Miracle (10 page)

She wouldn’t see it.

I had to get away from her then. I put my toothbrush down and moved past her, walking downstairs. I yanked open the front door, the night air warm on my face.

“Sweetie,” she said, running after me, and for a second I felt something hopeful flare inside me. I turned toward her.

“Here,” she said, and handed me my sneakers and a pair of socks. “You can’t go out barefoot. And don’t come home
too late, okay? You know how your father worries.”

That was it. That was all she said. It was night, I was going running again, and she—I yanked the shoes away from her and left.

I ran. I put on my shoes in the driveway and then flew down it. The trees were nothing to me now, just dark shadows, and what was a shadow?

Nothing; it was nothing and I’d known my parents wanted the crash to have left me whole, wanted to believe I was fine. That it had even somehow made me special.

I’d never thought that if they knew something was definitely wrong with me, in me, they’d pretend it away.

But that’s what had happened. What was happening.

I ran all the way to the center of town and then out past it, pushing one hand against my side to try and stop the stitch that had formed there.

It didn’t work and I ended up having to stop, panting. My side hurt bad, and my lungs felt like they were on fire. Reardon didn’t have much in the way of streetlights, and there were only faint pools of light coming from people’s houses, tiny half-moons on their lawns that didn’t quite reach me. I kept waiting for the dark to bother me, for the sound of the wind blowing softly through the trees to break me.

It didn’t happen. I liked being in the dark. I liked not
being seen. I walked and walked, ended up on the edge of the road that circled around town, running from the hills behind Reardon Logging’s offices into town and then back up into the hills on the other side, leading to the Park Service offices. And the airport.

I kicked at some loose gravel on the side of the road, and then moved to avoid a truck coming around the corner. It was Mr. Reynolds’s. I could tell just by the sound. When he got a job driving tractor trailers, the first thing he did was buy a new truck and fiddle with the muffler so that every time he turned the engine over you could hear it all the way down the street. Supposedly he spent a lot of time driving by his ex-wife’s boyfriend’s place for a while.

After he passed, I started jogging back toward town. Mr. Reynolds must have been to see Beth because he only ever did two things when he was home. He either sat in his house and drank, or he drove up to Beth’s grave and drank. Her grave was in the town cemetery, which was up the road from where I was when the truck had passed me.

It was like death was everywhere I went. I shivered and stopped jogging. I wasn’t even back in town yet, but I just—I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I was standing in what everyone called the fire zone, a gap that circled Reardon, serving as a buffer between the town and the forest. Reardon had been
built that way because the settlers that first came here were from another logging community, and they’d lost everything when a fire set to clear some of the forest ended up destroying their town. It had been called Reardon too.

I would have sat down, but the road out here was just gravel and there was no grass beside it, nothing but dirt and prickly weeds. It was a nowhere place and I liked that, stood there because it felt like it was where I belonged.

Fourteen

I don’t know how long I stood there, in that nowhere place. Long enough for the dark around me to get deeper and quieter, the faint, far-off light from houses in town disappearing as people ended their day. Long enough for Mr. Reynolds’s pickup to drive by again, its big headlights catching me as it passed. I moved back but it was too late. The truck slowed down, pulling off the road and onto the gravel before stopping right in front of me.

The headlights shone into my eyes and I looked away as I heard the whir of a window rolling down.

“Meggie?”

“Joe?” I said, surprised. “You’re driving your dad’s truck.”

“Yeah. He’s working, so I figured it’d be nice not to have to
bum rides everywhere. What are you doing? I swear I saw you out here when I drove by before.”

“Did you just say ‘here’ with a Southern accent?”

“What?” He got out of the truck. He was wearing jeans, dark blue and new-looking except for grass stains on the knees, and a gray T-shirt. One of his sneakers was untied. He was so good-looking it seemed like words needed to be invented to describe him. Something like gorgeosity. Or hotiful.

“Here,” I said again.

“Here?”

“Yeah.” He did have a bit of an accent, a kind of drawl over his vowels. So that’s what six months in military school got you. I smiled, imaging that on a brochure.
We Change Everything—Even The Way You Talk!

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been drinking, right?”

“No. Why would I . . . oh. Because your dad does, you think everyone—”

“Nice,” he said, and got back in the truck, slamming the door. “Real nice.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just—I was just talking.”

And I was. Joe was affecting me in a very weird way. Before the crash he was JOE and I couldn’t do anything around him
except stare. I’d spent so much time having feelings I knew were stupid because he looked like he did and I looked like Bonezilla that actually talking to him was something I’d never been able to do more than think about. But now that all those feelings were gone, now that I looked at him and just saw a guy, it was like my brain didn’t know what to do with itself. And since we didn’t have any connection, since he’d never seen who I used to be, since we’d never really spoken, I was apparently able to talk. To say whatever came to mind without checking to make sure it was something I was supposed to say.

I was able to just be me—the me who I was now.

“Talking, right,” Joe said. “You and everyone else. ‘Oh, look, there goes Joe. Just got home—wonder how long it’ll take him to end up like his dad?’”

“People don’t say that.”

He looked at me.

“Okay, maybe some of them do. But not everyone does. Like Tess down at the dealership—people like her, they’re more into your face and stuff. I mean, when you first got back all Mom did at dinner was bitch about how Tess took two-hour lunch breaks to meet you until you . . . you know. Moved on.”

“My face and stuff?” He rested his head against the steering wheel. “Crap, you are drunk. Get in and I’ll drive you home.”

“I don’t want to go home.”

“Yeah, well, life sucks that way sometimes.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I got in the truck. We drove in silence till we got back into town.

“I hate this fucking place,” he muttered as we began to drive by houses.

“So why did you come back?”

He glanced at me. “I was tired of getting up at four a.m. to pretend I was in the army and didn’t want to do it for real after I graduated. Plus it’s really hot in Alabama.”

“Oh.”

He tapped the steering wheel with one hand as we turned onto our street. “No one—no one ever even came to visit me when I was there. It was like when Beth died my parents just . . . they stopped, you know? Everything fell apart.”

“So you came back to—what? Make sure they saw you?”

“No. Maybe.” He blew out a breath. “We’re here.”

“I told you I didn’t want to go home.”

“Fine. Then you’ll have to sit in my driveway and hope your parents don’t see you.”

“Fine.”

“Okay,” he said, and pulled into his driveway, parked the truck. I could hear frogs and crickets chirping in the yard as he opened his door and said, “See you around.”

“Wait,” I said, and he paused, half out of the truck. “How come you haven’t asked me about the crash? You’re about the only person in town who hasn’t.”

“It’s not like everyone doesn’t know the story already,” he said, and slid back into the truck, pulling the door closed and looking over at me. “Besides, between the thing with the roof and then tonight with you standing out in the middle of nowhere . . . I don’t know. You seem a little . . . different than you were before.”

“I—I am,” I said. “But most people don’t see that. They look at me and they don’t even see me. They just see this thing, you know?” I shook my head. “Never mind.”

“They see what happened with the plane and not you.”

I looked over at him, surprised. “Yeah.”

“Before Beth . . . before she died, people looked at me and saw what happened to my dad, what he did at Reardon Logging. And then, afterwards, they just saw her, a girl who died because no one in her family could stop fucking up long enough to be there for her.”

He was silent for a moment, and so was I.

“You aren’t going to say that’s not true,” he finally said.

I shook my head, because he was right and I saw no reason to lie to him. No reason to pretend.

“It sucks,” he said. “People here look at you and see all
kinds of stuff, not about you, but about your family, and all you want is for them to look at you and see true.”

“See true?”

“See you. Who you really are.”

I nodded. “I didn’t—I didn’t know you were like this.”

“Like what?” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “That I can think?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, no, not like that. I know you think. It’s just you’re so—I mean, you’ve seen yourself in a mirror. Guys like you—”

“Guys like me graduate from their shitty military school and have their grandmother box up their stuff and put it out on the lawn when they won’t join the army. Guys like me come home and realize we’re not wanted by our own family. Guys like me are lucky to get a job, especially considering what their old man did, but pity goes a long way and everyone likes to tell them that. Guys like me end up sitting in their driveway talking to someone who runs around at night climbing up onto roofs or standing by the side of the road.”

“Does this whole pissed-off thing usually work for you with girls? Because I’m not getting it at all.”

He laughed, a startled sound, and then grinned. “I—you’re the first girl I’ve actually talked to in a long time. Usually it’s . . . you know.”

“Oh. Right. So when you stopped, were you—I mean, did I mess up plans you had or anything?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I was just visiting someone.” He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “Did you mean what you said about how people see you?”

I nodded.

“So tonight and the other night . . . ?”

“I—I can’t stand being Megan The Miracle. I’m not—it’s not me. Do you know what I mean?”

He nodded and I looked out the windshield. My parents’ bedroom light was on. I could see the curtains drawn back, see my father’s face looking out at the road. I could feel his worry and my mother’s calling me home, reminding me of what I was supposed to be. What I was.

I opened the truck door. “I gotta go. My parents are waiting up for me. Thanks for the ride.”

He didn’t say anything, but I thought I heard his truck door open and then close as I was walking down his driveway. I looked back when I reached the end, but the porch light had been turned off, and I couldn’t see where he was.

Fifteen

I went to school even earlier than usual the next morning. I had to. Going downstairs and seeing David at the kitchen table reminded me why I’d left last night. I said I wasn’t hungry, that I needed to get going.

David wouldn’t look at me when I told him goodbye.

I went to the girls’ locker room like I usually did and sat on the floor by the door. I stared up at the ceiling, counting the dots on each tile. My head felt heavy, and I leaned against the wall. I started counting dots out loud and then somehow I was in the kitchen at home.

Something had happened to the floor, and when I looked down I saw there wasn’t a floor at all, just dirt. It was cool and dry against my feet. I wiggled my toes and wondered what had happened to my shoes.

“Megan,” a voice said, and I looked up. Carl was waiting for me at the stove.

“I know you heard me,” he said. “Why did you let go of my hand?”

I backed away, my feet sliding in the dirt and catching on hidden rocks. I could smell pine trees all around me. Carl came closer.

I didn’t want him to. I didn’t even want to see him. I tried to turn away but behind me everything was on fire, ground to sky glowing red-orange. I tried to scream, but couldn’t because my mouth was full of water. I looked up and rain washed over me, the sky moving closer, the fire reaching for me, and Carl was right there, his hand—

I woke up then, a sudden, panicked jolt into alertness that left me shaking.

It was a dream.

I’d dreamed, I’d just fallen asleep, but what I’d seen had been so real that I could still feel the dirt against my feet. See Carl waiting for me. I took a deep breath and ran a hand over my face. It was wet with tears.

I left school then. I hadn’t cried since I’d woken up in the hospital. I hadn’t cried when I first got home and stood in the bathroom wondering if I was dead. I hadn’t cried when I realized I wasn’t a miracle at all. I hadn’t cried when I realized my parents
didn’t want to see that something was wrong with me.

But now I was crying, and couldn’t seem to stop. I could hear myself making noises, raw, hurt sounds, and I couldn’t seem to stop them either.

I wiped my eyes as I got in my car and wished I could go somewhere that would make me whole again. But it wasn’t going to happen because just driving was terrifying and painful; the trees made me tense, and seeing the hills off in the distance made me hunch over, holding the steering wheel so tight my hands ached.

I bit the inside of my mouth hard, using the pain to stop my tears, to quiet myself, and tried to focus. Why had I cried
now
? I’d seen Carl before, dreamed of him and fire and the forest. Maybe it was what he’d said about his hand, maybe I’d . . .

I couldn’t think anymore—wouldn’t—because I knew something really bad, like back in the gym or worse, was going to happen if I kept going. The church was up ahead, just around the corner, and I pulled into the office parking lot, shaking so hard my teeth were chattering.