The Question of Miracles (5 page)

“Anytime, sweetie.” Katherine turned back to her book.

 

Boris spent the next hour and a half explaining the intricacies of Magic. Iris did her best to be a good guest and pay attention, but by the time her mom arrived to pick her up, Iris's left eye was twitching.

She heard the doorbell and sprang up, scattering the cards in front of her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I've gotta go. Thanks for having me over.”

“Here!” Boris stacked up the deck Iris had been using and wrapped it with a rubber band from his desk drawer. “Take these with you. They're for you to keep. Bring them to school and we can play at lunch if you want.”

Iris couldn't think of a polite way to refuse.

She found her mom talking with Katherine just inside the front door. Their expressions were serious, and when her mom caught sight of Iris, she seemed to quickly change the subject.

This wasn't the first time Iris had seen this happen—some caring adult leaning in to listen to Iris's mom, commiserating, maybe, or sympathizing. It had happened more often in Seal Beach—at the grocery store, or the coffee shop, even outside the house by the row of mailboxes. Here in Corvallis not everyone knew their whole story, so Iris was spared most of those looks, those overheard snippets of conversation. But not all of them.

“Thanks again for looking after Iris,” her mom said.

“Yeah, thanks, Katherine,” Iris said as she pulled on her boots and raincoat.

“Did you have a nice time?” asked Katherine.

Iris silently weighed the hot chocolate against the compulsory game of Magic, but finally nodded.

“Come back anytime.” Katherine switched on the porch light and waved after them as Iris and her mom made a run for the car through the rain. The day had dimmed to evening, and Iris saw the puffs of her breath as she splashed down the walkway.

Then they slammed themselves into the car, her mom cranked on the heat to high, and they headed home.

When Iris and her mom got home, Iris couldn't help but compare Boris's house to the “homestead.”

Boris's house had other kids. Fifteen–Love.

Boris's house had an endless supply of snacks. Thirty–Love.

Boris's house didn't feel sad. Forty–Love.

“Meow,” said Charles. He stood by the cold, dark fireplace, as if imploring Iris to do something about it.

The homestead had Charles. Maybe that was something.

“Mom,” Iris called, “Charles wants a fire.”

“So build him one,” her mom called back. “Let me know if you want help lighting it.”

Iris had never built a fire before. She'd ask her dad for help, but he still wasn't back from Portland. Charles looked desperate. Well, how hard could it be to build a fire?

There were logs stacked next to the fireplace. Iris pulled open the screen and piled a few pieces on the grate, trying to leave room in between for air.

She rummaged through her father's stack of newspapers, checking to make sure each crossword puzzle she came across was completely filled in before crumpling the sheet and stuffing it between the logs.

On the mantel was the long-nosed lighter. It seemed kind of silly to call her mother in just to ignite the newspapers, so Iris pushed down the safety latch and pulled the lighter's trigger.

A tiny orange flame sprang to life. Charles stepped forward and twitched his nose. He looked happier already.

Iris touched the flame to one exposed newspaper edge. It blackened, wrinkled back a little, then glowed hot as it caught fire. Charles leaped up onto the hearth, settled next to Iris, and curled his tail around his legs.

Iris and Charles watched as the fire grew. His ears were forward, like he was trying to warm the tips of them. Iris held her hands out too, rubbing them in front of the growing flames.

Almost as good as the light and warmth,
Iris thought,
is a fire's sound.
She listened to the wood as it shifted and crackled. Like it was another voice. Next to her, Charles relaxed, his tail unfurling as the room warmed.

Then there was the sound of tires on gravel, followed by the slam of a car door. A moment later the front door swung open and banged closed. Iris's dad was home.

“Hello, hello,” he called. Iris heard two thumps as his boots dropped onto the rubber mat he had placed near the door. Then he came into the den.

“Pigeon!” he said. “Did you build that fire all by yourself?”

“Uh-huh.”

Her dad came over and examined her handiwork. “Lots of room for air,” he said. “Just enough newspaper. Crossword puzzles?”

“Only the filled-in ones.”

“That's my girl.” He rubbed her hair affectionately. Iris blew the strands out of her face. “You sure are getting grown up. What else can you do that I don't know about?”

Iris shrugged.

“What did you do this afternoon?”

Iris told her dad about visiting Boris's house. She told him about Magic and the incredible assortment of snack food. Then she asked him about Portland and the special gardening store he'd visited.

His eyes twinkled in a way that Iris hadn't seen in a long time. At first she thought that maybe it was just the firelight, but as he told her all about his trip to the city—“You should have seen this place, Pigeon! So many different kinds of organic fertilizers!”—Iris slowly realized that the shine in her father's expression was because he was happy.

And she realized that this made her mad. It didn't seem right that he would be happy—
could
be happy—just six months after Sarah's death.

She remembered how he had looked—how both of her parents had looked—in the weeks after that terrible day. How would they have looked if she had been standing slightly to the left, in Sarah's place? If the outcome were different? If Sarah were alive, and maybe Iris were dead instead?

 

At dinner, her dad told them all about his plans for spring. “I really think that I can grow most of our food right here on our own land! It'll take a few seasons, but I think we can be pretty autonomous. And guess what else . . .” He looked like he could barely contain his surprise. “Chickens!” he burst out at last. “We're getting chickens! Chicks in the spring—we can hatch them ourselves, in a rented incubator from the shop in Portland.”

“For eggs, right? The chickens will lay eggs?”

Her father, who had been alternately digging into his dinner and gesturing with both his fork and knife, turned to Iris. “Sure,” he said. “Some of them.”

Iris wasn't hungry anymore. “What about the rest of them?”

Iris's mother cleared her throat.

Her dad didn't notice. “Well, sweetie,” he said, “they won't all be hens. Some of them will be egg layers, and some of them will be fryers.”

“For
frying?
”

“We buy chicken all the time at the store,” he said. “This will just be . . . cutting out the middleman.”

“No way.” Iris's voice was shaking, but not quiet. “There is
no way
we are killing chickens.”

Iris's dad opened his mouth to respond, but her mom gave him one of her
looks.
He closed his mouth. After a moment he said, “Okay. No fryers.”

“No fryers,” Iris repeated. Then she said, “May I be excused?”

 

Upstairs, her room was cold, which didn't make a lot of sense to Iris because she thought that heat was supposed to rise.

She flopped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling. She thought about her father, how excited he had looked. She thought about chickens. Fryers and layers. After a while she got up and pulled the deck of Magic cards out of her backpack. She returned to her bed and shuffled the cards for a while, liking the sound they made when she split the deck, arched the cards, and fanned them back together. Apart, together. Apart, together. She liked that—how you could take a deck of cards and divide it into pieces and then put it together again, in a completely different order, but that it was still the same deck.

As long as all the cards were there, she reminded herself. If you lose just one card, then all you have is a bunch of laminated rectangular pieces of paper. It's not really a deck anymore at all. She supposed that this wasn't exactly true with Magic cards. In that game, you
could
switch out one card for another. But, Iris thought, that would feel traitorous.

 

Iris woke up briefly when her parents came in to check on her later. The cards had spilled from her hands all over the bedspread and onto the floor, and Iris heard herself say, “Make sure they're all there. All sixty of them,” and she felt her mom pull off her socks while her dad turned back the covers and tucked her in.

She had no idea what time it was when she woke again, and she wasn't sure what woke her. It wasn't the sound of rain against the roof, which had turned into a downpour. She was certain of it. Whatever it was came from beneath her, not above.

Iris swung up to sitting. She sat very still on the edge of her bed, waiting for the sound to come again.

It didn't.

She knew she should lie down and go back to sleep. Instead, Iris lowered her feet to the cold, wooden-planked floor and felt her way across the room. She pulled her fleece robe from its hook on the back of the door and cinched the belt before running her hand along the wall, finding the light switch and flipping it on, squeezing her eyes tightly at first and then slowly opening them, just a crack, then a little more, until at last she could open them all the way.

Her room all around her looked perfectly average—the boxes still stacked in the corners because she hadn't bothered to unpack yet and wouldn't let her dad do it for her, the crumpled clothes in the hamper next to her dresser, a messy desk underneath the night-black window.

Immediately upon leaving her room, Iris regretted letting her eyes adjust to the light. She blinked into the hallway's darkness and felt her way to the banister, then down the steep staircase. There were seventeen stairs. She counted them every time.

On the sixteenth stair, Iris stopped and listened. At last she heard the sound again—it was a lament, a wail, a beseeching prayer.

It came, she thought, from the closet under the stairs.

She stepped down the final stair.

Her eyes were readjusting to the dark. She couldn't see perfectly, but she could make out the six separate panels of the closet door. The knob. The thin, horizontal strip of darkness where the door didn't quite meet the floor.

“Sarah?” she whispered.

Nothing.

Iris imagined what was behind the door—the tennis racket, the rod of hangers each holding a body-shaped coat, the basket of gloves and hats.

“Sarah,” she said again. “Are you there?”

She heard another sound. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight. Her heart either pounded harder or missed a beat—she couldn't tell which. Her stomach roiled with fear.

All children are miracles,
Katherine had said.

And though her family wasn't religious, Iris closed her eyes and prayed.
Give me a miracle.

Then she opened the closet door.

The coats on the rack swung gently, though there was no draft.

Iris blinked back tears. “Sarah?”

It wasn't Sarah; not this time. The coats parted and the cat emerged from the shadows.

“Charles,” Iris said.

His
meow
was pitiful. He shivered and rubbed against Iris's leg.

Iris picked him up and tucked him into her robe. He started purring immediately, like he was too relieved to worry about conserving energy. Iris gently shut the closet door and went back upstairs. When she got to her room, she left her robe on and pulled the covers up around her and Charles both. He slept there, against her chest, an oversize heart outside her body.

At breakfast, Iris's mom said, “Did you have a hard time sleeping last night, Pigeon?”

Iris looked up from her plate of eggs and toast. “Sort of. Why?”

Her mom smiled, but it was sad. “I thought maybe I heard you downstairs, saying Sarah's name.”

Iris looked back down. She pierced a piece of egg with her fork but didn't eat it.

“We all miss Sarah,” said her mom. “Your dad and I miss her too.”

A tear slipped from Iris's eye and splashed on her plate.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Iris shook her head.

“We all
need
to talk about it, baby.” Her mom took a sip of coffee. Iris loved to fix her mother's coffee—she loved to scoop in the sugar, pour in the white cream. Her mom liked to keep her spoon in her mug, tucking it behind her index finger to keep it from slipping around and hitting her face.

It would have been simpler to take out the spoon, but her mom liked it that way, so Iris always left the spoon in the cup when she fixed her mom's coffee.

Iris spoke. “I don't know if Sarah is really gone,” she said. “Or, at least, not all-the-way gone.” It wasn't easy to speak around the lump in her throat, and she had to wait a long time before her mom answered.

“The people we love never go away completely. We keep them with us, in our hearts.”

Iris met her mother's eyes and wondered if she really believed that, or if it was just something to say. “I think Sarah is
here,
” she said. “I hear her sometimes, moving around.”

Her mother nodded, like she wasn't surprised that Iris had said this, but her face didn't exactly light up with excitement, either. “I think that's probably pretty normal, to hope for that,” she said.

Iris felt angry. “Miracles happen, you know.”

Her mother took another sip of coffee, the spoon tucked behind her finger. “Do they?”

Iris didn't feel like talking about it anymore. “The bus'll be here soon. I've got to walk down the driveway.” She pushed back from the table and went to get her boots and coat from the hallway. Her mother followed her.