The Probability of Miracles (17 page)

Wordlessly she packed the photo up in an envelope without a return address. She would mail it back to Lily today.

“Mom, I'm taking Tweety to the vet,” she yelled when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “Do they have a vet here, or do the animals miraculously heal themselves?”

“Don't get smart. I think I saw something on Cedar Street,” her mom called from the dining room. She was trying to work the ancient sewing machine she'd found in the basement and didn't even look up.

Cam unhooked Tweety's cage from its stand in the living room and found her car keys in the pocket of her hoodie.

“Wait! Take me to the beeeea—” she heard Perry whining as she shut the big front door with the dragonfly knocker behind her.

Cam was irritated. Literally. It was hot, she could not find the vet's office, and something was burning
down there
, which was probably normal after what
down there
had been through Friday night, but still a little disconcerting. After her third circle through town, she remembered Sunny and her theory of attracting what you think about.
I will find the vet's office
, she thought, and on her next trip around the block, there it was. A red barn with a silo and a mail truck parked out front. A donkey was penned inside of a white corral, and an old white sign read, ELAINE WHITTIER, with five shingles swinging underneath it: DVM, HEAD LIBRARIAN, POSTMASTER, SHERIFF, ANTIQUES DEALER.

“What are you feeding him?” asked Elaine Whittier as she examined Tweety. She was about sixty and had that self-proclaimed-feminist-from-the-seventies look about her. Long gray hair, dangling feather earrings, and a royal blue caftan blouse covering her seemingly requisite middle-aged paunch. To get to the exam room, you had to walk through Elaine's house, which was decorated with a lot of pine: pine woodwork, pine furniture covered with scratchy brown upholstery, pine floors, and pine plaques on the wall, shellacked with corny messages like HOME SWEET HOME.

“Um, I think there has been some extra papaya in his diet lately,” Cam said.

“He's massively overweight.”

Cam liked this woman. She did not mince words.

“You hear that, Tweets? No more papaya for you.” Cam had to speak loudly over the cacophony of animal sounds. Elaine didn't seem very discriminatory when it came to treating animals. Aside from the standard cats and dogs, the cages lining the periphery of the examination room were filled with hermit crabs, tarantulas, iguanas, ferrets, and—“Is that a muskrat?” Cam asked when she saw the slick black rodent with enormous bony feet.

“He's one of God's creatures.” Elaine lifted Tweety's wing and felt around for his glands underneath it. “What brings you to Promise?”

“I'm sick,” said Cam. She was inspired by the vet's demeanor to be direct, but it was strange to hear herself say those two tiny words. It was a relief, actually, to say it out loud to a stranger. She was sick.

“That's too bad,” said Elaine. Cam liked that response. No questions. No denial. No “I'm sure you'll get better soon.” Just: “That's too bad.” It was. It was just too bad.

“So what do you do?” the doctor asked as she cupped Tweety gently in both hands and placed him back in his cage.

“Do?”

“Aside from be sick. What do you do?”

“I'm putting all my energy into that right now,” joked Cam.

Elaine smirked. She had the same parentheses dimple on the left side of her smile that Asher did. “A woman has to wear many hats. It's in our nature. We're natural multitaskers. Here. Can you hold Bart for a second?” She plopped the soft, heavy belly of a St. Bernard puppy into Cam's hands. The warm folds of his extra skin draped around Cam's fingers. She held him up so she could look into his droopy brown eyes.

“I could work here, I guess,” mumbled Cam. The puppy licked the side of her face just once, as if that was all he could muster.

“What?” asked the vet as she plucked the side of a syringe to get the air bubbles out of it. “Keep holding him.” Elaine lifted some of the skin off of Bart's neck and stuck him with the syringe. Bart snuggled his head into the crook of Cam's, arm, and she hugged him close.

“I said, I wouldn't mind working here, if you needed the help.”

“You seem to tolerate needles, which means you'd be level-headed in an emergency,” Elaine noted. “And you seem to love animals. Those are the only job requirements. Oh, but don't get too attached. Especially to Bart. He's the runt of a big litter, and he may not make it.”

“Detached is my middle name,” said Cam, which was true in most cases, but she knew she'd already fallen deeply and seriously in love with Bart. Come on. Soft. Puppy. Belly. He was irresistible.

“Great! I have to do the mail route right now. If I'm five minutes late, Mr. Griffith has a panic attack. He never gets anything but the circular from the supermarket, but he really looks forward to it. Can you watch Bart for me?”

“You deliver mail, too?”

“Ayuh. Many hats, remember. Anyway, I'll be surprised if our friend here makes it through the night. If he's not improving tomorrow, I might ease his pain.”

“Ease his pain, what do you mean, ease his pain?”

“Put him down, Campbell. He's really suffering.”

“He'll make it,” said Cam. “He and I have a little pact.” Which wasn't exactly true, but she was going to make one with him right now.

Before Elaine left, Cam retrieved her biker bag from the front hall, grabbed the envelope, and handed it to her. “Will you mail this for me?” she asked. Her breath caught for a second as she handed the last remaining evidence of her friendship with Lily to Elaine. But she forced herself to suck in some more air and blow it out in a steady stream.

This is what it felt like to have a broken heart. It felt less like a cracking down the middle and more like she had swallowed it whole and it sat bruised and bleeding in the pit of her stomach.

Cam returned to the examination room and picked up the puppy, who was wrapped in baby blankets and lying on a doggie bed, motionless except for his belabored, snuffly inhales and exhales.

She sat down on the cold tiles of the exam room floor and let Bart rest on her lap, stroking the place where his snout and forehead came together. She and her mom had spent countless nights like this, reclining on the bathroom tiles, which cooled Cam's fever as she waited to throw up again.

Her mom would stroke her forehead, and after vomiting for the seventeenth or eighteenth time—dry heaving drops of bile into the toilet—Cam would say, “I want to die, Mommy. Just let me die.”

And her mom would say, “I'll make you a deal, Campbell Maria. You do not die, and tomorrow, we will have a special day.”

“Tell me what we're going to do tomorrow when this is over,” Cam would whisper.

Then her mom would make a list itemizing the world's best day. It was always different and always vivid, something Cam could imagine and look forward to.

“Tomorrow we will fly in a hot air balloon over the Everglades,” she would say.

“Oh, that's a good one,” Cam would sigh.

“No, we really will. We're going to get into the basket of a rainbow-colored balloon with a park ranger–slash–balloon aviator. And you will feel superior badgering him with questions he can't answer about Everglades conservation while he floats us out over the surface of the water and tries to point out the pretty flowers.”

“Excellent.”

“And then we'll have lunch and bubble tea.”

“Don't say lunch,” Cam would say before heaving again over the toilet.

“Oh, I'm sorry, baby,” Cam's mom would say and then place a cold washcloth on Cam's forehead and the back of her neck. “So after that, on our perfect day, we'll go to one movie and then sneak into a second show to get a freebie double feature. And then we'll come home and sleep dreamlessly all the way through the night.”

“Now you're exaggerating.” Cam hadn't slept through the night since the cancer had started.

World's Best Day actually materialized a lot in the beginning. Cam's mom would scramble, rearranging her schedule so she could take Cam on a hot air balloon ride or whatever it was she had described the night before. But as Cam got sicker and her episodes more frequent, Cam had to let her mother off the hook. She couldn't keep taking off of work for World's Best Day.

“Okay, pup,” Cam said, adjusting the puppy and removing some of his blankets. He was getting a little too warm. “You just need something to look forward to. Are you listening? Tomorrow is going to be the world's best day, so you have to hang on because you won't want to miss it.”

Then Cam described the myriad sights and especially smells of a puppy's perfect day. A walk through wet grass, lunch at the back door of the butcher shop, some backscratching against a tree, a game of fetch, a nap in the sun, chewing on a slipper, some tug-of-war, and a ride in the car with your head out the window.

It seemed to work a little. Bart seemed to be resting more comfortably when Elaine got home around four, with her ponytail stuck through the back of her postal cap. But Elaine said he was still very unstable. Cam made her promise that she wouldn't do anything rash, at least without calling Cam first.

“It's not rash, Campbell. It's medicine.”

“Just please don't do it,” Cam begged, and as she drove home with Tweety, she didn't pray, exactly. She wouldn't call it praying. But she sent energy to Bart. She used the visualization techniques that Lily taught her to imagine a future that contained a healthy, muscular, full-grown Bart. While she was at it, she visualized a healthy Cam and then, quite by accident, a healthy Asher lying shirtless in the sun.

BEFORE GOING BACK TO THE HOUSE, CAMPBELL PARKED CUMULUS WITH Tweety inside and took a walk past downtown Promise's happy brick storefronts streaming with wind socks and balloons. She bought a coffee at the café and then stole three lobster magnets, a bag of moose-shaped pasta, maple syrup, and a pair of stripy hand-knit slipper-socks from the gift shop.

The thrill of stealing distracted her from Bart and the memory of the Alec Debacle, but she felt this new thing—guilt?—over stealing, not from “the Man” or “the Mouse” but from some little old lady who probably spent her evenings knitting slipper-socks in front of
The Price Is Right
.

Cam had never stolen from Main Street before. Except for the fake one in Disney, they didn't have Main Streets in Florida, and the experience of it—the quaint, mom-and-pop, entrepreneurial, from-days-gone-by, up-by-your-bootstraps industriousness of it—was giving her a conscience. It was harder to steal when you could imagine from whom you were stealing.

It wasn't
that
hard, though, because she was just about to slip an irresistible lobster claw–shaped oven mitt into her biker bag, when she heard someone yell, “Samoa!” from out on the sidewalk.

“That's not exactly PC,” said Cam as Sunny walked in with her catalog boyfriend in tow.

“It's a post-PC world now, Samoa. We're not pointing out your difference; we're celebrating it.”

“Hmmm,” said Cam, trying to figure out whether that made any sense at all.

“We're going down to the flamingos. Want to come?” Sunny grabbed Cam's hand and spun underneath her arm. “They'll make you feel at home.”

“Is there some kind of traveling bird-circus in town?”

“No, they just arrived by themselves. A whole flock,” said Royal.

“Hundreds of them,” said Sunny. “They're feeding down at the pond behind the elementary school.” She pulled Cam out the door, swirling and skipping down Main Street, still barefoot and dirty and wearing Friday night's dress.