A Different Kind of Normal (43 page)

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Authors: Cathy Lamb

BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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Caden bought me two new wicker chairs with red and white cushions. “Let’s try not to destroy these, Jaden. They’re not footballs,” he told me, then winked. He also created for me a two foot teapot with wire, ivy, and white and yellow mums.
My sister replanted my bulbs in colorful pots and labeled each one. She also took three glass vases and filled them with the rocks and shells that she and I had collected as kids, which she’d found in the blue cardboard box. She filled the vases with water and placed them on a shelf where the sun hit just right.
She relabeled all the herbs I had. She drew a picture of the herb, then used a calligraphy pen to write its name. She also repaired the frogs with superglue and put them back up on the post. “A frog has to have a place to hop,” she told me.
Brooke could make beauty where none existed. It was tragic and sad that she hadn’t been able to make beauty in herself for many years.
Ethan ordered new windows, which, I must admit, were fantastic, the light flowed in cleanly in a way that made me feel I was outside. He had two of the busted windows replaced with stained glass, which cast out a myriad of colors. One of the windows had a design of an iris, the other of rosemary, because I had told him the story of Faith and Grace, who used to be, before a torch-wielding mob wanted to flog them for being witches, Iris and Rosemary.
I had a glowing rainbow of color in my greenhouse now. “Colorful windows for a colorful woman,” he’d told me, then kissed me silly.
My greenhouse wasn’t
my
greenhouse anymore. It was
our
greenhouse.
I bent my head over Grandma Violet’s crystal plate, over Faith’s silver spoon.
I smelled life.
The night before Tate was to finally come home from the hospital, Brooke and I sat on his hospital bed together. She still seemed pale and fragile, but my mother and brother had concentrated on feeding her and she was rosier, not completely healthy, but better, her auburn hair thicker, shinier.
She, Tate, and I played Monopoly. She won, her green eyes twinkling.
We had ice cream together. Before she left to go back to my house, she leaned down for an extra-long hug with Tate and kissed his forehead. “I love you, Tate.”
“I love you, too, Brooke.”
She held him far longer than usual. She hugged me tight, too.
“I love you, Brooke.” I had apologized multiple times to her for my fit in the greenhouse, my earth-scorching meanness. She had been gracious and kind, told me that she had deserved all that I’d said. Our conversation had been long and difficult, a minefield, but there was love in it, too.
“Thank you, Tate, for letting me back in your life. You’re talented, brilliant, funny, an excellent writer, too. Your blog is amazing.”
“Thanks for coming back into my life, Brooke,” he said, but his voice wavered. “You’re even getting better at catching Skittles in your mouth and balancing an apple on your head.”
She kissed his forehead, hugged him again, her tears on his cheek. She hugged me again, then left, closing the door quietly behind her.
Tate and I did not break our gaze from each other for long seconds.
“She’s leaving again, isn’t she, Boss Mom?”
I stood up and watched the street outside the hospital. We were high enough up so I could see for miles. The trees were beginning to bud again, their bare branches softening. Soon they would be covered in green leaves for spring.
Within a couple of minutes, I saw Brooke’s auburn hair whipping back in the wind. She paused in the middle of the street and looked up. I knew she could not see in the windows, and she knew I knew that, but she waved anyhow. I did not bother to wave back.
She headed down the street. A bus pulled up. Who knew where it was going? I didn’t. She didn’t.
She climbed aboard. I felt her loss immediately.
“Yes, Tate, she’s leaving again. I’m sorry.”
Why was she leaving? The pull of drugs again? The complications of family life? The cauldron of emotions here? The guilt from our father’s death? Was she leaving because of my verbal attack in the greenhouse? Had I blown up at her because I secretly wanted her to leave and felt threatened by her? Or because she’d deserved it and I wanted her to hear my pain? Was I more vengeful than I thought? Maybe I ranted simply because Tate’s life-threatening medical condition had been excruciating and she was a convenient target.
Would she have left anyhow?
Did it matter?
Tate silently cried, but this time I didn’t feel the same anger I had felt so often with Brooke. I felt an overwhelming sadness for her, my mother, my father, Caden, and for Tate, but the anger was gone.
Tate was here.
Tate had survived.
That was the most important thing. I could deal with losing my sister again, but I could not live without Tate.
I bent to hug him.
One of my tears fell on his cheek.
We did not wipe it away.
 
On a sunny afternoon, with my pink and white cherry trees blooming, Ethan’s truck rumbled up the drive between our column of green-leafed maple trees.
I took a quick breath, as I always do when I see him, and patted my hair in front of a tiny mirror I kept in my greenhouse. My fingers brushed the new crystals Tate had bought me saying, “Keep these out of the fountain, Boss Mom.” I tried not to get all mushy-gushy emotional again.
It had been an interesting day at work. One patient, Catalina Goodall, threw a full beer can at me and said to “kiss my fat ass,” and another, in her delirium, said she was seeing funny people running out of the TV and thought they might have been sent there by
Star Trek
.
Ethan smiled and waved and I waited for him by the door of my greenhouse, loving the way he moved, shoulders back, smiling, smiling. He wrapped me in his strong arms and held me close.
“Ethan, I know I’ve told you this a hundred times, but I can’t ever thank you enough for saving Tate—” I burst into the sloppy tears I wanted to avoid.
“You already have thanked me.” He tilted my head up and kissed me. “You put the ring back on. That’s what I wanted.”
My nose started to run and I knew I looked awful, red and wet. “I love you, Ethan. I love you so much.” I loved that I had him. I loved that I had Ethan in my life.
“I love you, too, Jaden. Have since the first day I met you.” He kissed me, held me tight. “I love how you take all the hits life has given you and you come up swinging and hit back. I love the way you do what’s right, all the time, no matter how tough. I love how you’re open and vulnerable and you cry when you feel like crying and you laugh when you feel like laughing and when you’re pissed off you destroy your greenhouse. I even love Witch Mavis. I especially love how you looked in that white lace negligee the other night. Although”—he pretended to ponder—“the purple one was nothing to sneeze at.” He pondered again. “The black one with the fishnets and garters was enough to make me stop breathing.”
He picked up my left hand and kissed my sparkly engagement ring. “Soon then, Jaden?”
“Anytime, Dr. Robbins.” I leaned against him. “Anytime.”
 
“If you had only taken the time to talk to me, Jaden, I think we could have avoided this mess.” Dirk leaned across the hospital’s conference table and shook his head, as a father might when reprimanding a child. He was decked out in an expensive suit. I knew he’d picked it carefully to be intimidating.
“How so?” Sandra asked, my whip-sharp attorney with the large teeth. She cocked her head to the side as if examining a foreign species. “You’re accusing her of killing your father. If Jaden had taken time out to talk to you, why would that have changed your mind?”
Dr. Baharri raised his eyebrows at me. Sydney humphed. My heart rate sped up because I was ticked off.
“I mean that during my father’s illness, I asked her out many times, I mean, not on a date. I wanted to talk to Jaden, privately, alone, at my home, for more information about my father, and she declined.” Dirk actually wagged a finger at me.
“My employees are not required to go home with the sons of their clients to”—Sydney made quotes in the air—“talk to them.”
Dirk’s attorneys, Nigel and Ralph, they of the outrageously high hourly rates who knew there was no case, tried to appear appropriately stern and forbidding, but I saw Nigel stifle a yawn. Ralph glanced at his watch. Keep those hours coming!
“Let me wrap my small brain around this,” Sandra said. “If she had dated you, you would not now be accusing her of killing your father?”
Dirk’s eyes narrowed. He is a weasel and he knew he was being trapped. “Yes. No.”
“Dirk means,” Nigel said, “that Jaden was remiss in her duties as a hospice nurse, that’s why we’re here. To talk about. Uh. That.”
“My client,” Ralph said, coughing, “didn’t mean what he said. He meant that if Jaden had talked to him, explained things better, instead of being confusing, evasive, and secretive, about medical issues and concerns, uh, things would have been, uh, more clear, but the result, uh, would be the same.”
“I believe Mr. Hassells meant what he said,” Sandra chimed in. “We have a court reporter here who tip-tapped it in, too. Dirk, if you think Jaden murdered your father, it seems silly to think you would change your mind about that accusation if you had a romantic dinner date together, but that’s what you’re suggesting, right, Dirk?”
“My client,” Nigel said, “doesn’t have to answer that. He’s not saying that anyhow—”
“Are you afraid of the question, Dirk?” Sandra said.
Ah, playing to Dirk’s ego. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
“I’m not afraid of anything.” He slapped the table with his open palm.
Ha. I had called it!
“I’m not afraid of nothing! Not anything or anyone! I’m saying if Jaden wasn’t standoffish and cold, we could have gotten to know each other . . . personally, the medical part would have been easier to understand. That was bad treatment and it led to a bad outcome for me, I mean, for my dad!”
“She is not required to get to know you”—Sandra paused deliberately—“personally. She was there for the care of your father.” She shuffled some papers and addressed Nigel and Ralph. “We believe Mr. Hassells is pressing this lawsuit because Jaden didn’t want to date or sleep with him. We can’t blame Jaden for feeling that way, plus his behavior makes my skin crawl, it’s gross to think of him coming after a woman, but his being pissed off at Jaden for not dating him, or worse, that’s no basis for a case, legally or ethically, as you know. We can, and will, countersue.”
“We, uh, are filing this lawsuit because, uh, Miss Bruxelle did not follow medical rules and regulations,” Nigel said. “Negligence. . .”
“Questionable use of”—Ralph flipped through his paperwork—“morphine.”
“For the record, on numerous occasions I told him to stop asking me out,” I said. “And Dirk asked me why I wouldn’t go home with him. I told him I didn’t owe him an explanation.”
“You did owe me an explanation.” Dirk was red and he clenched a fist. “I figured you had a husband or a boyfriend.”
“That’s the only reason you can think of that a woman wouldn’t want to go out with you?” Sandra said, her shiny teeth shining. “Perhaps there are other reasons?”
“Hey, hey.” Dirk chuckled and spread his arms wide. “Nope. Nada. No, I can’t think of another reason a woman wouldn’t want to date me.”
The court reporter continued to tap. . . .
Ralph squirmed. Nigel sighed, then smothered it.
Sydney said, “A snake might.”
Dr. Baharri said, quite loudly, “Shameful, unfounded arrogance.”
“Jaden didn’t want to go out because of the patient, client thing,” Dirk said, “but I was trying to convince her it would be fine, that we could get pleasure together out of a hard time—”
Nigel made a gargled sound in his throat, Ralph tried to interrupt.
“I could not get pleasure with you because I find you slimy,” I said. “I find you slick, dishonest, and disgusting. I found your lack of care and regard for your father to be appalling and hurtful to him. I thought your disregard of the enormous load your sister worked under to be unfeeling and thoughtless. I thought you treated her as your personal maid. I couldn’t stand how you constantly stared at me and tried to encourage me to get in your car with you—”

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