Miracle Girls (9781938126161)

by Caschetta, M. B.

  One loud inhale; one loud exhale: Alive.

  Alleluia! the crowd shouts, amazed. It's a miracle!

  Everyone rushes forward in a hopeful press. They lift Cee-Cee off the ground—Get help! She’s fainted!—and for a while she hangs over their heads in and out of consciousness like an offering to the dark sky above. She strains to watch the cops below working their air into Baby Pauly’s tiny blue lips and upturned nose; Vinnie the Cop huffs and puffs, refusing to give up.

  Later, there’s the sound of an ambulance, and somebody shakes Cee-Cee awake. Someone else carries her to a car. After voices and sirens, she is in a church, then with a doctor, then at her own house and ultimately where she has been for weeks, in bed at Nonna’s. Only then do things quiet down into the endless fever that loops her back to that horrible night over and over.

  Nonna and the Sisters pray and whisper, come and go.

  When the room empties, something unusual: A beautiful lady stands near Cee-Cee, smiling. Cee-Cee wants to touch her long sparkling dress, her gold and white shawl.

  The lady says: You are the little flower of my heart, Cecilia Marie.

  Sunlight washes into the room from the window. Cee-Cee has to squint to see; she wants to touch the lady’s hair, hold her hand.

  All the world’s children are like a garden, she says. But you are a special bloom: “Heaven’s Lily,” just like your name means.

  Cee-Cee kicks off the blankets, wanting to get closer.

  Do you know who I am? Above the lady’s head a sign reads: The Mother of All People.

  “Everybody’s Mother?” Cee-Cee says.

  The lady smiles: Miracles are everywhere, little Cecilia. See them and believe.

  Bowing her head, the lady spills a great warm light onto the bedspread. Cee-Cee feels her temperature boost another degree, and yet somehow she is cool. When the lady is gone, she sleeps for days and opens her eyes feeling perfectly rested.

  Nonna sits in the rocker, fingering a rosary, listening to the radio: “…further investigation into possibly illegal activities...”

  “Watergate,” Nonna mutters. “Crooks.”

  She sets aside her rosary beads and presents Cee-Cee with a steaming breakfast of toast, butter, jam, bacon, and oatmeal, as if she knew all along that today would be the day. “Mangiare?”

  Miraculously hungry, Cee-Cee sits up and eats with Nonna rocking and watching. When she finishes, Cee-Cee asks for some paper.

  Rummaging around in a drawer, Nonna pulls out a small notepad and pencil. Cee-Cee spells out the lady’s message, and shows it to Nonna who nods gravely.

  “Baby Pauly?” Cee-Cee asks.

  Nonna shakes her head and presses her lips into a grim line.

  “I hear his heart beat,” Cee-Cee says. “I know he’s alive.”

  To Nonna it’s a matter of interpretation.

  Once Cee-Cee is strong enough, Nonna cranks up the old Chevy. Every afternoon, she drives her to All Saints Rehabilitation Center.

  “Dead is dead,” Nonna says.

  Cee-Cee is dressed for school, but all that has happened so far is paperwork: Nonna’s guardianship, state papers declaring her authority to enroll Cee-Cee in the school, files and forms. There are aptitude tests, personality tests, standardized state tests. They spend the morning in Sister Amanda’s office, Nonna talking while Cee-Cee rests on the leather sofa.

  Without much fuss, Cee-Cee has been declared fit for the sixth grade.

  Nonna pulls into the hospital parking lot at All Saints, rolling her window up and then down, and then up again slightly, hoping to achieve the perfect balance of sun without glare, air without chill. Rather than step foot inside the stale rectangular building, home to Romeville’s paralyzed and vegetative, she studies the dirty winter snow at the edge of the parking lot. She grunts at the dramatic radio announcer: “The truth must out…or a nation will fall!”

  Everyone claims to be innocent these days, Nonna knows, dedicated to finding the truth. There’s the president of the United States, for one, Richard M. Nixon; there’s also the joint Senate Hearing Committee and Archibald Cox, who keeps coming up with more questions. The future looks grim: reports and convictions, resignation after resignation.

  “There are rumors of deeper wrongdoing…” the radio announcer says. And yet no one confesses.

  People are weak, Nonna thinks. She doesn’t bother with the sad, unmoving souls inside the hospital at All Saints, the paraplegics and brain-dead vets. She knows what it’s like in there. Years ago, when All Saints was still the Old Soldiers’ Home and Nonna’s husband had a stroke, she sat by his side day after day until it finally occurred to him to die.

  Sweet, stupid man. Nonna frowns.

  As far as she is concerned, Baby Pauly has already gone to Jesus. What’s left on earth is a shell, a husk, the trappings of a little boy who’s already mercifully escaped this world. Nonna is not about to waste any more time on the dead when mostly it’s the living you have to watch out for anyway.

  “Waste-a you time,” she tells Cee-Cee.

  Nonna squints across the vinyl seat. Cee-Cee is slumped in a plaid Catholic school uniform, dazed and messy, white blouse rumpled, knee socks drooping. It seems to Nonna that the child is waiting for something to come along and save her.

  Or maybe the girl is simply having an ordinary crisis of faith.

  Nonna cuts the engine.

  Plenty of people have temporarily succumbed to the darkness of the soul: Julian of Norwich, St. Paul, St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avila. Even Jesus had His agonizing moment in the garden at Gethsemane.

  But here’s what’s also true: this little saint’s hair never stays braided, her mouth is always full of gum, her clothes stain like everyone else’s, and the room where she sleeps requires just as much dusting as any other room in the house.

  Is that what it looks like to be chosen? Nonna wonders.

  “Policia…” Nonna says, looking her granddaughter straight in the eye. “They say rape?”

  “It happened all right,” Cee-Cee confides. “Just not to me.”

  With a deep sigh Cee-Cee gets out of the car and crosses the parking lot. She is as confused as anyone, bereft. When she reaches the hospital’s automatic doors, they zip open like magic and let her in.

  On the fourth floor of All Saints Rehabilitation Center, life is simple and unmitigated: a heartbeat.

  Baby Pauly floats in a coma, distant and hapless, a loose canoe. He rolls away shallow and unfixed with no one manning the oars. His thoughts, if he has any at all, are a light wind with no direction.

  What if there’s only drifting now? Drifting and loss.

  Sitting in an orange plastic chair behind a white curtain, Cee-Cee touches the pliant tubes and tangled wires attaching her brother to the machines and monitors. She studies the gadgets hanging on the wall behind his head, shiny equipment responsible for keeping him alive, his little body incapable of laughter, speech, or sighing. His fingers curl inward, wrapped around rolled wash cloths so they make the matching letters “C.”

  “It’s terrible without you,” Cee-Cee says.

  Her words are met with a mechanical clank, a sigh of air pushed through a tube into a hole in Baby Pauly’s throat. The pump puffs his lungs full, then lets them deflate. A line of light makes its way across a blank screen, signaling the repositioning of various levers and dials. Every few minutes, there is silence in which to consider the situation—an instant of peace—but every time it comes around Cee-Cee’s mind goes blank.

  Gurgle saliva, drip urine.

  Then, with a whir and a wheeze, the cycle of life begins again.

  This is how Cee-Cee’s twin is resurrected: a series of beeps and blips, an electrical pulse tracking across a blue-black screen. No brain activity, no reflexes, just vacuum cleaner hoses to breathe for him and a yellow tube to remove his urine.

  Everything before was a dream. Cee-Cee thinks. This is what’s real.

  Not a hair on her brother’s head stirs.


  She pulls out her deck of cards and shows him a thumb fan and a one-handed deck cut she’s been working on all week. But he doesn’t say a word about it.

  Outside Room 404, Cee-Cee hears the nurses come and go on quiet shoes. They drink coffee, get married, have babies, celebrate promotions, and plan divorces. If she sits there long enough, Cee-Cee will overhear entire lives being lived. They smile on their way past to roll patients over, drip medicine into veins, rub lotion into doughy skin. If anyone there has heard about Cee-Cee’s special talents, they don’t let on. Instead they call her ordinary pet names, winking and smiling as they breeze on past. Do they notice how heartlessly the minutes turn to hours, and hours to days?

  Closing the curtain around her brother’s bed, Cee-Cee gets on her knees. At first, she cannot think of a prayer: Hello?

  But what’s the use? Who is listening now? No one comes with messages, or to show them visions. Maybe God is no longer with them: that Punisher, Prankster, Fool. Or maybe God has a depressed imagination: Jesus on the cross, the world gone wrong. Maybe suffering is all there is for everyone, even for Him: write what you know, no matter how crappy.

  Or is suffering simply the thing that lets you know you’re alive?

  “It’s different now,” Cee-Cee says.

  Pauly doesn’t move a single muscle.

  When a stout nurse bustles into the room to adjust some wires, lower the volume, Cee-Cee sits back in her chair and points to the problem. “Something’s wrong with his hands.”

  The nurse inspects Baby Pauly from elbow to fingertips. “It’s a little early for contractures, but we can splint him.” She smiles at Cee-Cee. “Normal coma business, Ladybug. Nothing to worry about.”

  This nurse likes to remind Cee-Cee that Pauly doesn’t know what’s going on, which is the number one benefit to being in a coma. Sometimes people come out all right, she says, but mostly they don’t.

  “Just be glad he doesn’t suffer!”

  Getting ready to go, Cee-Cee smoothes Baby Pauly’s hair where the aides have come by with scissors and groomed him crooked.

  “I’ll be back,” she says.

  The machines pump their sad goodbyes.

  There’s no one in the corridor on H-Wing. H is for hopeless. On her way to the exit, Cee-Cee hears the nurses laughing; one shift ending, another beginning.

  The elevator dings and delivers her down to the cramped little lobby with its few chairs and magazine racks. Today, a handful of visitors fill up the room, making it seem smaller than usual.

  The attendant behind the desk seems mostly asleep.

  It takes Cee-Cee a moment to realize that the man in the lobby chair is Frank; the woman reading a magazine is Glory. A cold feeling runs through her body; she turns to find Roadie and Anthony sitting on a faded yellow sofa, kicking their feet against a dirty brown carpet.

  Seeing her brothers for the first time since she’s been taken to Nonna’s, Cee-Cee understands something new: Her memory is a broken glass. She can’t recall the last time she saw any of these people, her family. Has it been weeks or months?

  Glory hugs Cee-Cee fiercely, sobbing into her hair. Frank picks her up in his arms and twirls her around.

  “How’s my baby doing?” He puts her down. “You look good. You must feel better.”

  Roadie pats her shoulder. “Are you okay, Cee-Cee?”

  From across the room, Anthony looks the other way. “Hi," he says.

  Frank and Glory walk her past the doorman’s desk to the door.

  “We’re going to get you back home as soon as we can,” Frank says. “We’re working on it every day.”

  “Pretty soon we’ll be allowed to have you come for visits, the social worker says,” Glory adds. “Wouldn’t you like that, honey? To come home for visits?”

  Cee-Cee nods.

  Her family is familiar but uncomfortable, a small crowded room she’s stood in all her life. She isn’t so sure she belongs here anymore. The electric doors whiz open, casting her out alone into the pale gloom of the afternoon.

  In the car, Nonna sits waiting for a report.

  “He’s shriveling.”

  She frowns and starts the car. “Not so nice now, you-a miracle.”

  The officer arrives punctually and accepts a cup of coffee to be polite. At Nonna’s kitchen table, Cee-Cee closes her notebook and looks up at him expectantly.

  “Pick a card,” she offers. “Any card.”

  “You don’t have a deck,” Vinnie says.

  Cee-Cee shrugs.

  They both know Cee-Cee can’t answer his questions, but he comes every day after school anyway and sits in Nonna’s kitchen hoping to make headway. Working against the clock, Vinnie watches the minutes tick closer to the time when Nonna stands up and escorts him out the door.

  He sighs, noting Cee-Cee’s strange eyes for the hundredth time: dark, spooky, calm, a strange color with flecks of gold.

  Cee-Cee flashes them at him now, then goes back to her notes.

  He watches her write steadily, chewing gum, flipping the page and writing again, as if he weren’t there.

  All and all, he thinks she seems calmer, more regularly bathed and rested.

  On the other hand, the grandmother doesn’t seem to make a move without first consulting the church, which could ultimately lead to problems. The Sisters from across the street are awfully involved in the decision-making, always buzzing in and out. If Vinnie’s going to make something of this case, he may very well end up having to navigate nuns.

  “Tell me how it happened again,” Cee-Cee says.

  “Today,” he says, “you tell me.”

  It’s a game they play. He knows she will not be the one to speak first. She knows he doesn’t like to think about that night.

  He starts the story the way he always does: “Miracle at Pilgrim's Pond, the newspaper said the next day.” The headline seemed like a sick joke to Vinnie.

  Sure, he’d been the one to dive into that icy pond and fish the kid out. He’d even sealed his own lips over the little boy’s face, forcing in air to inflate his lungs like shriveled balloons. But he was extra careful to tell the reporter that someone could actually survive so many hours in freezing temperatures. It was a known fact. The drowning section in his officer’s training manual had diagramed how hypothermia could keep people alive during long submergences by slowing the body’s mechanisms down. He told this to the reporter, a perfectly good explanation.

  “You never give up on a drowning victim,” Vinnie says.

  Cee-Cee nods.

  Still, the front page had gotten it wrong: Cop Declares Boy’s Survival Impossible.

  It’s hard to imagine what people got so worked up about. Faith, Vinnie guesses, a topic far outside his area of expertise.

  “But you can’t just ignore what people believe,” he tells her. They think she resurrected her brother from the dead, brought him back to life.

  “They think it was you,” he says.

  In no time, religious nuts started flocking out to where the old highway crossed Route 177 outside the Bianco home. For a while, Vinnie and his partner, Al, had to drive out there on daily patrols to keep the peace. Now it’s been weeks since the kid emerged like a Popsicle, but holy rollers still make drive-by pilgrimages, gawkers still slow and lay on their horns.

  Honk for a Miracle, the signs along the road say.

  Vinnie thinks the whole thing is a terrible shame, a perfectly good kid like that.

  “I don’t see how a frozen kid all purple and bruised from a lack of oxygen is what convinces some people to get on their knees and pray,” he says. “But, then again, what do I know about God?”

  “Not much,” Cee-Cee says.

  “But I was there,” he tells her.

  He’d seen the aftermath for himself when the emergency workers peeled the blankets away. No one could believe the boy was still alive, if that’s what you could call it. Bloated as a dead fish, but still breathing.

  In the emergency ro
om, Vinnie had thought he’d seen Cee-Cee rocking in the corner, moving her lips—praying maybe. But he quickly realized she couldn’t have been there. The crowd at the pond had spirited her away immediately.

  A nurse passing by touched Vinnie’s wet uniform. You’ll catch your death.

  He hadn’t noticed the cold rivulets running down his back until the moment of her touch—a perfect stranger. That’s how it was with Vinnie: it took a female hand to bring him back to reality, teeth chattering and skin goose-bumped.

  That was when he overheard one emergency technician tell another it was probably the cold that had damaged the kid, shut down his kidneys, though the ice had slowed his breathing and kept him alive. Should be burying the little guy, the attending doctor had said, not putting him on a ventilator.

  Later, he’d read the official police report, which filled in the gaps––how after the ambulance took the boy away, the grandmother and the priest carried the little girl, limp and fevered, to an undisclosed location. She was bleeding, it turned out; they did a full examination, which was supervised by a doctor from the Diocese. Still, the police chief confirmed there’d been a sexual assault of some kind. Guys at the precinct said an escaped convict from Dannemora Prison was responsible, a kidnapping like all the others, but this one gone awry.

  At home that night, after a hot shower and a can of soup, Vinnie turned on the news.

  Divine hysteria, a priest said in an interview. They were sending for a Monsignor from Albany to interview the girl. A spokesperson for the Catholic Church chimed in: We’ve seen cases of stigmata before.