The Miracle Girl

by Andrew Roe

  By 5:05, he’s already changed his clothes and turned in his soggy shirt. Alphonso no more. Alphonso has left the building. No one says good-­bye, good luck. For everyone else it’s just another day at DP, after all. And he’s not going to linger, he’s in a hurry because he wants to make it to the TempPeople offices before 5:30 so he can get his check so he can cash it first thing tomorrow morning and send off money to Karen in the mail. By 5:10 he’s inside his car and driving on Lake Mead Parkway and he knows he’ll never see any of those people again, and by 5:25 he’s walking into Phil Wagman’s office, inquiring about his next assignment once the check (the final amount always disappointing) is in his hand. But instead of answering right away Phil leans back in his Captain Kirk chair, and John’s afraid there’s going to be dialogue, a discussion of some kind, when all he wants is to get out of there and return to his hovel and eat the carne asada burrito he’ll pick up on the way home and then fall asleep.

  “John, why don’t you sit down?” asks Phil, who’s one of those guys who shaves his head but really shouldn’t due to incongruent skull shape and multiple moles and blackheads, which otherwise would have been hidden if he had hair. “Take a load off. Relax. It’s Friday. We both survived another week.”

  John reluctantly sits and can’t help but look at the large eight-­by-­ten framed family portrait that dominates not only Phil’s desk but the entire room. Done at one of those mall photo places. A nature-­y, fall-­harvest background. Trees and a wooden fence. There’s Phil, Mrs. Phil, Phil Junior. Matching shirts. Smiling. Beaming. They all seem as one, one package, one unit, unable to exist without the other.

  “Are you sure,” Phil begins in a concerned, fatherly tone, even though they’re about the same age, “are you sure you want to start right up with another job again? I could get someone else. You’ve been going pretty hard, going from gig to gig without any time off. You’re entitled. You’re due.”

  Phil must not have had time to shave his head this morning, because there’s more stubble than usual, a prickly eruption across his scalp.

  “No thanks,” says John. “I’m good. I’m ready to go. I can do weekends, too. Weekends would be fine.”

  Phil catches John looking at the photo. It’s an opening. Then Phil smiles the same smile that’s in the picture: caring, confident, professional.

  “You have a family, John?”

  Uh-­oh.

  “I do,” John admits. “Back in California.”

  “Back in California? California isn’t that far.”

  “It feels far.”

  “And they’re there and . . . you’re here?”

  John nods, regrets the furtive glance at the picture, which obviously wasn’t so furtive.

  “That’s right,” John confirms, noncommittal as possible. “We’re living apart.”

  “I see. Well, I hope it all works out . . . the way it’s supposed to work out.”

  “Me, too.”

  “If you’d like to take some time off, though, to take care of some of the family stuff, that would be fine. You could take the week, drive out if you’d like.”

  “No thanks. I need the money. I’m ready to start on Monday.”

  “I’ve got something. It’s another warehouse assignment, for about a month.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “And something else came in this morning, for customer service, which could work out after that, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested.”

  Phil hands him the file with all the info for the warehouse job.

  A month, John thinks. That would take him through November. He’s good for another month.

  IT’S ANOTHER SOLITARY Friday night at Desert Piss—that’s what everyone calls John’s apartment complex (true name: Desert Mist Plaza) and for good reason: It’s the type of place where nobody wants to live but there really isn’t much choice. The bogus little creek running through the main courtyard had dried up long ago, the pool brimmed with sludge and empties (one morning a motorcycle wound up there, and it was weeks before someone removed it), and herds of ratty barefoot kids roamed around like untamed wild beasts—John had never been so frightened of children. The adults weren’t much better; the constant yelling, the boozy swaggers, and how they’d throw heavy objects—stereo speakers, crock pots, George Foreman grills—off their balconies, John narrowly escaping a flying chip-­and-­dip plate the day after he’d moved in. TVs blared constantly.

  Even though John’s been living here for months he still occasionally gets lost in Desert Piss (which is large, sprawling, and actually a series of four connected apartment complexes, each the same in terms of layout and minimalist construction and skeletal landscaping), and this is what happens tonight as he takes a wrong turn after dumping his garbage, failing, then, at this one simple task. Once again he finds himself wandering through Desert Piss’s network of cracked sidewalks and neglected paths, trying to decipher the perplexing system for numbering apartments and units (the unit he just passed, for example, stops at 133 and the next one picks up at 247, while the apartments themselves are sometimes designated by a letter, sometimes by another number). And it isn’t long after he resigns himself to an extra fifteen minutes of travel time back to his apartment that he sees a little girl wandering around, crying, it looks like, over by the entrance to what’s supposed to be the rec room, which merely contains a ping-­pong table with no net and an assortment of Nixon-­era board games with most of the pieces missing. It’s probably close to midnight. He doesn’t recognize the girl, not surprising given the vast number of children that live in the complex and that are, also not surprisingly, spawned here. Yet unlike those kids, this girl seems, well, kidlike; she’s softer, gentler; not so reform-­school-­looking and hardened and prematurely aged; and she may even still enjoy Disney animated features and trips to the zoo. He wants badly to be back in the womb of his apartment, alone and confined and indistinct, but he can’t just walk past this little girl, can he? That would constitute yet another moral failing on his part. From what he can discern here in the darkness she’s about the age Anabelle was at the time of the accident. Six, seven. Every kid he comes across nowadays seems to be right around the same age as Anabelle at the time of the accident.

  “Hello there,” he volunteers. “Are you lost?”

  “Yeah,” the girl sighs, sniffles. “I was looking for the soda machine. But when I put my money in nothing came out. I pressed the button but it didn’t work.”

  “Does your mom live here?”

  “No.”

  “Does your dad live here?”

  “No. My dad lives in Hollywood. Not Hollywood, California, which is what everyone thinks when you say it. Hollywood, Florida. He has another daughter but she’s not my sister. She’s my stepsister. She has cottage-­cheese breath.”

  “Uh-­huh. Then who are you here with?”

  “My mom.”

  “Your mom’s here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s visiting someone? She knows someone who lives here?”

  “Yeah.” Sighing again.

  “Well let’s see if we can find her.”

  “But you better be careful. I have pink eye.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  So together they search for the girl’s mother, venturing down another path, the little girl reaching out for his hand—the girl’s hand warm, alive, needy. Despite the late hour, most of the apartments show signs of life, emitting dim lights or the periodic lightning flashes of televisions, along with the accompanying sound of gunfire, screeching tires, fevered yelling. There’s the usual Friday night assortment of beer bottles lining the pool, some of which had fallen in, bobbing in the black water like tiny, useless buoys.

  Any fears about being lost vanish now that she has a companion. The girl’s name, he soon finds out, is Rachel. He also soon finds out about her life, more than he’s comfortable hearing about, details involving her mother’s body and boyfriends, the shape an
d color of her poop (both hers and her mother’s), things like that. She’s one of those kids so willing to divulge information and ask personal questions that you begin to wonder what’s behind this rabid intimacy.

  “How long did you say you’ve been out here?”

  “A pretty real long time. Are you married?”

  “Yes, but—” and he stops himself.

  “But what?”

  “We’re . . . estranged.”

  “What’s estranged?”

  Didn’t he just have this conversation with Phil? She pronounces the word—estranged—like it’s something from another language, another country far beyond her geographic or cultural knowledge.

  “It means, basically, that the two people are still married, technically, all right, but they don’t, uh, live together anymore. For various reasons. They decide that it’s best to be apart. For a while at least. So it could be temporary, it could be permanent. It’s hard to say. It’s . . . complicated.”

  That word again: complicated. John feels a compulsion to explain further, to confess to someone, and so what if the confessee happens to be six years old. But he doesn’t.

  “My mom and dad don’t live together,” Rachel responds. This was at least the third time she had informed him of this fact. Jesus, who stays married these days? What are the latest statistics?

  “Do you have kids?” Rachel asks.

  “Yes I do.”

  “How many?”

  “Just one.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.”

  “What were you like when you were a kid?”

  “Oh I don’t know. I was probably like you.”

  “But I’m a girl, silly.” She finds this very funny. How stupid can he be? Pretty stupid, apparently. “What did you do? What stuff?”

  “The usual I suppose: riding bikes, going to school, looking forward to summer vacation, watching movies.”

  The question kind of throws him. Sure, he’d done all the things he mentioned (who hadn’t), but what else? What had he really been like at seven? Ten? Twelve? His memory had never been good, and all those murky years suddenly seem even murkier, sealed away, unattainable. Mostly he remembers being by himself, how ghostly his mother was, how his father had him every other weekend and would take him to a bowling-­alley bar in Whittier, John’s clothes smelling of beer and cigarettes after. One thing he’d never done was confide in total strangers.

  They roam for a good fifteen minutes, John asking if this or that looked familiar. Nothing did. They pass a cigarette-­smoking woman, who eyes them suspiciously, and a group of swaggering teenagers, who ignore them completely. Finally the girl gravitates toward a ground-­floor corner apartment with the door partly open. She points.

  John asks, “You think your mom’s in there?”

  “Uh-­huh.”

  But she wants him to check first. The door is open a quarter of the way and the lights are on. Peering in, though, he can’t see anybody, just a sagging sofa and a large TV, plus the same oatmeal-­colored carpet and yellowing walls that defined the décor of his apartment. So he knocks, careful not to open the door any farther than it already is. But nothing. No response.

  “You sure?” John asks. “You sure this is the right apartment?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure or really sure?”

  “Really pretty sure.”

  John and the girl step inside. The apartment exhibits the familiar disarray of men who live without women and do so unapologetically, like it’s a dare to see how far they can take it. The place reeks of greasy fries and spilt beer and other unidentifiable odors. Limited seating options. Left out on a TV tray next to an empty liter of Diet Dr Pepper are a couple of pipes, and not pipes of the pot-­smoking variety. This is a whole other level, thinks John, who God knows enjoys his bud but has always been hesitant, even afraid, to graduate to harder drugs.

  “Can you watch TV with me for a while?” Rachel asks.

  They settle on the sofa—one of those couches that seem to immediately swallow you upon sitting, and once you’re down, you’re down; you’re planted and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to hoist yourself up—and John stares straight ahead and sees his life before him. Not in a flash. It’s actually there. His life. There. There on the TV. His daughter. His wife. His house. He looks over at Rachel, who’s watching, too. He blinks, rubs his eyes, shakes his head—all the clichéd things you do when you can’t believe your eyes. And he most definitely can’t believe his eyes. He manages to remove himself from the sofa (though it’s not easy, as expected) so he can turn up the volume. And he continues to stand because he cannot sit.

  From the outside the house looks the same, still in need of a paint job and a new roof and reminding him of the Saab-­driving realtor who sold it to them and had the nerve to call it a “fixer-­upper” (the down payment culled together from various family members, a dead aunt’s will, and John and Karen’s combined savings), and next they zoom in on the front door and concrete porch where he used to sit at night, alone, and drink beer and watch the streetlights and wonder how long he could hold out and how long it took for love to become something else entirely. Entering the rooms and hallways he knows so well. The reporter person says something about this being the house where it all began, located in a little-­known area of Los Angeles, so near the capital of glitz and glamour and yet so far, where dreams have more to do with survival than stardom. Then there is Karen, emphatic bags framing her eyes but emanating an undeniable look of exhilaration, of inner glow escaping outward. She’s talking about Anabelle, how the accident happened, the fucked-­up details and all that happened after, how there was a time when she was afraid to leave the house, it got so bad. Then there is his daughter, Belle, laid out in bed like always, like a prematurely prepared corpse, her face as white and blank and unknowable as snow, the open fish mouth and long Rapunzel hair. Her room filled with machines and stuffed animals and people. And even though he’s witnessing the reality of her, his daughter, on TV, right now (comatose, paralyzed, mute, eternally confined to her special bed, with guardrails and wheels and a high-­tech remote, which had cost like a grand and put them further in debt), he’s also thinking of her as a normal, carefree, gurgling child when she was first learning to walk and talk and was mesmerized by his mustache (“mush-­ash,” she called it, one of her all-­time favorite words, and which is how he still thinks of it, “mush-­ash”). Whether or not little Anabelle knows what’s happening around her remains as much of a mystery as her reputed ability to heal the sick and comfort those in need of spiritual guidance.

  Now they are interviewing people. People he doesn’t know. People standing in line in front of the house, waiting to enter, it appears. Midwestern faces, sunburned faces, haunted faces. Apparently they have come from all over to spend time with the girl who makes statues weep and people whole. The little miracle girl who’s a bright and shining star. A woman and her daughter, who’ve been waiting for hours and have driven all the way from Texas to offer a prayer for an ailing uncle in need of a miracle (specifically: an organ donor, liver), break down and cry, it’s just too much. And there’s more about his daughter, the rapidly expanding legend: reports of skin discolorations in her hands and feet, of sudden bleeding without explanation. (John trying to comprehend, process, but not doing a very good job of it.) The Catholic Archdiocese has begun an official investigation but is hesitant to make any comments at this early stage, a young movie-­star handsome priest only willing to go on the record as saying that the old cliché is true: the Lord works in mysterious ways. Father Jim something. Tanned and gym-­fit. He didn’t look like a priest. Not like any priest he’d ever seen anyway, which was mostly the TV variety. Back to Karen, who’s now in the kitchen and who’s wearing makeup and has her hair pulled back, something she rarely did. I’m as surprised, as mystified as anyone. Who could have imagined. Not in my wildest dreams. I can’t explain it myself. I really can’t. But I know what I
see. People come here and then they’re different when they leave. Maybe what they pray for happens and maybe it doesn’t, but they’re different. Anabelle touches them. She brings them peace. The reporter starts to wrap it up, appearing in the front yard with the long line of people behind her for effect, closing with a bit about hope—something that we could all use a little more of these days.

  Does this all mean he’s dying? Is he dead? And what he just witnessed was some kind of final fuck-­you flash before The End? Something for him to think about for all eternity? His last punishment perhaps?

  Walking backward. Sitting down. The sofa creaking mightily. Fuck. Shit. The girl, Rachel, asleep now, snoring. Stunned isn’t strong enough of a word—no word is strong enough a word. A word needs to be invented for this, for what he saw, what he’s feeling. It’s like there’s bad electricity in his brain. Snap, crackle, pop. He rubs his eyes some more, trying to remember if there’d been any mention of him. Was there? He can’t be sure. It was like watching a dream, a home movie that he’d been edited out of. He can’t be sure of anything. Someone playing Jedi mind games with him. This isn’t the life you’re looking for. He wants to press the rewind button, confirm that it was real, that he saw what he saw.