Some Kind of Normal

by Heidi Willis

"Do I get to know what you got?"

  He hands the envelope to me, and I move my chair under the dim light. It takes a moment to figure out how the scores are labeled but when I do, I practically stop breathing.

  Reading: 790

  Mathematics: 770

  Writing: 790

  "Logan! That's practically perfect!" I try to remember from the SAT prep books he used what the likelihood of this is, and all I can remember is that it's close to none. "How in the world. . ."

  Logan smiles, not an arrogant, I-told-you-so smile but a content one. "Not bad for a hick kid, huh?"

  I whack him on the arm with the envelope. "Don't you dare call yourself a hick kid. Look at this! You could get in anywhere you want! I bet you beat out every kid in Texas!"

  "It's not a competition, Mom."

  "Of course it is!"

  "I'm not going, Mom." He can't possibly be saying what I think.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm not going to college. At least not right away."

  "Oh yes you are. Do you realize what your Dad and I would do to be able to go back and go to college? Heck, I might just settle for finishing high school. This is the opportunity for you to be something. You can make something of yourself."

  "I already am something."

  I feel like he's hit me in the chest. "Of course you are. I didn't mean it that way. . ."

  "You did. I know what you think. You think to be someone important you have to go to school and get some degree and know big words and do math most people don't even understand. You think being someone important is moving out of the small town you grow up in and getting some fancy house in a city and having lots of money and a string of letters behind your name."

  "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.

  ~~~~

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  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. Ex
actly."

  "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."

  I take a towel out of a drawer and dry the glasses as she washes them. "It's good, actually, to get a break. I mean, I want to be with her all the time, but it's so tiring. This feels good: eating and talking and doing dishes. Even in a hotel. It feels . . . normal. I miss that."

  "I can't even begin to imagine," she says, handing me a plate with suds still clinging to it.

  ~~~~

  She stays with us for three more days. She fixes breakfast and dinner for us every day, and Logan slaps together sandwiches for us at noon. She washes Ashley's wispy hair and braids it for her so it don't get tangled, and reads books to her while I sneak out and do some laundry. Ashley seems to not be so sick anymore when Dr. Van Der Campen gives her the medicine, but she still sleeps more often than not.

  Dr. Wong visits every day as well, taking more blood to test. He announces on the last day
of Donna Jean's visit that Ashley must have super-marrow, because he got a very good sample of stem cells which are thriving in the lab and should be good to transplant as soon as Dr. Van Der Campen gives the word. Dr. Van Der Campen, however, is less than eager to move forward as fast as he predicted, although he don't say why. He uses his stethoscope to listen to her lungs several times a day, frowning but saying nothing. I suspect it might have something to do with the other two trial patients and how they're doing, but he don't say. Sometimes it's better not to know, so I don't ask.

  It turns out that two of the boys Logan plays basketball with each night are brothers of a girl about Ashley's age going through a trial at Hopkins for cancer. They don't talk about it much, I don't think, but there's comfort in knowing they'll be there every night to hang out with.

  We adjust. It amazes me how fast each new hotel becomes our home, how fast the routines become routine. And when Donna Jean says goodbye, the jolt in the new normal is significant.

  I'm not afraid to hug her. I am still not sure why she came, but if she says God told her to, that's good enough for me. Having another woman to talk to has been a blessing, and I hold her tight a tad too long before letting her get in the car. I lean over into the open window. "Thank you for everything again. I don't know what we would have done without you."

  "Starved," Logan shouts from behind me as he passes to get our car for the drive to Hopkins.

  When he's out of hearing distance, I reach in through the window as though I want to touch her, but can't quite do it. "I mean it. I'm not as strong as you think." I think about the bowed head and the mouthing of the songs in church. "I'm not really the person everyone thinks."

  She reaches out and takes my hand. "You're not the person you think."

  I blink back tears. "When I said that wanting this trial to work was the same thing as wanting God to answer my prayers, you didn't agree."

  "I never said that." She lets go of my hand. I feel the cool of the AC on my face even as the sticky heat of the day plasters my hair to my neck.

  "I'm asking. What is it you think I want?"

  "I can't answer that Babs. Only you know that. If it were me, I'd be praying for God to save her."