The day after your cousin’s funeral, you say you need to see a miracle, so we don our heavy coats, I usher you to the car, and we motor into the gray wintertime early afternoon that drains the world of color. We lean left and right at every tight turn, and with no initial destination in mind, we come up empty. Main Street. Shopping plazas. The parking lot of the municipal aquatics center. I count out the 34th street in the town directory (officially a “lane”), where we see two old men strolling the sidewalk, pelting each other with snowballs scooped from car hoods, but no miracles. I take us to the urgent care clinic, hoping a physician assistant will be cracking an impossible medical situation, only there are no patients, and the front desk employee says she has no time for antics. We even visit the sculpture garden in the park to see if any of the stone faces are weeping blood, yet all that we discover are a trio of horny teens making out in their anoraks.
It’s one disappointment after another. With every letdown you sigh, thinking about your cousin, her cancer, the way you see yourself in her, and I sputter with dwindling ideas, all slow gears grinding, scared I’m going to lock up and leave you worse off than when we started this distraction. But then we turn onto a new road and you tell me to pull over in front of a clapboard-sided white cape, the site of what appears to be a recent accident. Snow blankets the postage stamp lawn, but tire ruts run the length, past a sapling and to a black tarp covering a car-sized hole in the side of the house. As we idle at the curb, the car burping exhaust, you point at the sapling. You trace an invisible path from our spot to the tarp. That a driver avoided the sapling en route to the house is, you explain, something of a miracle.
I listen to the way your voice rises with an excitement I haven’t heard in weeks as you continue speaking of impossible odds, vague mathematics. And once you finish, I briefly think about countering, because there is plenty of space for a car twice as wide to pass the sapling without contact. The truth is that there is nothing miraculous about this unfortunate scene. In fact, I might wager that the homeowners would only accept that a miracle occurred here if the car had hit the sapling instead of the house. You stare me right in the eye, though, like you’re waiting for me to confirm your proposal. Like you need me to agree. Like this might help you forget, if only for a little bit. So I nod and you reach over the shifter to hold my hand. We watch the house as it, like so many tangibles in our lives lately, slips into the unknown with evening’s onset, and while you let your cousin temporarily wriggle from your mind, I imagine what it must be like to have a night of TV interrupted by a Ford Focus launching through the wall. Everything can seem fine until it suddenly isn’t.
