My Own Miraculous (4 page)

“Walcott said
hell
,” Natty reported, not looking up from his game.

I had no idea how to begin to answer. I’d been so relieved in the emergency room when Natty came back to himself that I’d forgotten her. I’d ignored the whole encounter, assuming we’d never see her again. Big mistake.

Natty didn’t need to worry about Hilde, though. He didn’t seem to be fretting about the encounter in the playhouse or fixating on the sprig of super-short hair chickening up at the back of his head. I wanted to keep it that way. I pulled Walcott up off the table and walked him a few feet away, out of earshot.

I spoke in a fast, low whisper. “She’s not right. She’s so not right. At the gym, remember, her mother was telling us that she’s some kind of genius? But I think it’s going wrong in there. In her head, it’s going very wrong. She has a thing about Natty, and I don’t think she’s safe. She thinks she’s magic or something, and she thinks my kid is like her. But he isn’t. He’s not like her. Natty is just regular.”

Natty looked up, though I knew he couldn’t have heard me.

“Done!” he said.

He turned the iPad to show us, and I saw he hadn’t been playing with Dinosaurs! It was the Rubik’s Cube app that had been tormenting Walcott for days. Natty’d had it less than ten minutes, but on the screen, fireworks were going off on the black background, and the cube itself spun in a beam of white light.

I shook my head no, because it wasn’t possible. He was three. No way was it possible. And yet he grinned at me so proudly, lofting the iPad where the cube spun, finished and whole, each side a smooth plane of a single color.

Chapter 4

W
alcott and me, we did what we should have done the second Hilde Fleming got freaky with a nail at the blood drive: We went and told on her to all our mothers.

Mimmy first. I had Walcott keep Natty occupied with Legos in the den because my kid had a vivid imagination. He was plenty good at inventing his own closet bogeys and under-bed monsters without having to deal with a real one.

Mimmy was fresh out of the shower, getting ready for work. I barged into her bathroom and got her up to speed as she sat in her silky robe at her vanity, moisturizing. She remembered Hilde from the hospital. The idea that the girl had put that nail through her own palm to follow us deeply alarmed her, and by the time I got through the haircut up in the play fort, she looked as concerned as I was.

“I think I should talk to her mother,” Mimmy said. “This kid’s in trouble.”

It took me a sec to realize she meant Hilde. I didn’t think of Hilde that way. She was six years younger than me, sure, but she’d graduated high school. She was about to be a college girl, like me. In my mind, Natty was the kid in trouble. Hilde was something awful, looming over him with wicked, silver scissors, out to get a piece. And that rich, low-country mother, bragging about Elon University and early graduation when Hilde was maybe ninety pounds and sickly pale—she struck me as oblivious and smug. “If that woman was any kind of decent mother, don’t you think she’d notice Hilde going off the rails?”

Mimmy said, “I certainly would have. I hope. But the girl did make a big point of telling you that no one else could know. Maybe she’s tamping it down around her family?”

My head shook in an inadvertent, instant no; I couldn’t absolve Mrs. Fleming that easily. Even if Hilde’s crafty mind was protecting its own crazy by telling her to keep it secret, even if she wasn’t announcing to her mom that she was God’s particular, best daughter, I’d known Hilde was off the second I laid eyes on her. I’d seen it, and I didn’t even love her.

“Her mother should have noticed
something
. The notebook—No one could see those crazy, inked-up pages and not pause. The nail! Where in a high-school gym is she going to fall on a nail like that? If the mom’s this blind, talking to her could make things worse. We have to think about Natty.”

Mimmy pursed her lips, thinking. “I tell you what, I’ll call around first and find out who these Flemings are and where they’re staying. Maybe someone here in town knows the family and can help us figure out the best way to handle them.”

I gave her a grateful kiss and said, “Yes. Be sure you find out when their rental ends. That’s the main thing.”

I left her to dress and went back to the living room. The boys were still in the den, but they weren’t playing Legos now. Walcott lounged on our old toile sofa, while Natty sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet. Natty had the iPad.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Walcott, and my voice came out sharp.

“I downloaded another puzzle. It’s kinda like Rubik’s, but it’s supposed to be tougher,” Walcott said, and instantly my ribs cinched in, squinching half my air out. “I want to see if he—”

I was already zooming across room, moving so fast that Walcott stopped midsentence to watch me with his eyebrows rising. Natty was wholly absorbed, concentrating so hard his tongue poked out between his lips. I wanted to take my finger and manually put it back. On the screen, hundreds of tiny lights blinked in rows, turning off or shifting color as he pressed them.

“Hey!” I said, super perky, and he looked up at me. I put my hands on the iPad. “Mimmy made scones. I bet the ones with chocolate chips. Go ask if you can have one.”

I’d smelled them coming in; that was all it took for him to let go and trot off toward Mimmy’s room.

“What was that?” Walcott asked me.

I looked at the puzzle. It wasn’t anything like solved. My next breath came easier, but I snapped at Walcott anyway. “Don’t give him these adult apps.”

“Adult?” Walcott said, chuckling. “It’s a puzzle, not porn. Don’t you want to see if he can do it?”

“Please! He can’t do this. You’ll frustrate him. He’s just a baby, poking at whatever pretty color gets his fancy.” No way a three-year-old could solve this thing. Not a regular three-year-old, anyway. Not even a clever one, like Natty. A preschooler who could solve this was stuck way out at the tail end of the bell curve. On the outside of everything. A freak.

Unbidden, a memory rose: all the people at the blood drive staring at my son. At first, they’d been so charmed to see a toddler, just turned three, already knowing letters. They’d all smiled, enjoying the cute little boy who’d seen enough
Sesame Street
to recognize a big, bright-colored G. But their gaze had changed when Natty said he had to run
Go, Indians
.

I realized my head was shaking itself back and forth. No. I didn’t want that for him. I never had. When he was a tiny baby, nursing late in the nighttime, I would whisper futures into the curve of his pink ear, putting them deep inside his baby brain.
Don’t you want to be an orthodontist? You could give out such cool toys in the goody basket that all the kids would want to come to you for braces. You’d have a wall full of smile pictures, if you were an orthodontist.
I wanted a regular, sweet life for him: a good education, a nice job, a loving wife, some kids. Natty wouldn’t be like me. He’d do it all in the right order. He would be happy and kind and safe and good.

Smart but not too smart. Gifted, sure, but not freakishly so. Real geniuses cut off their own ears and failed at interpersonal relationships and killed themselves.

Walcott didn’t get it. “Come on, he solved that Rubik’s Cube. That was amazing.”

My head kept shaking itself, back and forth. No. “If I gave iPads to a million monkeys, one of them would solve it, too, while another accidentally typed out
Romeo and Juliet
into the Notes app.”

Walcott slid off the sofa like a long man-ribbon, twining down onto the floor by me. “Yeah, I know it was probably a fluke, but don’t you want to know for sure? Look into my eyes, Shandi.” He waggled his brows up and down. “Deep! Deep into my eyes! You are getting sleepy. You are hyp-mo-tized. You want to know for sure.”

For once his clowning didn’t get me laughing.

“I do know for sure,” I told him, but I made myself say it gently because I wasn’t going to let Hilde Fleming get to me. She was the one who claimed that Natty was world-savior level special, and she was hardly a credible judge. I
knew
Natty. I’d made him in my body. Mimmy had catalogued his milestones in a baby book, and until now they’d fallen on the cute, bright side of normal. Solving that cube was just a weird blip in the regulation happy babyhood I’d been helping Mimmy unfold for him for three years now.

As for
Go, Indians,
Natty must have overheard one of the volunteers or waiting donors read those words out loud. I’d only had half an eye on him because I’d been filling out the forms, and Natty was such a friendly kid. He might have even asked or—As I stood up to go see what was keeping Natty in the kitchen, the explanation it hit me.
Hilde
could have read it to him. He’d passed by her over and over in all his going back and forth. She was a girl who set things in motion; she’d put a nail clean through her own hand to get to the hospital. She could have seen him yelling the letters and given him the words herself, creating food to fatten her delusions.

I needed to quit worrying about Natty. Hilde was the problem.

I said, “Anyway, he didn’t solve the new one, so, there you go,” just as Natty came back in, his mouth full and most of an outsize scone clutched in one hand. I scooped him up and dropped a kiss onto his chocolate-smeared cheek. “Come on. Let’s go see your momses.”

“Okay,” Walcott said obligingly, but as he followed us out, he added, “He only had the new puzzle for a minute, though. If that.”

I ignored him.

We walked over to the B and B. It was faster to hike the wooded cut-through than to drive; Walcott and I had been running the trail back and forth since we were five years old. We swung Natty in between us, but the path was steep. He wanted to stop and sit down on the big fallen tree when we got to the halfway place, a grassy mini-clearing where Walcott and I always met up. Instead, Walcott swung Natty up onto his back and piggied him the rest of the way.

As we came out of the woods, we saw both of Walcott’s momses in their gardening togs, working on the beds in front of the big house with all the guest suites. Aimee straightened up and and waved, and then Darla looked up and waved, too.

I peeled Natty off Walcott and said, “Let’s go to the cottage?” while Walcott continued on to the big house to talk to them. I took the iPad, too.

The cottage was behind the main house; his momses lived there. It had a big screened porch off the den, and Darla had put this red plastic table and chairs from when Walcott was little out there for Natty, along with a bunch of old toys.

They never locked their doors—no need up here, and anyway they always had a couple-three big dogs who roamed the property—so once I had dragged out the proper Fisher-Price buildings and Natty was happily rummaging about in the box of Little People and accessories, I went on through the sliding glass doors into the den.

I didn’t want my back to Natty, though. I sank down on the big blue sofa that faced out to the porch, watching Natty through the glass. He was setting up the farm. I had a strong urge to keep my eyes on him, every living minute.

It was the first time I’d had a second to myself. I woke up the iPad and went to Google, even though I knew from experience that Google could be a terrible alarmist. Hand Dr. Google the symptoms for ringworm, and he’d likely link you right to leprosy. Still, he was the only doc I had just now.

What I wanted most of all was to talk to Dad. He was a real doctor and the smartest person I knew. If he didn’t know what was wrong with Hilde, he would for sure know how to find out. He was out of the country, though, taking my spoiled-ass stepmother on a Nile cruise.

I knew Hilde was hearing voices. I knew she was delusional, believing she and Natty were some kind of yin-and-yang messiah. I had a vague idea what those things meant. I had a one-word guess—but oh, it was a scary word.

Staring at the blinking cursor, I didn’t want to put that scary word in. Instead, I put in “hearing voices,” hoping to get better options. The top links that came back were for an online poetry journal and a creative writing blog. Under those, I found a link to the UK version of WebMD. I clicked to it, and it helpfully told me, “Hearing voices is a common symptom of severe mental illness.” Oh, you don’t say.

I started over, typing the word in as fast as I could and still have a hope of spelling it correctly:
schizophrenia.

I waited for the list of links to load:
Symptoms of Schizophrenia. What is Paranoid Schizophrenia?
And
Schizophrenia: Symptoms Explained.

As I scanned the page, my gaze caught on words:
delusional
,
suicide
,
breakdown
,
psychotic
. That last one chilled me down into my bones.

I heard Walcott and his momses coming through the front door. Out on the porch, Natty was so absorbed in his farm pretend he didn’t so much as look up as they came into the den.

“How’re you doing, kiddo?” Aimee asked me. She was long and tall, with permanently wind-chapped cheeks. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a careless tail.

I shrugged. “Google’s freaking me out. I’m trying to get it to tell me what’s wrong with this girl.”

Aimee said, “Speaking as a parent—my first worry is drugs.”

I thought about it, but then I shook my head. Every school had drug kids, even mine, way up in our sleepy mountain town. Pot-’n’-’shroom hippie wannabes, mostly, but we’d also had two guys who’d gotten into meth and dropped out and disappeared. I looked to Walcott, but he shook his head no, too. Last semester at Georgia State, he’d had a genuine sniffy-nosed, twitchy cokehead in his modern lit class. Whatever Hilde’s problem was, it wasn’t any kind of drugs we’d ever seen.

I said, “She’s not a burnout. She got into Elon University at fifteen. Whatever’s wrong with her, I think it has to have started pretty recently, don’t you? I don’t think a person could be that crazy and still organized enough to stay on the honor roll.”

“What’s Google say?” Darla asked, twisting at her silver bangle bracelets. She was more intense than laid-back Aimee. Walcott called her Worrsy-Wartsy because to this day, she told him to be careful every time he drove, even if he was just running to fetch milk.

They clustered around me to look at the screen, Walcott and Aimee plopping down on either side of me, and Darla leaning over the back of the sofa.

“Are schizophrenics dangerous?” I asked.

“I think they can be,” Aimee said, concerned.

“I don’t know much about it,” Walcott said. He pulled the iPad onto his own knees and touched the second link,
What is Paranoid Schizophrenia?

But it was Worrsy-Wartsy who shook her head no, even as the page loaded. “It’s a disease. A frightening one, and schizophrenics need medication and proper treatment, sure, but it’s not hopeless. They can lead pretty normal lives.”

Aimee craned her head around to stare at her. Darla had once been a very successful investment broker—so successful they had retired to run this B and B when Walcott was a toddler. She was a numbers head, not any kind of psychologist.

“How do you know that?” Aimee asked.

Darla straightened and flushed, a little guilty, I thought. “I don’t know much. Just what I said.”

“Oh ye god and little fishes!” Aimee said, chuckling, “You’ve been watching Dr. Drew or something!”

Aimee, who spent her leisure time hiking, gardening, and reading in the hammock, wouldn’t have a TV in the cottage, but they had full cable in the guest rooms. Darla had been known to sneak and watch
Real Housewives
and worse. She flushed even deeper, busted.