Miracle (5 page)

Mrs. Reynolds moved away soon after Beth’s funeral. She started living with a bartender outside of Derrytown and was supposedly saving up money for a divorce. She never came back
to town, not to visit Beth’s grave, not even when Joe finally came back home from military school.

Beth was born about a year after David was and she was adorable, a chubby, happy baby like the ones you see in ads, and she grew into an adorable kid. Everyone in town loved her in spite of the rest of her family. She was also really smart. I can remember seeing her sitting at the end of her driveway waiting for Joe to get off the school bus when she was about four. When David and I got off they were already walking toward their house but I heard them talking. Joe was reading problems from his math book to her.

“One-half plus three-quarters equals what?” he said. “See, what you do is—”

“Five-fourths,” she said. “What did you have for lunch?”

When she finally started school, no one knew what to do with her. She probably should have been in high school, but who would send a five-year-old there? So she went to school with kids her own age but basically got to do her own thing. Right before she died, she was reading thick novels written by authors I’d never heard of and solving math problems that had just as many letters as numbers.

After she died, the whole town turned out for her funeral, and so many people wanted to share their memories that the service lasted for hours. Six months after that, Joe went off to a military
school near where his grandma lived. Everyone said his mom sent him so she could move out and live with the bartender. Joe had come back the month before I left for soccer camp, tanned and dressed in a military-looking uniform that was in the trash on the curb the morning after he got back, and got a job working at Reardon Logging. There was a lot of talk about that. That, and how he was out all the time and all the girls he was seen with.

Joe always had girls following him around, and it wasn’t because he was popular or funny or anything like that. He was just beautiful. Guys aren’t usually beautiful, but there was no other word for Joe. He had the same things everyone else had—a nose, eyes, a mouth—and there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them. But put all together, there was just something about him that made you want to look at him. It was like you couldn’t help yourself.

I’d spoken to him exactly nine times.

1. A “Hi” the day he moved in. We’d both said that.

2. He said, “No,” when I asked him if he wanted to come over and play the next week. My parents saw me ask him and told me not to do it again.

3. Which, of course, made me ask the next day. He said, “Play what?” I said, “I don’t know.”

4. He said, “So why’d you ask?” Again, my reply: “I don’t know.”

5. Naturally, of course, I decided I liked him after that and even told him so. “I like you,” I said. He said, “So?” And that was that.

6. He said, “Hi,” to me when I was seven and we were both waiting, shivering, at the end of the road for the school bus to pick us up because the town still hadn’t been able to send the volunteer fire department/rescue squad/snow removal crew around to clear all the streets.

7. When I was nine, he threw a baseball over our fence and said, “Thanks,” when I took it back to him.

8. When I was thirteen he said, “Hey,” to me right before he told Jimmy Hechts, a senior who was trying to get me to come sit with him in the back of the bus, “Damn, Jimmy, I know you’re desperate, but at least pick someone who actually has breasts.”

9. And last year, when I said, “I’m sorry,” at Beth’s funeral, he said, “Thanks,” like a robot, his voice and expression totally blank.

Before I’d left for soccer camp I couldn’t stop trying to catch glimpses of him. I was afraid to talk to him, but I never got tired of looking at him. Even Mom noticed him when he’d come outside to mow the lawn his second day home. Jess and I had been watching him out the kitchen window. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and we’d both pretty much had our faces pressed up against the glass.

“Girls, honestly,” Mom had said, and then “Oh,” when she’d actually looked over and saw him, blushing as she twitched the curtains closed and asked Jess about Brian.

I’d thought about Joe a lot before I’d left for camp, the kind of thoughts that probably would have made Mom and Dad lock me in my room and forbid me from ever even looking next door again.

Now when I thought about Joe, I didn’t feel anything.

I felt nothing all the time, and it had started to feel normal. It should have scared me, but it didn’t. Instead I was tired, the kind of tired that drapes itself over you like a heavy coat, pressing you down and muffling the world.

School was too much effort, even when my eye got better. Jess and Lissa always wanted my attention. They would talk and I would watch them, their words collapsing into a loud buzzing noise. It was even worse with everyone else. Whenever someone talked to me, it was all I could do to just keep watching them. I wanted to look at the floor or, better yet, lie down and curl into it. I got by on nodding and tossing out a few words when I had to, but it took a lot and I just—eventually I stopped pretending I was even listening to anyone.

I could feel my body changing too, softening. I wasn’t running around a practice field, wasn’t getting up early every morning to jog. The soccer ball had joined my cleats up on
the roof, wedged in among all the crap, and every morning I slept until Mom came and woke me up with a kiss. I was her bleary-eyed miracle, and I ate everything she made for me even if I wasn’t hungry because at least then I knew there was something inside me.

It was easy enough to be Miracle Megan. Everything I did made Mom and Dad happy. Just sitting at the dinner table would make them grin at me through the whole meal and every day I got an offering: a magazine from Mom, a pint of my favorite ice cream brought home by Dad. A car.

The night Dad brought that home, a sleek and shiny red two-door that looked like a dream I was supposed to have, I stood clutching the keys and staring at it.

“Come on,” Dad said, grinning at me. “Let’s take it out, see what you think.”

“I don’t want it.” I didn’t. Just seeing it made me feel sick. I’d begged them for a car, back before everything changed, back before I was a miracle. They’d said they couldn’t afford it.

“Oh,” Dad said, glancing at Mom nervously.

“You’re crazy,” David told me. “Dad, I’ll take the car! I promise I won’t even drive it till I have my license.”

“David, hush,” Mom said and then turned to me. “Let’s have dessert out on the deck.”

We all went outside and she kept hugging me, pushing
my hair back from my face and staring into my eyes, and Dad kept squeezing my shoulders like he was making sure I was still there. They wouldn’t stop, not even when David went back inside and yelled that he was up on the kitchen counter trying to get the chocolate chips.

It was a disaster waiting to happen but they didn’t do anything but watch me like they had to, and so I went into the kitchen and hauled David off the counter.

“Idiot,” I said, hissing the word because I was suddenly angry, a rush of red-hot fury filling me so fast it was like I was choking on it, and he just stood there. That made me even madder because didn’t he know he needed to be careful? Why didn’t he ever care if he got hurt? Didn’t he know how easily it could happen?

He didn’t know. He just stood there, stupid and lucky, and he had lived when he shouldn’t have and never thought about it. Never wondered why. He just banged himself up, got hurt, and never thought about it, but one day he wouldn’t be able to stop it, one day he’d open his eyes and see—

Red, burning, the sky on fire.

I hit him. I hadn’t hit David since he was two and went around biting everything, including me, but I smacked him so hard my hand stung.

He stumbled, round-eyed with tears starting to shine in his
eyes, and then hit me back. His fists felt like nothing as I yanked him toward me, one hand tight in his hair, a red haze covering everything I saw and flooding through me. Driving me.

“Meggie! David! Meggie! DAVID!” Mom and Dad were both shouting, pulling us apart, and David and I were suddenly on opposite sides of the kitchen.

“She hit me!” David screamed, his face so red you couldn’t see the mark of my fingers on it.

“Shut up,” Mom said, and he did.

Mom never said “shut up.” She thought it was rude, and had always told us so. “Your sister rushes into the kitchen to pull you off the counter, the counter you’ve been told not to climb up onto, and you hit her?”

“She HIT ME!” David screamed again, even louder. “And I always climb on the counter!”

He did. He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. Just like he climbed trees and fell out of them, then promised he wouldn’t before doing it again. That was how things were. He was the baby, the special one, the one Mom and Dad held tight and worried over even as they smiled and shook their heads because he was alive and was never supposed to be. He was their miracle.

“David Jacob,” Mom said. “Go to your room. I’m too angry to look at you right now.”

Was
their miracle.

Seven

I ate a mountain of pancakes in the morning, their sweet fluffiness not filling me up or erasing David’s angry eyes as he touched his face where I’d hit him, and went out to meet Jess and Lissa. They saw the car in the driveway and said I should have called and told them.

“I meant to,” I said, but I hadn’t and was pretty sure they knew it. I also knew they wouldn’t say anything about it. Not now that I was a miracle.

“You know, Brian can change the oil and stuff,” Jess said. “He’s really good at it.” Brian loved cars and wanted to work at the one garage in town. It was an impossible dream, as the garage had a mechanic who was twenty-five and who’d taken over just last year when his father, the previous mechanic, had died of a heart attack.

“Great. Thanks.”

We rode in silence to school, but when we got there and out of Jess’s car, Lissa cleared her throat.

Jess shot her a look and asked me, “So . . . what’s going on with soccer? You haven’t quit, have you?”

“I just need a break. I mean, I’ve been playing forever.”

“Exactly,” Lissa said. “You’ve been playing forever so it’s kind of weird that you just stopped.” She caught Jess’s eye and added, “Not weird bad or anything. Just, you know, kind of strange.”

“Strange?” I said.

“Different,” Jess said hastily. “That’s what Lissa meant. It’s just different.”

I nodded. “Right. Different.”

I wasn’t sad, standing there knowing they knew something was wrong with me but couldn’t bring themselves to say it. I wasn’t anything.

I looked at my two best friends, who knew everything about me, and it was like I was looking at strangers. People I could easily walk right by.

“Look, Meggie,” Jess said and she didn’t even look like Jess to me now. She was just a girl with brown curls dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and I didn’t—I didn’t even miss the girl I used to see.

“I gotta go,” I said and walked away. It was the only way I
could get through the day and even then it seemed to last forever. They both called that night, and I told Mom to tell them I was sleeping. I went to my room to “work on homework” and fell asleep when it was still light out.

I woke up shaking from a dream of a hand clutching mine under a burning sky.

Jess and Lissa came to pick me up again the next morning. I didn’t want to deal with them, with how they’d gone from being my best friends to nothing.

“Hey, Dad, I haven’t finished breakfast,” I said, and he grinned at me over his paper. I was so sick of smiles. “Can you give me a ride to school?”

“Sure.”

I went to the porch and yelled, “Dad’s giving me a ride,” then watched Jess and Lissa squint at me from inside the car.

“Meet by the soda machine before first period?” Jess said, sticking her head out the window.

“Sure.”

“You’d better be there,” Lissa yelled, grinning to show it wasn’t a threat but a friend thing, a “we want to see you” thing. A “we have to talk” thing.

“Of course!” I yelled back, but I didn’t meet them. I had Dad drop me off by the gym and went into the girls’ locker room, empty during the day because Physical Education
hadn’t been offered since my parents were in high school due to budget problems.

I went to first period after the bell rang. The teacher didn’t give me a tardy. Jess tried to get my attention, but I pretended I didn’t see her and scribbled in my notebook, page after page of long, waving lines. After class, I stayed to talk to the teacher. Jess and Lissa hung around, waiting for me.

“Don’t wait,” I called out, and then turned away.

I made it through the rest of school, but that night Mom said, “Are you upset with Jess and Lissa?”

Lissa had just called, and I’d told Dad to tell her I was busy with homework. I’d already had Mom tell Jess the same thing.

I shook my head.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

“Is there anything you need?”

A way to avoid Jess and Lissa, I thought. A way to avoid everyone, to go where I was supposed to on my own . . .

“The car,” I said. “Can I have the car?”

I could. Dad hadn’t been able to talk the previous owner into taking it back, much less returning his money, and it had been sitting outside his office.

So I started driving. I didn’t like it. In the car, the sky seemed much closer somehow, like it was pushing down into
the road, and if I looked at it too long I got dizzy and was afraid I’d get sucked up into it, that it would slice open the car and take me.

But I drove. I drove myself to school, getting there in time to make first period just as the bell rang. I spent the rest of the day in the library, supposedly working on an independent study project on local history. I’d gotten Coach Henson to sign off on supervising it by saying I’d come back to soccer in a month.

Independent studies were normally given to the Walker kids, supersmart whiners who got to do them because their mother threatened to sue the school over the lack of AP classes. But I was an exception. I was very special. I was a miracle. My guidance counselor said all this and more when I sat in her office asking permission, Coach nodding along, and I smiled and said the thing was, I was going to need to do a lot of research and would have to be in the library during school, maybe even sometimes during a tiny bit of class, and I might sometimes do research outside of school.