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Authors: Cathy Lamb

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BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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“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 me 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 under 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.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions, okay?”
“Okay. Please do.” My sister put her hands in her lap. She was wearing long sleeves, I knew why. She had many scars, but she seemed better. Her face was no longer bruised purple and green, and she had put on some makeup. I think my mother had something done to Brooke’s face, too, maybe dermabrasion, because her complexion, which had been rough and pitted, was much clearer. The spa had done a great job on her auburn hair, and it appeared thicker. Brooke wore jeans and boots and a blousy pink shirt. Our styles did not differ that much.
“First is, why did you leave me?”
My sister’s eyes flooded again. I did not try to rescue her, or this conversation. I couldn’t see their relationship progressing without it. Sometimes you have to walk through the sludge and shattered glass to get to the other side of the marsh.
“Tate,” Brooke said. “I . . . I was a screwed-up person. I was on drugs.”
“Which ones?” Tate took another hunk of bread. Nothing could keep that kid from his food.
“At that time”—she took a ragged breath—“I was on cocaine, painkillers, heroin, alcohol, and I smoked.”
“Whoa!” Tate said. “That’s some bad stuff.”
“It was.”
“Why did you start taking them?”
“I was young, I was stupid, I wanted to fit in. A girl I knew was using them, and I started to, too.”
“Yeah. Peer pressure.”
“I was lost and became more and more messed up, then became addicted. I had friends, but they weren’t true friends.”
“Blew your mind, then?”
“Yes. They did.”
“And that’s why you left me in the hospital?”
I heard Brooke’s quick inhale. “Yes. I couldn’t think. My mind was a mess. I was coming off of . . . I’m embarrassed to say this. . . .” She made a whimpering sound. “I was coming off being high and I felt ill and desperate and . . . and I left.”
“Do you think your drug use is why my head grew so big?”
Whew.
My sister’s hands shook. “I don’t know.”
“I think it probably is.”
Whew.
My sister nodded, her guilt so heavy I could almost see it. “You could be right.”
“I think I am right.” Tate kept eating, but I did not miss the steel glint in his eye. Tate rarely grew angry, but when he did, he focused it to a laser point. I’d seen him in action with other kids, with teachers who weren’t treating him fairly, with others who made fun of him. I hadn’t expected less. Tate is a kind, compassionate, wise person who gives people a lot of latitude and a lot of forgiveness. But his mother was on drugs when she was pregnant with him, then she took off.
That’s a lot to get past. Maybe impossible to get past.
“I’m sorry, Tate.” My sister’s voice shook, up and down, a verbal roller coaster.
“I’m sorry, too.” He had another bite of salmon. “Do you know what it’s like to live with a head this size and with crooked eyes?”
“No,” she whispered.
“It’s hard. People have made fun of me forever. I’ve been teased and beaten up.”
“I’m sorry.” The tears were streaming down, onto the tablecloth. “Tate, I am sorry.”
“I’m sorry about the teasing, but it’s made me a lot better person. And I have to say I’m not sorry you left me at the hospital with Nana Bird and Boss Mom.”
“You’re not?” She wiped her tears with a napkin.
“No. You were shooting up drugs. Can you imagine the life I would have had with you? I would have had this huge head, all the medical problems I had when I was younger, and you would have been too drugged out to take care of me. I would have grown up poor, moving around all the time, running into your friends who were doing drugs. It would have been scary, it would have been dangerous, I probably would have been abused or I would have died. So, I’m glad you left.”
I took a deep, deep breath. My sister deserved it, but I saw the way her head moved back, as if Tate had slapped her.
“I would have made a lousy mother.” Her voice was small.
“Yep. You would have.” Tate took an apple and balanced it on his head. “I can eat when I’m balancing things on my head. General Noggin is pretty talented in that way.”
I didn’t laugh. Neither did Brooke.
“I wanted to meet you, Brooke, and I’m glad I did. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m glad to meet you, too, Tate. I have been such a bad mom, I hope you can forgive me one day—”
“You haven’t been a mom at all.”
Oh, whew, again!
No one said anything into that slippery pit for long seconds. All we could hear were Brooke’s muffled, squeaking noises as she cried. I didn’t think Tate was trying, exactly, to be mean, but he wasn’t cutting her any slack, either.
“A mom is Boss Mom here, who is around all the time. She always hugs me and nags at me and feeds me and feeding me takes a long time, too. Five meals a day, that’s what I eat. Plus snacks. Last night I ate eight chicken pancakes. That’s a pancake that’s the size of a chicken. It’s a joke. But Boss Mom, she’s the one who was up with me all night when something was going wrong and who helped me figure out how to deal with all the mean people out there.
“She’s the one who bought me clothes and set up movie nights with popcorn and taught me all about herbs and plants and bought me all the books I wanted, especially ones about brains, and helped me set up my experiment room with all kinds of stuff, which I’ve only set on fire a few small times and maybe a couple of explosions. Boss Mom gave me all I needed to become me, do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I do.” Brooke pulled her arms tight around herself.
“And she was nineteen when she became a mom, too, and she did all that. Nineteen.”
Brooke and I locked gazes, and I saw the shattered remains of the last seventeen years in her eyes. She knew what a failure she had been. She knew what she’d missed. She had missed out on being a mother. Can’t get that one back, no matter how hard you wish. “You’re right. I haven’t been a mom to you, Tate. Not at all. And I’m glad you had your mom.”
“That’s why I have to call you Brooke now that we’ve met. Are you going to visit now and then, are we going to see you again? Are you going to take drugs again?”
“I would love to stay and visit for a few days and to see you in the tournament, if it’s okay. I am not planning on taking drugs again. I would like to get to”—she sobbed, her mouth quivering—“get to know you, Tate, if that’s what you want, too.”
My sister was tiny. The drugs had wasted her to that sick-skinny appearance addicts get. It was pathetic. But she certainly seemed better than the first time I’d seen her in Hollywood.
Tate thought about that. “Okay. We can get to know each other, but it sort of hurts me in my heart, too. I mean, here you are, my mom, and I’m meeting you after seventeen years. You gave me up at a hospital and I get that you were on drugs, but you still made a choice to stay on drugs. You still chose drugs over me for all these years. You chose drugs over Nana Bird, Boss Mom, and Uncle Caden and his family. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m telling you that it might be awhile before I can say, ‘I love you, Mom,’ you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know. I do know, Tate.” My sister struggled to stop sobbing.
“You missed out on a lot, Brooke, but, okay, let’s shake on it.” He offered his hand across the table. “We’ll get to know each other.”
“I would love that.” Her gratefulness went to her core, I knew it. “Thank you.”
“Okay dokay. Hey! Do you want to throw Skittles in each other’s mouths? I love that. We can have a contest!”
So, when the tears were dried, and many were from Tate as he hugged my sister, the tough guy act had worn him down, we threw Skittles into each other’s mouths.
It was fun.
It was a start.
Maybe the start of a new family, new relationships, new people to love.
 
I had a patient named Nikolai Burlachenko two years ago who saw dead relatives in the days before he died.
Nikolai’s parents had brought him to America when he was thirteen. They fled Russia. His father had spoken out against the government, and he’d been jailed and tortured, as had Nikolai’s mother. Nikolai remembered both his parents coming home when they were in Russia, beaten up, relatives carrying in their sagging, bloody bodies. He remembered the arrest warrant on his father and how they escaped from their home in the middle of the night.
The Burlachenko family was poverty-stricken. His parents had no money when they arrived in the United States. Both had been college professors. They ended up working as custodians, at first, until they put together their own custodial company and made some money.
“Once you’re in poverty, once you go to bed hungry for weeks at a time, you never forget it. Hard work is the only thing that will protect you, that’s what I taught my sons,” Nikolai told me. “Hard work. Save your money.”
He was dying of pancreatic cancer. I had known him for two months.
“Jaden, all I can tell you is that I have a party going on in my bedroom, and all my relatives who have passed are all waiting around until God’s ready to take me to heaven. I see people who have already died on one side of me, and on the other side I see my four boys.”
People talking to dead relatives is not, I would say, common. But it happens. This was not the first time I’d seen it.
“Who has died that you see?”
“I see my parents.” He smiled. “Igor and Nadia. They were tired all the time when I was a boy, scared witless, but now, they are not tired, not frightened for their lives. I see my grandfather who had been executed in Russia, my uncles, one of whom died in prison there, aunts, three cousins, one who disappeared in Siberia, we never saw him again, didn’t know what happened. . . . I see my friend, Shane, who died when we were seventeen in Illinois in a car accident. I see a bunch of my buddies . . . Howie, Blake, Peter.
“Most importantly, I see Helga, my wife. She’s smilin’ at me. Waiting for me. She’s waiting. Dying isn’t that bad.” He cracked a smile.
His sons and their families were there ’round the clock. Nikolai had done something not unusual with his money. When he heard he had less than a year to live, he took his four sons and their families on three vacations: Disney World, Maui, and Russia, to his home in his hometown, so the grandkids would know where they came from. He left each son $100,000, not to be touched until they retired. “I want to know I’m helping to take care of you when you’re old like me.”
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