Some Kind of Normal

by Heidi Willis

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.

  ~~~~

  Chapter Nine

  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 chauffe
urin' 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."

  "But what if I do?"

  I want to point out that livin' in the middle of Texas with no water closer than Town Lake ain't likely to get her over the ocean, but I realize she's seen her web too close to the door, too. "Well," I say, twisting my face into a serious expression, as if I'm really considering this. "If you go on a plane trip, maybe you make sure you take extra insulin on board with you. That way, if you go down, you'll have enough until you're rescued."

  This seems to satisfy her for a few minutes. She watches the fields fly by out the window. Then she says, "What if I want to be a cheerleader?"

  "You hate cheerleaders."

  "That's not the point. What if I decide I want to be one? Can I do that with diabetes?"

  "Do you want to?" I look at her sideways and wonder if the disease has affected her brain. Will she be a different person now? Has this changed who she is?

  "No way. They're all snotty and stuck on themselves." She looked out the window instead of at me, which is good because I almost snort in relief. "But if I did. If I changed my mind."

  My heart aches with the squeezing of her life into something smaller than the world she knew a few days ago. "Dr. Benton said you could do anything you wanted."

  "But he also said I have to be very careful about exercising because it can make my blood sugar go really low."

  "Do you really think cheerleading is exercise?"

  This makes her smile a little, and so I decide to play along. "Then you make sure you have a juice box with you all the time."

  She grows quiet again, and I wonder what other obstacles she's building for herself.

  When we turn onto our street, cars crowd the curb so we can barely squeeze between them and into our driveway. Balloons are tied to our mailbox, and a homemade banner hangs from our porch. "Welcome Home Ashley."

  Ashley looks wide-eyed at me and grins. "For me?"

  She jumps out of the car before I turn the ignition off, and she's running up the sidewalk as her friends burst out the door at her. I see her running, and I think of the morning hardly more than a week ago. I keep hoping the doctors are wrong. I hope it's a fleeting thing. But I see her now, all pumped full of insulin, and she's normal again. Well, at least, a new kind of normal.

  Janise comes to help me get the bags after the girls have all disappeared into the house, giggling and gossiping.

  "Thanks," I say, but not for the luggage help. I nod towards the sign and the now wide-flung door. "It's the happiest I've seen Ash for awhile."

  She gives me a hug. "You know I'd do anything for y'all." A dark look passes over her face. "Morgan isn't here." Morgan is Ashley's best friend since kindergarten. "Her mom was afraid she might 'catch it' if she got too close."

  I feel the blood rush to my cheeks. "You can't catch diabetes. How ignorant is she?"

  "The same as all of us. None of us knew any better a week ago," she says, but not to rebuke me, because she is my best friend since kindergarten. I know what she says is true, but I can't help being angry.

  "Just call her. She wants to understand. We all want to understand."

  I just pick up our bags and carry them in myself. In the dining room I see the girls gathered around our table looking at something. When I peer over them I see a sheet cake decorated with thick icing and yellow roses. "We're glad you're better," it says.

  "Can we have some," Ashley says, looking expectantly at me.

  I press my lips together and look over at Janise. She clearly don't see the problem. "I bought paper plates so you wouldn't even have to clean up," she says, missing the point.

  Travis picks this time to exit the kitchen with a fist full of plastic forks. "I found them!"

  "What are you two doing," I seethe. The girls are all looking at me now. I tell them to go play Wii until we're ready, and I wait until they scramble off like prairie dogs before whaling on the two people who should have my back.

  "Are you crazier than a rabid coon? She can't have that stuff! It's loaded with carbohydrates!"

  "What are carbohydrates?" Janise asks, as if she hadn't spent the last three days in the hospital with me.

  "Flour," I practically scream. "Sugar. Milk. Apparently anything white and edible. Doctor Benton says she can't have more than 45 grams in a sitting for the next few weeks. Ten Doritos got 15 grams. That cake is more than 45 grams."

  "You have a scale in the kitchen," Janise says, trying to be helpful and missing the mark entirely. "We could weigh out 45 grams for her."

  "It's not like that. You have to know how much flour and sugar and stuff is in it, and I don't." I think about the nutritionist and her plastic food. "If a bagel's got 60 grams, that cake's got about a bazillion."

  "What if we did know?" Logan is standing in the door so quiet I don't hear him until he speaks. "Did you make the cake or buy it?" he asks Janise.

  "Made it," she says indignantly, because she's never served a store-bought cake in her life.

  "Then tell me what you put in it." He disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a calculator and a pen and a scrap of paper. "It's not that difficult. We can do it."

  So Janise lists the ingredients, which she knows by heart because this is the same cake she makes for every church function and every birthday. Logan asks how much of each until he has the recipe written down. Then he crosses off the baking powder, salt, eggs, butter and vanilla and Crisco. "These don't have carbohydrates in them, so we don't have to worry about them." He circles the flour, sugar and sour cream in the cake and the powdered sugar and milk in the icing and disappears back into the kitchen.

  He comes back with the sacks of flour and sugars from our pantry and the tub of sour cream that I know is expired. He looks at the labels on the side. "See? This tells you exactly how much is in each."

  Janise looks o
ver his shoulder as if seeing the bags for the first time. "Jiminy. What's all that mean?"

  "It tells you what's in them. You know--how much salt, protein, fat, and carbohydrates. See? The sugar has four grams of carbs per teaspoon."

  "Well, ain't that grand! That's not so much then, is it?" Janise is ready to call the girls when Logan gets out the calculator.

  "That's per teaspoon. You have two cups in this recipe." He crinkles his forehead like he did when he was two and trying to figure out some cosmic question like why God gave some animals tails and some got none. "Let's see. Three teaspoons in a tablespoon. Sixteen tablespoons in a cup. That's 48 teaspoon in a cup. 48 times four is 192. And you have two cups, so that is 192 times two, which is 384." He doesn't even type the numbers into the calculator. He writes 384 next to the word sugar.

  He moves on to the flour, and then to the sour cream. He totals the numbers in the cake column and circles it. 596.

  He begins the column with the powdered sugar and milk from the frosting. It's even scarier. 772. He adds the two. The grand total is 1368. Janise's face falls, and my own heart sinks knowing not just this week, but never will she be able to eat cake again.

  "That's for the whole cake though," he says, quickly writing more numbers. You don't eat the whole cake. You just eat a piece. So if you cut the cake into, say, twenty pieces, that's 1368 divided by 20. That's about 68 grams per serving."

  Janise's face gets even longer, but suddenly I see what Logan is getting at. "Try twenty-four pieces," I say. "How many grams is that?"

  "57."

  "What about 30?"

  Logan taps it out on the calculator. "45.8!" He grins, and I could kiss that pink Mohawk.

  "45! She can have that, then. We'll cut the cake into thirty pieces, and she can eat it!" I'm so excited I could spit.

  Travis is already beside me, cutting even pieces, and Janise is at the stairs yelling at the girls that cake's on. Logan makes himself scarce before the girls can overtake him, and I don't even have time to kiss him on his pretty pink Mohawk head. Travis gives each kid a plate with a small piece of cake and not one complains. They grab it and head back upstairs. I take Ashley's arm and pull her into the kitchen before she can escape up the stairs as well.