Page 63 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
“It was a miracle,” his mother said reverently.
A small crowd was forming around them. (Was this Beatrice’s lot in this town?) A man said into his phone, “Yeah, send an ambulance.”
The driver covered her face with both hands. “I can’t bear this. I’m so sorry.”
Beatrice stood. She said the truest thing she knew. “Your son is just fine.”
That had been a miracle. Of course it had. It had taken no energy from her. It had been an unearned gift.
It had been a miracle, so the boy would be okay.
The fourth miracle.
Through the static zapping through her brain, she said, “I’m going to get some wet paper towels, okay?” She pointed at the public restroom. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait—”
But she didn’t wait. She hurried toward the bathroom as if she had an important task to carry out, as if wet paper towels were exactly what was needed.
At the restroom’s door, she turned and looked at the knot of people clustered on the sidewalk. Everyone was staring at Dario, and at his mother, who was just starting to shout at the driver. So instead of going inside the restroom, Beatrice went around it. On the other side, she could see the marina, just a block and a half away.
She ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Universe speaks in shouts and whispers. The whispers are fine, but I honestly think it’s got some work to do on its inside voice.
—Evie Oxby,Come at Me, Boo
A startled-looking Reno stood on the deck of Beatrice’s houseboat sanding a long piece of wood as Beatrice raced down the dock.
Reno took one look at her face. “Just about done. Leaving now.”
Beatrice waved her hand in what she hoped was aDon’t worry about itmotion but didn’t wait to see if it was received that way.
She boiled water for a cup of tea, watching her hands shake as she waited. Strangely, they didn’t feel connected to her body. It was as if she were watching someone else move through the boat. These were her hands? Really?
She peeked out the blinds—Reno was already heading up the ramp, away from the boat, and that was probably for the best.
Then she flipped on the lamp, got in bed, and opened her laptop.
Miracles were fucking real.
And Beatrice was going to die.
She was going todie, as in she would diesoon. Everyone was going to die, yes, and everyone knew that, but Beatrice had never realized until this very moment how much she’d enjoyed the denial she’d cultivated. Decades in the future, yeah, she’d known she would die. But it wouldn’t happen until she was old, until she was tired, until she was ready. It had never been anything to worry about, not really, even though at any moment of her life so far, her breathcouldhave been snatched away unexpectedly. A drive-by shooting, a medication mix-up, a subway derailment.
So nothing had changed, not really. She even had a clean bill of health, something that should have reassured her. But all possible reassurance had been stripped from her when Dario had flown into her arms.
Impossible things didn’t happen. That was simply their nature. Unless they were miracles.
After a lifetime of nothing impossible occurring to her, Beatrice had experienced four miracles. Numbers were important; numbers made sense. To zoom from zero to four? Miracles were real, and numbers didn’t lie. That meant three miracles remained. Then her own death.
Beatrice opened a new Google Sheet, poising her fingers over the new, blank cells. Spreadsheets were where she could lay her brain down, setting each thought into its own discrete block so that she could fly up and look down on everything from a great height. It worked so beautifully with math—when each number was contained in its perfect little box, she could see where the problems were. Then she could make them work better, or best case, fix them entirely.
It wasn’t just addition and subtraction. Even though Iris had teased her mercilessly for doing it, when Beatrice had been trying to decide whether it was a good idea to marry Grant, she’d used aspreadsheet to enumerate the pros and cons. She’d assigned each pro a number between one and ten, and had done the same thing for the cons. Pro: they had good, rambunctious sex. That earned an eight. Con: he was a man, and she honestly preferred the clean softness of women. That got a six. Pro: Naya was sick, and she and Dad wanted to live closer to Beatrice than ninety minutes away. Grant helped them find an affordable house just a block away from his place. That was a huge ten in the pro column. (It would have been an eleven if Beatrice exaggerated in columns, but she never had, and she never would.) Con: after a year of trying to engage with Grant’s boys, the closest she’d come was when she learned to lace a lacrosse stick and Josh had said, “Not bad. For a girl.” Four.
In the end, the pro column had 101 points, the con column had 97. So she’d married Grant.
