Some Kind of Normal (31 page)

"That's not it at all." But it is and I know it, and
I'm suddenly ashamed at how shallow it sounds. "College is
important. Having the degree is important, because people see you
differently when they think you're smart. People listen to you. You
can do more. Do big things. Lordy, Logan, I have no idea where you
got your brains, but they're a gift, and you should use them. Use
them to do something really important, like cure diseases, or run
the world or something."

"But you don't have a degree and look at you."

"Exactly. Look at me. I ain't nothing but a mom and
wife, and everyone in town knows I ain't smart enough to pour spit
out of a boot if the instructions was on the heel."

"You're the smartest person I know."

I laugh until I realize he's serious.

"You know more words than me. And you learned them on
your own and just because you wanted to, not because you had some
teacher hovering over you. And you taught me how to drive a stick
shift. And how to dance."

The image of him and I dancing around in the kitchen
when he was five floats in front of me. Can he really remember
that?

"And you," he stops and swipes at tears, and I
realize Logan is near to crying. "You saved Ashley. When no one
knew what to do, you found the answers. Not Doctor Benton. You. You
are the reason we're here. You never gave up, even when it meant
slugging through thousands of pages of medical jargon, you did
it."

He takes back the SAT scores and stuffs it in the
envelope. "I'm not saying I'll never go. I'm just saying I don't
want to think about that right now, because it's not the most
important thing in the world. They're just numbers. Everything
that's really important is here."

He stands up and stares down at me for a minute. "You
shouldn't keep selling yourself short, Mom. Everything this family
is, is because of you." He leans over and kisses me on the head,
the way I kissed him for years and years before he started pulling
away and making faces at me.

I watch him walk away and think,
I can't be all that dumb. I raised
some really great kids.

~~~~

Travis leaves for home five days after the poison
begins its work. A shuttle takes him away when the sky's still
gray, and I stand on the sidewalk until I can't see the van
anymore. A small piece of me feels relieved.

Logan stays and we go out for breakfast before
visiting Ashley. We haven't talked anymore about college, and I'm
surprised to find I'm not worried. The thought of him staying
around another year is pleasantly comfortable.

When Dr.Van Der Campen comes to inject more medicine,
Ashley cries through the heaving. Her eyelashes are falling out,
and dark circles under her eyes give her an alien look.

"How many more days of this?" I ask, squeezing
Ashley's hand as she wretches again.

"Another three. By then, we hope to have enough stem
cells to transplant back in."

He's efficient. Thorough. Professional. But I miss
Dr. Benton and his warmth and the way he winked at Ashley and made
us feel like everything would be all right.

When he leaves we start the wait all over again,

By lunchtime Ashley is asleep again, and Logan
decides to go grab lunch. I'm not hungry, so I stay. Someone should
be here if Ashley wakes up.

A few minutes later someone knocks on the door and
opens it just a crack. I look up, and there is Donna Jean.

"What the--"

"I thought you might need some company. Is it okay if
I come in?" Already, she's dressed in scrubs and gloves, a mask
hanging around her neck. I nod, and she slips the mask up and
closes the door gently behind her so as not to wake Ashley, as if a
bullhorn could do that.

The relief of seeing her is so huge I want to hug
her, but we left things so awkward at the airport the most I can do
is motion for her to sit. "How did you get here?"

"I took a plane this morning, rented a car. Travis
gave me directions."

"He knew?" I wonder if he set it up, or if she
volunteered, but then I realize it doesn't matter. "This must have
cost a fortune, Donna Jean."

She shrugs like it ain't no big deal. "Money's just
money. There's always more. It was important I come."

"Why?" I don't want to sound ungrateful. I'm not
ungrateful, just bewildered.

She sighs, and it comes across as uncomfortable,
which is not like Donna Jean at all. "I don't know. I prayed and
prayed about it, and it just seemed important."

I don't know what to say to this, so I let it sit in
the air until she feels the need to explain further.

"I don't know how to say this. I've been thinking of
how to say this for years, and I just couldn't. I wanted to, but I
didn't know how so I convinced myself it wasn't important."

She isn't looking at me, and I'm suddenly on
edge.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong." She laughs, but not a funny ha-ha
laugh; one of those cynical laughs, like there's some inside joke I
ain't privy to. She glances at Ashley. "How is she?"

"Not good right now. They're giving her drugs to kill
the immune system. It makes her real sick. But in three days they
start the transplant, where they inject her with her own stem
cells. It should get better after that. That's the hope,
anyway."

The silence grows again as we both wonder what to say
next.

She breaks the silence. "You know the day in high
school you walked in on me crying?"

How could I forget? I nod.

She looks everywhere but at me, fidgeting with the
buttons on her skirt. "I was ready to kill myself that day."

"What?" I nearly fall off my chair.

"It's true. I'd snuck a bottle of my dad's sleeping
pills out of the bathroom. I had them there, in my purse. I just
didn't have the nerve. I was sitting in the bathroom praying God
would send a sign for me, that there was some reason to live." She
laughs again, that same cynical laugh that ends in an almost snort.
"Over a stupid boy."

I snag a Kleenex off the nightstand next to Ashley's
bed and hand it to her.

"I'm praying for a sign," she says, sniffing, "and
then you walk in."

I can't think of a more unlikely sign from God than
me.

"Do you remember what you said to me?"

"Don't he know you're Baptist." I say this in almost
a whisper, the memory clear as a Texas spring.

She's surprised I remember. "Yes. Exactly."

"It didn't mean what you thought it meant."

She smiles wryly. "I know. I figured that out later.
But at the time, what I heard was, 'Doesn't he know that God is
more important to you than some silly argument over sex.'"

"That's a lot to get out of "Don't he know you're a
Baptist'."

She smiles at me, finally looking me in the eye. "I
think sometimes we hear what God wants us to hear. And God wanted
me to hear that what he thinks of me is more important than what
someone else thinks of me." She reaches out and takes my hand. "You
saved my life that day, Babs. I don't know. I may never have gone
through with swallowing all those pills. But I do know I wasn't
real happy with God at that moment before you appeared. I didn't
know who I was anymore. I didn't know why I made choices that ended
up breaking my heart. And then you were there, and you basically
reminded me that I made those choices because I believed there were
rights and wrongs. Because I believed God was more important than
what I wanted in a fleeting moment."

"I'm glad I helped." I don't know what else to say.
It was so long ago. What could that mean to her now? Why is she
here today?

She lets go of my hand and wipes her nose again. "I'm
a mess."

"You're beautiful," I say, meaning it. "You've always
been beautiful."

She stands and walks over to the window. "It's so
lovely out today. It's such a shame that you can't open the window
and let the air in."

"Why are you here, Donna Jean?" I don't mean just
today, but every day since this started. "For years we been going
to the same church, and I barely see you. Ashley gets sick, and
you're like some angel. You sit by our side; you bring us stuff
that keeps us from going insane with boredom. You give us a laptop,
which, frankly, is what's saving Ashley's life. And you show up
here, some two thousand miles away, to tell me you remember some
conversation in a bathroom near twenty years ago. Why?"

She's still staring out the window, but she answers
without hesitating. "When you came running out of the airport you
asked, 'What if it doesn't work?' What you really meant, I think,
is 'What if God doesn't answer my prayers?'" She turns to look at
me, and the intensity of her eyes makes me look away.

"It's the same thing. This working is my prayer."

"Yes." It doesn't seem to be where she was going, but
she stops here. "Well, I thought I might fix y'all some dinner
tonight. How would that be?"

"Dinner?"

"Yes. You know, that meal you eat when the sky gets
dark."

"How are you going to fix dinner?"

"The hotel has functioning kitchens in every room.
Weren't you wondering why there was a fridge and oven next to your
bed?"

I look over at Ashley, hesitating.

"She'll be fine. I'll fix it, call you, and you can
come over and eat, and then come back. I'll clean dishes and
everything. Logan can help me."

I try to think of the last meal I ate that wasn't
fast food. "Okay."

"Okay." She heads to the door and then looks over her
shoulder before leaving. "It's all right that I'm here, isn't
it?"

"Yes. It's very all right." I wish I were the hugging
type. I want to reach out and show her how much it means, but the
distance from me to the door is too much, the contact too intimate.
"Thank you. Again. For everything."

She nods and smiles and leaves as quietly as she
came.

The conversation rolls around in my head, and I'm
struck by how little we truly know of people. How many people in
church, sitting next to Donna Jean in high school all fancy and
popular and perfectly put together, would imagine the pills tucked
inside her purse? Who would see Logan with his multicolored Mohawk
and gold hoop earring and imagine he scored almost perfect on his
SATs, and sits on his sister's bed and reads her romance stories
out of the teen magazines? Who would see me bow my head in church
and pray alongside others and guess that I'm speaking into the
silence, words as hollow as the hole in my heart?

When I get to the hotel at 6:00, the refrigerator's
full and the pantry is busting its seams. Bread and deli meats,
eggs, cheese, bagels, cereal, peanut butter, jelly, cream cheese.
Lord Almighty she's even managed to find us grits. She's made a
list of possible breakfasts and dinners and the ingredients and
hung them on the fridge with a Baltimore magnet covered in bright
orange crabs.

"This is some primo food," Logan says, licking the
spoon as Donna Jean puts a pan of brownie batter in the oven. The
smell of garlic and tomatoes flood the room.

"It's just spaghetti," she says, taking a wooden
spoon and stirring the pot on the stove. "They don't give you a lot
of pots to work with."

"She made enough for leftovers," Logan says, sounding
giddy with the thought of so much food.

On the table sits a bowl of salad, with greens and
tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots and red bell pepper.

Logan carries a bowl of garlic bread and sets it next
to the salad. "We can eat like kings for a week on this." He steals
a small piece of the bread and munches on it as he tries to get a
taste of the sauce. Donna Jean playfully bats at his hand, and he
grins at her. Their interaction stabs at my heart. In all my worry
about losing Ashley, I wonder what I've lost with Logan.

He's famished, and while Donna Jean and I banter
about the area and the shopping center nearby, Logan inhales ten
meals worth of spaghetti and bread.

For weeks and weeks, Travis and I have hardly eaten.
I've thought Logan wasn't hungry either. It never occurs to me
maybe he needs to.

When he gets up to do the dishes, I notice how tall
he is. He's shot up the last couple months and practically towers
over us. And he's so skinny. A beanpole. It reminds me of how fast
Ashley thinned out. Suddenly I'm wondering how much water he drank
at dinner. If he's been drinking a lot lately, whether he's seemed
more tired than usual, and if he's disappearing to go to the
bathroom more than usual.

"Are you feeling all right?" I ask out of the
blue.

"Sure," he says, raising his eyebrows at me.
"Why?"

"You're thin."

"I'm fine, Mom." He grabs a brownie off the plate and
stuffs it in his mouth to prove it. "Just hungry."

"It's all right," Donna Jean says, laying her hand on
my shoulder as if she knows exactly what's going through my head.
Not the diabetes part, the bad parent part. The part where I
realize I've so neglected my son in the quest to help my daughter
that I don't even feed him proper.

"Yeah, mom. It's all right." He grins and takes
another brownie. "I met a few kids at the pool yesterday. They were
going to play basketball at the court out back tonight. Can I
go?"

"I was going back to the hospital," I say.

"Oh." He struggles to keep the disappointment out of
his voice.

"No. You go. I just mean, I'm going back for a few
hours. But you'll be okay here, right?"

He brightens again, and I think of how much he has
sacrificed the last few months. School. Friends. The band. His job.
Last week they took senior pictures and he missed that. At the very
least he needs a huge meal and an hour of hoops with some
strangers.

Donna Jean and I clean up the dishes together, even
though she keeps insisting I go back to the clinic. "I made the
mess. I promised to clean it. Go be with Ashley."