Night of Miracles

by Elizabeth Berg

  She sighs and turns onto her side. Tears slide down her cheeks and she wipes them away. She supposes she’ll always cry over Frank: finding the first and only love of her life in high school and losing him, then finding him again—at eighty-three!—only to lose him again, to a heart attack, just like that. Here, then gone again. So very much here, then so very much gone.

  She closes her eyes and tells herself to dream of him. Oftentimes, it works, telling herself to dream of someone, and her dreams are increasingly very real-seeming. After the death of her friend Arthur, she could summon him up on a regular basis. She dreamed of Arthur sitting on the porch with her, as he so often used to do, eating cookies, taking his tiny bites and brushing crumbs carefully into his hand. She dreamed he was out in the garden with his battered old straw hat on, pruning roses, the sun shining right through his stick-out ears when he turned to offer her an impromptu bouquet. Sometimes she dreamed he was laughing with Maddy.

  Maddy had been eighteen and pregnant by her lousy ex-boyfriend when she moved in with Arthur to be his housekeeper. She and Arthur had met in the cemetery, where Arthur used to go every day to visit his wife, Nola, and where Maddy went to escape lunch hour—if not whole days—at her high school. What a fragile and sorrowful little being Maddy had been, a motherless child, estranged from her father, bullied in school, with absolutely no friends. But Arthur (“Truluv,” Maddy had nicknamed him) took her into his home, and after a little while Lucille moved into Arthur’s house, too. The girl needed proper nourishment, and a woman’s touch, Lucille thought. And Lucille needed company. Now Maddy has just about finished college—she goes to a wonderful place very close by where she can keep her child with her in the dorm. She studies photography and she has started to become quite successful. More important, at least in Lucille’s opinion, she’s doing a great job raising her daughter, named Nola, after Arthur’s wife. Lucille misses both Maddy and little Nola, but they keep in touch with cards and phone calls and the occasional visit. Nola’s drawings wallpaper Lucille’s kitchen: big-headed figures with crossed eyes and stick fingers, lines of sparse grass with perky flowers poking up, tilted houses with smoke coming out of chimneys, figure-eight cats.

  Lucille’s dreams of Arthur are always pleasant. Sometimes she asks to dream of him because she misses him. More often, it’s for a particular kind of comfort. When her GERD is acting up, say, or if a news story has scared the bejesus out of her.

  When she asks to dream of Frank, it’s different. Her dreams of him are particularly intense. She can smell him; he always smelled of Old Spice and soap and leather, and if that isn’t the best scent on earth, she doesn’t know what is; it’s even better than baking bread. She and Frank have conversations, too, and she hears his voice plain as day.

  Well, she may have had Frank for just short of a month, but to Lucille it seemed like a little lifetime. In her dreams, she and Frank are together always, and even if they’re not looking at each other, they’re seeing each other. It would have been wonderful to spend the rest of their lives together, it would. Not just for the immense pleasure of being with each other but for the services they would have provided each other. Reminding each other to take their pills. Accompanying each other to doctors’ appointments. Helping each other decide whether to be buried or cremated—a lot of people think that’s just an awful thing to talk about, but when you’re old, you’ve got to. She thinks Frank would have made a joke.

  Oh, he was wonderful, Frank, and the best thing was that he made her kind of wonderful, too. That is the gift of love, not only that you have somebody but that you are changed by somebody.

  She will dream of Frank tonight, she can tell. She will feel she caught him by the tail of his spirit and he really is here, a see-through Frank come back to her. She will believe she is holding him tightly, running her hands up and down the personal mountain range of his spine, which she remembers perfectly, as she remembers everything about them being together, truly she does.

  A letter on a random day from a man who last knew her when she was eighteen years old. Think of it. You’re eighty-three, and your life has been stretched out like a rubber band. And then you open an envelope and Snap! there you are, back at eighteen. Eighteen inside of eighty-three. And you’re ready for love just like you were all those years ago. Readier.

  Lucille thinks she knows how most people would regard what happened between her and Frank. There was a time when she was in her late fifties and a woman from church, who was approaching ninety, told Lucille in a tremulous voice, “I still need love, too, you know.” And Lucille felt a kind of embarrassment mixed with disdain, she must admit she felt some disdain. Because she believed the woman should be through with all that. What she knows now is that no one is ever through with love. No one ever should be.

  These are the things Lucille thinks about before she falls asleep tonight. She is in her blue nightie and her hands are clasped between her knees and she is ready for Frank to come. When a deep pain snakes into her midsection, she ignores it. It will go away. It always does.

  Iris

  IF YOU COULD LIVE ONE day in your life over again and change the outcome of something that happened that day, what day would it be? This is a question many people have difficulty answering. Not Iris Winters. She knows the day, and she knows exactly how she’d change what happened.

  Ten years ago, early morning. She was in bed, lying on her side, her eyes open. The drapes were cracked so that there was a thin band of sunlight running across her bent knees. She was staring dully ahead, breathing in, breathing out. The night before, she had told her husband, “I need to say something to you. And this is not a mood. I have thought carefully about this, and I am sure. I want a divorce, Ed. I don’t want to have to say it again. Please don’t make me say it again.” She blinked back tears, lifted her chin. “I’m sorry.”

  Before he left for work, her husband came to sit on her side of the bed. He lowered himself onto the mattress very slowly, as if he were sore, or as if she were, or as if they both were. She moved only her eyes to look at him. He was wearing one of his good suits and the tie she liked best, a pale-blue silk with a paisley pattern. He took her hand in his, and his hand was sweaty: he was nervous. “Can we try again,” he said. He didn’t say it like a question, he said it like a statement. She took a while to answer. It was probably only a second or two, but it felt longer. And then she said, “No,” in a morning voice that cracked. She cleared her throat and said it again: “No.” No more anguished talks at the kitchen table, no more talks in front of television shows neither of them was really watching, no talks in the car, at restaurants, in bed at night. She was exhausted, and she was finished. She could not stop what she had started; it had its own momentum now, and all she wanted was for it to be over.

  Her husband sat there for a minute, nodding. Then he said, “Would you be honest with me if I asked you just one thing?”

  “What.”

  His voice was gentle, but firm. “Do you think that your pushing me so hard for something you wanted made me kind of necessarily resist it? Would you admit that, would you say that you pushed way too hard?”

  She spoke with a cold remove. “No. I would not say that. I would say that I didn’t push hard enough.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Well, I’ve been thinking. What if we—”

  “No.”

  They didn’t even eat together anymore, not breakfast, not lunch, not dinner. Oftentimes, they ate separate things, and Iris thought this was worse than separate beds. They were more than over. They were rotted.

  Her husband stood and went out of the room, downstairs, and into the garage. He started his car, backed out, and drove off. Sounds she had heard thousands of times, but that day they were different.

  If she could have the day back, it would go like this: She lets him finish asking the question. She sits up and puts the pillows behind her. Takes in a breath. She say
s, “Well, how would we do that?” And he tells her. And they do it. And it works. She stays. And she does not live every day for the next ten years with a small sword stuck into the back side of her heart.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER SHE AND ED had been married for three years, Iris decided she was ready for a baby. She purchased a kit to check for pregnancy, she circled the days that month when they should be sure to have sex, she bought a hot-pink negligee that sat squarely between whimsical and sexy. That night, she said, “Guess what?”

  After she’d told him, he said, “Wow. Well, let’s see. Let’s wait a bit.”

  “For what?” Iris asked.

  “For…well, for one thing, let me have a little time to adjust to the idea.”

  “To the idea of…?”

  “Having kids!”

  Iris stared at him. They were in the kitchen, he was sitting at the table chopping the ends off the green beans, she was turning the salmon in the marinade sauce. She resealed the ziplock bag, then came to sit at the table with him. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, a tight smile on her face.

  “Did I forget to ask you something?”

  He said nothing.

  “Ed?”

  “What.”

  “Did I make a wrong assumption?” The very thought made her feet feel cold.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I just…I mean, when we got married, I did assume you’d want children.”

  “But you never asked.”

  “And you never told, Ed! You never told me you didn’t want children.”

  “I don’t know if I don’t want them ever. I just don’t want them now.”

  “But…when, then?”

  He pushed the cutting board away. “Jesus Christ, Iris. I don’t know! I don’t have an exact date for you!”

  She swallowed, spoke quietly over a sudden dryness in her throat. “You like children. You seem to like children a lot.”

  “I do. But it doesn’t mean I want any of my own.” He sighed and looked over at her. “My God, Iris, look at the world.”

  She tilted her head and squinted at him. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing.

  “You know?” he said, getting up to wash his hands. “Look at the environment. Look at the population crisis.”

  “This…I have to tell you, this comes as a total shock to me.” She laughed. “I feel like I was putting your underwear away and found a lethal weapon in your drawer. I feel like…My God, Ed! I just had no idea that we wouldn’t have children. At least one. Can’t we have just one?”

  “You sound like you’re begging for a puppy.”

  “And you sound like a jerk.”

  Silence.

  Then, “Ed. I was the girl who always minded her egg. Remember in college when my psychology class was doing that experiment with the eggs, you had to care for your egg like it was your child? I took care of the egg. Only one other girl and I, we didn’t break our eggs, we didn’t lose them, we kept them with us all the time.”

  “You didn’t have your egg with you all the time.”

  “I did!”

  “Not when we went out. I never saw it.”

  “It was in my purse. In a nest padded with flannel that I made for it. I always had that egg.”

  “All right, so you were inordinately responsible for an egg.”

  “And when I was a little girl, I played dolls incessantly. I asked for a rocker so I could rock them to sleep. I gave them illnesses so I could cure them. I cut out food from magazines to feed them. I checked on them in the night. I washed their clothes and laid them out on the lawn to dry. Ed! I love children! I want one of my own!”

  Ed looked down. “I don’t know, I guess we both made false assumptions. But just give me some time. Don’t keep at this, okay? Let’s think what this would mean, having children. Children aren’t dolls, or eggs. Think about how they would impact our lives. How we could no longer do a lot of things we do now.”

  I’m done doing those things, she thought.

  “Let’s keep using birth control for another year, okay? And then we’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to take birth control pills anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve had some weird circulation things happening.”

  “Really? This isn’t just an excuse?”

  “Really, Ed. I’ll get an IUD.”

  They ate dinner with an odd formality, as though they were on a first date.

  That night, in bed, he pulled her to him, wrapped his arms around her, rested his chin on the top of her head, and told her he was sorry, but he thought they should both be sure. They’d talk about it again in a year.

  She said one more thing. She said, “So, would you feel any differently about adoption?”

  He said this: “Iris.”

  Finally, she let it go. They did have time. She was only in her late thirties. But then she got a terrible infection from the IUD, a life-threatening infection, one that necessitated a hysterectomy. After the surgery, when she woke up, Ed was by her bedside and he took her hand so tenderly and kissed it and said, “Maybe it was for the best.” She pulled her hand away and turned her face to the wall. Inside her, a different kind of implantation took place, and the seed of bitterness grew.

  * * *

  —

  IRIS MOVED TO MASON, MISSOURI, two months ago. She didn’t want to be in Boston any longer, never mind that her consignment clothes shop had taken off and was flourishing. She didn’t want to be in the same town where her happily remarried husband lived.

  She ran into Ed and Kathleen at the Museum of Fine Arts. She ran into them at Giacomo’s in the North End. After she ran into them at the West Newton Cinema and saw that Kathleen’s coat couldn’t close over her pregnant stomach, Iris decided to move to San Francisco. She’d always loved the city, and it was time to try something new.

  She sold her store, sold her condo and all her furniture, overpacked her SUV with clothes, artwork, and kitchenware, and headed west. But something happened on the way, which was that she got tired of driving, and also she remembered something. She didn’t like big cities. She didn’t even like medium-size cities. What she liked were small towns, or at least the idea of them.

  Someone she’d gone to Boston College with, a girl named Susan Sloat, was from Mason, Missouri. Whenever Susan described it, it was as justification for her never going back, but Iris always liked the sound of it: one river, one cemetery, one department store, with wooden floors and a ribbon department. When the Olive Garden came to town, there was much excitement and a big write-up in the paper; whenever there was a speaker at the library, nearly everyone in town came or had a good reason why they couldn’t. Pancake breakfasts, spaghetti dinners, father-daughter dance night: all that her roommate derided, Iris found charming. She thought that living in a small town would be a refreshing change from the Boston suburbs, where she’d been born and raised.

  And so it was that on her trip west, she abandoned the idea of San Francisco and drove instead to Mason, Missouri, and settled in. And she was right about the town being a good fit for her. Her only regret about being here is that she didn’t come long ago.

  She lives in the uppermost corner unit of a three-story brick apartment building, on the banks of the Red Birch River, a narrow, winding waterway into which willow trees dip their branches. In the early morning, she can see mist rising off the water as the ducks float by, and sometimes at night pieces of moonlight lie on the river like islands. All day, birds flit and chatter in the trees along the banks. Iris puts breadcrumbs on her kitchen windowsill so that she can attract them and see them close up, though she has signed a lease with a provision stating that she will do no such thing. But everyone does it; in fact many people affix little feeders to the windows with suction cups.


  Iris bought a guide to the birds of Missouri, and she has checked off the downy woodpecker, the eastern bluebird, the white-breasted nuthatch, the dark-eyed junco, and the tufted titmouse. She has seen others, but she doesn’t want to check them off yet. She wants the prospect of more to come. The only one she doesn’t want to see is the mourning dove, whose name and call press on the bruise.

  Abby

  ABBY AND JASON SUMMERS AND their ten-year-old son, Lincoln, are driving home from Columbia, Missouri, where they’ve been first to the bookstore and then to Whole Foods. They do this every other Saturday. A good organic grocery store and a bookstore are the only things missing from Mason, as far as they’re concerned. Otherwise, they love living here, and have from the first day they moved in. Jason and Abby are both able to work from home, he as a computer consultant, she as a freelance writer for a natural-foods website, and they moved to Mason from Chicago when the congestion in their Wrigleyville neighborhood finally became too much for them. They considered a move to Evanston or Oak Park, but then decided to find a small town they loved. They drove through Mason once on the way to a wedding and had never forgotten how likeable it seemed, and, in fact, is.

  But Columbia is a two-hour drive, and going there and back takes up a whole day, mostly because of the way all three of them like to linger in the bookstore. Today is a beautiful mid-October day, but soon the bad weather will be upon them and the drive will take longer.

  Abby is exhausted, as she has been for some time. She’s exhausted, her gums are bleeding, and last night she found a big bruise on her leg she doesn’t remember getting. Today, she stocked up on some herbal medications in Whole Foods that will help. What she minds most is this bone-deep fatigue; she is normally a very energetic person.