The Probability of Miracles (34 page)

Cam's skin was on fire, but she knew if she could get to the Advil she could hide her fever for another day. She took some and then went back to bed and waited for it to kick in. She dug in the pocket of her cargo pants and found the little eyedropper of pink liquid morphine that she hadn't used in weeks. For the hell of it, she squeezed three drops under her tongue.
I will be in a delightful mood today
, she thought. Like a crazy-eyed, homeless, psychotic vet from the Vietnam War, probably, but at least she would feel no pain. She was tempted to take a toke on her inhaler as well, but if her shortness of breath was caused by the tumors pressing against her heart and lungs, an inhaler was not going to help.

“Cam, you okay?” Asher called up to her from the bottom of her staircase.

“Yeah, come on up. There's something I need you to help me with.”

Asher circled his way up the stairs. He wore brown plaid Bermudas and a soft brown T-shirt that showed the contours of his chest without being too obnoxiously tight. Asher the perfect.

Cam sat on her mattress leafing frantically through the pile of miracle mail that had found its way to her in Promise. She was looking for the little gray Hello Kitty envelope with Lily's handwriting on it. She had a feeling she should open it now before it was too late. She shook the Harvard admission papers upside down, and finally the envelope dropped, corner-first, onto her bed.

“I need you to open this,” she said.

“Are you afraid to get a paper cut?”

“No,” Cam said a little irritably. She wasn't in the mood for jokes. “It's from Lily. I need to open it, and I don't want to be alone when I do.”

“No sweat. Let's open it.” He sat down on the bed behind her, straddling her with his thighs.

She sighed and picked up the envelope.

He kissed her shoulder. “Go ahead, Cam.”

The envelope popped right open, the seal moistened from weeks of misty, salty sea air. Cam pulled out a folded-up piece of lined paper. It was Lily's Flamingo List, torn from a spiral notebook more than a year ago. Lily had decorated it with black ink drawings of flamingos around the border, and inside she'd made neat check boxes to the left of every item on the list. Cam ran her finger over the ink as if reading Braille. She wanted to feel more of Lily, how she pressed the letters into the paper.

Most of the items on her list were checked off with a glittery, silver gel-pen check mark. Like:

Next to this last one was a note, “enclosed.” Cam shook the envelope and a movie ticket fell out onto the bed, an autograph scrawled across the back.

Lily had outlined the empty check boxes with a red Sharpie. With the same Sharpie, she had written, underlined and in caps,
CAMPBELL, DO THESE!!!

The unchecked items included:

The final red box, left conspicuously and heartbreakingly blank, was
Find true love.

“Shit,” Cam said, as her heart bounced off her diaphragm and did a jackknife dive into her stomach. “Oh, Lily.” Cam sighed, and she sucked in a deep breath to hold back her tears.

Asher took his carpentry pencil from behind his ear, reached over Cam's shoulder, and checked that one off immediately.

“Asher,” Cam said.

“What? It's true,” he said.

“I know. But . . .” She felt like she was stealing this one from Lily, and she felt for a second that she didn't deserve it.

“She's happy for you, Cam.”

“I know.”

Cam grabbed the pencil and checked off the volcano because she'd been to Hawaii a couple of times for hula seminars. She checked off the surf & turf because eating the lobster was close enough. She'd seen the It's a Small World version of the Taj Mahal at Disney, and that would have to suffice. She checked it off.

“The rest we can do in one day,” Asher said.

“We can?”

“We will.”

Cam stood on the shore of the beach on the far side of the lighthouse, where she wrestled with a black heap of neoprene.

She could not figure out her wet suit. It was getting even colder in Maine as the summer stretched into August, so thankfully, Asher had built a little fire on the beach. It crackled and hissed a little and fought to stay alive in the sea breeze.

“Put it on like panty hose,” Asher called from the shore, where he had dragged her enormous foam training board. “Or just don't wear it. Then you can check off the skinny-dipping and kill two birds.”

“I'm not surfing naked, Asher.”

“Rats,” he said.

When she finally zipped up the suit, Asher made her lie down on the board in the sand and practice snapping up to her feet a couple of times. Finally they got into the water, paddled out a bit and sat straddling their boards, rocking side by side.

“This is the part where sharks mistake us for sea turtles.”

“Asher! You know I hate sharks. Dammit!” The sea looked a dark and menacing gray all of a sudden.

“Just joking. We don't have sharks in Maine.”

“You don't?”

“No. Wait. What's that?!” he pointed to something close to Cam's leg.

“Asher! Seriously! Stop!” Cam's eyes filled with tears for just a moment. She wasn't feeling well, she was emotional about completing this list for Lily, and she really didn't like sharks.

“Sorry, Cam. Really. I didn't know you'd be so afraid. Come here,” he said, and he hugged her right there in the water. Their boards knocked into each other as they bobbed atop the ocean waves, trying not to tip over.

“Okay, lie down on your board. I'll push you into a wave at the right time, and then you just have to stand up.”

“‘Just stand up,' huh? I think if it were that easy there'd be more people surfing right now.” Cam scanned the stretch of sand, sea grass, and rocks in front of her. They were the only people for miles around. The town off to her left seemed small and abandoned, like one of those miniature ceramic towns people put around their Christmas trees.

“You can do it,” he said. “Allyoop.”

Cam lay down on her board, and Asher held the back of it to steady it for her. He steered her into an oncoming wave right before it was about to curl over and break. Cam pressed herself from her hands to her feet in one smooth motion like she'd seen on TV, and then . . . she did it. She was standing on water. Master of the universe. She could feel the ocean rolling and rumbling beneath her feet. It was thrilling! Who wouldn't want to feel this?

She made it all the way to shore. A little beginner's luck surfing miracle. Asher pumped his arms up and down in celebration as he bobbed on his board. He found a wave and stood up on his own board, cutting back and forth inside it as perfectly as Cam expected he would. He asked her to go back out and try again, but as much as she'd enjoyed riding the wave, she was exhausted. She still had a fever masked only by Advil. Just getting into that wet suit had tired her out.

“You go,” she said. “I can watch for a while.”

On the beach she peeled herself out of her wet suit, bundled up in her fleece-lined hoodie and her sister's pink boots, and sat near the fire. She took out the notebook Izanagi had given her and unfolded Lily's list. She checked off
Go surfing
and then paged through the book. At some point during her stay in Promise, she had started recording the revelatory notions that her time here had seemed to accommodate.

And a recent one:
Only the present moment matters.

She sat with the present moment, watching Asher surf with the joy and concentration of a child. Surfing brought about conditions where you had no choice but to live in the present moment. You had to pay attention. Maybe that's why people got so spiritual about it. Cam was glad Lily had it on her list.

AT HOME THEY TOOK HOT SHOWERS. CAM POPPED SOME MORE ADVIL, and they rested before embarking on Asher's plan for the rest of the evening. He said he knew of a special cove in the bay, perfect for “night swimming,” which was his euphemism for skinny-dipping.

“Oh, we should totally play that song,” said Cam.

“Of course,” said Asher. He would take her there in the boat after the sun went down.

The rest of the family was playing bocce on the lawn: Perry and Izanagi versus Nana and Alicia. Cam sat on the picnic table to watch for a while. She was cheering for the old-lady team. She didn't need to, though, because those two were ringers, and they had the situation under control. Asher joined her.

Cam looked over to the beach. The familiar purple and orange stripes behind the lighthouse seemed to hang there forever before they would let darkness fall.

“Can't we go now?” she asked after Asher got back from judging a close call on the bocce court. She was anxious to finish the list.

“No, it has to be dark,” he said.

“I don't think anyone will see me.”

“That's not why it has to be dark.”

“Then why?”

“Patience, Campbell.”

The boat's deep-throated engine rumbled through the black dark of the bay. As they got closer to their destination, Asher put on R.E.M., and the wake behind the boat started to glow and sparkle as if someone had put a spotlight underneath the water. He anchored the boat near the moonlit sandbar.

It had to be dark, it turned out, because he had taken her to a bioluminescent cove, where the water glowed magically in fluorescent, neon-colored sparks. Cam had heard of this before. The glowing was caused by ancient single-cell organisms that were neither plant nor animal. They were the beginnings of life. The inhabitants of the original primordial soup. The only place where electricity and water could coexist. It was science and it was magic and it was absolutely unbelievable.

When Cam looked down, she could see trails of glitter through the water. Tiny blue fish darted back and forth through the dinoflagellates, the magical glowing algae.

“Ladies first, madame,” Asher said. “Hop in.”

Cam skinny-dipped the wimpy way. First she eased into the water with her bathing suit on. The water was warm. She slid around in it, wiggling off her suit and throwing it back up to Asher in the boat. He caught it and stripped down before doing a naked cannonball. The splash lit up the sky like liquid fireworks.

It was shallow enough for Asher to stand, so he held Cam and kissed her as she wrapped her legs around him. The glitterlike pixie dust swirled around them when they moved. It was like swimming inside a star. She used her finger to paint a stripe of glow-in-the-dark water down his nose. He painted her face and her neck and her chest. They kissed and then swam to the sandbar where they made slippery, cosmic, half-here-and-half-in-some-world-beyond love.

“That wasn't on the list,” said Cam.

“I was improvising.”

“Good work.” Cam was sprawled on the beach like a mermaid.

“I want to be with you forever,” Asher said as he looked down at her. Her hair, now wavy and long, spun around her head like silky seaweed in the sand.