This and Other Miracles

She was on the lookout for miracles. She’d seen one before. Two, really. That first one on the carnival ride and the little girl in the air. Maddie watched her pass by, her tiny hands reaching. Oh, Maddie thought. Oh. Flight. And the boy she was with, what was his name? She couldn’t remember now, not so many years later. But he was cute some, curly hair to his shoulders, a big nose that looked good on his broad face, over his sweet lips. She remembered them now, too, his lips, even if she couldn’t remember his name.

But the little girl. The miracle. They were up there, she and the sweet-lipped boy, going round and round in that cage, high in the air when the girl fell. Oh, Maddie said out loud, maybe, because the little girl rolled a bit in her flight, and she looked at Maddie, smiling, giggling. and Maddie leaned forward, reached through the bars as the girl fell by and the boy said, Careful, careful now, darlin’. And another time Maddie would have thought that was the miracle, a sweet-lipped boy calling her “darlin’” like no one ever had, like no one, she thought, probably ever would again. But that wasn’t it. There was more. The little girl rolling and tumbling and flying and looking right into Maddie’s eyes, her reaching out to Maddie and Maddie to her, but neither close enough to touch, not close enough to catch. And then she was gone, the little girl. Or so Maddie thought.

There was a commotion above and below. And the ride stopped and then went, stopped and then went, one car and another emptying out on the midway, and even though they never said anything, Maddie and the boy, not the whole way down, not at the bottom where they got off the ride, they moved together like they had planned it, walking quickly away from the crowd gathering and gawking, from the parents of the girl, the sheriff quick to get there, the hubbub and the spot where the flying girl had landed. And past the rides and the games, away from the people running the other way, toward the girl, the boy (who Maddie didn’t exactly know but had agreed to go on the ride with when he asked her while she stood in line by herself, alone and a little lonely) held Maddie’s hand and led her to his friend’s pickup truck and helped her into the flatbed of it and held her close and kissed and kissed and kissed her. She remembered that. How he breathed on her, and in her, life-giving his breath was as she felt herself swell with it, go buoyant under the hot summer sun. They were doing it then. It wasn’t the first time, not for Maddie, and maybe not for him because he had a rubber and he stroked her first with a calloused hand and said, this good? This good, darlin’? And it was when he pushed inside of her and she caught her breath and looked past his shoulder that she saw the little girl again, her eyes bright and her hands reaching and smiling, and Maddie knew it was a miracle, the girl coming to her and the boy calling her darlin’ and the rush of love and heat that lifted her up, up off the hard bed of the truck and so far out of her head she couldn’t remember her own name, much less his, the boy who called her darlin’ and who after, when she passed him in the hallway at school, reached for her face with his calloused hand and walked on by, leaving his touch and something else on her, like the little girl had left something on her when she fell, and then again when she appeared to her in the back of the truck.

A touch. A seeing. A sort of miracle.

The second miracle was when the tornado hit town and she ran outside into the mess of it. It was prom night, but Maddie was alone, no date, no dance. Her father forbade it and her mother said, Listen to your father, dear. And so she could not go to prom, and that was sad, and even sadder still, no one had asked her. Not the boy from the truck, and not the other boys who, at school, looked at her a little meanly but showed up sometimes in her backyard and tapped on her window, told her to come out, just for a little while, come out and look at the moon, at the stars and let them look at her, Maddie in the moonlight, and kiss her, touch her. And she would. 

When the tornado hit town on prom night, the wind rattled her window and she thought, when she looked, that there was someone out there, a boy, a man, a shadow. Her mother and father were in the living room in the dark, drinking, she knew, because they always were, fighting, she knew, because they always were. So Maddie opened her window like she had done so many times before and slipped out over the sill, felt the push of wind and rain against her face, her bare legs under the nightie she wore every night, even those nights she met the boys outside to look at the moon. But it was good, this weather on her skin, and cool and thrilling. She ran toward the boy-shadow, but there was no one there, nothing. Just empty lawn. Still, she loved being out there in the night, in the tornado. The chugga chugga of the wind made her vibrate; she tried to do cartwheels, but the wind blew her over. She laughed and laughed, her whole body wet now, her hair in strands, her teeth chattering. She stood up and tried to do a backflip. She was pretty good at gymnastics even though her parents didn’t let her join the team, wouldn’t let her try out for cheerleading. Gotta keep your horizons small, her dad said. She didn’t know what that meant except that he never allowed her to do anything. One flip, not bad. A little low and wobbly on the landing, but she was getting there. Another, better still. She planted her feet and the wind came stronger and she counted under her breath, one, two, three. She sprung up into the air and reached with her hands over her head and felt her body lift. And lift. And lift. 

Later, who knows how long, when her folks found her in a pile in the wet grass, her father lifted Maddie in his arms and carried her inside the house, and her mother patted her and patted her, her face, her hands, her clammy legs. 

What, Maddie said, coming to, but she remembered what. The flip then the flying, the house and the world beneath her. She knew then, while she flew, what her father had meant because she could see the horizon then, a long line of darkness and roiling clouds, but at the edge of it, where she knew the earth began its rounding, was a glowing stripe that beckoned her. She tried to get there, pulled herself like swimming in her flight, but that is where her memory stopped. Then there was her father and her mother and her bedroom that smelled green and wet like the outdoors, like an open window, a way out. And she was sure her father would punish her like he did sometimes, a smack and a dark closet, but he didn’t. He just leaned in close and looked into her eyes, kissed her forehead. His face looked soft like it never did, sad and tired, and he kissed her again. Darlin’, he said. Oh, my sweet darlin’.

Another miracle. 

It had been a few years since the miracles, the first one, the second. Still, Maddie watched for them, wanted them. She even prayed for them, a little, at the Church of New Hope up the block from her house where Pastor James stood at the front and spoke quietly and without, Maddie thought, much conviction. He looked at her sometimes, the way those boys used to in high school. Like he could see right into her and what he saw there was not too pretty. She knew it was the residue from her miracles he could see. She felt it herself, a murky blackness like something untended and unwashed. Like the miracles came and left, and in their wake a thick, dark tangle.

Her parents had died one after the other, her father from a broken heart Maddie wanted to believe, just days after her mother went. The house was found to be filled with carbon monoxide, the windows nailed shut ever since she ran into the tornado, the furnace failing over a couple of months. But Maddie preferred her version of heartbreak and loss, even as she stopped feeling sick herself once the furnace was fixed, once the windows were opened wide and she came home from the hospital and was allowed back inside. At the Church of New Hope, Pastor James gave the sermon, quiet still, but kind. Good people, he said about her parents as though they might have been, Good people and bad things.

There weren’t many people at the service, and even fewer came to the house afterward, afraid, maybe, of all that bad air. But Pastor James was there, and he sat with her after the last few left, and when she cried, he sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulder. When he followed her to the floor, to the old rug that smelled like tobacco and dust, Maddie wasn’t surprised, not really. She knew this was what she did, lay down with boys and men, she—like everyone else in town—knew it was who she was. 

Darlin’ she said to him, whispered it into the spot where his neck met his shoulder. She hoped he would say it, too, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything, only kept moving and moving; the rough noise from him reminded her of the tornado. She matched his rhythm and his breath, hanging on, hanging on. And Maddie looked up to the ceiling, to where the stains from her father’s cigarettes made yellow clouds above her. And there, there, she saw something familiar. A little girl, maybe the little girl, the one who flew from the carnival ride all those years ago. She thought it was her, she hoped it was her. Because this was what she needed, she knew as she clung to Pastor James, as she felt her body lift up and up. This. Another miracle. This.

Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash.