The Probability of Miracles (2 page)

“What do you think it's going to be like?” Lily interrupted. She had finished her list and sat tentatively on her bunk, chewing the end of her pen.

“What is
what
going to be like, Lily?” Cam asked. Lily could jump right into the middle of a conversation, forgetting that Cam did not necessarily inhabit her brain to experience the beginning of it. “Senior year? The Winter Olympics? The prom? Sex? Tonight's dinner?”

“Death,” Lily answered.

“Death.” Cam paused. “Well, I guess there'll be the tunnel and the white light and the looking down at your own body. . . .”

“I didn't think you believed in an afterlife,” Lily said.

“I don't,” Cam answered. “The so-called ‘near-death experience' is a neurological event. A big dream set off by massive amounts of hormones released by the pituitary gland. It's all caused by dimethyltryptamine. Not God.”

“Oh,” said Lily, disappointed. She looked out the window.

“Well, what do you think it'll be like?”

“I think it's going to be dark at first. There has to be darkness when your body shuts down. Then a bright rainbow bridge will arch through the blackness, and stars will blink on around it, lighting your path to the Spirit World.”

Cam smirked. “Spirit World? Wait, let me consult my dreamcatcher. . . .”

“Heaven,” Lily said. “I believe there's a heaven.”

Cam opened her eyes, staring out at the bleak underground parking lot.
Maybe it's time I start crossing some of these off
, she thought, running her eyes down the list again. Since the last item seemed to be the only quest fully within her power right now, she would start with that one first.

She called Lily. “What should I steal, Chemosabe?”

“What?” Lily's voice was raspy and slow, as if she had just woken up.

“It's on the list.”

“What list?” Cam could hear sheets rustling and the bed squeaking as Lily pulled herself into an upright position.

“Remember that list from summer camp?”

“Why is shoplifting on your Flamingo List?” Lily asked, exasperated. “You're not supposed to force it, anyway, Campbell. You're just supposed to let things happen.”

“I'm feeling the need to hurry things along a bit,” Cam said. She let her forehead fall to the steering wheel and rolled her head along the upper arc of it.

“Get some Burt's Bees lip balm, then. I just ran out,” Lily said, conceding. Cam could practically see her squinting as she inspected her dry lips in the mirror.

“And what else?” Cam asked.

“A plastic flamingo from the dollar store,” Lily threw out. “Like one of those lawn ornament things.”

“That will be a challenge.”

Cam lifted her head from the steering wheel and patted her car.

“To Whole Foods, Cumulus,” she said, and they were off.

CAM LOVED THE SMELL OF WHOLE FOODS: A BLEND OF SANDALWOOD, patchouli, lavender, dirt, garlic, and B.O. Whole Foods was one of the few places in Florida where Cam did not appear suspect in her tight black hoodie and the torn-to-shreds, faded black skinny jeans that she could wear only because the big C had wasted her half-Samoan body to a size zero.

Whole Foods embraced people like her. Oddballs with a touch of the native to them. This was where people tried to get in touch with the native. The authentic. And where they pretended to be more tolerant. So Cam sniffed an aluminum-free deodorant stick while she stuck some Burt's Bees lip balm into her green canvas biker bag shellacked with a collage of ripped bumper stickers. The top one read, IMAGINE . . . and the rest bore such slogans as A FREE TIBET, MARRIAGE FOR ALL, NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL, PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, THE GOLDEN RULE, HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT, and WHERE'S MY VOTE? (in solidarity with the Iranian people who had had their election stolen by an evil dictator).

She was the only person in Osceola County, Florida, who cared about things like stolen elections, freedom, human rights. . . . The rest were too busy procreating, which started early down here. Three couples had gotten engaged at her senior prom.

Cam hadn't gone to senior prom because they probably had rules about dating your car, but if she'd been there, she would have wished the happy couples
pomaika'i
, “good luck” in Hawaiian. They would need good luck. A miracle, really. Without a miracle, each of the couples would end up divorced and trying to raise three kids on twelve dollars an hour, increasing the population of trailer-park-livin', broke-down-car-drivin', dollar-store-shoppin', processed-food-eatin' diabetics that populated the happy Sunshine State.

But maybe it would work out for them. Cam hoped so. Maybe they were different.

She stuck some calendula root into her sweatshirt pocket. She didn't even know what it was, but she loved the sound of it,
cal-en-du-la root
. She'd swallow some on the way out the door.

“Excuse me?” chirped a voice behind her.

Cam jumped. Was she busted already?

She turned to find the typical Whole Foods shopper: fifty, gray hair tied back in a loose bun, blue eyes, no makeup, baggy pants, Clarks, organic cotton shopping bag. More and more ex–college professors and social workers were making their way to these parts because this was all they could afford in retirement.

“Yes?” said Cam, fiddling with the bottle of calendula root in her pocket.

“Who does your hair?”

“Um. My hair?”

“Yes, it's such a great cut.”

Cam's thick black hair was short. She buzzed it with her dad's old electric clippers on the one-inch setting. “I do it myself,” she said.

“Well, it really suits you. You have such a beautiful face,” Typical Whole Foods Shopper said as she put some fiber capsules in the front basket of her cart.

“Thank you,” said Cam, and she waited for the lady to turn the corner before sticking a tiny box of chlorine-free, all-natural tampons into the cuff of her jeans.

She'd heard that before. “Such a pretty face.” God, she hated that. Pre-C, that was code for, “What a shame. She's so fat.” Now it was code for, “What a waste. Such a pretty lesbian.”

It
killed
Cam's mother that she wouldn't let her hair grow back after the chemo. Her mom thought long hair was powerful. Plus, without long hair, Cam would never get to dance in “Aloha.” Without long hair, she was relegated to the kitchen in the back of the hotel, where she spent hours as a prep cook, carving out pineapple boats for the Polynesian rice.

“There's always Perry,” Cam would say to her mom. “She could dance with you someday.”

“Agh!” Cam's mom would throw up her hands in disgust. As a hula dancer (who was really an Italian-American woman from New Jersey), her hands were very expressive. Alicia had met Cam's dad in New York when they were in their twenties, dancing in clubs and the occasional Broadway chorus. She took Polynesian dance class just to spend more time with him and then eventually made a career out of it.

Perry, Cam's eleven-year-old half sister, could never dance in “Aloha.” She was the result of a post-divorce one-night stand their mom had had with a cast member from “Norway” in Epcot. Perry had white-blonde hair and moved with heavy steps, like a Viking.

“Perry is a lot of things,” her mom would say, “but she is no dancer.”

Cam's mom wanted her to dance not simply because she wanted a legacy but more because the dance had healing powers. At least for the spirit. And Cam did dance—it was in her blood—but she did it alone, at home, in front of her Spikork mirror from IKEA.

TYLER, A WHOLE FOODS TEAM MEMBER scanned the bar code on the breath mints she'd decided to pay for.

“You're a cashier,” Cam mumbled, staring at the green name tag with the cheap white letters.

“What?”

“You can see through their bullshit, right? You're not a team member. They don't really care about you as a person.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

“Disney was the first to use that trick. They call their employees ‘cast members' so the poor guy twisting balloon animals thinks he's a star at Disney.”

TYLER just grunted.

“If you have to wear a name tag, you're an employee,” she went on.

“I know you took the lip stuff,” he said, handing the breath mints to Cam. He had strong, knuckly fingers, messy black hair, and brown eyes with one adorable golden fleck in the left one.

“But you don't know about the calendula root. Or the tampons,” she said. Or the natural sea sponge she'd stuck in her bra. “Have a nice day.”

And as she slowly made her way to the door, she imagined a Rolf moment from
The Sound of Music
—the one where Rolf finds the whole family behind the tombstone in the abbey and hesitates, deciding whether or not he loves Liesl, before blowing that pansy-ass Nazi whistle. Did TYLER, A WHOLE FOODS TEAM MEMBER, love her, or would he blow the whistle?

He loved her.

She was free, walking across the Alps of the parking lot to the neutral, loving Switzerland of her car. She let out a sigh and wished for a second that she were in the Alps. Living in Florida was like living on the sun. She could actually see the gaseous heat rising from the asphalt.

Cam arranged her Whole Foods booty into a still life on the dashboard and sent a photo of it to Lily. She crossed
Experiment with petty shoplifting
off of her Flamingo List and stuck it back in the glove box. Then her phone rang with the Lily ringtone, “I Believe in Miracles,” by the Ramones. She'd picked it because she suspected that perhaps Lily did believe in miracles. In a small, somewhat sarcastic kind of way.

“Good job, Cueball, I didn't think you had it in you,” she said when Cam picked up.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. You know how you are.”

“How am I?” Cam asked, opening the little pot of Burt's Bees and sliding the goop across her pursed lips.

“You know, that thing where you're brutally honest and truthful and always right even when you're sick and tired of always being right because you know it makes you seem obnoxious. I thought that would get in your way.”

“I heard some bad news today, Lil.”

“We've heard bad news before.”

Cam was silent. She unstuck the suction cup of her dashboard hula doll and waved her back and forth so that her eyelids opened and shut.

“It doesn't matter,” Lily went on. There was a pause. No one said anything. And then: “Nothing matters but getting that flamingo.”

“'Kay,” said Cam, and she hung up. She sucked in some breath, which buoyed her for a moment. But after she exhaled she felt everything inside her—her stomach, her solar plexus, her throat—getting wrung out by an imaginary pair of cruel and strangling fists.

Cam drove past the pink and aquamarine–canopied strip malls until she found the one with the Family Dollar. No one dressed in black shopped in Family Dollar. That was pretty much a rule. She would not blend.

Cam donned her grandmother's old straw beach hat with the yellow ribbon for a splash of color. She put on her big red sunglasses. And, luckily, while she was crossing the parking lot, she was able to catch a Family Dollar plastic bag that was swirling away in a miniature tornado.

She walked up to the sidewalk sale and pretended to peruse the plastic, lead-painted offerings made in China. The flamingos were stuck pole-first into a big cardboard box, where they butted up against one another and stared with their black spray-painted eyes at the tiki torches, kiddie pools, water wings, and plastic margarita glasses that were all half-price for summer.