A Different Kind of Normal

  We gasped, as Grandma Violet swished her hands together to get rid of excess flour. “They were no longer silly girls but strong women.” She locked her blue gaze onto my blue and green one, then to Brooke’s and Caden’s, for emphasis. “That’s what you’ll grow up and be, too, dears. Not women and men who fight in alleys, necessarily, but women and men who know their minds and can speak them clearly. Anyhow, Faith and Grace skittered on out of that sleazy alley, looking behind them to make sure no one saw, then found a boardinghouse to stay in and collapsed. They had survived a treacherous journey. They were ill and itchy, and they had lost everything: their families, their homes, their friends, their country. They cried, oh, how they cried.”

  She shook her head, her own blue eyes filling, then told us the rest of the story.

  When Faith and Grace finally ventured out, they found Charleston to be hot, humid, and chaotic. The slave trade disgusted and appalled them. When they saw how slaves were treated, they cried again.

  “But they decided to turn their tears into action,” Grandma Violet said, her chin tipped proudly. “Those women loved fashion and they started a business called Faith and Grace’s where they sold dresses, petticoats, corsets, lacy undergarments, parasols, jewelry, handkerchiefs, pretty shoes, bonnets, fabrics for clothing or curtains and pillows . . . and naughty things.”

  “What naughty things?” I asked.

  “Precious, lacy, seductive naughty things that women wore at night. They rented a tiny corner shop with large windows. They lived above it in a teeny-tiny room with a window, one bed, a washbasin, a battered dresser, and a slanted roof.”

  Grandma Violet put the bread under a red and white cloth, her hands gentle now. “They planted a tiny garden out back, all the flowers and herbs we have now, but they tried to hide the herbs a bit, no use getting anyone suspicious again of them being witches, the screaming mob who had wanted to flog them hadn’t left their minds. The point is, dears, they took adversity, they did cry, but then they put up a fight—not only for themselves, but for the slaves. I’ll tell you the story of the slaves another time. That’s a scary one.” She shook her finger at us. “But remember this: Tears and toughness go together.”

  I smiled in memory of Grandma Violet, of the stories of Faith and Grace.

  I thought of all the tears I’d shed in my years as a hospice nurse, and the tears I’d shed over my grandparents, Tate, Brooke, and my father as I stared through the windows of my greenhouse, through the inky night, at my home, the home that Faith and Jack built. The home Faith lived in and loved in and cried in.

  I figured I should turn my tears into action, too.

  Just like Faith and Grace.

  TATE’S AWESOME PIGSKIN BLOG

  I have been given permission to try out for the basketball team.

  Boss Mom said yes.

  I don’t know if I’ll make it, but man, I’m going to try.

  See, I have a shunt in my head that goes from my brain to my heart that gets rid of excess fluids called cerebrospinal fluid. This is the stuff that acts like a liquid pillow in your skull. It swishes through the four ventricles, like the rooms, of your brain. You need this liquid stuff to nourish yourself and for the ol’ nervous system. It goes all over the brain and your special, slinky spinal cord, and then it heads for the hot red stuff, yes, my favorite, BLOOD! The shunt in my head, I know, I know, it’s seductive to you young ladies out there to know I have a shunt, but it regulates the fluids as they flow as smooth as syrup.

  If something hits my head too hard, there is a sliver of a slim and narrow chance I will need another operation or pass out or do something weird like start waltzing around a gym with an invisible partner while yodeling or taking off my clothes and then the women would faint with ecstasy, seeing my nakedness and muscles and masculinity and all.

  There’s also a teeny-weeny chance I could die.

  I know this.

  But I could also die because a helicopter goes down and lands on my ears, Bert and Ernie.

  I could also die if we’re attacked by space aliens. Even my cyber-blasting, fire-shooting, alien destruction gun operated by Billy and Bob can’t cream all the aliens.

  I could die if I swallowed an entire orange at one time and it stuck in my esophagus.

  These things maybe could happen. It’s the same risk as playing ball. Sort of.

  But I can’t say no to life because of the maybes.

  I can’t say yes to fear.

  I have ancestors named Faith and Grace. They were part of the Underground Railroad in South Carolina and they got caught hiding slaves underneath their house. Now, that’s scary. But they didn’t say yes to fear even though they knew all along they could have been jailed, hung, or shot for hiding slaves.

  I’m seventeen years old. Saying yes to fear is not really in my vocabulary.

  People say this is the best time of your life. I hope not. I hope it isn’t. Because a lot of being a teenager is hard. It’s awkward, it’s lonely, you feel alone, no one wants you around, and you’re close to having all your friends reject you. You’ll never have a girlfriend. You’re different.

  Try doing all that with a head named General Noggin.

  I’ll always be different.

  But what I want, this one time in my life, is to be a part of a team and not so different.

  I want to be part of a whole group of guys playing ball. I want to be as normal as I can be. For once.

  I wanted to play basketball.

  Boss Mom said no.

  Then she said yes.

  Now I’m in tryouts.

  I hope I make the team.

  Here’s a photo of Faith and Grace, Underground Railroad conductors and women who said no to fear. Faith had blue eyes, Grace had green eyes, and my mom got one of each. That is so radical.

  Here’s the question for today: What are you afraid of? Why?

  The night before, a kid sitting in the bleachers when Tate made his long shot for pizza downloaded it to YouTube. He included Tate’s blog address. The video showed Tate pretending to think about the deal, asking for ice cream and pop, all the kids laughing, Tate’s concentration, the ball careening up, up, up through the air and swishing through the hoop. It showed all the kids leaping up and down in excitement, and Coach Boynton grabbing Tate and hugging him off his feet.

  Friends sent it to friends who sent it to friends.

  “Mom, look at this.” Tate pointed to the stats on his blog, awed. “Man. Unbelievable. I could almost call myself a real blogger.”

  5,200 hits.

  And hundreds of responses from people about what they were afraid of, as Tate had asked. Their responses ran from cryptic and funny, to tragic and rawly honest, the words almost burning up the screen with their searing pain.

  “I guess people are reading my blog.” He was absolutely thrilled, almost giddy.

  “Yes, son, I believe that you’re right.” I put an arm around his shoulders.

  “I think I’m getting to know some people finally, without General Noggin in the way.” He patted his head. “No offense, General Noggin. You’re cool.”

  “You are definitely getting to know people, and they’re being honest in what they write.”

  “Yep. I’m talkin’, they’re talkin’.” He pumped his fists together. “I’m not invisible anymore or someone that others wish was invisible. Somebody’s listening to me and I’m listening to them. I have something to say and people are actually reading it. We have a miracle in this old, creaky house, a miracle! Hey! Boss Mom! Can I have some cinnamon spice cookies? Please? I’m double and triple bashed hungry for them.”

  10

  From then on out, when I picked up Tate from basketball practice at night, he came out of the gym grinning, spinning a basketball on his finger, other players jostling around him.

  “How did it go?”

  “Good. I think. I let a guy go past me today and I should have been a better defender, but he wasn’t looking fast out there and I was afraid
he was going to get cut if he didn’t get one drive in, at least.”

  “You let him go by you?”

  He squirmed. “Yeah. It’s Zeke. I don’t think he’s going to make it but at least he had a try.”

  “Did he make a basket?”

  “No, he air-balled it.”

  The next day: “How did practice go?”

  “Okay. I moved out of the way to let Ronnie shoot, and the coach yelled at me to ‘Defend, Tate, defend, you know what that is, do it.’ ”

  Oh boy.

  “Did you make your shots?”

  “Yeah, I did. Road Runner was on fire.” He wriggled his eyebrows at me. “Mickey Mouse helped, too. Except for one shot. Patel was guarding me, and I shot but I missed so the coaches would think he was a fast defender. I don’t think Patel has a grip on his feet yet, Mom. I mean, in school he’ll trip when he’s walking down the hallway.”

  The next night: “Maybe tomorrow you should play as best you can and let the other kids play the best they can.... The tryouts are coming up soon, as you know.”

  “Yeah. I should.” His face brightened. “Man, Mom, it’s much funner to play basketball when there’s other guys on the court and not me all by myself imagining that I’m playing against a full team.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I mean, when I’m out on our sport court I’ve got both teams all around me in my head doing different stuff, but now I know where all the other real life nine dudes are and what they’re doing. This is cool, Mom, it’s radical!”

  I listened to him, excited, but my worry knocked up another hundred notches. I hadn’t wanted him to make the team, I didn’t want him hurt, but he wanted it, he wanted to make the team more than anything, he was off-the-charts hopeful, so I started to crack and I wanted him to make it, too.

  It would devastate him not to make it, and yet, even though I had seen him shoot, though I thought he had a solid chance, I had no idea how he was doing compared to all the other kids, many of whom had been playing since kindergarten, and how he was doing with the other skills he needed to play basketball.

  “I love you, Boss Mom, thanks again.” He sighed, grateful, relieved.

  “I love you, too, Tate. And you’re welcome.”

  “I called Dirk Hassells a couple of days ago to reconfirm our meeting, ostensibly, but basically to see if he had changed his mind or if I could change it for him.”

  “And?” I asked.

  Sydney Grants leaned back in her chair in her office, then flicked her black braids back and sighed. She was wearing an African-styled silk blouse in browns, beiges, and greens and a matching headband. “The conversation went poorly.”

  I was in jeans, leather boots to my knees, a white T-shirt, and a skinny leather jacket. I tapped my fingertips together. I could strangle Dirk. How’s that for a hospice nurse?

  “Dirk is still proclaiming that the care you provided his father caused his father to die much earlier than he would have, including all that morphine, and I quote, that you ‘poured down his throat.’ He was mad that you wouldn’t return his e-mails, calls, and texts. Mad that you were avoiding him when you were caring for his father. He even said you didn’t want to go out to lunch with him, refused to have conversations with him that weren’t directly about his father, and did not seem interested in who he was, and I quote again, ‘as a man. Jaden Bruxelle blew me off.’ ”

  I laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. The whole thing was a mess and causing more stress in my life. This incident didn’t make me appear poorly to the other hospice nurses and doctors, I knew that. I had worked with them for years. Hospice nurses, because of the terminal nature of our business, will, like any other medical profession, sometimes get caught up in something that is not our fault at all. You are dealing with dying people. Family members are emotional, they want to blame someone. This kind of thing happens.

  But it was hard all the same and contributed to the exhaustion I felt with my profession.

  “He said you denied him personal time and physical comfort, hugs and such, even though you talked to his sister, Beatrice, all the time and her kids and hugged all of them. He said he was excluded from hugs. He said that twice.”

  “He is disgusting.”

  “He is. He says he’s going to bring in lawyers, blah blah blah. He insists on seeing you at the table. Another quote, ‘Make sure Jaden has her butt at the meeting, I want to talk to her, she’s avoiding me, she’s going to talk to me or else. Does she understand who I am? Does she know I’m rich, that I own a business? ’ ”

  “He is a scary, odd, controlling duck.” My heart sped up again and I wanted to eat the smile off a cinnamon Gummi Bear. Stress!

  “Definitely creepy. I’m sorry that you have to be there at the meeting, hospital regulations. We should go to trial. I think the jury would be entertained.”

  “I would prefer it if he choked on his tongue.”

  Sydney nodded. “That’s a special image I think I’ll hold on to.”

  “I’ve paid Ernest Rodriquez to search for Brooke,” my mother said that night over the phone. She’d had a busy day on Foster’s Village. She had arranged for evidence to be planted so it would appear that her younger stepsister had stolen millions of dollars and would go to jail for years.

  “I still don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, Mom.” I rocked back and forth on our old rocking chair, a rainbow arching over our fields through a light rain. “Tate wants to meet her, but I don’t think I want him to meet her. It’ll be upsetting, at the very least, and I can’t let him meet her if she’s all drugged up, which she probably is.”

  “I know. Let’s see what Ernest finds out about her, then we can wrestle this lion to the ground and declaw it.” She paused and sniffled. “I must show you the new dress that Cooley designed for me. . . .”

  My mother is not as into designer clothes as she appears. She clings to that type of thing for distraction because the pain of losing Brooke to drugs threatened to kill her for years.

  When Brooke was out from one of her rehab jaunts, my dad, Caden, Brooke, and I moved up here to London Gardens so we could all be in a different environment, different school. My mother flew up every weekend.

  My father stayed home and wrote his scripts. “I had no idea a man could feel this much pain and still breathe,” I’d heard him say to my mother about Brooke. “I had no idea a man could feel this much fear and not scream. I had no idea this level of desperation existed.”

  I loved living full-time in Tillamina. I loved my new friends who wanted to run around outside and ride horses more than go shopping. I loved that people wore jeans and sweatshirts to school instead of the latest couture fashions, and no makeup.

  I loved that everyone went to the football and basketball games at the high school and how downtown was a fifteen-minute walk and my dad let me go by myself. Though my grandparents were no longer alive, I loved their house with all the history, the stories, the antiques, ancient books and quilts, and the maple trees that lined the driveway that Faith and Jack had planted. I wondered if Faith loved watching the leaves change color as much as I did, if she watched the hawks, blue jays, and robins, too.

  I loved Grandma Violet’s garden, the herbs and flowers our family had planted and tended for generations, in honor of the “witches in our family line.”

  We thought London Gardens would be a new start for Brooke.

  It wasn’t. It was simply a new place.

  Anyone can find drugs at any time, in any town, in this country, and she found them.

  She found a kid named Corey who had dropped out of high school. His parents were addicts. They lived in a trailer park. They did coke together. One night Corey almost died. He later told us he saw Jesus in his dream and that’s what got him off coke.

  Corey eventually became the senior pastor of a megachurch. He personally apologized to my mother several years later, the tears unending.

  Brooke kept using. She had not seen Jesus in her dreams.


  We all loved Brooke dearly. Even when she was on drugs, she was kind to me. Brushing my hair, styling it, making me special gifts with whatever was in our art box—sequins, shells, beads, flowers from outside, shiny rocks. Her hands would shake, her eyes would be funny, she would giggle inappropriately, and make odd comments about seeing stars, snakes, and sugar, but she’d always hug me.

  She made things for my parents, too, and Caden, and wrote, “I love you,” on the gifts.

  I mourn for my sister and that “I love you,” to this day. I have never stopped missing her, though her drug addiction caused ceaseless pain in our family and devastated all of us.

  I rocked harder in our old rocking chair, my mother and I talked a few more minutes, then hung up.

  The rain was now a deluge, as if the clouds had been poked, the water streaming out, the rainbow gone.

  “How are you doing, Tate?”

  “Atom based radically. How are you, Dr. Robbins?”

  Ethan smiled at me. “Fine, more than fine.”

  While they chatted I took the time to surreptitiously, without drooling, stare at Ethan with barely concealed lust. He drums up my engines, I will not deny that.