A Different Kind of Normal

by Cathy Lamb

Every summer Brooke, Caden, and I came up from Hollywood and watched Grandma Violet work. Her patients cried, they talked as if no one had listened to them before, they told her their aches and pains, in both body and heart. She listened, she soothed, she healed.

  She did not hesitate to send them to a doctor when needed. For example, when Davis Castille crawled to her on his knees because his appendix had burst, she called an ambulance. “I want you to take it out, Violet,” he pleaded, pale white. “You do it. I don’t trust them damn doctors. Stealing my money, that’s what it’s about, all for a bad stomachache.”

  When Lizzie Hasten’s son’s arm had split to the bone from a tractor accident, same thing. “Get out your sewing kit and sew him up, Violet!” Lizzie said. “He wants you to use red thread to make him seem manly, isn’t that right, Reggie?”

  When Ruby Black had shingles, she came to Grandma Violet for the “magic herbal tea.” Grandma Violet made her a cup before driving her to the doctors. “It wasn’t the medicine that cured me,” she told anyone who would listen. “It was Violet’s magic herbal tea.”

  The magic herbal tea was soon in great demand.

  “What I do, dears,” she told Brooke, Caden, and me one summer, her blue eyes huge behind her glasses, “is help to heal the heart and the head, the passions, the pain, loss, grief, frustration, disappointment, and anger. All of those emotions will cause your body to fail in one way or another. Joy lifts the spirit and sorrow weighs it down. Joy gives health, sorrow brings illness.” She held our hands in hers. She smelled like a blend of nutmeg and vanilla. “And I do a few Silent Spells, to help things along, spells I learned from my mother and her mother, all the way back to Faith and Grace, and their mothers, the twins Henrietta and Elizabeth, immensely talented witches.”

  We nodded, still in blind awe as children at the thought of our magic, chanting, spell-throwing witch-ancestors.

  I wanted to be a healer, too.

  I became an emergency room nurse first and worked to heal people who were sometimes on the brink of death. Most of the time we saved them, sometimes we didn’t. That job certainly gave me nerves of steel and a deep background in trauma. But I also understood grief. I lost Grandpa Pete before Grandma Violet; my father, Shel, on that terrible night; and Brooke to drugs. Your own grief helps you understand others’ grief, therefore you’re in a unique position to help.

  So I became a hospice nurse. My job isn’t to heal my patients physically, they’re past that point, but to make sure they’re comfortable and getting as much quality time out of the rest of their lives as possible. I offer medicines for various symptoms and problems that come up with the terminally ill, and pain and anxiety management. I listen, comfort, help, and explain various aspects of the patient’s health and what will happen in the future.

  Another reason I became a hospice nurse was because I crave raw, honest relationships and have zero patience for superficiality.

  When you are working with people who are dying, all pretenses are off. There is no shallowness, no silliness. I don’t have the patience for relationships that float and skim across the top of human existence, relationships that have no depth or that are based on shopping, manicures, gossip, men, clubbing, etc. I want real relationships.

  I had found, after Tate was born, and after his critical medical emergencies, that many people annoyed me. I could not relate to their problems: bad hair days, a fight with a husband, a jealous sister, a kid who didn’t get into the college she wanted, an extra twenty pounds to lose, an irritating cold that produced endless whining, a PTC president who is an obsessive control freak, a fender bender, etc. These were not problems to me. They were vague irritants. They were everyday life.

  A kid who has medical issues is a problem. Someone critically ill is a problem. Someone dying is a problem. A kid on drugs is a problem. I could no longer relate to many people. I found myself rolling my eyes, sometimes in front of people, when they would complain about one ridiculous thing or another, as if they had a problem.

  I snapped at people, too. One day I said, “You know, Randi, no one wants to hear about your mother-in-law anymore. Stop obsessing about her. For God’s sake, is that all you have to worry about, you lucky whiner?”

  Another time a gal named Deborah was gossiping, and I said, “Come on, Deborah. Is that all you have going on in your life? You have all this spare time and the only way you can think to fill it is to judge other people?”

  When I was an emergency room nurse, an administrator who sat on her ass all day was complaining about how hard she worked. “It’s a job, Cheryl, you get that? It’s a job. There are a whole bunch of people who have no job and therefore no health insurance. You think you have problems? Go and talk to the lady in room 489. Then you’ll hear problems.”

  Many people, all of a sudden, seemed to me to feel entitled to have an easy life, as if it were a guarantee, as if they had done something to deserve it. If something went slightly wrong, it was an affront, shocking, horrible. They came off seeming spoiled, sheltered, and petty to me.

  I had lost family to long-term illness and tragedy. I had a sister on drugs and a kid with severe medical problems. Nothing in my life was light and frilly. It was all serious. I was, I am, a serious and rather impatient person.

  Hospice patients, hospice nurses, they are right in the thick of that seriousness, they are in the thick of what is important in life. I think that’s another reason that I relate to Ethan. He gets it, too. He gets what’s important and what’s not. He gets life and death.

  I have loved being a hospice nurse. It is not an easy job, but it is an honor. It is a privilege. It’s a calling.

  That said, I don’t know how much longer I can do it. This last year, it’s been wearing on me in a way I can’t explain. I won’t say that it’s killing me, that’s an unfunny pun, but I have taken to eating red cinnamon Gummi Bears for comfort and my heart sometimes beats too fast. It’s stress. Stress from the dying.

  I have watched many people die and I remember all of them.

  Sometimes I think I need more life in my life.

  “Hello, darling!” My mother’s cheery, modulated voice rang through the phone.

  “Toodle, toodle, Jaden!” Sammy Zieker called out. My mother had put me on speakerphone on her end. Sammy Zieker is Mrs. Evelyn Carrodine on Foster’s Village. She is the grand dame with all the money, and my mother is slowly poisoning her to get her money. Mrs. Carrodine has a son, Alistair Carrodine, with whom my mother is having a tempestuous affair. When Mrs. Carrodine dies, my mother will ditch her husband and marry Alistair and be rich!

  “Jaden, my dear!” Mickel O’Dierno called out, aka Alistair Carrodine.

  “Hello, Mom, hello, Sammy, hello, Mickel! How are you all?”

  “Splendid, my dear! We’re in the middle of the poisoning but the lighting is off, so we’ve a few moments to tittle-tattle,” Sammy said. “Your mother brought the Naughty Brownies you baked to the set, and now I know nirvana exists in a heavenly sphere.”

  “They were nirvana?” I needed another compliment.

  “We love them! Life is now grand,” Mickel called out. In his real life Mickel has been married for twenty-two years and has six kids. “I’ve had four. It makes for a better day since your mother is plotting to kill Sammy.”

  “Murder and brownies, don’t they go well together?” I asked.

  “Oh yes!” my mother agreed, cackling evilly. “It’s a sweet murder! Chocolate and poisoning!”

  “I couldn’t agree more, honey nut, and I’m the one being slowly murdered,” Sammy said. Sammy is on her third husband in real life. She is seventy-five. “Third time was the charm!” Her current husband is eleven years younger than herself and still “frisky as a colt! I ride him, the bucking bronco.”

  “You must send us cinnamon rolls, though, dear,” Mickel said. “I have to have another one. They’re the best! The best!”

  “It was like having a cinnamon roll orgasm,” Sammy drawled. “With melted powde
red sugar.”

  “Hey! I need one for my wife,” Mickel said. “With six kids she could use a cinnamon roll orgasm.”

  We chatted and laughed.

  “I love the violence on Foster’s Village, it pulls it all out of my system,” my mother told me later. “Witches have that streak, as you know.”

  I laughed. I don’t believe in any of that.

  No, I don’t.

  I don’t think so.

  9

  I received Tate’s PSAT scores.

  He did not miss one question. Not one.

  I showed him his scores in his experiment room. He pushed back the goggles he was wearing, a row of glass tubes with liquids in front of him. “Superb work, Einstein, and please don’t blow up the house.”

  He glanced at his PSAT scores. “I would never blow up the house because I know what I’m doing.”

  Tate’s Experiment Room had loads of science stuff. Books, beakers, and experiment tables with all sorts of goo, liquids, and models. There were also graphs, charts, and posters, almost all of them about the human brain, plus life-sized models of brains. He had a collection of DVDs featuring brain surgeons and brain operations. He had been on robotics teams so that paraphernalia was around, too, plus an engine, old radios, computers, routers, electric gizmos, and stuff I could not name, plus his weight set.

  “I’d rather have flunked the PSAT if it meant I could play basketball.”

  “I’d rather be in the Bahamas.” I tossed my hair back, the tiny crystals brushing my ear. “Life’s tough. Want to play chess?”

  “No, you green- and blue-eyed mean mother.”

  “Come on, Tate.”

  He snapped the goggles back on. Because of the size of his head, he’d had to re-engineer them. He’d done an excellent job using an elastic strip. “Mom, I love you, but I don’t want to talk to you right now unless it’s about my trying out for the basketball team.”

  “I know you don’t want to talk to me, Tate. I get it. Do you think I haven’t noticed the silence the last few days?” I had missed him. I had missed his interesting conversation, his laughter, his jokes, his hugs . . .

  “There are hardly any more weeks until tryouts, and I want to practice with the guys.”

  “I’m not discussing this with you again.”

  “Okay, fine. But I’m not going to discuss chess with you, either.”

  “You don’t have to discuss it. Come play it with me.”

  “No, Mom. I’m going to stay up here experimenting with chemicals because I want to learn how they react, and later I want to read some scientific papers on why the universe keeps expanding when gravity is pulling us in. You can go back downstairs and cut up all your herbs by yourself.”

  “I’d rather talk to you.”

  “Then let me play.”

  I watched him for a few more seconds. “I love you, Tate.”

  “I love you, too. Me being mad at you doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I do. But I need space because I’m so mad at you I want to cry.”

  “You want to cry?” Sadness settled even heavier on me.

  “Yeah, Mom, I do. I want to cry. I want to be on a team. I don’t want to spend all my time playing imaginary basketball outside and hanging around in my experiment room by myself. I want to make friends if I can, shoot baskets, wear a uniform, and be a regular kid. Can you leave now?”

  “Okay, Tate.”

  “And I still want you to find my Other Mother so I can meet her. She can get to know me through my blog, too.”

  I glanced outside his window. It was a chilly night. It had hailed earlier. It would be a cold winter.

  The next day, I received the same cold attitude from Tate.

  He played basketball on our court. He would not talk to me, except to say that he loved me and wanted to play basketball.

  The day after that we repeated the whole scene yet again. I felt like I’d dropped into a pit of sadness. I loved that kid, loved him a million times over, and I do not do silence well.

  Over the weekend, the silent treatment continued. I even offered to set up a weekend trip to the mountains.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Please, Tate.”

  “No. I want to play basketball.”

  “Go outside and play on our court.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Mom, and you know it. I want to try out. I’ll probably get cut, but I want to try.”

  “Let’s go to the mountains. It’s snowing—”

  “No. I’m going to my experiment room to see if I can concoct a potion to alter your brain and make you reasonable, and then I’m going to take apart a radio piece by piece and put it together again. When I turn it back on, it will play songs about mean moms.”

  He stomped up the steps.

  On Tuesday I arrived home late from work.

  Tate was not on the stools at our butcher-block island eating his second lunch. He was not in the nook doing homework for his online advanced statistics class or listening to a lecture about brains on TV. He was not at the long, wooden table that Grandma Violet used for her herbs and that Faith’s husband, Jack, built.

  He was not practicing basketball with his imaginary team on our court or working on his blog.

  I knew where he was.

  “Darn that kid.” I grabbed my keys and headed out to the high school.

  From my parked car I watched Tate leave the high school gym with a bunch of boisterous, laughing boys, including his best friends, Anthony and Milt.

  I was steamin’, boilin’ mad. I had said no and there he was, completely disobeying me.

  I was trying to protect him. He was being a stupid teenager who would not acknowledge the unique, personal threats to his life and health. He didn’t get it because he didn’t want to get it.

  I opened my car door and started to scramble out. I would let him have it. A millisecond before shrieky recriminations left my throat, I stopped . . . and watched.

  The boys were patting Tate on the back, laughing, talking. I heard one of them say, “You’re frickin’ bionic, Tate. Man!”

  And another one said, “Dude, you’re sick and awesome.”

  “You’re on Varsity, for sure. Where you been all these years?”

  “You made all your friggin’ shots, every friggin’ one! How you doin’ that, man? You’re trippin’.”

  Another guy shot out of the gym doors and grabbed Tate from behind. Tate hoisted him up on his back.

  And Tate, my dear Tate, Tate of the big head and slanted eyes, had an expression on his face that I’d never seen before.

  Unadulterated, free-flowing joy.

  It lit up his face like a star.

  Anthony and Milt grabbed him, pushing him good-naturedly. He was part of the group. Part of the gang. Part of a bunch of boys who had just finished practicing basketball.

  That was what he’d wanted.

  I watched him smile, the happiest, most glorious smile I’d ever seen in my life.

  Until he saw me.

  Then the smile rapidly disappeared and he froze, a stalked animal who knows they’re being watched and probably about to be eaten.

  The other boys stopped the roughhousing and stared, probably frightened by the stormy expression on my face.

  “Get in the car, Tate. Now.” I was still furious.

  “Mom, I was tight, please, Mom, you should have seen me!”

  “I don’t need to see you. I know what I would see.” I slammed the front door of the house. Our trip home from the high school had been in total silence on my end. Tate had tried to talk, but I’d held a hand up so he wouldn’t speak and I could rein in Witch Mavis. “You are not going to tryouts again tomorrow, Tate. You are not to go. Do you hear me?”

  “But, Mom—”

  I slammed cabinets in the kitchen, looking for ingredients for dinner. He followed me. I couldn’t even meet those bright blue eyes of his. I knew he was devastated. It didn’t mean his disobedience was okay. I put the scene with the othe
r boys out of my head. “My job isn’t to keep you safe until you play your next basketball game, Tate, my job is to keep you safe for years. Your life is not worth a basketball game.”

  “It’s more than that, Mom. Don’t you get it?” He shoved his backpack on the butcher-block island as I popped three red cinnamon Gummi Bears into my mouth. “I can hang out with the other guys. I can be more than a weird-looking, bigheaded genius. I’m an outcast.”

  “You are not. I hear that the kids like you—”

  “Some of them are nice to me, but that’s because they’ve known me since kindergarten, and also because Milt and Anthony are really cool and popular, and that helps, and some are nice because they feel sorry for me, which makes me want to blow, and others are nice because they’re trying to pat themselves on the back about being nice to a pathetic deformed kid, and some are nice because they’re nice, but a lot of them aren’t nice to me, Mom, or they avoid me because they think I look freakish. I know that, they know that, and they can’t get past General Noggin enough to see me as a person. But this way, maybe . . .” He bit down on his lip, and I knew he was trying not to cry.

  I tried not to cry, too. Be strong, Jaden. Be strong!

  “Maybe they can forget, or try to forget, about my head, my crooked eyes, if I can shoot baskets, Mom. It makes me less gar-golylish weird to them. I’m doing something that they get. They understand basketball. It’s like I’m—”

  He ran both hands over his face.

  “Like what, Tate?” I slammed a pan to the counter.

  “It makes me, I mean, it makes me more . . .”

  “More what?” My heart was breaking for this kid. High school is tough, cliquish, and exclusive. Try it with a big head. I reached for my spices.

  “Normal. Mom, I want to fit in for a few minutes, maybe an hour, during a game. I want to pretend that I’m the same as the other kids . . .”

  “Tate—”

  “Don’t tell me that I fit in. I don’t. I never have. I never will. I accept it. But right now, if I play basketball, if I’m good . . . maybe it’ll be different for me. Maybe.” He brushed his hands across teary eyes.