The Probability of Miracles (11 page)

“Okay. You stay. I'll go. I don't want you breaking a hip,” Cam said. The traffic light at the corner turned from red to green, but there were no cars to take advantage of it. It was a quiet night in Hoboken.

“But I'm going to look suspicious out here,” Nana said, shifting from one foot to the other.

“Then why did you dress like that?” Cam asked.

“I don't know. I got caught up in the heat of the moment.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going on in your life. You need to work on impulse contr—”

“Just go. Up and over,” Nana said, bending over and cupping her hands to make a human step for Cam.

“I'm not exactly 100 percent, you know. Feeling a little weak these days,” Cam said as she stepped into her grandmother's hand-stirrup and then placed her own hands on her Nana's increasingly stooping shoulders.

“You want me to do it, honey?” Nana asked. Cam was close enough to smell her breath, which was always licorice-y, like anisette.

“No. I'll do it.”

“Okay. Up and over. Wait, what is our code word? In case of an emergency or something,” Nana asked.

“Banana,” Cam said as she took a quick step, grabbed the top of the wall, and then hoisted herself over it. She slid her stomach down the other side and clung with her fingers for just a second, trying to avoid dropping into a rosebush. As soon as she let go, she heard, “Oh, God. Banana. Banana. Banana.”

“What is it?” Cam whispered. “Police?”

“No. Rita. I'm going home. Good luck.”

“Nana?” said Cam. But her grandmother was already gone. Cam turned her attention to the tree, which was gated off with a white fence and bottom-lit with blue and white spotlights implanted in the ground. She snuck up to it and reached for a low-hanging leaf when suddenly she heard the unmistakable, ding-dong, doorbell chirp of Tweety.

“Tweety?!” Cam could just make out his tiny little yellow belly perched behind a flapping leaf at the very top of the tree. She knew she shouldn't have trusted Perry with him.

“Tweety, get down here!” Cam whispered insistently, but he wouldn't budge. Adrenaline must have taken over because Cam's usual fear of heights disappeared. She felt weightless and nimble enough to scamper to one of the highest branches, where she held onto a branch above her and sidestepped herself along the one she was standing on. She reached for Tweety and called to him again.

“Come here, silly boy. This is Jersey, Tweety. You can't handle these mean streets. Come back here, Tweets.”

She whistled the little call that he liked. “Here, Tweety.” She almost had him. Her fingertips grazed the sharp claws on his left foot, when she felt her own foot begin to slip. The peeling bark beneath her sneakers began to give way and fall in chips to the ground until both of her feet were dangling. Cam hung by her armpits from a high branch of some crazy tree in Hoboken.

And then a door slammed. A bald-headed priest, struggling with his big black-framed glasses, came storming out of the rectory in his bathrobe.

“Get down from there this instant! You must get out of that tree!”

Tweety chirped a last ding-dong chirp. Everything started to move in slow motion. Tweety looked Cam straight in the eye as if to apologize for something. Then he flapped his wings. He didn't take off. He just flapped. As if to say,
Come with me
.
Let's get out of here, Cam. Why can't you come with me?
He let out a tiny sigh and then flew away in the moonlight toward the blinking stegosaural skyline of Manhattan.

“You asshole!” Cam screamed down to the priest, who, even in New Jersey, was not used to being called an asshole. “You scared away my bird. You asshole,” she said in a barely audible gasp because for the first time since her dad's funeral, she couldn't stop herself from crying. She tried to. She stiffened and tried to swallow the aching lump in her throat. But once the tears started, she couldn't stop them.

The priest, Father John, actually turned out to be a pretty cool guy. He literally talked Cam out of her tree and walked her home. He told her he would pray for Tweety's safe return, which he really didn't have to do after being called an asshole. Twice.

“Cam,” said Perry as she came up the stairs and into the living room.

Cam held up her hand, catching a glimpse of Tweety's empty cage in her peripheral vision. “Don't even speak to me, Perry. Just leave me alone.”

She turned to her nana. “I don't know which of your lost causes is most lost, Nana: reforming the Catholic Church, curing stage-four cancer, or finding a canary set loose in Hoboken. But if you could at least pray to St. Jude for the last one, that would be good.” Cam flopped into her grandfather's old vinyl chair, which was covered with dishtowels and lace doilies in strategic places to prevent stickage.

“Did you get the leaf?” Her grandmother couldn't help herself.

“Here,” said Cam, opening her clenched fist. There she held a crumpled green leaf. When unfurled, it seemed to be veined in almost exactly the same pattern as the creases in her palm.

Good-byes with Nana were difficult. Because in order for her to get through it without crying for ten days straight, she had to pretend to be angry with you.

Cam and Perry sat at the breakfast table. Their mom was packing the car, and they were supposed to leave in ten minutes. They had stayed in Hoboken for three extra days, combing the neighborhood for Tweety without any luck.

“Who used all the syrup?” Nana sighed as she hung her head into the refrigerator, and then she slammed the door shut.

“Ca—” Perry began, but Cam shot her a look like
Don't you
dare
throw me under the bus, child
, and because Perry was still trying to repent for losing Tweety, she said, “I did, Nana. I'm sorry.” And then she ducked her head and covered it with her forearms to protect herself from the dishtowel Nana threw at her.

“You people eat me out of house and home,” Nana said, sitting indignantly at the kitchen table without looking at either of them. “I guess I'll just drink this small glass of grapefruit juice, since that's all that you've left me.”

“Cheers,” Cam said, and she held up her glass to clink with her grandmother's. Nana just looked out the window above the kitchen sink, ignoring her.

“Where's your mother?” she finally said. “Don't tell me you two lazy bums let her pack the car by herself.”

“She likes to do it herself,” Perry said, and Cam smirked a little because Perry still hadn't learned when to keep her mouth shut. Cam waited for her grandmother to erupt.
Three . . . two . . . one . . .

“Your mother does
everything
by herself. The least you can do is help her pack
your
suitcases into the trunk. She does everything for you and this is how you repay her? Ingrates. That's what you are, a couple of ingrates. Don't have kids because this is how they treat you.”

“Wait, Nana,” Perry said, “she really does like to do it herself.”

Oh, Perry
, thought Cam,
shut up!

It was true, of course. Alicia had a sick, neurotic blueprint for packing the trunk in the most efficient way, and she needed to be in complete control of it. But that was beside the point. When Nana was on the rampage, you just needed to stand clear.

Cam watched her grandmother swallow a sip of grapefruit juice and then watched her rheumy eyes narrow as she stared at Perry and contemplated her next move. Cam saw it coming, but before she could warn Perry to get out of the way, Nana tilted her little juice glass and threw its contents toward Perry's face.

The pinkish blob of liquid flew through the air in slow motion before it landed with a splat on Perry's forehead. Perry sat midgasp with her mouth half open and her bangs dripping and stuck to her head. She was deciding whether to laugh or cry, and since she'd had a bad week with everyone blaming her for Tweety's escape and all, she cried first. But she looked so ridiculous that Cam started laughing, and then Nana started laughing, until they were all laughing and crying at the same time and the ice was officially broken.

Cam reached over the table to pass Perry a napkin, her sleeves riding up. She tried hastily to pull them back down, but it was too late.

“What's that?” Nana asked. In the last three days, the blueberry spots had gotten worse. Cam's right forearm was pocked with ugly, raised purple bubbles the size of dimes that marked the plodding progress of the disease and its ambitious plot to take over her entire body.

“What?” Cam said, sneaking her thumb back into the hole she'd created in the wristband of her sweatshirt to keep her sleeves down.

“Don't say ‘what.' You know what I'm talking about. That. On your arm.”

“Bug bites,” Cam said.

“We don't have those kinds of bugs in Hoboken.”

“Ah, but you haven't been to the Magic Tree,” said Cam.

“Campbell. Should you go get that checked out?”

Campbell just shrugged. “Let's go,” she said. “I'm sure Mom's finished packing.”

The three of them walked down the narrow, wood-paneled staircase to the front hall. Cam first, then Nana, and Perry trailed behind, jotting something down into her brown notebook from Izanagi. “Miracle number thirteen,” she said as she wrote, “Nana is walking us to the door.”

“Yeah, what are you doing, seeing us to the door?” asked Cam. Normally after pretending to be angry and then throwing a faux tantrum, Nana retreated to her bedroom without even saying good-bye.

“Just making sure you get the heck out of here,” Nana joked.

Outside, it was a glorious day. Their ridiculous rig took up two metered spots on Church Street. Alicia wiped some sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, looking pleased with herself. Everything was packed up and ready to go.

“Let's go,” she said. “Bye, Ma.” She gave her mother a hug without even realizing how strange it was that Nana had actually made it outside to see them off.

Perry hugged her grandmother. Nana apologized for the juice.

“I guess it's our turn,” Nana said. Cam and Nana circled around each other like wrestlers in a ring.

“Yeah.”

“You want to just do one of those exploding fist-bump things?” Nana asked, holding out her fist.

“You can hug me if you want,” Cam said.

Nana wrapped her arms around Cam and Cam choked back her tears. “I'm going to be okay, Nan.”

“I already know that about you. You asked me what I believe. I believe that you are going to be okay,” Nana said, and she squeezed Cam one more time. “Now go. I have my ten days of crying to do.”

THEY WERE BACK IN THE VAGINA TRAIN AND HEADING NORTH. CAM missed Lily. It had been days since they'd left North Carolina, and still Cam could not get the words
he's using you
out of her head. That was probably a little harsh, as was the word
desperate
. She wished she could take it all back.

They passed blue sign after blue sign advertising the fast-food options at each exit. Cam still got a little excited, a vestigial feeling from her overeating days, when she saw a good sign—one with four or more restaurants at one exit. But the thought of eating any of that garbage now turned her stomach. She had a metallic taste in her mouth, and she felt nauseous, with a strange pain shooting from her jaw down into the sides of her neck. She wished she could just throw up and maybe feel better.

After they had gotten through New Jersey and Connecticut, the strip-mall landscape on the side of the road had slowly and thankfully disentregrated until they were flanked on both sides by forest. Aside from her time at summer camp, Cam had never really been flanked by forest before. She peered through the trees, taking snapshots with her eyes of the ancient, falling-down rock walls and the ruins of an old chimney left standing after a cabin fire. Then the forest seemed to get darker and denser until she could barely see through the trees. It was all Hans Christian Andersen-y, and maybe, Cam had to admit, a little magical—as if there might be pixies and leprechauns hidden among the mushrooms or monsters lurking in caves. That was until she looked up and saw five beautiful semis piled with long, dead trees headed south toward the paper mill.
So much for magic
, she thought.