The Question of Miracles (17 page)

“Listen,” she said. “I want to teach
you
how to do something.”

“What?” asked Boris. He sounded suspicious.

“I don't know,” said Iris. “What do you want to learn? I could show you how to garden, maybe. Or how to give a hairless cat a bath.”

“No, thanks,” said Boris. “I think I'm better off
not
knowing how to do those things.”

“Okay,” said Iris. “But I'm going to teach you
something.
”

“That sounds like a threat.” Boris laughed. “Besides, you're already teaching me things. Like the friend stuff.” He looked embarrassed for a minute, and then he said, “I invited Heather to sit with us at lunch tomorrow.”

Iris felt her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You did? What did she say?”

Boris smiled. “She said okay,” he answered. “So maybe that'll be fun, having a third player.”

Iris nodded. “Maybe,” she said.

 

That night, Iris sat in front of the fire practicing what Boris had shown her—casting on and the basic knit stitch. He'd loaned her a fat pair of needles and a ball of blue cotton yarn. Charles sat beside her, his steady gaze following the motion of the needles.

Boris was right. Knitting wasn't that hard, once you got the hang of it. And it was kind of nice to have something to do with her hands.

“Very soon,” Iris told Charles, “you're going to be wearing a fuzzy hair sweater. In orange, I think.”

Charles didn't answer. Something diverted his attention, and suddenly he leaped down from the hearth and headed over to the incubator. Iris unfolded her legs, set aside her knitting, and followed him.

There was a little sound, like a tiny tap. Charles's tail twitched. One of the eggs, the second one in on the bottom row, moved a little. Just the tiniest quiver. But it moved.

“Dad! Mom!” Iris ran into the kitchen. Her parents were playing gin rummy at the table. They looked up, startled.

“The eggs!”

That's all she had to say. Her dad jumped up, forgetting about the hand of cards he held. They fluttered to the kitchen floor. “It's happening,” he said. He sounded like he could hardly believe it was true.

Then he rushed into the living room. Iris and her mom followed him. Charles was still there, sitting motionlessly, watching the incubator.

Now two eggs were moving—the first one and another, in the middle of the top row. And then, almost simultaneously, the chicks began to peck themselves free.

A crack emerged on the bottom egg, and it spread slowly, and then a tiny piece of shell at the center of the crack broke loose. Something tiny and light orange—“A beak,” said Iris's father reverently—pecked its way through.

Then the crack widened, and the hole in the shell grew, piece by tiny piece, as the chick emerged. Above, on the top row, the second chick fought its tiny, valiant fight for freedom. Finally the first chick pushed through its head, and then its wings. The chick was damp, as if it were coming in from the rain, its feathers dark with moisture, streaked here and there with bloody mucus.

But even still, it was beautiful to Iris, and she knew her parents thought so too. All three of them gasped in unison when the little chick kicked free of its shell. It just sat there, its tiny body breathing hard, exhausted from the effort its exodus had taken.

On the top row the second chick managed to free itself, too, and then there they were, two living, breathing, perfect creatures, surrounded by all the hidden potential of the eggs around them.

Iris's dad opened the door of the incubator and very carefully scooped up one of the chicks, and then the other. He carried them over to the hearth and held them in front of the fire, warming them.

“Iris,” he said. “Here. Take them.”

She reached out, and her father transferred the chicks into her cupped hands. Iris could feel the beating of their hearts.

She sat on the hearth and warmed them, watching breathlessly as their feathers dried and fluffed up, and listening as they made their first little chicken sounds.

It was too much for Charles to resist, and he hopped up next to Iris on the hearth.

“Careful!” warned both of her parents, together.

“Charles is a predator,” said her mom. “He can't help himself.”

Iris brought the chicks closer to her chest, but Charles stepped forward, sniffing them. “Charles,” she warned. “Be nice.”

She opened her fingers a little to let Charles see the chicks. His ears were forward, and he didn't
look
like he wanted to eat them, so Iris lowered her hands to give him a better view.

All three of them—Iris, her father, her mother—held their breath as they waited to see what Charles would do. And then he stretched his neck forward, leaned into the chicks—and licked one of them, right on the head.

“He likes them,” said Iris, triumphant. “He knows they're not food. They're family.”

Charles nudged the other chick, as if prodding it to stand. It peeped.

Iris's dad shook his head. “I'll be damned,” he said. “That's the craziest thing I've ever seen.”

There weren't a lot of things Iris knew how to do that Boris would want to learn. As she knitted in the living room by the fire, she thought about what she could teach him. For the past three days, Heather had shared their lunch table. Every now and then Boris would do something gross, like rub his finger across his teeth in between bites, and Iris would kick him under the table to get him to stop.

Heather was really into horses and liked to tell them about her riding lessons out at the stable. Iris asked her, “How do you ride in all the rain?”

“There's a covered arena,” Heather said. “And it's kind of nice, listening to the rain on the roof while I ride. And since it's cold, the horse's breath comes out in big puffs of steam, like a dragon's. You can come out sometime, if you want, to watch me ride. You can help me groom the horse.”

That sounded fun to Iris, but Boris said, “No way. Have you ever seen one of those things poop? Disgusting.” Then Heather laughed, but not in a mean way, and then Iris laughed too, and so did Boris.

 

Iris liked the way the needles felt when they rubbed together. She liked the neat, tight row of stitches she was making. She didn't even mind the mistakes that much, when she'd have to unwind the yarn and start again.

Over and over again as she practiced her knitting, Iris's gaze returned to the closet door.

Finally she laid her work aside and went to the closet under the stairs. She opened the door. As it swung open, a draft blew in and shifted the coats on the rack.

Iris leaned in, peering into the shadows, then lowered herself to a sitting position. She shut the door behind her, leaving just a crack for light. Deep in the closet was a mirror that her dad still hadn't gotten around to hanging.

Iris had reported to Boris a while ago about her research into Mirror Gazing. “You have to wear loose clothing,” she'd told him, “and you're not supposed to wear any jewelry. Then you sit with something that reminds you of the person you've lost. And you look into the mirror, and after a while, if you concentrate and wait long enough, you're supposed to see the person.”

Iris had shrugged, like she didn't really believe it would work, and then she'd dropped the subject. But here she was, and here was a mirror, and Sarah's tennis racket, and Iris's parents were both busy in other parts of the house. Iris took the cover off and laid the racket across her lap. She shifted the mirror against the wall so that she could stare right into her own eyes.

Iris waited, and waited, thrumming her fingers across the racket's strings. She didn't look at her hands, kept her gaze focused on her reflection. She longed to see Sarah's blue eyes gazing out at her, her reddish hair, her freckled nose. Her grin. But even in the midst of all that
wanting,
Iris remembered something else. A day not too long before Sarah died, when the two of them had stared together into the bathroom mirror at Iris's old house in Seal Beach.

“Your nose is longer than mine,” Sarah said. “And your eyebrows are darker.”

“But we have the same lips, almost,” Iris said. “And our hair is the same length.”

And they both wore bangs, and they liked the same strawberry-flavored lip balm. The similarities were greater than the differences, and Iris remembered that, on that day, she had felt that this was as close as she would ever get to having a sister.

Now, alone in the darkness, Iris's gaze focused on her own features. There was a scratch above her right eye, where Charles had stepped on her in the middle of the night. Her bangs were gone, grown out. And her eyes seemed darker, maybe wider, than they had once been. Maybe it was the half-light of the closet. Maybe it was time passing, or all the sadness she had felt in the past months. Maybe it was living with so much rain. Whatever it was, Iris saw that her face was not the same as the face she had compared with Sarah's, months and miles behind her. She was not the same.

She wanted so badly to see Sarah there in the mirror, beside her own reflection, or even within it. She wished so hard, again, that by a miracle, Sarah would be there. Or even her ghost. Iris would be willing to settle for that.

She closed her eyes against everything—the racket in her hands, her image in the mirror, the shine of her tears. She would never stop wishing. She would never stop missing Sarah. She would never forget her birthdays, or the sound the ball made when it hit Sarah's racket just right. Iris knew she would never go back to the way she had been, before Sarah had died.

When she opened her eyes, Iris was not surprised to find that there had been no miracle reincarnation.

Sarah wasn't there. But her racket was. Iris ran her fingers again across its strings, and then held it against her chest. Finally she stood, and pushed open the door, and stepped back into the hallway. Gently, she closed the door behind her.

She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the light, and she tapped the edge of the racket's head against her palm, as Sarah had done, and spun it once, twice, three times, listening to the
whoosh
of air through its strings.

It was a beautiful racket. Still holding it, Iris went into the kitchen and called Boris. He answered on the third ring.

“Boris,” Iris said, “do you know how to play tennis?”

“No way,” he said. “That ball flying across the net at you as fast as the other person can hit it? Uh-uh.”

Iris bounced the racket's strings against her knee. “Come on,” she said. “Let me teach you how to play.”

“I don't think so, Iris.”

“Come on,” she said again.

Boris was silent for a minute. Iris listened to him breathe. Finally he said, “You won't hit it hard?”

“I promise I'll be super careful,” said Iris.

He sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I'll try.”

Out of the twelve eggs, eleven hatched. Iris's dad let her leave the last egg in the incubator for a whole week, but finally he told her it was time to return the incubator to the store in Portland.

“It would have hatched by now, Pigeon, if it was going to.”

Iris knew he was right. She'd looked it up on the Internet. That last egg wasn't going to hatch.

“Can we bury it in the garden?” she asked.

“Absolutely. That way, when it decomposes, it'll feed the soil, and the soil will feed the plants, and the plants will feed us. So in a way, the egg will live even though it'll never hatch.”

Iris liked that idea, the idea of the egg turning into something, of the egg not being nothing. She watched her dad unplug the incubator. The heating coils faded from bright yellow to orange-red. Some eggs won't hatch. That's just the way it is. Leaving them in the incubator for days and days couldn't make them hatch, no matter how badly she wanted it.

She watched as her father opened the incubator door, as he extracted the egg that would never be a chick, as the coils cooled to black.

Iris closed the incubator door.

As she walked into the kitchen, the constant, high-pitched, many-voiced “peep” grew louder. Corralled in a playpen in a corner of the kitchen, eleven chicks peeped all day, as long as there was light, only quieting when the sun went down.

She walked out the back door, took a shovel from the porch, followed her dad to the garden.

“Where do you want to bury the egg?” he asked.

Iris found a nice flat spot between the cabbage and the cauliflower, and she dug a little hole. The earth was soft from their earlier tilling, and the shovel cut easily through the dirt. Iris watched her dad set down the egg and tuck it into the ground. And then all she could think about was how that egg would never, ever hatch.

Everything
made her cry, Iris thought, a little angry with herself. So many worse things could happen—so many worse things
had
happened,
did
happen, and here she was crying over one unhatched egg.

The thing was, they'd never know what might have been in that egg—maybe the friendliest little chicken ever laid should have cracked out, but didn't. And they'd never know
why
the egg hadn't hatched. Had it been jostled during transport? Was it somehow never fertilized in the first place? Was there something wrong with it, some genetic mutation that made life unfeasible?

Most of the eggs had hatched; this one would not. Boris had lived, but other babies with his same condition had not. Iris had survived; Sarah had not. Did God like some of the eggs better, or prefer Boris to the other unborn babies? Did the universe love Sarah less than Iris? Is that why Iris had been standing by the fence that day? Was that a miracle? Was Boris's survival, or the birth of a chick, a miracle?

Iris didn't know. She
couldn't
know, not really. Neither could Claude the psychic or the doctor who weighed the soul. Or Linus Pauling, who didn't think that miracles could happen, or Thomas Edison. All the people who listened to recorded static, searching for voices. Those nuns, the ones who were so sure that Boris had lived because of their prayers to the right dead pope—they didn't really know either. They
believed.
They
hoped.
But hoping, Iris decided, is not the same as
knowing.