Some Kind of Normal

by Heidi Willis

  "Yes, well. . ." says mustache man. "If he isn't breaking any rules, we can't exactly take that into consideration in this case."

  "But it goes to show his overall attitude towards the school system," Mrs. Gianuzzi says, pulling herself up to her full 5'3" height.

  "But this isn't about his attitude towards school or authority," the tiny lady says. "It's about one particular incident, with one particular test. Do you have proof that Logan took this test, and that he used it to cheat?"

  The principal starts explaining how she found the test, and how she knows it's Logan's locker, and how she then went to examine his test scores and that the scores shows he clearly cheated in some way. The board members listen with no expression on their faces. My stomach is churning.

  "Can I add something," the teacher behind me says, standing up. I've got a sinking feeling like my stomach has dropped into my toes. The mustache man, who I now gather is the head person here, motions him forward.

  "It's true that Logan is not the best student. He doesn't always turn in his homework, and he doodles a lot in class instead of taking notes." He looks sideways at me and smiles. "But he is, as a person, an outstanding individual, and smart as they come. He's probably the smartest kid I've ever taught."

  I'm sure my jaw is dropping. I clamp my teeth together to make sure I don't look surprised that someone is complimenting my son.

  "What do you teach?" asks the girthy lady.

  "Science. Chemistry and physics. Logan was in my chemistry class this year. He didn't make A's because he didn't do the homework all the time, but I'll tell you, he never missed one question on a test. Not one. And I can't say that about anyone else in class. He didn't need a cheat sheet to pass that standardized test. He could have done it with his eyes closed."

  Mrs. Gianuzzi starts to say something, but the man raises his hand to her and she stops. "Dave, do you have something to add?" He looks past me at the baseball coach, who comes forward as well. I think about the fight Logan got into in the locker room and figure this whole deal is now done. Alternative school, here we come.

  But Dave don't say anything about the fight. Instead, he tells about his relationship with Logan over the past three years; how he found him on the middle school baseball team and saw such great talent, and how he feels like Logan is his second son, and how Logan has better sportsmanship than any kid he's taught. "He would never, ever cheat," he finishes. "It goes against everything he is."

  There are other things being said, but I miss them for a minute because I'm thinking about Dave's comments. His complete and unswerving faith in Logan and his honesty. Can I even say that about myself? Did I know these things about Logan, his sportsmanship and dedication and ability to ace tests without ever studying for them?

  "Mrs. Babcock?" I look up and realize the tiny lady is speaking to me.

  "Yes?"

  "Do you have anything to add?"

  I tell my children to tell the truth, no matter what. But I know Logan hid that test in his locker, and I don't know what they will think if I admit that, even with the fact that Logan didn't use it, even if it wasn't even the test they gave his class. I look from Dave to the chemistry teacher and wonder how strangers can have more faith in my son than me.

  "He's a good kid," I say, and I mean it. My entire being fills with admiration and love for this kid I've never quite known what to do with. And suddenly I know. I fight for him.

  And I do. And everything the principal throws at me I argue with, and every question the board asks, I answer with passion. I've spent the last few months pouring out my energy on Ashley. Logan is every bit as deserving.

  Before they rule, they kick the others out and ask me a few private questions, about Ashley and the time Logan spent away from school and how he's handling this crisis in the house, and I realize he's the glue holding our family together, and I tell them this. They excuse me for a few minutes to talk amongst themselves, and when they bring me back in, they take a vote and unanimously choose to dismiss his case as well.

  I don't know if it's a pity vote, but I'm willing to take that over expulsion any day. I thank them and leave before they can change their minds.

  ~~~~

  When Logan gets home from the music store, he stands around the kitchen pretending he's looking for food when I know what he wants is the result.

  I hand him a tub of rocky road ice cream and a spoon. "You kicked butt," I say.

  "I'm off the hook?"

  "Yeah." I turn my back on him to wash off the lunch dishes, and he throws his arms around me.

  "Thanks."

  I can feel the relief flooding from him and can't believe I didn't notice that he was actually worried about this.

  "I didn't do anything," I say, patting his arm and leaving soapy bubbles on him. "You pretty much speak for yourself."

  He squeezes me a smidge and leaves the room humming. The feeling in the house is different now, subtle shiftings of the space between us, and I vow that I will never again be the least of his supporters in a room.

  ~~~~

  Wednesday evening I drop Ashley off at youth group and Logan off at band practice. Before I can get out of the parking lot, Brenda comes running down the stairs waving at me. I sigh and roll the window down.

  "Can I get in?"

  I unlock the doors, and she climbs in the passenger side. "You need a ride?" I ask.

  "No. I just want to talk. We ain't talked since you got home. How are things?"

  I study her face, trying to figure out why she's here. "You need your casserole dish? I can bring it by tomorrow if you need it."

  "I don't need it. I just want to know how you are."

  "We're fine."

  She fiddles with her purse, latching and unlatching the clasp, and I want to tell her to just get out and go on home. I got my own share of things to do and no time for this.

  "I heard about the hate mail."

  I raise my eyebrows at her 'cause I ain't told no one.

  "Ashley told Savannah and Savannah told Joe and Joe told me."

  It's our own church version of telephone. I want to tell her it didn't work this time: the info is wrong. But since it's not, I keep quiet, wondering how Ashley found out.

  "I don't know what you think about us, Babs, but you're wrong. We're not against you."

  "Did you see us at church Sunday?" I ask. "You'd have thought we had leprosy. Hardly anyone looked at us. Do you really want to get into this?"

  She stops playing with the purse and lays her hands in her lap. "I'm not the enemy here."

  "I got so many enemies, Brenda, I can't keep them all straight. I got people bashing in our mailbox every other day, and throwing rocks through windows and digging fake graves in the front yard, but the only enemy I care about is the one killin' Ashley."

  She looks surprised. "I thought Ashley was doing so much better. I looked up diabetes, and I thought people could live a long time with it. Like arthritis or something."

  She takes me a little off guard here. It strikes me as so out of place that she would look it up. I don't know whether to be suspicious or thankful. I size her up and decide I'm either gonna spend my time fighting people's perceptions or fighting for Ashley. I ain't got the energy for both.

  "She's not well," I say, and suddenly tears are rushing to my eyes, but I'm not going to cry here in this car with this overbearing lady. I blink them back and grit my teeth while I take in her astonished look. She reaches out for my hand and squeezes it, tears springing to her own eyes suddenly. I stop my jaw clenching and let out a long sigh. "She's really sick, actually."

  "She don't look that sick," she says, not letting go of my hand. It's not an accusation but an observation that I admit is pretty true. "I seen her in the hospital, and she looks real good now."

  "What do you know about diabetes?" I ask.

  "She's not making insulin, and so she has to take shots of it. It's got something to do with eating, right?"

  I think of the long days in
the hospital, the nurses and the nutritionists and all the medical pamphlets I pored over, and here Brenda pretty much sums it all up in two sentences.

  "That's pretty much it. Except, on top of that, she can't take insulin either. She's allergic to it."

  I see the information registering on her face, the confusion and then the dawning of what that means. "So she can't eat? 'Cause she can't take the insulin?"

  It means so much more than this. At this point, eating is not the biggest of our worries. Whether Ashley eats or not, her blood sugar is going up, but this seems unimportant to explain. It's enough for Brenda that Ashley can't eat. In fact, for Brenda, this is probably the most awful thing that could happen.

  "So what are you going to do?"

  And there it is. The question everyone wants to know. Are we the stem cell family? Months ago I didn't like Brenda much. She wears too much lipstick, and it always sticks to her front teeth. She has damp patches on her shirt under her armpits, and she smells of too much perfume. She is loud and almost always happy. For some reason this really bugs me.

  But here she is, in my car, asking about Ashley. What stands out to me above all these other things is how many times she drove down to Austin to be with us. How many meals she cooked for Travis and Logan, and I wonder how many suppers she missed with her own family 'cause she was ministering to mine. And it all spills out. The days watching Ashley waste away to practically nothing. The hours and hours on websites looking for something that would take the place of the insulin that isn't working. The desperation that there is nothing left, no stone unturned. And then Jack Van Der Campen. And possibility.

  "It's not what everyone thinks," I say, maybe a little too defensively. "It don't have anything to do with babies. There aren't any abortions or anything involved. It's a whole other kind of stem cell thing."

  She takes in everything I say, real quiet and not talking. Not even asking questions. When I finish, she just nods. "What do you think of Jack Van Der Campen?"

  "Well, he ain't the devil like everyone wants to think." She don't say nothing so I keep going. "He's good folk, Brenda. Not what the papers say about him and what the protestors make him out to be. He's like all the rest of us, trying to do the best with what life gives us." I think about the newspaper article and his wife and kid. "If he made some mistakes in the past, he did it with a good heart." I stare at my own hands in my lap. "This is our last chance, Brenda. He's our last hope."

  The quiet is so loud I can hear it. I almost stop breathing, waiting to see if I'd gone too far, but when she finally meets my eyes there's only good stuff there. "You think he likes cookies? I make a mean chocolate chip I could send with you when you go."

  ~~~~

  When I get home the house is empty and there ain't no signs of meanness. No paint or shattered glass. No letters in the mailbox.

  I don't fool myself in believin' that now the church will be behind us all the way. I figure it's a little like everything else in life: there will be some on both sides of the divide. I count the people for us: Logan and Travis, by far the two most important, and not necessarily the easiest to get; Dr. Benton, whose experience and expertise make his support a hundred times more significant than any cowardly bullies; Pastor Joel and his wife, who gave us not a moment of wavering, even though they mighta felt it at home; Janise, who would stand behind me no matter what; and now Donna Jean and Brenda, two women I barely spoke to before this mess. All in all, it's a pretty good list.

  As I start to fix us dinner, I find myself humming.

  ~~~~

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  "Can we go to the beach?" Ashley's been staring out the window for a good minute or more before she drops this bomb at the dinner table.

  Everyone's finally home and we're picking over chicken, along with the green beans and tomatoes Janise brought from her garden. Thank goodness salt isn't off the menu yet.

  "Why?" Travis asks, reaching for the Tabasco.

  "I just want to. It's been a long time since we've gone."

  "The youth group went last summer," I say.

  "Yeah, but that wasn't the family."

  "You want to go with the family?" Logan asks, his mouth full of tomatoes. "Why?" I kick him under the table.

  "I just want to." She pushes the food around the plate but don't eat anything.

  "You need to eat, Ash. You took insulin already. You'll go low if you don't."

  She wrinkles her nose. "I don't see that happening, Mom."

  She's probably right. Her sugars are eeking up again, and it's been hard to keep it under a hundred, even without eating.

  "How about we plan to go when we get back from Baltimore?" Travis suggests.

  "I want to go now. Before we leave."

  "Why?" Travis asks again.

  "Because," she says stubbornly.

  "Because she's afraid she's not coming back," Logan says, tomato juice dripping down his chin.

  We all freeze, forks in the air, not believing what Logan just said.

  "What? It's true, isn't it?" He looks at Ashley, who scoots out her chair and runs out of the room.

  "What?" Logan says, looking at Travis and me. "We all know that's why. We can't say it?"

  I give him my best look of disgust and leave him to Travis, who is giving him an earful as I make my way to Ashley's room.

  I knock on the door and walk in when she don't answer. "Ash?" She's sprawled out across her bed, her headphones plugging her ears and her eyes closed. I tap her and she don't move. I take the earphones out. "Ashley?" Finally, she looks up. I sit next to her. She rolls over and stares at the ceiling.

  "It's true. If that's what you want to know. Logan's right."

  "Jeez, Ashley, you think if this thing don't work we're going to leave you there?"

  "No. I think if it doesn't work, I'm going to die."

  "Don't be melodramatic," I say, sounding much more confident than I feel. It's not that I don't want to admit it's possible. I don't want her to admit it's possible. Every motherly instinct is telling me to lie, lie, lie.

  "I know what's going on, Mom. I've been sick, not dumb. I don't make insulin. I can't take insulin. It's pretty simple."

  I think how casually she tosses out the word insulin, like everyone knows what it is and does, like she's saying I got a heart and it don't beat.

  "So going to Corpus Christi and watching the oil refineries belch their smoke over the gulf is your dying wish?" Even she can't resist smiling at this.

  "Yeah. Camping at the beach. Just like we used to."

  I stand to go. "I'll see what I can do."

  Travis isn't too thrilled with this idea. "What happens if she gets sicker when we're out there?"

  "We bring her home."

  "It's so dirty. Maybe we should stay in a hotel."

  "She has diabetes. A little dirt isn't going to raise her blood sugar."

  "What do we eat?"

  "I can cook chicken and green beans just as well over a campfire."

  "How will she go swimming with the pump?"

  "I don't know. Maybe we don't go swimming. Maybe we just walk on the shore with our feet in the water."

  "I don't know where the camping stuff is."

  "It's in the garage." This is Logan, who's come into the kitchen to grab a handful of cookies now that Ashley is gone. "So we're going?"

  I look at Travis, who looks back at me and shrugs. "I guess we are."

  ~~~~

  We're all actually excited as we pile in the truck the next morning. I've banned the I-Pods and the cell phones in the spirit of making this a family trip. Ashley's blood sugar continues to rise, and the itching's getting worse, but she's insistent and our plane trip to Baltimore is still a few days off. She could itch at home or on the road, so we throw in the tent and the sleeping bags and the camp stove and take off.

  "Can we at least listen to music on the CD player?" asks Ashley, not even fifteen minutes from home.

  "And not that country junk you guys
like, either," Logan pipes in.

  I shuffle through the stack Travis keeps in the glove compartment and pull out the only non-country one he has. It's 50s and 60s music, and the kids groan, but when I turn it off they yell to put it back on, so I do.

  It's fun music, and we find ourselves singing along enthusiastically, mostly out of tune, and laughing over the goofy lyrics. When Wonderful World comes on we all sing louder, the windows of the truck down and the hot wind blowing away the cares weighing down on us the last weeks. For a few moments, it's as if none of this has happened and we're all back to the way we used to be, years ago, before the hospital and before adolescence, before money troubles and time wore us down.

  Travis takes my hand as he sings.

  I used to love this song because it felt like my life. It's really just a litany of things I don't know nothing about. Me and Louie Armstrong-- neither one of us knew about biology or science or French. But we had love. I liked that all that mattered was love.

  I danced around the kitchen singing this song with the kids when they were little. It seemed funny then. A tenth grade education don't seem too bad when your kids can barely speak and they only need to learn colors and shapes and letters, and love is the thing they need the most. But pretty soon it's algebra and dissecting frogs and Spanish and curing major diseases, and love's just not enough.

  I let the others' voices carry the song, and I watch the flat ground turn into rolling hills and the clouds gather on the horizon. I ignore the signs that say the next rest stop is 110 miles away and that civilization's behind us, and we are heading further out to where there is nothing if we should have trouble.

  ~~~~

  We set up the tent without making too big of fools of ourselves and decide to go walk along the shore before the sun goes down. Ashley lingers behind us, searching for shells and pretending that she isn't so tired she wants to lay down in the sand and sleep. Logan pretends to be searching for stones to skip, but I see him slipping shells into the bucket Ashley sets down every now and then. We are all pretending this is something it isn't, which is Ashley's version of a "make a wish foundation" request.