You dip a toe into the swimming pool, a forgotten plastic dolphin bobs up and down. Mom is wearing that turquoise costume, pulling Lycra out of her butt crack. Everything will change. You don’t know this; I do the knowing for us both.
Mom turns towards a wolf-whistle the man on a sun lounger is too old to give and she’s too wobbly to receive. The man has a beer. It’s 6.35. She looks over, deciding if he’s crazy, wasted or just bored. There’s no one else around so she takes those off-season baby steps towards him. Your water wings flap in the air, want to fly.
‘Can I go in?’ You stamp a splashy foot, stick out a ruffled behind.
‘Not yet,’ Mom yells, turning back to the man. He is all smiles, between sips.
You don’t know what it’s like to want to close your eyes so bad. Mom’s looking at the plump man as if he’s a life raft we can all climb aboard and drift into the sunset on. Under my sunglasses, I blink. I won’t see her fall in love again. She always drowns. Sssshhh. Mom’s breath is a leak. Your water wings are slowly losing air.
‘Lose the wings,’ I say.
The cap on the left wing isn’t all the way in. I blow with my back to the pool, all eyes on Mom. Her hope fits like hot pants she’s not young enough to wear.
The man points, legs of his chair scrape concrete as he rushes to his feet. Shouts. And Mom’s running, hands automatically fly to her chest, clutch her jiggles to prevent herself spilling out of her costume. She dives into the pool and rises with you in her arms.
‘Won’t someone help?’ she yells, laying you on the deck.
The man bounces into the motel. And Mom keeps breathing, pinching your nose, blowing into your mouth. Where did she learn CPR? Your body rises and falls, inflatable, doll-like. And like anyone with a doll, I’m staring at it, wishing it to come to life. I slide my sunglasses onto my skull and stand still. You don’t know what it’s like to do nothing, to know that, whatever happens, nothing is your default setting. It’s realised in seconds, one moment that rolls like live coverage for a lifetime. I’ll be tying my shoelaces, or telling someone the capital of Peru, and stuff splashes up.
I see you, that plastic dolphin, Mom’s ‘Won’t someone help?’ One water wing sighs in my hand. I stand by the pool. I never dive.
This is the moment life can drift into past tense. It happened so fast. We saw the doctor, we asked another specialist, you went for another scan. There are moments to really be somewhere, and hours to barely be there. Everything was different. It hadn’t soaked in yet. Mom’s eyes lurched to the door at the squawk of the nurse’s rubber shoes. There were strawberries printed on her clothes. You’d have asked why the nurses all wore pyjamas – if it was to make the patients feel less left out. She hooked up a tube to suck saliva from your mouth. If her bright clothes could talk they’d be singing: Don’t worry, you aren’t in hospital. This is one big pyjama party! Here, have Jell-O, a fruit cup. No, not you. Your eyes were shut. I sat on a plastic chair. Mom gripped my hand. ‘Everything will be ok.’
The doctor’s stethoscope looked too cold for you. Everything always was. On days when the breezeway’s plastic roof crackled in the sun like bacon you used to kick your legs and moan, ‘Cold.’
‘I think she’s got the words wrong,’ Mom said. ‘She says cold when she’s hot, and hot when she’s cold.’
You never said how things were. You only said how you wanted things to be. Then, you said nothing. You got fed through a tube in your stomach. I got addicted to soup from the vending machine, sticking my finger into Dixie cups, slurping up salty goop that wouldn’t dissolve.
‘Where there’s life…’ Mom said.
There’s waiting, waiting for someone to wake up.
‘It’s unusual: all her vitals are good,’ the specialist said. ‘Kidneys, heart, lungs…’
He didn’t have to mention your brain. If he was kind of cute, Mom didn’t mention it. Once, when I had tonsillitis, a different doctor flattened my tongue with a wooden paddle and said, ‘He has your eyes.’ Mom assessed a white band of skin on his finger that had never seen daylight and turned up her laugh like the brightness on a TV. We returned four times.
That was the old Mom. You wouldn’t recognise this one, pure Mom mode. The Mega Mom. She sang about cats in cradles and promised you the moon.
Your body rises and falls, inflatable, a doll. And like anyone with a doll, I stare at it wishing it would come to life.
You came home on a Thursday. The men scraped the paint on the doorframe carrying you in. The scratch is still there in the woodwork, like a cut that won’t scab. The doctor recommended a facility with 24/7 care. Mom shook her head. She could do it. You should be at home. She looked at catalogues with bedpans in and measured my room.
I didn’t complain, honest, not that much. You needed the space, the bed with sides like a cage, diaper storage, the oxygen tank, just in case. Every time I opened my mouth to speak about school, ask what was for dinner, or complain about my sneakers being too tight, I sounded small, my voice scrunched into a whine.
‘Not everything’s about you,’ Mom said. ‘Think of your sister. Don’t you know how lucky you are?’
I did. I lay in my room listening to the drone of your electric bed and the buzz of Mom brushing your teeth. Then it stopped. It must be 9pm. Mom was Nursemom. Shark-like, if she stopped moving she’d die. She rolled you over, checked for sores and switched on your TV to colour in the silence. I flicked on my TV to see what she was thinking. It was some show about miracles.
I counted the cowgirls on the wallpaper in your old room. Mom had a new hobby: screaming at airlines. You were a fire hazard. You could block the aisles. Then, she was packing your case. The airline bumped you up to first for nothing more than an article in the paper. ‘I am taking my daughter to a monastery in Europe where the sick have been cured. It has been a difficult year, since the accident,’ Mom said. ‘I can’t tell you what this means to us. The airline has been amazing.’
I was whisked off to the grandparents. Every day at 11am Gran said, ‘Starbucks time!’, slopped milk, sugar and instant coffee into a pan and boiled it to the bubble.
‘I wonder if your mother and Jessica are having a nice time,’ she said. ‘I wish they’d phone.’
We slurped sweet milky coffee opposite a photo of a little me and baby you on the wall. I looked like someone had placed an anvil in my lap and said ‘cheese’.
Only you know what the Virgin Mary thought about it all, maybe. Mom buzzed louder than a moth skirting the zapper. The vacation was amazing, she said. You rolled to the front of the queue at the convent like VIPs at Disneyland. Inside, a monk whispered in your ear.
‘What did he say?’ I asked, foiling a Toblerone.
Mom disassembled the praying mantis of her hands. Thumbs up.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t speaking American, or French.’
You won’t remember how badly she wanted to look clever the year Dad left. She kept dropping French phrases at dinner, ah fromage, jambon. She plonked lettuce on the table, announcing salaud with all the glee of a schoolgirl spelling matricide or patricide.
‘Your sister received a message from the Virgin Mary, the monk whispered it to her,’ Mom said. ‘Something happened: she moved. It’s a miracle.’
‘How?’
‘She twitched.’
‘How do you know it was the Virgin Mary? How do you know, for sure?’
‘I don’t,’ Mom said. ‘I choose to believe it. I don’t need to know everything. The message was for your sister, not me. Doesn’t she look different? See that? She’s smiling. Doesn’t she look like she’s smiling?’
I looked for the miracle pasted all over you. You lay on your pillow, breathing, a nylon sunflower clipped to your hair, lips shiny as wax fruit.
The smiling plastic dolphin bobs in the pool.
A Miracle Girl is never alone. Mom cashed in a pension and hired a retired nurse called Isola to come in five days a week. Isola was a small woman with hair like scuzzy foamed milk. Occasionally, she spoke about her son who died in the marines, but mostly she said stuff like, ‘God has a purpose for everyone’ and ‘Where there’s life, there’s…’ Pictures of the Virgin Mary in the kitchen, your bedroom, the john. They popped up like the cut-out paper Barbies you used to leave everywhere you went: Barbie at the discount store; Barbie caged with the rabbit Mom wouldn’t buy at the pet store; Barbie soaked, curling by the tub.
Mom was Bloggermom, a counter of blessings. It’s rude to keep a miracle to yourself. She posted pictures of you and typed stuff like ‘faith’ and ‘just knowing’. She knew you were special now, she could feel it, she said. The comments and letters took her by surprise. People believed in you, I don’t know if you know that, if you felt you had ‘followers’, thousands of ‘friends’. I got sick of never being able to get on the PC.
Every night, Mom slipped photographs of sick kids under your pillow and read you letters from strangers like bedtime stories.
‘God bless you both. I know what you’re going through… my son has ADD… my daughter has diabetes… my husband’s battling with… You’re in our prayers, Jessica. Please pray for us.’
I lay in my room listening, biting my fingernails to stumps. The cowgirls on the walls watched me lick blood from my hands.
I was watching a show about sleepwalking when Isola screamed in the kitchen. This lady psychologist on TV fiddled with her wedding ring and spoke about things people don’t know they’re doing. One of her patients got up every night to make sleepsandwiches, some guy played sleephoop, a kid in pyjamas walked to the top floor, opened the window and sleepstoodontheledge.
Isola gasped through the hallway, holding up glistening fingers: ‘Our Lady is weeping for Jessica!’
Mom put down the hairbrush, left it on your chest like Buckaroo and ran.
We stared up at a slip of oil on the cheek of the Mary painting above the fridge.
‘It’s a miracle,’ Mom said.
Isola was crying, so was Mom. I left the pair dabbing painted eyes with cotton wool, closed my door and hurled a compass out of my bedroom window.
Once, I stroked the painting. The tears smelt of pesto. The oily olive waft mingled with the rusty smell on my arms. Each night I catalogued any small wound the day dished out: papercuts on a finger, a puncture wound on a wrist, a bruise on a shin where I wheelied off my bike. I was obsessed with the slightest scrape: I had to know where I was when it happened, who was there, why, like I was investigating a crime. The shins spoke for themselves, but I couldn’t account for the scabs on my arms. I came up with a theory I was a scratcher. I guess I scratched the same place in my sleep till I bled. I locked all my plastic superheroes, pencils and pens in my closet and dropped the key in the pot of paint that never got around to covering the cowgirls on the walls. If I was a sleepscratcher, anything with sharp edges could make things worse.
It was a year for signs and stealing, nothing major, anything I could get: dog chews from pet stores, handkerchiefs, Duck Tape, maxi pads. Mom photographed splotchy sores on your ankles and compared you to Jesus. Whatever. I changed into a black sweatshirt to go help empty the garage. The radio was fading out Johnny Cash.
‘Man in Black!’ Mom said, ‘Don’t you ever want to be colourful?’
‘Don’t you ever want to blend in more?’
She handed me a broom. Isola had the idea to convert the garage into a chapel for your visitors – all those Hallelujahs wouldn’t fit in the house.
‘You don’t need this,’ Mom said, holding a skateboard by a wheel.
‘I do. I just don’t use it.’
I scurried inside for the bathroom. On the way, I wandered into your room. Was it ever mine? The walls were oyster. Pearly cards and gifts squatted among medical supplies. I flicked open a card: ‘God bless you, Jessica. They gave me six months. I wrote to you. Now I’m better…’ I put it down and slipped a glass angel on the nightstand into my pocket. You slept on, surrounded by angels, an army of paper, glass and plastic guardians.
You flap your water wings by the pool, want to fly.
On Monday, I slipped the angel into the backpack of a girl at school with a blind brother – sort of stealing in reverse. It felt so good I thought I’d never steal again.
‘Grab something out the fridge, Ben. I haven’t time,’ Mom yelled on Tuesday.
It was another frantic morning. You had a cold. The doctor was coming. I raided another lunchbox from a locker with a 007 combination. Sandwiches shaped by heart-shaped cookie cutters, crusty brownies, optimistic apples slipped in by healthy Moms: I ate the lot, licked bloody mayo off my fingers and stuffed the napkins up my sleeve.
You didn’t have to remember stuff like birthdays. You hit eleven, but you were still always five, swaddled in pink T-shirts covered in kittens, Sesame Street duvets on your bed. I was sixteen. Isola burnt a Betty Crocker. Mom opened a medical bill and promised we’d celebrate properly next month. The cards slumped on the kitchen counter, fenced in by your letters. I gave myself the gift of fingering a girl.
We were ditching. I ditched gym eight out of ten and I always cut French. (Who needed to know what Mom said that summer?) The girl sat on the floor of the storage room behind the canteen. Everything smelt of congealed pizza and the deodorant I caught her stuffing up a sleeve and squirting at her armpits.
‘I thought I was the only one who knew about this place?’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘No one’s the only person who knows anything.’
I sat beside her, surrounded by vast bottles of ketchup and monster cans with terse labels. I was waiting for the bell. So was she. I put a hand on her knee. She didn’t move. I took it as a sign.
I withdrew my fingers, aware, so aware, of my sleeves sliding down my wrists. If she didn’t want me to stop, she didn’t say.
‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ she asked. ‘Amy Morgan called me a pig yesterday.’
I saw her look at me, waiting for me to say yes, knowing it was some sort of fingerer’s etiquette. I looked away, unable to say a word. The question depressed me to death.
I slide my sunglasses onto my skull. I stand by the pool. I never dive.
‘Hey, what’s wrong with you? You’re bleeding.’ She reached for a blood-streaked hand. I clamped down my sleeves and ran.
Mom rubbed lotion into your hands. Your big day was approaching. The anniversary of ‘your calling’ was on Friday. People were coming from all over the country to pray all over you. I stole a box of tissues from by your bed. Let them sniff. I was out of there, on a bus across town.
The house had a swing set and a birdbath draped with Big Bird. I stood across the street and watched Dad push small twin boys on the swings. One looked like the good twin. One looked like the one who’d grow up and never get laid, even though he and his brother were supposed to be the same. Dad pushed one swing, then the other. The kids flew away, then came back. One, then the other.
You wouldn’t know Dad looked different. You were barely here when he left. Once, Mom told me it was his idea to call you Jessica. Jess, Jessie, Jessie James. I guess he wanted to be clever, and Mom was stupid enough to let him. You stopped being an outlaw when you got miraculous on us. Everyone lengthened your name as if they just wanted it in their mouths a little longer. The only person who still called you Jessie was me.
The paralegal wife slipped outside with sunscreen. I sloped off to the dime store, killing time, pocketing a flag and a packet of Band-Aids. The swings were still when I returned. The kitchen window was misted with steam. I laid the flag on the porch, took a shit on it and ran. The whole bus ride home I regretted it. It would have been better to shit first and put the flag on top like an umbrella in a bad cocktail to make some sort of statement. I stated shit.
On Friday, I rolled my bike down the drive after school. The lawn swayed with strangers fanning themselves with bibles in the sun. The garage door was open. People on folding chairs prayed to oil stains on concrete. Others queued by the house, admitted by Isola to see you in pairs.
‘You can pray with Jessica and ask her to pray for you,’ she said. ‘She always listens, she’s non-verbal, but if you hold her hand it may move.’
I weaved through the crowd to the door, and was detained by some guy in a bandana. He rolled up his shirtsleeves to wave you in my face.
‘Have you been before, dude? I visited last year. That little girl saved my life,’ he said.
I looked at you in inky blue on his forearm, your name tattooed to his skin, bearded in hairs: Saint Jessica. I don’t know what you cured him of, but it wasn’t of being an asshole.
‘Her name is Jessie,’ I said. ‘Jessie James, like the train robber.’
I pushed into the house and made for my room. Your bedroom door was ajar. I watched a young man and woman place a floppy baby on your bed and grip your hand. I recalled you asleep in theme parks, dropping off right there on a ride as if your fun circuit was fried. You’d be carried home, stiffening your legs against Mom’s manoeuvring you into pyjamas, you’d mumble, ‘Sleep. Sleep. Now.’ I wondered if lying there was like that, if you just wanted to sleep and people kept keeping you awake by speaking your name, if it was like drifting off with the TV on and hearing it in your dreams.
‘Do you want to pray with us?’ the woman asked. She looked up, eyes like holy water. The baby gurgled on your bed.
I stand by the pool. I never dive.
I locked my door and sat on the bed. The cowgirls on the walls watched me wind bandages off my wrists, the punctures between the bones slowly weeping. Don’t ask how often it has happened, I don’t count. Don’t ask why, I don’t know. You’d call it a miracle, perhaps. I call it a pain, taping tissues to my skin all day, long sleeves, lying ‘I’m cold’ in July. It’s cutting gym, stealing psychology textbooks and kind of hating yourself like that cutter chick at school. Except, I’m not that chick, I don’t think. I’ve never cut myself to see why I’m bleeding. Not that I know of. I’m a sleepscratcher, or some such shit.
The walls hummed with the crying in your room. I could hear Mom join the couple with a fistful of tissues and a ‘let it all out’. I pictured myself walking in with crucified arms held high, blood steadily flowing from my wrists, dripping onto your My Little Pony rug.
‘Look Mom! No razors.’ Mom would clap her hands in joy. Isola would piss. ‘It’s a miracle! The boy’s special!’ she’d say. Everyone on the lawn would fall to their knees, if I gave them a reason. I walked to the window and stared at strangers praying outside, waiting to be let in, misty-eyed and wilting in the sun. I closed the curtains, sucking a wrist. You can keep the prayers, all that hope, please, it’s all yours. Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.