The Probability of Miracles Read online

  For J. Albert Wunder

  There are two ways to live your life:

  One is as though nothing is a miracle.

  The other is as though everything is a miracle.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  ONE

  WHEN CAMPBELL’S FATHER DIED, HE LEFT HER $1,262.56—AS MUCH AS he’d been able to sock away during his twenty-year gig as a fire dancer for the “Spirit of Aloha” show at Disney’s Polynesian Hotel. Coincidentally, that was exactly how much her fat uncle Gus was asking for his 1998 Volkswagen Beetle in Vapor, the only color worth having if you wanted to have a VW Beetle. Cam had been coveting it since she was six, and it was worth every penny. It blended into the mist like an invisible car, and when she drove it, she felt invisible, invincible, and alone.

  She hoped this was what it would feel like in heaven.

  Not that she believed in heaven, or a god (especially a male god), or Adam and Eve, like half of the morons who lived in Florida. She believed in evolution: Fish got feet, frogs got lungs, lizards got fur, and the monkeys needed to walk upright to travel across the savannah. End of story.

  She didn’t believe in the Immaculate Conception, either, but it could get you into a buttload of trouble if you admitted to anyone that you thought the Virgin Mary probably just got herself knocked up like 20 percent of the teenage girls in Florida. That was an idea you kept to yourself.

  Because other people needed their miracles. Other people believed in magic. Magic was for the people who could afford the seven-day Park Hopper and the eight-night stay at the Grand Floridian. Magic, Cam knew from a lifetime of working for the Mouse, was a privilege and not a right.

  She inhaled the car’s plumeria-oil air freshener. It was a powerful Hawaiian aphrodisiac, but since no one ever drove with her, it had only served to make her fall deeper in love with her automobile. Who was male. She called him Cumulus.

  Right now Cumulus was parked on the Zebra level of the Children’s Hospital parking structure. Cam typically parked on the Koala level; she preferred the eucalyptus tree mural and the soft, muted gray tones to the stark black-and-white stripes on Zebra. But when she arrived two hours ago, there were no spots available.

  If she had been perceptive enough, she would have taken this for a sign. This appointment would not go well. They’d come to the point where things would be black and white. The good ol’ gray times were over.

  A family of four disembarked from the parking elevator. The mother tried to hold the hand of a healthy four-year-old as he skipped wildly and gawkily in his Spider-Man sneakers with blinking red lights on the side. A sick, bald-headed two-year-old in a pink dress slept on the shoulder of her father, who walked in a daze toward the family’s SUV, probably wondering how this had possibly become his life.

  Cam knew the feeling. She needed to do something—binge and purge, get drunk, smoke a cigarette, something—to get rid of this feeling. Her hands shook as she opened the glove compartment and rustled around to see if her mom had hidden any cigarettes in there. Her fingers felt the sharp corner of something.

  What’s this? She pulled the tiny square of notebook paper out of the glove box. It crackled as she unfolded it. The handwriting didn’t seem like hers at first. The pencil had pressed these letters forcefully into the paper. The o’s were round and full and the consonants stood proud and upright as if the writer knew she had all the time in the world. (In the past few months, Cam’s handwriting had become the faint and falling-down mess of an old woman’s.)

  FLAMINGO LIST

  * Lose my virginity at a keg party.

  * Have my heart broken by an asshole.

  * Wallow in misery, mope, pout, and sleep through Saturday.

  * Have an awkward moment with my best friend’s boyfriend.

  * Get fired from a summer job.

  * Go cow-tipping.

  * Kill my little sister’s dreams.

  * Dabble in some innocent stalking behavior.

  * Drink beer.

  * Stay out all night.

  * Experiment with petty shoplifting.

  Cam stared at the sheet of notebook paper. She hadn’t seen the list in almost a year, since she wrote it last summer from the top bunk in cabin 12 of Shady Hill Empowerment Camp for Girls. The camp brochure had promised to “help girls access their inner strength and help wallflowers blossom into the life of the party!” which made Cam shudder at first. But she had wanted to spend time with her best friend, Lily, outside a hospital and it was better than becoming counselors at “sick camp,” where the sea of bald heads, the meds cart making its rounds with the pill bottles clicking together, and the occasional pity visit from a popular celebrity were constant, depressing reminders of their condition. At Shady Hill they were just regular campers—the Flamingos. Each cabin had to choose a bird, and they decided to choose one that you’d least likely find in the woods. One that would not blend in with its surroundings. Like them.

  Cam closed her eyes and leaned her head against Cumulus’s headrest. She could practically hear Lily’s voice thinking out loud from her adjacent top bunk in cabin 12:

  “. . . Then you put the list away and stop thinking about it, and slowly . . . eventually, the simple act of writing things down will bring them about.”

  Over the summer, Lily had become obsessed with making fun of the self-help books she found in the self-esteem section of the camp “library.” While the other girls were sneaking their way through the yellowing pages of After-School Action and Graduating to Passion that someone’s cousin had hidden beneath one of the library’s floorboards, Lily read about “affirmations.” They’d spent one afternoon in front of the cabin’s cracked and patinaed bathroom mirror jokingly informing their reflections that they were beautiful and powerful and deserving. Lily read about “visualizations,” and they giggled as they closed their eyes and imagined a rainbow of light purifying their diseased organs. Then it was this list.

  “Lil,” Cam had said, but Lily was on a roll, twisting a strand of the green part of her hair around her finger as she summarized out loud.

  “You can’t type it or text it. It has to be handwritten on paper, old-school like. And you can’t show it to anyone else, or it won’t come true.”

  “Come on, Lily—you don’t believe in that, do you? Write it, and it will happen?”

  “Of course not. But we should do it. Just for laughs. Here,” she said, and she threw Cam the oversize three-foot-long orange pencil she bought at the Davis Caverns gift shop on the last all-camp field trip. “Get writing. A list of everything you want to do before you die.”

  Cam doodled in the top margin of her notebook. “What should we call it?” she asked Lily, who was already scribbling furiously. “‘Bucket list’ is so grandpa.”

  “What’s another phrase like ‘kick the bucket’? ‘Pushing up daisies’? We’ll call it the Daisy List,” Lily said without looking up.

  “No way,” said Cam.

  “I don’t know, Campbell,” sighed Lily. “Just call it the Flamingo List then.”

  “Isn’t that sort of irrelev—”

  “Just write it.”

  Cam sighed, wrote Flamingo List in big block letters, and then thought about what to include. It should be realistic, she decided. What she really missed since becoming sick was normalcy. That’s why she came to Shady Hill instead of cancer camp, even though the cabins smelled like mildew. Maybe because they smelled like mildew. Cam wanted a life that was mildewed. Metaphorically speaking. So she began making a list of all the regular stuff she might miss out on if she didn’t make it through her teens. Like Lose my virginity at a keg party, she wrote. Or Wallow in misery, mope, pout, and sleep through Saturday . . .

  “What do you thi
nk it’s going to be like?” Lily interrupted. She had finished her list and sat tentatively on her bunk, chewing the end of her pen.

  “What is what going to be like, Lily?” Cam asked. Lily could jump right into the middle of a conversation, forgetting that Cam did not necessarily inhabit her brain to experience the beginning of it. “Senior year? The Winter Olympics? The prom? Sex? Tonight’s dinner?”

  “Death,” Lily answered.

  “Death.” Cam paused. “Well, I guess there’ll be the tunnel and the white light and the looking down at your own body. . . .”

  “I didn’t think you believed in an afterlife,” Lily said.

  “I don’t,” Cam answered. “The so-called ‘near-death experience’ is a neurological event. A big dream set off by massive amounts of hormones released by the pituitary gland. It’s all caused by dimethyltryptamine. Not God.”

  “Oh,” said Lily, disappointed. She looked out the window.

  “Well, what do you think it’ll be like?”

  “I think it’s going to be dark at first. There has to be darkness when your body shuts down. Then a bright rainbow bridge will arch through the blackness, and stars will blink on around it, lighting your path to the Spirit World.”

  Cam smirked. “Spirit World? Wait, let me consult my dreamcatcher. . . .”

  “Heaven,” Lily said. “I believe there’s a heaven.”

  Cam opened her eyes, staring out at the bleak underground parking lot. Maybe it’s time I start crossing some of these off, she thought, running her eyes down the list again. Since the last item seemed to be the only quest fully within her power right now, she would start with that one first.

  She called Lily. “What should I steal, Chemosabe?”

  “What?” Lily’s voice was raspy and slow, as if she had just woken up.

  “It’s on the list.”

  “What list?” Cam could hear sheets rustling and the bed squeaking as Lily pulled herself into an upright position.

  “Remember that list from summer camp?”

  “Why is shoplifting on your Flamingo List?” Lily asked, exasperated. “You’re not supposed to force it, anyway, Campbell. You’re just supposed to let things happen.”

  “I’m feeling the need to hurry things along a bit,” Cam said. She let her forehead fall to the steering wheel and rolled her head along the upper arc of it.

  “Get some Burt’s Bees lip balm, then. I just ran out,” Lily said, conceding. Cam could practically see her squinting as she inspected her dry lips in the mirror.

  “And what else?” Cam asked.

  “A plastic flamingo from the dollar store,” Lily threw out. “Like one of those lawn ornament things.”

  “That will be a challenge.”

  Cam lifted her head from the steering wheel and patted her car.

  “To Whole Foods, Cumulus,” she said, and they were off.

  TWO

  CAM LOVED THE SMELL OF WHOLE FOODS: A BLEND OF SANDALWOOD, patchouli, lavender, dirt, garlic, and B.O. Whole Foods was one of the few places in Florida where Cam did not appear suspect in her tight black hoodie and the torn-to-shreds, faded black skinny jeans that she could wear only because the big C had wasted her half-Samoan body to a size zero.

  Whole Foods embraced people like her. Oddballs with a touch of the native to them. This was where people tried to get in touch with the native. The authentic. And where they pretended to be more tolerant. So Cam sniffed an aluminum-free deodorant stick while she stuck some Burt’s Bees lip balm into her green canvas biker bag shellacked with a collage of ripped bumper stickers. The top one read, IMAGINE . . . and the rest bore such slogans as A FREE TIBET, MARRIAGE FOR ALL, NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL, PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, THE GOLDEN RULE, HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT, and WHERE’S MY VOTE? (in solidarity with the Iranian people who had had their election stolen by an evil dictator).

  She was the only person in Osceola County, Florida, who cared about things like stolen elections, freedom, human rights. . . . The rest were too busy procreating, which started early down here. Three couples had gotten engaged at her senior prom.

  Cam hadn’t gone to senior prom because they probably had rules about dating your car, but if she’d been there, she would have wished the happy couples pomaika’i, “good luck” in Hawaiian. They would need good luck. A miracle, really. Without a miracle, each of the couples would end up divorced and trying to raise three kids on twelve dollars an hour, increasing the population of trailer-park-livin’, broke-down-car-drivin’, dollar-store-shoppin’, processed-food-eatin’ diabetics that populated the happy Sunshine State.

  But maybe it would work out for them. Cam hoped so. Maybe they were different.

  She stuck some calendula root into her sweatshirt pocket. She didn’t even know what it was, but she loved the sound of it, cal-en-du-la root. She’d swallow some on the way out the door.

  “Excuse me?” chirped a voice behind her.

  Cam jumped. Was she busted already?

  She turned to find the typical Whole Foods shopper: fifty, gray hair tied back in a loose bun, blue eyes, no makeup, baggy pants, Clarks, organic cotton shopping bag. More and more ex–college professors and social workers were making their way to these parts because this was all they could afford in retirement.

  “Yes?” said Cam, fiddling with the bottle of calendula root in her pocket.

  “Who does your hair?”

  “Um. My hair?”

  “Yes, it’s such a great cut.”

  Cam’s thick black hair was short. She buzzed it with her dad’s old electric clippers on the one-inch setting. “I do it myself,” she said.

  “Well, it really suits you. You have such a beautiful face,” Typical Whole Foods Shopper said as she put some fiber capsules in the front basket of her cart.

  “Thank you,” said Cam, and she waited for the lady to turn the corner before sticking a tiny box of chlorine-free, all-natural tampons into the cuff of her jeans.

  She’d heard that before. “Such a pretty face.” God, she hated that. Pre-C, that was code for, “What a shame. She’s so fat.” Now it was code for, “What a waste. Such a pretty lesbian.”

  It killed Cam’s mother that she wouldn’t let her hair grow back after the chemo. Her mom thought long hair was powerful. Plus, without long hair, Cam would never get to dance in “Aloha.” Without long hair, she was relegated to the kitchen in the back of the hotel, where she spent hours as a prep cook, carving out pineapple boats for the Polynesian rice.

  “There’s always Perry,” Cam would say to her mom. “She could dance with you someday.”

  “Agh!” Cam’s mom would throw up her hands in disgust. As a hula dancer (who was really an Italian-American woman from New Jersey), her hands were very expressive. Alicia had met Cam’s dad in New York when they were in their twenties, dancing in clubs and the occasional Broadway chorus. She took Polynesian dance class just to spend more time with him and then eventually made a career out of it.

  Perry, Cam’s eleven-year-old half sister, could never dance in “Aloha.” She was the result of a post-divorce one-night stand their mom had had with a cast member from “Norway” in Epcot. Perry had white-blonde hair and moved with heavy steps, like a Viking.

  “Perry is a lot of things,” her mom would say, “but she is no dancer.”

  Cam’s mom wanted her to dance not simply because she wanted a legacy but more because the dance had healing powers. At least for the spirit. And Cam did dance—it was in her blood—but she did it alone, at home, in front of her Spikork mirror from IKEA.

  TYLER, A WHOLE FOODS TEAM MEMBER scanned the bar code on the breath mints she’d decided to pay for.

  “You’re a cashier,” Cam mumbled, staring at the green name tag with the cheap white letters.

  “What?”

  “You can see through their bullshit, right? You’re not a team member. They don’t really care about you as a person.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  “Disney was the fir
st to use that trick. They call their employees ‘cast members’ so the poor guy twisting balloon animals thinks he’s a star at Disney.”

  TYLER just grunted.

  “If you have to wear a name tag, you’re an employee,” she went on.

  “I know you took the lip stuff,” he said, handing the breath mints to Cam. He had strong, knuckly fingers, messy black hair, and brown eyes with one adorable golden fleck in the left one.

  “But you don’t know about the calendula root. Or the tampons,” she said. Or the natural sea sponge she’d stuck in her bra. “Have a nice day.”

  And as she slowly made her way to the door, she imagined a Rolf moment from The Sound of Music—the one where Rolf finds the whole family behind the tombstone in the abbey and hesitates, deciding whether or not he loves Liesl, before blowing that pansy-ass Nazi whistle. Did TYLER, A WHOLE FOODS TEAM MEMBER, love her, or would he blow the whistle?

  He loved her.

  She was free, walking across the Alps of the parking lot to the neutral, loving Switzerland of her car. She let out a sigh and wished for a second that she were in the Alps. Living in Florida was like living on the sun. She could actually see the gaseous heat rising from the asphalt.

  Cam arranged her Whole Foods booty into a still life on the dashboard and sent a photo of it to Lily. She crossed Experiment with petty shoplifting off of her Flamingo List and stuck it back in the glove box. Then her phone rang with the Lily ringtone, “I Believe in Miracles,” by the Ramones. She’d picked it because she suspected that perhaps Lily did believe in miracles. In a small, somewhat sarcastic kind of way.

  “Good job, Cueball, I didn’t think you had it in you,” she said when Cam picked up.