Virgin (31 page)

"And?"

"They're
clear."

"Cured?"

Dan saw Jose's
head nod in the dark. "Yep. They're now HIV neg. Their peripheral smears
are normal, their CD four
cell counts are
normal, their skin lesions are gone. Not a single goddam trace that they were
ever exposed to HIV. Hell, they both used to be positive for hepatitis B
surface antigen and now even
that's
gone."

Jose sounded as
if he was going to cry.

"But
how--?"

"Nothing I
did. Just gave them the usual--AZT, didanosine, TP-five--and let me tell you,
man, they weren't all that reliable about taking their meds. Fucking miracle,
that's what it is. Medical fucking miracle."

Dan's mouth
went dry. Talk of miracles did that to him lately. So did talk of seeing the
Virgin Mary in his neighborhood.

"Miracle.
You mean like . . . Preacher?"

"I can't
say much about Preacher. I've got no medical records on him from when he was
blind, so I can't say anything about the condition of his retinas when he
couldn't see. All I can say is that his vision has improved steadily until it's
almost twenty-twenty now. But . . . these two AIDS patients, they were
documented cases."

Dan sensed a
certain hesitancy in Jose.

"I
wouldn't happen to know these two patients, would I?"

Jose hesitated,
then sighed. "Normally I wouldn't tell you, but they're going to be in all
the medical journals soon, and from then on they'll be news-show and talk-show
commodities, so I guess it's okay to tell you they're both regulars at your
Loaves and Fishes. You'll hear their names soon enough."

Dan stumbled a
step.

"Oh my
God."

"Well, you
knew some of them had to be HIV positive."

Dan tried to
remember who hadn't been around lately.

"Dandy and
Rider?" he said.

"You
guessed it."

"They had
it but they're
cured?"

"Yep. Both
with a history of IV drug use, formerly HIV positive, now HIV neg. You figure
it out."

Dan was trying
to do just that.

He knew Carrie
wouldn't have to think twice about an explanation when she heard the news: The
Virgin did it.

And how was he
supposed to counter that? Damned if he wasn't beginning to think she might be
right. First Preacher gets his sight back, then people all over the area start
sighting someone they think is the Virgin Mary, and now two of their regular
guests at St. Joe's are cured of AIDS.

The accumulated
weight of evidence was getting too heavy to brush off as mere coincidence.

He glanced at
Jose and noticed he still looked glum.

"So how
come you're not happy?" Dan said.

"Because
when I gave Rider and Dandy the news they gave
me
all the credit."

"So?"

"So I
didn't do anything. And if they go around blabbing that Dr. Martinez can cure
AIDS, it's going to raise a lot of false hopes. And worse, my little clinic is
going to be inundated with people looking for a miracle."

A miracle . . .
that word again.

Dan clapped him
on the shoulder, trying to lighten him up.

"Who
knows. Maybe you've got the healing touch."

"Not
funny, Dan. I don't have the resources to properly treat the people I'm seeing
now. If the clinic starts attracting crowds I don't know what I'll do."
Suddenly he grinned. "Maybe I'll direct them all to St. Joe's Loaves and
Fishes. If they're looking for a miracle, that's the place to find it."

A knot of dread
constricted in Dan's chest, stopping him in his tracks.

"Don't
even kid about that!"

"Hey,
think about it," Jose said, laughing. "It all fits. Preacher regained
his sight there, and both Dandy and Rider are regulars. Maybe the cure-all can
be found at Loaves and Fishes. Maybe Sister Carrie's stirring some special
magical ingredient into that soup of hers."

Dan forced a
smile. "Maybe. I'll have to ask her."

Carrie held up
two Ziploc bags. "Here they are. The magic ingredients."

When he'd
mentioned Jose's remarks to her this morning, she'd smiled and crooked a finger
at him, leading him down to the subcellar. It was the first time he'd been down
here since he'd carried in the Virgin. After Carrie lit the candles, Dan saw
that the Virgin looked different. Her hair was neater, tucked away under her
wimple, and those long, grotesque fingernails had been clipped off. The air was
suffused with the sweet scent of the fresh flowers that surrounded the bier.

Carrie then
reached under her bier and produced these two clear plastic bags.

Dan took them
from her and examined them. One contained an ounce or so of a fine, off-white
powder; the
other was full of a feather-light gray substance that looked for all the world
like finely chopped . . . hair.

He glance back
at Carrie and found her smiling, staring at him, her eyes luminous in the
candle glow.

"What are
these?" he said, hefting the bags.

"Hers."

"I don't
get it."

Carrie reached
out and gently touched the bag of fine, gray strands. "This one's her
hair." She then touched the bag with the powder. "And this is what's
left of her fingernails."

"Fingernails?"

"I trimmed
her nails and filed the cuttings down to powder."

"Why on
earth . . . ?"

Carrie explained
about the strand of hair in Preacher's soup, and how he'd begun to see again
almost immediately after.

"But that
was coincidence," Dan said. "It had to be."

"Are you
sure?" she said, trapping him with those eyes.

"No,"
he said. "I'm not sure. I no longer know what I'm sure of or
not
sure
of anymore. I haven't been sure of much for a long time, and now I'm not even
sure about the things I've been sure I couldn't be sure of."

Carrie started
to laugh.

"Sounds
like a country-western song, doesn't it," Dan said, then he too started to
laugh.

"Oh,
Lord," Carrie said after a moment. "When was the last time we laughed
together?"

"Before
Israel," Dan said.

Slowly, she
sobered. 'That seems like so long ago."

"Doesn't
it."

Silence hung
between them.

"Anyway,"
Carrie finally said, "I've been dosing the soup with tiny bits of her hair
and her ground-up fingernails every day since she arrived."

Dan couldn't
help making a face. "Carrie!"

"Don't
look at me like that, Dan. If I put in a couple of snippets of hair I mix it
with the rosemary. If I use some fingernail, I rub it together with some
pepper. Tiny amounts, unnoticeable, completely indistinguishable from the
regular spices."

"But they're
not
spices."

"They are
indeed! You can't deny that things have changed upstairs since the Virgin
arrived."

Dan thought
about that and realized he couldn't deny that things had changed. In fact,
strange things had been happening at the Loaves and Fishes during the past
month or so. Nothing so dramatic as the return of Preacher's sight, but the
place had
changed.
Nothing that would be apparent to an outsider, but
Dan knew things were different.

First off, the
mood had changed. The undercurrent of suspicion and paranoia that had prevailed
whenever the guests gathered for a meal was gone. They no longer sat hunched
over their meals, one arm hooked around the plate while the free hand shoveled
food into the mouth.
They ate more slowly now, and they talked. Instead of
arguments over who was hogging the salt or who'd got a bigger serving, Dan had
actually heard civil conversation along the tables.

Come to think
of it, there hadn't been a fight in two weeks--a record. The previously
demented, paranoid, and generally psychotic guests seemed calmer, more lucid,
almost rational.
Fewer of them were coming in drunk or
high. Rider had stopped talking about finding his old
Harley and had even mentioned checking out a Help Wanted sign he'd seen outside
a cycle repair shop.

But the biggest
change had been in Carrie.

She'd withdrawn
from him. It had always seemed to Dan that Carrie had room in her life for God,
her order, St. Joe's Loaves and Fishes, and one other. Dan had been that one
other for a while. Now he'd lost her. The Virgin had supplanted him in that
remaining spot.

Yet try as he
might he could feel no animosity. She was
happy.
He couldn't remember
seeing her so radiant. His only regret was that he wasn't the source of that
inner light. Part of him wanted to label her as crazy, deranged, psychotic, but
then he'd have to find another explanation for the changes upstairs . . . and
the cures.

"You think
she's responsible," he said, stepping past her to stare down at the prone,
waxy figure. She looked so much neater, so much more . . . attractive with her
hair fixed and her nails trimmed.

"I
know
she is."

Dan's gaze
roamed past the flickering candles to the flower-stuffed vases that rimmed the
far side and clustered at the head and foot of the makeshift bier.

"You've
done a wonderful job with her. You've turned a coal room into a grotto. It's
like a shrine. But how do you keep sneaking off with all these flowers? Aren't
you afraid one of these trips somebody in the church is going to catch you and
ask you what you're up to?"

"One of
what trips? I haven't borrowed any flowers from the church since she
arrived."

Dan turned back
to the flowers--mums, daffodils, gardenias, gladiolus, their stalks were
straight and tall, their blossoms full and unwrinkled--then looked at Carrie
again.

"But these
are . . ."

"The same ones I brought down the first
day." Her smile was blinding. "Isn't it wonderful?"

Dan continued
to stare into those bright, wide, guileless eyes, looking for some hint of
deception, but he found none.

Suddenly he
wished for a chair. His knees felt rubbery. He needed to sit down.

"My God,
Carrie."

"No,"
she said. "Just His Mother."

That wasn't
what he needed to hear. Things like this didn't happen in the real world, at
least not in Dan's real world. God stayed in his heaven and watched his
creations make the best of things down here while priests like Dan acted as
go-betweens. There was no part in the script for His Mother--especially not in
the subceller of a Lower East Side church.

"Is it
her, Carrie? Can it really be
her!"

"Yes,"
she said, nodding, beaming, unhindered by the vaguest trace of doubt.
"It's her. Can't you feel it?"

The only thing
Dan could feel right now was an uneasy chill seeping into his soul.

"What have
we done, Carrie? What have we
done?"

AIDS CURES LINKED TO VIRGIN MARY

A
prayer vigil outside St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church on the Lower East Side
last

night attracted
over two thousand people. Many of those attending proclaimed the recent well-

publicized AIDS
cures as miracles related to the sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the

area during the
past month. When asked about the connection, Fr. Daniel Fitzpatrick, associate

pastor of St.
Joseph's, responded, "The Church has not verified the figure that has been

sighted as
actually representing the Virgin Mary, and certainly there is no established
link