A Different Kind of Normal

  “No, I took ’em all out to the garage.”

  “No mixing chemicals you don’t understand.”

  “You’ve told me that a million times. I know what will explode when I put them together.”

  “Then don’t mix ’em.”

  “Back to basketball. We have the best team in the state. We’re gonna win the championship.”

  “I think you’ll win, too.” The town was going crazy, thrilled to all ends. I hoped down to my toes that we wouldn’t play Sunrise. I did not need to see TJ Hooks shoving my son around.

  “But I have a question for you, Mom.”

  “And that question is . . .”

  “When is my Other Mother coming up here so I can meet her?”

  He saw my expression, it must have reflected the exhaustion, the wariness, the intense trepidation I felt about throwing Brooke back into his life.

  “I have to meet her, Boss Mom. I have to.” He leaned back in his chair. “I have to. Please. Please, Boss Mom.”

  Darn it all. “Okay, honey. I’ll arrange it. It’ll be soon. Remember—”

  “I know she’s a recovering drug addict. Don’t romanticize her. Don’t expect anything. Don’t get hurt.”

  “That one is most important, Tate. Don’t get hurt.”

  Don’t get hurt, Tate.

  I put on my yellow duckie rain boots and plodded through the puddles to my greenhouse on a rainy night. Tate’s team had won again, to the delirium of Tillamina. He’d come home and eaten eight pieces of Great Great Grandma Lacy’s Cinnamon French toast after using three of the pieces to create a French Toast building.

  I checked on the herbs I had in red pots, then moved on to the herbs I had in green pots, then the yellow pots. I get a gardener’s thrill watching them grow day by day. I also planted seedlings: impatiens, snapdragons, and petunias.

  As usual, I felt compelled to chop up herbs and blend in spices, though my hands trembled like an interior wire was shaking them and what I really wanted to do was run to Siberia. I took a pinch of cilantro, St. John’s wort, dill, and sea salt. I kept them in separate piles, then blended them together. I made designs on the crystal plate from Grandma Violet. I used the silver spoons from Faith.

  By the third design I was shaking.

  Death.

  Death again.

  Damn.

  I took Tate to play chess with Maggie at her request.

  He won. He did not hesitate to checkmate that lady in minutes.

  She humphed. “You’re a skilled chess player, Bishop Tate.”

  “And you’re a smart woman, Maggie Shoes, even though you’re not good at maneuvering your rook and you have to leave your queen protected more.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Play ya again after I get another slice of that pecan pie in your kitchen?”

  “Yes. This time I’m going to whip your young ass.”

  When Tate won he said, “I whipped your ass, Maggie Shoes. Whipped it back to Wednesday.”

  Maggie’s sticks will bloom with roses again next year. She will not be able to see them.

  Tate’s team kept winning. There was a possibility that we might, might, hopefully might be going to the state play-offs in our league!

  The crowds grew and grew. Ethan came to all the games with my family. He videotaped Tate playing so we could all watch it together later.

  Tate kept making the most impossible shots.

  Another newspaper article ran, this time in the statewide newspaper, about the team, the winning season, and the kid with the big head who kept hitting all those three-pointers.

  Tate and I read one of the articles over breakfast one morning. He was eating a five-egg omelet, three pieces of toast, and orange juice.

  Here are a few of the reporter’s questions:

  Q. This is your first year playing basketball, right, Tate?

  A. First year with real, live, breathing people on a team that is visible to other humans. I’ve been playing imaginary basketball for years. Even had cute cheerleaders on the side doing high kicks for me. This year I figured I had a lot of points to make up from previous years of not playing, so that’s why I keep shooting. It’s the revenge of a basketball geek.

  Q. You’ve made an incredible number of three-point shots. Any advice on how to do that?

  A. I’ll tell you what Boss Mom told me: Just throw the damn ball up.

  Q. You’ve had to endure a lot of taunting and ridicule out on the courts.

  A. Yeah, but General Noggin and I shut it out.

  Q. General Noggin?

  A. That’s the name of my head. General Noggin and I keep our brain in the game and I keep shooting. I try to ignore people who call me ugly, freak, gargoyle boy, fire head, ’cause of my hair, you know, Mongloid, asshole, and genetic mistake. But if there’s a young woman out there who wants to call me sexy, then that would be a symphony to my ears, Bert and Ernie.

  Q. When did you start playing basketball?

  A. I was playing basketball when I was four days old.

  Q. Seriously.

  A. That would be my serious answer.

  Q. You’re an athlete and a 4.0 academic. It’s rumored that you did not miss any answers on your PSAT.

  A. Hmmm. Well, on that day, I took my brain out of my head, with General Noggin’s permission, and gave my brain the pencil and he took the test. It seems he scored high. Freaked my teacher out, though, to have a brain with a pencil in its hand on my desk.

  Q. What are your plans?

  A. My plan is to get my second lunch. I’m starving.

  Q. I mean, for college, for life after high school ball? Do you think you’ll get a basketball scholarship?

  A. I don’t think I’ll get a scholarship. I am planning on studying brain and cognitive science, molecular neuroscience, biophysics, cell biology, and organic chemistry. I am writing a blog now so that when I get out into the world hopefully people will have seen my face already and won’t bust a gut when they see me.

  Q. What are your other interests?

  A. I read all the books and research articles I can about brains, which have a hundred billion neurons each and look like white and gray worms wrapped around each other. I’m also interested in biology and chemicals. I have some skill at catching Skittles in my mouth, eating twelve tacos at a time, standing on my head, even though it’s sort of cheating because of the size of it, and I am trying to learn how to dance. Right now I look like a snake that’s being slung around by a leopard, but I’m not giving up. I have to learn how to bust a move for the Winter Formal.

  Q. Do you think you’ll make the play-offs?

  A. Yes. And we will win all of the games and become the state champions.

  Q. That’s pretty confident.

  A. No, it’s a fact.

  “Boss Mom. Watch this.” Tate put one apple and a ceramic elephant on top of his head. “I can eat my omelet and read the article all with an apple and an elephant on top of my head.”

  “Your talent is mesmerizing. Again, something you can put on your college résumé.”

  “Yep. Now stand back with a bow and arrow and see if you can shoot it off. I won’t move. Film it with your phone, though, I want to post it.”

  “If I wanted child services to come and take you away from me, I’d shoot that apple off your head.”

  “Okay, no arrow, but take the picture. I need it for my blog.”

  I took the photo. He wrote the blog. “There are not many people who can eat an omelet with an apple and an elephant on their head.... Hello. It’s me, Tate, again.”

  It was the humor, the humility, the kindness, and his personal story that had people signing up for his blog by the hundreds.

  “It’s awesome now, Boss Mom. I get to play basketball. People say hi to me in the halls. One girl even yelled at me the other day for tripping over her feet, and I loved it because it meant that she didn’t feel sorry for me, didn’t feel disgusted or repelled by me, it was me, Tate. She called m
e a klutz, then she smiled at me. I smiled back. She’s pretty, too.”

  “And you figured out what to do for the Winter Formal, right?”

  “Yep. You’re going to have a lot of people here, Mom.”

  “Ethan, Nana, and Caden will come to help.” All would be welcome. Tate had friends, and they were coming over to the house. I wanted to click my cowboy heels. “I will try to control whatever outrageous things your Nana Bird wants to say, but there’s no telling what the triplets will wear, and if someone ticks Damini off, she’ll take off her leg and you know what.”

  We laughed.

  “I couldn’t care less,” Tate said.

  I hugged him. I couldn’t be happier.

  Tate’s team won the next two games.

  The Mid Court Mob was rocking out. Each game continued to be standing room only. Now and then I could still hear the catcalls from the opposing fans.

  I heard one girl call out, “You’re ugly.”

  I heard another girl call out, “Hey, you! Rectangle head.”

  And a boy with reddish hair yelled, “Teeter-totter eyes!”

  But as I boiled, my son ignored them. The crowd cheered and obliterated most of the mean comments. Ethan came with me to the games and held the camera. He was often overcome watching Tate make baskets, though, and had to sit down, head in his hands, while I patted his back.

  “This is one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me,” my mother breathed as we talked on the phone. She was at work in Hollywood wearing a couture gown. Her stylist had added a chignon to the back of her neck. Tiffany had given her jewelry to wear. It didn’t matter. “I have never been more thrilled. Tate, our boy Tate, playing basketball!”

  “Me, too, Mom. Me, too.”

  “My insides quiver all the time. I can’t wait for the tournament! I think about it every minute! Here, darling, I’m with Dylan, you know I’m blackmailing him, and we’re going to have some violence on the set, oooh! It’ll be delightful! I’ll put you on the speakerphone.”

  “Hello, Dylan!” He and his wife, Gideon, had been to dinner at my mother’s house many times when I was there.

  “My love!” Dylan boomed. “Tell me, what are you growing in your greenhouse?”

  We talked about that for a while. Dylan was born poor. His mother gave birth, then left with a trucker; his father was in and out of jail for assault, robbery, etc. He now has an expansive greenhouse at his farm in Vermont. When he’s not in Los Angeles, he is there because “it brings peace to my soul, the only place, it seems, where that peace is possible.”

  “What are you two doing in the next scene?” I asked.

  “We’re in a ballroom, dancing,” my mother said, “and I tell Dylan in a hissy voice that he must obey me and my malicious manipulations or his life will end as he knows it. End! He leads me out to the garden, da da da! He’s overcome with rage and tries to kill me, but Beck comes running out, hero-like, and defends me. He pummels Dylan with his fists, strangling him against a tree, da da da!”

  “Yep. I almost die,” Dylan said. “I fight, I sweat and swear, it’s useless, I collapse, my head back, mouth open, gag gag gag eyes rolling back, the breath being squeezed out of me, ack ack ack! Hey, Beck! There’s the strangler right now, Jaden! Beck! Come on over here! Jaden’s on the line!”

  “Jaden!” Beck called out. “How are you up in Oregon? You know I’m going to try to kill Dylan here, the old fart. Boom, boom, he’s down, his hair all messed up, makeup smudged.”

  “You’re going to smear my makeup?” Dylan said, his voice falsely appalled. “Oh, don’t do that! You’ll ruin my pretty face!”

  “Pretty face.” Beck scoffed. “You’re Godzilla and King Kong, mixed. Jaden, your mom brought some of your cinnamon rolls with the extra white frosting to the set. They were to die for! I almost cried when I ate one. Tate said I would, and he was right. Tell me about those miniature lemon meringue cakes you made the other night. . . .”

  The memory of the night my father, Shel, died, still hurts. It was a lazy summer evening, the first week after my senior year in high school. He told me he would have chocolate mint ice cream waiting for me when I returned home from the movies with my girlfriends and my blond boyfriend, Josh, who made me giddy, as only first loves can do.

  Brooke, in withdrawal, nauseous, sweating, and craving drugs, had taken off again two weeks before to hang out with her dealer and other scummy people. My parents were devastated, but it was a controlled devastation as this had happened many times before. My father patted his aching heart, as if comforting it, and wiped the useless tears off his cheeks while he worked on his scripts here in Oregon, while my mother, in Los Angeles, worked on Foster’s Village. Caden was at a summer wrestling camp.

  I had been smelling death in my herbs and spices for months, clinging and foul, and it made abject fear and anxiety a constant companion for me. I thought it was for Brooke. I was wrong.

  Several people saw my father’s car, driving too fast that night, losing control and disappearing straight over a cliff, arching through the blackness like a flying toy. The police and paramedics were called, but it was too late, his car had exploded on impact. The police called my mother, and she called me.

  Amidst our unspeakable grief, we scrambled to locate Brooke before the press did. I called a friend, who had a drug addict friend who might know where she was, and he called his cousin. I told Brooke over the phone about our dad. She was silent for a long time, then let out a shrill, horrified scream that still echoes through my body now and then on lazy summer evenings.

  My mother took a private jet to Portland from Hollywood and picked up Brooke, literally right off the streets, in a blighted part of town. She had new tracks up her arm and was stoned and hysterical. My mother drove her straight to the hospital, then to our home in the country, down the lane with the maple trees.

  I have never seen my mother that shattered. I’m sure I never will again. Her husband was dead, and her daughter was stoned right out of her mind.

  My father’s memorial service in Tillamina, on a day filled with tunnels of gold from the sun and blooming red poppies, was packed with hundreds of people and more cameras than I can count outside the church. Two days later, with only family and my parents’ best friends, we buried him in a cemetery that held most of our ancestors, under a willow tree that blew in the summer wind.

  Brooke was despondent, almost comatose in her grief. “I can’t live with this,” she whispered. “I can’t.” Shortly after the funeral, her drug cravings reaching a panting, delirious peak, she took off on a Greyhound bus. Two weeks later she tried to kill herself in a seedy, dirty hotel in west Los Angeles. The manager called an ambulance, then he called the gossip magazines.

  It was a neat slit to both wrists. She was forcibly committed for psychiatric help.

  To get this picture straight for you: My mother lost my beloved father, her darling Shel, whom she had met and fallen in love with when she was eighteen. Her drug-addicted daughter tried to kill herself. Caden and I were beside ourselves. She whispered later, bereft, as Faith and Grace had said so long ago as they bounced along the sea, “This is the worst shipwreck time of my life.”

  I missed my deep-thinking, kind father all the way to the core of my being. That hole has never filled. I was depressed and scared about Brooke. My mother was racked with misery and hardly spoke for two weeks, her eyes empty, lost.

  She later returned to work, amidst enormous sympathy from the American public. I moved to the Hollywood house with her, as did Caden, for the summer. She would come home at night and we would all cry together. The three of us planted honeysuckle. That’s what I remember: honeysuckle. It’s huge now, covering two trellises, the only plant that my mother lets grow without any trimming.

  Brooke was eventually released from psychiatric/drug addiction care and disappeared. This time my mother didn’t search for her. She had given up. There is only so much you can do for a drug addict before you are dragged unde
r the bus with them, the wheels on your chest, breaking your bones, wiping the air out of your lungs. The next time we saw her she was stumbling through our field, pink and white cosmos floating in the wind, pregnant with Tate.

  17

  I rocked in my old rocking chair one night after Tate went to bed, the lights off, pomegranate tea in my hands, facing the windows as the wind howled, pushing snowflakes sideways. I thought of Faith living in this house without central heat, reading one of the fragile books we’ve saved in the armoires, a cup of tea in her hand. It would have been mighty cold in this house, all fireplaces burning.

  I tapped my teacup. How do you introduce your son to his ex-addict mother, whom he has never met? Where’s the protocol on that? Where’s Emily Post when you need her?

  I had decided it would be Brooke, Tate, and me when they met. Not my brother and his family, not my mother.

  My mother had bought Brooke a plane ticket and she flew in. When Tate returned from basketball practice, he knew his Other Mother would be at the house.

  I thought it would be awkward. It was.

  I thought there would be tears. There were.

  I thought there would be anger. Anger was around and about, too.

  But all in all, with a lemon dill salmon dinner, a tomato salad with white wine, bay leaf, garlic, and olive oil, and hot buttered bread, snowflakes gently falling, the three of us, we did pretty darn well.

  Mostly because of Tate’s blunt honesty.

  “So, Brooke.” Tate helped himself to more salmon.

  “Yes.” My sister could not stop looking at Tate with those tired green eyes of hers. Not because of his head, but because he was her son. She kept tearing up, kept clasping her charms between her hands. She was also completely sober. That meant she had room in her mind to realize the magnitude of what she’d done all those years ago.