My Own Miraculous: A Short Story

  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.

  “So I sometimes flip on the TV when I turn the suites. Sue me. A couple months ago, some channel had an eighties retro weekend, and they had an old, old Lifetime movie on. I remembered watching it when I was in high school. I loved it. It starred Jo from Facts of Life.”

  Aimee was laughing openly now. “Aw, your first crush!”

  “Yes, well,” Darla said, compressing her lips. “That’s about enough from you. The point is, Jo from Facts of Life was a regular, good teenager, great student, and then suddenly, she went full-blown schizophrenic. It was awful, but as I recall, it ended hopefully. All those movies are based on true stories, and this was made in 1980-something. I’m sure treatment options are even better now.”

  Walcott had been half listening, surfing link to link and skimming pages. Now he was on the Mayo Clinic website.

  “Mom’s not wrong; Lifetime for the win,” he said. “Look, here—the kind of schizophrenic that has delusions and hallucinations responds the best to medication.”

  “She’s not getting any medication, though,” I said. “She’s running around unsupervised with scissors.” In that moment, how I hated Mrs. Fleming, with her designer glasses and her blown-out, pricey hairdo. How could she not see? “And she’s obsessed with Natty.”

  We all paused and looked out at Natty on the porch. At the Fisher-Price Little People Farm, the cow, the pig, and the horse had been in a terrible three-animal crash. Natty swooped the sheep toward them, making vrooming noises so loud we could hear them through the glass. The vrooms changed to the squeal of failing sheep brakes, and the poor fellow careened into the pile.

  “This isn’t a real diagnosis,” Aimee said. “This is just four worried people and some Google.”

  I nodded. “But that doesn’t mean that we won’t . . .” I trailed off. What could we do?

  “Keep him close,” Darla finished for me, and this time Worrsy-Wartsy had it right. As long as the Flemings were in town, Natty would have eyes on him, loving ones, in sets of four or higher.

  Natty and I spent the day at the B and B, not heading back to our house until late in the evening, when I knew Mimmy would be home. As we came in, I didn’t smell anything cooking, though. Mimmy was sitting on the sofa, looking pensive.

  “We’re going out to eat,” she announced. “How about Blue Moon Diner?

  “Suits me,” I said. “Natty, run go potty.” Blue Moon was a twenty-minute drive, and nothing made Natty have to pee like getting all the way buckled into a car seat.

  The second the door closed behind him, Mimmy leaned toward me and said, “I talked with Doris and Raylinda.” She’d named the two biggest gossips in the county. If Doris didn’t know it, then it hadn’t happened yet. If Raylinda didn’t know it, then it never would. “You want the good news or the bad news, first?” Mimmy spoke quickly and kept her voice quiet. Natty was an incorrigible eavesdropper.

  “The good, please. Definitely.”

  “The Flemings have rented the Jerome house, up on Carver Avenue. The father is a named partner in some old-money law firm.” That made sense. The dad had to be making some kind of righteous bank to rent that place. It was close to downtown, with high-end finishes and furniture, a tricked-out chef’s kitchen, and a huge deck that overlooked one of the prettiest views in Georgia. Mimmy went on, “He’s also a workaholic, according to Raylinda. He was only here for the first weekend. Now it’s just the mother and the girl.”

  “How is that good news?” I asked.

  “They only have it four more days,” Mimmy said, and that was good. “Plus, they aren’t from Atlanta. They came over from Charleston.” That was even better. When they left, they’d be heading east, away from all my territories. Come fall, Hilde would go north, to spew her varied crazies across Elon University.

  Natty came out of the bathroom then, and I said, “Did you wash your hands?” He turned around and went right back in.

  I still wasn’t ready for the bad news. While the water ran in the bathroom, I told Mimmy what we’d read on Google. By the time I was done, Mimmy had come to a decision.

  “I know you don’t think it will help, but I have to talk to that girl’s mother,” she said. “As a parent, I’d want someone to talk to me. We can’t be sure what’s wrong with Hilde, but we can at least get Mrs. Fleming in the loop, and make sure Hilde stays far away from . . .” she tilted her head at the closed bathroom door just as Natty opened it and came out, his wet hands spread wide in front of him.

  “Double washed, with many soaps!” he announced, very proud. “I’m hungry.”

  “We?
??re going out to eat, just as soon as I make one quick call,” Mimmy told him.

  “Now?” I said, clutching her arm.

  “Absolutely now,” Mimmy said, adding quietly to only me, “That girl won’t be any less crazy if we wait until after dinner.”

  I wondered if I should make the call, but Mimmy was much better at getting what she wanted out of people. I let her walk off toward her bedroom, and I stayed with Natty. As far as he was concerned, he was having a perfect day, with everyone he loved clustered about, spending time with him in shifts. I sat on my butt on the floor with him, vrooming cars, while Mimmy took on the grown-up, scary business at the back of the house.

  It seemed like the phone call took a long time, though. I thought maybe that was just me, until Natty said, “Except I really am hungry.”

  “I’ll go speed Mimmy up,” I said.

  I stood, but as I went back through the kitchen to Mimmy’s room, I found myself walking soft. When I reached the door, I didn’t knock, much less go in. Instead I leaned in close, pressing my ear against the wood and listening.

  I could hear bits and pieces of Mimmy’s side of the conversation. Enough to catch the tone and know that she was angry. Enough to realize she wasn’t talking about Hilde. She was . . . defending me? I could only make out snatches, but then her voice rose even higher and I heard, clear as day “—stop digging for the mote in Shandi’s eye when your girl has so many beams of pure crazy sticking out of her face, I could build myself a cabin!”

  I gulped. Talking to Mrs. Fleming was a mistake; I’d said so from the start. And Mimmy should never go to war on phones, where her disarming beauty couldn’t give her the advantage. On the phone, Mimmy and Mrs. Fleming fought mom to mom, as equals.

  “My daughter’s delusion? My daughter’s?” Mimmy was so outraged she was practically squawking. Apparently Hilde’s voices were protecting themselves well—she must have told Mrs. Fleming what she’d overheard me say at the emergency room. Mimmy tried again, saying, loud and firm, “You do not know my child. Shandi is not the mentally ill one, here. It’s a coping mechanism, and if you underst—”