6. He said, “Hi,” to me when I was seven and we were both waiting, shivering, at the end of the road for the school bus to pick us up because the town still hadn’t been able to send the volunteer fire department/rescue squad/snow removal crew around to clear all the streets.
7. When I was nine, he threw a baseball over our fence and said, “Thanks,” when I took it back to him.
8. When I was thirteen he said, “Hey,” to me right before he told Jimmy Hechts, a senior who was trying to get me to come sit with him in the back of the bus, “Damn, Jimmy, I know you’re desperate, but at least pick someone who actually has breasts.”
9. And last year, when I said, “I’m sorry,” at Beth’s funeral, he said, “Thanks,” like a robot, his voice and expression totally blank.
Before I’d left for soccer camp I couldn’t stop trying to catch glimpses of him. I was afraid to talk to him, but I never got tired of looking at him. Even Mom noticed him when he’d come outside to mow the lawn his second day home. Jess and I had been watching him out the kitchen window. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and we’d both pretty much had our faces pressed up against the glass.
“Girls, honestly,” Mom had said, and then “Oh,” when she’d actually looked over and saw him, blushing as she twitched the curtains closed and asked Jess about Brian.
I’d thought about Joe a lot before I’d left for camp, the kind of thoughts that probably would have made Mom and Dad lock me in my room and forbid me from ever even looking next door again.
Now when I thought about Joe, I didn’t feel anything.
I felt nothing all the time, and it had started to feel normal. It should have scared me, but it didn’t. Instead I was tired, the kind of tired that drapes itself over you like a heavy coat, pressing you down and muffling the world.
School was too much effort, even when my eye got better. Jess and Lissa always wanted my attention. They would talk and I would watch them, their words collapsing into a loud buzzing noise. It was even worse with everyone else. Whenever someone talked to me, it was all I could do to just keep watching them. I wanted to look at the floor or, better yet, lie down and curl into it. I got by on nodding and tossing out a few words when I had to, but it took a lot and I just—eventually I stopped pretending I was even listening to anyone.
I could feel my body changing too, softening. I wasn’t running around a practice field, wasn’t getting up early every morning to jog. The soccer ball had joined my cleats up on the roof, wedged in among all the crap, and every morning I slept until Mom came and woke me up with a kiss. I was her bleary-eyed miracle, and I ate everything she made for me even if I wasn’t hungry because at least then I knew there was something inside me.
It was easy enough to be Miracle Megan. Everything I did made Mom and Dad happy. Just sitting at the dinner table would make them grin at me through the whole meal and every day I got an offering: a magazine from Mom, a pint of my favorite ice cream brought home by Dad. A car.
The night Dad brought that home, a sleek and shiny red two-door that looked like a dream I was supposed to have, I stood clutching the keys and staring at it.
“Come on,” Dad said, grinning at me. “Let’s take it out, see what you think.”
“I don’t want it.” I didn’t. Just seeing it made me feel sick. I’d begged them for a car, back before everything changed, back before I was a miracle. They’d said they couldn’t afford it.
“Oh,” Dad said, glancing at Mom nervously.
“You’re crazy,” David told me. “Dad, I’ll take the car! I promise I won’t even drive it till I have my license.”
“David, hush,” Mom said and then turned to me. “Let’s have dessert out on the deck.”
We all went outside and she kept hugging me, pushing my hair back from my face and staring into my eyes, and Dad kept squeezing my shoulders like he was making sure I was still there. They wouldn’t stop, not even when David went back inside and yelled that he was up on the kitchen counter trying to get the chocolate chips.
It was a disaster waiting to happen but they didn’t do anything but watch me like they had to, and so I went into the kitchen and hauled David off the counter.
“Idiot,” I said, hissing the word because I was suddenly angry, a rush of red-hot fury filling me so fast it was like I was choking on it, and he just stood there. That made me even madder because didn’t he know he needed to be careful? Why didn’t he ever care if he got hurt? Didn’t he know how easily it could happen?
He didn’t know. He just stood there, stupid and lucky, and he had lived when he shouldn’t have and never thought about it. Never wondered why. He just banged himself up, got hurt, and never thought about it, but one day he wouldn’t be able to stop it, one day he’d open his eyes and see—
Red, burning, the sky on fire.
I hit him. I hadn’t hit David since he was two and went around biting everything, including me, but I smacked him so hard my hand stung.
He stumbled, round-eyed with tears starting to shine in his eyes, and then hit me back. His fists felt like nothing as I yanked him toward me, one hand tight in his hair, a red haze covering everything I saw and flooding through me. Driving me.
“Meggie! David! Meggie! DAVID!” Mom and Dad were both shouting, pulling us apart, and David and I were suddenly on opposite sides of the kitchen.
“She hit me!” David screamed, his face so red you couldn’t see the mark of my fingers on it.
“Shut up,” Mom said, and he did.
Mom never said “shut up.” She thought it was rude, and had always told us so. “Your sister rushes into the kitchen to pull you off the counter, the counter you’ve been told not to climb up onto, and you hit her?”
“She HIT ME!” David screamed again, even louder. “And I always climb on the counter!”
He did. He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. Just like he climbed trees and fell out of them, then promised he wouldn’t before doing it again. That was how things were. He was the baby, the special one, the one Mom and Dad held tight and worried over even as they smiled and shook their heads because he was alive and was never supposed to be. He was their miracle.
“David Jacob,” Mom said. “Go to your room. I’m too angry to look at you right now.”
Was their miracle.
Seven
I ate a mountain of pancakes in the morning, their sweet fluffiness not filling me up or erasing David’s angry eyes as he touched his face where I’d hit him, and went out to meet Jess and Lissa. They saw the car in the driveway and said I should have called and told them.
“I meant to,” I said, but I hadn’t and was pretty sure they knew it. I also knew they wouldn’t say anything about it. Not now that I was a miracle.
“You know, Brian can change the oil and stuff,” Jess said. “He’s really good at it.” Brian loved cars and wanted to work at the one garage in town. It was an impossible dream, as the garage had a mechanic who was twenty-five and who’d taken over just last year when his father, the previous mechanic, had died of a heart attack.
“Great. Thanks.”
We rode in silence to school, but when we got there and out of Jess’s car, Lissa cleared her throat.
Jess shot her a look and asked me, “So . . . what’s going on with soccer? You haven’t quit, have you?”
“I just need a break. I mean, I’ve been playing forever.”
“Exactly,” Lissa said. “You’ve been playing forever so it’s kind of weird that you just stopped.” She caught Jess’s eye and added, “Not weird bad or anything. Just, you know, kind of strange.”
“Strange?” I said.
“Different,” Jess said hastily. “That’s what Lissa meant. It’s just different.”
I nodded. “Right. Different.”
I wasn’t sad, standing there knowing they knew something was wrong with me but couldn’t bring themselves to say it. I wasn’t anything.
I looked at my two best friends, who knew everything about me, and it was like I was looking at
strangers. People I could easily walk right by.
“Look, Meggie,” Jess said and she didn’t even look like Jess to me now. She was just a girl with brown curls dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and I didn’t—I didn’t even miss the girl I used to see.
“I gotta go,” I said and walked away. It was the only way I could get through the day and even then it seemed to last forever. They both called that night, and I told Mom to tell them I was sleeping. I went to my room to “work on homework” and fell asleep when it was still light out.
I woke up shaking from a dream of a hand clutching mine under a burning sky.
Jess and Lissa came to pick me up again the next morning. I didn’t want to deal with them, with how they’d gone from being my best friends to nothing.
“Hey, Dad, I haven’t finished breakfast,” I said, and he grinned at me over his paper. I was so sick of smiles. “Can you give me a ride to school?”
“Sure.”
I went to the porch and yelled, “Dad’s giving me a ride,” then watched Jess and Lissa squint at me from inside the car.
“Meet by the soda machine before first period?” Jess said, sticking her head out the window.
“Sure.”
“You’d better be there,” Lissa yelled, grinning to show it wasn’t a threat but a friend thing, a “we want to see you” thing. A “we have to talk” thing.
“Of course!” I yelled back, but I didn’t meet them. I had Dad drop me off by the gym and went into the girls’ locker room, empty during the day because Physical Education hadn’t been offered since my parents were in high school due to budget problems.
I went to first period after the bell rang. The teacher didn’t give me a tardy. Jess tried to get my attention, but I pretended I didn’t see her and scribbled in my notebook, page after page of long, waving lines. After class, I stayed to talk to the teacher. Jess and Lissa hung around, waiting for me.
“Don’t wait,” I called out, and then turned away.
I made it through the rest of school, but that night Mom said, “Are you upset with Jess and Lissa?”
Lissa had just called, and I’d told Dad to tell her I was busy with homework. I’d already had Mom tell Jess the same thing.
I shook my head.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“Is there anything you need?”
A way to avoid Jess and Lissa, I thought. A way to avoid everyone, to go where I was supposed to on my own . . .
“The car,” I said. “Can I have the car?”
I could. Dad hadn’t been able to talk the previous owner into taking it back, much less returning his money, and it had been sitting outside his office.
So I started driving. I didn’t like it. In the car, the sky seemed much closer somehow, like it was pushing down into the road, and if I looked at it too long I got dizzy and was afraid I’d get sucked up into it, that it would slice open the car and take me.
But I drove. I drove myself to school, getting there in time to make first period just as the bell rang. I spent the rest of the day in the library, supposedly working on an independent study project on local history. I’d gotten Coach Henson to sign off on supervising it by saying I’d come back to soccer in a month.
Independent studies were normally given to the Walker kids, supersmart whiners who got to do them because their mother threatened to sue the school over the lack of AP classes. But I was an exception. I was very special. I was a miracle. My guidance counselor said all this and more when I sat in her office asking permission, Coach nodding along, and I smiled and said the thing was, I was going to need to do a lot of research and would have to be in the library during school, maybe even sometimes during a tiny bit of class, and I might sometimes do research outside of school.
“Well,” Coach said, “I think it’ll be all right just this once, don’t you? I mean, this is Megan Hathaway who’s asking.”
It was all right. Of course it was.
Jess and Lissa tried to talk to me for a while, but I always realized I’d left something in the car or had to go see Coach or a teacher, and when they called, I was always busy or asleep.
And then one morning Lissa was waiting for me as I came into school, caught me as I was on my way to the girls’ locker room. She was angry. I could tell just by looking at her.
“What’s going on with you?” she said.
I shrugged. “Just busy.”
“Look, Meggie, last night Brian told Jess he’s giving her an engagement ring at graduation. We’re going to my house after school to look at rings online and then she and Brian are going to the Walmart out in Derrytown this weekend to pick one out and put it on layaway.”
“That’s great.”
“That’s great. That’s it? Jess is going to get engaged. I know Brian gave her a promise ring last year but this is different. She’s going to be getting married. It’s the biggest thing that will ever happen to her.”
“I know.”
She shook her head. “Yeah, you know. Now. But you won’t be there after school today, will you? And if she tries to call and tell you what he said when he asked her to marry him, you’ll be too busy or have a headache or David will say, ‘She doesn’t want to come to the phone. Bye.’ You know, I’m sorry we didn’t all survive plane crashes this summer, Meggie, because if we had then maybe we’d be good enough for you to actually talk to.”
“Maybe,” I said and heard the nothingness in my voice. The emptiness.
Lissa stared at me, and then she started to cry. Lissa never cried. Jess cried at the sappy parts in movies and over birds that had fallen out of their nests, but Lissa reminded us not to touch them, that the parents would reject them if we did even as they flopped around, helpless. Lissa kept tissues in her purse for when we went to the movies so Jess could cry into them.
Lissa was the one who fixed things, not the one who fell apart.
But she did. Lissa cried and the worst thing of all was that I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away from her.
So I did. I walked away.
Eight
Jess and Lissa didn’t bother to try and talk to me at school anymore after that. They didn’t call. One night, a few days after the phone hadn’t once rung for me, Mom and Dad asked me about it as the three of us watched television after dinner.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Girl stuff, right?” Mom said, and told me about a fight she’d had back in high school with her best friend until David yelled that he needed help with his homework.
Dad said, “You know, as your mother’s boyfriend at the time, I got to hear all about it, so if you ever want a guy’s opinion or anything, I’m here.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” I said and watched him smile at me.
Smile, smile, smile, all anyone ever did.
Mom came back, rubbing her head and saying she didn’t remember history being so hard when she was David’s age, and every time I looked at them, they were watching me. Grinning at me as I caught their gaze, but when I got up to get a soda, I heard Dad say, “Laura, the letter you sent your parents came back today marked REFUSED again,” as I left the room.
My father’s parents had died a long time ago, but my mother’s parents were still alive. They’d lived in Reardon, but sold their house and moved to a retirement community outside Staunton right before I was born. I’d never met them. They stopped speaking to my mother when she was just a little older than I was. When she told them she was marrying Dad.
When she told them she was pregnant with me.
When I got back to the living room, Mom and Dad stopped talking, their serious expressions wiped clear and replaced by the all-too-familiar smiles. They didn’t ask me about Jess and Lissa again, not even as the phone stayed silent.
On Sunday, when we got to church, arriving together in one car like we always did, Jess looked at me and then away, her mouth twisting the way it did when she was upset. I jumped when the organ started to play, startled
by the loud buzz of the first note, and suddenly saw a forest all around me, rain-slick and looming.
I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I didn’t think I could breathe.
“Sit down, stupid,” David said, and I saw everyone around me was sitting down, ready for prayer. I sat. Mom patted my arm and glared at David. Dad took away the book David was always allowed to read because he found the sermons boring and handed him a Bible.
David grinned at Dad, his I’m-sorry-but-hey-I’m-cute grin. Dad turned away, smiling at Mom and me. I closed my eyes but the forest came back and when I opened them I saw Margaret watching me, squinting so hard the skin between her eyes looked like it was frowning.
After church she cornered me, striding up to me as I was trying to slip outside. “How are you, Meggie?”
“Fine,” I said automatically, and she frowned for real then, like she’d heard something she didn’t like in my voice.
“You know, when I got back from Vietnam—” she said, and I cut her off, said, “It was nice to see you,” and got away, found Mom and told her I didn’t want to stay for the covered dish supper.
“Honey, in church you seemed . . . tired,” Mom said in the car as she drove me home. “Did you read the paper this morning? Because if you did, you don’t have to worry about anything. Those Park Service people certainly do like to complain, as if we all don’t know that Staunton’s airport is easy enough to get to.”
“Right.” I hadn’t read the paper. I’d seen the headline, Park Service Officials Predict Problems If Local Airport Closes Permanently, and immediately pushed it away and asked Dad for the comics.
There weren’t as many Park Rangers up in the hills as there used to be because of funding cuts, but there were still a few, and it was because of them that Reardon had an airport. Service had stopped since the crash though, pending an FAA investigation, and I wanted it to stay that way. I didn’t want to hear any planes. I definitely didn’t want to see any. Just thinking about it made me feel bad, weird and sick.
It’s raining really hard, but I can tell we’re starting to descend because the trees are closer and the plane is shuddering. It’s been bouncing around since we took off, but it’s a little plane and that’s normal. Totally normal. It is. I look out the window again and the trees are so close, so very close and—