Some Kind of Normal (12 page)

Brenda unfurls the banner for the youth group. Ashley
ends up holding up one side and Morgan's got the other. I look
around to see if Morgan's mom is here to make sure they don't touch
or breathe the same air or anything, but I don't see her. Brian Lee
and his abnormally large football friends line up close beside the
banner, and Morgan and Ashley giggle.

I try not to look at the ghastly photos of aborted
fetuses some of the women are carrying on large posters as we meet
up with other churches in town. Folks are handing out placards with
the pro-life logo on it, too, and some with a picture of a very
serious looking man in a doctor's coat who I assume must be some
abortion doctor with a big red slash across his face.

"Doncha wanna carry one," a little girl asks me,
holding out one of the pictures of a dead baby on a poster stuck to
a stick.

"No, thank you." I say. "I think I'll hold out for
one with just words." The little girl skips off to hand her poster
off to someone else, who ends up being Ashley, who hands off the
banner to Brian Lee in order to carry it. Three of her other
friends take one as well, and they join the front of the crowd
gathering to begin the march down Main Street. Although she is
still skin and bones and her sundress is hanging loose on her, her
skin is rosy today, and her eyes are alive and sparkling. Brian Lee
leans towards her and says something that makes her giggle
again.

"She's the picture of health, isn't she?" Donna Jean
has fallen in beside me, natural as if we was best friends. I've
never gotten over seeing her as the beautiful upperclassman
cheerleader and even now, I feel frumpy and unnerved by her
attention. She went off to college and married some handsome
educated man and brung him back to our podunk town for some reason
I will never understand. By then we was already going to First
Baptist, and Donna Jean had the grace to shake my hand with a nice
smile when she came back but not ask what I was doing there. She's
married, but she never had kids. I find myself watching her
sometimes to see if she don't like them or if she's one of those
who wishes she had one but just couldn't.

Today, her expression is unreadable as she walks next
to me handing out flyers to the few people who are out this
afternoon.

"Tom and I have been praying for your family this
week."

"We appreciate that." I appreciate that she don't say
she's praying God will heal Ashley.

"How is Ashley doing?"

"She's okay." I glance at my daughter holding up her
sign and chanting with her friends. "Better than okay. She's
probably taking it better than the rest of us."

"Kids are so much stronger than we give them credit
for."

"I suppose."

"I don't quite understand them, I admit."

"Who's that?"

"Teenagers. How some things are so important they
might kill themselves over it. Like getting pregnant, or failing a
class in school. And other things, like faith in God and being
healthy, don't matter at all."

"I read in a magazine about that once." I try to
remember what it said that made so much sense to me at the time.
"The part of the brain that thinks about consequences, long term
stuff, don't develop 'til they're mostly grown. They actually can't
really think about what's gonna happen ten years down the line.
Realistically, I mean." I glance at her in her designer pantsuit,
and I feel like I'm sounding all big-shotty about talking to
someone so educated like I might know something they don't, but she
has this look of wonder on her face, like everything is now clear
as day.

"Someone should explain that to teenagers," she
says.

"They won't listen." I remember my daddy telling me
the older he got, the smarter his daddy got. I tell her this and
she laughs.

"It's better that way, anyway," I say. "At least for
Ashley. Today she's fine. She feels good. She's not thinking about
tomorrow and the next day, and the year down the road."

"What's down the road for her that isn't here today?
Is it just that she's going to have to do this, the shot thing,
every day?"

"Partly. I mean, today is one thing, but think about
the rest of her life--that she's not going to get a break from
this. She can't go on vacation from it. Every single day of the
rest of her life. Shots. Counting carbs. She's not thinking about
all the literature that says she's a higher risk for heart disease,
and blindness, and amputation." I'm talking now like I haven't to
anyone since she was diagnosed, and I want to stop, but I can't,
because Donna Jean listens to me.

"Kids only see this minute, and look at her." Ashley
is clearly flirting with Brian Lee, in that kind of comfortable way
I never could. "She isn't thinking, 'I have to take another shot
tonight, and then four more tomorrow, and four more the next day,
and every day for the rest of my life.' She's not thinking that
every shot she takes could be a tiny bit too much, and she could
end up in the hospital again. She's not thinking every high is
slowly eating away at her nervous system and her kidneys, and that
she will never be able to eat the entire pan of brownies when it
comes fresh out of the oven."

I've stopped and I'm crying beside the road, while
the rest of the marchers pass us with hardly a glance. Donna puts
her arms around me, and I'm crying into her shoulder, ashamed.

"Look at her," Donna says, turning me back to the
parade. "Do we ever know what's in our future? Do any of us know
what's in store for us? But today," she squeezes my arm, "today she
is great."

We begin to walk again, and I use my hand to wipe the
tears because I don't have any tissues on me.

"You know what Jesus says about diabetes?" She smiles
at me like she's got a secret. "He says don't worry about tomorrow,
because today has enough worries of it's own."

I find myself smiling back. "Ain't that the
truth?"

For the smallest of minutes, I think God might just
be talking to me.

~~~~

When we arrive at the Capital steps I find Ashley
sitting on a curb, her head in her hands, with her friends gathered
around her like she's a freak show.

"What's wrong," I say, pushing through them.

"I'm fine," Ashley says, clearly embarrassed. "I'm
just really weak. I needed to sit. It's a lot of walking."

"Let's test," I say, and fish through her purse and
find the meter, shooing everyone else away except Morgan, who is
sitting with her. I take her hand to test, but she grabs the lancet
from me, clearly agitated.

"I can do it myself," she snaps. Diabetes or being
twelve, I wonder.

She has to prick her finger three times before she
gets one deep enough to squeeze blood out of. She drops the test
strip trying to get it in the meter. Her blood smears across the
bottle as she digs a new strip out, her fingers shaking as she
tries to get this one in. She squeezes her finger and more blood
bubbles up and she touches the strip.

56.

I open her purse to find the jellybeans, but she
snatches it from me. "I got it, Mom. You don't need to hover all
the time." She finds the Ziploc bag we've put a handful in and
counts out seven. Pure sugar. She tries to close the bag, but her
hands shake and she drops the jellybeans. "Crap."

"Ashley!"

"Can you go away, Mom? I'm fine." Of course I'm not
going anywhere. Morgan looks up at me.

"I'll count them out for her and make sure she takes
them, Ms. Babs." I hesitate, then nod and stand up. I back up a
foot or two and watch Morgan count out seven and put them in
Ashley's hand. She puts them all in her mouth at once.

"It's the walking," I explain. "Dr. Benton said
exercise could do that. We know now if you're going to exercise you
should eat something extra, or take less insulin for lunch," I say
to Ashley.

"Yeah. Okay. Go, please."

Morgan looks at me and mouths, "I'll watch her."

I nod and walk away, but not too far. I never walk
too far away anymore.

They sit on the curb while the crowd listens to a man
behind a microphone telling about the development of a baby. A few
cells that have all the DNA necessary to make a human being, the
organs and the body parts, every piece of the puzzle that makes a
person an individual. Parts of the personality are already
determined at four weeks, he says. What you will look like, who you
will be, are already in the making before the mother even knows you
are there.

I wonder if the part of Ashley's DNA that made her
diabetic was already there. Waiting. Waiting for this flu, this
moment of weakness. Waiting to change all the DNA that came before
it, to change Ashley's life into this thing I don't know.

The speaker goes on and on, sanctity of life and all
that. He talks about the damage abortion does to mother, too, and
quotes some of the verses Pastor Joel used in his prayer. He moves
on to embryonic stem cell research, and his words get too big for
me. I understand the word evil and the word research and the idea
that it kills unborn, but most of the rest is lost on me. It sounds
like he's saying they can take some baby out of the womb and use
its cells to make other things a person needs, like that scientist
doctor on the poster is creating some baby factory to make babies
for baby parts and then kill them, but that sounds like science
fiction, so I figure I must be getting it wrong.

Donna Jean is lost in the crowd, and I edge closer to
Ashley and the rest of the kids hoping not to lose them too.

"We need to send a message loud and clear," his voice
is booming over the mic system, "that we will not tolerate the
killing of unborn children for any reason. Not for convenience, or
for the scientists who justify murder as a means to an end." People
with the posters of the doctor start waving them and chanting.

The sun is hot on my head, too hot for May, and I'm
suddenly so tired I sit on a curb, too. If the DNA was there at the
beginning, it must have come from us, from Travis and me. I don't
remember much of biology, but I know everything we are comes from
what our parents pass down to us. We are the sum of their parts.
Greater, maybe, and completely different as a product, but all the
same, everything we are came from somewhere in them.

She came from me. I gave it to her.

People around me begin to cheer something the man has
said. They are chanting something that sounds like nothing to me. I
find Ashley in the crowd, jabbering with some girls. "I want to go
home," I say.

"Now?"

"I'm so tired. I just want to go."

"I want to stay," Ashley says. She looks like she has
recovered from the low without any side effect. "Morgan's mom will
take me home."

"I didn't see Morgan's mom."

"Not here. From the church. I'll ride the bus, and
she'll pick me up at the church."

"Did you ask Morgan's mom?" I try not to be snippy,
but I know Morgan's mom won't let Ashley in their car until the
health department clears her.

"No, but I'm sure she would. Or Sarah's mom. Can't I
stay? We just got here."

"No. We've been here long enough. And I don't want
you walking more and going low again. I'm tired and we've already
wasted the whole afternoon. There are things I need to do at home
more important than this."

"But why can't I stay?"

Because your blood sugar might dive,
I think.
Because you might
pass out. Because I might lose you, and I could no more bear that
than sprout wings and fly. Because you have diabetes,
I want
to say.

"Because I say so," I say out loud.

She pouts the whole way home, and I'm sure that is
the twelve year-old part of her.

~~~~

When the kids are gone to school, I take stock of
what we left behind a week ago. Two laundry baskets of dirty
clothes sit in the hallway, and piles of clean ones needing to be
folded are heaped on the couch. The wastepaper can in the living
room is overflowing with Kleenexes from when Ash had the flu, and a
stack of magazines lies on the floor. Logan has been ripping out
pages with pictures that he deems a possibility for his first
tattoo that he's getting over my dead body. There is an almost
empty coffee cup. I don't even remember whose it was.

On the kitchen counter, Janise has stacked the mail
from the last week on top of the papers the kids had brought home
from school--the day before papers and school suddenly didn't
matter.

For the first time in over a week, life seems back to
normal. I throw laundry in the washer and straighten the living
room, taking comfort in the routine of folding clothes and putting
them back in the drawers. I tackle the stack of mail, separating
into a throwaway pile, a to-file pile, and the bills, some of which
are now overdue. When I finish the bills, I walk them to the
mailbox at the end of the drive. As I head back up, I spot the
bottle of Sunny D in the dry grass. The ants have swarmed and gone,
and now it is sun-bleached and dried. I pick it up to throw it
away, and a knot forms in my stomach.

For almost three hours I work and the house is quiet.
By the time I go to dump jeans in the wash, I've got the radio on
and am humming along. I dig through the pockets as I toss them in,
putting loose change in the jar on the dryer and throwing out
wadded up Kleenexes. When I come to Logan's favorite pair, I find a
folded piece of paper in the back pocket. I set it aside until I
get all the clothes in and shut the lid. I unfold it, thinking
it'll be a note from some girl, or this week's baseball practice
schedule, or the name of some pizza place the band is playing.
Instead, it's a form from his coach saying Logan's been kicked off
the team.

I scan it, stunned, and then take it to the couch
where I sit down to reread it.