Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  “Shut up. It really says that?”

  “Serious as a heart attack.”

  “Put down no.”

  “Put down no?” She gave him a teasing poke in the side. “So is it no, or is that just what I’m putting down?”

  “It’s too bad you ain’t funny.”

  With puckish glee she read off another: “ ‘Have you ever been photographed in lingerie?’ ”

  “Come on. You’re just jacking with me now. Gimme that thing—”

  Batting away her brother’s hand and pressing the questionnaire to her chest, Tanya leveled a mock-stern expression at him. “Will the defendant please answer the question?”

  “This really why you made me pause my game?”

  “Naw.” Tanya frowned, deflating herself with a sigh. “There’s all kinda stuff in here I don’t know how to answer. Like this…” She went flipping through the pages. “ ‘Have you ever been the subject of any judicial or nonjudicial disciplinary action while in the military?’ ”

  “Negative,” he said.

  “All right, what about here—what do we put here: ‘How many times a week do you drink alcohol?’ ”

  “Hell, what’s that about? I don’t know. Seven?”

  “Maybe we say four?”

  “Don’t reckon it really matters.” Cameron gave a yearning glance to his paused game, swigging a Bud Light, then shrugged. “They’ve cut me off anyway.”

  The prohibition on Cameron drinking beer (and smoking cigarettes) on camera, which the cameraman known as Honeybun was drolly calling the network’s “Sharia clause,” had come down from Bree Winterson—and while the directive may seem minor, it exemplifies the course she was navigating for Miracle Man. In early November, after viewing some of the roughly edited daily footage known as “string outs,” she’d emailed her objections to Griffin: “Seeing that beer in his hand all the time just doesn’t feel right to me, and if it’s making me itch then it’s going to make the aud break out in hives. We’re not tailoring this for evangelicals but obv they’re in the target demo. Their little heads are going to pop off if they’re watching Cameron chugging beer all day. Ditto on the smoking, let’s lose it.” What about Tanya?, Griffin wrote back. Winterson’s answer: “Let ’er rip.”

  Winterson’s email correspondence with Griffin reveals the extent to which she was modifying and in some sense upending Griffin’s original vision for the show. “Let’s cut the medical expert component by about half, maybe more,” she wrote him in early December, following another round of string outs. “Reeks of PBS.” When Griffin resisted, she doubled down: “The more I think [about] it the more I want to lose the medical angle outright. The science grinds it down. There’s no suspense because no one [is] saying anything remotely fuckable about what happened.” Winterson referenced a scene in which Tanya split a highly compromising seam on her leggings just as Cameron was taking the stage for a presentation at a Baptist megachurch, and Tanya’s delicious remark to the camera that she “could use a miracle in my crotch right about now.” How do you shift, Winterson asked, “from ‘I need a crotch miracle’ to some doctor droning about nerve endings? It [the medical component] stomps the brakes.” The way Griffin was interpreting Winterson’s edicts was for him to reshape Miracle Man into “a sort of religious conversion narrative,” he says, “with Tanya cast as the heathen. Will she come to the light? Will she become a Jedi like her brother? That was the gist I was getting.” Tanya, he admits, was never informed of this direction, nor were she and Cameron ever privy to any edited footage. “She didn’t know anything about it,” he says.

  Yet this underestimates Tanya, who by December was sensing that her life and her brother’s—and their relationship—might be heading for a skewed depiction onscreen. In the interview segments, for instance, Tanya would be asked to say what she found most inspiring about her brother, to which she’d respond with a joke, usually too ribald to air, and then, when pressed, a milder joke, until Griffin or his field producer would say, “Maybe you can talk about how his persistence and determination have inspired you,” to which Tanya would respond that his persistence and determination sure did inspire her, at which point they’d say that was wonderful but it’d be great if she could express her emotions more openly, so that viewers could really feel the intensity of that inspiration, could see through the clouds the heights to which she looked up to Cameron.

  “And this one,” Tanya was saying now, her legs tucked beneath her on the couch. “ ‘Have you ever experienced psychological distress that’s interfered with your daily functioning?’ ”

  Cameron lit a cigarette and grimaced. “Ain’t like I’m not talking about my PTSD on camera…”

  “I’ll put yes, then.”

  Then she read another: “ ‘Do you have any history or difficulty controlling anger and/or violent conflicts, including loss of temper, family fights, fights with boyfriends/girlfriends?’ ”

  Smoke oozed from the corners of Cameron’s mouth. He squinted at his sister. “Why they wanna know all this for?”

  “Hell if I know, Cam. I’m just reading you what it says.”

  “Well, just put no.”

  She pressed her pen to the paper, then stopped. “But then it asks this: ‘Have you ever been accused or charged with assault?’ ”

  Cameron turned away from her to screw his eyes onto the screen with its frozen Halo tableau. “You mean the Landry thing? That was youth court. So put down no.”

  “It says ever been charged.”

  “I didn’t get charged with nothing.”

  “Then how come we had to get that lawyer?”

  “What the hell?” He swung his head back toward her and with an icy glare and a riled edge to his voice asked, “You think those guys on Ice Road Truckers didn’t crack a few heads back in the day?”

  “I didn’t write it, Cam. I’m just reading you the stupid form.”

  She watched her brother tighten himself into the couch, venting smoke through his nose.

  He didn’t like the memory and neither did she. That Tanya had been present for Cameron’s arrest was coincidence—a younger co-worker of hers at the Dollar General had invited her along to a party at the piers on Biloxi Beach, across from what was then the Biloxi Yacht Club, where she wasn’t shocked to see a throng of Biloxi High School students—she’d partied there herself, back in high school—but was surprised to encounter her little brother, staggering drunk.

  This was August 21, 2004, two and a half months after Debbie Harris’s fatal accident. Cameron was there with some of his football teammates, blowing off steam before the following Friday’s season opener against St. Martin, and Tanya was trusting they’d see him home safely. She and her co-worker’s crowd were keeping their distance from the rowdier high-school kids, who’d started a campfire on the beach. When they heard the unmistakable uproar of a fight breaking out, they moved to extend that distance—until Tanya heard her brother’s name, first being shouted and then being shrieked.

  Someone had already dialed 911 by the time Tanya was able to shove her way through the crowd to its seething, open center. To her left she saw Cameron, shirtless and distorted in the campfire’s glow, with two of his teammates holding him by his arms and another blocking him from the front; and to her right she saw a guy sprawled on the sand with a panicked clutch of girls tending to him, his squashed face almost completely slickened with gore. The crowd was seized with an unnatural hush; high schoolers were craning their necks for a view, whispering ohmygod and holyshit but not much else.

  Cameron didn’t appear to recognize Tanya when she finally made her way to him. His blood-spattered chest was still heaving and his drunk gaze seemed locked upon something very far in the distance, past even the lights of the shrimp boats on the black horizon. He maintained that faraway stare, without acknowledging his sister, as sirens whooped and floodlig
hts scalded the beach and two Biloxi police officers arrived to jerk Cameron away in handcuffs. “I don’t know what happened,” one of Cameron’s teammates told her afterward. “They was talking, Landry was laughing, and then Cam just got to whaling on him. Went all rabid-dog on him. Took like four of us to pull him off.”

  Tanya never did get the full backstory from her brother—she fitted her own assumptions and theories into the missing puzzle piece spaces, some more congruently than others. If his face hadn’t been so battered she would’ve recognized the guy Cameron had laid out on the sand: Tommy Landry, a senior baseball standout whose older brother had been in Tanya’s graduating class. Landry went to the ER with a broken nose, a cheekbone fracture, a concussion, and a cut beside his eye requiring significant stitching. There was nothing to indicate that Landry returned even a single punch; from what Tanya heard, Cameron never gave him the chance.

  For help Tanya called Jim Yarbrough, who connected them with a lawyer whose fees Tanya paid out of her mother’s life insurance payout. Cameron wouldn’t talk about the fight with her except to say that Landry started it—exactly how he wouldn’t say—and got what he had coming. But he did confide in Yarbrough, who told Tanya that Landry had been bullying Cameron for a while and that, drunk, and emotionally eroded by Debbie’s death, her brother had just snapped. This was also the explanation their lawyer presented to the youth court judge, who, noting Cameron’s lack of prior arrests, his recent trauma, and his value to the Biloxi High School football team, sentenced him to a probationary period known as informal adjustment. An eight p.m. curfew for the next six months was as punitive as it got, though the judge voluntarily exempted Friday night football games from the curfew. This exemption was meaningless, however, by the time of the ruling—by then Cameron had already quit the team.

  “Says here,” Tanya was saying, “that they need dates, jurisdictions, and parties involved.”

  “I’m telling you—youth court don’t matter none,” he told her. “Just drop it.”

  Tommy Landry, Tanya knew, wasn’t the only one to have suffered her brother’s temper. After high school he’d gotten into some kind of ugly scrap with one of his construction co-workers, one of the Mexican guys he sometimes hung out with after work. Again, the details she got were sketchy, but Cameron had come home late and tequila-rattled with the knuckles of his right hand broken, got fired from his job the next morning, and two days later found his truck tires slashed and a Spanish word spray-painted onto the driver’s-side door. One of the meager consolations Tanya later formulated about Cameron’s enlistment in the Army was that maybe he’d be able to purge this violent streak from his system, could get that rage vented—that whatever ammunition with which Snead Harris’s genes had endowed him could be emptied into some terrorist and be gone forever.

  Despite this knowledge, she checked no where it asked if Cameron had ever been fired from a job. She also checked no about gun ownership, though she knew Cameron had picked up a pistol at a pawnshop after his truck tires got slashed. She didn’t feel like getting up to inventory all of Cameron’s medications, so, in an instance of accidental accuracy, she just wrote “none” where the form requested a full listing. Sometimes Tanya mumbled the questions aloud to herself as she read—a habit she developed as a dyslexic child—and with every third question or so she heard Cameron sigh or grunt until finally, in a surprisingly plaintive voice, he asked, “What the hell they gotta know all this for?”

  “Beats me,” she said.

  “You gotta have security clearance to go on the freaking TV?”

  “Just about,” she said.

  Cameron stamped out a cigarette and sat staring at the coffee table with dazed intensity. After a while Tanya felt compelled to ask, with equal parts concern and annoyance, “What?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Tanya heard a remnant of his boyhood whine cocooned in his voice, the mewling he used to do when flustered with homework or when their mother ordered him to bed. “It’s just that—everyone’s been up in my shit for months. Asking this, asking that…”

  “What’d you think was gonna happen, dumbass? You had a miracle happen.” She shook the questionnaire at him. “And now you’re fixing to go on TV about it.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought the TV guys was gonna help figure out what happened to me.”

  She sat there blinking. “A miracle happened to you.”

  “Yeah, but…” He shook his head and winced. “They said they were gonna be like private investigators—you remember Scott T. saying that? They were gonna find out some answers.”

  “Some answers? You been saying God’s the answer.”

  “I’m saying—what I’m saying is the only thing anyone’s got for me is questions. A million damn questions. Like I’m the one with the goddamn answers. I mean, last week, shit, when I did that thing for the paralyzed vet group? One of those guys—this big old Marine, said he took a bullet to the spine in Desert Storm—he’s asking me what I think I did to make this possible. Asking me if I think the secret is just to never give up. And I’m standing there trying to come up with an answer knowing the real answer’s this, this right here.” He flicked his game console with a finger and tumped an empty can of Bud Light off the table. “I played some fucking games and drank some beer and popped some pills, man. That’s what I did. I didn’t do shit. I didn’t think about doing shit. There’s your secret recipe.”

  Tanya folded her arms and waited while her brother lit a cigarette before asking him, “You done?”

  “Done what?”

  “Done bitching.”

  “You think I’m—bitching?”

  “For someone who’s up and walking after four years, yeah, I’d say you’re bitching.”

  “So I’m supposed to do what, Tan—just, like, dance all the time? Crank up some Christian rock and do the hokey fucking pokey?”

  She tilted her head, unimpressed by this angst. “Telling folks about yourself and about what-all happened and going to Mass on Sundays and wearing free clothes and getting asked to run for congress and all the other shit you been complaining about…” This light inventory caused her head to shake. “Most folks’d say that’s a pretty low price for what happened to you.”

  “You ain’t getting it,” he said, his face ruddying with exasperation. “It ain’t the going to Mass. It ain’t really the talking to folks. It’s all these people looking—looking up to me, it’s all these people thinking my prayers are going to fix whatever they got wrong—”

  “Maybe they will.”

  “Like all the prayers I never said helped me? You seen all the letters—you heard all those voicemails—you seen the way folks treat me, that dude telling me I should run for congress now—shit, why not be president? All these people think I got some kinda magical powers and I don’t, I don’t got nothing like it…I mean, I don’t think I do. Do I? I don’t know. Shit, that it’s right there.”

  “What’s it right there?”

  The eyes he presented her were big and glossy. “It’s like I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  “Well,” Tanya said, lighting a cigarette of her own, unmoved by her brother’s plight. “Who the hell were you before?”

  Cameron didn’t answer. He just nodded a few times, dimly, before returning the earphones to his head and resuming his game. Everything she’d done for him all these years, Tanya was thinking, plus everything God had done for him, and here he was: whining like a spoiled kid who’d received just nine of the ten things on his Christmas list. It was classic Cam: overthinking everything. Can’t have nothing nice, not even a miracle. Tanya sped her way through the remainder of the questionnaire, giving no thought whatsoever to its final question: “Is there anything else in your past and background that would cause embarrassment or other harm to you, the network, or the show?”

  thirteen

  The speed at which Miracle Man wen
t hurtling into production was uncommonly swift but not unprecedented. In contrast, the speed at which a Vatican-linked investigator arrived in Biloxi to examine the particulars of Cameron’s recovery has few contemporary parallels, according to church observers. While the digital age has expedited the Vatican’s inquiries into supernatural phenomena, the process still tends to be measured less in months than in years or even decades—two-thousand-year-old institutions, after all, lack a certain spring in their bureaucratic step.

  This quick-fire dispatch, however, owed almost nothing to the specifics of Cameron’s case. Underlying it—and underwriting it—was a Michigan trucking magnate’s decades-long quest for a substantiated miracle, part of a larger goal to which he’s so far pledged more than half a million dollars. More than anything else, though, the rapid-response nature of the investigation can be credited to a fluke of geography and to the enchantments of an Italian sports car hugging Southern backroads. The investigator, Euclide Gianni Abbascia, a former Roman prosecutor who lives part of the year in Washington, D.C., happened to be spending much of the autumn in Knoxville, Tennessee, assisting with the official inquiry into a medical miracle being attributed to a nineteenth-century priest and current sainthood candidate named Isaac Hecker. Abbascia adores road trips, partly because he’s an amateur photographer but more significantly because he’s the owner of a 1972 Maserati Ghibli Spyder, and was therefore happy to oblige a request from Rome to swing south to Mississippi for a preliminary vetting of Cameron’s case.

  The Vatican’s protocol for investigating and authenticating miracles can strike atheists and other skeptics as absurd. (The social critic Carolyn Brinkwater once likened it to “performing a background check on your imaginary friend.”) Every major faith recognizes miracles, to varying degrees, but the Catholic church is the only entity that purports to verify them. Miracles are not seen as proof of God’s existence, because the church considers that a given, but rather as proof of a deceased person’s presence and stature in heaven—as signals of saintly or pre-saintly intervention in the frail, chipped gearing of human existence. This is why Father Ace asked Cameron about the recipients of his prayers, and why Tanya’s remembrance of a friend’s grandmother praying via Facebook to the late radio evangelist and current saint candidate Nicholas Fahey was essential to him. Without a saint’s verified role, an event may be miraculous—but not, canonically speaking, a miracle.