I WOKE UP IN WHAT AT FIRST I mistook to be a jungle. Big plants with broad, waxy leaves hung over me, and the humid air clanged with the twittering of birds. A flash of yellow flitted overhead, and a small canary swooped down and perched on the arm of the floral couch where I was lying, my boots placed neatly on the floor beside me. From far away, I heard the drone of a television and the clatter of dishes being washed. My head throbbed, and so did my shoulder. My mouth was bone dry, my tongue heavy and lolling. The chills persisted, and my teeth began to chatter so loudly that the startled canary swooped away and disappeared down a hallway.
“Hello?” My voice sounded foreign, moose-like and mournful. There were footsteps, and finally a stooped old woman appeared in the doorway, holding a ziplock bag of ice in one hand and a steaming mug in the other. I lay there, paralyzed with terror, as she leaned down close enough that I could see the big, soft, porous moles all over her face and smell the combination of rosy old-lady perfume and birdseed that drifted from the folds of her old-fashioned housecoat. She had red slippers on her feet that were so worn I could see through them to the outline of her thick, yellow toenails, and her sparse gray hair was pinned up around her head with little metal barrettes.
She came over to me, said something in Polish, then clucked at me in a universal language of grandmothers that I understood to mean that I should sit up. She leaned close, and another bird, this one bigger and gray, with a shock of red feathers mohawked across the crown of its head, zoomed through the air and landed on her shoulder, peering at me with beady, jealous eyes. The lady put the bag of ice into my hand and guided it to a spot on the back of my head where a lump had formed, the hair matted with dried blood. Then, she put the mug on the glass coffee table next to me.
“Drink.” She pointed. I peered into the depths of the chipped mug. It was filled with blood and floating white fingers. Wonderful: I had escaped the clutches of the most epic snowstorm in Chicago history only to land in the hands of a serial killer and/or cannibal. The black jellyfish came oozing back. Bird Lady must have seen the fear in my face, because she sighed impatiently and held the mug to my lips.
“Is borscht,” she snapped. “Beet soup.” She tilted the mug so I had no choice but to open my mouth and drink it. It was bitter and earthy, like drinking sun-warmed dirt, even better than the stuff Alice and Maria made at the deli. I swallowed, and my shaking subsided a little bit. Once I realized this woman was not making me drink the blood of dead children, I was able to look around at my surroundings and gather my thoughts. The walls were lined with old-fashioned iron cages, and inside them an entire zoo’s worth of exotic birds twittered and preened. The whole place smelled like birdseed, which was not unpleasant, exactly, but sort of earthy and feral, like the borscht. The coffee table and wood floors were nicely polished, but fluffs of feathers floated in the air, settling into corners in small, rainbow-colored piles.
In the largest cage, an enormous green parrot dozed. He was bigger than a crow, and so green he looked like he might glow in the dark. On the wall opposite from where I was lying stood a fireplace, but instead of logs, it housed a shrine to the Blessed Virgin, arched with Christmas lights, crisscrossed with Palm Sunday leaves, and glowing with votive candles. The mantel above this shrine was lined with icons of saints, mostly Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. This all made me feel a little better about my situation—if Bird Lady was a devout Catholic, she probably believed in the sixth commandment, which meant that she was probably not going to kill me.
She took the mug from my hands and placed it on the table, then heaved her squat body onto the couch and put a small, soft hand on my forehead. She peered into my face. Her eyes were small and pale blue and almost lashless, the eyebrows scraggly and white.
“I find you on my front stoop. You lucky I keep watch out my window. Otherwise, you be dead. Frozen.”
I nodded weakly.
“You very sick.”
“I’m fine,” I said, attempting a breezy laugh that came out more like a tubercular cough. “Just must’ve knocked my head when I slipped on ice. What time is it?”
“Not fine,” she said, ignoring my question. She produced a thermometer from the folds of her housecoat and stuck it in my mouth. While we listened to the numbers beep upward, she squinted her doughy face at me. “You homeless?”
I opened one eye beneath her warm palm and shook my head.
“You running away?”
“I just wanted a Dr Pepper,” I mumbled around the thermometer.
“Hm.” She put her soft, stubby fingers to my throat, rubbing the lymph nodes. She lifted one of my arms and felt beneath the armpits. She put a palm on my chest bone and tapped with two fingers, listening. My body felt noodly, muscleless, and I sat there limply and let her poke at me. Then, she leaned me forward and tapped twice, firmly, once on my back and once on my right shoulder.
I screamed in agony.
“Aha!” she said, while the Mohawk bird ruffled its feathers and squawked. “What’s problem back here?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I whispered.
“Show me.”
I reached behind me and lifted up my sweater as delicately as I could. I heard a gasp, then a stream of hysterical Polish, and then Bird Lady ran off into the other room. She returned a moment later with another woman—her mother, maybe—who looked at least twice as old as she was and who skated in slowly behind an aluminum walker. This woman had a humpback that reached higher than her stooped head, and the only hair she had left was a few staticky wisps standing straight up at the crown of her head. The two of them whispered to each other in awe, and then, with shining eyes, they began furiously crossing themselves again and again.
“It’s just a tattoo,” I said. If I’d had the energy, I would have rolled my eyes. “Not, like, a vision.”
Bird Lady interrupted her signs of the cross to swat me over the head.
“I know is tattoo,” she said, her voice hushed in wonder. “But you don’t see what she does.”
The older of the two ladies moaned then, cast aside her walker, and collapsed to her knees. Slowly, her knobby hands clasped together, she began to crawl across the carpet on her knees, swaying back and forth.
“O Boze! Matka Boska placze!” she wailed. “To jest cud, to jest cud!”
“Yes, Mama! Yes! Thanks be to God!” Bird Lady rejoined. She took me by the hands, drew me up from the couch, and stood me before the big gilded mirror above the mantle.
“Look!” She lifted the hem of my sweater dramatically, as if unveiling some celebrated painting. “Ave Maria! Ave Maria!”
I peered over my shoulder into the glass and saw immediately what all the fuss was about. There was Our Lady of Lourdes, her terrible, botched face staring back at me, the dead-fish pink light glowing on my hot, feverish skin.
And she was weeping.
Tears dripped and flowed from her turquoise eyes in rivers down my back and left dark stains on the waistband of my leggings. The birds began to take up the pious howls of the old ladies, and soon the room was filled with the strange jungle sounds of birdsong and the chant of the Polish rosary. If anybody else had been around, I probably would have laughed at them, these two crazy religious nuts and their silly little beliefs. But something inside me resisted laughter. Maybe it was the way the tattoo seemed to itch whenever I was faced with a moral decision. Maybe it was Kenzie. Alexis. My dad. The ghosts of Lady Clara and Sandy DiSanto and Tiffany Maldonado. The closing of Academy of the Sacred Heart. There had never been a time in my life when I needed a sign, a miracle, as much as I did now, and here it was. I could see it with my own eyes. Maybe afterward I would feel embarrassed and sneering and cynical. But for now, I just believed. I got down on my knees and joined Bird Lady and her mother in the rosary. I let their dry, soft fingers graze my back while they keened. I let myself be swept up in the miracle, in the soft, holy light of Our Lady of Lourdes.
At their insistence, I stayed for a dinner of veal chops and boiled potatoes. We ate in a small, cluttered kitchen while a trio of parakeets hopped around at our feet waiting for crumbs. I helped the women clean up, and by the time we’d wiped dry the last dish, the whiteout had trickled to a regular snowfall. I would at least be able to see where I was going now. When I looked out the front window, I saw in the glow of the streetlights that I had overshot my location by just a block. I could see the top floor of my apartment building, a short walk back toward the viaduct.
After reassuring Bird Lady over and over again that I was okay, after accepting a long, warm coat to borrow for my walk home, the pockets filled with downy feathers and seed kernels, and after they insisted that I go around blessing everything in their house: their statues of Saint Francis, their framed pictures of the pope, their Palm Sunday leaves, bottles of water that they hurriedly filled from the tap to give out to their friends, the canned beans in their pantry, the aluminum walker, and every single one of their bird cages, I stepped back out into the moonscape, my Dr Pepper long forgotten. The two women stood huddled together in the doorway of their apartment building. Bird Lady waved at me furiously, while her mother leaned on her walker and stared at me with those blue glittery eyes gleaming in her wondering, almost child-like face, still whispering softly, “To jest cud, to jest cud.”
Yes, I thought as I lifted my legs through the mountains of snow, wading through the night in the direction of my apartment. It really is a miracle.