Page 1 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
CHAPTER ONE
We are all interconnected at the cellular, molecular level. That’s what Spirit gives us. That’s what Spirit wants us to know. That, and that email as a form of communication is overrated.
—Evie Oxby, keynote at Dreamforce
The first tortilla chip Beatrice Barnard bit into was so stale, it didn’t even crunch. Nachos on a ferry should have been a good idea. They sureseemedlike a good idea—Beatrice imagined gooey, bright orange cheese melted over jalapeño slices, beans, and salty chips—but the reality, when it arrived in its red paper tray, sailed right past disappointing into disgusting. The chip smooshed between Beatrice’s teeth like a greasy piece of damp cardboard, and if the ferry hadn’t been so crowded, or if there hadn’t been a stranger sitting across from her at the small table, Beatrice might have spat the food from her mouth back into the container. But instead, she swallowed the chip, regretting every life choice that had led her to eating this, starting with marrying Grant, the man who was supposed to have been sitting next to hernow. Instead of starting his birthday trip and suffering through these chips with her, Grant was probably at this moment having limber, rambunctious sex with Beatrice’s ex-friend, Dulcina.
Dulcina had once confided to Beatrice that she was so flexible, she’d modeled for art students as a nude contortionist to pay for law school. No words existed in any human language that could express how very much Beatrice wished she didn’t know that fact about Dulcina.
ThankgodDulcina and her perfectly dew-kissed face wasn’t here right now. Beatrice had wrestled at the break of dawn with a dull eyeliner and dried-out mascara in the musty back bathroom at her father’s house. But now, after flying nearly three hours from LAX to Seattle, and a forty-five-minute delay at the ferry landing, she could feel that her eyeliner had melted into the corners of her eyes, and she couldn’t bring herself to care whether her wan skin was shine-free.
Beatrice poked again at a suspiciously gooey chip.
Her soon-to-be ex-husband, Grant, was a health freak who didn’t believe in chemicals in food. He’d been the whole reason Beatrice had ordered the snack-counter nachos today. How, exactly, did someone not believe in chemicals? Chemicals were life. Literally. That was like not believing in gravity. But somehow, his dedication to “clean eating” had been such a point of pride with him that, out of respect for his preferences, Beatrice had eaten carefully, too.
At some point on this trip, Beatrice would get a McDonald’s cheeseburger, by god. Maybe two. And she’d love every minute of eating both of them. With a large fries. And a Coke. No, a chocolate milkshake, extra-large, followed by two apple pies. All of it ordered from the drive-through, eaten in the parking lot, like an actual human being.
The teenage boy Beatrice had bought the nachos from walkedpast her table carrying an empty tray. “Hey! How’s your food treating you?” He’d been so excited when Beatrice had ordered.The nachos are my favorite. On shift, I get to eat one order a day!
“Um…”
“Oh, no, you don’t like them?” His eyebrows disappeared up into the shag of his badly cut hair. “I made them myself. Usually the steward does it, but he’s out sick, so I tried, but maybe I got them wrong?”
Beatrice shoved a chip in her mouth and spoke around the sogginess of it. “They’re thebesht.”
The guy’s smile reset to full wattage. With a happy nod, he shuffled away.
Out the window, a long, blue expanse of water unrolled below the clouds. Kids hurtled through the main cabin to the stairs, which they thumped up and raced back down like raging herds of spooked wildebeests while small clumps of adults chatted and watched the scenery. Some were obvious tourists, like the old man with a camera that looked as vintage as his mustache, while others might have been locals, like the people at window seats who never glanced up from their laptops.
Across the table from her were a woman and her young daughter. Beatrice and the woman had nodded to each other when they’d all sat down, but they hadn’t spoken. The child wore a red polka-dot dress and flipped the pages of a picture book, while the woman kept her head lowered, reading a paperback. The backs of the girl’s heels drummed against the seat, a steady thumping metronome.
Were they traveling away or toward someone? Who was waiting for this pair? Who loved them?
Beatrice’s heart, which had felt stubbornly resilient until that moment, suddenly ached.
Nope, she didn’t have time for unnecessary emotion.Altogether too much of that lately. She shook her head to clear it and clicked the shortcut link on her phone, pulling up theBirthday Tripspreadsheet.
Grant’s requests for his fiftieth-birthday trip had been simple. He’d wanted to golf in Skerry Cove, an expensive course he’d never played off the coast of Seattle, and he’d wanted to bring his favorite people: Beatrice, his teenage sons, and his two best friends.
It had turned out that Beatrice hadn’t been able to book the trip until two weeks after Grant’s birthday, but she’d thought that would work perfectly, since they’d end up traveling on her forty-fifth birthday. Two birthday birds, one convenient vacation stone.
So at this point, had things gone according to her plan, there would have been six of them on this ferry. Grant’s two sons would have ordered and then scarfed these nachos, no matter the chips’ level of squishiness or their father’s level of disapproval. Grant and his friend, Emmett, would have been watching golf on their phones, while she and Dulcina, Emmett’s wife, would have been happily chattering their way to the island.
But two weeks ago, Grant’s law partners had thrown him a surprise party at the office. When it was time for him to blow out the candles, he’d been nowhere to be found. Beatrice had eventually located him in his office, where she’d found Dulcina blowing out Grant’s candles in private.
If Beatrice hadn’t caught them, she still wouldn’t have known that they’d been having an affair.
For seven years, apparently.
Beatrice had only been married to Grant for six.
So now, on her birthday, it was just her on the ferry. No husband, no stepsons, no ex-friends. Just Beatrice and her phone, full of her very well-laid and utterly useless plans. The eyewateringgreens fee she’d paid to the golf course was nonrefundable, but as she stared at the decimal amount, she let herself imagine showing up to stroll the fairway tomorrow morning. Would they notice if she didn’t rent a cart? If she carried no clubs? Would they care if she just screamed her way from tee to tee? Shehadmanaged to cancel the dinner reservations, but the fanciest suite in the hotel people loved most on Tripadvisor turned out to be as nonrefundable as the greens fee. She’d decided to be a no-show for the whole thing, sucking up the pain of the cost. But then Grant had asked if he could go on the trip.With Dulcina.“I mean, you already paid for it, right?”
It had taken her less than a pained heartbeat to change her mind. “I’mgoing on the trip. Alone.”
Now, as the ferry hit a swell, Beatrice sighed.
Truthfully, it would have been so much easiernotto go on this trip. Staying under the covers of her father’s spare-room bed would have been effortless. She could have done it for the next, oh, thirty or forty years. Easily. But Dad had looked so relieved that she’d decided to do something that didn’t involve crying or rereadingPride and Prejudicefor the thousandth time. At some point, she knew she’d have to go “home” to the house she’d shared with Grant, if only to box up the hundreds of books in her towering to-be-read stacks. But she could have put off moving a muscle for quite a while longer.
