The Probability of Miracles (35 page)

“This is forever.” She stretched her arms up over her head and yawned contentedly.

“Don't get all metaphysical on me, Ass Whisperer.” Asher smiled with the gorgeous dimple side of his mouth.

“No. This moment.” Cam looped her hands around the back of his neck. “The present moment can be chopped into infinitely smaller present moments. This moment is forever. And it is all that matters.”

They both heard a swoosh, which was eerie because they were alone in the dark in the middle of the ocean.

“Look!” he said, and they sat up on the beach.

Two lavender blue dolphins leapt from the sea simultaneously, creating an arc of sparkling gold water in the air behind them.

“They come here all the time,” Asher said. “It's like a playground for them.”

“Aren't they colorblind?”

“They must be able to see the light, I guess. Is this close enough to swimming with them, or do you want me to go get one for you?”

“I don't think you're going to have to,” said Cam. The dolphins jumped again, a little closer to the sandbar and the boat. They were curious about Cam and Asher and wanted to play.

Cam stood and waded in up to her waist, still naked, like Brooke Shields in
The Blue Lagoon
. She watched a fin come closer to her. “Asher!” she said shakily. “You need to stand next to me. This is a little too sharklike.”

“They're definitely not sharks, Cam.”

Asher stood next to her with his arm around her waist. Cam stuck her hand out, and the dolphin slid up against it like an enormous purring cat at feeding time. Its skin was slippery to the touch.

“Grab onto his fin,” Asher said. “He'll give you a ride.”

She held on to either side of the fin, and the dolphin, all muscle, all power, took off.

Cam shrieked. “I hope you're watching this, Lily,” she said, and she let the dolphin pull her about ten yards before letting go. She didn't want to be dragged into the oblivion of the deep sea.

As she swam back to Asher, she hoped for a sign, some validation that Lily's life was made complete. She had gotten used to everlasting sunsets, nighttime rainbows and flamingos flying through the snow. Some small part of her had changed its mind about the probability of miracles. She had almost come to expect them.

She waited for something, a light in the distance, a tidal wave, something grand and definitive. But there would be no sky-splitting miracles tonight. She thought she felt the soft tickling wisp of a butterfly kiss on her cheek and then a chilling breeze, and she took this to mean that Lily had officially moved on.

Asher's face grew sterner as he drove closer to the dock. Cam tried to tickle him. “I see your lips curling,” she said, trying to get him to smile. His mood confused her. He slammed things around as he prepared to dock the boat, and finally she saw it. She looked toward shore, at the big red-and-white SMITTY'S LOBSTER POUND sign, and she saw a thin blonde sitting on top of a stack of lobster traps with her legs crossed, swinging her front leg back and forth, waiting for the boat to return.

“Shit,” Asher said.

It was “Marlene,” according to the personalized license plate on her Mustang. She was the woman, too old for her mother to have used the Land's End catalog as a baby-naming book, who was with Asher in his Jeep that night.

Asher didn't look at Cam as he deboated with his head down and his hands in his pockets like a guilty little boy about to get scolded. He walked toward Marlene, and Cam's hands went numb. Finally, he turned back to Cam and said, “I'm sorry. Just give me one second, 'kay?”

Cam's skin burned in humiliation, in sadness, in the recognition that there was no righteous place in reality for their love.

She climbed into Cumulus and turned on the heat, trying to melt the chill in her bones. Five minutes later, Marlene was still talking animatedly from the driver's seat of the Mustang while Asher sat silently with his head down. This was going to be a while.

Cam pulled out of the driveway of the marina and willed herself to blend into the mist. Invisible, invincible, and alone.

CAM WOKE UP WITH AN EVEN WORSE FEVER. HER THROAT HURT, HER right side ached, and her stomach felt like it was filled with cement. She knew she should probably get to the hospital, but she also knew that if she went in, this time, she would never come out.

She was barely able to get down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Perry sat at the island reading a book.

“I thought you were with Asher,” Perry said as Cam opened the fridge and looked around inside for something that wouldn't make her throw up.

“No.”

“Why aren't you with Asher?”

“I don't need to be with him 24-7, Perry.”

“Are you guys breaking up?”

“God! Perry. No, okay. I'm just having a glass of orange juice, which I can do very well on my own without Asher.”

Just then Asher came into the kitchen, grabbed Cam from behind, and dipped her. “No, you can't,” he said. “You need me to pour you some orange juice.”

“Actually, I don't,” she said, completely deadpan.

“Brrrr. That's cold, Cam Chowda,” Asher said, looking seriously into her face. He still had her in a dip.

“I told you I didn't like the Cam Chowda thing,” she mumbled, and she wriggled free.

Asher righted himself. “I am in the dog house, no?
Le château de bow-wow
.”

“No. You just have to know that I don't need you in the way you love to be needed.” Cam opened a cabinet and poured herself a bowl of cereal that she had no intention of eating.

Perry took her book into the living room.

“You seemed to need me yesterday.”

“No. I'm not the kind of person who needs people,” she said, reaching in the fridge for some milk.

“Campbell,” Asher said after taking a deep breath, “I have a past with her, all right? But she was just a temporary fling. A placeholder for the real thing. You are the real thing.” He stood, taking hold of her hand and stroking her palm with the tip of his rough index finger.

Cam pulled her hand away. “That's nice. I'm glad I'm the real thing. Isn't that an ad for Coke? ”

Asher moved toward her again, but she pushed him away.

“Just be honest with yourself, okay, Asher? Just admit that there's a strong chance that you're going to waste away in this stupid town getting the life sucked out of you by the likes of that woman, who will take whatever you give her and keep asking for more unless you grow some balls and get the courage to create your own life.”

“Cam.”

“You won't, though, will you? You will never leave your precious big-fish-in-little-pond status. You're a coward. You could be somebody. You could have a future, and you're too afraid to try. What a waste,” Cam said as she threw the milk back into the fridge and slammed the door. Her hands were shaking, and she cried, hot, angry, feverish tears.

Asher took a step away from her, like she might take a swing at him. “I like it here, Campbell. I have everything I need. Why would I want to be anywhere else?”

“Because most people want things, Asher,” she said to the fridge door. “They want something, and they go after it. It's not okay to wait for your life to happen to you.”

“I thought you said I should reside in the present moment.”

“That was me.
I
should reside in the present moment. But
you
should plan your future because you effing have one.”

“You have one, too. Have you sent those forms back to Harvard?”

Cam turned and looked at him. “We're not talking about me, Asher, but
of course
I did. Come September I leave here, and I never look back. How could you think this was more than a summer fling?”

“I don't know, maybe because you told me you loved me. Or maybe you didn't. You said it in Samoan, so I have no idea what you said.”

“I'm sure I'm not the first girl who's told you that.”

“At least the other ones meant it.”

She leaned down onto the counter with her head down and listened as he walked away and slammed the front door behind him. She knew she had to push him away, but she'd never felt heavier. The force of gravity pulled so strongly on her body, she thought she might get sucked through the floor.

Cam had cried herself to sleep and was woken up by the sound of the wind whistling through the windows of the widow's walk. For the first time since they'd moved to Promise two months ago, clouds gathered in the sky. Gray clouds that seemed to be moving at warp speed, like in one of those nature documentaries where they dramatically speed up the weather. One big raindrop finally splatted against her east-facing window, and it was like the keystone drop that, once loosened, let all the other ones fall behind it. The rain began to pelt the windows like shrapnel.

At first she could hear individual drops, and then the walls of water slammed against the window with slapping thuds. Cam had seen some impressive storms in Florida—deep, resonating thunderclaps with crackling displays of lightning—but the staggering thing about this storm was its permanence. Storms in Florida were fickle and ephemeral. Utterly temporary. This one had settled in for the long haul. Cam wrapped herself in her blankets and kept watching it, analyzing the shape-shifting shades of gray.

“He's out there, you know,” she heard a scratchy old lady's voice say from the corner of the cupola.

Her fever must have been really high because Cam could actually see the shadowy figure of the long-haired woman from Asher's photograph.
Olivia, 1896
was sitting upright in the antique wooden chair where Cam usually piled her laundry. It probably
was
a pile of laundry, Cam reminded herself.

She'd had hallucinatory fevers before. The hallucinations usually went away if you didn't talk back to them, so Cam ignored her.

“You really know how to dole out the ‘tough love.' Isn't that what they call it on
Dr. Phil
?” said the shadow.

It's a pile of laundry
, Cam repeated to herself.
It's just a chair and a lumpy pile of laundry.
She fumbled around the floor next to her bed to find the Advil and swallowed eight at once.

“Pretty selfish of you to go ahead and decide for him how he needs to handle this,” said the chair.

“He doesn't need to experience any more loss,” Cam couldn't stop herself from saying. “It's better for him to be angry than depressed.”

Rats
, she thought. Now that Cam had spoken to her, the creepy witch would never go away.

“You are such a know-it-all,” the widow said. “Maybe he needs to grieve. He needs to say good-bye. Maybe he needs some closure.”

Cam hated that word,
closure
. It was even worse than
tough love
. “Where did you get ahold of the self-help books?”

“There is so much you don't know about men.”

“Oh, and you know so much. Sitting up here and waiting your whole life for one to come home.”

“We weren't put on this earth to go it alone.”

“Maybe not, but we all die alone, don't we?”

“What am I, chopped liver?”

“You're here to help me die?” A crack of lightning lit up the cupola, and Cam could see the figure more clearly. She sat with her eyes down, focusing nonchalantly on the needlework in her lap. She wore an ankle-length black skirt and a black cardigan sweater. Her nose was long and sharp. Her face was wrinkled and grizzled now, but her hair was still a beautiful, wavy strawberry blonde.

“Ayuh.”