Miracle (7 page)

Four people, all gone.

And then I started to see them.

When I went outside to my car one morning, Carl was standing by it, Sandra and Walter just behind him.

“Missed a chance to grab lunch earlier,” Carl said. “Why is it that there aren’t any vending machines in airports? Seems like it would be a great place to put them.”

“Stop it,” I said. “This isn’t real. You’re—you aren’t here.”
Mom tapped the kitchen window, waving at me and mouthing, “Did you forget something?”

I forced myself to wave back, to shake my head.

Walter cleared his throat and said, “When my sister went to Japan, she said there were vending machines everywhere.”

Carl shot him a look. “Japan? Who the hell is talking about Japan? You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No.” Walter flushed and tugged on his hat.

“Look, I just want to get home,” Sandra said. “My daughter’s been sick, and now my husband’s got her cold, and I hate flying and just want to get this over with.” She raised her voice a little, and looked at me. “Why are we waiting here?”

I got in the car then. I backed down the driveway. I didn’t look back to see if Sandra and Carl and Walter were still there. Still waiting.

I’d been there during that conversation. It was . . . it had happened. It was real and I could remember all of it now. We’d been in Staunton, waiting for the plane. I could see the thin blue airport carpet, scuffed with shoe prints. Sandra had turned away when I’d shrugged after she’d asked why we were waiting, looked out the airport window. There had been nothing to see except asphalt and then, past that, a drainage ditch and a fence. We couldn’t even see our plane.

I drove to school, my hands wet and shaking on the steering
wheel, and told myself it was just a memory. That’s all it was. They weren’t real. They weren’t here.

But they were, and after that first time, I couldn’t get rid of them. Couldn’t stop seeing them. When the sun rose, I would peer out my bedroom window and see them sitting on the lawn waiting for me. On the way to school, I’d see Carl cracking his knuckles. Walter would be at school, in the halls tugging nervously on his hat. Sandra would be in the kitchen when I got home, reading the little airline safety booklet and frowning.

They were dead. I knew that. But I saw them anyway, and I felt something when I saw them.

I was scared, and I didn’t like that.

I didn’t like that at all.

I would close my eyes when I saw them, tell myself I could make them go away. That they were just in my mind.

But when I opened my eyes, they were always still there.

School got harder. I couldn’t concentrate, my mind gritty with exhaustion and fear. And then Coach Henson asked me to come back to soccer. “Team needs you, Megan,” he said when I came into school one morning. “Needs your skills. Your strength. You’ll come to practice today, won’t you?”

“I—” I said, and beside him Henry shook his head, dandruff snowing from his hair, and waved at Carl, who was standing right beside me.

“Can get bumpy up in the hills,” Henry said. “Is all that damned luggage yours?”

I nodded, terrified.

“Fantastic,” Coach said. “I knew I could count on you.”

“Don’t mind Henry,” Carl said. “It won’t hurt him to deal with a suitcase or two. Say, you don’t have anything to eat on you, do you?”

Henry wasn’t there. Carl wasn’t there. I wasn’t really seeing them.
I wasn’t.
I watched Coach smile and told myself I had to try and be the Megan I was supposed to be.

So I tried. When classes were over I went down to the practice field. I didn’t see Carl or Sandra or Walter or Henry anywhere. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe I really could play soccer again.

We ran first. Warming up, Coach yelling encouragement and telling us to move. My body felt strange, not light and in danger of floating away like it usually did. Instead, I felt awkward, slow. Weighed down. My lungs hurt, and I couldn’t get into an easy rhythm.

I kept going, though, and toward the end of the last loop around the field, I felt something inside me relax. I felt my body moving, saw the last curve of the field, the patch of grass where we always stopped. It was dented and yellowed from where everyone stood, sweating and ready to play, and when I finally
got there, my lungs were on fire and my whole body hurt. The muscles in my legs were trembling, and sweat was pouring down my face. But I felt good. I felt connected to myself in a way I hadn’t since I’d opened my eyes and found out I was a miracle.

I felt real.

Then I saw the soccer balls. Coach tipped them out, pointing and yelling as he kicked one to each of us. “Stacey, get over there! Kathleen, hustle! Megan, let’s focus on the attack! Wait a minute, what’s with your shoes?”

I hadn’t worn my cleats. They were still on the roof. And when the soccer ball came toward me, black and white circling round and round, everything got dark, my vision narrowing like I was going to faint.

I staggered back a step, the ground a pinpoint I could hardly see, the sky a speck of fading blue that seemed wrong. False. I knew what was really there. What was underneath.

I knew that past the blue was smoke and flames and the burning sky; the hidden one, real one, would crackle red and wrap itself around me. I saw pieces of clothing and shoes and a soccer ball melting together, burning as a hand touched mine, its skin cracking and blistering and—

I bit the inside of my cheek as hard as I could. It hurt, and blood filled my mouth, the world coming back as I spit, watched red spatter the ground.

I backed away from the soccer balls, from the field. I backed up until everything was a blur, Coach’s questions a buzz in my ears, and then I went home.

When I got there, I went in the bathroom. I put two fingers in the left side of my mouth, stretching it wide as I stared at myself in the mirror. There was a raw red spot inside my mouth. It hurt when I touched it. I pulled my fingers free and watched my face settle back into place, blank and pale except for the dark circles under my eyes.

I had been here before. I stared in the mirror and saw rain falling all around me, felt it slapping my hair, my face, and my feet.

I’m cold and tired and my head hurts and I saw—I trip over something, a tree, a rock, my own feet, and I don’t mind that I will hit the ground. I would like to close my eyes. But my mouth, which is open, panting, snaps shut and my teeth catch on skin, tearing. I spit, red more red, and the wind blows through the trees, pushing me forward, and I go, one foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other because I know what is behind me and I don’t want to see it.

I left the bathroom. I went to my room, shut the door, and opened the window.

Up on the roof, I could feel the sun hot on the bottoms of my feet, burning through my shoes. The ground looked far away. The trees didn’t. Around me were my soccer shoes, the
afghan I’d gotten, and the clothes I’d been wearing when the plane crashed, the ones Mom and Dad had saved in a bag I wasn’t ever going to open again.

I looked down at the ground. I had fallen into it before. Maybe I should have stayed there. I leaned over more, closer.

Carl stared up at me, mouth open and hands reaching toward me. His face was bloody, melting.

I almost lost my balance and felt my heart hammer in my chest as I slipped to my knees, my hands scrabbling over the hot roof as I tried to steady myself.

David got off the bus and walked through Carl on his way to the house. I blinked hard, wiping my eyes with one hand.

Carl was gone; I just saw ground now. I climbed back into my room and shut the window, then closed the curtains.

At dinner, I told Mom and Dad I wasn’t ever going to play soccer again.

Dad opened his mouth, shocked-looking, but Mom put a hand on top of one of his and he closed it.

“Are you—are you sure about this?” Mom said, and then bit her lip like she’d said something she shouldn’t have.

“I’m sure,” I said, and she smiled but I knew she’d almost asked me something else. Almost asked me if I was all right. If anything was wrong. But she hadn’t.

She hadn’t, Dad hadn’t, and they weren’t going to. I was a
miracle, and they needed that. I didn’t know why, but I could see it in how they looked at me. In all the things they didn’t say.

“I got an A on my math test,” David said.

Once upon a time Mom and Dad would have made him get his test and stuck it on the fridge. They would have told him how proud they were. Once upon a time they looked at him and saw proof of a special gift they’d been given, a baby who hadn’t been expected to live but had. A miracle.

No one said anything to David now.

“I hate you,” he told me before he went to bed, opening my bedroom door and hissing the words at me. “Mom and Dad act like you’re perfect, but everyone else knows you’re crazy.”

“No,” I said. “You’re the only one who does.”

David looked surprised, and then he made a face at me and slammed my door.

Dad called out, “Meggie, are you all right?”

I got up and opened my door. David was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down into the living room where Mom and Dad sat. He looked so lost, so hurt.

“I’m fine,” I said, and shut my bedroom door so I wouldn’t see him cry.

Ten

Jess was waiting at my locker after second period the next morning. I ducked into the bathroom and locked myself in a stall. I heard her come in, saw her feet pause by the stall door as the bell rang, but I knew Jess. She could never be late for class. She’d be gone when I opened the door.

She was, but there was a note shoved into my locker, Jess’s round handwriting sprawled across a piece of notebook paper.
Call me. Please.

I crumpled the note, watching the words disappear, and then, instead of going to class or even the library, I went home.

Mom showed up about an hour later, tires screeching as her car flew up the driveway, and she stayed home with me for the rest of the day. She felt my forehead constantly, said she’d heard there was a bad cold going around. She said I
needed to rest. We watched her soap opera and made cookies.

She asked me how I felt, but she never asked what I was thinking. I think she hoped that the food and the attention, the constant kindness, would make me into the girl I was supposed to be.

But that girl could never be—not ever—and so that night, I ran.

I was in bed, wrapped up in my covers with my hands resting on my belly so I could feel myself breathing. My eyes were gritty as I waited for sleep, only to have it come for moments. I was waking up with a start as soon as dreams came for me, trying to take me somewhere I knew I didn’t want to go.

I lay there and remembered running at soccer practice, remembered how I had been able to just focus on it. How, for a little while, I had felt like I was really here. I got up, got dressed, climbed out my window, and slid down onto the porch. From there I dropped onto the grass, and then I ran.

I ran down our driveway, our street. The trees were dark shadows, like everything else, and I ran past them, too busy hearing myself breathing, too busy feeling my body working slowly, clumsily.

I ran until I couldn’t anymore. I didn’t get very far.

I had to walk back because I’d overdone it. I could feel my hamstrings tightening in protest already and when I got back
to the house I stood on the driveway for a second, looking up at the porch.

Looking up at my room waiting for me, looking at the open window leading to my bed, leading to me lying there awake and waiting for another day I didn’t want.

I climbed up anyway, feeling my arms shake as I pushed myself onto the roof.

“What are you doing?”

I looked around and saw Joe leaning out his bedroom window watching me.

“What does it look like?”

He grinned. I could see what looked liked a hickey on his neck, a dark spot on his pale skin, and his hair was sticking up in the back, like someone had been running their fingers through it. “Did you lock yourself out?”

“No.”

I was sliding one foot toward my window when he spoke again. “Then what are you doing?”

I glanced over at his window. He’d leaned out of it far enough so I could still see him, head tilted to one side as he watched me.

“Not what you’re doing.”

He grinned again, wider, and touched the hickey. “What, this? I got it earlier. Believe me, if I had a girl in my room
right now, I wouldn’t be watching you try to break your neck.”

I froze halfway through my window, my arms burning as I held myself still. “I’m not trying to break my neck.”

“You wouldn’t anyway. You’re not up high enough. You’d just mess up your mother’s flowerbeds and maybe break your arm.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Beth saw your brother jump off the roof the time he made a parachute,” he said. “And when he was in the hospital getting his arm set, she calculated that it would be almost impossible to die jumping off your roof. She wanted to put that in the get-well card she made, but Mom talked her out of it. She said ‘Feel Better’ was nicer than math problems about death.”

“I’d forgotten all about David and the roof,” I said. “I bet he might still have the card Beth—”

“I haven’t forgotten,” he said, and I heard his window close. I slid inside mine, shaking my arms out and wondering what Joe had seen in my face to make him say what he had.

I pushed the thought away and went back to bed, hoping that now I could sleep.

I didn’t.

Eleven

I got to school late the next morning and was greeted by the sight of Coach Henson standing in the parking lot, arms folded across his chest as he paced back and forth like it was game day. Maybe it was. I didn’t know the team schedule anymore.

He waved me down as soon as I got out of the car like he’d been waiting for me.

“Talked to a few of your teachers the other day,” he said. “Seems you’ve had trouble keeping up with your schoolwork. Also, your guidance counselor says you’re behind on your independent study. You were supposed to turn in your outline and a general thesis statement last week, remember?”