The Question of Miracles (15 page)

But the men didn't seem upset. Their benign facial expressions didn't change, and none of them raised his voice. Father Santorno even smiled a little before he said, “God works in mysterious ways.”

“That may be,” said Katherine, rising and stretching her back. “Can I offer you gentlemen a cup of tea? I'm absolutely parched.”

Tea sounded good to all the visitors, and they spoke to each other in quiet, melodic Italian while Katherine filled the kettle and lit a flame beneath it.

Monsignor Augustin asked something, and Mr. Gardello flipped through a file, found an ultrasound image of Boris before he was born, and handed it across the table to him.

Iris looked at the picture. Curled in upon himself, his bones exposed, his head too large for his body, Boris as a fetus could have been a seedpod, a hairless cat, a chick inside an egg. He could have been anything.

Katherine pulled some cookies from a bin in the pantry and arranged them on a plate. When the water boiled, she poured it over black tea leaves in a cheery red ceramic pot. The men pulled together the papers strewn across the table, tapped them into piles, and set them aside to make room for the cups and plates. Katherine set out five of everything, and asked Iris to pour the tea.

It seemed to Iris that she wouldn't get a better chance than this, when the priests' attention was on the cookies and tea rather than the documents and pictures. So after she poured the tea, Iris cleared her throat. “Excuse me. Father? Monsignor?” She wasn't Catholic; the terms felt funny in her mouth. But she forged ahead. “Can I ask you something?”

Father Santorno was the one to answer. He smiled kindly and said, “Of course. What is your question?”

Now that she was here, finally, Iris had a hard time forming her question—the one she'd been thinking about since Boris had told her about his miracle. The one, actually, that she'd been pondering even longer than that, since last spring. “I just wanted to know,” she said, “if Boris's recovery was a miracle . . . You
do
think it was a miracle, right?”

“Most certainly,” said Father Santorno. “I have been through his files very carefully. I have spoken with all his doctors. I have corresponded with the fine sisters who prayed to Pope Paul. It seems clear to me that if not for the hand of God, Boris would not have survived.”

The other two men nodded in agreement.

“Okay,” said Iris. “But . . . why Boris?”

“What do you mean, child?”

“I mean, why Boris? Why should
he
get a miracle? Not that I wish he didn't, or anything. Of course I'm glad he's alive. But don't you ever wonder how God decides who gets the miracles? And why doesn't
everyone
get a miracle, if miracles are real? If God is real? I mean, if I had the power to make good things happen, and to stop bad things from happening, I wouldn't just do it for some people. I'd want to help everyone. All the time.”

Iris was crying. Her nose was running, and she rubbed her sleeve angrily across her face. She hadn't meant to cry. She just wanted to ask her question, the same question she'd asked Dr. Shannon, the same question she'd asked herself over and over again. Why Boris? Why her? And why not Sarah?

Katherine, sitting back down, squeezed her shoulder. She looked at the men from the Vatican as though she, too, would very much like to hear the answer.

Father Santorno handed Iris a napkin. He said, “The questions you ask, child, are good questions. They are questions each of us asks, many times.”

Iris took a ragged breath. She picked up a cookie, just to have something to do with her hands. “Well,” she said, “what's the answer?”

“The answer,” said Father Santorno, “is faith. Faith that God has heard us—that He always hears us. And that if it seems that He does not answer, it may rather be that He has not answered in the way we would like. We must have faith that His answer is the right one, even if we cannot see why, or how.”

Iris took a bite of her cookie. She didn't want to be rude, but it seemed to her that Father Santorno's response was the worst answer she had ever heard.

She looked over at Katherine. “I think I'll go play some Magic with Boris,” she said.

She pushed back from the table and left the kitchen. Behind her, she heard the three men begin their interrogation again.

April was almost half over before the ground finally warmed up enough for Iris's dad to plant his garden. He had a soil thermometer that he'd stuck into the ground, in the turned-over dirt that was going to be the garden. It looked just like the meat thermometer they kept in the utensil drawer, except bigger.

Finally, on a Sunday afternoon, Iris's dad came whistling into the kitchen carrying the soil thermometer, its long metal spike coated with black dirt. “Today's the day,” he sang. “Soil temperature has held steady just above sixty degrees since Tuesday. It's planting day!”

Iris was at the table, eating a bowl of cereal and flipping through a graphic novel Boris had loaned her. He had raved about how great it was, but Iris thought it was kind of stupid.

The story was about a boy named Harvey who had a superpower that let him turn into any animal, anytime. That part was okay, but the animals he chose to morph into seemed predictable. She was on page thirty-one, and so far he'd become a snake, a spider, and a great white shark.

If it had been her, Iris would have come up with better animals to become. Right off the top of her head she thought of a narwhal and a flying squirrel. When her dad came in through the kitchen door, Iris was considering whether it would be possible to become an extinct animal, like a dodo bird—something that didn't exist anymore, something that would never live again.

“Put on your mud boots,” said her dad. “I'm going to need your help.”

Iris looked out the big window above the sink. The sky was as gray as ever; a fine mist floated in the air. “It's raining,” she said, and turned back to her book.

Her dad walked over and looked down at her. Iris could
feel
him looking at her. She ignored him. He reached out, took hold of her book, and pulled it from her hands. He closed it.

“Hey!” said Iris. “You lost my spot!”

“Pigeon,” he said, sliding into the seat across from her, “if we wait for the rain to go away, we might never plant our garden.”

“Well, I can't help it if it's stupid here,” Iris said.

Her dad sighed. “There is lot of rain. But Pigeon, let's not let the rain dictate our lives.”

Iris wanted to shake her father. “You want me to just
ignore
the rain?”

“No,” he said. “I don't expect you to ignore it. You
can't
ignore it—nearly every day is a rainy day. But I want you to learn to live with the rain. To live
in
it. Eventually, it will fade into the background, little by little. I promise you. But you've got to make plans, to plant gardens, to go outside. In spite of the rain. Even if you get wet.”

Iris had the feeling her dad wasn't just talking about the rain.

Iris's mom came in from the living room. Her glasses were on top of her head, and her hair was kind of wild, the way it got when she was working on a problem. Like the energy from her brain frizzed her hair.

Charles was at her heels. He looked pleased with himself, and very dapper.

Iris couldn't help laughing. “What is
that?
” she asked. Charles was wearing a blue and yellow striped turtleneck sweater. It looked like something her father would wear, except shrunk down. And he crossed the kitchen proudly, his tail waving high in the air as if to announce his arrival. Weaving through the legs of the kitchen table, he purred.

“You like it?” asked Iris's mom. “I ordered it online.”

Charles leaped onto Iris's lap and circled, stretched his claws, lay down.

“He looks kind of ridiculous,” said Iris, “but he seems warmer.” She rubbed his side through the sweater.

“I think he likes it,” said her mom.

“Very handsome, Charles,” said Iris's dad. Then he told her mom, “Guess what? The ground is warm again today.”

“Time to plant the garden?”

He nodded, scratched his beard. “Today's the day.”

“I'll get my boots,” Iris's mom said.

Her dad put the thermometer in the sink and poured a cup of coffee. “I'll be outside,” he said. Before he opened the door, he flipped up the hood of his jacket. “Button up, Pigeon,” he said. “It's cold out there.” Then he winked and headed out to the garden.

A minute later, Iris heard her mother's booted footsteps as she reentered the kitchen.

“Iris?” she said. “I found something in the hall closet. Is this yours?”

Iris knew before she looked up what her mother would be holding. There it was—the ribbon-wrapped copy of
Anne of Green Gables.
Iris flushed. “I guess so,” she said.

Her mom walked over to the table, pulled a chair close to Iris's, and sat down. Her flowered raincoat created a bright spot in the kitchen. Iris didn't look right at her, but in the edge of her vision she saw the way all the colors melted together—purple and red and yellow and pink. Like a spring bouquet.

“What was it doing in the closet?” asked her mom.

She shouldn't feel embarrassed, Iris told herself. But she did. “I got it for Sarah,” she mumbled. Beneath her hand, Charles stretched a little, settled further into sleep.

Her mother stroked Iris's hair. For a minute she was quiet. Then she asked, “Sarah loved this book, didn't she?”

Iris felt that she had as little control over her tears as she did the drops that fell from the sky.

“It was her favorite.”

“May I?” asked her mother. Her fingers were poised to loosen the ribbon.

Miserably, Iris nodded. She watched as her mother pulled the end of the red and white bow, watched as the first loop slipped free, as the bow flattened into a line. Her mom undid the knot and set the ribbon aside. She opened the cover and flipped through the pages. The edges were gilt, and they shone under the kitchen light.

“I loved this book when I was a girl,” said her mom. “I loved Anne's great big imagination.”

“So did Sarah,” Iris said.

“Remember that scene, when Anne is walking with Diana through the woods after she fell off the ridgepole of the roof and sprained her ankle?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And remember how she was telling Diana that ghost story, and she thought that the woods were haunted?”

Iris remembered.

“And then she fell down. Didn't she trip on something?”

“She walked over an old boarded-up well. She broke through the wood and got stuck. Diana had to leave her there to go get help.”

“That's right! I'd forgotten that she got stuck. And then she got herself so worked up and scared that she actually
fainted.
Isn't that what happened?”

Iris nodded.

Her mom flipped through the book some more. Finally she said, “Pigeon? Why was the book in the closet?”

The words came out in a whisper. “It was for Sarah's birthday.”

“Oh,” said her mother. “And that's where you think Sarah is? In the closet under the stairs?”

Iris shrugged. It sounded ridiculous, when her mother said it like that. She braced herself for what her mother would say next—that there was no such thing as ghosts, that Sarah wasn't in their house, that Sarah was gone and wasn't coming back.

She didn't want to hear her mom say this. And if she did, Iris was ready to argue—her mom couldn't
prove
that Sarah wasn't there in the house, in the closet. Miracles could happen, after all. Claude said she could communicate with ghosts, and all those people online who believed in EVP, they believed that the dead weren't all-the-way gone. And look at Boris—look at what had happened to him. That was a miracle; it had been studied, examined by those priests, researched for hours, and they gave it their stamp of approval. And didn't they know more about what was possible—what miracles might occur—than Iris's mother?

But her mother didn't try to convince Iris that she was wrong, or that Sarah wasn't in their closet. All she said was, “I'll bet Sarah would love it if you'd keep this beautiful book up in your room, on the shelf with all your other books. I'll bet she'd want you to read it. To enjoy it enough for the both of you. Do you think you can do that?” She closed the book and slid it across the table, to Iris.

Iris traced the picture of the two girls on the cover. The two best friends. She took a deep breath, and she nodded.

“Good,” said her mother, standing and fastening the belt of her raincoat. “Then what do you say we go play in the mud with your dad?”

 

Iris didn't think she had ever seen her dad so happy. He'd tucked his mud-splattered khaki pants into his rain boots, and he was troweling rows into the rich, dark soil of his garden patch.

“Grab a shovel!” he called to Iris when she stomped down the back stairs and through the yard. Mist still floated across the grass, and everywhere Iris looked was wet. She hoisted a shovel and started turning the dirt at the far end of the garden, mixing in the coffee grounds and organic fertilizer her dad had poured over it.

Each turn of the spade revealed life—plump pink worms, wiggling blindly, tiny hairlike roots from plants that had once grown. Gray-brown mushrooms, thick-headed and thin-spined, that sliced easily when Iris pressed into them with the side of her shovel.

The dirt smelled
good
—wet and strong and familiar. And Iris remembered sitting on the floor of their Seal Beach home, digging through the dirt in their potted plants. Now, working in the garden, it was as if she was carried back to that time.

Her mother was on her knees in a rocky patch of the garden, sifting the dirt through her fingers and separating out pebbles. She was humming.