Some Kind of Normal (9 page)

"Can you do the go round for me," I ask him, nodding
at the game.

He shrugs but, God love him, he don't roll his eyes.
I kiss Ashley's head, and Logan takes my place in the chair, sizing
up the board and his loot with an expressionless face.

In the hall down by the nursing station the ladies
are sitting in the waiting room. I can't tell if they're praying or
gossiping. Probably a little of both. I don't see Pastor Joel.

Brenda seizes on me. "Is everything all right?"

I stare because I can't believe the words coming out
her mouth.

"No, Brenda, they're not all right." Janise steps in
and puts her arm around me, more to keep me from lunging than to
comfort me. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why
these women bug the heck out of me so much.

"We know this is really hard. What can we do to
help?"

Suddenly, I'm tired of all this. I am tired of
fighting these women who have driven all this way to be with me. I
am tired of trying to make a wall between us when I've been on the
other side so often. I look at their faces, and even though I want
to see the false sympathy, there ain't nothing there but love. I
feel ashamed.

"The doctor gave me lots of information I don't quite
get. Maybe you could help me sort it out."

They all immediately jump on that, anxious to do
something other than bring gifts we can't eat and plan church
socials. I say I need to get all the pamphlets back in the room,
and I tell them to meet me at the cafeteria.

When I get back to Ashley's room, I stop short at the
door.

Logan's sitting on the bed with Ashley, and they're
laughing so hard I see tears in Ashley's eyes. She's bunched up
like she's got the stomach pains, and Logan throws out one-liners
that make her gasp for breath.

I'm all at once standing at the doorway of Logan's
bedroom when they were just young'uns, buried in the dark of night
in Logan's bunk beds. Despite me painting a whole room of pink
butterflies for Ashley, she still sneaked in every night to sleep
with Logan. As I'd head to bed, I'd hear them giggling in the
black, trading jokes that revolved around body sounds and stuffing
the blankets in their mouths to keep me from hearing. Of course I
heard, and I'd stomp in and demand Ashley go back to her room and
the laughter to stop, because school was coming early in the
morning. She'd slink past me, but in the morning I'd find her back
in his room, curled up in the bottom bunk.

One night she stopped going in, and I wished I'd
never sent her back.

I haven't seen them pass a word between them for
barely a year other than to grumble at each other over the dinner
table. I want to be happy they've found each other again. Mostly
I'm jealous.

I back out of the room without a sound and return to
the nurse's desk where I say I've lost some of the pamphlets Dr.
Benton gave me. She flips through a file cabinet and produces
another stack like magic.

I sit in an orange plastic chair like my middle
school had in their cafeteria, and I go through the motions of
explaining diabetes to women with blank looks on their faces.
Already, I'm using words they don't know, like I've entered a
private club with its own language. I'd be surprised by how easily
the new words slip from me but I'm numb, and they're just
words.

They stay about an hour, nodding and looking through
the papers, asking polite questions like "Can she eat cherry
cobbler?" and "How do you know how much insulin to take for a
chicken potpie?" They arrange a list of people who will feed the
fish until we get home and water the flowers. Since we're all here,
there's nothing else to do at home, and they all realize there
ain't much else for them to do here. So one makes an excuse to go,
and they all follow. One by one they hug me and kiss my cheek and
say goodbye.

"We're praying God will heal, Ashley," Brenda
says.

"But what if he don't," I say. "Maybe it's not his
will to heal her."

I might as well have let loose a string of cuss words
for all the shock. "Why would he not?"

I don't know this answer. God knows I'm praying for
the answer, because I don't think he plans on healing her. The
peace that he
isn't
going to heal her sits like stone in my
stomach. When they leave I'm alone in a cafeteria full of other
people who are alone.

~~~~

In the room, Logan's put away the monopoly game and
is sitting in his totally-bored position on the daybed reading a
book the size of the New York city phonebook. Ashley is chattering
with Travis, who won't make eye contact with me.

"The game's over already?"

"Logan wiped me out in a matter of minutes," she
said, her voice all bubbly. "Look what Pastor Joel left me!" On her
lap lay dozens of homemade cards. "From the kids at church! The
youth group and a bunch of Awana kids got together last night and
made them for me." She is so excited she's nearly bursting. She
holds a few out, and I take them and look through them. Some are
just pictures, the kind Ashley and Logan drew before they realized
that nothing they drew looked like what it was supposed to. Some
are obviously from the youth group, with scripture verses
handwritten in everything from chicken scratch to calligraphy.

"I'd say you look pretty loved," I muse, opening each
one and pretending to read and admire them, though I can barely see
through my watery eyes.

"Especially Brian Lee." This comes from Logan, who,
although he don't even look up, manages to smirk behind the pages
of his book.

"Shut up, Lo!" Ashley's cheeks flush, and I'm
irrationally relieved to have the two like cats and dogs again.

"Brian Lee made you a card?"

Brian Lee is in the grade above Ashley, which makes
him a high schooler, and I've heard her giggle on the phone with
her friends about him when she thinks I'm not listening. I suspect
he's the one that instigated the interest in lip-gloss.

"The whole youth group did. Not just him." She sticks
her tongue out at Logan, who buries himself further in his book.
"I'm sure they all had to," she adds lamely.

I hand the cards back to her, and she shuffles them
in the pile on her lap and begins to go through them again.

"So," I say, "Pastor Joel brought them by?" I try to
sound innocent but Travis knows me well enough, and he suddenly
finds some need to wash his hands in the lavatory. He washes for a
long time. Ashley murmurs something akin to consent but is now lost
to me for conversation.

Ash with her cards, Logan with his book, and Travis
avoiding me with his near-to-godliness hands. My entire family is
in one room, and we might as well be blind and deaf for all the
interaction.

Travis comes out drying his hands on a paper towel
and, without looking at me, says, "I talked to Joel. We're
good."

This is as much as I'm likely to get from him. I'd
bet anything they didn't actually talk. Girls talk. Men nod curtly
at each other, slap each other on the back and ask how the Rangers
are doing this season.

Still, they'll be some hearty praying at the deacons'
meeting tonight with Travis's name attached.

~~~~

In the afternoon Ashley is officially unhooked from
her lifeline of insulin and saline, and Dr. Benton presents us with
our very own box of syringes. There are enough to draw all the
heroine addicts in Austin to our small room. Logan tries to sneak
out, but the good doctor tongue-lashes him into a chair and tells
us we all need to know how to do this. He produces an orange and a
vial of saline, which he says will neither harm Ashley nor the
orange, and proceeds to show us what he assures us will become
second-nature.

Pull air into the needle. Put air into the vial. Turn
vial upside down and draw medicine into the needle. Pull needle out
of vial.

This part is simple, even for me.

He holds the syringe like a dart, and I have a sudden
visual image of Logan using them for target practice on our
dartboard in the garage. I give him my best "Don't even think of
it" look, and he gives me that "what in the world are you talking
about" look, and even though we are in a hospital holding needles,
this strikes me as so terribly normal I start to laugh. I turn it
into a cough and nod for Dr. Benton to go on.

Quick as lightening he stabs the orange and depresses
the plunger. Then he hands it to Ashley.

She forgets to fill the syringe with air and has
trouble getting the saline out. "It's pressurized," Dr. Benton says
as she struggles to pull the plunger back. "There has to be a
certain volume in the vial. If you don't put air in first to take
the place of the insulin you take out, it gets harder and harder to
get the insulin out. Try again."

She does it right the second time and triumphantly
holds up the full needle. "Now the orange," he says. She holds it
like he showed her, but she's scared of stabbing it too hard,
though I'm not sure she's scared of hurting the orange and more
likely she's scared of doing this to herself. She places the tip
gently on the skin and tried to press it in slowly. The needle
bends.

"You gotta do it quick," he says, taking it from her
and putting it in a red plastic jar with skull and crossbones on
it. "Slow is painful. Fast is fabulous." He winks at her.
"Again."

She does it again, and then again, and then once more
before she passes it to Travis. Over the next half hour we all
manage to mangle a handful of syringes and destroy the orange to a
holey pulp and pop Ashley's illusion that we can be her backups if
she finds herself unable to poke herself.

When lunch arrives, we're required to calculate the
carbs and insulin, and Dr. Benton passes the syringe and the real
vial of insulin to Ashley. Something akin to panic flickers but
disappears behind her resolve. She takes the needle and draws out
the insulin, looking to Dr. Benton who nods his consent, and then
she plunges it, eyes closed, into her abdomen.

We're all holding our breaths. Ashley opens her eyes
and looks around. "Is that it?"

Dr. Benton laughs. "That's it."

She smiles wide. "It didn't hurt at all."

Dr. Benton moves the tray over her bed. It's no
country fried chicken and cornbread, but for the first time in days
Ashley looks famished. "Go ahead and eat," he says, handing her the
fork. "It's not going to kill you."

He tousles her hair and winks. And she, who blushes
at a card from Brian Lee, winks back.

~~~~

When I was eight I spent a lazy Saturday lying on my
front porch watching a spider spinning his web across the
threshold. He climbed up the frame a foot or so and dropped,
catching the breeze across to the other side, glimmering silk
flowing out behind him. Dropping to the bottom, he attached another
strand and then climbed back up, 'til he had a lopsided triangle.
He did this over and over, each time adding new thread and
attaching it with a quick little hook of his back leg. In less than
ten minutes, he had himself a fair home waiting for a bug to fly
through for lunch. What he got was my mama throwing open the screen
door and asking if I was going to fritter away the day like some
privileged kid or go weed the garden like she'd asked me twice.

I never took much time to reflect before now, but all
these hours in the hospital without laundry and dishes and
chauffeurin' people around, I got lots of time to think. For some
reason that comes to mind several times. I think we all ain't
nothing but spiders, spinning a web across a doorway. All we see is
the living we're building for ourselves, not realizing that at any
minute the world might throw open its door and walk right over us.
And all we've made is lost.

And what I think is I never noticed how fragile life
is before this drive home. I'm suddenly waiting for the inevitable
wrecking of my life. We're one crazy driver away from a crash.
We're one Luby's away from a gun-wielding lunatic. We're one flu
away from disease, one miscalculated donut away from death.

Even with the hospital in the rearview mirror, I
can't believe we're going home. I can't believe we passed the
tests. For three days we calculated the carbs in Ashley's food. We
figured the insulin needed. We learned how to put new lancets in
the insulin pen Ashley will use for three of the four shots a day.
We successfully poked the orange. They patted us on the back,
handed us a fistful of prescriptions, and sent us out the door.

Still, I'd have stayed in the hospital another year
for the security of knowing someone would be there if 'n we messed
up.

I let Ashley pick out the music, and she enjoys the
freedom of sitting in the front seat and flipping through the
stations. She finds one playing country and settles back to listen,
staring out the window all quiet-like. The dry grass fields pass
like a memory, and we drive without talking, aware of our tentative
hold on life.

She breaks the silence with a question. "If I'm on a
plane that goes down over the ocean, you know, like on that TV
show, I'm going to die aren't I? Because I need insulin. I won't
even have the chance to eat bugs and build a fire to try and
survive, will I?"

I've been expecting the reality of living with this
disease to hit her eventually, but this ain't the question I
expect. I expect something along the lines of, "Can I still eat
pizza with the kids in the band after football games?" I expect,
"If I don't eat the mashed potatoes, can I have the Oreos, 'cause
they're the same amount of carbs." I don't expect no plane
crash.

"I think that's the silliest thing I've ever heard,"
I say. "If you're on a plane that goes down over the ocean, you got
bigger problems than insulin."