Some Kind of Miracle

M
ost of the guests arrived at about four, parking their cars up and down Moorpark Street, slowly trailing in, carrying bouquets of flowers or white bakery boxes tied with string. Dahlia looked at the clock on the mantel again, relieved that it was already five-thirty and there hadn’t been even the tiniest incident yet. She was sure the success of the day was thanks to the fact that all the fingers on both her hands were tightly crossed. For an hour and a half, she’d kept her hands in her pockets so nobody could see them, because her mother always laughed when she did superstitious things like that. But this time it was actually working.

Thanks to her crossed fingers, any outsider who happened to look in the window might think this was an ordinary family gathering. No Sunny locking herself in the bathroom screaming out death threats to everyone at the party by name, no Sunny keening and wailing about how

some unidentified “they” were after her. No Sunny frantically rushing around the house destroying every breakable item in her path. Today there was just the music.

Just Dahlia and Sunny sitting at the baby grand piano singing their best songs, surrounded by friends and family. Everyone seemed to love the new one they’d finished writing just that morning as Sunny belted out each verse in her big, husky voice. And every time she came to the chorus, Dahlia chimed in, harmonizing in her pure, childlike voice, their sound enchanting the friends and family who swayed to the music, smiling.

Most of them were gazing at Sunny, probably wondering how a pink-skinned, blue-eyed blonde like her could have been born into this olive-skinned, dark-haired family.

“Recessive genes,” Uncle Max said with a shrug when anyone asked him.

“The milkman,” Aunt Ruthie joked with a grin when anyone asked her. Dahlia didn’t get why everyone always laughed at that.

Sunny was seventeen and curvy, and her long, wavy hair was as white as the piano keys she stroked and pressed and cajoled until glorious tunes rose from them. Tunes she fashioned from her tormented psyche. And always, from the moment her graceful fingers began to play until the last song was over, nobody who was listening ever yawned or stole a glance at the clock, wondering when she would finish. They were much too caught up in the spell of the songs, the way she delivered them and the way their melodies transported her. But Sunny never saw their awestruck gazes, because she was far away in what she sometimes called the “secret garden” of her songs.

“Music isn’t just something I play or write,” she told
Dahlia many times. “It’s a place where I get to go.” And it was clear when the others watched the way she threw back her head and closed her eyes as she played and sang that she was unquestionably elsewhere, gone into some parallel world where none of the rest of them could travel, including the twelve-year-old Dahlia singing along, pale and dark and looking particularly frail because of the inevitable comparison to the dazzling Sunny.

Usually when the song was over and Sunny turned to discover the relatives fishing in their pockets and purses for handkerchiefs to wipe their teary eyes, she laughed an embarrassed laugh at their emotional reaction and told them they were “too cute.” Today while the girls were singing their original “Stay by My Side,” Dahlia spotted Aunt Ruthie making an O with her thumb and forefinger and holding it up to Uncle Max to say, “So far so good,” and she was sure everyone else in the room was thinking that same thought.

Unfortunately, it was only a few minutes after the performance, while Dahlia stood at the buffet table hoping nobody noticed she was sneaking slices of corned beef from her own plate and feeding them to Arthur the dog, that the shrill cry went up from Aunt Ethel warning the others that they were on the brink of another Sunny emergency. And Dahlia hated herself for uncrossing her fingers so she could eat.

“Maxieeeee!” Aunt Ethel squealed, causing everyone in the room to look up from his or her sandwich. “Naked” was the only word Dahlia’s mother’s sister could get out as she dropped her paper plate on an end table and headed for the screen door to the front porch.

All the family members left their own plates behind, rushing outside to look west toward Coldwater Canyon,
where Sunny was now sprinting away from the house wearing only the red rubber band that held her white-blond hair in a ponytail. All of them lined up on the porch looking down the wide street after her except Sunny’s older brother, Louie, who could chronicle his entire life, after the age of five, around landmark Sunny emergencies and was no longer fazed by them. Louie stayed inside, filled his plate from the tray of sweets, and turned on the TV to watch a baseball game.

Now Sunny was halfway down the block dodging traffic, and Dahlia was relieved that the most anyone in the family could see of her was her very white back and her pretty white tush bouncing along as she moved down Moorpark Street, the long ponytail swaying from side to side against her white shoulders. Many of the astonished drivers who had just passed Sunny now drove by the family, red-faced and tugging at their rearview mirrors to get another look.

Dahlia saw Uncle Max hurry back inside the house, letting the screen door slam behind him. An instant later the door flew open and he bolted out onto the porch, now hanging on to the floral-print throw Aunt Ruthie always flung over the couch when company came, in case anyone spilled food from the buffet. Uncle Max was big and athletic and fast, and as he leaped off the porch and sprinted down the street after Sunny, it was easy to see he wasn’t going to have any trouble catching up with her.

Dahlia saw Sunny dart between a red pickup truck and a silver convertible to get across the intersection, and the driver of the convertible slammed on the brakes and veered left and right as he spotted her. That was when Uncle Max, close enough to overtake her, in one acrobatic move managed to toss the floral-print throw over her. As he reeled her
in, the others cheered as if they were at a sporting event. But Sunny fought off the throw with flailing arms and spun quickly to face her father, raising what the others could now see was the flashing blade of a meat cleaver as it caught the sun.

Then, letting out a throaty cry that the others could hear all the way back at the house, Sunny wielded the cleaver at her father, who didn’t move out of the way fast enough. Even from that distance, the family could hear both of them screaming, Sunny in outrage and Uncle Max in pain, until, with a loud grunt, he seized his beautiful, tormented child and lifted her into his arms, their cries and screams commingling indistinguishably now. Dahlia heard doors slam, and she looked around to see the neighbors hurrying from their houses to see what was causing the commotion.

The blood was pouring out of the gash on Uncle Max’s face onto the throw and onto Sunny as he trudged back toward the house, holding tightly to his daughter, who kicked and shrieked for him to let her go. The family stood quiet and somber-faced, except for the occasional cluck of a tongue or an “Ay, ay, ay” of sadness as they watched the bloody Uncle Max trying to contain the irrational outburst of the hysterical Sunny.

Dahlia noticed that there was not a trace of surprise on the faces of anyone in the family, all of whom had seen Sunny meltdowns like this many times before. Once at a picnic, when Sunny threw handfuls of food at all of them, then sawed at her wrists with a bread knife and bled over what was left of the potato salad and coleslaw. Then there was the time they all met at Disneyland and Sunny stood up on the Matterhorn and removed her blouse and, when the ride was through, ran through the park screaming obscenities.

Dahlia would never forget when the ambulance came to take Sunny away from Disneyland that day, how embarrassed she’d felt when the other families stood gawking, watching Sunny being strapped down as if she were another park attraction, some of them snickering, one woman actually letting out a big laugh. Dahlia wanted to run around and pummel them all and scream at them to stop staring. Especially when Sunny caught Dahlia’s eye and begged, “Don’t let them do this to me,” and Dahlia had been helpless. Too young and too afraid to do anything.

Now Aunt Ruthie sat on the curb moaning. The party was over. Louie came out of the house as if nothing had happened. He was eating a brownie, and the crumbs were all over his chin and falling on to the front of his shirt.

“Hey, Ma, I’m going over to Richie’s house to watch the game.”

Aunt Ruthie didn’t even look at him as she hurried inside. Dahlia’s parents gathered their things to leave as Sunny’s agonized wails filled the house. Aunt Ruthie hurried upstairs, and in a minute Dahlia could hear her aunt’s muffled attempts to calm Sunny, which were doing no good. Soon the high scream of an ambulance heading toward them grew louder. Dahlia looked through the living room window and saw it pull up, the flashing light on the top continuing to blink even after the two men got out and walked, in perfectly matched steps, toward the house.

When Aunt Ruthie opened the front door and saw the serious-faced men, she let out a little grunt of surprise, as if she hadn’t been the one to call them, as if she hadn’t already known they were the ones who had rung the bell. Then she gestured for them to follow her up the stairs. Dahlia was sure she recognized one of the men from another time
Sunny had been taken away in an ambulance. After a moment Dahlia heard what had to be the instant Sunny laid eyes on the men, because her poor cousin cried out in protest, “Nooooo! Nooooo!” And then there was the sound of a struggle and finally only the sound of Aunt Ruthie crying quietly and repeating, “My baby. She’s my baby.”

Dahlia heard the men’s voices at the top of the steps as they tried to decide how to get the stretcher to turn the corner on the tiny landing, and Dahlia suddenly felt as if she shouldn’t be there when Sunny went by. She felt sure she couldn’t stand to see that helpless, panicked look in Sunny’s eyes one more time. Maybe, she thought, she should go out to the backyard and stay there until she heard the ambulance pull away.

But she stood right where she was, mesmerized with sadness, as one of the men walked backward, guiding the head of the stretcher down the narrow staircase. And when the men got to where she was standing, Dahlia held the screen door open wide for them. As they moved past her, she saw Sunny strapped down to the stretcher, her hair wildly askew, but this time she didn’t look helplessly at Dahlia the way she had in the past. This time her face looked dramatically changed. She was slack-jawed, wearing a vacant, far-off stare, probably induced by the drugs one of the white-coated men had given her. How scary, Dahlia thought, that those drugs they forced on her poor cousin transformed her into someone that she, Dahlia, the closest person to her in the world, was barely able to recognize.

At the curb two little boys from across the street peered into the open doors of the ambulance and watched as the men slid the stretcher holding Sunny, the beautiful Sunny, into the back. Then a solemn Uncle Max hoisted himself up
and in to sit beside her. Dahlia always remembered that, even though the scream of the ambulance’s siren was ear-piercingly loud, it couldn’t drown out the screams of Aunt Ruthie, her face clouded with a black and terrible despair, as the rest of the family circled her protectively and moved her back toward the house.