Some Kind of Normal (18 page)

"That's the answer! I know it!" Her eyes are shining
again. "God's gonna cure me!"

My heart sinks to my knees. "Baby, don't go getting
your hopes up. . ."

"Why not?" Suddenly she's a tempest whirling on me.
"Don't you want me to get better? Don't you want this whole thing
to go away?"

"Of course, I do--"

"Then stop acting like God can't do it. If we
believe, and we ask, God will do it. That's what the Bible says.
Believe and ask."

"It's not that easy, Ash."

"It's as easy as believing. You don't have faith.
That's your problem."

She's right. Lord Almighty, she is right. I have no
faith. I seen my father waste away from cancer even as he was
praying for God to heal him. I seen people lose their farms when
the rain didn't come, even though they prayed on their knees for
God to send it. There are starving kids in Africa, suffering
Christians in China, soldiers in battle all praying for God to save
them. Our church folks gather every Wednesday to pray for God to
answer these prayers. And he don't. Least ways, not all of them.
How am I supposed to believe he'd hear us?

"Life is more complicated than that. It's more
complicated than throwing your wish list into some God-wishing-well
and thinking everything will come out roses."

"No, it's not." She stands, unsteady but ready to
leave. Tears are filling her eyes, and there's more hurt than fire
there. "It's just that easy."

As she starts out of the room, she stumbles and grabs
the door to keep herself up. I'm at her side in a blink, but she
pushes my hands off. "I want to go alone. You stay here and find us
a plan C."

"Ash, baby, I'm sorry." Just as suddenly as it came,
the fire dies in her. "It's okay." When she touches my arm, it
feels like a feather. "I'm not mad, Mama. I have faith enough for
both of us."

~~~~

It don't take long for me to become computer-savvy.
That's what Dr. Benton calls me, but I'm not sure he always means
it in a positive way. I'm the bulldog. He's the neck.

I admit I can be overbearing. "It just ain't right
for the woman to wear the pants in the family," my own mama used to
say. But if I became my mama, Ashley'd die lying here in this
hospital with people just twiddling their thumbs around her. Travis
is either working or trying to find business for Bob; he oughta get
paid twice for that. I want him here, but that's not possible now.
Without his job, we have no insurance; without no insurance, we got
no way to pay for all this. So Travis works all day, every day, and
is hardly at the hospital, which I don't hold against him, but he
has his job, and Dr. Benton has a job too, with lots of patients
and an office, and if I'm not here to fight for Ashley, ain't no
one else to do it.

I keep copious notes--that's what Logan calls
it--about everything I find on the Internet, and I tear the pages
out and give them to Dr. Benton when he comes at night. He looked
at the mice experiment and shot that down. "It's a great idea, but
it's a long way from being anything significant. They're still
testing it. Right now, in mice, it only works a little, for a short
period of time. Like it reverses the disease partway, for a few
hours. Then it's back. Maybe in a few years this would be an
option." He hands the paper back.

I keep at it though. Day after day, new things. Every
time I Google the same things, and the same 1.8 million hits show
up. I slog through them, page after page, thinking something has to
be there. Out of 1.8 million web pages, there has to be an answer
somewhere.

"There's an insulin you can inhale, like one of those
asthma things. You think we should try that?"

"They took it off the market."

"Why?"

"Not enough money in it."

"How can there not be enough money in it? People got
some kind of emotional attachment to sharp needles?"

"How about this one," I say a couple days later,
handing him yet another paper. "This says diet and exercise can
completely reverse the disease in some people."

"That's for type 2," he says, handing the papers back
to me without even looking.

By the sixth set of notes in my awful chicken
scratch, he brings in an old printer and sets it up on the desk in
Ashley's room. "Now you have your own control center," he says.
"This way you can spend more time researching and less time
writing."

I print everything I come across: pharmaceutical
evaluations, newspaper articles, message board posts.

My own message board post remains mostly empty. There
are over five hundred hits on it and a handful of replies that
read, "How terrible! I've never heard of this. We'll be praying for
you."

Ashley has made a few friends on the "kids with type
1" forum. Their posts are the kind of normal I'm now hoping for
Ashley. "Cut myself cutting up an orange today. I decided 2 test,
since I was already bleeding. Hate 2 waste blood! lol" "Found sour
apple glucose tablets! yum! much better than fruit punch!" "Anyone
know how 2 hide pump under prom dress?"

I read some of them to Ashley when she's not up to
reading them herself. Sometimes she wants me to write back, so I
write what she says and add at the end, "Written by Ashley's mom.
Ashley--12, dx t1 may, dx insulin allergy june."

One day she receives an email from a girl on the
forum. "Check this out!"

It is a link to a newspaper article somewhere in
Europe. I skim it, then go back and read it again. And then again.
And I print it out and run down to the nurses's station.

"Do you know when Dr. Benton will be in?"

She shakes her mile-high hair and keeps clicking at
her keyboard. I thrust the printout in her face. "Have you read
about this? Do you know anything about it?" She glances at it and
hands it back.

"Sounds like some kind of scam to me."

"It's real. It's from a real newspaper. It was
online."

She shrugs without looking up. "There's lots on the
Internet that's not real. People make this stuff up for kicks."

"It's not." I take the paper back, but now I'm not so
sure.

I go back to the room and read it again. Then I
Google it, but I can't find anything else except the article. Maybe
it's a fake.

By the time Dr. Benton arrives, I'm more nervous and
less excited about giving it to him. I've learned hope can be scary
because at the end there's usually disappointment.

"What have you found for me today?"

I hand it to him real slow. "I'm not sure it's
anything. It's probably not even real."

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't have something."
He smiles as he takes it, but as he reads his face grows serious.
"I've heard about this. A year or so ago. I'd completely forgotten
about it."

"So it's not a hoax?" My heart starts beating faster
now.

"No, not a hoax." I let him read more, biting my lip
to keep from interrupting.

"Can I keep this?"

"It's true? That British doctor really cured diabetes
with baby teeth?"

"Yes, it's true." He seems distracted suddenly,
folding the paper and putting it in his pocket and checking
Ashley's vitals with barely a word. Ashley sleeps through it all,
which is what she does most of the time, now.

"I got her baby teeth. All of them. I can bring them
in. Can you cure her?"

"No. I can't do that."

"Could he? That doctor in the article?"

"No. I don't think so."

He's not looking at me so I pull on his arm. "Dr.
Benton, look at me." His eyes meet mine, but I can't read them.
"What does this mean?"

"I don't know."

"But it means something?"

"Yes." He runs his fingers through his hair in that
way Travis does when he's figuring how to pay the bills. "It means
something very big. Possibly. But possibly not."

"Are you kidding me?" His eyes seem to focus on me,
like he suddenly realizes I'm in the room.

"I'm sorry. I mean, I don't think that baby teeth are
going to help now, but it may be the lead on something even better.
I don't know for sure. I have someone I need to call, and I need to
look into a few things. So no, it isn't the answer, but it might
lead to the answer." He grabs me into a hug, a very undoctorly
thing. "You keep looking, Mrs. Babcock. This is good stuff. We
might get there after all."

~~~~

When I talk to Travis on the phone he don't get it.
"What do you mean they cured diabetes with baby teeth?"

"I don't know how. I ain't no doctor. The article
just said the doctors took something in the baby teeth and made
them grow new insulin cells. And the kids aren't diabetic
anymore."

"And Dr. Benton thought he could do that?"

"Not exactly. But he seemed to think it meant
something. Like, it was something he never thought of before."

"But it's not our plan C?"

"It sounded like it might lead us to plan C." I hear
him sigh on the other end of the line. "It means something, Travis.
It does. If you could have seen the look on his face."

"Okay. How is Ashley today?" And we stop talking
about cures and shift to the day to day we're comfortable with. He
found his company two new jobs that'll take him through the summer.
Logan is job-hunting for the first time and is weighing the choice
of fast food or gas attendant, not particularly thrilled with
either. Life is going on as normal at home, and it seems like a
world away from where I am.

~~~~

The stretches of boredom are broken by bits of news
called in from home. Pastor Joel's wife had her baby--a healthy
girl they name Mary Ashley. I am both touched and horrified. It
ain't like Ashley's dead already, but since they mean well I try to
lean more to the touched.

Brenda calls to say her cinnamon brownies won second
place in Cinnamon Fest. Yolanda's new pool hit a snag when the
diggers hit granite and had to bring in dynamite to blow it out.
The paper had a typo in one of the ads, and HEB had to sell all
their brisket and t-bones at 80 percent off instead of 30
percent.

Despite the mundaneness of these news bits, I look
forward to my cell phone ringing, if only to hear a voice that's
not a doctor or nurse's. But when I hear the voice of Logan's
principal, I know no good can be coming.

It's not just that it's her, although that alone sets
my teeth on edge, 'specially since school's been out a month
already. It's mostly the way she says my name, like a squeeter got
caught in her throat and she's trying not to swallow it.

"It's about Logan."

"I didn't expect you'd call about anyone else," I
say, taking the phone into the bathroom so's not to wake Ashley and
not to expose the hospital staff to what I'm sure is about to be a
very unsavory conversation.

"The school janitor has made a very unfortunate find
in Logan's locker."

"A moldy PB and J sandwich?"

"A test, Mrs. Babcock." I've always hated the way
teachers and principals use my formal name to emphasize they are
serious, the way I use Logan and Ashley's first and middle to get
their attention.

"Oh my. A test. In a school locker. Shall we report
this to the police, because I'm quite sure there has been some
great crime committed here, Mrs. Gianuzzi." I can do it too.

There's a pause and I can almost hear her teeth
grinding. "A standardized test, Mrs. Babcock."

"Should I know what that is and why this is a
crime?"

"It's the test the state gives students every year,
part of the requirement for federal funding. Logan and his
classmates took the test at the very end of the year. No one in the
school should have had a copy of that test. Every copy was kept
under lock and key until distributed for testing, and then every
one was numbered, handed out, and collected."

"If they were all collected, how does Logan have one
in his locker?"

"That's what we would like to know."

My completely fine stomach suddenly feels completely
not fine. I sit on the toilet and push the door closed all the way.
"What is it you're trying to say, Mrs. Gianuzzi?"

"That we believe it's possible Logan got a hold of a
copy before he took the test and used it to prepare."

"Was it an answer key?"

"No."

"So you're afraid Logan found out what was on the
test and studied to make sure he got the answers right?"

"Yes. That's called cheating, Mrs. Babcock."

"You can stop using my name like that. I know who I
am. What I don't know is why a school would be so worried about a
student studying to make sure they do well on a test." I've never
liked the principal, mostly because it seems to me like she has
never liked Logan. From the first day, she tried to force him to
change his hair, except there ain't no rule in school about hair
cuts. I swear she made a judgment about what kind of student he was
the moment he stepped off that bus looking like some punk rocker,
and she ain't never looked far enough to see differently.

She don't like me none either, which I gather is
mostly because, while I don't like Logan's hair none the better, I
don't make him change it. And I don't have past a tenth grade
education, and she ain't the kind that can understand that.

"Don't you find it strange that Logan barely makes Cs
in class, and yet he scored almost off the charts on the
standardized tests?"

"I find it strange that he makes only Cs in school
and yet can translate everything the doctors tell us about his
sister into language we all can understand. That, and he's like
some rainman of nutrition facts 'cause he can calculate the carbs
off the side of a box faster than you can whip out your calculator.
I find it strange that you would call me, worried that he did well
on some test you should be hoping he does well on instead of
calling his teachers asking why he ain't making better grades."