The Question of Miracles (10 page)

“Everything reminds you of Magic.”

“It's like when one of your best cards gets stuck in your graveyard, and you can't play it anymore, and then you draw an Adun Oakenshield.”

“What's an Adun Oakenshield?” Iris was curious, in spite of herself.

“It's a Legendary Creature. A Human Knight. If you draw it, you can return one card from your graveyard to your hand, back into play. There are a bunch of cards that let you do that. I have one at home. I'll show it to you next time you come over. Wanna come over today? After school?”

“Sure,” said Iris, feeling generous. And maybe it would be all right to have Boris helping her. After all, if Boris really was a miracle, then it couldn't hurt to have him on her side.

“We've got to make a plan,” Boris said that afternoon, pacing in the kitchen while Iris perused the snack possibilities at his house. Pre-sliced red peppers and baby carrots, she decided, with ranch dressing. Later, maybe she'd come back for snack dessert.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “A plan is good.”

Boris watched as Iris assembled her snack platter. “Throw some crackers on there too. And some cheese slices,” he said. “We can share.”

Ugh. Sharing a snack with Boris. Iris felt her appetite waning, but she added the cheese and crackers, pushing them to the far edge of the plate.

“Come on,” Boris said. “We'll see what we can find on the computer.”

Iris followed Boris down the hall to his bedroom. He dumped his backpack on the bed and pushed his laptop to one side of the desk to make room for the snacks. “Get another chair from the twins' room,” he ordered, and flopped himself into his chair in front of the computer. He opened the laptop and began tapping the space bar impatiently, waiting for the computer to start up.

Iris almost said something about manners, but then decided it would be a waste of energy. Instead she slid the tray of food next to the computer. Boris dug right in, dunking a carrot into the dressing and slicing it in half with his teeth, chewing loudly. He was, Iris noticed with a tiny shudder, a double dipper. Iris went in search of a chair.

The twins weren't home, and Iris found a chair on the clean side of their room. There may have been a matching chair on the other side, but it was difficult to be certain, draped as it was by sweaters and jeans and something that looked alarmingly like a banana peel.

“There are over one billion results when you Google ‘talking to the dead,'” Boris told Iris when she reentered his room with a chair. She dumped it with a clatter next to Boris, but he didn't get the hint. He didn't even look up.

Iris sat. A billion results. The number terrified her. “We'll never sort through all those,” she said. “It would take a lifetime.”

Boris looked over at her, chewing. “You say that like it's a bad thing.”

“It
is
a bad thing.”

He shook his head. He looked, Iris thought, like a spaniel shaking water off its coat. “No way,” he said. “It's a
great
thing. Over a billion results . . . One of them's got to be something good.”

It could be, Iris considered, that Boris actually had a point. One billion results . . . If each result was a lottery ticket, then one of them was bound to be a winner. “Okay,” she said, grabbing a red-pepper slice. “Let's see what we can find.”

 

An hour later, all that was left of the snack platter were crumbs and one sad baby carrot, half drowned in the remaining ranch dressing. Iris had kicked off her shoes, and she sat cross-legged next to Boris, her science notebook open on her lap. They had made a list.

Out of the billion results that their Google search had yielded, Iris figured that they had skimmed through at least a thousand. Maybe more. Most of them, of course, were ridiculous. Some of them were pretty scary.

Boris had gotten especially creeped out when he read some of the stuff the Bible had to say about contacting the dead. “Look at this,” he'd said, after clicking on a link to Leviticus, a book of the Bible. He turned the computer toward Iris.

“Men and women among you who act as mediums or psychics must be put to death by stoning. They are guilty of a capital offense,”
she read out loud. “That doesn't sound great. Does it worry you? I mean, if you don't want to help me . . .”

“No, no, I'm totally going to help you,” Boris said. “It's just sort of weird, you know? Because the nuns who prayed to that dead pope to save me . . . Wasn't that like talking to the dead? And
that
was okay. With the church, I mean.”

Iris shrugged. She hadn't even known what a pope was
,
all that long ago. She wasn't the right person for questions about that. But still, what if it
was
dangerous to try to talk to Sarah? Not stoning-dangerous, but maybe some other kind of dangerous. Something she couldn't imagine.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” she said.

“Uh-uh,” said Boris. “If a bunch of old nuns feel safe talking to the dead, then how bad of an idea could it be?”

Every now and then, Iris thought, Boris said something really, really smart.

“This one looked pretty cool.” Iris tapped her pencil against the first thing she'd written. “EVP.”

“Which one is that, again?”

“It's short for electronic voice phenomena. It's the idea that the dead are still here, right around us, and it's only because our ears aren't sensitive enough that we can't hear them talk.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Boris. “That one did sound neat. We could try it right now, if you want.”

Iris shook her head. “We need to learn more about it first,” she said. She considered telling Boris about Sarah's ghost, how sometimes it felt like she was there, at the homestead, under the stairs. But that felt like too fragile a secret to share. “And when we try it, we should do it at my place.”

“Okay,” said Boris. “I'll research it.”

Iris wrote his name next to
EVP
. And underneath that, next to
Mirror Gazing,
she wrote her own name. Then she said, “Maybe we could try to find out more about the Catholics, too. Since you got that miracle, and all. Maybe we could learn about how those nuns contacted the dead pope.”

“I think they just
prayed
to him,” Boris said.

“I know,” said Iris. “But I mean, why did
that
prayer work? Lots of people pray for stuff, and they don't get miracles.”

“I guess I could ask the Vatican guys, when they come to visit,” said Boris, but he sounded dubious.

Iris wondered about the people from the Vatican, what they would look like, what kind of answers they might have. “Yeah, maybe,” said Iris. But she thought,
Maybe I can ask them myself.

The list grew. Some of the ideas were silly—
Ouija Board, Crystal Ball—
and Iris dismissed them almost as soon as they were written down. Others were scary—
Visit a Graveyard, Hold a Séance
—and Iris considered these to be last-resort ideas. Boris was enthusiastic about what he had started to call “The Ghost Project” in a way that Iris found increasingly irritating, especially once winter break began and they had whole days together.

“I don't think we should give up on the idea of a séance quite yet,” Boris told Iris on the second day of vacation. The two of them were wandering around downtown, poking into various shops. Boris needed to buy Christmas presents for all of his sisters, and Iris wanted to get something for her parents. Each store they went into had a bucket by the entrance for umbrellas, and a rack for hats and jackets. Most of them also had a large rubber mat just inside the door.

“A séance just sounds creepy.” Iris picked up a ceramic cabbage and turned it over, enjoying its cool smoothness against her palm. Maybe she could start a collection of glass vegetables for her dad. Then she saw the price, $17.95, and she put it back down.

“The whole thing is creepy, though, isn't it?” He sounded eager. Too eager, Iris thought.

“You don't get it,” she said. “Sarah is my friend. This isn't some fun game, Boris, like Magic.”

Next to her, Iris felt Boris deflate a little. He cleared his throat and adjusted his beanie. It was black and white striped, with a fuzzy ball on top. Iris stepped away and pretended to be really interested in a collection of shell figurines on the next shelf, but it was hard to see them through the tears that clouded her eyes.

A minute later, Boris walked up behind her. She felt his hot breath on her ear.

“Hey, Iris,” he said. “I'm really sorry.”

She lifted and dropped her shoulders in answer.

“I guess I just get excited about things,” Boris said. “And I want to help.”

“It's okay,” Iris said. “But Sarah isn't creepy.”

“I know,” Boris said. “She was your best friend.”

Iris nodded.

“What was she like?”

Iris considered this question. She wanted to remember everything about Sarah, wanted to hold on tightly to all of her—the way she could raise one eyebrow and then the other, the sound of her laugh, the joy she found in winning—but so much of Sarah was already gone. And Iris worried that if she shared anything about Sarah with Boris, she would halve what little she had left.

 

Later, sitting with Dr. Shannon, Iris shared this concern. She left out the stuff about trying to communicate with Sarah; Dr. Shannon didn't need to know
everything.
But she did tell Dr. Shannon that she felt like she was sort of cheating on Sarah. By hanging out with Boris. By having another friend.

Dr. Shannon nodded, but didn't answer at first. She passed Iris the ever-present box of tissues, and she waited for Iris to blow her nose. Then she said, “When I was about your age, my parents got a divorce. My dad didn't remarry, not right away, but my mom did. She married a man named Paul, who became my stepfather. I was pretty angry about the divorce, but even more I was upset on my father's behalf that he had been replaced so quickly. That's what it felt like—that he'd been replaced.”

Iris took another tissue and shredded it in her lap.

“I didn't want to like Paul. And I didn't want Paul to like me. I was actually pretty rude to him.” Dr. Shannon smiled, remembering. “I used to hide his shoes,” she confessed. “Not whole pairs, just the left ones. There was a panel in the ceiling of my bedroom closet that accessed the attic, and I would push that aside and throw Paul's left shoes up there. Not all the time—that would have been too obvious. Just every now and then. I don't know if they suspected me right away, or if it took them a while to figure out that I was the culprit, but Paul never yelled at me or even confronted me about it. He just kept buying more shoes.”

“Did you ever give them back?” Iris asked. “The shoes?”

“I did,” Dr. Shannon said.

“When?”

“When my father got engaged to his next-door neighbor,” Dr. Shannon said. “About eighteen months later.”

“Did he say anything then? Paul, I mean?”

“Nope,” said Dr. Shannon. “Not even then. He never said a word about the shoes.”

Iris thought about the stories grownups had been telling her lately about leave-takings. She thought of Claude, about how her best friend had abandoned her. She considered Dr. Shannon's parents, and how their separation must have felt to Dr. Shannon.

There were, Iris felt, so many ways for a heart to break.

 

When Iris got home, she called Boris. When he came to the phone, without even saying hello, she told him, “Sarah was funny, and smart, too. And she was brave.” Iris could hear Boris breathing on the other end of the line. Then she said, “Back home, our teacher, Mrs. Preston, used to post all our test grades up at the front of the class, right next to our names, from best to worst.”

“Huh,” said Boris.

“She thought it was a good way to encourage us to do better. And this one time, after our U.S. geography test—we had to fill in the names of all the states and capitals on a blank map—this kid, Jimmy Dermer, his name was right at the bottom, dead last.”

“I guess someone had to be,” said Boris.

Iris ignored the interruption. “He was doing that thing when you have to cry but you don't want anyone to notice—where you pretend that you're rubbing your eyes because you're tired but really it's to keep the tears from falling. No one was paying any attention to him, anyway. They were all too worried about their own place on the list to care about Jimmy. And you know my friend Sarah?”

Boris was silent, but Iris could feel that his silence had weight. “Sarah's name was the first one,” she went on. “She got one hundred percent, plus extra credit for writing in the names of all the state birds. That's how she was . . . super competitive, and smart. Anyway, she didn't notice Jimmy either, but I pointed him out to her.”

“Then what happened?” Boris asked.

“She went right up to Mrs. Preston and told her to take down the list. Sarah said that if Mrs. Preston didn't take it down, she would start a petition to make her, because it was illegal in the state of California to post students' private information, like grades and stuff, without their permission.”

“Was that true?”

“Who knows?” Iris said. “But since Sarah had just scored a hundred and ten percent on a test all about the states, I guess Mrs. Preston believed her. She went over and untacked the whole list, and that was the last time she ever posted our grades.”

“That was pretty cool of Sarah, considering her name was at the top of the list,” Boris said.

“That's just the way she was,” Iris said. “Sarah took care of business.”

After a minute, Boris said, “Hey, Iris?”

“What?”

“Thanks for calling.”