My Own Miraculous: A Short Story

by Joshilyn Jackson

  There was another kind of brave that mothers had to be. This kind was much harder. This kind let you look at your kid and really see them. Not what you wanted them to be. Not all your hopes. Not a chance to fix everything that you’d done wrong, and get everything you’d screwed up done in the right order. Just as a person. Just as the most beloved little person in the world, the one who wouldn’t eat peas and who loved fire trucks and who once wept himself sick, he was so sorry he’d burned up an ant with his magnifying glass.

  Right as I thought this, there was a pause, a breath of time when every yelling mother had to inhale. Into that second of fraught silence, I said, “I have to take my kid to see a doctor.”

  It was off beat enough to shut them down for another second, to turn them all to me, and I took a page from Mimmy’s book. I stepped into that space, right into the middle of all of them, and then I kept it. Not with pretty. I didn’t have my Mimmy’s pretty. But I had something else, rising new inside me.

  What had Hilde called Natty in the car? My own, she’d said. My own miraculous.

  That was exactly right.

  Natty was my own. My own miraculous. No noun, yet. He was my own miraculous something, and whatever noun went in that slot, Natty would become it all himself. Becoming exactly Natty, that was his job. My job was to love him, no matter what nouns appeared there as he grew and changed.

  Hilde was her mother’s own miraculous, and I knew the noun Hilde had in that slot now. Hilde was Mrs. Fleming’s own miraculous sick baby, who so badly needed help.

  Mrs. Fleming didn’t want to see it. Mrs. Fleming was afraid. She was loving the kid she wanted, defending the kid she made up to please herself, blind to the kid who was hearing angels and driving nails clean through her hand. Not from meanness, but because she so badly wanted Hilde to be okay, to fit in and be normal, to be happy and regular and safe. And wasn’t that what every mother wanted?

  Into the space I’d claimed, I said to all of them, but mostly Mrs. Fleming, “I have a son. You saw him at the blood drive. He’s so beautiful. I know you saw Natty do something in that gym that wasn’t normal. He sight-read a banner, and he’s barely three. That’s not right. What you don’t know is, Walcott and I saw him solve Rubik’s Cube in under ten minutes. I couldn’t solve it if you gave me ten days. That’s not what a three-year-old does. It’s so far out from what a toddler should be doing that I’m scared for him.” Tears welled in Mrs. Fleming’s eyes and her nostrils flared. I kept on talking, keeping the space, because there were five whole mothers in the room now. “If Natty’s that different, how is school going to work for him? How will he ever make friends? I’m really scared. But next week, I’m going to take him down to Atlanta, and I’m going to have him tested, anyway. Whatever’s going on with him, I need to know. Because if he’s going to be that different, he’s going to need help. I have to help him. Me. Because I am his mother.”

  There was a pause and we all heard Mrs. Fleming swallow. Her eyes cut to Hilde, quiet on the steps, and then away. She brushed at her eyes with her hand, and then looked at it, surprised, I think, to find her hand so wet.

  Hilde sat, not looking back. Listening, but not to us.

  “Natty did what?” Mimmy said.

  “Not now,” I told her quietly. “It’s time for us to go home.”

  Darla said, “But she—”

  “Darla,” I cut her off, speaking firm, mother to mother. I was her equal now in a way I’d never been before. I think she heard it in me, too, because she stopped. “Let’s go.”

  So we did. We trooped back out the door in single file, Darla, then Aimee, then Mimmy, and me last of all. We left them there, Mrs. Fleming crying and crying under the cut-glass chandelier in that beautiful, vaulted foyer.

  As I closed the front door soft behind us, Mrs. Fleming was staring at her broken child as if Hilde was something frightening, but also undiscovered. Something that she had never seen before.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning, I met Walcott at the halfway place to retrieve Natty. My way, it was all uphill, while his way was an easy trot down. When I arrived, Walcott was already lounging on the fallen tree. Natty was running some kind of matchbox-car construction project in the grassy part of the mini meadow.

  “Hi, Mommy. Aimee let me eat all the bacon that I wanted,” Natty reported.

  “Yum. Sounds like it was a bad day to be a pig,” I said. I dropped a kiss on his head, then went to sit down by Walcott on the log.

  “We still on red alert?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Mrs. Fleming called the Jeromes last night and cancelled the rest of the rental. They lit out this morning, very early, in a white Cadillac. This year’s model. Mimmy got all that straight from Raylinda Dobbs, so you know it’s gospel.”

  “Down to the color of the car,” Walcott said. “Good deal.”

  I kicked my shoes off and let my toes squinch into the grass. Mimmy thought they’d just left to get away from us, but not me. I knew we wouldn’t ever see them again, but I wasn’t worried about Hilde. Her mother would find out what she needed, and she would get it for her. It’s what I would do, and I’d seen right down into the very bottom of Mrs. Fleming last night. We were more than a little bit alike.

  Walcott’s iPad was beside him on the log, and I reached over him and got it. I flipped the cover open and found that puzzle app, the new one, with all the switching lights. The one that was supposed to be harder than the Rubik’s.

  I called, “Hey Natty, you want a turn with Walcott’s puzzle?”

  “Yes, please!” Natty got up and trotted over immediately. The kid loved him some screen time, and he didn’t get a lot. He toted it back to the patch of grass with all his matchbox cars and sat down.

  Walcott was looking all askance at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing. Just, you ate my head off like a sexed-up praying-mantis lady when I tried to let him play that before.”

  I smiled and I took his hand.

  “We need to know for sure,” I said, even though I did know, mostly.

  I’d already called my dad to ask for help, interrupting his vacation and irking my easily irked stepmom. Dad was probably the best heart surgeon in Georgia; he had all kinds of connections. He’d known at once who Natty should see, and he promised he’d get Natty an appointment, immediately.

  Watching Natty poke at the screen now, his forehead crumpling up as he concentrated, I had the weirdest déjà vu. I felt exactly as I had that day three years and seven months ago, when Walcott and I sat in my bedroom with a pregnancy-test stick under a Kleenex, waiting to know what miracle would happen. Waiting for a pink plus sign to confirm what I already knew inside my heart.

  I was so glad again to have Walcott here with me. I turned his hand in mine, and I ran my finger over the thin ridge of the scar in the middle of his thumb. He got it here at the halfway place, sitting on this very log with me. Twelve years ago.

  It was his ninth birthday. Aimee had wanted to give him a big Swiss Army knife with several blades, plus scissors and a corkscrew. She’d grown up on a farm out west with three big brothers; by the time she was nine she could whittle a cardinal that you could blow against to make a birdcall sound. Darla, on the other hand, grew up in the city, the only child of university professors. She’d wanted to raise Walcott with only nonaggressive toys. Not gender-neutral things; it was “boy” stuff, just peaceful: racing cars and dump trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lego sets.

  By the time he was four, Walcott was eating his toast into a gun shape and pointing it at the dog, yelling, “Pew! Pew! Pew!” while Frisco wagged and grinned up at him, hoping he would drop the buttered weapon. Darla caved and let him have water guns, lightsabers, and Mr. Bang. But no BB gun, like many country boys had. No Swiss Army knife. She drew the line at any weapon that was “real.”

  The mini pocketknife with its one dull blade was a compromise.

  Ironically, it was Darla who gave him the idea that we should cut
ourselves open with it. They’d been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer together. That book, the knife—what nine-year-old boy worth his salt wouldn’t want to make his best friend into a blood brother?

  We knew that even Aimee would object to this idea, so we met up at the halfway place to do the deed. We sat facing each other, straddling our fallen tree, horsey style. He unfolded the blade, which, small and dull as it was, looked plenty wicked to me, shining in the dappled sunlight.

  “Gimme your thumb,” he said.

  I shook my head, “No, thank you.”

  I hadn’t liked the knife idea from the start, even though I very badly wanted to be blood brothers. I’d brought a safety pin from home, and I held it up and showed it to him. He rolled his eyes at me, silently calling me a wuss, or maybe he didn’t think the pin would do the job. I popped it open and before I could think, I jabbed my thumb with it, right at the ball. It hurt, but I didn’t so much as peep. I pulled the pin out, and we both peered at my thumb, blank and whole.

  Walcott said, “It’s no good.”

  I squeezed at my thumb, and a single bead of blood rose up, red and round. Walcott gave me an approving nod.

  I offered him the pin, but he shook his head. He put the knife against the ball of his own thumb and sliced lightly down. Nothing happened. The blade was too dull. He tried again, harder. Nothing, and then again, until he was pretty much sawing at himself.

  I offered him the pin once more, but by then he was ticked off. He lay his hand down on the tree trunk, palm up.

  I had an inkling of what he was going to do. It was a bad idea. Even as my mouth creaked open, way too slow, he was driving the knife straight down, with all his weight behind it. Right into his thumb.

  Walcott sucked in air, but it seemed to get stuck in his throat. I leaned over, staring at his terrible hand. The blade was in his thumb, all right. The pointy tip was sharper than the edge. A good third of the blade had buried itself into the real, true meat of him. He made small air-choking noises, and he was so pale even his lips were white. He lifted his stabbed hand up, and the blade stayed in. He turned it palm down and still it stayed in, a thin line of red running down into the workings of the hilt. I could see the tip of the blade pressed against his thumbnail from the inside.

  I leapt to my feet.

  “I’m going to get Mommy,” I said, my fear regressing my mother’s name back to its babiest form.

  Walcott said, “No! Wait!” I paused, and he held his hand out with the knife hanging down out of it and a few drops of blood falling down to spatter on the log. “Blood brothers! We have to finish.”

  His blood looked redder than mine. Maybe only because there was so much more of it. I was so proud of him then, of how tough he was. He wasn’t even crying much, just a few tears leaking out his side eyes. I came back to him, and I pressed my thumb with its single smeared bead, up against the slick surface. I could feel his heartbeat in it. I could feel the side of the knife, cool against my hot skin.

  I held my thumb to his until he nodded, satisfied.

  “Good deal,” he said, and then I walked him back to the B and B to get yelled at, to get stitches and a tetanus shot, to get a thousand what-did-I-tell-yous from a distraught Darla, and to get the little scar I could still feel to this day. The same scar he pressed against my hand the last time I was this far outside my comfort zone. The day we knew for sure that there would be a Natty.

  Now Natty looked up from the iPad. He turned it toward us. All the lights were golden, shining in perfectly solved, uniform rows. He’d done it. I looked down at my watch. Six minutes.

  “Holy shit,” Walcott breathed out, so soft that I only could hear.

  I exhaled, very slow, and nodded. “I’m taking him to see a child psychologist that my dad knows down at Emory next week. He’ll give Natty some IQ tests and stuff like that. Tell us where we stand.”

  Walcott nodded. “This reminds me of the day, you know, when—”

  “I know,” I interrupted him.

  Natty set the iPad aside, like what he’d done was no big deal. He turned back to his matchbox cars, making vrooming noises as he moved them. Like any three-year-old might do. Beside him, the winking lights in perfect rows knew better.

  I held tight to Walcott’s hand, and I thought to myself, There are only two things I want Natty to know about that day, the day we found out he was coming.

  Not that I said, Shit! Not how scared and sick I was. Not that I had little red tongues of panic and disbelief come licking up all through me, just like now.

  Only two things. First, that though Walcott wasn’t his father, twenty seconds after we knew he existed, Walcott was all the way on board. And second? I want him to know the image that came into my head when I knew he was a real, true thing, alive and inside of me.

  It was presents. Presents and a cake and a single word: Surprise!

  A wonderful word, shouted loud and bright, coming from the mouths of everybody dear to me.

  If you loved My Own Miraculous,

  don’t miss Joshilyn Jackson’s

  smart, gorgeously written novel,

  SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY

  Available in hardcover December 2013

  from William Morrow.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek . . .

  It seems like an ordinary hot summer day. Single mom Shandi Pierce, her three-year-old son, Natty, and her best friend, Walcott, stop for gas at a Circle K. While Walcott fills the tank, Shandi and Natty go inside the store for a cold drink. Shandi is in line, eyeing a very good-looking man, when the door opens and a stumpy guy with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead walks in. In his hand is a rusty, old silver pistol.

  Minutes later there’s been a shooting, and everyone in the store is on the floor, taken hostage. All of these strangers are carrying secrets that will cause their lives to intersect in a most surprising way.

  Chapter 1

  I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could.

  I thought then that I had landed in my own worst dream, not a love story. Love stories start with a kiss or a meet-cute, not with someone getting shot in a gas station minimart. Well, no, two people, because that lady cop took a bullet first.

  But there we were, William gone still as a pond rock, me holding a green glass bottle of Coca-Cola and shaking so hard it was like a seizure. Both of us were caught under the black eye of that pistol. And yet, seventeen seconds later, before I so much as knew his name, I’d fallen dizzy-down in love with him.

  I’ve never had an angel on my right shoulder; I was born with a pointy-tailed devil, who crept back and forth across my neck to get his whispers into both my ears. I didn’t get a fairy godmother or even a discount-talking cricket-bug to be my conscience. But someone should have told me. That afternoon in the Circle K, I deserved to know, right off, that I had landed bang in the middle of a love story. Especially since it wasn’t—it isn’t—it could never be my own.

  At eleven o’clock that same morning, walking into gunfire and someone else’s love story was the last thing on my mind. I was busy dragging a duffel bag full of most of what I owned down the stairs, trying not to cry or, worse, let my happy show. My mother, never one for mixed feelings, had composed herself into the perfect picture of dejection, backlit and framed in the doorway to the kitchen.

  I wanted to go, but if I met her eyes, I’d bawl like a toddler anyhow. This tidy brick bungalow on the mountainside had been my home for seventeen years now, ever since I was four and my parents split up. But if I cried, she’d cry, too, and then my sweet kid would lose his ever-loving crap. We’d all stand wailing and hugging it out in the den, and Natty and I would never get on the road. I tightened my mouth and looked over her head instead. That’s when I noticed she�
�d taken down the Praying Hands Jesus who’d been hanging over the sofa for as long as I’d had concrete memory. She’d replaced him with a Good Shepherd version who stopped me dead in the middle of the stairs.

  The new Jesus looked exactly like her.

  He was super pretty, slim and elegant. He was backlit, too, standing in front of a meadow instead of a kitchen, cradling a lamb instead of a spatula. My mother had never once gone into direct sunlight without a hat and SPF 50, and this Jesus shared her ivory-bloom complexion. I looked more Jewish than he did. They had the same rich brown hair glowing with honey-gold highlights, the same cornflower blue eyes cast sorrowfully upward to watch me struggle a fifty-pound duffel down the stairs. Neither offered to give me a hand.

  Mimmy wasn’t anywhere near ready to let me go, and the thought of having to fight my way out of here made me want to flop down onto my butt and die on the staircase.

  “Please don’t make this awful. This is the best thing,” I said, but Mimmy only stood there, radiating lovely sorrow. The pretty my mom has, it’s an unfair amount. Simply ungodly, and it worked on everyone, even me sometimes.

  “Maybe for you,” she acknowledged. “But Natty?”

  That scored a hit; I was trading Mimmy’s mountain full of trees and deer and sunshine for my dad’s three-bedroom condo, sleek and modern, bang in the middle of the city. But all I said was, “Oh, Mims.”

  We’d been having this fight all week. Dad’s condo was ten minutes from the Georgia State campus, and from Mimmy’s, I drove about four hours round-trip. I had to register my classes around Atlanta’s rush hour and make sure they all met either Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday. This was enough to make a simple coffee date an exercise in logistics, and Mimmy didn’t help my social life go easier. She’d been boycotting anything with a Y chromosome for going on seventeen years now. Even her cat was female, and she’d been known to change my shifts at her candy shop if she knew I had a date. I would’ve moved to the condo long before if my stepmother, Bethany, had ever let my father make the offer.