Miracle

by Elizabeth Scott

  And I would be fine. I just had to stop thinking about the crash. I had to stop worrying about why I couldn’t remember it. I had to stop worrying about why I’d lived. I had to stop feeling weird about being called a miracle. It was just another word, and people used it to talk about things like shampoo. I was still me, and that was what mattered.

  But when I crawled into bed that night and closed my eyes, I saw a burning sky and didn’t sleep again.

  I lay there, staring out my window up at the sky, and I couldn’t escape the thought that I didn’t feel much like myself anymore. I didn’t feel much like anything.

  Then school started a few days later, and things got worse.

  Jess and Lissa were waiting for me when I left the house, full of homemade waffles and tired of watching David run around trying to get Mom or Dad to notice that he’d given himself a haircut with the scissors Dad used to trim his beard.

  “Hey!” they both said, and hugged me. Then Jess showed me an orange spot on her neck, said, “Look what Brian did last night. Can you tell I have a hickey? Is this foundation too orange for me?”

  Jess never asked me about makeup. Or hickeys. We both knew I knew practically nothing about either of those things.

  I nodded.

  “See?” Lissa said. “I told you. Meggie, what do you think of my outfit?”

  Lissa never asked me what I thought about her clothes. Lissa’s parents, who’d “retired” to Reardon after they’d made a lot of money starting some computer company, went to New York twice a year on vacation, and Lissa always came back with clothes no one else would have until the Target in Derrytown started selling knockoffs months later.

  “Just don’t mention her butt,” Jess said, laughing. “She’s obsessing about it again. Oh, I like your flip-flops!”

  “They are nice,” Lissa said. “Where did you get them?”

  I stared at Lissa. Since when had I had any fashion sense at all? “Mom got them for me.”

  She had. She’d also bought me a new pair of soccer cleats. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to look at them, and after she gave them to me, I threw them in the trash. She took them out, smiling as she reminded me to check shopping bags before I threw them away, and put them in my closet. Now they were on the roof.

  I’d realized a lot of stuff about my room when I was supposed to be sleeping, like the fact that if I opened my window and climbed out, I could swing down onto the porch. I hadn’t tried it, but I’d thought about it.

  I could also fling stuff up over my head and hear it land on the roof. I had tried that. So far the cleats were there, and an afghan made by volunteers at the Staunton hospital. They’d made it the color of the forest, different shades of green, to remind me of my “amazing courage.” I hated it.

  “So,” Jess said, and pointed at her neck again. “Is this color really okay?”

  It was like that all day. Lissa and Jess wanted to know what I thought about everything. Everyone wanted to know what I thought. Everyone wanted to say hi to me, to hug me, to tell me how great it was to see me. It was nice, I told myself, and tried to be happy.

  It didn’t work.

  After school Lissa said, “Call me when you get home from practice,” and Jess said, “Yeah, call me too, okay?”

  As I walked down to the field, I could feel the whole team looking at me. Then they started clapping, and Coach Henson smiled at me. He never smiled. He frowned and yelled stuff like, “Is that the best you can do?”

  “This,” he said, pointing at me as I started to sit down, “is what you all need to strive to be like. Meggie doesn’t quit. She doesn’t ever give up.”

  Everyone clapped again. I started to feel weird again, like I wasn’t in my body even though I knew I was.

  “Why don’t you get us started on our warm-up laps?” Coach said, and everyone looked at me, waiting. Watching.

  “I—I can’t,” I said. “I just remembered I have to do something at home.”

  It took everything I had to walk off the field normally, to keep whatever was inside me pushed down enough to act like I was fine when I just wanted to run and run until I couldn’t think, until I was far away. Until I was away from myself.

  Coach called that night, and after I told him I needed a break from soccer and hung up, Mom and Dad agreed that they respected my choice. Mom had said stuff like that before, but what she’d meant then was she respected my choices as long as they were the ones she wanted. As for Dad, well, he loved that I played soccer. David, for all his fort-building and tree-climbing and bone-cracking, wasn’t very athletic. He was slight and clumsy and got sick so easily that putting him on a team just meant there’d be more days of school he’d have to miss, more colds he’d suffer through.

  “Meggie, whatever you want to do is fine with me,” Mom said, and Dad nodded, added, “You have to do what’s right for you, sweetheart.” Then they both hugged me.

  That’s when I knew things weren’t ever going to get back to normal. My parents hugged me plenty, but they’d always given parent hugs, those squeezes that make you feel safe but also judge a little, a reminder that you’re still loved but the fact you forgot to take out the trash has been noticed.

  Now they hugged me like I was made of glass. Not like I might break, but like I was something priceless. They didn’t hug me like they used to and that’s when I knew I wasn’t Meggie anymore. I wasn’t even Megan.

  I was Miracle.

  I didn’t know what to do. I kept getting up in the morning, kept going to school, and kept doing homework. Kept doing all the things I’d always done. But in the mornings now, I didn’t have to eat cereal bars while Mom fussed over David, feeling his forehead or asking him how he felt. Instead I ate waffles and bacon and orange juice and when David wiped his runny nose on his sleeve Mom said, “Sweetie, use a napkin, please,” and asked me if I wanted anything else.

  At school, the popular people, the ones whose parents were supervisors at Reardon Logging, didn’t ask me to sit with them at lunch, but they said hi to me in the halls and asked me what I was doing on the weekends. Sometimes they even invited me to their parties and once I said, “I can’t,” a couple of times, they started asking me even more. In class, my teachers said, “Good job,” even when I answered a question wrong, and I passed every test and quiz I took, even when I left every answer blank.

  Jess and Lissa also finally asked about the crash. I’d been waiting for it, and as soon as they did I realized I’d been hoping they would ask something different. That they would somehow see that I was different and want to know why. But they just wanted to know the same things everyone else did, wanted to know what I’d thought, how I’d survived. They wanted to hear how amazing I was. Find out how I’d become a miracle.

  I kept the story short. I had to. I still didn’t remember the crash or what had happened afterward. But what little I said made them smile, made them look at me like I was their best friend.

  The thing was, Jess and Lissa had always been better friends with each other than with me. But now I was the one they turned to first, and every day after school I decided what we would do. They should have hated me for wanting to sit in Lissa’s or Jess’s house and watch television and not go anywhere, but they didn’t. Everything I wanted to do was a great idea. Everything I said was interesting.

  I knew I should care about that. That I should hate how weird things were or maybe like it, enjoy being the center of our friendship. But I didn’t hate it. I didn’t like it. I didn’t care.

  I didn’t care about anything.

  In church the Sunday after I’d told Jess and Lissa what they wanted to hear, Reverend Williams talked about miracles. Everyone was quiet when he finished speaking, and he smiled at me. Mom squeezed one of my hands and Dad squeezed the other. I sat there and wondered again why I’d lived. Why I didn’t even feel like I was here.

  The organ started the hymn we were supposed to sing and the opening notes were loud, booming, and my heart lurched, pounded
hard and fast. I gasped and twitched like I was having some sort of fit and the organ faltered, Margaret hitting a wrong note.

  When I looked at her she was watching me, unsmiling.

  After church there was a covered dish supper. I ate baked ham and mashed potatoes and cake and sat with Jess and Brian. Behind them I could see my parents, chatting with everyone around them as they watched me. I heard David, his loud “ha!” of a laugh rising up over everyone else’s voices, and Mom and Dad still looked at me instead of checking on him. Before we left, I promised Jess I’d call her when I got home.

  When we did, I didn’t call her. Instead I fell asleep on the sofa, exhausted from all the nights I’d lain awake reminding myself that I was home. That I was safe. That I was alive.

  I dreamed I was running through a forest, pushing past trees licked with flame into deeper, darker woods, running and running as I heard the flames grow closer, urging me to turn back, to wait for them. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. They caught me though, held me tight, and I wrenched my eyes open with a start, muffling a cry as I slipped off the sofa and onto the floor.

  When I landed, the side of my face hit one of David’s toys. He saw it—he was sitting there watching TV—and froze. Both of us did, but then my right eye started to swell shut. I went and stood in the bathroom with my hands clutching my arms, staring at it, at the skin around it turning that dark inky purple-blue the sky sometimes gets at night, and then I poked it over and over until my eyes watered so much I could hardly see a thing.

  David knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Are you okay?” I ignored him even when he said it again and rubbed my eyes one more time, making the right one burn, and then opened the door.

  I didn’t say anything to David, and he didn’t say anything either. He just stared at me.

  “You’re acting like a freak,” he finally said. “You’re all quiet and weird.”

  Dad heard that and yelled at him—I kept my head down so I wouldn’t have to hear anything about my eye—and when Mom came in, she got upset too and decided she and David and Dad needed to have a talk.

  “About Meggie?” David said.

  “No, about you,” Mom said and Dad nodded, adding, “That’s right, son. Your behavior—wait a minute. Did you cut your hair?”

  David smiled and I realized it was the first time he had all day. It was also the first time Mom and Dad had noticed the haircut he’d given himself. The one he’d done days ago.

  I went upstairs and looked out the window. Even though one eye was swollen shut, I could still see the trees. There were too many of them, and I didn’t like how close they were. I lay down on my bed and watched them.

  Six

  School was a joke with my eye. I didn’t have to do much before and now I didn’t have to do anything. Coach Henson pulled me out of chemistry to ask how I was doing and ended up taking me to the principal’s office, where the secretary showed me a scrapbook the school was putting together about me. They were going to put it in the display case by the auditorium, in with all the trophies.

  I said I needed to get back to class—the thought of me, singled out like that, made me feel sick—and Coach Henson said, “Good, good, keep up those grades and come sit in on a practice whenever you want, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said but I wasn’t going to practice. Not again. I just . . . I couldn’t.

  When I got home after school, I went straight to bed, exhausted from not sleeping, and woke up when David stood in my doorway and yelled, “Dinner!”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes before I remembered.

  “We’re having BLTs again because they’re your favorite,” he said as I winced, my right eye hurting, and stomped downstairs.

  Dinner was quiet. Or was until David said, “Mom, why did you spend forever staring at Meggie when you got home?”

  “What?” I said.

  “You weren’t even doing anything,” David said to me, picking the tomatoes and lettuce out of his sandwich. “But I had to be quiet so you could sleep.”

  “Whatever, David. You know Mom wouldn’t tell you to . . .” I trailed off, shocked by the anger in his eyes. I looked at Mom and knew he was right. She’d watched me sleep and that . . . that was beyond weird. She’d watched me sleep and hadn’t asked about my eye, as if talking about it would make me somehow not perfect, not a miracle, and now she was looking at me with that happy and yet terrified look in her eyes, the one that had been there since I woke up in the hospital.

  I wanted it—Mom’s look, how I felt, everything—to stop so badly but it hadn’t. And it wouldn’t.

  I got up from the table and went out onto the deck. Mom and Dad came out to join me right away and my insides cramped. David came too, carrying my soccer ball. Mom and Dad both said, “Put that back!” at the same time.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “He can use it.”

  David stared at me, then frowned furiously and kicked the ball as hard as he could. He didn’t swing his leg right though, and the ball popped over our fence and landed in Joe’s yard. It came back over right away, on the wings of a muttered curse, and I saw the top of Joe’s head. A minute later, I heard music, so loud the boards of the deck shook a little.

  “Goodness,” Mom said, looking at Dad.

  “I’ll call over there. Ron’s truck is in the driveway, so he’s probably home,” he said, and went into the house. Two minutes later, Joe came back outside.

  “You could have just asked me to turn it down,” he said to all of us, looking over the fence from David to me to Mom and Dad and then back to me. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “She survived a plane crash,” my mother said sharply.

  “No, I mean your eye,” Joe said, looking at me. “You didn’t have it before, and why are you poking at it like that?”

  I froze and realized my fingers were by my eye, pressing into the soft bruise around it.

  “Let’s go inside and get some ice for that,” Mom said. “David, come do your homework. Joe, please tell your father we said hello.”

  “Right,” Joe said. “He’ll be thrilled.”

  Joe and his parents moved next door when I was four and he was six. They’d lived all the way across town before that, but moved because they needed more room. Or at least that’s what they said. They actually moved because Joe’s grandmother kicked them out of her house in order to sell it and move to Alabama. Everyone knew that. There are plenty of people who don’t speak to each other in Reardon, just like in any other town, but it’s small enough so that everyone knows everyone else’s business eventually.

  We’d helped our other neighbors at the end of the street move in, and I was even allowed to carry the cake Mom had made to welcome them. We didn’t do anything like that for Joe and his family. My parents didn’t like them. No one in town did. Mr. Reynolds had lost a thumb and his job at Reardon Logging in an accident he caused that had also killed four people, and that’s not the kind of thing people forgive. He didn’t work for years after that, not until after his daughter, Beth, died, and even then he could only get a job with a company in Clark as a trucker.

  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—”

  “Fiv
e-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.