That night Wunder sat at his desk in his bare room and tried to sort through what had happened that day. Everything was so jumbled though, so twisted and distorted, like the hallway of the DoorWay House.
There were no answers.
Just questions, more and more questions.
Why did the witch have The Miraculous? Why had she been looking at the obituaries? Why had she ordered the cemetery stone?
And other questions, questions that had to do with the way the DoorWay House made him feel and how the witch’s eyes reminded him of his sister.
“Now I have a black-eyed baby,” his mother had whispered to him on the night his sister was born, “to go with my blue-eyed baby.” She had hugged him tight there in the hospital room as they stood watch over Milagros’s incubator, as they watched her sleep in a nest of wires and tubes, both still believing that a miracle was on its way no matter what the doctors said.
Wunder jumped out of his chair and paced his room. He should never have gone to the DoorWay House. He should never have broken into the town hall. He had hurt his mother even more and for what? Questions with no answers.
He shoved his hands into his pockets—and there it was. An answer.
The envelope from the witch.
The envelope was cream-colored with darker, discolored edges, as if it had sat somewhere for a long time. It was held shut by a wax seal. The wax was black and imprinted with the shape of a tree, a mostly bare tree with deep, spread-out roots and a few flowers on its long-reaching limbs.
Wunder ran his fingers over the seal, tracing from roots to branches and back again. Then he turned the envelope over.
On the other side there was a name written in black sprawling script:
Sylvester Dabrowski
Branch Hill was a small town, but it was big enough that the average resident couldn’t possibly know everyone. But Wunder was a former miracologist. He had spent countless hours reading the local newspaper and gathering stories from his neighbors. They had written him letters, agreed to interviews, called him on the phone.
He didn’t know everyone in Branch Hill. But he knew their miracles.
And, of course, he had kept track of them all.
Wunder pulled The Miraculous out of his backpack. The book’s familiar worn cover looked even more worn now. There was dirt caked over the white lettering and the silver edges were crushed in places.
He carried the book to his bed, where he opened to the first page—Entry #1—and began to flip through.
The miracles passed before his eyes. A news story from Colorado of a three-year-old girl found alive in the woods five days after she went missing. A letter from his neighbor Susan Holt telling him about the starling who had sung her to sleep every night since she was a little girl, even following her when she moved across town. An anecdote about the philosopher-poet Rumi silencing some impertinent frogs copied from a book his mother had given him. An entry about Davy’s mother and how the doctors had told her that her tumor was shrinking.
And then there it was—a clipping from his church’s bulletin and then his own words. It read like this:
Miraculous Entry #603
PRAISES THIS WEEK FROM ST. GERARD’S:
Luis Aritza
Florence Dabrowski
Edith Greenwald
Robert Ozols
Every week for a long time Florence Dabrowski has been listed in the Prayer Requests section of the bulletin. And then at church today I saw her name again—but it wasn’t in the Prayer Requests section. It was in the Praises section. She must have gotten better!
It wasn’t Sylvester, but it was something. Florence Dabrowski went to his church.
And she was a miracle.
What did the witch want with Sylvester, the other Dabrowski? Did it have something to do with Florence?
The answer was there, right there in his hands. The answer to those questions and maybe others.
But Wunder didn’t open the envelope.
He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to look for the bright in the dark. He would just throw the letter away, along with The Miraculous.
But he didn’t.
He put The Miraculous in his backpack.
And he put the letter on his nightstand.
He had another dream that night.
He was holding the envelope in his hand when the tree on the wax seal began to grow. Its branches spread up and out, through the ceiling. Its roots reached the floor and tunneled down, into the floorboards. The tree grew and grew until it was enormous, wider than his house, taller than the tallest tower of the DoorWay House.
And covering it, round and perfect and bright, were the spirals. It was a DoorWay Tree. And on the very top branch, half-hidden behind white flowers, was the old woman.
“‘We will all be changed!’” she cawed from her perch. “Changed! Changed!”