The 100 Year Miracle

by Ashley Ream

  “My mother took me shopping with her when I was a kid. I’d look all over for the little boxes of them. I remember they looked like white Kleenex boxes. I’d try to stretch the footsies over my head, so I could look like a burglar and scare people.”

  “They couldn’t possibly fit over your head.”

  “They didn’t. I’d end up breaking a few before putting them on my hands instead and pretending my fingers were all fused together. Made my mother furious.”

  “I could understand that,” Tilda said and then did stand up.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What would your alternate future be if you weren’t a senator?”

  “I’m not a senator, so I guess we’ll find out. But for now it’s time for me to say ‘good night.’”

  Tip was putting the glass jar of store-bought fudge sauce into the microwave and setting the timer. “You can’t leave yet.”

  “I’m almost certain that I can.”

  “Nope.” The microwave dinged. “You can’t leave because we’re not friends yet. You’ve spent more time alone in my restaurant than you have with me, and the point of tonight was to convince you to be my friend.”

  “All of this because Harry doesn’t like you?”

  “No. I’m not that fragile.” Tip dug a spoon out of the drawer and drizzled on the fudge with a generous hand. “I saw you in the coffee shop, and you looked like someone I would like to spend time with and maybe even someone who would like to spend time with me. Harry was just a good excuse. I guess I felt like I needed one.”

  Tip licked a drip of fudge off the side of his hand. “Are you sure you don’t want some? It’s really good.”

  He put the fudgy spoon into the bowl and topped everything with a good long squirt of whip and dug a cherry out of the jar with his fingers.

  “Bring a second spoon over,” Tilda said. “But I’m just tasting.”

  * * *

  Two hours after they finished the ice cream, Tilda let Tip lead her to the bedroom. He turned the light on, and she took her hands from his shirt buttons to find the switch and turn it back off. He tasted like beer and chocolate, and the scars on his forearms from kitchen burns felt slick and taut under her fingertips. When she pressed her nose to his chest and breathed, she could smell that he had been sweating earlier, probably at work, and she could smell something else, the musk of his excitement, the smell that would be left on the sheets.

  15.

  Rachel grabbed her cooler marked “food,” doing all she could not to reveal how heavy it was with a dozen of her full containers secreted away inside.

  She carried it up to the parking area, loaded the cooler into the campered back, and shut the tailgate. Her heart rate and breathing were labored, and she bent forward with her hands on her knees, giving herself just one moment. Anyone might see her, so she raised herself up, refusing to pant from the effort, and came around to unlock the driver’s door. She put in her key and turned. Something was wrong. The key turned freely in the lock. There was no telltale friction as the mechanism gave way, no click as the old-fashioned plunger popped up on the inside. Rachel opened the truck door and fiddled with the lock. The plunger moved up and down just as easily as the key had turned. She fiddled with the door handle and the key some more, looking for some configuration of maneuvers that would right this wrong, but there was no getting around it. Not only had the door been unlocked, but the lock had been broken.

  With the door open, the small dome light cast a dim yellow glow in the cab. She looked all over the floorboards first and then climbed inside. She hadn’t left anything important or incriminating in the truck. She was almost certain she hadn’t, but the longer she sat there the less certain she became. She tried to push down the paranoia. This was ridiculous. Of course, there was nothing for anyone to find in here. What could there be? Everything was back at the cabins.

  Jesus, the cabins.

  She reached out far to grab hold of the wide-open door and slammed it shut, starting the engine with her other hand before the dome light could even click off. She couldn’t get back to the camp fast enough, not even if she could fly.

  * * *

  It took two hours for Rachel to unhook all of her equipment and load it into the back of the camper. Thirty minutes of that was spent checking everywhere inside and outside for signs of disturbance. The door and window seemed secure, and her clothes were still taped up to block the noise. She tore it all down, shoving it into bags and hauling it out to the truck without even bothering to pull the duct tape off the sweatshirts. She was sweating, and her hair, which had started to fall out of the ponytail, kept getting in her face.

  In the rush, she nearly forgot to grab her toiletries from the bathroom, which made her nervous about what else she might have forgotten. She checked her watch. The night team wouldn’t be back—shouldn’t be back—for another two hours, and the day team was asleep. But her stomach wouldn’t stop clenching, and she worried she’d get diarrhea. It was the last thing she needed. Bad enough that the effects of the Artemia lucis had begun to wear off. Her back sent zings of pain up and down her spine, and the knot on the side of her head was sensitive to the touch. Just grazing it with her hand, which she kept doing as she pushed her hair away, made her wince, and a headache was coming on.

  She locked up the cabin and wrote a note for Hooper, which she shoved under his door. The note said she’d decided to take her caretaking duties a step further and would stay at the old man’s house.

  Finally finished, she ran to the truck and backed up in a spray of oyster shell, feeling for all the world like she was fleeing the scene of a double homicide. At the bottom of the street, she stepped too hard on the brake. Her seat belt locked into place with a jolt, snapping her back and away from the steering column. Rachel wiped her hands on her jeans, made a loud exhale that only helped a little, and forced herself to drive the speed limit.

  * * *

  Later Tilda might wonder about her own judgment, but just then the bed was comfortable and her brain was operating on its lowest possible frequency. All she could manage was the general feeling that she should be home before sunrise for Harry’s sake. And that general feeling was enough to get her to sit up and, with some reluctance, retrace the bread-crumb trail of clothing to get herself dressed again.

  Tip groaned when she moved and was slow to follow her, but he did not object or ask her to spend the night. “I’ll walk you home,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. You got me talking about my mother over ice cream, God rest her soul. How do you think she’d react if she knew I’d just let you out the front door in the middle of the night? You could be killed.”

  “I live less than fifty yards from this bed. I think that’s unlikely.”

  “Ax murderers are very crafty these days.”

  At the door, Tip held up her coat while she slipped her arms in. Then he put on his own, and they walked across the grass, which had never grown well in the sandy soil, toward Harry’s. They were quiet, and he waited while she unlocked the door.

  “Good night,” she said just before stepping across the transom.

  “Good night,” he said. “I hope you find your thing, whatever it is.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  Tilda knotted her eyebrows. “What thing? Who said I’m looking for a thing?”

  Tip didn’t reply. He had already turned around and was heading back across the grass.

  He really was a bold little shit, she thought, and went inside.

  16.

  Day Three of the Miracle

  Harry was asleep in the library when the doorbell rang well before eight a.m. Tilda had woken up just after five o’clock like she did every morning. It had not been a joyous occasion. For a half hour, she tried to will herself back to sleep, but images of Tip kept intruding. There were whole story lines—what he said, what he did, what
she did, what it would be like when she saw him again.

  Tilda squeezed her eyes shut tighter. If anyone could see into her head, she’d kill herself rather than endure the embarrassment. These things probably happened to him all the time, and she herself was far too experienced to have expectations. Tilda tried to be without expectation. It sounded very Zen, which wasn’t her at all. The night before was imprinted on her mind like letterpress. Tilda gave up and got up.

  On three hours of sleep, a swim was out of the question. She had an exhaustion headache, and her eyeballs hurt. The alcohol had left her dehydrated and light sensitive. By seven, she’d been alternating cups of coffee—three so far—with glasses of water—two so far—which she’d used to swallow more than the recommended amount of ibuprofen. To keep it all down, she’d made two pieces of plain buttered toast but was only able to stomach one. The other sat on a small plate on the kitchen counter for later. She’d had a scalding shower, which she’d let beat down on the back of her neck for some time, and had put on jeans and a half-zip top more suited to the gym than going out in public, which was just fine because Tilda didn’t want to be in public. Then the doorbell rang. Shooby barked at it for emphasis.

  Tilda looked around herself, as though there might be someone else who could handle this. Finding no one, she walked to the door with Shooby at her heels and looked through the peephole. It was a woman. It was, if Tilda was not very much mistaken, the scientist woman from the night before, the one she’d seen coming across the sand from this house.

  Tilda considered the possibility that Tip had been right. Maybe Harry had begun some sort of romance with this woman. One of Harry’s male friends might have thought this good news. Why shouldn’t he have one last bite at the apple? But Tilda was not one of Harry’s male friends, and she didn’t think that way at all. But she did open the door.

  “Yes?” Tilda said and then added, “Can I help you?” because the first sentence had sounded snooty and short.

  The woman stuck out her hand. “I’m Rachel Bell.”

  “Tilda,” she said and shook.

  Shooby stayed where he was but wagged his tail. Rachel stayed still. She seemed to be waiting for something. She did not ask for Harry. Perhaps she expected Tilda to have been informed of the dalliance already.

  “Harry isn’t up yet,” Tilda told her. “He needs to rest whenever possible.”

  “Yes,” Rachel agreed, not seeming the least bit uncomfortable standing there on the front porch. “I assume he’s all right. The fall didn’t seem serious.”

  “The fall? What fall?” Tilda forgot she was exhausted and put on the tone of voice she used with Juno when he tried to sneak unpleasant news into conversations.

  “Harry fell last night on the beach. On the dog.” She indicated Shooby, who seemed pleased to be made part of the conversation.

  “He fell on the dog?”

  “That’s my understanding,” Rachel said. “I didn’t see it. My boss called me over to help. I carried the dog inside. It seemed like they were both more or less all right.”

  Tilda had let Shooby out to do his business earlier, electing to let him run around the front yard rather than go on an actual walk. She hadn’t noticed anything wrong with him, but she hadn’t been looking either. She looked down, but Shooby neither confirmed nor denied his injuries.

  “He seems okay,” Tilda said.

  “Good.”

  There was that pause again like the young woman was waiting for some foregone thing.

  “Did you come by to check on him?” Tilda was in danger of becoming annoyed. She remembered her head hurt. It was also cold outside, and her hair was wet, and now she had to deal with the fact that Harry had begun to have falls. Maybe he’d been having them all along. She really didn’t know.

  “No, I have everything in the truck,” Rachel said. “If you could just show me where to put it, I can unload it myself. I prefer to.”

  “Unload what?”

  “My lab equipment.”

  “Your lab equipment?”

  “Yes.”

  “I seem to have missed something.”

  “Because Harry isn’t up yet,” Rachel provided.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Last night, Harry offered to let me set up my equipment and stay here. It’s much closer to the beach than the old camp. I imagine you have hot water, too.”

  “He asked you to move in?”

  “Just for the next three days. I realize this is sudden, but I’m running some experiments, and it really can’t wait. So if you could just show me where I can set up—”

  In other circumstances, Tilda would have appreciated the woman’s demeanor. She was forthcoming and didn’t seem like the sort who would be dissuaded easily. She had started rocking back and forth from her heels to the balls of her feet, which was irritating to Tilda, but still, if the young woman had shown up at campaign headquarters looking for a job, Tilda would have given it to her. Not that any of that made any of this any better.

  “Harry!” Tilda called out, walking back inside the house, no longer so concerned about his sleep.

  She left the door open, and when she checked back over her shoulder to see if the woman was going to step inside, Tilda saw Rachel heading toward her truck to unlock the camper.

  “Harry!”

  It always took more than a little doing for Harry to get upright the first time each morning. He needed his cane in one hand, and the edge of a piece of furniture in the other, and still he might have to give a couple of heaves like a batter warming up before he got all the way standing.

  “Yes,” he said, annoyed that Tilda was watching these undignified contortions, jabbering on at him the whole time. He wished she’d stop talking. He wished she’d just stop all together, at least for the time being, which was a feeling he’d had often during their marriage.

  “Yes, I did tell her she could stay. It was the least I could do, and it’ll be interesting having her here. Perhaps,” he said, cutting off another bit of jabbering before it could pick up any steam, “you might show her into the dining room. I thought she could put her things up in there, and then there’s the guest room for her to stay in, of course.”

  Tilda did not appreciate being dispatched like a maid with her duties and opened her mouth to say so but shut it again when she heard footsteps in the entryway. There wasn’t time to argue, but there would be time, she told Harry with her eyes, for discussion and soon.

  * * *

  There was no role for Tilda in the house, but now that they were hosting guests, she felt she couldn’t go off and nap. Napping when someone had just arrived was rude, ruder even than leaving. Leaving was understandable. For all anyone knew, Tilda’s plans had been longstanding. She could very well be a busy and important woman who could not be delayed. Feeling that she had to have this conversation with herself made Tilda even less happy about things.

  She hissed at Harry the moment the woman walked back out to her truck that they would “discuss this later” and grabbed her purse from beside the front door. The two women did not acknowledge each other when Tilda climbed into her car and backed out of the driveway, and when she returned home half an hour later with two plastic sacks in the seat beside her, she did not go back in.

  She sat in the driveway next to the old red pickup truck, which was in her spot. It was in her spot, and its driver was in her house. Harry’s house. Her old house. It didn’t matter. The truck and the woman were strangers, and they were in her space.

  Tilda had a book from the marine shop on her lap. After she explained her concerns, the clerk had dog-eared several chapters for her and then charged her forty dollars for the manual alone, which was something close to a mugging. She was skimming the marked sections, paying most of her attention to the photographs. Things were coming back to her.

  She shoved the book back into a bag, gathered up the rest of her purchases, and climbed out, walking not into the house but around back. She stole glimpses at Tip�
�s place as she went. His car was gone. She wondered if he was back at the bakery picking up bread or maybe already at the restaurant. Of course, there were a hundred other places he might be. She hardly knew him, she told herself. She certainly couldn’t predict his schedule.

  Having delivered this mental scolding, she continued down the sandy slope toward the beach, her tennis shoes slipping here and there on the sharp descent, forcing her to turn her feet sideways and crab walk down for better traction.

  The boat was just where she had left it.

  Tilda’s father had owned boats his entire life, bass boats mostly. Summers had been spent towing them back and forth from the house to the lake, then backing the trailer up into the water, which had excited and worried her as a child. The car is backing into the water! The tires are getting wet! And then her father would push the aluminum boat, which was not very much like Harry’s at all, off the trailer and into the water.

  Being the oldest sibling, she had been allowed, from time to time and when there were no other boats or obstacles like submerged trees around, to pilot. This was a good number of years before she drove a car and to be able to drive anything at all was terribly exciting. She was quite grown up, being a pilot and all, and she took the duty seriously.

  The summer weekends her father didn’t spend on the lake he spent in the driveway fixing the boat or, as often, the boat trailer. Things seemed to go wrong with an alarming frequency, and more often than not her father would say, “It’s the damn wiring again. Bring me an iced tea.” Tilda would, and then she would watch him work, fetching tools from the toolbox and holding the flashlight until it all got too boring, which it always did.

  In college, Tilda had taken up with a boy whose family had owned a forty-foot sailboat, much larger than the one sitting in front of her. The boyfriend’s boat had a below deck with galley and bunk and enough navigational equipment to sail from Florida to the Bahamas, which is exactly what he had planned to do. And she, more in love with the boat than with him, had spent nearly every weekend of her sophomore year helping ready it for the trip. When the school year was over, he had asked her to come with him for the final time, and for the final time, she had said no. He had left and had not come back, and she had married Harry and had her children and her career, and she did not regret that decision. She did not regret it, but that did not mean she was not very, very pleased to have found this replacement.