The Probability of Miracles (18 page)

Cam let Sunny drive since she was bold enough to ask and she knew where to go. Royal sat in the backseat with Tweety, and Cam gripped the door handle on the passenger side. She was not used to surrendering control of Cumulus.

They drove along the coast toward the lighthouse. To their right, the pounding surf reminded Cam that they were at the end of the Earth, an eerie feeling for someone raised in the middle of a swamp. The horizon was frightening. It was no wonder the pre-Columbians thought they would fall off of it.

“Grab the wheel for me?” Sunny said as she wriggled out of her fleece-lined sweatshirt.

Gladly
, thought Cam.

“Have you seen those yet?” Sunny asked, driving with her knees as she put her hair in a ponytail. Cam tried to keep one eye on the road as she glanced quickly to where Sunny was pointing: a grassy hill, embedded with large, gray, lichen-covered rocks. Three or four black-and-white cows stood grazing on purple flowers.

“Are those dandelions?” Cam asked.

“Uh-huh. They grow purple here for some reason. Even when they turn to fluff. We have a festival in spring when all the little kids in town get together to make a wish in the town square and blow fistfuls of dandelion fluff into the air at once.”

They were quiet for a while. Sunny now had two hands on the wheel, so Cam let herself look around. Almost every home seemed to be selling something in its front yard. Antique shutters, weathervanes, sleds, chairs, bear sculptures carved from the burls of trees with a chainsaw, washers and dryers. She even saw one sign that read, FOR SALE: USED HOT TUBS.

“I like my hot tub straight from the factory,” mumbled Cam.

“What?” Royal asked.

“Nothing.”

They turned back toward the coast. Cam let herself be mesmerized by the spots of sun glittering off of the waves, when Sunny said, “Look at these bozos!”

Alec with a
c
was hitchhiking along Route 1, looking very European in his gray skinny jeans and oversize black turtleneck sweater. His black greasy hair swung loosely across his forehead. Cam couldn't help getting excited, in spite of how bad he must have smelled in that sweater in this heat.

Man, that biological imperative is strong
, thought Cam. She should not have been excited to see him; she was supposed to have had nameless-faceless-lose-my-virginity-before-I-die sex. Not fluttery-jittery-I-can't-wait-to-see-him-again sex. And she really should not have been dejected when she saw the beautiful, porcelain-skinned redhead, who must have been the voice from the other night, jump out from behind him and wave the car down. Cam's whole body felt heavy, as if there were mercury flowing through her veins. She felt like a polluted tuna.

Before Cam could say anything, Sunny pulled over. She rolled down the window and asked, “Going to the flamingos?”

Alec climbed into the backseat, and Royal handed Tweety's cage to Cam.

“It's very dangerous to pick up hitchhikers,” Cam mumbled under her breath.

“Hi, Autumn and Alec,” Sunny said. “Do you know Campbell?” Cam's heart kicked at her chest. She wiped her palms on her shorts and tried to look Alec bravely in the eye.

“No,” said Alec flatly. He looked out the window, leaning his head against it, letting his knees splay wide apart. Autumn, another catalog kid, stuck a limp hand out to Cam and giggled, “
Enchantée
,” before sinking down next to him and whispering something rudely into his ear.

Detached
, thought Cam.
Detachment. I am detached
, she chanted to herself. She tried this mantra on the entire drive to the flamingos, but the lump in her throat kept growing and eventually gave way, allowing one tear to slip from the corner of her eye. She never thought she'd feel like this, but she was beginning to miss home.

The five of them unfolded their limbs, climbed out of Cumulus, and took big steps through the ragweed in the field behind the school. Autumn put a daisy in her hair and Royal chewed on a piece of hay.
They could be in a music video right now
, thought Cam. They were so obnoxiously young and beautiful, and—aside from her own petty concerns about having just lost her virginity to the asshole who stood right next to her making out with his
girlfriend
—they were carefree.

She tried to stay a few steps behind the couples, acknowledging her fifth-wheel status, but Sunny ran back, linked arms with her, and kept her with the group. “Wait till you see this, Samoa,” she said.

And what she saw when they got to the top of the rise actually made her forget Alec for a second.

It was like flamingo lava—liquid pink—flowing toward them down the hill in the shape of a huge, bright, orangey-pink cornucopia. The whole thing seemed like one enormous amoebic organism blanketing the gentle hillside. Like some giant inside the Earth had blown a huge, bubble-gum bubble that popped all over the swampy mud. As they walked closer, they began to hear the distinct calls of individual birds and see the thousands of reedy legs and knobby knees that made up the inner workings of the flock.

“Isn't pink the most peaceful color in the universe?” asked Sunny as they looked out on the enormous cloud of pink feathers. The five of them sat on the top tier of an old wooden fence and watched as the birds sifted through the silt for the blue-green algae and shrimp that were their only food.

Cam was glad the question did not require an answer. Pink. Pink was the color of chicken pox, pimples, bloodshot eyes, Pepto-Bismol, a syringe full of bone marrow, her eyedropper of liquid morphine, Alec's tongue. A lot of horrible things were pink. And the flamingos, while fabulously, fiery pink, were not peaceful at all. They constantly pecked and nagged at each other like the senior citizens of their Florida homeland.

Cam sat in between the two couples on the fence. Alec was to her right. He gave her a sly glance and then purposefully let his little finger graze hers before pulling it away and pretending to ignore her again at the sound of Autumn's giggle. Cam hated him.

And yet she desperately needed him to want her. She finally understood the Adolescent Postcoital Syndrome: Couple has sex. Girl gets uncharacteristically clingy. Boy feels suffocated. Boy pushes girl away for good. Cam wanted to be cooler than that. She did not want to succumb to the clinginess. The desperation. It was just that even though she had given it to him, she felt like Alec had stolen something from her, and she didn't want him to get away with it.

She jumped down and took a walk along the perimeter of the birds.

Some of the happy citizenry of Promise had meandered over to the school to calmly take a look at them, too, but no one was photographing the flamingos or making a big “to-do,” as Cam's grandmother would say. A Little League game continued, uninterrupted, on the baseball diamond in the far corner of the field. Instead of flocking toward the flamingos, the kids who were playing on the school's playground ran screaming to the ice cream truck that had pulled up in the school parking lot. No one had even notified the media, which was a little surprising to Cam.

Not that she thought this was a miracle. Far from it. The real miracle was how an entire
bird
could grow to this size and resplendence from eating mostly microscopic organisms. That was a miracle. The fact that they flew here was a migration. The birds were simply in search of volcanic mud.

Cam watched the birds for another minute, beginning to tire of their honking and nagging and pecking, when two birds moved to the right to reveal a tall mound of mud topped by a chubby bird the size and shape of an oven stuffer-roaster. It was covered lightly with fuzzy gray fluff the color of dryer lint. A baby flamingo! It was so ugly, it was cute.

“Hi, Buddy,” Cam said. She turned to point him out to the happy couples.

Unfortunately, though, they had started up a game. They would kiss whenever two flamingos came face-to-face, their curved pink necks creating each half of a flamingo-necked heart. It was cute, really. But it was also Cam's cue to leave.

CAM CAME HOME EXHAUSTED, READY TO HOLE UP IN HER ROOM AND watch a movie. But she couldn't get past the front porch.

“Where have you been? I was about to call the police!” Alicia said. She and Perry sat on Adirondack chairs, sipping pink lemonade, as Asher painted the rungs of the porch's railing a glossy black.

Asher was starting to make a little more sense to Cam. He was a lone wolf at the top of the food chain. And when you're at the top of the food chain, you don't want your prey to lay itself down in front of you like that Barbie doll on the bench that Cam had seen through her telescope. You crave something more complicated. You want to engage in the hunt. Something surreptitious, covert, clandestine. And yet something safe. Something that would guarantee your ultimate bachelorhood and the solitude of your lair.
He must be involved with an older woman
, thought Cam. But after today, she felt too tired to care.

“I can't win. You force me to get out of here and now I'm in trouble for not coming home? Excuse me, I need to put Tweety inside. He's had a very long day.” She tried to push past them all, feeling Asher's eyes on her, but her mom stopped her.

“Campbell, you're covered in dog hair.”

“I got a job at the vet.”

“That's great. Really. But please go wash off in the outside shower.”

“Now?”

“Cam,” her mom said, and then Perry started sneezing on cue. Even Asher started wiping his eyes on the back of his sleeve. “I'm allergic to dogs, too,” he admitted.

“Oh, God.” Cam yielded. She handed Tweety's cage to her mom and said, “He's morbidly obese, by the way. You need to stop feeding him the papaya.”

“Go!” her mother said, throwing her a beach towel from the porch.

The shower assailed her with its sharp, freezing drops. Only hardy, robust New Englanders would think of installing an outdoor shower. Didn't her family realize that she had zero body fat? She shivered as she soaped up with a cracked and drying bar of Irish Spring, probably decades old. She was trying to ignore the spiderwebs in the corners of the shower when she heard the sudden scratchy sound of her towel scraping against the top of the wooden stall. Cam knew what was coming next, but before she could react, Perry plucked each of her articles of clothing off of the shower stall.

Cam peeked over the stall while Perry proceeded to fling the clothes piece by piece from the cliff to the beach below. Cam stood naked in the shower except for her Chuck Taylors. She wasn't about to take those off.

“
Perry!
” Cam screamed. “Dammit, Perry, I'm freezing.” Cam hopped around, trying to stay warm, and turned the red knob of the shower to full steam. She screamed again for Perry.

“Need some help?” Asher asked from outside the stall. “Here, you can take my shirt.”

“Here we go again. Asher to the rescue. This is so
It's a—
”

“
—Wonderful Life,
” Asher finished. “When they were walking home from the pool and she loses her robe behind the bush. I was just going to say that.”

“You could learn a lot from that movie, actually, about what happens to nice guys,” Cam said through her chattering teeth. It was the movie about the angel who prevents some sad family man from jumping off a bridge on Christmas Eve. Her mother made her watch it every year. Cam hopped from foot to foot and rubbed her hands up and down her arms to get warm. The sky was eerily dark, like someone had spilled black ink over the stars, and the crickets, usually so vocal, were strangely silent.

“What are you saying? Is it possible that you could have missed the entire point of that movie?”

Cam paused and listened for a second to the waves crashing to the shore in the distance. “What? He didn't go to college, even after he got the suitcase. He missed the honeymoon. He was left at home, and everyone took advantage of him.”

“And he had a wonderful life. It's the title of the film.”

“It was all propaganda to make you feel like your miserable life is worthwhile,” Cam said, staring at the knots in the wood in front of her.

“You don't deserve my shirt,” Asher said, but she could see beneath the stall that his feet stood motionless.

“But you're going to give it to me anyway.” Cam stuck her hand up and over the stall.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“Here,” he said, handing it to her.

The shirt was long enough, but it was white, so it was soaking through in strategic places where she actually hadn't lost all of her body fat. She kept her arms crossed in front of her chest and stepped out of the stall. The shirtless, six-packed Asher still stood there, and Cam was taken aback by what football and a little handiwork could do for a body. They shared a speechless moment, and then Cam said, “I can take it from here.”