was on s.h.i.+ft, I didn't do much around the house except cook. So, during the three days following our appointment with Zack's counselor, I didn't check my home e-mail. When I turned on my computer Sunday morning, I found a message from Rose Zander-Brown, continuing an exchange we'd started the week before. She confirmed that the wedding would be the third weekend in June and would be an outdoor affair at their house on Long Island. She concluded the message by saying that she and her family were looking forward to meeting Zack and me in D.C. during the Columbus Day weekend.

I didn't get it. Why was this meeting happening here? I thought she was going to invite Zack and me to Long Island.

Then I figured it out. Claudia must be having this engagement party during the Columbus Day weekend.

That was not going to work. I called Mike on his cell phone. ”This engagement party-is it the Sat.u.r.day before Columbus Day?”

”Yes.”

I wondered why no one had told me. ”The Tuesday after Columbus Day is Senior Travel Day. You and Zack were going to look at colleges that weekend.”

Mike paused. He doesn't like making mistakes. One of the unexamined a.s.sumptions of our marriage was that I made mistakes, and he didn't.

”Oh,” he said slowly, ”I guess I had just written that down as being for Monday and Tuesday.”

”But most families leave Friday afternoon. That's what we did for Jeremy. Can Claudia move the party?”

”I doubt it. She's already booked the caterer and ordered the invitations. I guess he and I can leave first thing Sunday morning. We'll still have three days.”

I decided to talk to Zack before I got too huffy about this. As soon as he got up, I told him. I wanted him to be outraged. Let me get this straight. We are prioritizing a party over my college search. You wouldn't have done that for Jeremy.

But anything that spared him time with his father was just ducky with him. ”I'm not going to want to go to any of those places anyway,” he muttered.

P.

art of why I'm a good nurse is that I like learning new things. I never pa.s.s up a chance to be trained on a new piece of equipment, even if it isn't likely to be on our floor. When the doctors start ordering a new test, I want to know what we're going to do with the information that it provides.

But this curiosity had never extended to an excessive interest in other people's lives. I don't gossip. As a kid I'd never joined the gaggle of girls who giggled endlessly about who liked whom. Once I had my own sons, I had stayed out of the mom-on-mom gab fests about which kids the coaches were favoring or which families didn't supervise their children properly.