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 unusuaclass="underline" 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.