The Miracle Girl

by Andrew Roe

  She doesn’t want to be alone either. You have your kids, sure, but kids are different. You can have kids and still feel alone. You need more. And her “more” these days was Victor. She knew things had gone as far as they could go; there had been no progress or forward momentum for months. But he was a body. He was a man. He made her laugh, too, sometimes. People said he looked a little like Erik Estrada.

  And by the time the day is done and she finally makes it home, five client visits in all, a different city each time, back and forth between L.A. and Orange Counties, eating a late lunch (El Pollo Loco) in her car while driving yet again, she’s exhausted; it’s already dark, the lights in the apartment not on, just the familiar TV glow visible behind the mini blinds as she climbs the stairs to the second floor; and inside she finds the dishes from the morning still stacked in the sink; the kid’s homework not done; her sons, David and Danny, holed up in their room; no dinner made, no laundry done; the apartment in the same state as when she’d left at seven o’clock that morning; and Victor sprawled on the couch, like a teenager, waiting, wearing sweatpants, taking up space. He’d been home all day. Her “more.”

  Linda stands there in the living room until he’s forced to notice her, acknowledge her. It wasn’t going to get any better. His body still did not listen. Maybe she should give in and talk to the girl. Make her prayer to Anabelle. Ask for the necessary strength. Nothing else had worked so far. And look where that had gotten her.

  “Hey,” says Victor. “What time is it? I think I fell asleep.”

  First there was Steve, who she’d made the mistake of marrying, father of her first son: welder, drummer, cheater, liar, car tinkerer, addict, charmer, lover of Tommy’s burgers, distant, unwilling to give. Then there was Antonio, who she’d had the wisdom not to marry, father of her second son: carpenter, poker player, movie quoter, buyer of Lotto tickets and imported beer, unremarkable, plain, constant maker of promises he could not keep, two kids of his own living back East somewhere, also distant, but willing (sometimes) to give, though usually giving the wrong thing. And now Victor.

  “It’s late,” she says. “It’s very late.”

  How many times could you be wrong about love?

  * * *

  Just ask her husband: Mavis Morris isn’t one for patience. So there’s no way in Hades she’s going to wait in that line. She’s a neighbor after all. Has paid her dues. Has lived here in El Portal for most of her life. Can remember when the neighborhood was mostly white, then mostly black, then mostly Mexican. Now it’s sort of a combination of all the above, along with a scattering of Asians, Middle Easterners, Ukrainians, you name it. “Multicultural,” she guesses, at least that’s what they’d call it if they were doing some study or an Eyewitness News Special Report on Channel 7. But that makes it sound like a grand experiment when it’s not. It’s just people—people living together but separate, the usual suspicions and boundaries remaining intact.

  “I’m going,” Mavis announces, finally, emphatically, huffing away from her husband. “I don’t care if it’s crazy or what, doesn’t matter, I’m going right up, walking across the street, marching up the driveway and ringing the doorbell, and I’m not waiting in line, Mar, I’m going right up to the door and say hi there, I’m your neighbor from across the street, Mavis Morris, pleased to meet you, we never met proper before, which I apologize, but you know how it is, and but we used to wave and such sometimes, every once in a while, we’d see each other and wave, from a distance—you remember that? —and but here I am now, saying hello, introducing myself, one neighbor to another, official, and I know there’s a line, there’s all these people waiting, but I was wondering, talking to my husband, Marcus, wondering if it’s different for neighbors, like some kind of exception where you can go to the start of the line. I just figured maybe there was. It’s Karen, right? We shop at the same stores, probably. Have the same mailman. You know, the guy who never smiles and wears the funny straw hat? I used to wave at you in the mornings sometimes. You remember that? Just neighbors being neighbors. Waving at you and your little girl when you were driving her somewhere, school I guess. It was school, right? Neighbors are different, is what I figured.”

  Marcus puts down his newspaper for the third time. It’s a significant gesture. He goes about it slowly, folds it into the four quadrants, then places the result calmly on the kitchen table. Then the final flourish: he removes his reading glasses and sets them on the table, too. There. Now he’s ready.

  “And if you do this,” he begins, “like you say, going there and cutting in line. Say you do these things. And the mother, she takes you to the girl’s room. She closes the door. Says you got your five minutes. Then what? Then what are you going to do? What, exactly, are you going to ask her for?”

  Mavis had been walking over to the refrigerator. But that last line stops her. She turns and stares deep into Marcus’s eyes. He can only hold her gaze for so long. It’s always been this way.

  “You know, Marcus. You know what I’m going to ask. What else?”

  Marcus has no need for this, indignant about it all. But she—she’s willing to try. Why not? What could it hurt? All those years ago, not long after they were first married, still flush from the newness and surprising intensity of their bond, when they lost one—a child. The baby was born early, dead: a tiny, blueish creature, all veins and goo, no bigger than a Kleenex box, resembling nothing Mavis had ever seen before nor would ever see again. And after, the doctors said that was most likely probably it. No children for Mavis. Too much damage to the wiring and circuitry of her traumatized uterus. Leaving a dusty ache inside them both.

  “This could be our last chance,” she says. “I’m going to be forty soon, and once a woman hits forty all those birth defects and three-­headed babies are way more likely.”

  “That little girl, across the street, in a coma, possessed by the Holy Spirit or whatever, she—she’s our last chance?” he asks, searching his wife’s face to see if she really means it. She does.

  “It’s something, Marcus. We got nothing else.”

  Neither speaks for a while. Mavis continues on to the refrigerator, retrieving from the top a plate of cookies she’d baked yesterday (now he understands why he hadn’t been able to have any). Marcus then puts his glasses back on and returns to his paper, resuming an article about the rape and murder of a fourteen-­year-­old girl down in Fullerton.

  “Wish me luck at least,” says Mavis.

  Marcus almost goes through the whole newspaper-­and-­glasses routine again. But he doesn’t. He just says, “Good luck, Mav. I hope you don’t have to wait. Let me know if you see Geraldo or somebody over there.”

  “It might help if you came, too. Better odds. Two’s always better than one.”

  His wife’s voice is hopeful, urgent. It’s the same voice that said “yes” when he asked her to marry him. It’s the voice that said, “It’s OK, we’ll figure it out” when he fell and fucked up his back and couldn’t work anymore. And it’s the voice he wants to hear when he closes his eyes for the last time: Dear? Dear? I’m not going anywhere. I’m still here. Dear?

  Marcus stops his reading again. He’s older than her, by almost six years, maybe not a huge difference, but still. The years accumulating harder on him. He complained about being an old man even when he was a young man.

  “All right,” he says, standing up. “Give me those god-­damned cookies. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Ever since Donald Westerfield took his place in the long, theme-­park-­worthy line, the woman standing in front of him has not stopped talking. That was approximately over an hour ago, maybe longer; checking his watch only makes it worse. And why is he here? He’s here because of his wife, because he doesn’t know what else to do at this point, the days accelerating away from him. He can’t let Patricia down. He wants this to be like anything else: if you do something the right way, if you follow the rules and precedents and prepare yourself properly, then you’ll succeed. That
’s always been his credo, what he taught his children, what gave him grounding, meaning. But after the Diagnosis (he internally capitalizes the D whenever he thinks of the word) that foundation has seismically shifted. And he now knows more about Cassie Solinski’s life and its circular script of woe and disappointment than he knows about most of his friends and former coworkers and some family members even.

  To begin: she has two academically challenged ADD kids and two worthless ex-­husbands (one kid with each) and works in sales (her supervisor a total perv) as a Transaction Processing Specialist (he didn’t ask) and lives in Brea near the freeway, a rented house that’s about to collapse and there’s probably toxic stuff everywhere and that lead paint thing they’re always talking about, too. It’s not so bad, she guesses, she tells him, there’s worse, it’s life, it’s how it is, you just get used to it, you know? (No, he did not.) Plus there are more important, more pressing matters. Like: she thinks she might have one of those syndrome deals, the one where you don’t feel like doing anything, you’re like total blah, and her cousin who’s a nutritionist’s assistant said it sounded like maybe it was some sort of chemical imbalance, which is probably hereditary, which means you’re screwed, genes and biology and whatnot, that’s your destiny and what can you do about that, you know?

  He nods a nod of noncommittal acknowledgment, doing his small part to maintain the social contract. But Donald doesn’t want to hear about someone else’s troubles, he’s got enough of his own, he has no space for people like Cassie Solinski who so readily share themselves with the world, who believe it’s their constitutional right to publicly chronicle the days of their lives. He’s always been the opposite: privacy, withholding certain information, the covert mentality of a Cold War spy. If nothing is secret anymore, then can anything be of value? He wonders. Maybe it’s his age. That’s the way he’d been brought up. Holding it in instead of letting it out. That was the norm back then. (His father never talked about “feelings”; his mother, he found out only after her death, had been married once before, to a man who died of tuberculosis when she still lived in Minnesota—an episode she had chosen to keep private from her children.) Now it’s all about sharing and confessing and broadcasting your own personal narrative. You want an audience to know about your pain, as if that somehow makes it more real, more true. And who’s to say, Donald concedes. Maybe it does.

  And Cassie Solinski has a lot she wants to share. So she monologues her way through a variety of other topics, from Irritable Bowel Syndrome to the latest blockbuster movies to the inadequacies of our public school system. The line advances at a staggeringly slow DMV pace: he estimates it will be at least another hour or two of shuffling and waiting and periodically interjecting a “Really” or “I didn’t know that” to appease Cassie, which is short for Cassidy. Donald notes there are no visible tattoos, but he’s thinking she has them, somewhere, hidden—on her back, her ankle, shoulder, somewhere. If one of his kids had come home with a tattoo, what would he have done? Anything he sees or experiences in life, his thoughts eventually boomerang back to how it relates or could relate to his family. Once a parent, always a parent. He can’t help himself. Early December now, and the sun microwaving above him and the crowd—it has never before looked like such a powerful, intimidating force, anchored up there in the sky.

  Yes, he’s here for his wife, he reminds himself. It’s why he drove all the way from Laguna Beach on this most foolish of fool’s errands that he’s embarrassed and still not too sure about. Because of his wife. His loving-­wonderful-­suffering-­yet-­flawed-­like-­all-­of-­us wife, who, as he waits his turn, is in the hospital, in Intensive Care after last week’s sudden fall in the backyard, the frantic surgery to remove one of her lungs, the subsequent complications, now breathing with the assistance of machines, no longer really alive. Take that back: her eyes are still alive. That’s it, though. And that’s the hardest part, too, witnessing the watery whispers of memory pooling futilely between blinks, because he can see her in there, in her eyes; in fact he can see their entire history, their entire lives contained within those two muted orbs.

  What is left for her? Time has stopped. There is no time. Or rather it is all time. Her days are nothing but stabbing pinpricks of the clock ticking away, carrying her farther away from who she was, is. There is nothing he can do. So he sits in a chair next to her bed, getting up whenever a nurse or doctor hurries in and out, and he talks to her (and to himself, a recent development he’s uneasy about, fretting that the first wave of Alzheimer’s troops has been deployed against him). He reads to her, gives her updates on family members (weddings they’ll have to miss, births that only remind him of the nearing completion of their own deathward arcs) and tells her about the world. The news is usually not good, despite his filtering out the more violent and macabre tales: the babies left in dumpsters, the school shootings, the incarcerated rappers. The doctors said they couldn’t say for sure whether she is cognizant and aware or completely vacuous, her brain nothing but a TV channel tuned to snow. Like the little girl, Donald thinks. Same worthless diagnosis from the magicians of modern medicine. Fifty-­fifty chance either way, they said.

  “I hear that sometimes there’s a light that shines right out of her eyes, right at you,” says Cassie Solinski.

  “Really,” he responds.

  He tries not to make too harsh a judgment about his fellow pilgrims (he is, after all, one of them, standing here, doing things like calling up the offices of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, talking to priests, investigating alternative cancer treatments in Germany and Mexico), but what he finds himself coming back to is this: they are mostly poor, or at least poor-­looking, or poor-­seeming, in his admittedly privileged estimation. He doesn’t know if it’s just the neighborhood or the nature of the event. Regardless, this is not a part of the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area he’s been to before. So he turned to his trusty Thomas Guide map. Taking a while before he zeroed in on the exact location, thumbing through corresponding numbers and letters and multicolored grids. But even then he had some difficulty. Some of the streets here did not have signs. Either they’d been taken down by roving vandals or no one even bothered to put them up in the first place. It struck him as that kind of place. He got lost.

  After circling for an hour he stopped at a gas station, Super Gas N More, not a brand name he’s familiar with, no Shells or Chevrons in sight, and asked the slack-­eyed young man behind the counter (was he an employee or had he tied up the real clerk and disposed of him in back?) if he knew where Shaker Street was, very aware of his Lexus of recent vintage idling outside. Oh, the girl, said the clerk. You want to see the little girl, the little Miracle Girl, sí? Sí. Then the clerk (no uniform or name tag, fostering further suspicion) imparted a flurry of difficult-­to-­decipher directions: right here, left there, second stop sign, past the railroad tracks and the closed-­down MacFrugals, and Donald got lost again, but still he drove, noting the high concentration of liquor stores and cigarette outlets, the billboards for movies from two, three years back. He pulled over and queried a woman walking on the sidewalk. She did not seem to speak English. Then he drove some more, giving himself over to random turns and going on instinct, triple-­checking to make sure the windows were fully up and the door locks locked, then coming upon a block with a heavy concentration of parked cars and seeing the people congregating outside, just like on television, lined up in front of a small one-­story house like a matinee movie crowd. Budding entrepreneurs were selling water, soda, oranges cut into fourths, Popsicles. All at highly inflated prices. Everything went fast.

  When he turns his attention back to Cassie Solinski, she’s lamenting the heat, but then she pauses to watch a man and woman walk past them, bypassing the line and heading right to the front door of the house, the woman carrying a tray of some kind, the man walking with a slight limp, nervously scanning the crowd, hands in pockets, coughing into his fist.

  “Who’s she, gets to go right in like that?”
says Cassie, who doesn’t wait for an answer and moves on to a discussion of her sister’s chronic skin problems.

  Donald again tunes her out—as much as he can tune her out without manifestly appearing to do so, meaning that he continues to make the appropriately timed nods and attendant facial gestures. He hasn’t been out of the hospital in days, desperately needs a haircut, has given up on shaving regularly for the first time in his life. Behind him a woman chats away on a cell phone, informing the person on the other end where she was and what she was doing and how her mother has incurable blood cancer and how she’d never heard of that kind of cancer before—blood? blood cancer? what the hell?—but now she’s pretty much a de facto expert and no it did not look good, multiple myeloma, what happens is that the cancer erodes the bones—can you believe it? the bones?—and half of those who get it are dead within five years, I’ll call you after, I’m on my cell, waiting in line, this is costing me a fortune, bye.

  It wasn’t all that long ago that he’d retired. So many years spent on his career, away from his wife and children, the trips for work, the conventions and working vacations, the strategic cocktail parties and hellish commute to Century City, Patricia always making sure he had his Saturday golf, his Tuesday night tennis. Retirement would make up for all that. That would be her time, Patricia’s time, when he was finally fully available. There’s a picture he can’t get out of his mind from the Laguna Beach fires of 1993: Patricia grabbing a hose, defiant, watering down their roof, refusing to leave their house until the very last minute, firefighters with bullhorns practically threatening to drag her away if that’s what it took. That time they got lucky. Their house was spared. Life went on as before. If you do something the right way, then you’ll succeed. The day before she’d fallen, Patricia had told him, “It’s stupid. I still don’t think I’m going to die. I still don’t think it’s possible. How can I not exist? How can I not be? How can there be one of us and not the other?”