The Probability of Miracles (25 page)

She could hear the waves crashing on the rocks below her. She closed her eyes and put both hands on the wheel. “I love you, Cumulus,” she said. “Now don't get any Herbie Lovebug ideas and try to save me.” Then she lowered her foot on the gas pedal. “Good boy,” she said as Cumulus lurched forward, picking up speed like a jet about to take off.

Cam heard the whoosh of the wind and then nothing at all for ten seconds and then an earsplitting pop, which must have been the sound of all of her bones breaking at once. She heard a hiss, which might have been the life seeping out of her, or perhaps it was the sound of the waves.

Even from behind her closed eyelids, she could still sense the beam from the lighthouse swinging intermittently over her face. She waited for it to stop and reveal the famous tunnel and bright light of the beyond.

Then she heard someone calling her name.

Cam awoke in a pool of her own purple Gatorade vomit. “Who's the genius who induced vomiting?”

“That would be me. I saw the empty pill bottle.” Asher's voice echoed toward her as if from very far away.

“Asher to the rescue,” Cam said groggily. “Did you at least turn my head to the side?”

“Of course. That's First Aid 101.”

“Where's the bimbo?” she asked, suddenly remembering how she'd last seen him.

“She's home,” he said. He lifted her tiny, limp wrist to take her pulse. His fingers gently grazed and then pressed on the vein.

Cam pulled her hand away.

“I just need to feel your pulse.”

“No. I can take it myself,” Cam said, trying in vain to lift her right arm off the ground.

“Relax, I can do it.” His fingers brushed the inside of her wrist, and she felt a tingling through her arm.

Cam rested her head on the cool, wet grass, defeated, and stared up into the dark night sky. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she saw it. A brilliant rainbow stretched slowly across the black night sky. She blinked, but it was still there when she opened her eyes. The colors glowed radiantly for an entire minute before fading to muted pastels.

“Do you see that?” she asked Asher.

“What?”

She was glad he didn't see it and immediately lump the rainbow in with the orcas and the purple dandelions and the magic sunsets. This was her experience. And it was personal. A message from Lily.

“Never mind. What happened?” Aside from feeling heavy and sluggish, she felt fine. No crushed bones. The life had not seeped out of her limbs.

“You drove into a bouncy house.”

“A bouncy house?”

“Yep. From the Fourth of July.”

“Saved by a bouncy house.”

“And your seat belt. You must have some hope left, or else you wouldn't have buckled up.”

“Hope is its own reward.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It's just something someone told me once.”

“The ambulance should be here any minute.”

“Do we really need one of those?” Cam could hear the waves again, sloshing against the shore. Crickets were chirping. The night rainbow had disappeared. Everything was coming back into focus.

“You should probably have your stomach pumped.”

“I don't want my pomach stumped. I mean, pomach stumped. I mean. You know what I mean,” Cam said, waving her hand weakly in the air. “Uh-oh,” she said, and she sat up and retched, hurling one more time onto the grass. “I guess I've ruined Riptide Rush for everyone.”

“Yeah. And it was the best flavor, too.”

“Sorry about that.”

Cam was finally able to sit up enough so that she could survey the damage. The bouncy castle had been orange, red, and yellow. One tiny striped turret of it was still inflated, and it waved back and forth in the breeze. The rest of it was flattened, as if someone had dropped an enormous water balloon from an airplane. Cumulus sat in the middle of the entire mess, his pale Vapor paint glinting in the moonlight.

“Thank God no one was bouncing.”

“You can say that again, Ass Whisperer.”

“Thank God no one was bouncing,” Cam said, and she started to drift off to sleep.

The hospital in Promise was the size and shape of an elementary school. A small square building with gold linoleum tile, sea foam green–painted cinderblock walls, and old-fashioned nurses who still wore white dresses, white shoes, and winged white paper caps. Cam thought she had woken up in 1965.

Her mom and Perry sat in puce-colored vinyl chairs in her private room. They had brought Pilly, the little airplane pillow wrapped in a satin pillowcase that her nana had made for Cam when she was a baby. Cam rubbed the cold corner of it between her fingers, and she was instantly calm.

“I'm fine now that I have Pilly. Can we get out of here?” Her swallowing muscles were sore from the tube jammed down her throat last night.

“I think we should talk about that, actually.” A small, dark-haired man sat in a chair to the right of the bed holding a yellow legal pad. He had a full-on GI Joe beard that desperately needed a trim, and he fiddled nervously with his pen. Cam hadn't even noticed him.

“Oh, come on,” said Cam. “Didn't anyone warn this bozo?”

Alicia and Perry just shrugged and went back to texting (Perry) and knitting (Alicia). “You need to talk to him, or they won't let you out of here,” her mom said without looking up.

“Is that true?” Cam asked the shrink. “And please don't answer my question with a question.”

The shrink was about to speak and then closed his mouth, dumbfounded.

“Amazing. Do you want to know what happened to my last shrink, or do you just want to sign those papers and make it easy?”

She and Lily shared the same shrink when they were at St. Jude's. He was a nerdy, nervous guy named Roger, who, as they found out by Googling him, had been the 1986 national Rubik's cube champion. They would torture the poor man by using their sessions to explain the intimate details of their pretend sex dreams. They were discovered finally when Lily got carried away and incorporated a Rubik's cube into one of her dreams, which was too much of a coincidence, even for Roger.

“Are you threatening me?” New Shrink asked.

“How does that make you feel?” asked Cam dispassionately as she glanced up at the TV, pointed the remote at it, and changed the channel.
Wheel of Fortune
came on, and it was a before-and-after puzzle. “Rubik's cubic zirconia,” said Cam. And she was right.

“You're acting out,” he said.

“Do you believe coincidence is truly coincidence, or do you think we should pay special attention to it?”

“What do you believe?”

“How did I know you were going to say that? Mom? Can you please rescue me from this as—I mean, nice man?” You had to remember who had the power in these situations.

“I'm enjoying watching you suffer, Campbell.”

“Why?”

“Why? You need to ask, why? Campbell Maria Cooper . . .” Her mom's voice cracked, and she shook her head.

“What?” Cam asked. “Please don't cry.” It was impossible for Cam not to cry when her mom did, because of that oldest-child, emotional-umbilical-cord thing.

“Campbell. I have never, ever, ever in my life,
for one moment
given up on you.”

“That's true,” said Cam.

“No matter what.”

“I know.”

“It's like you are my heart, beating outside of my body.”

“What does that make me, your liver?” Perry mumbled.

“No, you're my heart, too. My other heart.”

“Whatever,” said Perry.

Alicia set down her knitting and stood up. “Cam, last night you gave up. On me. On all of us. On everything. And you broke my heart. I couldn't believe you could do that to us.”

“I wasn't doing it
to
anybody, Mom. I was just doing it. I just had to do something. I'm sorry.” After a moment of heavy silence, she said, “I wore my seat belt.”

“Oh, wonderful. Thank you, Campbell. Doctor Zimquist, I think we've got it from here. She wore her seat belt. So it's fine.” Her mom laughed through her tears and gave Cam a hug.

“Lily—” Cam blurted as she leaned her head into her mother's hug and burst into tears.

“I know, honey. I know,” said her mom.

Perry came to the bed and joined in the group hug.

After a moment Alicia looked up. “Dr. Zimquist,” she said, “I think this is what you call in the business a breakthrough. We get to them pretty quickly because we have no time for years of therapy. Can you draw up the papers, please?”

IT HAD BEEN TWO DAYS SINCE SHE'D HAD HER STOMACH PUMPED, AND the whole experience had set her back a little. Cam had gotten used to a certain rounding and browning since she'd arrived in Promise. She had begun filling out. The angles of her joints had become less distinct, and her skin had returned to its natural pigment. But since the episode, she'd become cold, pale, and frail.

Sitting on her bed in the widow's walk, covered with seven blankets, Cam watched
The Sound of Music
on her laptop. People who knew her (
Lily and . . . Lily
, that list went) were surprised that this was one of her favorites.

Of course there were movies she liked better:
Chinatown
,
Ghost World
,
Best in Show
,
Midnight Cowboy
,
Citizen Kane
,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
. . . There were even some movie musicals she preferred,
American in Paris
, for example. Or even
Dirty Dancing
(Patrick Swayze, may he rest in peace).

The Sound of Music
, though, was her grounding film. The one she came back to whenever she needed to shut out the world, slow things down, and start over. It had to do with how the sadness percolated beneath the hopeful melodies. It seemed real to Cam that no matter what, there was still sadness.

Even the happy moment at the end, as they're crossing the Alps to freedom—when Christopher Plummer hoists Gretl onto his back. Even that moment is suffused with the sadness of them leaving their homeland forever.

Cam had watched it 257 times.

She pulled her seventh blanket tighter under her chin and pulled her sleeves down to cover her hands.
Maybe hope and sadness can coexist
, she thought. That felt like a significant idea. Maybe Cam could hope without denying that huge part of herself that needed to be sad. She didn't have to sacrifice one for the other. Maybe all people were both hopeful
and
sad in every moment of their lives.

Julie Andrews started up the “Lonely Goatherd” puppet show and won the captain over with her flushed and sweaty innocence. He was just about to take the guitar from Liesl and sing “Edelweiss.” It was Lily's favorite part—aside from Baroness Schraeder's restrained, tearful good-bye on the balcony, of course. She and Lily both loved Baroness Schraeder. It was the name of Lily's imaginary punk band.

The thought of Lily being gone forever destroyed Cam. It was as if Cam's soul, if you believed in things like souls, had been vacuumed out of her body.

She hadn't even gotten to say good-bye.

Cam thought again of the night rainbow. She tried to stop herself from thinking that the rainbow was a sign—a final message from Lily, letting her know that everything would be all right. Part of her knew it must have been a hallucination from the drugs. But it seemed so real. And it was exactly how Lily had described it a year ago when she talked about what she would see when she died. That flash of color, that blinding lightness, against a midnight sky.