The Question of Miracles (12 page)

“I'm interested,” Boris answered, “in everything.”

And then the two of them launched into a lively conversation about manure, a topic Iris had no idea Boris knew anything about.

Iris ignored them and stared at her window, not through it, watching raindrops race down the pane of glass, watching as the wind swept them away. Some of the drops scattered easily, right after they'd fallen, but some of them left the windowpane not all at once, but rather little by little, tinier droplets breaking away until, inevitably, the pressure of the car's speed and the wind against them won, and the drops disappeared.

 

Her father turned the station wagon up the gravel driveway, and the tires made the crunching sound that Iris had come to identify with being almost home.

“There she is,” her dad announced, turning off the car. Iris appraised the farmhouse as she imagined Boris was doing beside her: its yellow wooden siding, in need of a fresh coat of paint (“In the spring,” her dad had promised them); its perpetually rain-darkened shingle roof; the porch that wrapped around the house, strewn with gardening supplies; the tall white stacks of bagged fertilizer; the bikes no one had ridden since they'd been unloaded from the moving truck. And on the far edge of the property, the new wind turbine her dad had just had installed, his current pride and joy.

“Awesome,” Boris said. “It looks like an old haunted mansion.” He slid out of the car, forgetting his duffle bag, and completely oblivious, Iris thought, to what he had just said.

She collected her backpack and Boris's overnight bag, and followed him into the house.

Boris loved everything about the place: the steep staircase, the old woven rugs that Iris's dad had found at a nearby antique shop, the original O'Keefe & Merritt oven, the fireplace. And then he spied Charles, tucked into a corner of the couch, just his head visible from the woolly blanket that engulfed him.

“Whoa,” said Boris. “Is that your cat?”

“This is Charles.” Iris sat down gently beside him and scratched between his ears.

“He's even weirder-looking than I thought he'd be,” Boris said. He didn't reach over to pet him.

“Charles thinks the same thing about you,” Iris retorted, and Boris laughed.

All through dinner and dessert, Iris tried to act normal. Luckily, Boris was a fountain of conversation, and Iris didn't have to do much to blend in. As she listened to Boris telling her parents an animated story about how hard it was to be the only son in a family of girls, she thought about everything Boris had earnestly reported to her about his research into EVP.

“In 1952, two Catholic priests were recording Gregorian chants on this old machine called a Magnetophone,” he'd said during lunch. “The wire kept breaking, and one of the priests looked up to heaven and asked his dead father to help. Later on when they listened to the recording, they heard the priest's father's voice say, ‘Of course I shall help you. I am always with you.'”

It seemed to Iris that the Catholic Church kept itself pretty busy.

After dinner, Iris's mom suggested that they all watch a movie together, but Iris said, “No, thanks, we're going to play a game of Magic before we go to bed.” She pulled her cards out of her backpack and made a good show of clearing off the kitchen table and shuffling the deck.

But after her mom said, “All right, you two. Have fun,” and pushed through the kitchen's swinging door, Iris dropped her cards onto the table.

“Should I get the recorder?” Boris asked in a terribly loud whisper.

Iris nodded. “I found this cool article online,” Boris had told her that morning on the bus. “It turns out that Thomas Edison, way back in the 1920s, was into electronic voice phenomena. He even tried to invent a machine that could pick up the voices of the dead. He never managed to do it, but he was pretty much a genius about electricity and stuff.”

Iris listened to Boris's thumping footsteps as he ran up the stairs to the spare bedroom, then again as he ran back down. Slightly out of breath, Boris set the recorder on the table. He couldn't help but share its stats: “It's an Olympus. It has a four-gigabyte flash memory, up to one thousand and seven hours of recording time, and a USB 2.0 port. Usually it costs $199.99, but my dad got it on sale for thirty percent off.”

Iris heard him, but only sort of. She felt a nervous flutter in her veins, and swallowed twice.

“Do you know what you're going to ask?”

Iris had written a list of questions, but she didn't need to retrieve it. Every question she had for Sarah was seared into her brain.

“Remember,” Boris prompted, “after you ask the question, leave time for an answer. Just like you're having a conversation. And don't touch the recorder. Leave it flat on the table so you don't shake it around and accidentally cause sounds. And then after you're done, leave the recorder running. People on the Internet say that sometimes the ghosts, or whatever, say something more at the end.”

Iris nodded again. Suddenly she wished Boris wasn't there, but he was. And this was the time—she could feel it. She reached out a shaky hand and pressed
RECORD
. A moment passed, and then Iris asked, “Sarah? Are you there?”

She waited a long moment, longer than it would take anyone to say yes or no, and then she asked the next question. “Sarah? Are you okay?”

And that was when the tears began, and didn't stop, as she worked her way through the rest of the questions—
Did it hurt to die? Are you scared? Are you alone? Do you miss me? I miss you. Can you hear me?
Boris stood beside her awkwardly, and he patted her shoulder in his best attempt at comfort as she spoke, and waited, and spoke again, as her tears and dripping snot mingled together, as one blotchy tear smeared across a Magic card, a Reya Dawnbringer that Boris had given her, a Legendary Creature-Angel. The picture was filled with yellow light, and the broad-winged golden angel held a sword in her right hand. Beneath the picture were the words, “At the beginning of your upkeep, you may return target creature card from your graveyard to play.” And beneath that, in italics,
“You have not died until I consent.”

Then Iris's questions were all asked, but still she didn't hit the button to end the recording. Together she and Boris waited in the kitchen, watching the digital clock on the Olympus show the seconds, the fractions of seconds, all the moments that they were there, and Sarah might be as well.

Iris stood in front of the door to the closet under the stairs. She counted again the six wood panels.

Down the hall in the kitchen, her parents were fooling around with the dishwasher. It had finally been installed that afternoon. Iris's mom was loading coffee mugs into the top rack, and her dad was reloading them into the other side, where he apparently thought they should go.

She heard her mother's warm, full laugh, and the cadence of her father's reply. Her parents, she realized, were another pair—like Starla and Isobel, like Boris's twin sisters. Like Iris and Sarah had been.

Iris held a book in her hands. It was tied around with one of her hair ribbons, red and white grosgrain. The book's spine was maroon, embossed with gold. The cover read
Anne of Green Gables
in tall purple letters, and there was a picture of two girls—one dark-haired, the other with red braids—sitting under a tree, looking off into the distance.

It was an old copy of the book. Not first edition or anything, but not new, either. Iris had found it at Used and Valuable Books on Fourth Street. It had cost her thirty-three dollars exactly.

She had thirty dollars left over from Christmas, and Boris lent her the extra three. He didn't ask her what she needed the money for, or why she didn't get it from her parents. He just pulled the crinkled bills from his pocket and handed them over.

 

Since that night when they'd tried to record Sarah's voice, Boris had been even nicer to Iris than usual. Probably because when they'd listened to the recording the next morning, they had heard nothing in the pauses between Iris's questions. Or, not quite nothing, but certainly not Sarah's voice, not answers. The blank emptiness they did hear was, Iris felt certain, exactly what space would sound like if like one of the humans in Boris's dad's unwritten science-fiction novel, she'd been collected by aliens to be their pet and been shuttled out of Earth's atmosphere, and into the wide boundlessness of the cosmos. A deep silence, darker and wider than Iris could completely fathom, in which there was nothing for sound waves to bounce off of, no way for them to return, only reams and reams of static nothing.

Today was Sarah's birthday. Or it would have been Sarah's birthday, if she had lived to see it. Iris wondered which verb tense was correct—was or would have been. Did you keep having birthdays after you were dead?

Sarah would be twelve.
Anne of Green Gables
had been her favorite book. She'd wanted Iris to love it as much as she did. And Iris liked it all right, but not as much as funnier stuff, or books with spies.

But when Iris had bought this book and secreted it home, she spent an hour flipping through its pages.

One part in particular reminded her of Sarah: “‘Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them—that's the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.'”

Before she opened the closet, Iris peeked around the corner into the kitchen—her parents were still fiddling with the dishwasher.

Then Iris turned the door handle and peeked inside.

The closet was musty and dark. There were the coats on the hangers. There was Sarah's tennis racket, leaning against the wall.

Iris took half a step into the closet. She whispered, “Sarah?”

There wasn't an answer, which didn't surprise Iris, after the failure with the recorder, but still she felt less alone. Like Sarah was listening, even if she couldn't answer.

“I got you a present,” Iris said. She paused for a minute, unsure what to do with the ribbon-wrapped book. Then she knelt and placed it on the floor next to the tennis racket. She could still hear her parents' voices, laughing as they argued over the best way to load the dishwasher.

Iris blinked into the closet's darkness.

She thought about it all again. She remembered how they'd stood there together, near the edge of the schoolyard, waiting for Sarah's mom to pick them up. Iris had been leaning against the fence; Sarah had been closer to the curb.

It was a fine day, like all days were—a big blue sky, salty fresh air, a breeze that wasn't cold and seemed to whisper that summer would be coming soon.

Alison Fredricks and her mom drove by, honking cheerfully and waving. Their windows were rolled down.

It had been a Friday. The weekend was there, and Sarah and Iris had been making plans.

“Let's stay at your place,” Sarah said. “My mom is making that awful meatloaf tonight.”

And those were the last words Iris ever heard Sarah say.

Because then the car came around the corner, too fast, and not in its own lane, black like a shadow but not harmless like one. And there had been a scream that sounded like a person, except maybe it had been a car's brakes—stepped on hard, but not
that
car's, because later the police would say that it hadn't even slowed down. The hood of the car had scooped Sarah up like she was made of stuffing or straw, like she didn't weigh anything at all.

At the hospital the police officer told Iris's parents, “It's a miracle that your girl is okay. Not even a scratch. Someone up there must have been looking out for her today.”

But if that was true—if it
was
a miracle that Iris was unharmed, if someone “up there”
had
been looking out for her, then what did it mean that Sarah was the opposite of unharmed? That Sarah was dead?

No matter how many times she thought about it, Iris couldn't see how it made any sense.

Right then, kneeling in the hall closet, the hanging coats swaying around her like mourners, Iris wanted nothing more than to see Sarah step forward and pick up the book. She wanted it so strongly, so completely, that it seemed as if it must happen, as if it
would
surely happen if only she waited long enough, believed deeply enough. But it didn't happen. And at last she stood, and sighed. “Happy Birthday,” she whispered. She stepped back out and shut the door.

 

Winter was long and deep. It snowed a few times, but mostly it rained, and the rain turned the occasional snow to slush. By the middle of March, it had warmed enough that Iris's mom said she could ride the bus to school again, and Iris's dad started to get busy preparing for his garden.

He'd spent the winter sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a rotating pile of gardening books that he'd checked out of the library. He'd taken three more trips to his favorite gardening supply store in Portland and had started following half a dozen gardening blogs.

One of his favorite books was all about identifying and eliminating common soil pests, and about the natural enemies of pests—the good bugs that would prey on the bad bugs. It was full of close-up photographs of beetles, wasps, and flies. Iris found it hard to believe that a fly could ever be a good thing. Her favorite was the assassin bug. It was mostly green with yellow and black stripes down its sides.

“We're going to feast this summer,” Iris's dad said a lot, flipping through his books, tracing a finger along a plump red tomato, a spiny zucchini leaf.

But it was too soon, and too wet, for him to put anything in the ground, so in between preparing the soil with various nutrients and fertilizers, Iris's dad occupied himself with plans—for the garden, and for springtime's flock of chickens. “Orpingtons are probably the way to go,” Iris heard him tell her mother for maybe the fifteenth time. “They're gentle, they lay lots of eggs, and they're good-looking chickens too.”