Miracle (6 page)

“Well,” Coach said, “I think it’ll be all right just this once, don’t you? I mean, this is Megan Hathaway who’s asking.”

It was all right. Of course it was.

Jess and Lissa tried to talk to me for a while, but I always realized I’d left something in the car or had to go see Coach
or a teacher, and when they called, I was always busy or asleep.

And then one morning Lissa was waiting for me as I came into school, caught me as I was on my way to the girls’ locker room. She was angry. I could tell just by looking at her.

“What’s going on with you?” she said.

I shrugged. “Just busy.”

“Look, Meggie, last night Brian told Jess he’s giving her an engagement ring at graduation. We’re going to my house after school to look at rings online and then she and Brian are going to the Walmart out in Derrytown this weekend to pick one out and put it on layaway.”

“That’s great.”

“
That’s great.
That’s it? Jess is going to get engaged. I know Brian gave her a promise ring last year but this is different. She’s going to be getting married. It’s the biggest thing that will ever happen to her.”

“I know.”

She shook her head. “Yeah, you know. Now. But you won’t be there after school today, will you? And if she tries to call and tell you what he said when he asked her to marry him, you’ll be too busy or have a headache or David will say, ‘She doesn’t want to come to the phone. Bye.’ You know, I’m sorry we didn’t all survive plane crashes this summer, Meggie, because if we had then maybe we’d be good enough for you to actually talk to.”

“Maybe,” I said and heard the nothingness in my voice. The emptiness.

Lissa stared at me, and then she started to cry. Lissa never cried. Jess cried at the sappy parts in movies and over birds that had fallen out of their nests, but Lissa reminded us not to touch them, that the parents would reject them if we did even as they flopped around, helpless. Lissa kept tissues in her purse for when we went to the movies so Jess could cry into them.

Lissa was the one who fixed things, not the one who fell apart.

But she did. Lissa cried and the worst thing of all was that I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away from her.

So I did. I walked away.

Eight

Jess and Lissa didn’t bother to try and talk to me at school anymore after that. They didn’t call. One night, a few days after the phone hadn’t once rung for me, Mom and Dad asked me about it as the three of us watched television after dinner.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“Girl stuff, right?” Mom said, and told me about a fight she’d had back in high school with her best friend until David yelled that he needed help with his homework.

Dad said, “You know, as your mother’s boyfriend at the time, I got to hear all about it, so if you ever want a guy’s opinion or anything, I’m here.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine,” I said and watched him smile at me.

Smile, smile, smile, all anyone ever did.

Mom came back, rubbing her head and saying she didn’t
remember history being so hard when she was David’s age, and every time I looked at them, they were watching me. Grinning at me as I caught their gaze, but when I got up to get a soda, I heard Dad say, “Laura, the letter you sent your parents came back today marked REFUSED again,” as I left the room.

My father’s parents had died a long time ago, but my mother’s parents were still alive. They’d lived in Reardon, but sold their house and moved to a retirement community outside Staunton right before I was born. I’d never met them. They stopped speaking to my mother when she was just a little older than I was. When she told them she was marrying Dad.

When she told them she was pregnant with me.

When I got back to the living room, Mom and Dad stopped talking, their serious expressions wiped clear and replaced by the all-too-familiar smiles. They didn’t ask me about Jess and Lissa again, not even as the phone stayed silent.

On Sunday, when we got to church, arriving together in one car like we always did, Jess looked at me and then away, her mouth twisting the way it did when she was upset. I jumped when the organ started to play, startled by the loud buzz of the first note, and suddenly saw a forest all around me, rain-slick and looming.

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I didn’t think I could breathe.

“Sit down, stupid,” David said, and I saw everyone around me was sitting down, ready for prayer. I sat. Mom patted my arm and glared at David. Dad took away the book David was always allowed to read because he found the sermons boring and handed him a Bible.

David grinned at Dad, his I’m-sorry-but-hey-I’m-cute grin. Dad turned away, smiling at Mom and me. I closed my eyes but the forest came back and when I opened them I saw Margaret watching me, squinting so hard the skin between her eyes looked like it was frowning.

After church she cornered me, striding up to me as I was trying to slip outside. “How are you, Meggie?”

“Fine,” I said automatically, and she frowned for real then, like she’d heard something she didn’t like in my voice.

“You know, when I got back from Vietnam—” she said, and I cut her off, said, “It was nice to see you,” and got away, found Mom and told her I didn’t want to stay for the covered dish supper.

“Honey, in church you seemed . . . tired,” Mom said in the car as she drove me home. “Did you read the paper this morning? Because if you did, you don’t have to worry about anything. Those Park Service people certainly do like to complain, as if we all don’t know that Staunton’s airport is easy enough to get to.”

“Right.” I hadn’t read the paper. I’d seen the headline,
Park Service Officials Predict Problems If Local Airport Closes Permanently
, and immediately pushed it away and asked Dad for the comics.

There weren’t as many Park Rangers up in the hills as there used to be because of funding cuts, but there were still a few, and it was because of them that Reardon had an airport. Service had stopped since the crash though, pending an FAA investigation, and I wanted it to stay that way. I didn’t want to hear any planes. I definitely didn’t want to see any. Just thinking about it made me feel bad, weird and sick.

It’s raining really hard, but I can tell we’re starting to descend because the trees are closer and the plane is shuddering. It’s been bouncing around since we took off, but it’s a little plane and that’s normal. Totally normal. It is. I look out the window again and the trees are so close, so very close and—

“Meggie?”

I jumped, and Mom put a hand on my arm.

“Sweetie, we’re home, and whatever you’re thinking about must be good because it was like you weren’t in the car at all for a second there.” She grinned at me, please-be-all-right-please-you-are-a-miracle shining in that grin and even stronger in her eyes.

I unbuckled my seat belt and got out of the car to get away from her, from everything. Mom waved as she backed down
the driveway, returning to church. I waved back even though my arm felt like it was stuck in drying cement.

I couldn’t walk up the driveway. I couldn’t even move. I knew if I did something horrible would happen. I tried to keep standing, but my knees were shaking so bad I had to sit down.

The driveway was hot. When winter came, it would come hard, but for now the last of summer held on, creating a heat shimmer everywhere I looked. I didn’t like that, how everything was blurred around the edges, and stared down at the driveway.

Dad had paved it when David was four, after he’d tried to ride standing up on his kiddie bike and fell, scraping his face and arms on the gravel. Now the driveway was smooth and dark, and the heat of it radiated through the long skirt Mom had brought home for me on Friday, something she’d “grabbed” while out in Derrytown loading up on stuff at the warehouse club. She and Dad hadn’t said anything about the weight I’d gained, the way the muscles in my legs had become coated with a soft, shaking layer of fat.

I liked it. I’d always been skinny, so skinny that Dr. Weaver was forever asking Mom if I was eating. When I was born, he’d told her I’d always be sickly and weak, a child to worry over, to keep away from anything strenuous. Then David came along and he was even scrawnier than I was and sickly for real.

But David filled out, became blond and angelic-looking
with soft little dimples of skin around his elbows and knees and chubby little cheeks that he’d never quite lost. I stayed brown-haired and scrawny, but I didn’t get sick, and the first time I played soccer I never wanted to stop. I’d stayed totally flat-chested until I was fourteen though, and even then grew just enough to fill an A-cup. I’d hated that, but liked how strong I was, how I could run and kick. I liked feeling my body work.

I didn’t want to think about it now. My heart beating. Me breathing. I didn’t—I didn’t get why any of it was still happening. I felt like it could stop anytime.

I closed my eyes and lay down on the driveway, let the heat of it soak into me. I ran one hand up my side, trying to make sure I was still there, and stopped at my chest. I had actual breasts now, and I poked at the side of one. I completely got why guys loved them now. They were so soft.

“What are you doing?”

I opened my eyes and saw a pair of jean-clad knees down toward the end of the driveway. Up, up, I looked, all the way up to a beautiful, puzzled-looking face. Joe. If I’d known before that all I had to do to get him to talk to me was come home from church and lay down on the driveway on a Sunday afternoon . . .

I never would have done it.

I never was the kind of person who did stuff like that. I was the kind of person who laid out in the backyard wearing a T-shirt over my bathing suit to hide my flat chest and everything else. I was the kind of person who always wore my seat belt, cleaned my room, and did my homework. I was the kind of person who freaked out over pop quizzes or running a mile a tenth of a second slower than usual. I was the kind of person who didn’t know what to do when things went wrong.

I was the kind of person who should have died when the plane crashed.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I was the kind of person who wouldn’t have been able to say anything to Joe until long after he’d left.

Was. Now I just didn’t care anymore.

“Like you’re lying on your driveway feeling yourself up. Did Reverend Williams replace the grape juice with wine at Communion?”

“Nope.” I lifted myself onto my elbows, looking at him. “So, you’ve been standing around watching me?”

“What?” he said, clearly startled, and small stripes of red bloomed on his face, across his cheeks. “I didn’t—wasn’t—”

“Oh, get over yourself,” I said. “So you were watching me. If you came home and lay down on your driveway—with your shirt off, of course—I’d look.”

“Like I could lie down on my driveway without your parents seeing and calling the cops. Ever since I got back, it’s like they’re waiting for me to come over the fence swinging an axe or something.”

“Are you?”

He grinned. “I might now.”

I started to say something but the wind rustled behind us, pushing through the trees. I couldn’t see his smile anymore, just saw red, hungry and waiting, all around me.

I turned around to look at the trees. To see where they were. To make sure they weren’t any closer. If I wasn’t careful, they’d surround me, scratching me as I moved, waiting to grab me, swallow me—

“Hey, are you all right?” Joe had come up the driveway and was leaning over a little, snapping his fingers next to my face. “Megan?”

The red—the haze—it was fire and it was here. It was inside me. I could feel it hissing, a strange sharp pain that snapped inside my head.

It made me want to scream. It made me want to run.

I pushed myself up and smacked into him, hitting my head on his chin.

“What are—shit!” he said, and took a step back. “I almost bit my tongue off! What the hell is wrong with you? First you
go into some sort of trance, then you—Jesus.” He brushed the back of his hand across his face. “Crap, I did bite my tongue.”

“Trance?”

“You were staring at the—” He gestured back at the trees. “I wasn’t sure you were even breathing because you were so still you looked half dea . . .” He trailed off, wiping his mouth again, and I knew, suddenly, what he was thinking about. Who.

And it wasn’t me.

“Do you miss Beth?”

He looked at me and then down at the ground, a picture-perfect image of grief, and I was sorry I’d asked. I didn’t want posturing, pretending. I’d had enough of that.

Then he said something.

“I don’t miss how she went through my stuff,” he said, looking up and off into the distance, at something—someone—only he could see, and I saw his grief was real. It was still there, raw inside him. He still missed Beth enough to remember that she wasn’t perfect. He still missed her enough to see her as real.

“I don’t miss how she was so smart she would say stuff I didn’t understand. But I miss the way she got excited about weird stuff like vinegar and would read everything she could about it. She . . . you know, she could have done anything, been anything, but she never got the chance. I hate that she didn’t get that like you did.”

“Oh. I mean, yes, I got a second chance. I’m very lucky.”

He looked at me then. “Yeah?” He didn’t sound like he believed a word I said.

I looked back at him and saw I could tell him the truth, or at least part of it. I could tell him, and he’d get it, somehow.

He must have seen that and not wanted any part of it because he turned around and walked away. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t look back.

I didn’t feel anything watching him go. I didn’t even wish I did.

Nine

There were four people on the plane with me. Carl, casting glances at my pretzels and telling stories. Walter, tugging at his hat and talking excitedly about trees. Sandra, arms cut with muscles that flexed whenever she moved, fiddling with her seat belt and jiggling one leg. Henry, with his weathered face and brown hair combed flat with dandruff flaking in his part.