by Heidi Willis
I look around and see heads nodding. Ashley ended up standing next to Brian Lee, and now their hands are clasped. It makes me smile. I remember trying to figure ways to get close to Travis, way back when. Some excuse to talk to him, touch him, without it needing to mean anything.
That seems like a long time ago. And not so long ago.
Pastor Joel is finishing up, about how God has a plan for each of us, and he's quoting some part of the Bible that must be important 'cause lots of people are saying it with him, and then he's done and everyone says Amen. The group parts like the Red Sea, adults on one side and kids on the other. I'm wishing Janise were here. The Lutheran church in our town don't seem to be big into the politicking the way the Baptists are, and I miss that about being Lutheran.
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.
~~~~
Chapter Eleven
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.
There was a brawl in the locker room. Logan and some other kid. Technically, no punches were thrown and both students were deemed to be at fault, so the coach chose to take the matter in his own hands rather than send it up through the ranks to the principal. Both students received detentions to be served cleaning the equipment closet and washing uniforms after school, and both were indefinitely suspended from the team.
I turn it over, but there's nothing else. There's no date. I try to remember the last time I saw Logan play ball. Two weeks before the hospital, maybe. Two weeks of deception. How's the practices? I've asked. Same ole, same ole, he says back. He didn't tell me he was flunking PE the first quarter when he kept forgetting his gym clothes. He lied about forging my name to the driver's ed permission form. And this morning he walked out of the bathroom with a royal blue Mohawk.
Enough is enough, I think. This time, I'm gonna wring his neck.
I scrounge through the junk drawer to find the coach's phone number, when the phone rings. It's the middle school.
"Mrs. Babcock? We need you to come down to the school."
Instantly, I forget about Logan. "Is Ashley okay?" Suddenly my world is dropping out from under me.
"Not really. We need you to come right now."
I already have the keys in my hands, and I'm hunting for my purse. "Did you call the hospital? Has the ambulance come? Should I just go there?"
There is silence at the other end of the line for a minute. "Ashley's fine, Mrs. Babcock."
I stop my flight out the door. "You just said she wasn't."
"She's not sick or hurt, if that' s what you mean. She's in trouble. We need you to come pick her up." And in case I was wondering she adds, "The expulsion kind of trouble."
I'm so relieved Ashley ain't lying dead somewhere that I'm in the car before the word expulsion registers. I've feared this call but never expected it to come for Ashley. Logan's a different matter, of course. He's clashed with school since eighth grade when he created an explosion in chemistry class that sent the entire school into evacuation mode. Then t
here was the protest he began over the quality of cafeteria food, complete with a sit-in that resulted in a school-wide ban on recess for a week. Not to mention this year's adventures. If there was any form of authority, Logan was there to rebel against it. Trouble always follows him.
But never Ashley.
I'm between scared and mad by the time I march into the office and demand an explanation. Ashley sees me from the corner where she's been banished and lunges at me, throwing her arms around me and bursting into tears.
The principal's door opens, and she motions for us to go in. The secretary makes a point of not making eye contact with us.
"What in the world is this about?"
She motions to a chair. "Have a seat."
"No, I will not have a seat, Laura. What is going on?" Ashley's leaning on me still, shaking hard and digging her nails into my arm. I pry them off and notice how sweaty they are.
"Ashley's brought drug paraphernalia to school." She lets this sink in and then deals what she thinks is the final blow. "You know the school has a zero tolerance policy. That is automatic expulsion."
This is so absurd I laugh.
"I assure you this is not funny, Mrs. Babcock."
"Jiminy, Laura, call me Babs. We've known each other since grade school."
She opens the desk drawer and pulls out the insulin pen, the needle still attached. "Did you know she had this in her backpack?"
I am no longer laughing. "As a matter of fact, I put it there." Suddenly, I know Ashley isn't shaking because she's scared.
"Did you take the insulin?" I'm in her face, holding her damp hair out of her eyes and gripping her head. She nods. "How much? How much did you take and did you eat anything?"
She shook her head. "One and a half units, I think. Then they made me leave the lunch room."
"Where is your lunch?" I'm now completely ignoring Laura, who's telling me to calm down and sit. "Where's your lunch? Is it in your back pack or still in the cafeteria?" As I'm asking, I'm hunting through my purse, throwing items on the desk until I finally just dump the entire contents searching for a tick tack, a life-saver, something with sugar. "She needs food. Where is her lunch?" I grab a can of Coke off the desk. I pop the top open and hand it to Ashley. "Drink it." I don't have any idea how many carbs are in the can, or how much she is drinking, but I'll worry about that later.
