My Own Miraculous (6 page)

It was off beat enough to shut them down for another second, to turn them all to me, and I took a page from Mimmy’s book. I stepped into that space, right into the middle of all of them, and then I kept it. Not with pretty. I didn’t have my Mimmy’s pretty. But I had something else, rising new inside me.

What had Hilde called Natty in the car?
My own,
she’d said.
My own miraculous.

That was exactly right.

Natty was my own. My own miraculous. No noun, yet. He was my own miraculous
something,
and whatever noun went in that slot, Natty would become it all himself. Becoming exactly Natty, that was his job. My job was to love him, no matter what nouns appeared there as he grew and changed.

Hilde was her mother’s own miraculous, and I knew the noun Hilde had in that slot now. Hilde was Mrs. Fleming’s own miraculous sick baby, who so badly needed help.

Mrs. Fleming didn’t want to see it. Mrs. Fleming was afraid. She was loving the kid she wanted, defending the kid she made up to please herself, blind to the kid who was hearing angels and driving nails clean through her hand. Not from meanness, but because she so badly wanted Hilde to be okay, to fit in and be normal, to be happy and regular and safe. And wasn’t that what every mother wanted?

Into the space I’d claimed, I said to all of them, but mostly Mrs. Fleming, “I have a son. You saw him at the blood drive. He’s so beautiful. I know you saw Natty do something in that gym that wasn’t normal. He sight-read a banner, and he’s barely three. That’s not right. What you don’t know is, Walcott and I saw him solve Rubik’s Cube in under ten minutes. I couldn’t solve it if you gave me ten days. That’s not what a three-year-old does. It’s so far out from what a toddler should be doing that I’m scared for him.” Tears welled in Mrs. Fleming’s eyes and her nostrils flared. I kept on talking, keeping the space, because there were five whole mothers in the room now. “If Natty’s that different, how is school going to work for him? How will he ever make friends? I’m really scared. But next week, I’m going to take him down to Atlanta, and I’m going to have him tested, anyway. Whatever’s going on with him, I need to know. Because if he’s going to be that different, he’s going to need help. I have to help him. Me. Because I am his mother.”

There was a pause and we all heard Mrs. Fleming swallow. Her eyes cut to Hilde, quiet on the steps, and then away. She brushed at her eyes with her hand, and then looked at it, surprised, I think, to find her hand so wet.

Hilde sat, not looking back. Listening, but not to us.

“Natty did what?” Mimmy said.

“Not now,” I told her quietly. “It’s time for us to go home.”

Darla said, “But she—”

“Darla,” I cut her off, speaking firm, mother to mother. I was her equal now in a way I’d never been before. I think she heard it in me, too, because she stopped. “Let’s go.”

So we did. We trooped back out the door in single file, Darla, then Aimee, then Mimmy, and me last of all. We left them there, Mrs. Fleming crying and crying under the cut-glass chandelier in that beautiful, vaulted foyer.

As I closed the front door soft behind us, Mrs. Fleming was staring at her broken child as if Hilde was something frightening, but also undiscovered. Something that she had never seen before.

Chapter 6

T
he next morning, I met Walcott at the halfway place to retrieve Natty. My way, it was all uphill, while his way was an easy trot down. When I arrived, Walcott was already lounging on the fallen tree. Natty was running some kind of matchbox-car construction project in the grassy part of the mini meadow.

“Hi, Mommy. Aimee let me eat all the bacon that I wanted,” Natty reported.

“Yum. Sounds like it was a bad day to be a pig,” I said. I dropped a kiss on his head, then went to sit down by Walcott on the log.

“We still on red alert?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Mrs. Fleming called the Jeromes last night and cancelled the rest of the rental. They lit out this morning, very early, in a white Cadillac. This year’s model. Mimmy got all that straight from Raylinda Dobbs, so you know it’s gospel.”

“Down to the color of the car,” Walcott said. “Good deal.”

I kicked my shoes off and let my toes squinch into the grass. Mimmy thought they’d just left to get away from
us
, but not me. I knew we wouldn’t ever see them again, but I wasn’t worried about Hilde. Her mother would find out what she needed, and she would get it for her. It’s what I would do, and I’d seen right down into the very bottom of Mrs. Fleming last night. We were more than a little bit alike.

Walcott’s iPad was beside him on the log, and I reached over him and got it. I flipped the cover open and found that puzzle app, the new one, with all the switching lights. The one that was supposed to be harder than the Rubik’s.

I called, “Hey Natty, you want a turn with Walcott’s puzzle?”

“Yes, please!” Natty got up and trotted over immediately. The kid loved him some screen time, and he didn’t get a lot. He toted it back to the patch of grass with all his matchbox cars and sat down.

Walcott was looking all askance at me.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. Just, you ate my head off like a sexed-up praying-mantis lady when I tried to let him play that before.”

I smiled and I took his hand.

“We need to know for sure,” I said, even though I did know, mostly.

I’d already called my dad to ask for help, interrupting his vacation and irking my easily irked stepmom. Dad was probably the best heart surgeon in Georgia; he had all kinds of connections. He’d known at once who Natty should see, and he promised he’d get Natty an appointment, immediately.

Watching Natty poke at the screen now, his forehead crumpling up as he concentrated, I had the weirdest déjà vu. I felt exactly as I had that day three years and seven months ago, when Walcott and I sat in my bedroom with a pregnancy-test stick under a Kleenex, waiting to know what miracle would happen. Waiting for a pink plus sign to confirm what I already knew inside my heart.

I was so glad again to have Walcott here with me. I turned his hand in mine, and I ran my finger over the thin ridge of the scar in the middle of his thumb. He got it here at the halfway place, sitting on this very log with me. Twelve years ago.

It was his ninth birthday. Aimee had wanted to give him a big Swiss Army knife with several blades, plus scissors and a corkscrew. She’d grown up on a farm out west with three big brothers; by the time she was nine she could whittle a cardinal that you could blow against to make a birdcall sound. Darla, on the other hand, grew up in the city, the only child of university professors. She’d wanted to raise Walcott with only nonaggressive toys. Not gender-neutral things; it was “boy” stuff, just peaceful: racing cars and dump trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lego sets.

By the time he was four, Walcott was eating his toast into a gun shape and pointing it at the dog, yelling, “Pew! Pew! Pew!” while Frisco wagged and grinned up at him, hoping he would drop the buttered weapon. Darla caved and let him have water guns, lightsabers, and Mr. Bang. But no BB gun, like many country boys had. No Swiss Army knife. She drew the line at any weapon that was “real.”

The mini pocketknife with its one dull blade was a compromise.

Ironically, it was Darla who gave him the idea that we should cut ourselves open with it. They’d been reading
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
together. That book, the knife—what nine-year-old boy worth his salt wouldn’t want to make his best friend into a blood brother?

We knew that even Aimee would object to this idea, so we met up at the halfway place to do the deed. We sat facing each other, straddling our fallen tree, horsey style. He unfolded the blade, which, small and dull as it was, looked plenty wicked to me, shining in the dappled sunlight.

“Gimme your thumb,” he said.

I shook my head, “No, thank you.”

I hadn’t liked the knife idea from the start, even though I very badly wanted to be blood brothers. I’d brought a safety pin from home, and I held it up and showed it to him. He rolled his eyes at me, silently calling me a wuss, or maybe he didn’t think the pin would do the job. I popped it open and before I could think, I jabbed my thumb with it, right at the ball. It hurt, but I didn’t so much as peep. I pulled the pin out, and we both peered at my thumb, blank and whole.

Walcott said, “It’s no good.”

I squeezed at my thumb, and a single bead of blood rose up, red and round. Walcott gave me an approving nod.

I offered him the pin, but he shook his head. He put the knife against the ball of his own thumb and sliced lightly down. Nothing happened. The blade was too dull. He tried again, harder. Nothing, and then again, until he was pretty much sawing at himself.

I offered him the pin once more, but by then he was ticked off. He lay his hand down on the tree trunk, palm up.

I had an inkling of what he was going to do. It was a bad idea. Even as my mouth creaked open, way too slow, he was driving the knife straight down, with all his weight behind it. Right into his thumb.

Walcott sucked in air, but it seemed to get stuck in his throat. I leaned over, staring at his terrible hand. The blade was in his thumb, all right. The pointy tip was sharper than the edge. A good third of the blade had buried itself into the real, true meat of him. He made small air-choking noises, and he was so pale even his lips were white. He lifted his stabbed hand up, and the blade stayed in. He turned it palm down and still it stayed in, a thin line of red running down into the workings of the hilt. I could see the tip of the blade pressed against his thumbnail from the inside.

I leapt to my feet.

“I’m going to get Mommy,” I said, my fear regressing my mother’s name back to its babiest form.

Walcott said, “No! Wait!” I paused, and he held his hand out with the knife hanging down out of it and a few drops of blood falling down to spatter on the log. “Blood brothers! We have to finish.”

His blood looked redder than mine. Maybe only because there was so much more of it. I was so proud of him then, of how tough he was. He wasn’t even crying much, just a few tears leaking out his side eyes. I came back to him, and I pressed my thumb with its single smeared bead, up against the slick surface. I could feel his heartbeat in it. I could feel the side of the knife, cool against my hot skin.

I held my thumb to his until he nodded, satisfied.

“Good deal,” he said, and then I walked him back to the B and B to get yelled at, to get stitches and a tetanus shot, to get a thousand what-did-I-tell-yous from a distraught Darla, and to get the little scar I could still feel to this day. The same scar he pressed against my hand the last time I was this far outside my comfort zone. The day we knew for sure that there would be a Natty.

Now Natty looked up from the iPad. He turned it toward us. All the lights were golden, shining in perfectly solved, uniform rows. He’d done it. I looked down at my watch. Six minutes.

“Holy shit,” Walcott breathed out, so soft that I only could hear.

I exhaled, very slow, and nodded. “I’m taking him to see a child psychologist that my dad knows down at Emory next week. He’ll give Natty some IQ tests and stuff like that. Tell us where we stand.”

Walcott nodded. “This reminds me of the day, you know, when—”

“I know,” I interrupted him.

Natty set the iPad aside, like what he’d done was no big deal. He turned back to his matchbox cars, making vrooming noises as he moved them. Like any three-year-old might do. Beside him, the winking lights in perfect rows knew better.

I held tight to Walcott’s hand, and I thought to myself,
There are only two things I want Natty to know about that day, the day we found out he was coming.

Not that I said,
Shit!
Not how scared and sick I was. Not that I had little red tongues of panic and disbelief come licking up all through me, just like now.

Only two things. First, that though Walcott wasn’t his father, twenty seconds after we knew he existed, Walcott was all the way on board. And second? I want him to know the image that came into my head when I knew he was a real, true thing, alive and inside of me.

It was presents. Presents and a cake and a single word:
Surprise!

A wonderful word, shouted loud and bright, coming from the mouths of everybody dear to me.

If you loved
My Own Miraculous
,

don’t miss Joshilyn Jackson’s

smart, gorgeously written novel,

S
OMEONE
E
LSE’S
L
OVE
S
TORY

Available in hardcover December 2013

from William Morrow.

Keep reading for a sneak peek . . .

It seems like an ordinary hot summer day. Single mom Shandi Pierce, her three-year-old son, Natty, and her best friend, Walcott, stop for gas at a Circle K. While Walcott fills the tank, Shandi and Natty go inside the store for a cold drink. Shandi is in line, eyeing a very good-looking man, when the door opens and a stumpy guy with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead walks in. In his hand is a rusty, old silver pistol.

Minutes later there’s been a shooting, and everyone in the store is on the floor, taken hostage. All of these strangers are carrying secrets that will cause their lives to intersect in a most surprising way.

Chapter 1

I
fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could.

I thought then that I had landed in my own worst dream, not a love story. Love stories start with a kiss or a meet-cute, not with someone getting shot in a gas station minimart. Well, no, two people, because that lady cop took a bullet first.

But there we were, William gone still as a pond rock, me holding a green glass bottle of Coca-Cola and shaking so hard it was like a seizure. Both of us were caught under the black eye of that pistol. And yet, seventeen seconds later, before I so much as knew his name, I’d fallen dizzy-down in love with him.

I’ve never had an angel on my right shoulder; I was born with a pointy-tailed devil, who crept back and forth across my neck to get his whispers into both my ears. I didn’t get a fairy godmother or even a discount-talking cricket-bug to be my conscience. But someone should have told me. That afternoon in the Circle K, I deserved to know, right off, that I had landed bang in the middle of a love story. Especially since it wasn’t—it isn’t—it could never be my own.

At eleven o’clock that same morning, walking into gunfire and someone else’s love story was the last thing on my mind. I was busy dragging a duffel bag full of most of what I owned down the stairs, trying not to cry or, worse, let my happy show. My mother, never one for mixed feelings, had composed herself into the perfect picture of dejection, backlit and framed in the doorway to the kitchen.

I wanted to go, but if I met her eyes, I’d bawl like a toddler anyhow. This tidy brick bungalow on the mountainside had been my home for seventeen years now, ever since I was four and my parents split up. But if I cried, she’d cry, too, and then my sweet kid would lose his ever-loving crap. We’d all stand wailing and hugging it out in the den, and Natty and I would never get on the road. I tightened my mouth and looked over her head instead. That’s when I noticed she’d taken down the Praying Hands Jesus who’d been hanging over the sofa for as long as I’d had concrete memory. She’d replaced him with a Good Shepherd version who stopped me dead in the middle of the stairs.

The new Jesus looked exactly like her.

He was super pretty, slim and elegant. He was backlit, too, standing in front of a meadow instead of a kitchen, cradling a lamb instead of a spatula. My mother had never once gone into direct sunlight without a hat and SPF 50, and this Jesus shared her ivory-bloom complexion. I looked more Jewish than he did. They had the same rich brown hair glowing with honey-gold highlights, the same cornflower blue eyes cast sorrowfully upward to watch me struggle a fifty-pound duffel down the stairs. Neither offered to give me a hand.

Mimmy wasn’t anywhere near ready to let me go, and the thought of having to fight my way out of here made me want to flop down onto my butt and die on the staircase.

“Please don’t make this awful. This is the best thing,” I said, but Mimmy only stood there, radiating lovely sorrow. The pretty my mom has, it’s an unfair amount. Simply ungodly, and it worked on everyone, even me sometimes.

“Maybe for you,” she acknowledged. “But Natty?”

That scored a hit; I was trading Mimmy’s mountain full of trees and deer and sunshine for my dad’s three-bedroom condo, sleek and modern, bang in the middle of the city. But all I said was, “Oh, Mims.”

We’d been having this fight all week. Dad’s condo was ten minutes from the Georgia State campus, and from Mimmy’s, I drove about four hours round-trip. I had to register my classes around Atlanta’s rush hour and make sure they all met either Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday. This was enough to make a simple coffee date an exercise in logistics, and Mimmy didn’t help my social life go easier. She’d been boycotting anything with a Y chromosome for going on seventeen years now. Even her cat was female, and she’d been known to change my shifts at her candy shop if she knew I had a date. I would’ve moved to the condo long before if my stepmother, Bethany, had ever let my father make the offer.

She hadn’t. Not until last week, when the results of Natty’s tests came back. Dad had set them up after Natty taught himself to read. The tests said my kid was rocking an IQ north of 140, which put him firmly in the genius category. My three-year-old could probably apply to freakin’ Mensa.

Bethany—Bethany herself, not Dad—called to tell me I could have the condo. This was unusual. Bethany was the heavy who told me I was getting uninvited from Passover because her entire family was coming and the dining room table only had so many leaves. A few days later, Dad would do something huge and beautiful and thoughtful for me, as if these events were wholly unconnected. But this time, Bethany had wanted to talk to me badly enough to dial Mimmy’s house phone when she missed me on my cell. A risky move. Mimmy and Bethany were matter and antimatter. Contact between them could trigger a blast that would knock the planet clean off its hinges and plummet us all right into the sun.

Luckily, I was the one who picked up. We had the briefest exchange of cool politenesses, and I waited for her to drop whatever awful bomb she’d primed this time. She cleared her throat and delivered what sounded like an overrehearsed monologue:

“So! Given Nathan’s unusual intellect, David wants to help you place him at a more academically focused preschool. We understand how limited the choices are out there in the weeds.”

I swear I could
hear
the narrow nostrils of Bethany’s long, elegant nose flaring in distaste through the phone as she said that last bit. It was a carefully worded piece of code. Last year, I’d almost killed my Jewish father by sending Natty to preschool at Mimmy’s Baptist church. Natty and I no longer attended synagogue
or
church, which was better than when I was a kid and had to go to both. Dad offered to pay all tuition if I moved Natty to a “better” school.

“Surely there is more than one close preschool,” he’d said.

“Of course,” I’d told him. “If you prefer, Natty can go to the one run by the Methodists.”

Now Bethany went on, “It means moving to Atlanta. I know that your mother isn’t likely to see this as an opportunity. Country people can be shortsighted, especially when it comes to education. But the benefits . . . I think any decent parent could see them.” She sniffed a little huff of disparaging air and finally came to the heart of it. “You and Natty could stay at the condo. We’d put your own phone line in, and you could decorate the third-floor bedrooms as you please. I’m not sure your father is prepared to suffer the on-call rooms with the residents, so sometimes you’d have him napping in the master. But otherwise, you could think of it as your own place.” There was a pause, and she added, pointedly, “For the year.” Then, in case I hadn’t gotten it, “Until you graduate, I mean.”

This was an amazing number of long-standing, guaranteed fight starters to pack into a single speech. Even a dig at Lumpkin County! Sure, we were rural, but not the kind of rural in
Deliverance
, and she damn well knew it. If she’d hoped to goad me into turning down the condo I’d been coveting—fat chance. I summoned all my inner sugar and said, hell, oh hell, oh hell-hell yes, and then I got off the phone fast as I could.

Now I dumped my heavy duffel by the front door, next to Natty’s
Blue’s Clues
suitcase and the stacked laundry baskets full of books and socks and toys. I went to Mimmy and looped my arms around her little waist and put my face in her hair. She smelled like vanilla.

“You’re the best Mimmy in all the world. I don’t know how I would have gotten through Natty’s baby years without you. I couldn’t have, not and gone to college. But I’m twenty-one. Natty and I have to stand on our own at some point. This is a nice step.”

She shook her head. “You and Natty setting up house ought to be exciting. It’s a rite of passage. I ought to sew you curtains and throw a housewarming. But I don’t know how to celebrate you moving into that awful man’s place.”

I let the
awful man
part go and only said, “I am not moving to the
house
house.”

Bethany and Dad and my three little stepbrothers lived in a huge stucco and stone McMansion out in Sandy Springs. No way I could ever share a roof with Bethany. I called her my Step-Refrigerator to my mother and much worse things to my best friend, Walcott. She’d earned all her names, though to be fair, I’m pretty sure I’d earned whatever she privately called me.

Mimmy started to speak again, but just then we heard Walcott coming down, his long feet slapping the stairs. He had most of my hanging clothes in a fat fold he held against his chest.

“Why do you have so many dresses?” he asked.

“Because I’m a girl,” I said.

My mother eyed my things and said, “A better question is, why do you dress like a forty-year-old French divorcée?”

“I like vintage,” I said, going to unburden Walcott. It was a huge stack; I found most of my clothes at rummage sales and thrift shops, digging through mounds of acid-washed mom jeans for the one good circle skirt or perfect two-dollar wrap dress.

He waved me off with one hand, arms still clutched tight around my clothes, heading for the front door.

Mimmy said, pinchy-voiced, “You can’t load hanging clothes first. They’ll get smushed and have to be re-ironed.”

Walcott stopped obediently and draped my clothes over the duffel, giving me a Walcott look, wry and mock-martyred. He’d walked over yesterday from his momses’ place to help me pack, as his hundred-millionth proof of best-friendhood. Today he’d help load my car and keep Natty entertained on the drive to the condo. The condo was built in a stack of three small floors. The kitchen and living space were at ground, and Dad’s master suite took up the whole middle. Natty and I were taking the two rooms that shared a bath at the very top. Walcott, being Walcott, would carry the heaviest things up all those stairs, while we toted in pillows and Target bags full of shoes. I didn’t even have to drive him home, just drop him at his girlfriend’s place in Inman Park.

He’d been doing crap like this for me since we were both five, the outsiders at a milk-white elementary school in a so-white-it-was-practically-Wonder-Bread county. I was the only half-a-Jew for miles, and Walcott was the sperm-donated product of a pair of lesbians who left Atlanta to grow organic veggies and run a mountain bed-and-breakfast for like-minded ladies. Walcott’s momses engaged in all manner of suspicious behaviors, including Zen meditation and hydroponics. Where we lived, those words were as foreign as Rosh Hashanah or Pesach Seder, strange rites that got me extra days off school and sent me to my dad’s place in Atlanta, where I no doubt painted the doors with lamb blood and burned up doves.

Me and Walcott, we’d stood back-to-back with our swords up, together surviving the savage playgrounds; yet here was Mimmy, giving him the glare she saved for any poor, male fool who got caught by all her immaculately groomed pretty and tried to ask her out. She knew darn well that Walcott didn’t have a sex-crazed man-genda for helping me move, but every now and then, she remembered he technically belonged to the penis-having half of the human race. She’d flick that suspicious, baleful look at him. She’d done it when he was in kindergarten, even. Back then, he’d showed me his penis on a dare, and it had been an innocent pink speck, clearly incapable of plotting.

“This is the last from upstairs. Let’s pack the car after we eat,” Walcott said.

“As long as we get on the road by two. I don’t want to unload in the dark.”

“I’ll dish up lunch,” my mother said, wilting into acceptance. The wilt was a feint. I caught her sloe-eyed side-peek at me as she rolled away against the doorway on her shoulder and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Hoo! You’re so screwed,” Walcott said, grinning. To an outsider, my mother would seem to be in a state of mild, ladylike displeasure, but mainly at peace with the world and all its denizens. But Walcott and I had grown up together, in and out of each other’s houses all day long our whole lives. He could decode the state of the Once and Future Belle from her lipstick colors and the angle of the tortoiseshell combs in her hair almost as well as I could.

“She’s loaded for bear. And I’m bear,” I said.

“I can’t help you with that. No one can.” He flopped into a lanky heap of string on the wingback chair. “But I could say you a poem? I’ve been working on one for you, for this exact occasion.”

“No, thank you,” I said primly.

“It’s really good,” Walcott said. He cleared his throat, putting on a faux beat-poet reading voice, really boomy and pretentious. “Alas! The Jew of Lumpkin County, exiled once more. Like Moses—”

“Poem me no poems, Walcott. I know what you use those things for.” Before he got hooked up kinda serious with CeeCee, his signature move was to quote hot lines from John Donne or Shakespeare to mildly drunken girls in the Math Department.

“They work, though,” he said. “I used to get a lot of play, for a skinny English major with a big nose.”

“Bah! It’s a noble nose.”

“It’s overnoble. It’s noble plus plus. Lucky for me, chicks dig iambic pentameter. But this poem? It’s not for seduction. It’s free verse and quite brilliant. You wander forty days and forty nights in Piedmont Park, following the smoke from a crack pipe by day and a flaming tranny hooker in the night.”

“You’re a goof,” I said, but as always, he’d made me feel better. “Stop it. I have to pacify The Mimmy. Maybe we could crawl to the kitchen with fruit? Throw a virgin into her volcano?”

“Now where are you and I going to find a virgin?” he asked, droll.

I started for the kitchen, then paused under the painting. The new Jesus, with his salon-fresh highlights, had those kind of Uncle Sam eyes that seemed to track after me.

Walcott followed my gaze, craning his head back to look. “Holy crap! Where is Praying Hands Jesus?”