The Virgin of Small Plains (30 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

By the time she got back to the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying, Catie Washington felt exhausted again, or at least her body was. Her mind was still racing, and her emotions were still in a rising, swirling white tornado of their own. Her thoughts were floating, her feelings were sailing, they were riding out ahead of her body’s ability to keep up with them. She felt
alive.
Emotionally, she couldn’t wait to get back to her bedroom in the B&B and open her laptop computer and log on to write her story down as fast as she could, in the hope of remembering every detail of the miracle while it was still incredibly vivid in her mind. But physically, she felt terrible again, ill, worn down to the marrow, drained of the tiny bit of remaining energy that had driven her to Small Plains in desperation.

Was it a miracle? she wondered, though she didn’t really feel any doubt that it was. But other people might question her, so she needed to be able to answer them. Was it still a miracle if your body didn’t feel healed, but you felt happier than you ever had in all your life, and you felt lifted up onto a higher plane of existence where amazing things could happen, like fresh flowers raining directly onto you, only onto you, from out of a terrifying sky?

A few of the flowers lay around her on the floor of the van.

When she had risen from the grave, she had gathered into her hands some of the flower heads and stalks, leaves, and buds that had fallen on her. When she got to the car, she let them fall into her lap, from where most of them had tumbled around her as she drove the van. Now she bent, painfully, to pick up as many of them as she could carry again.

But she couldn’t force her body to move after that, and finally she gave up the effort, and simply pressed the horn until the proprietor of the inn came running out to help her.

In her room, seated in a straight-backed chair in front of a scarred old wooden desk, Catie logged onto thevirgin.org, which was the most popular of the small number of websites that had sprung up about the Virgin of Small Plains. Without even stopping to read through the entries from that day, she opened a new window to type up her own account of the astonishing thing that had truly happened to her.

“I have a miracle to report,” she typed. “Some of you know me, because I have participated in this blog before today. If you recognize my blog name, then you know that I have advanced breast cancer that has spread to my lymph nodes, my lungs, and most recently, my brain. I drove down here to Small Plains two days ago after my doctors told me I was going to have to go through another round of surgery, chemo, and radiation, and that there wasn’t much chance left that any of those miserable things would do any good for me. Like you guys, I had heard about the Virgin, and how she had helped lots of people in this town over many years. So here I came, and here I am.”

After that preface, she typed what had happened to her that day, ending her story with, “I survived a tornado that flew directly above me! I actually looked up into the cone of it! And it released flowers on me! I have never felt so protected, so blessed. I know now that no matter what happens in regard to my cancer—even if I die tomorrow, or today—I will be all right. Something in the universe is watching out for me, keeping me safe from the most terrifying harm there could possibly be. Until today, I thought that was cancer. But I have looked up into a deadly tornado, and it has sprinkled flowers onto me, and I have lived to tell you my story. If that’s not a miracle, then I don’t know what is.

“I wish blessings on all of you, as I have been blessed today. May the storms of life fly safely over you and may the flowers of the Virgin bring you beauty and peace as they have done for me today. I don’t know if you will ever hear from me again, but when the storm clouds gather around you, think of me, and know there are flowers in the storm.”

She signed it with the only name by which they knew her, “Love, Catie.”

Slowly, feeling ill but calm, she closed out the blog window.

Then she turned off her computer and lowered the lid of it.

Too ill to get back into her wheelchair, or even to crawl to the bed, she slid as carefully as she could out of the chair, and slipped to the worn, flowered carpet. There, she lay on her side, curling up against the pain she felt, closed her eyes, and grasped some flowers in her hands. Breathing in a shallow, careful way to keep her chest from hurting, Catie lay on the carpet wondering if she could sleep, wondering if she would ever wake again. She felt so transcendent, so peaceful to the depths of her soul, that she wasn’t sure she cared.

Chapter Twenty-seven

By the time he got back to the ranch house, Mitch felt both wired and tired, exhilarated by the storm and by his own anger, and also exhausted by them. He’d been up since before dawn. He’d traveled a long way in both the literal and the figurative senses. He’d had a few surprises, none entirely pleasant, and he had even managed to launch the business end of his plan of attack. Practically the only thing he had not managed to do in the long day was see his father. He hadn’t stopped by the old man’s house, had even driven out of his way to avoid that street. He hadn’t gone to the courthouse to look for his father there, hadn’t even been able to bring himself to look up at the tall, wide windows where the courtroom used to be, and most likely still was.

Now he felt exhausted one minute, and too keyed up the next.

He knew he’d probably feel better if he could go running, but the idea of running over rough, unfamiliar dirt roads in the dark didn’t appeal to him, so he left his running shoes in his suitcase for now.

It seemed incredible to him that among all the things he had managed to do on his first day back, one of them was to avoid getting killed by a tornado. But it had also occurred to him that if it had dropped its deadly tail on the ranch, he’d have had to head for the storm cellar.

He’d better make sure he could actually get the damned thing open.

It was full nighttime when he approached the old storm cellar with a flashlight in his right hand. He suspected that he had picked this time of night on purpose, just to test his courage. Mitch was damned if he was going to allow a stupid hole in the ground to spook him anymore, as if he were still a boy. He might allow himself to feel frightened of a tornado, but not of a hole in the dirt.

The grass that he walked through to reach it, behind the house, was still wet.

His flashlight picked up gleamings in the brush a few yards to either side of him—small creatures, doing their nocturnal things. He stopped for a long moment to listen to one coyote call from the east, and another one reply from the west. There were no bears in Kansas. A few wildcats, yes, but no bears, panthers, crocodiles, or other predators that a grown man had to fear. There were rattlers, but he had found a pair of his father’s old cowboy boots in a closet, and put them on to protect his feet and legs against snake strikes in the uncut grass.

He felt like an idiot to even be considering such things.

When he’d been a boy, he’d never thought about predators, except to hope to get to see them, to have great stories to tell his friends.

At the entrance to the storm cellar, he saw that it was badly overgrown with vines.

Daring himself not to think about spiders, and cursing himself for having turned into a city boy, he ripped the leaves and tough green cords away with his bare hands, after setting his flashlight on the ground.

When he had cleared enough away to see the door, he picked up the light again.

It was a wooden door, dark and splintery now, aged like a cask of wine.

The metal handle looked so rusted he was loath to touch it.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he muttered to himself. “You’d think I’d never rehabbed an old house or apartment building. You’d think I’d never seen a rat, or cleaned up filthy properties.”

But it felt different to be standing alone, with only a flashlight, in the country, in the deep darkness. He was a lone human in a million acres of solitude, the last man on Mars, the first man on the moon, that’s how it felt to him. All around him there was a profound silence such as he hadn’t heard in seventeen years. He glanced overhead to see the stars again, just to remind himself they were still there. The Milky Way had been invisible in Kansas City for decades, since even before he had moved there. But here, it still curved and stretched across an endless sky that wasn’t hidden by city lights.

It was both frightening and deeply satisfying.

He let out a breath that seemed to come up from his soul, a breath he felt he had been holding onto for almost two decades of his life, a breath that gave him a shuddering release so deep it shocked him.

“I missed you,” he murmured to the stars.

And then he laughed out loud, glad there was no one to overhear him.

“Don’t get attached to anything,” he warned himself. “Remember, there’s no decent cup of coffee for a hundred and fifty miles, or a movie any closer than Emporia. There’s no Krispy Kreme. There’s no—”

He finally realized there was a padlock on the handle, a big sucker, so rusted and crusted it was invisible until his flashlight shone full on it. How was he going to get in to save himself from a tornado if there was a padlock on the storm cellar door, and he didn’t have the key?

“Maybe it’s in the house,” he said, out loud. He was beginning to enjoy the luxury of talking to himself out loud, inside or out. Nobody to see him do it. Nobody to hear what he had to say. “Dad probably still has a key, but since I’m not going to ask him for it, that’s not helpful.”

Then he noticed that the plate that held the hasp through which the lock was looped was loose in the wood. It was all so old, so weather-beaten, that the screws that held all the pieces in place had come loose.

Mitch couldn’t get his fingers under the plate to give it a pull.

He flipped his light over and gave the loose screws a few expert knocks with the flashlight handle. It put a few dents in the aluminum, but it did the trick of knocking the plate completely loose.