A Different Kind of Normal

  “Miss Bruxelle—”

  My mother, Caden, and Brooke ran out behind them, my mother unstable, leaning on Caden, my brother seeming to have aged in hours, Brooke a pale mess, their faces awash in yet another round of utter despair.

  I stayed on my knees and stared at the nurses, at their rigid, stressed expressions.

  “No,” I whimpered. “Oh God, no.”

  The nurses bent down so they could be eye-to-eye with me.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this,” one nurse said, her arms wrapping around me.

  My mother stumbled in beside me, her cheek to mine, as Brooke and Caden kneeled with me, a group of people with nothing left.

  The nurse looked me right in the eyes. “Miss Bruxelle, Tate’s heart has stopped.”

  Tate’s heart has stopped?

  What are you talking about?

  It was his head that was hurt. His head! Not his heart! They were fixing his head. It was cut open. There was nothing wrong with his heart!

  “The doctors are working on him. This sometimes happens during these operations.”

  They’re working on him? How do you work on a heart?

  “They’re doing all they can.”

  Doing all they can?

  Does that mean he’s dying on that table? They’re working to prevent his death? They’re trying to bring him back? Or that he’s dead, his good-bye done? Why do they have to work on his heart?

  What is going on?

  I heard screaming. I heard wailing. My throat was hoarse, I didn’t understand why. Was it me? Was I screaming? People rushed out of the reception room toward us, running, I knew I knew them, but I couldn’t figure out who was who. Who were they? Why were they running to me? All I heard were those screams, pitched and high, desperate and petrified, they swirled all around us, then the screams went down my throat, pulsating and harsh and sucking my life out of me in a continuous plunge of pain.

  Caden hauled me onto his lap, cradling me, my mother’s eyes green pits of agony. Brooke was on all fours and wrapped her arms around me.

  Tate was gone, that I knew because I could not feel him anymore.

  I could not feel him, but I didn’t want them to say it.

  I couldn’t feel his strong arms, his chicken pancake scent, I couldn’t touch his curls. I couldn’t hear him say, I love you, Boss Mom.

  Gone.

  Not here.

  Not with me.

  My son was gone.

  I tilted my head back as the excruciating pain ran all the way up my body and out my mouth in a wall of wrenching pain and into that bitter, freezing cold night.

  Both Faith and Grace had six children.

  Faith’s first sweet baby died when she was two of a raging infection. It came on in the morning and four days later she was dead.

  Grace lost a darling child when he was three to pneumonia. The doctors were of no help. Nothing the cousins did, with herbs, with their thimble, white lace handkerchief, needle, gold timepiece, charms, their spells and chants, the book with the black cover . . . nothing could save those children.

  Faith had a baby with one arm shorter than the other. It wasn’t too much of a problem because he was also six foot six inches tall, with a redhead’s temper and giant fists. He became the mayor of Portland.

  The women never stopped missing their children. They were blessed with many grandchildren and acted as the second mother to their cousin’s children, but their grief was never totally gone, and they would often picture the babies they had lost playing outside with their siblings.

  Grandma Violet told me it was said that when they died, Faith and Grace uttered their dead children’s names, and smiled.

  Henrietta Grace.

  Russell Philip.

  How I have missed you.

  I heard about Maggie Granelli’s death later from her daughter, which was right after Tate’s heart stopped beating.

  “There are many angels now. All waiting. They’re waiting for me,” Maggie said, with awe in her voice, seeing the scene only she could see.

  “Her face went from this serene peace to anxious to panicked, Jaden,” the daughter told me. “She had been smiling but then she started twitching and jerking. Her eyes didn’t move but she said, ‘Tate! Oh no, you’re not supposed to be here, you’re not supposed to be here, go go!’ ”

  The daughter started to cry. “I’m sorry to tell you that, Jaden, I’m so sorry. But I thought you should know. Mom started shaking her head, she was very weak, and said, ‘Bishop Tate, not you, not you, honey, not yet.’ ”

  The clay pot went crashing right through the window of my greenhouse, glass shattering into thousands of pointy shards.

  The second clay pot took out another window.

  The third clay pot took out yet another.

  I used both arms and a raving temper to send herbs, flowers, and plants flying off tables and shelves. I sent tools careening through the open glass. The silver watering can from Ethan cracked another window, and I smashed a pot of budding impatiens to the floor, followed by snapdragons and petunias.

  “What are you doing?” Brooke yelled, sprinting in, her auburn hair back in a messy ponytail, raindrops on her sweatshirt.

  “I’m killing my greenhouse!”

  Brooke wrapped her scarred arms around me. “Stop, honey, Jaden, stop it!”

  “No, you stop it!” I struggled to get free of her. We had both been at the hospital for three straight days. Tate’s heart had stopped, they had finally gotten it beating again on its own, but he was now in a coma. I was told that I should think about when I wanted to “let him go.”

  “I will never let Tate go,” I raged at the tiny, pixie-doll doctor who I later found out was an intern and shouldn’t have been talking to us at all. “I will not let him go! Never will I let him go, do you have that straight?”

  She nodded. “Okay, Miss Bruxelle. I understand. I’ll tell Dr. Robbins.”

  “You tell him that I said never!” I bent over and yelled at her as she walked her irritating pixie self down the corridor. “Never! Never! Never!”

  Brooke wrapped her arms around me, as did my mother and Caden. My words, “I will never let Tate go!” echoing around the corridor, jagged, raggedy, then I’d fallen to pieces again, sagging against Caden. The whole thing was beyond horrendous.

  Caden had brought me home with Brooke so we could take showers, change clothes and, he hoped, rest, because I was a walking emotional zombie who had lost all control and had not slept in forever. “Rest, baby,” he’d told me. “Please, you can barely stand up. Rest. I’m going to check on the kids, then I’ll be back.”

  But first, first I was going to kill my greenhouse and the spices and herbs that made me smell death. I was going to take it down to its studs. I was going to break all the glass, take an ax to the posts, and rip every living thing apart. Then I was going to burn the herbs and spices. Burn them in a red-hot bonfire, one after another tossed into the flames, until they crinkled and disintegrated, then I would toss in my smiling, dumb red cinnamon Gummi Bears and my teas.

  I did not want to see an herb or a spice again in my life. I would not have them anywhere, anytime. The herbs and spices had warned me, I had ignored the warning, now Tate was in a coma because his heart had stopped. There would be another operation today to relieve swelling and pressure in his head. He could die.

  Because of me, my son could die. My son! I hurled a wicker chair straight through a broken window. Stupid, stupid chair! Now you can live in the rain!

  Tate was essentially dead now. Kept alive artificially. Tubes, machines, blinking lights, doctors and nurses, including Ethan.

  I sent the other chair tumbling out into the rain, too. Stupid chair!

  “Don’t kill your greenhouse, Jaden,” Brooke begged. “Please, don’t.”

  She was crying, her skinny body shaking. I finally focused on my sister, my younger sister whom I had adored for years, whom I had lost to a mess of drugs. She had been my friend, my playmat
e, and she had poisoned our family and hurt Tate. She had hurt Tate! Tate was almost dead and she had hurt him! Where had she been all these years! How dare she hurt my son!

  “Please, it’s beautiful out here, Jaden. Tate loves it.”

  “Tate!” I raved, my chest heaving. “What the hell do you know about Tate?”

  She reached out a hand to support herself on a wood table, now strewn with smashed plants and piles of dirt.

  “Do you know how much you’ve hurt him? Do you have any idea at all, you selfish sister?” I rammed two blue pots into the floor. They broke into a hundred blue pieces. “Do you know what your walking out did to him? He knows I’m not his biological mother. You are! He doesn’t even know who his father is because you don’t!”

  “You’re his mother, Jaden, I know that—” She put shaking hands to her face.

  “I know that! I am his mother! And he had me, and Caden and Caden’s kids and Mom. He knows we love him, but he lived with knowing his mom abandoned him. He would worry about you, and yet—” I hurled two red pots, filled with tulip bulbs, across the greenhouse, getting an odd thrill from the bomb-blast sounds they made. I threw a yellow pot, too. Boom, boom! “You didn’t deserve his worry. You didn’t deserve him caring about you. You didn’t care about him.”

  Brooke leaned more heavily on the table. She knew she deserved my rage.

  “He wanted to know that you were okay, he said he worried about you being cold, alone, crying, but you never, not once, stopped enough in your life to check on him, did you?” I took a climbing spotted frog off the post and pitched it through the broken glass, then I grabbed another frog and did the same thing, and a third. Flying frogs! Off they went! Hop hop!

  “I asked Mom how he was all the time—”

  “You asked Mom,” I mocked, panting. “During the infrequent times that you stumbled home, stoned?” I suddenly hated my colorful Chinese lanterns from San Francisco and grabbed a rake and swung at them, bringing them to the floor. So long, happy lanterns! I hate you! I swung at my dried lavender, the dried roses, then crushed them with my shoes.

  “Do you know how many hundreds of nights Mom and Dad didn’t sleep because they knew you were out in the world somewhere, drugged up and in danger? Do you know Mom’s been on sleeping pills for years? She’s seen a therapist once a week since you left. Remember when twice during the run of her show she was either put into a coma, how ironic is that now”—I smashed another yellow pot—“or stuck in a mental institution on the show? It was because she had nervous breakdowns. She fell apart because of you, Brooke. Dad did, too. They couldn’t take it, couldn’t take that any day you could die of a drug overdose, be a victim of a crime . . . it drove them out of their minds.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I am sorry. I’ve never stopped being sorry!”

  I brought down the last purple Chinese lantern with a swing of my rake, then started on the hanging wicker baskets. “Sorry isn’t good enough. It will never be good enough, never! You ruined years of our lives. Years. And now you’re here.”

  “You asked me to come—”

  “Yes, I asked an addict to come—”

  “I know I’m an addict—”

  “And you are a selfish, weak, and thoughtless person. You destroyed part of my childhood because you didn’t have the backbone to get yourself cleaned up. You wouldn’t do the hard work to get sober.” I stomped on the Chinese lanterns. I didn’t want any color in my life anymore, anyhow! “You had to relentlessly hurt our family because you were too into yourself, your pleasures, your highs to get it together.”

  “I know that, I’m trying—”

  “Trying? You’re trying?” My chest was pounding with exertion. I grabbed a pot of zinnias and out it went! I never wanted to grow anything again! Nothing! “You’re not intending to stay clean? Is that too much to ask? Do you think that you are on this planet all by yourself and you can do anything you want?”

  “No, no, I don’t—” She used both hands to prop her skinny self up, her eyes huge in that too-thin face.

  “My son is in a hospital.” I hated my greenhouse now! I hated my herbs and spices and flowers and bulbs. “He may die. And after all this time, you show up.”

  “But you said Tate wanted to meet me, Jaden,” she whispered.

  “He did. And now I think it was a mistake. What are your plans, Brooke? To walk away, to stay? What?” I started hacking at the white Christmas lights, bringing the strands to the floor. I would never want to have Christmas without Tate.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know—”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know shit because you haven’t been around this family enough to know anything.” I ignored the hot tears that were falling down my cheeks and hers. “Did you know that Dad died fearing for your life? He was always scared you would die. He lived with your possible death hanging over him.”

  “I know.” She broke into another round of sobs. “I know it. You think that doesn’t follow me around? I know that I did that to him. I know it was all my fault.”

  I checked my rage for a minute, there was something else here. “What do you mean, you know it was all your fault? What do you know?”

  “Nothing, oh God, nothing—”

  “Yes, you know something, Brooke. What is it?” I whipped a strand of lights to the floor.

  “Not now, I don’t want to tell you now, I don’t want to talk about Dad—”

  “Tell me, damn you, Brooke, tell me.”

  She cried, hands to mouth.

  I picked up one of my teapots and threw it. It burst three feet from her feet. “Tell me, Brooke! Right now!” I picked up another one, broke it, too, right close to her.

  “Oh my God!” She screeched, then turned her shoulders in, huddling into herself. “I know because I called him that night. I called him because I was in Portland and I was tripping and I needed help and I wasn’t sure where I was and I thought I was dying.”

  What? I grabbed a teacup and sent it crashing across the greenhouse. Never would I drink tea again. I wanted to drink it with Tate. Only Tate. “You called him? When?”

  “That night.”

  My air seemed to be stuck, not moving around in my body. “You called him that night he died?”

  “Yes, I called him.” She started to hyperventilate but I had no pity for her. “I told him the names of signs, street signs, a store in Portland that I could see, I was stoned.... And he said he was on his way and he came to help me, to save me. He came to save me. Daddy came to save me. Save Brooke, save me. . . .” Her voice grew small. “To save me . . .”

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” That was it. He was driving that night to her. To Brooke. That’s why he was going too fast, he never drove fast. We thought he’d gone for chocolate mint ice cream for me. . . . He’d told me there would be ice cream when I came home.... I picked up a rosemary plant, my rage quivering, and threw it through a window, then thyme, then oregano. “Damn you, Brooke!”

  “I called him and he went over . . . over . . . over that cliff.”

  I envisioned his car, careening out of control, flying into the inky blackness, his face when he realized there was no road under his wheels. He would have thought of my mother, of his children.

  I reached for another rosemary plant, but found I had no energy to break it, probably because I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t stand any longer. I sank onto the messy floor of my greenhouse as my legs gave out, my knees weak, the rosemary plant in my lap.

  “I’ve had to live with that since then, Jaden. I killed Dad. I am responsible for Dad dying.” She groaned, primal and raw. “I killed him. I killed my own dad. I killed yours and Caden’s dad. I killed Mom’s husband. He was worried about me dying, he wanted to save me, but I killed him.”

  “Stop, stop, don’t say anymore. I can’t take it.” I rocked back and forth, filthy with dirt, filthy with black emotions. “Good God, I can’t take it. I can’t take any more. Not of this, not of you . . .” r />
  “I killed Dad.” Brooke tilted her head back, gasping for air, hardly even with me anymore, lost in her own hysterical turbulence. “It was me. It was my fault. All my fault. Forever it’s been my fault, all of it. I’m sorry. Mom, I’m sorry, Jaden and Caden, I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry. . . . I can never be sorry enough.”

  I pushed the rosemary plant off my lap and turned over, ripped and exhausted, face down to the ground, to the dirt, and cried a thousand tears while Brooke wailed, the wail escaping out the broken glass of the greenhouse, across the grass and to the country house that Faith and Jack built, where her quilts still hang, her banister my banister, her view of the maple trees my view now. Brooke’s soaring wail surrounded the gardens where I grow Canterbury bells, hollyhocks, lilies, irises, sweet peas, cosmos, red poppies, peonies, and rows of roses, the same flowers Faith and Grace grew.

  No, Brooke could never be sorry enough.

  I sobbed so hard I thought my body would burst.

  There was such a heavy load of abject misery in that greenhouse if misery could demolish a building, it would have been demolished, with us in it.

  Later, with Brooke shrieking and hyperventilating, I struggled up, dirt dropping off me. I wanted to continue killing my greenhouse, the place where death was stored in my herbs and spices.

  I stumbled to my cutting and mixing area and grabbed as many spice jars as I could. I would dump out the spices and the herbs into one pile for my bonfire. I would add all my teas! It would be a bonfire of spices, herbs, and teas! They would all be burned to ash. With shaking hands I started to gather them up to incinerate them and I accidentally knocked over paprika and coriander, which broke on the floor.

  I swore up a blue streak.

  A jar of parsley fell to the ground, too, and shattered on the floor right on top of it. A box of peppermint herbal tea fell, too, and I smashed it with my boot.

  “Hell, double hell! Fine, then! I’ll break all of you! You’re all going right now! You’re dead!” I raised my arms up and with one mighty swoop, spice jars went crashing to the floor and their scents—ginger, sage, chervil, tarragon, nutmeg, dill, oregano, thyme, bay leaves—all floated up, twirling together with the peppermint herbal tea, blending and folding into one another.