Wunder had been out of school since the day of his sister’s birth.
If she had been born healthy, he probably would have been back in class the next day. But on the day she was born, the doctors had told his parents that she wasn’t going to live for long. His mother hadn’t believed them, but she had wanted Wunder to be there anyway, in the hospital room, getting to know his sister.
But now his sister was gone and the funeral was over, and it was time for Wunder to go back to school.
He didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to listen to everyone say how sorry they were. He didn’t want to pretend that he was fine, just fine.
But he didn’t want to stay home.
His father left for work very early. The sound of the front door closing woke Wunder out of an unsettled half sleep.
His mother did not have to be back to work for four more weeks. She had been on maternity leave.
Now she was on bereavement leave.
Wunder knew that she wouldn’t leave her room, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t have to be in the same room for him to feel her sadness. It seeped under closed doors, spread across floors, filled up every vacant space. Her sadness was a thing Wunder felt he could drown in.
It seemed impossible that a few weeks ago, she had been so happy, happier than he had ever seen her. A few weeks ago, she had looked, all the time, the way she did when she told the story of Wunder’s birth.
Wunder had heard that story more times than he could count. It was in The Miraculous, of course. It was in there several times, with more details as he grew older. His mother had written a version over the summer, while she was pregnant. It went like this:
Miraculous Entry #1279
You know, Wunder, this is my favorite story. The story of you.
It starts with me and your father. We were high school sweethearts, and we got married right after graduation. This, as you know, is not something I recommend, Wunder, although it’s not something that I regret.
After a few years, we wanted to have a baby, even though we were babies ourselves. Again, not something I recommend, but we felt—your dad and I—that we had so much love, too much love for just the two of us.
But year after year after year, there was no baby. We tried everything we could afford. We went to so many doctors. Your father prayed and lit a million candles at St. Gerard’s. I drank special teas and went on fertility retreats and tried my best not to worry so much. But nothing worked.
Until, after ten years—unexplainably, inexplicably—we found out that you were on the way.
I won’t lie to you, Wunder; it was a hard pregnancy. I was sick the whole time, and there were a lot of concerns about your health.
But then you were born—a fuzzy-headed, blue-eyed, seven-pound pooping machine, as Dad always says—and you were perfect. You were absolutely perfect, and we were so in love with you.
And you know your father has always had so much faith, always believed so easily and so strongly. And you know that before you were born, I never really believed in much of anything.
But when I met you, I couldn’t deny that you were a miracle.
You were our Wunder.
Wunder had been enraptured by this story when he was young—the story of how wanted he had been, how longed for, the story of his specialness, of how he had defied the odds and come into being. As he got older, he started trying to cut his mother off when she told it, embarrassed by how she would run her hands over his hair and his back, how she would beam at him. But she never let him stop her, and he didn’t really try that hard.
Embarrassed or not, he had always believed her. He was a miracle. Miracles happened.
And when his mother had announced, out of the blue, that she was pregnant, it had seemed like another miracle.
Not right away, of course. He’d had almost eleven years of only-child-hood, almost eleven years at the center of his parents’ love, and at first, the news that everything was about to change had completely terrified him.
But little by little, his parents’ excitement had become his own. His father had told him story after story about growing up with two sisters and three brothers. His mother had taken him to one of her ultrasounds, where he had seen, for the first time, the baby that would be theirs.
And his parents, they hadn’t seemed to love him any less. In fact, everyone seemed to have more love.
He had started wondering what kind of big brother he would be, and once they knew she was a girl, what kind of little sister she would be. He had found himself paying attention to babies he saw at the grocery store or at the park, found himself thinking about things he could teach her and how it would feel to have someone to take care of, someone new to love.
He had helped his father set up the crib and install the car seat. He had helped his mother shop for baby clothes and bibs.
And he, he alone, had chosen her name.
They had all been so happy, waiting for her to be born.
And even when there were more and more doctor’s visits and more and more bad reports and more and more times when Wunder walked in on his mother with her head in her hands—even when the baby was born and so much was wrong and everyone was waiting, waiting for her to die—even then, Wunder had expected that there would be another miracle.
But there hadn’t been.
And he couldn’t stay in the house with his mother and the crib and those rising floodwaters of sadness.
So he grabbed his backpack, full of schoolbooks and The Miraculous, and he headed out the front door.