Some Kind of Normal (5 page)

"I haven't seen one yet. I spent the first half hour
filling out paperwork. When I finally got up here, she was already
done with the labs. A doctor is supposed to come back when the test
results are in."

"And they are," says Dr. Benton, joining us in what
is quickly becoming a crowded room.

"What are you doing here?" I ask, surprised.

"I have privileges here. I did my internship in
pediatrics here, and I've kept the ties. I called from the hospital
and asked if I could come work with Ashley since you live in my
town. That way, we can be consistent with treatment, here and at
home."

I'm so thankful and relieved I could kiss him. "Let
me have the nurse bring in another chair or two, and we can sit
down and talk about what's going on with your daughter."

He leaves and Logan slouches over to the daybed and
sprawls out, turning the TV on with the remote that's attached to
Ashley's bed. I snatch it and turn it off. "Do you mind?"

"Actually, I do," he says. "If you're going to drag
me away from school, the least you can do is let me entertain
myself."

"This is not about entertaining," I hiss, because the
door is still open, and I can't very well shout with a dozen
doctors and nurses lurking in the hall. "This is about your sister,
who nearly died today. And since when did you care about
school?"

"Yeah, well you said she's fine." He yawns and
scrunches the pillow behind him.

Travis clears his throat, and I throw him a "stay out
of this" look when I see him looking at Ashley. I turn as Ashley's
eyes flutter open.

"Daddy!" Her voice is gravely but cheerful, and I'm
jealous of the warmth she shows him that I didn't get. For goodness
sakes, she threw up on me, and he's the one who gets the smile.

He leans over to kiss her on the cheek. "How's my
chickadee?"

"A little better," she says, and Travis and me laugh
because this has been her standard answer after being sick since
she was three. "I like your hair, Logan. That pink looks good on
you."

"It's been pink a week now. Nice you finally
noticed."

"It has?" She seems thrown off by this, but before I
can ask anything else, Dr. Benton is back.

"Well look here, our patient is up and alert already!
How are you feeling?"

"A little better," she says.

"That's good. We've got some good concoctions flowing
through your veins. You should feel back to yourself in a day or
two." He rolls a stool to the other side of her bed so he is facing
all of us and puts a stack of papers and packages on the tray table
behind her bed. He takes out the file that has her name in red
along the edge.

"You feel up to talking?" he asks Ashley. She nods.
"Good. Because today, right now, life is going to change for all of
you. I want to help make this as easy as possible."

I see Travis from the corner of my eye shift in his
seat. I kick him in the shin.

"Changes?" Travis sits on the edge of his seat,
moving his legs out of my reach and running his hand over his
scruffy goatee. "What kind of changes?"

"The good kind," Dr. Benton tells us. "The kind that
will make your whole family healthier."

I think of Travis's doctor telling us it'll be good
for us not to eat the biscuits and gravy every day--that finding
out about his LDL was a good thing because now we could all be
healthier. I'm not liking this talk any better.

"I explained that Ashley has diabetes," he begins.
"We know that from her blood glucose results. Everyone has some
amount of glucose-- sugar--in his blood. Your brain needs it to
think. Too little, and the brain seizes and can't think straight or
send the right signals to the body. Too much, and the brain slows
down and damage starts occurring to the organs. A non-diabetic--"
he motions to us, "has a blood sugar level around 95 milligrams per
deciliter of blood. Fasting, it might go as high as 125, but any
higher than that and we start suspecting diabetes. It can go as low
as 80, so those are the numbers we typically look for. Between 80
and 125." He pauses and opens Ashley's file.

"Ashley has a blood glucose reading of 865."

I think he wants a reaction, but I'm still not sure
what that means. "That's high then, right?"

"Duh, Mom," Logan says, swinging his legs over the
daybed and sitting up. "There's a 45 milligram variance in what's
normal. She's 740 milligrams over the highest normal number. Her
glucose is almost seven and a half times what it should be."

I have no idea how he does this kind of math in his
head and can't bring home better than a C+.

"That's right," Dr. Benton says, looking
impressed.

"But it's not unusual, though, right?" asks Travis,
bless him.

"It's not unusual to see people who are dead at that
level." He looks at Ashley. "You are a very, very lucky little
girl. By all accounts, you should be dead right now." I can tell
Ashley don't feel lucky. Her face is suddenly tight, and she looks
like she swallowed a bee. But Dr. Benton puts his hand over hers,
tubes and all, and squeezes it. "You've been given a new life
today. You ready to start it?"

~~~~

I wasn't raised Baptist. My friend Janise and I,
baptized in the Lutheran Church as infants, snickered at the
Baptists across the way that sang of plunging in the blood of
Jesus. We thought they were strange for not dancing or going to
movies, and we rolled our eyes at the old men who chastised us for
playing cards on our front porch. But Sunday afternoons, when my
parents handed us cheese sandwiches and apples for lunch and told
us to eat outside, we could smell the fried chicken and cherry
cobblers through the open doors as their congregation spilled out
onto the stairs, paper plates bending with the weight of food and
tall cups of homemade lemonade bleeding icy perspiration.

On Halloween, when my friends and I would dress as
witches and ghosts and tubes of toothpaste, they'd gather at the
church for the Harvest Festival. I'd lug home my pillowcase of
candy, and I'd see them riding through the streets on hay wagons,
their faces wet from bobbing apples, arms looped through each
other's, singing and laughing. They laughed a lot, even when we
stuck our tongues out at them and called them holy rollers.

I thought they all just had the happy gene until I
walked in on Donna Jean in the girls' bathroom in tenth grade.
Though she'd barricaded herself in a stall, I could hear her
crying. I almost backed out. I'm ashamed to say I'm one of those
who don't deal well with discomfort, and hearing Donna Jean sobbing
like a willow tree was uncomfortable. But before I could turn
around and leave, she opened the door and froze on seeing me. I
asked if she was all right, 'cause I didn't know what else to say,
and she nodded and said she needed more toilet paper. She'd used it
all up, and so I stood awkward as she got more from the next stall
and blew her nose and tried to collect herself. I didn't know her
that well. She was a grade above me, a flouncy cheerleader with
perfect hair and the football wide receiver as a boyfriend, and a
Baptist to boot. But she stood there sniffling, mascara black under
her eyes, and I couldn't very well turn and leave or ask her to
move so I could go pee in the only stall now that had toilet paper.
So I asked her what was wrong.

"Jim broke up with me," she sniffed. "He said if I
wasn't going to put out, he could find a dozen who would. He said
he's tired of waiting around for me to be ready." She blew loudly.
"He's already given his ring to someone else."

I wasn't about to try to give Donna Jean love advice,
seeing as she was gorgeous and flirty and everything I wasn't. I'd
never even had a boyfriend let alone come close to putting out. But
I couldn't say nothing, her standing there all weepy, having bared
her soul to me, so I said what came into my mind at the moment,
which is hardly ever a smart thing for me to do. I said, "Don't he
know you're a Baptist?"

She gave me a funny look, the kind adults give right
before they say, "Well don't kids say the darndest things!" And
then she smiled a little. "I guess he didn't." And she straightened
her shoulders, threw her tissues in the trash, and fairly marched
out of the bathroom.

I certainly didn't mean it as a compliment. Just that
everyone knows if you want to get laid, it's not the Baptist kids
you hang out with. But she took it as a compliment, and after that
she always smiled at me in the halls and from the sidelines of the
football field. I heard two years later that Jim got some girl
knocked up right after prom, and they got married, had three kids,
and are now divorced.

I remember that, not because it was some meeting of
God moment for me or anything, but because in the bathroom that day
I realized it meant as much to Donna Jean that she was Baptist as
it did to me that she was a Baptist. Only in a good way. And I
realized it never meant anything to me to be Lutheran. And I began
wondering if there wasn't something wrong with that.

I stuck that memory away for awhile. After Logan was
born I told Travis, who wasn't any religion at all, "I think I want
to go to the Baptist church. If we're going to raise children, it
seems they ought to know God." And he just shrugged. So that's how
we became Baptist.

Which didn't seem important at all, until all them
god-fearing folks from First Baptist start pouring into Children's
Hospital with flowers and balloons and goldfish, assuring us that
God would heal Ashley.

~~~~

Brenda and Yolanda are the first to barge in. They
immediately push past Dr. Benton and right over to Ashley, the
smell of wild flowers and Aqua Net hairspray filling the room. "Oh,
Baaaaby, how arrrre you?" Brenda drawls, leaning over to hug Ashley
and crushing her with her oversized bosom. "We got here as soon as
we heard." She lets go and looks around for a place to tie the
dozen Mylar balloons decorated with the face of some Disney
teenybopper. When I read the word
officious
in the week-five vocabulary list
in the SAT book, I thought of Brenda.

"Over here," Yolanda says, hip-checking the tiny
table with the ice chips on it until it rolls to the corner where
she sets a plate of brownies. "We know how bad hospital food is, so
we brought you some goodies."

"She can't have any of those, now," Dr. Benton says.
He maneuvers around the ladies, picking up the plate and handing it
back to Yolanda. I can see her lip curl just a hair, and I know
she's forming an unfavorable opinion of my favorite doctor.
"Ashley's on a special diet for the next few days."

"Aw, a few brownies can't hurt her none," Brenda
says, stepping in and batting her over-mascara-d lashes at him. She
gives him her best sugary sweet smile, Marvelous Mango lipstick
smudging her front two teeth. He doesn't fall for her flirting, and
I love him even more for this.

"In fact, they can hurt her very much." He turns to
Travis and me and says, "I'll let you all visit for a few minutes
alone." To Ashley he says, "No food." Ashley don't look like she
even cares about the brownies, which is a first.

Yolanda watches him leave, and then says, "He's a
stick in the mud, ain't he?"

"I think he's cute," Brenda says. "Not everyone can
be plied with your cooking."

"What's wrong with my cooking?"

"Maybe you should ask your husband. He seems to
always be starved at the church suppers."

Travis clears his throat. They both stop suddenly and
look at us.

"Goodness, look at us bickering and adding to your
suffering 'stead of helping out like we should be."

"We aren't suffering," I say. "Why are you here?"

Brenda's eyes get wide and hurt. "We're here to see
Ashley. We thought y'all might need some encouraging. The church
always visits people in the hospital."

"That's why they call us the hospital-ity group."
Yolanda jokes. I don't laugh, and she looks around to see if anyone
else got it.

"We want to check on Ashley and see if there's
anything we can do for y'all."

"I don't know," I say. "We ain't been here long
enough to find out what's wrong. And now you done chased the doctor
out, and who knows how long 'til he comes back and we find
out."

Travis steps up next to me and puts his hand on my
arm. "We sure do appreciate y'all coming all this way out here. It
means a lot to us to know people in the church care that much."
Yolanda don't look like she thinks we are that appreciative. "We'll
probably be needing help later on, but we really don't know much
yet, and the doctor was just about to fill us in. You understand."
I can tell they don't at all.

"There's more of us coming," Brenda says.

"The committee wanted to be here for your family,"
Yolanda adds.

There's awkward silence. Then Travis says, "You know,
I don't think Logan has eaten yet, and he's bored to death in here.
Do you think you could take him to the cafeteria for us?"

Logan shoots Travis a look to kill, but Yolanda and
Brenda don't see it, and they brighten immediately. Feeding people
is their specialty.

"Gloria is bringing barbecue sandwiches. And Dot's
got a fruit salad. We could set up a little feast for y'all, and
you could come down when the doctor is done and get some
nourishment."

"That would be a great time for us to fill you in," I
say, warming to this idea, as my stomach is growling like a grisly
bear at the smell of the brownies. They are both smiling now, our
dismissing them forgiven.

Yolanda pats Ashley on the head. "I'm sorry, bunny. I
wish the mean ole doctor would let us give you some."

Ashley, bless her heart, manages a smile and says,
"That's okay. I'm not hungry anyway."

Yolanda tousles her hair like she's a stray dog, all
pity. "You're such a brave girl." She leans over and whispers in
her ear loud enough for all of us to hear, "We're all praying God
will heal you quick. The God who heals the lame and raises the
blind will make you healthy, too."