by Wendy Wunder
“You ready?” Alicia asked from downstairs in the great room.
“Yeah,” said Cam. “I’m ready.”
As they were starting up the rig, Cam put some extra-reinforcement duct tape around Darren. Lily’s parents waved good-bye from the front stoop. They were about to pull out when Lily came running out the front door.
“How dare you leave without saying good-bye!” she said, trying to catch her breath. She stopped in the middle of the driveway.
“I tried,” said Cam, meeting her halfway between the house and the car.
“Oh, Cam, don’t pout.” Lily placed her hands on her hips. The drawstring of her light blue hospital scrubs was cinched as tight as it could go around her waist. And yet the hem of the pants dropped over her Ugg slippers and onto the driveway, sucking up the morning dew like the roots of a flower.
“I’m not pouting. I’m happy for you. Good luck with Ryan, and I hope you get your wish,” Cam added coldly.
“Cam,” Lily said.
Cam took a moment to watch a ladybug crawl up and over a blade of grass. “He’s just using you, you know,” she blurted.
“How could you possibly know that?” Lily’s icy blue gaze shifted from concern to dismissal. Her eyes hardened.
“I asked him, Lil. And he was strangely honest about it, actually. I was right about him,” Cam said, and she immediately regretted it. She felt numb inside. As if she had no organs. She was a shell. A carapace. An empty carcass alone and adrift.
“Oh, God, Campbell, you are not right for once.” Lily’s voice went up an octave on the word right. “You’re just so obviously jealous.” She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. She turned around and began to walk away but then stopped. “You can’t stand seeing me happy, can you? You just need to pull me back into your misery. But I need to enjoy my life. Let my guard down a little. Maybe you should try it.”
Cam knew that letting her guard down would be the end of her. Her guard was all she had left. “I guess I’m just not that desperate,” she said.
It took Lily a moment to absorb that blow. She looked down, kicked a few pine needles, took a deep breath, and said, “That’s funny because you are the most desperate person I know, Campbell Cooper.” She looked up with a final, watery stare. “And I have no more room in my life for your negativity. I need to be surrounded by positive energy. I need you to leave me alone.”
“You sound like one of those stupid self-help books,” Cam said.
“I’m serious, Campbell. Good luck with everything.” Lily backed away toward her pretend–log cabin house and politely waved to Alicia and Perry.
“Lily—” Cam started. But Lily was gone.
Back in the car, Cam took the screenplay that they had started together out from her biker bag. As Lily’s house disappeared into the distance, she tore it right down the middle.
NINE
“MARIA! LYDIA!”
Their nana came screaming out of her three-story house in Hoboken, which had a view of the Manhattan skyline if you stuck your head out the attic window and looked to the left. Nana was wearing a bright blue matching tracksuit. She was very matchy.
“Mom. Call them by their first names,” Alicia said.
“I don’t even remember them anymore. What are they again? Harry and Jonathan?”
“Mom.”
“I’m kidding. Girls, just promise me you’ll give my great-granddaughters girls’ names, would you? That’s my dying wish. What about Rose? Name one of your kids after me.”
“Sure, Nana,” said Perry, giving her grandmother a hug.
“That’s a good girl,” said Nana, kissing her on top of her pert blonde head.
Cam couldn’t yet speak. Something about seeing her nana really choked her up. She didn’t realize how much she’d missed her.
“Campbell,” said her nana, opening her flabby arms wide as Campbell let herself melt into them.
“See, you remember my name,” said Cam.
“You, I never forget, my love. My firstborn grandchild . . . you are my heart,” she whispered so Perry wouldn’t hear. “Now come,” she said, secretly wiping away a tear. “Let’s eat. You must be hungry. Look at you, all skin and bones. You look like an Olsen twin.”
“Which one?” joked Campbell.
“The one who’s dating Justin Bartha.”
“Who is Justin Bartha? You need to stop reading People magazine.”
“What? I read it at the beauty parlor. I don’t have a subscription or anything.” She fiddled with some containers in the fridge. “Here. Eat this. It’s Miracle Lasagna. Tony Spinelli ate it last month, and his gallstones completely disappeared.”
“Do you believe in miracles, Nan?” Cam asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe, does it? Right now, Campbell, it only matters what you believe,” she said as she poured herself another cup of coffee from her seventies stainless-steel percolator.
That was what Cam loved about her grandmother’s house: the way that, aside from a gradual yellowing or fading, nothing ever changed. Her nana still had her coffeepot from the seventies, the same NANA’S KITCHEN needlepoint in a frame, the same cast-iron trivets, the same crocheted pot holders, and the same yellow, ruffled cotton valence in the kitchen window that she’d take down three times a year to wash and iron. The kitchen had the same checkerboard, black and white linoleum tile, the same chrome-plated Formica kitchen table with four red vinyl seats. Everything was the same.
“She doesn’t believe in anything,” said Perry matter-of-factly.
“I believe in you, Nana,” said Cam.
“You better find something more powerful than me, kiddo.”
There was a time when Cam would have Believed, with a capital B, in all of this miracle business. In fact, there was a time when she’d thought she was special. Things had happened to her. Subtle yet amazing things that made her believe that someone, a higher power, was watching over her.
When she was six, she thought a lot about the hands of God. God, to six-year-old Cam, was a bearded old man on a cloud with enormous hands that would hurt if you got spanked. She was never spanked by the hands of God. But once, when she was trudging up her street on a hot day in the swamps of Florida, wishing she had a bicycle so she could get more quickly to her friend Jessica’s house to play Barbies, she was swept off the ground by . . . a mysterious vortex? The hands of God? . . . and delivered right to Jessica’s doorstep. One minute she was in front of Mark VanHouten’s house—the one with the scary Rottweiler tied to a chain—and the next, she was a quarter mile down the road at Jessica’s, holding her Barbies with the shorn blonde hair, a consequence of living with a baby sister who got her hands on some safety scissors.
Anyway, there was a time when Cam would have believed in miracles. A time when she was lifted up by some mysterious force and placed gently back down onto Jessica’s doorstep. But that was before divorces and before cancer and before her father died right smack-dab in the middle of his life. Way before Cam knew she’d never see her eighteenth birthday.
After nightfall, when Cam and Perry were drooling in front of some reality TV, and their mom was visiting some old friends, Nana walked into the living room dressed in black. She wore her black leotard and tights from Jazzercise underneath some black Bermuda shorts and a black baseball cap. She had black eyeliner smudged beneath her eyes.
“You ready, Campbell?” she asked.
“Oh, my God, Nana. For what?”
“Our mission. We’re going over the wall.”
According to church history, on a Sunday morning in 1999, the Virgin Mary appeared to housewife Joan Caruso while she was teaching Sunday school to preschoolers at Our Lady of Ascension Church on Church Street. She was out in the churchyard, letting the little ones burn off some of their pent-up Catholic steam, and she was staring at a knot in a tree. Slowly, according to Joan Caruso, who’d had five kids in five years and probably hadn’t slept in as much time, the knot in the tree morphed into the visag
e of the Virgin. And the Virgin told her, “Build for me here a shrine and let all who come here be healed. Hoboken will become the Lourdes of America.”
Anyone who heard that sentence would know it had to be a joke. It sounded to Cam like this Joan chick was watching the Pocahontas movie on acid. The one with the talking tree. But people believed this woman instead of putting her on some antipsychotics. And those who knew the story made pilgrimages to the tree in Hoboken to be healed by its mystic maple leaves.
“Come on,” said Nana. “Here’s a flashlight.”
“Why can’t we do this in daylight again?” asked Cam, flicking the light on and off to check the batteries.
“I told you. Because of Rita.” Nana’s ex-friend Rita was the volunteer in charge of leaf administration and had denied Nana’s application to visit the tree and take away a leaf for Cam three times. “There’s bad blood between us.”
“What’d you do to her?” Cam asked as she stood up from the recliner.
“I accidentally slept with her husband once. Or twice. Maybe it was twice,” Nana said distractedly as she opened and closed the attachments of her Swiss Army knife, and then placed it into her black fanny pack.
“What do you mean, ‘accidentally,’ Nana? How can that happen by accident?” Cam asked.
But Nana just shrugged her shoulders. She was all business. “You coming, Perry?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I’m too tired.”
“Feed Tweety for me, would you?” said Cam. “But don’t let him out of his cage. He gets nervous in a new environment.”
Cam was already dressed in black, as usual, so she walked with her grandmother two houses down to Our Lady of Ascension Church. They turned the corner and walked to the back, where the courtyard was enclosed by a ten-foot-high sand-colored brick wall.
Cam did not believe any leaf could cure her, of course. She didn’t even believe the Virgin was a virgin. She imagined Mary after getting knocked up, powwowing with her girlfriends, gathering round the well, trying to figure out what to do.
“I know,” one of them said. “Tell them that God did it.”
“Perfect,” Mary’s girls chimed in.
And then the publicity of the thing must have just gotten way out of hand.
So Cam did not believe in any Mary miracles, but she loved the prospect of a caper with her grandmother, and the idea of helping her get revenge.
“There it is,” she said, pointing to the tree at the very center of the church courtyard. Someone, a nun probably, had taken very good care of this space. It was lush, verdant, fecund—words one didn’t usually associate with Hoboken. It looked a little like the Polynesian Hotel, but with different flora. Rosebushes surrounded the perimeter just inside the wall. There was soft green grass, some other flowering plants, miscellaneous Mary statuary, and a soothing angel fountain trickling in the far corner. At the center stood the maple tree.
“Can’t we just take a leaf from one of these?” asked Cam, pointing to the leaves growing conveniently out and over the wall.
“No. That’s the one. In the center. It has to be that one,” she whispered and covered her head with the hood of her sweatshirt. The baker and his wife had just stepped out of the Italian bakery across the street, closed the door, and locked it. They gave Cam a suspicious look before turning and walking home with their box of cannoli tied up with red string.
“Okay. You stay. I’ll go. I don’t want you breaking a hip,” Cam said. The traffic light at the corner turned from red to green, but there were no cars to take advantage of it. It was a quiet night in Hoboken.
“But I’m going to look suspicious out here,” Nana said, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Then why did you dress like that?” Cam asked.
“I don’t know. I got caught up in the heat of the moment.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going on in your life. You need to work on impulse contr—”
“Just go. Up and over,” Nana said, bending over and cupping her hands to make a human step for Cam.
“I’m not exactly 100 percent, you know. Feeling a little weak these days,” Cam said as she stepped into her grandmother’s hand-stirrup and then placed her own hands on her Nana’s increasingly stooping shoulders.
“You want me to do it, honey?” Nana asked. Cam was close enough to smell her breath, which was always licorice-y, like anisette.
“No. I’ll do it.”
“Okay. Up and over. Wait, what is our code word? In case of an emergency or something,” Nana asked.
“Banana,” Cam said as she took a quick step, grabbed the top of the wall, and then hoisted herself over it. She slid her stomach down the other side and clung with her fingers for just a second, trying to avoid dropping into a rosebush. As soon as she let go, she heard, “Oh, God. Banana. Banana. Banana.”
“What is it?” Cam whispered. “Police?”
“No. Rita. I’m going home. Good luck.”
“Nana?” said Cam. But her grandmother was already gone. Cam turned her attention to the tree, which was gated off with a white fence and bottom-lit with blue and white spotlights implanted in the ground. She snuck up to it and reached for a low-hanging leaf when suddenly she heard the unmistakable, ding-dong, doorbell chirp of Tweety.
“Tweety?!” Cam could just make out his tiny little yellow belly perched behind a flapping leaf at the very top of the tree. She knew she shouldn’t have trusted Perry with him.
“Tweety, get down here!” Cam whispered insistently, but he wouldn’t budge. Adrenaline must have taken over because Cam’s usual fear of heights disappeared. She felt weightless and nimble enough to scamper to one of the highest branches, where she held onto a branch above her and sidestepped herself along the one she was standing on. She reached for Tweety and called to him again.
“Come here, silly boy. This is Jersey, Tweety. You can’t handle these mean streets. Come back here, Tweets.”
She whistled the little call that he liked. “Here, Tweety.” She almost had him. Her fingertips grazed the sharp claws on his left foot, when she felt her own foot begin to slip. The peeling bark beneath her sneakers began to give way and fall in chips to the ground until both of her feet were dangling. Cam hung by her armpits from a high branch of some crazy tree in Hoboken.
And then a door slammed. A bald-headed priest, struggling with his big black-framed glasses, came storming out of the rectory in his bathrobe.
“Get down from there this instant! You must get out of that tree!”
Tweety chirped a last ding-dong chirp. Everything started to move in slow motion. Tweety looked Cam straight in the eye as if to apologize for something. Then he flapped his wings. He didn’t take off. He just flapped. As if to say, Come with me. Let’s get out of here, Cam. Why can’t you come with me? He let out a tiny sigh and then flew away in the moonlight toward the blinking stegosaural skyline of Manhattan.
“You asshole!” Cam screamed down to the priest, who, even in New Jersey, was not used to being called an asshole. “You scared away my bird. You asshole,” she said in a barely audible gasp because for the first time since her dad’s funeral, she couldn’t stop herself from crying. She tried to. She stiffened and tried to swallow the aching lump in her throat. But once the tears started, she couldn’t stop them.
The priest, Father John, actually turned out to be a pretty cool guy. He literally talked Cam out of her tree and walked her home. He told her he would pray for Tweety’s safe return, which he really didn’t have to do after being called an asshole. Twice.
“Cam,” said Perry as she came up the stairs and into the living room.
Cam held up her hand, catching a glimpse of Tweety’s empty cage in her peripheral vision. “Don’t even speak to me, Perry. Just leave me alone.”
She turned to her nana. “I don’t know which of your lost causes is most lost, Nana: reforming the Catholic Church, curing stage-four cancer, or finding a canary set loose in Hoboken. But if you could at least pray to
St. Jude for the last one, that would be good.” Cam flopped into her grandfather’s old vinyl chair, which was covered with dishtowels and lace doilies in strategic places to prevent stickage.
“Did you get the leaf?” Her grandmother couldn’t help herself.
“Here,” said Cam, opening her clenched fist. There she held a crumpled green leaf. When unfurled, it seemed to be veined in almost exactly the same pattern as the creases in her palm.
Good-byes with Nana were difficult. Because in order for her to get through it without crying for ten days straight, she had to pretend to be angry with you.
Cam and Perry sat at the breakfast table. Their mom was packing the car, and they were supposed to leave in ten minutes. They had stayed in Hoboken for three extra days, combing the neighborhood for Tweety without any luck.
“Who used all the syrup?” Nana sighed as she hung her head into the refrigerator, and then she slammed the door shut.
“Ca—” Perry began, but Cam shot her a look like Don’t you dare throw me under the bus, child, and because Perry was still trying to repent for losing Tweety, she said, “I did, Nana. I’m sorry.” And then she ducked her head and covered it with her forearms to protect herself from the dishtowel Nana threw at her.
“You people eat me out of house and home,” Nana said, sitting indignantly at the kitchen table without looking at either of them. “I guess I’ll just drink this small glass of grapefruit juice, since that’s all that you’ve left me.”
“Cheers,” Cam said, and she held up her glass to clink with her grandmother’s. Nana just looked out the window above the kitchen sink, ignoring her.
“Where’s your mother?” she finally said. “Don’t tell me you two lazy bums let her pack the car by herself.”