The Probability of Miracles (10 page)

Lily was buried under her puffy white cloud of a comforter. She was so tiny, the lumps of her body under the blanket were barely perceptible. Cam jumped on the bed to say good-bye.

“I'm leaving,” she said.

Lily just giggled beneath the covers.

“Why is that funny?”

“Hold on,” said Lily, and when she popped her head out from under the comforter, Cam realized that Lily was on the phone. “I'll be with you in a minute, Cam,” she said, and she swept the back of her hand at Cam like a little broom before sinking under the covers to resume giggling.

That sounded so cold.
With you in a minute.
And the hand broom? Cam was tired of being swept away. She was leaving and had no idea when she'd see Lily again. They never used to speak that way to each other.
With you in a minute.

On her way out the door, Cam noticed an oxygen tank standing next to Lily's clear plastic desk. Two white picture frames sat on the desk staring at each other. One was of Lily and Cam, sitting on a hospital bed at St. Jude's with their arms around each other. Their bald heads knocked together as they smiled for the camera. Before she knew what she was doing, Cam grabbed it and stuck it inside her hoodie. Then she went out and closed the door.

“You ready?” Alicia asked from downstairs in the great room.

“Yeah,” said Cam. “I'm ready.”

As they were starting up the rig, Cam put some extra-reinforcement duct tape around Darren. Lily's parents waved good-bye from the front stoop. They were about to pull out when Lily came running out the front door.

“How dare you leave without saying good-bye!” she said, trying to catch her breath. She stopped in the middle of the driveway.

“I tried,” said Cam, meeting her halfway between the house and the car.

“Oh, Cam, don't pout.” Lily placed her hands on her hips. The drawstring of her light blue hospital scrubs was cinched as tight as it could go around her waist. And yet the hem of the pants dropped over her Ugg slippers and onto the driveway, sucking up the morning dew like the roots of a flower.

“I'm not pouting. I'm happy for you. Good luck with Ryan, and I hope you get your wish,” Cam added coldly.

“Cam,” Lily said.

Cam took a moment to watch a ladybug crawl up and over a blade of grass. “He's just using you, you know,” she blurted.

“How could you possibly know that?” Lily's icy blue gaze shifted from concern to dismissal. Her eyes hardened.

“I asked him, Lil. And he was strangely honest about it, actually. I was right about him,” Cam said, and she immediately regretted it. She felt numb inside. As if she had no organs. She was a shell. A carapace. An empty carcass alone and adrift.

“Oh, God, Campbell, you are not right for once.” Lily's voice went up an octave on the word
right
. “You're just so obviously jealous.” She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. She turned around and began to walk away but then stopped. “You can't stand seeing me happy, can you? You just need to pull me back into your misery. But I need to enjoy my life. Let my guard down a little. Maybe you should try it.”

Cam knew that letting her guard down would be the end of her. Her guard was all she had left. “I guess I'm just not that desperate,” she said.

It took Lily a moment to absorb that blow. She looked down, kicked a few pine needles, took a deep breath, and said, “That's funny because you are the most desperate person I know, Campbell Cooper.” She looked up with a final, watery stare. “And I have no more room in my life for your negativity. I need to be surrounded by positive energy. I need you to leave me alone.”

“You sound like one of those stupid self-help books,” Cam said.

“I'm serious, Campbell. Good luck with everything.” Lily backed away toward her pretend–log cabin house and politely waved to Alicia and Perry.

“Lily—” Cam started. But Lily was gone.

Back in the car, Cam took the screenplay that they had started together out from her biker bag. As Lily's house disappeared into the distance, she tore it right down the middle.

“MARIA! LYDIA!”

Their nana came screaming out of her three-story house in Hoboken, which had a view of the Manhattan skyline if you stuck your head out the attic window and looked to the left. Nana was wearing a bright blue matching tracksuit. She was very matchy.

“Mom. Call them by their first names,” Alicia said.

“I don't even remember them anymore. What are they again? Harry and Jonathan?”

“Mom.”

“I'm kidding. Girls, just promise me you'll give my great-granddaughters girls' names, would you? That's my dying wish. What about Rose? Name one of your kids after me.”

“Sure, Nana,” said Perry, giving her grandmother a hug.

“That's a good girl,” said Nana, kissing her on top of her pert blonde head.

Cam couldn't yet speak. Something about seeing her nana really choked her up. She didn't realize how much she'd missed her.

“Campbell,” said her nana, opening her flabby arms wide as Campbell let herself melt into them.

“See, you remember my name,” said Cam.

“You, I never forget, my love. My firstborn grandchild . . . you are my heart,” she whispered so Perry wouldn't hear. “Now come,” she said, secretly wiping away a tear. “Let's eat. You must be hungry. Look at you, all skin and bones. You look like an Olsen twin.”

“Which one?” joked Campbell.

“The one who's dating Justin Bartha.”

“Who is Justin Bartha? You need to stop reading
People
magazine.”

“What? I read it at the beauty parlor. I don't have a subscription or anything.” She fiddled with some containers in the fridge. “Here. Eat this. It's Miracle Lasagna. Tony Spinelli ate it last month, and his gallstones completely disappeared.”

“Do you believe in miracles, Nan?” Cam asked.

“It doesn't matter what I believe, does it? Right now, Campbell, it only matters what you believe,” she said as she poured herself another cup of coffee from her seventies stainless-steel percolator.

That was what Cam loved about her grandmother's house: the way that, aside from a gradual yellowing or fading, nothing ever changed. Her nana still had her coffeepot from the seventies, the same NANA'S KITCHEN needlepoint in a frame, the same cast-iron trivets, the same crocheted pot holders, and the same yellow, ruffled cotton valence in the kitchen window that she'd take down three times a year to wash and iron. The kitchen had the same checkerboard, black and white linoleum tile, the same chrome-plated Formica kitchen table with four red vinyl seats. Everything was the same.

“She doesn't believe in anything,” said Perry matter-of-factly.

“I believe in you, Nana,” said Cam.

“You better find something more powerful than me, kiddo.”

There was a time when Cam would have Believed, with a capital
B
, in all of this miracle business. In fact, there was a time when she'd thought she was special. Things had happened to her. Subtle yet amazing things that made her believe that someone, a higher power, was watching over her.

When she was six, she thought a lot about the hands of God. God, to six-year-old Cam, was a bearded old man on a cloud with enormous hands that would hurt if you got spanked. She was never spanked by the hands of God. But once, when she was trudging up her street on a hot day in the swamps of Florida, wishing she had a bicycle so she could get more quickly to her friend Jessica's house to play Barbies, she was swept off the ground by . . . a mysterious vortex? The hands of God? . . . and delivered right to Jessica's doorstep. One minute she was in front of Mark VanHouten's house—the one with the scary Rottweiler tied to a chain—and the next, she was a quarter mile down the road at Jessica's, holding her Barbies with the shorn blonde hair, a consequence of living with a baby sister who got her hands on some safety scissors.

Anyway, there was a time when Cam would have believed in miracles. A time when she was lifted up by some mysterious force and placed gently back down onto Jessica's doorstep. But that was before divorces and before cancer and before her father died right smack-dab in the middle of his life. Way before Cam knew she'd never see her eighteenth birthday.

After nightfall, when Cam and Perry were drooling in front of some reality TV, and their mom was visiting some old friends, Nana walked into the living room dressed in black. She wore her black leotard and tights from Jazzercise underneath some black Bermuda shorts and a black baseball cap. She had black eyeliner smudged beneath her eyes.

“You ready, Campbell?” she asked.

“Oh, my God, Nana. For what?”

“Our mission. We're going over the wall.”

According to church history, on a Sunday morning in 1999, the Virgin Mary appeared to housewife Joan Caruso while she was teaching Sunday school to preschoolers at Our Lady of Ascension Church on Church Street. She was out in the churchyard, letting the little ones burn off some of their pent-up Catholic steam, and she was staring at a knot in a tree. Slowly, according to Joan Caruso, who'd had five kids in five years and probably hadn't slept in as much time, the knot in the tree morphed into the visage of the Virgin. And the Virgin told her, “Build for me here a shrine and let all who come here be healed. Hoboken will become the Lourdes of America.”

Anyone who heard that sentence would know it had to be a joke. It sounded to Cam like this Joan chick was watching the Pocahontas movie on acid. The one with the talking tree. But people believed this woman instead of putting her on some antipsychotics. And those who knew the story made pilgrimages to the tree in Hoboken to be healed by its mystic maple leaves.

“Come on,” said Nana. “Here's a flashlight.”

“Why can't we do this in daylight again?” asked Cam, flicking the light on and off to check the batteries.

“I told you. Because of Rita.” Nana's ex-friend Rita was the volunteer in charge of leaf administration and had denied Nana's application to visit the tree and take away a leaf for Cam three times. “There's bad blood between us.”

“What'd you do to her?” Cam asked as she stood up from the recliner.

“I accidentally slept with her husband once. Or twice. Maybe it was twice,” Nana said distractedly as she opened and closed the attachments of her Swiss Army knife, and then placed it into her black fanny pack.

“What do you mean, ‘accidentally,' Nana? How can that happen by accident?” Cam asked.

But Nana just shrugged her shoulders. She was all business. “You coming, Perry?” she asked.

“No, thanks. I'm too tired.”

“Feed Tweety for me, would you?” said Cam. “But don't let him out of his cage. He gets nervous in a new environment.”

Cam was already dressed in black, as usual, so she walked with her grandmother two houses down to Our Lady of Ascension Church. They turned the corner and walked to the back, where the courtyard was enclosed by a ten-foot-high sand-colored brick wall.

Cam did not believe any leaf could cure her, of course. She didn't even believe the Virgin was a virgin. She imagined Mary after getting knocked up, powwowing with her girlfriends, gathering round the well, trying to figure out what to do.

“I know,” one of them said. “Tell them that God did it.”

“Perfect,” Mary's girls chimed in.

And then the publicity of the thing must have just gotten way out of hand.

So Cam did not believe in any Mary miracles, but she loved the prospect of a caper with her grandmother, and the idea of helping her get revenge.

“There it is,” she said, pointing to the tree at the very center of the church courtyard. Someone, a nun probably, had taken very good care of this space. It was lush, verdant, fecund—words one didn't usually associate with Hoboken. It looked a little like the Polynesian Hotel, but with different flora. Rosebushes surrounded the perimeter just inside the wall. There was soft green grass, some other flowering plants, miscellaneous Mary statuary, and a soothing angel fountain trickling in the far corner. At the center stood the maple tree.

“Can't we just take a leaf from one of these?” asked Cam, pointing to the leaves growing conveniently out and over the wall.

“No. That's the one. In the center. It has to be that one,” she whispered and covered her head with the hood of her sweatshirt. The baker and his wife had just stepped out of the Italian bakery across the street, closed the door, and locked it. They gave Cam a suspicious look before turning and walking home with their box of cannoli tied up with red string.