Shandi says to Natty, “Walcott will take you to the cafeteria to get that ice cream now, okay?”
Natty nods, and Paula is still talking. “You’re very popular. Mrs. Grant—the lady who owns the Circle K—stopped by to weep and abjectly apologize. She’s very, very sorry that she shot you with her foot. Her husband has a couple of cracked ribs, she said to tell you, but he should be fine. He’s in a room down the hall. He wants to say thank you. That clerk came by, too—”
“Carrie,” Shandi supplies. She is handing the little boy up to the much larger one, angry in his flip-flops. All the motion in the room makes William more nauseous.
Paula talks over her. “—on the same errand, one assumes. They didn’t stay, though. Only this one stayed. And watched you sleep. Which isn’t creepy.” She says it in the way that means she does think it is creepy.
“So did you,” William says.
He feels his mouth stretch out long into a smile. Too long. It feels like half his head could yawp open and hinge back entirely, until he is staring upside down at the wall behind him.
“Yeah, but I love your sorry ass,” Paula says.
Shandi startles and draws in her breath, fast and sharp.
The angry boy flairs his nostrils. “We’ll be in the cafeteria, when you get done with this lunacy.”
He carries Natty out.
Natty waves as he goes, and William waves back. So, this is what three looks like, big-eyed and quiet and intense. William has not spent much time with children other than his own daughter, who stopped at two. She was all noise and chaos in glittery pink clothes, a ball of willfulness with short, fat legs. He can see the physiology is different. Three is longer and straighter, the back no longer bowed and the stomach losing its baby roundness.
Paula says, “He’s gone. You can stop waving now, Bubba.”
He didn’t realize he still was. He stops, and stops smiling, too, trying to narrow his mouth back down, make it shorter. He can’t do it, and he deliberately sets the morphine button aside.
Shandi says to Paula, “Could you give us a minute? Alone?”
Paula chuckles. “Absolutely not. Your friend said that you are here for lunacy, and this man is clearly helpless. What if you eat him?”
“William,” Shandi says, like a plea. Her eyes are big and desperate, like they were in the Circle K, fixed on him like she expects him to bang Paula in the head now. It reminds him.
“Did I kill him? When I hit him with the paperweight?” he asks her. He doesn’t want to have killed anyone. Not even Stevie.
“No,” Shandi says. “He was in surgery, they said, and now he’s in the ICU. They put a cop outside his door, but I don’t know why. He’s in a coma.”
She stops talking and looks down at her hands, glancing over at Paula a couple of times. William picks up Natty’s dilapidated paper bird, pulling the tail to make it peck. It’s so rumpled that all it can manage is a lurching, sad movement. Shandi still keeps glancing back at Paula.
Paula says. “I’m not leaving, crazy lady.”
“I’m not crazy.” Shandi turns to William and says, “Or maybe I am. In the Circle K, when you, when you were shot, you looked at me and you said a word.”
William shakes his head. He doesn’t remember.
“You said ‘destiny,’ ” Shandi tells him.
Behind her, Paula sits up straight, and now she is looking at William with intensity. She knows his definition. Her eyes narrow.
“William,” Shandi says, and he sinks back to that moment, when their eyes met over the head of her frightened child. He thought then that she might kiss him. She leans in close again, speaks barely above a whisper. “Do you believe in miracles?”
Behind her, Paula’s eyebrows disappear into her bangs.
“Define the term,” he says.
“Like when the Red Sea parted, or when Lazarus got back up,” she says. She swallows and looks away.
“No,” he says.
She shrugs. “I was a virgin when I gave birth to Natty. For a long time now, I’ve told myself it was a miracle.”
Miracle is another word for magic, and magic is only science, unexplained. The simplest explanation for her sentence is a need for antipsychotic medication. Paula, twirling her index finger by her forehead behind Shandi’s back, is advocating for this one. William, even in the grips of morphine, doesn’t think so. He was with her in the Circle K. She was steady and cool, doing her best to keep her child safe. She did all the ugly things that needed doing when he took the bullet. She doesn’t strike him, even now, as unstable. Though certainly his judgment is impaired. Right now, it looks as if she has two or three overlapping faces.
“There’s no such thing,” he tells her.
She shakes her head, rueful. “I know. I’m not even sure if I believe in God. But I pretended it was a miracle anyway. It was easier. If there’s something you can’t live with, you have to get it off of you. You do whatever you need to do, to push it far away.” This, of course, makes perfect sense to him. “It can come back, though. You never know what’s going to call it back.”
“Detergent,” he says and Shandi’s eyebrows knit.
“Okay, stop,” Paula says, standing. “He’s in no condition to talk to you about whatever your disturbance is.”
Shandi ignores her and bulls onward, talking faster now, and her voice is fierce, telegraphing urgency. “There was no miracle. I killed it in the Circle K. I killed it dead, and now I only want to know the truth. You said that word, destiny. You said you were a scientist. I think that you could help me know.”
“I mean it,” Paula says, looming up over her. “Time to go.”
Shandi retracts under Paula’s glare, sinking herself deep into the chair. She grips the edges with her hands so hard the knuckles whiten. She will not easily be moved, but Paula is about to lay hands on her and make it happen, easy or hard. Someone could be hurt. Probably Shandi.
“Wait,” William tells Paula, and she pauses to boggle at him.
His mind, even soaked in narcotics, is engaging. Something rose for this girl, too, inside the Circle K. She says she killed a miracle, and while he understands that she means this figuratively, the concept pleases him. She wants willfulness and science now, to help her. “I’m interested in doing that,” he tells her.
Paula is so startled she does an actual double take. Shandi only nods. She looks relieved, but not surprised. It’s almost as if she expected him to agree, and this is interesting, too. William himself would not have predicted it, right up until he heard himself say it.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Paula says. She is examining Shandi again. She’s been teasing William about having a young woman hanging around to watch him sleep, but now she’s taking Shandi seriously. Her gaze rests on the girl, appraising, suspicious, and then she’s glaring at him. “William, do you hear yourself? Is your brain in a cloud?”
He shoots her an impatient look. “You know I don’t like metaphors before I’ve had my coffee.”
She laughs in spite of her confusion. “Or after,” she says.
“Or during,” he agrees. He understands what she means, of course, but why should he have to? Why ask if his brain has been encased in a visible mass of tiny water droplets when what she really wants to know is why he’s acting out of character.
“Whew, you’ve bounced back sassy,” Paula says. “I should have shot you months ago. You’ve really thrown me, though. This girl just said the most ass-crazy mess I’ve ever heard, and you’re all in? Just like that?”
William shrugs, though he can tell from a distance that his wound is not reacting well. It also wasn’t the best idea to sit up, now that he’s noticing. The two women undulate in the fuzzy room, each wanting different things. His loyalty is to Paula, but the night was long and black; the morning seems impossible to navigate with
loyalty alone.
Shandi may well have saved his life with a borrowed sweater and quick thinking. The common perception would dictate that he is in her debt, although he isn’t grateful. Being saved was not the outcome he was seeking. But now she’s said a lot of things that have left him feeling curious. He’s almost interested, his mind engaging with something far outside himself for the first time in a year.
And why not? It isn’t every day he meets a girl who killed a miracle.
“Sure,” he tells Paula, tells them both. “Just like that.”
PART TWO
Chemistry
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
EMILY DICKINSON
Chapter 7
This is what I knew: William would find Natty’s biological father. He would banish the red-clay golem I’d imagined rising, malformed and anonymous, from the earth around the beanbag chair. He would make it have a human face, a human body, a human vulnerability to justice. I had finally become a true believer.
“He’s not Sherlock Holmes,” Walcott told me on the phone. I was hurling a load of laundry into the machine at the condo, getting ready to go back over to William’s. I hadn’t seen Walcott since we’d visited the hospital. I’d told myself it was only because he lived in Lumpkin County in the summertime, working for his momses. But he hadn’t answered my texts, and that was unprecedented. I called the B and B and had Aimee go and get him. Now we were in this stupid fight. He didn’t think William could do it, and he was irked that I’d even asked him to try. “You believe it the same way Natty believes that he saves Tinker Bell by clapping, every time I read him Peter Pan.”
“Yeah? Well last I checked, Tink was still breathing,” I told him, irked back.
“Don’t go back over there,” he said.
But as soon as we hung up, I went.
I’d been taking care of William for more than a week, cooking healthy meals in his kitchen and making him stay flat as much as possible, so his abdomen could heal. His friend Paula took the night shift, and I do mean took. With both hands. She showed up every night but Tuesday, arriving near enough to Natty’s bedtime that it was hardly more than our paths crossing. I might have let Natty stay up later, though, if it wasn’t for the way she filled up the house, pushing me aside until I felt like an invading bug scuttling along the walls.
She’d bring a six-pack, pop open a couple, and pass one to William. She’d plop into the armchair and only then say, “Oh, did you want one?” She shut me outside the conversation, engaging William in an odd, truncated sparring or saying things soaked in so much history and reference it was almost shorthand.
I might have been jealous, if he wasn’t so completely unromantic with her. It was like watching some alternate-universe version of me and Walcott, where Walcott was the quiet one, and I was kind of an asshole. I wondered if they weren’t cousins or some other flavor of family. Paula was such an indecipherable mix of races she could theoretically be related to anyone.
That night, she showed up early.
We’d finished eating dinner but were still sitting at the table, chatting, with William at the head and Natty and me on either side of him. This was the third day he’d felt well enough to sit at the table instead of having a tray in bed. He was barefoot, wearing a T-shirt that said E. COLI HAPPENS, and a pair of ancient Levi’s that looked so soft I wanted to drop to my knees and rub my cheek along his thigh.
I heard her letting herself in as Natty began agitating to go see the little brown bats before it got too dark. She sauntered into the kitchen and put a six-pack down on the counter.
I told Natty, “In a minute, baby,” mostly because I didn’t want to let her run me out in the middle of an hour that was still my time.
She gave me a cool nod, then said, “Hey, Bubba, how’re you feeling?” to William.
“Twenty-six percent less dead,” William said.
I said, too loud, “There’s more salmon if you like?” She shook her head. When I added, “Can I at least get you some coffee?” she laughed outright.
“I’ll get my own drink, Susie Homemaker. Take a load off.”
She popped the cap off one of the beers and leaned against the counter, drinking and looking at me over the bottle.
Natty was out of his chair now, coming around the table to tug my sleeve and say, “It’s bat o’clock immediately, Mommy.”
But I wasn’t ready to give the room, much less William, over to Paula. “I have to get the dishes done.”
Paula said, “Why don’t you take him, William, since you have pants on, for a change.”
“Sure.” William got up, his palm pressed lightly against the place where he had been shot, as if the bullet was still there and he was holding it in.
I started to follow, but Paula said, “I think they have bat-watch covered, don’t you? You finish clearing. I’ll rinse.” Paula struck me as having the domestic instincts of a barn cat; I thought, This is a ploy to get me alone.
But then she gave me a wide, bland smile and started running water in the sink. Not a ploy at all. She wasn’t trying to trick me. It was a clear request for a tête-à-tête, designed to run under the male radars in the room. I grabbed a couple of the dirty plates and took them over, curious enough to let her have it. We’d never been alone together, and when William was present, she’d never shown the slightest interest in talking to me.
Paula took the plates and began rinsing, but the second the front door closed, she shut the water off. She turned toward me, sharp-eyed and canny, wiping her hands dry on the dish towel to save her sleek, bitch-black suit.
“This was one thing when you were a cute little stray with a crush. But now you’re trying to get a dish in the house,” she said with no preamble. “William’s feeling a lot better, and so I think you’re done here.”
All at once I felt so awkward that I didn’t know where to put my hands. I found myself clutching them together in front of me like Natty caught sneaking a jelly bean. I made them drop down by my sides.
“Ooh! You’re spooky,” I said, “but I don’t think you get to decide that.”
“Are we going to let William decide?” She chuckled, but it was not a friendly sound.
“I guess,” I said, because I wasn’t sure where this was going.
“You think he’d pick you?” Paula asked.
For a moment I wondered what his other choice was. Then I realized that, while I’d never seen him so much as glance at her in a romantic way, she was a harder thing to read. She was pushing me, though, so I pushed back. “He still needs help. It’s not like you’re up for the job.”
I hated how defensive I sounded, but there was enough truth in it for her to incline her head and say, “Touché.”
When Natty and I first drove over to his house, a renovated Tudor in the heart of Morningside, we’d found him spaced out on pain meds, swaying and eating cold noodles directly from a carton. He was in no shape to continue the conversation I’d started at the hospital. Paula had driven him home, but then she’d left him with nothing in the fridge but milk, OJ, and a bunch of take-out Chinese food for reheating. I’d put him to bed, and Natty and I stayed. We’d come back the next day with real groceries and stayed longer.
I kept thinking someone—family, maybe, or close friends—would show up and kick me over a step, saying, Oh thanks, Shandi, you almost perfect stranger, we’ll take it from here. But Paula didn’t come until seven, most nights. A neighbor dropped off a coffee cake, and Geneti-Tech sent a huge crate of pears, individually wrapped like they were diamonds. I made fun of that until I bit into one and felt its perfect, crisp sweetness flood my mouth. Until Natty and I came, the house was a beautiful void: breezy sheer
s, glass bricks, and silence.
Paula’s head cocked and her eyes were so cold. She stepped in closer still, and she was spooky as all hell. I caught a whiff of what it might feel like to be some hapless deadbeat dad, about to get creamed, stuck alone on the witness stand with Paula bearing down.
“I appreciate the casseroles, okay? But you can’t have my au-tastic Dr. Ashe. I don’t care what he’s said or what it looks like. I’m telling you, he’s not available.”
I tucked my chin down, eyebrows rising. Paula was claiming him like territory, but my brain stuck on the other thing. “Your what?” I said, and then, processing it, I said, shocked, “William’s not autistic.” But I had a click in my head, like, Oh. That slight lack of inflection. The way he looks off sideways when I talk. It isn’t the Percocet.
“On the spectrum. Whatever. He’s a grown-up, Shandi. He’s learned how to pass. Mostly,” she said, then added in a sweet nursery-rhyme singsong, “Asperger’s, autistic, a green and yellow biscuit.” Her lip curled up and her voice went from kiddy-sweet to bullets. “Try to stay on topic. Stop coming here, wearing the shit out of those cast-me-as-the-wifey sundresses. This one looks like you dug up June Cleaver and ripped it off her corpse. No one dresses like that to get help with a science-fair project, or whatever crazy bullshit you were spouting at the hospital.”
I was instantly ashamed of my own stupid vintage apron, which was unfair. I’d come to remind William of his promise to help me, but I had found him hurt and alone. There’d been no one else, and he’d gotten shot saving my life. Saving my kid’s life. So, yeah, I’d Mimmy’ed around a little, tucking blankets under his feet, greeting him with the smell of Lemon Pledge and a big-ass slice of pie when he woke up. Now it had somehow turned into a full-on Mim-vasion. But Mimmy’s life was a dress rehearsal for a show that never opened. I wasn’t her, and I didn’t want to be her, cooking and smiling and dead from the neck down.
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