The History of the Miracle

Erin McGraw

 

This story appears in the book Lies of the Saints: Stories by Erin McGraw published by Chronicle Books. Used by permission.

WHEN the pebble flew out from the gravel truck in front of them and cracked the windshield, Iris wasn't even looking; she had leaned over to tighten her daughter's seat belt. She jerked her head up at the sharp pop and looked into a lattice of hard lines. Lisa, of course, started to cry. "Hush," Iris said, fighting unsuccessfully to keep the snap out of her voice. "It's just an accident."

Lisa wailed.

They were on their way to Lisa's third day at school, and the girl had been crying for a week, threading herself around Iris's legs, refusing in the mornings to pull on her own socks. “This happens all the time,” the kindergarten teacher had assured Iris, but Iris, drained of patience, knew better—she remembered how Lisa’s brothers had whooped and torn into the classroom. Now the girl was thrashing under the seat belt as if it were a harness, screaming “I hate it! I hate it!” Iris pulled over by yanking on the steering wheel, and the car bumped hard against the curb, sending the girl’s screams up half an octave.

“You’re too old for this,” Iris said, trying to still the quiver in her voice. “You’re a big girl.”

“No!” Lisa squalled, pointing to the explosion of lines. Iris couldn’t begin to guess the replacement cost. She sighed, shifted the car into park and smoothed her daughter’s hair. “All right,” she said. “Let’s calm down now.”

“No.” Lisa subsided, but Iris could see her calculating a victory; the car had stopped. “It’s broken,” she said, nodding at the windshield.

“It sure is,” Iris said. “But isn’t it pretty? Look,” she said, running her finger along a line that caught the morning sun in a bright channel.

“Pink,” Lisa said, pointing her own small finger at another line.

“You wouldn’t have seen this if it didn’t get broken.”

“I hate it,” Lisa said.

“Me too. But at least it’s pretty.” Iris shifted the car back into drive before Lisa could cloud up again, and they made it to school only five minutes late. Lisa dragged morosely into the classroom. “See?” the teacher said, smiling. “They always come around.” Iris smiled back, too depleted to think of a snappy answer.

She felt tired all the time lately. She had hoped for wide drifts of time now that all three of the children were in school, but her energy dribbled away into PTA and Cub Scouts. If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought she was pregnant again; her own body seemed mysterious and alien and exhausting. She stooped for a drink at the water fountain outside Lisa’s classroom door, then went down to the teachers’ lounge for a cup of coffee. She might as well stay; she was scheduled for 10 a.m. playground duty.

 

By the time she made it out to lean against the fence and watch the fourth graders play kickball, Iris’s mood was perfectly sour. The preliminary telephone bids for the windshield were each enough to break the bank; Jack would be furious. By the third call she simply hung up and went out to the playground. The children played ferociously; games ended when some bruised child sat sniffling and shrugging her away, and Iris wondered what her presence there was supposed to do. She had never once prevented an accident.

She listened, keeping a distracted eye on the game, while Frances Holmes fretted about next week’s parish-wide crab supper. Frances was hoping the event would bring in at least five hundred dollars. Plans for the outdoor chapel were way behind schedule, but Frances didn’t know what people expected her to do without any budget.

Iris sighed and stared unhappily at her feet. Sheer guilt would force Jack and her to go, although seafood made her queasy. Why couldn’t the committee have set up a steak dinner? She was about to ask, and nastily, when she glanced to her right, toward the boys, to see the red kickball shooting at Tommy Pointer and catching him on the throat; the boy dropped as if he’d been shot.

Iris took off. Tommy had fallen hard, straight back, and on the asphalt beneath his head there was a tiny seepage that Iris looked away from the moment she saw it; she could only stand so much.

Tommy was silent, and his face had already turned a rubbery gray. Iris, wincing as sharp pebbles cut into her knees, took his hand. “Tommy? You’re all right, aren’t you?” A moment passed, and Iris was aware of the boys jostling behind her to catch a glimpse, though none of them made a sound. Then Tommy opened his eyes and pulled his hand away from hers.

“Sure,” he said, scooting onto his feet. He wiped his nose with a gritty hand and ran toward the water fountain while his friends jeered. Iris felt a rush of relief, and for a moment she stayed on the ground, too soft with gratitude to stand. When she glanced at the spot where Tommy’s head had lain, there was no moisture at all, and she thought it was amazing what a panicky mind could invent.

“They’re indestructible,” said Frances when Iris rejoined her at the fence. “Did you hear about Pat Kenny’s boy?” Iris nodded. Pat’s four-year-old, left for a moment in the car, had slipped off the emergency brake. The car had rolled across an embankment and four lanes of traffic before settling underneath a speed limit sign.

“God keeps an eye out,” Iris said, surprising herself, and then let Frances go back to costs and logistics. Iris’s head pounded with children’s laughter and shrieks; she felt like an overfull cup. Five minutes later, when the recess bell sounded and the children formed wavering lines, she had to look away, weak at the thought of looking after so much sweet, unscarred skin.

 

The night of the crab dinner, Jack and Iris entered the church auditorium warily. Iris’s sourness had lingered and spread to Jack, so that they had spent all weekend sniping at each other. On the drive over, ducking and craning to see through the windshield, Jack said, “We’ll get stuck with the Logans. Bill will talk all night about his important work for TRW and his important work on the steering committee and his important work with the Boy Scouts. And then we’ll come home and you’ll throw up all night.”

“We don’t have to sit with them. We can’t not show up. People expect us.” Iris was trying to get the clasp on her necklace to catch, taking deep breaths—her stomach already felt wobbly.

“We certainly wouldn’t want to let people down,” Jack said, pulling into a space by the rectory and jerking up the parking brake. “My head feels like it’s breaking in half.”

“What do you expect? You diddle around in the basement until it gets so late you don’t even have time to take an aspirin. Ben wanted to talk to you, you know. He wanted to show you his project.”

“I thought you wanted the water heater fixed. I thought you’d asked me to look at it.”

“For God’s sake,” Iris snapped. “Here. Let me rub your head for a minute. We can’t go in there looking like murder.”

“Ah hell, nobody notices anyway,” he said, settling his head into her lap. She could feel the tightness quivering around his eyes, how hot he was, and she brushed his temples with the tips of her fingers, unable to keep herself from slumping. Her weariness seemed able to deepen infinitely.

“That’s better,” he said.

“Relax.”

“I mean it. It’s better.” He held her fingers still against his head for a moment, then straightened up.

“It can’t be. I hardly touched you.”

“Well, it’s gone, Magic Fingers. Let’s go in. Maybe we can still get home before the news.”

But Iris was exhausted; Jack had to help her to the door, where Frances met them and said, “We almost started without you. Thought maybe you’d decided not to come.”

“Who, us?” Iris said faintly. “Bells on.”

The auditorium seemed to rattle with laughter and the banging of steam tables. Above the racket, Iris heard the buzz of Kay Wendell’s wheelchair and winced—Kay had been diagnosed with MS ten years before, only a month after her husband was killed by a hit-and-run driver. She persisted in attending church functions, Iris was convinced, because she could trap people into listening to her pathetic litany. Iris turned, but Kay was already on her.

“Well, you finally made it. I guess I shouldn’t expect people with children to be on time.”

Iris felt Jack stiffen beside her, and she put her hand on his arm to keep him from bolting. “Nice to see you, Kay.”

“How many wee ones are there?” Kay cackled. “Six?”

“Please. Only three. That’s plenty.”

Kay looked down and fiddled with the controls on her wheelchair. “When you live alone, everyone else’s house seems so full of life.”

“I see plenty of life in you yet, girl,” Jack said, and took Iris by the wrist. “Look, dear. There’s Bill Logan. We’ll be seeing you, Kay.” He steered Iris to a table already heaped with red and white crabs while Iris ducked her eyes and glanced back at the other woman, who at least wasn’t following them; she had caught Betty and Frank Marsh at the coat rack.

Iris survived the meal by industriously separating meat from shell and then eating the hard French rolls—first her own, then Jack’s. Jack and Bill Logan carried the conversation, Jack laughing forcefully at all of Bill’s jokes. Jack wiped his eyes. Iris wished he wouldn’t try so hard. By the end of the meal, her plate and lap were covered with crumbs, and she thought of her house and robe with a yearning that bordered on the erotic.

As Jack was encouraging Bill to tell him more about the Scout trip, a cry rang out directly behind Iris. She turned to see Meg Price choking and flailing at her husband, who shrank away from her. Meg’s shoulders jerked and her face turned the color of iron. Iris scrambled up before she had a chance to think and started pounding Meg on the back, while the woman grabbed her and whined desperately. Iris turned Meg around, clutched her under the ribs, and pulled up so hard she felt something in her own back give. She had no idea what she was doing. Meg was still choking, so Iris tried it again, half hanging onto the other woman for support. After the third try Meg barked and spat out a piece of shell an inch across that gleamed as it hit the plate. She fell forward, hanging onto the table, and Iris reached for a chair. Her lower back seemed to have separated into distinct, fiery pieces.

The auditorium clamored. People rushed in on Iris and Meg, exclaiming over what they’d seen, congratulating, marveling. Iris’s knees quivered, and the damp shadows of nausea swept across her stomach. “Lucky for Meg you knew how to do the Heimlich,” Jo Salton was saying. “I keep meaning to learn.”

“Instinct, I guess,” Iris said. “I just found myself doing it.” She saw Jack studying her from across their table, looking startled and uneasy. “If it wasn’t me, somebody else would have helped,” she said loudly, looking straight at him.

“That’s right,” Kay called out, whirring over from two tables away, her mouth bunched up like a paper bag. “Anybody would have done as much.”

“Not that I wasn’t glad to help,” Iris said.

“Purely human nature,” Kay said. “Reflex.”

“You know, it’s harder than you think. Next time . . .,” Iris began.

“Somebody else will get to do the saving,” Kay said, grinning at the speechless Iris until Jack picked up his coat and said that they’d better get back, before someone needed saving at home. He had to let Iris lean on him all the way out to the car; her ankles kept buckling as if she’d been drinking.

 

Jack stalled a week before he asked, diffidently, how Iris had known what to do for Meg, and Iris looked out the window and told him the truth: “I don’t know. I found myself grabbing her.” He didn’t ask any more, but she felt him tracking her as she made her way around the house.

She wished he would stop it. He snuck looks from around the newspaper, watched her dry dishes as if she might reach into her pocket at any moment and produce a hissing fuse. “Here,” she said, setting a cup of coffee in front of him. “Please just drink this.”

“I don’t know if I want it that bad.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re acting like Joan of Arc at the stake because you fixed a cup of coffee. I didn’t even ask for it. What is going on with you?”

“I’m trying to be a good wife. I’m trying to do my job around here.”

“Well, quit trying. It didn’t used to take you all this effort.”

That night, while she was brushing her hair, Jack came and laid his hands on her shoulders with a gesture so proprietary she jerked away despite her best intentions. “I’m tired,” she said, which was the level truth.

In the morning she apologized, but Jack grunted; mornings were not his best time. And still she felt nervy, full of prickles; she swore at the agave by the door when she stepped too close and snagged her stockings. Later, she drove to the guild meeting snags and all, barely avoiding a dog who got lost in the fractured windshield, and when she was nominated to head the outreach committee, she said with embarrassing passion, “Please! Anybody else.” At the break Mary Lou Betts asked compassionately whether everything was all right at home, and Iris smiled, shrugged, and nodded, afraid of what might fly out of her mouth.

At home the kids’ noise filled the house, and Iris found she could get by on nods and shrugs, which at least kept her from picking more fights with Jack. He didn’t understand; she was scrabbling to keep solid ground under her feet. When Ben came down with the flu, she made Jack take the boy’s temperature and dole out antibiotics. “I can’t afford to be exposed,” she murmured as an excuse. “We go to the clinic next week.”

In fact, she was in charge of the guild’s annual visit to the free clinic downtown, the one committee duty she didn’t mind. Iris enjoyed watching the young doctors and nurses who volunteered there. The clinic patients were mostly immigrants—entire enormous families—and Iris listened happily while the doctors prescribed blood-pressure medication and iron supplements for the grandmothers, dark green vegetables for the children. Here was real help; she was glad to be a part of it.

For weeks the women in the guild had been collecting medical supplies from their own family doctors—drug samples, tongue depressors, disposable gloves and basins. The bags of supplies always seemed impressive to Iris until she got to the clinic, where the stack of tongue depressors rattled into an empty drawer. A nurse smiled at Iris. “There’s never enough,” she said.

As always, the women stayed to serve lunch to the doctors and nurses. Iris took on sandwich duty in the clinic’s tiny kitchen, where she methodically sliced the ham they had brought and slapped it onto slices of bread. She was good at this; the line of sandwiches was scarcely different from mornings at home.

A woman, one of the patients, slipped into the kitchen with Iris. She was thin, and had a lump the size of a tangerine under her jaw. She wasn’t supposed to be in the kitchen. The guild couldn’t bring enough food for patients, so they tried to be discreet about lunch. Iris wondered whether she should say something, or simply escort the woman back out to the waiting area. She stared at the woman’s lump; the skin over it was stretched so taut it was lustrous. “Would you like a sandwich?” Iris asked.

“Yes.”

Iris handed it to her, watching while she took her first bite. The lump didn’t prevent her from swallowing, and so Iris smiled and went back to the ham. “Thank you,” the woman said, and then the door clicked softly after her. Thank you, Iris thought, pleased with herself. She made three more sandwiches before she heard the door open again and looked around to see the woman standing with a crowd of children—seven? ten? The woman looked at her calmly.

Iris felt the small of her back sag. She gestured at her meager provisions—two loaves of white bread, a small ham and the mustard Renee Cox had remembered to bring. “There isn’t enough.” She looked at the woman with the lump. “I’m sorry.”

The woman said nothing, and played with the hair of the boy standing before her, who was looking at Iris with eyes so soulful they seemed impertinent. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Iris said, and began to hand sandwiches around. She would go out to a grocery store. Lunch would just have to be late. The children chewed their dry sandwiches, and she returned to the counter, hacking at the ham. She felt a tug on her skirt. A little boy pointed to the oranges, and she handed him one. “Thank you,” he said.

Then Iris heard the door open again, and Renee saying, “What are you doing?”

“Things got out of control.”

“There are medical professionals out there, volunteering their time for these people.”

“Give them these.” Iris filled her hands with sandwiches and a few oranges.

“Now everybody wants to eat. Iris, we never feed the patients.”

“They never asked before,” she said, reaching into the bag for more bread.

Before long, the guild members began coming into the kitchen in shifts to collect sandwiches and oranges. In a minute, Iris told herself, I’ll have to go out and get some more. But her hands, greasy with fat, kept slicing and stacking, and she stood at the narrow counter and made sandwiches even after Renee told her that she had made enough, that everyone had eaten. There was still the butt end of the ham, half a bag of oranges. Renee had to take her by the elbow and force her to sit down, when finally Iris felt blind with fatigue. Renee pressed a sandwich into her hand, but Iris couldn’t lift it to her mouth.

“We didn’t have that much food,” Renee was saying. “You know we didn’t.”

“Hush,” Iris said.

 

Monsignor Laoghrie was calling when Iris walked in her front door, and after him neighbors, half-strangers. People had heard reports that Iris had been bathed in light, had talked in languages no one had ever heard. Suzanne Muller asked if it was true that the oranges tasted like sacramental wine. “Mine didn’t,” Iris said, talking with her head propped against the wall.

It was after four, and none of the children was home. Iris shivered. She felt naked in the house without their comforting uproar. She tried to remember—was this the afternoon of Jim’s rehearsal, Lisa’s soccer practice? She was hanging up the phone for the seventh time when she finally heard a shuffling at the door. “Hey,” Iris called. “There are cookies in here.”

She heard them file back to their rooms. Fear rose in Iris like a quick flood; she set the phone off the hook and went to the boys’ room. Jim, face down on the bed, didn’t move, and Ben sat with his back to her, his jaw hard and quivering. Sometimes he looked so much like Jack that Iris caught her breath. “Don’t you want anything to eat?”

“No,” Ben said.

“What’s up? How come you were late home?”

He shrugged. “Leave me alone.”

She went to Lisa’s room, her mouth dry. Like Jim, Lisa was stretched out on the bed, but Iris heard her sniff and she crouched by the bed, laying her head beside her daughter’s on the pillow. “What is it, honey? What happened?”

Lisa edged away from her, and at first Iris thought she wouldn’t talk at all. “Sister made us stay. The whole school. She made us all stay after school and said you’d performed a miracle.” Her shoulders were rigid. “She said you were holy.”

“Oh, honey,” Iris said. “Honey. I’m just your mom.” She put her hand on Lisa’s steely shoulder. “Everything is just the same.”

“It is not. Everything’s wrecked.”

Iris looked at her daughter, who lay with her head twisted away from her. Wildly, she wanted to laugh. “If I’m holy, maybe I’ll be a better cook. What do you want for dinner? Do you want spaghetti? I’ll make you anything you want.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You’ll see,” Iris said. “It will go away in a few days, and you’ll see that nothing has changed.” She reached out to stroke her hair, but then let her hand drop in the air between them.

Jack came in an hour later, and they looked at each other warily across the width of the living room. “Well,” he said. “I hear I’m married to Our Lady of Sandwiches.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“You are some kind of famous,” he said, his tone so noncommittal that Iris felt like slapping him. “I’ve been getting phone calls telling me the history of the miracle all afternoon.”

“What do they say?”

“It’s the loaves and the fishes, right here in River City.”

“The food went further than we thought. Nobody thought we had enough, but we did. That’s all.” She stood blinking at him, her hands clenching and unclenching.

“A committee will be over later to take the measurements for your shrine.”

“Listen to me, dammit. I sliced the ham thin, and it went around. Who are you going to believe here?”

“A hundred people say it was a miracle. You say it wasn’t. How do I know who to believe? Hell, Iris. How do you know?” He shrugged.

“You never believed in miracles before.”

“You never performed any before.”

Iris shook her head; frustrated tears were crowding her throat and eyes. “Wait till you hear what Sister did,” she whispered, fighting for control.

“I heard.”

“The kids won’t speak to me.”

“They’ll get over it. They’re scared.”

“So am I. Aren’t you?”

“Terrified,” Jack said flatly.

 

That night, after Iris had burned the potatoes and broken two dinner plates while loading the dishwasher, the doorbell rang. It was Sandra, the little girl who lived next door. Her parents didn’t belong to the parish, so Iris only saw the girl when she happened to be outside playing, a tiny, weedy thing, smaller than Lisa. “It’s late, honey,” Iris said. “Do your parents know that you’re out so late?”

Sandra nodded. “I hurt my elbow.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” the girl said, jutting her knobby elbow at Iris, who couldn’t see any scratch or bruise. “It hurts,” Sandra said. “I hurt it.”

“Do you want me to kiss it for you?”

Sandra nodded again, and Iris bent swiftly. When she straightened again, the girl’s expression was rapturous. “I knew it would feel better if you kissed it. I’ll bet it will never hurt again.”

“Kisses don’t last that long,” Iris said, but Sandra was already backing away, her hand cradling her healed elbow, her face radiant. “Shit,” Iris muttered.

“Suffer the little children,” said Jack, coming in from the living room.

“Very funny.”

“Come on, honey. Kids love saints.” He skimmed his fingers lightly up her sides, and she jerked away. “Stop twiddling at me. I am not a saint. I don’t do miracle cures.”

“Not on the home front, that’s for sure.”

“Then quit looking at me like you’re expecting something.”

“Lately I don’t expect one thing from you. Some miracles are just too much to hope for.”

Iris nearly collided with Ben as she stormed to the bedroom. He was still sniffling, and she rested her hands on his head as they passed. She listened after he went into the bathroom, but he wasn’t crying any more. God damn it, she thought.

 

The next morning the phone was still off the hook and notes were stuck under the welcome mat; Iris had refused to answer the door again after Sandra’s visit. Jack left early for work and the kids shuffled and muttered, refusing to look at their mother. When Ruth Dowers, who was driving carpool that week, swung into the driveway, Jim and Ben and Lisa raced out the door like escapees.

Iris trudged into the kitchen. Sugar was scattered across the table and floor, milk was already hardening at the bottom of glasses. The frying pan Jack had used was jammed into the sink, dried egg crusted around its sides. Iris stiffened her arms in front of her. “Shazam,” she said. Nothing moved.

There were beds to be made, laundry. But she walked through her house with her hands stuffed deep in the pockets of her robe. She wanted to sit down, but there wasn’t one chair in the whole damn house that didn’t have ripped upholstery or jabbing springs. She and Jack had said for so long they would get around to new chairs. How many nights had she watched him squirming in the recliner by the door, trying to find a smooth space? She felt her heart open to him as if it took a physical fall, even though she had meant to stay angry.

She wandered into their bedroom, vaguely planning to make the bed, but she stopped at the doorway, looking at the one crucifix in the house. It hung next to the window. Iris hated religious art, and had agreed to put up the crucifix only because it had been a wedding present—she couldn’t remember now from whom. Someone who didn’t know her very well. She took it off the wall and turned it around in her hand, surprised at its lightness. Cheap construction. Sitting on the bed to relieve her back, supposing she ought to pray, she let her thoughts race away from her. She remembered how, when Jim had been a toddler, he’d sat for hours turning his toy car in tight circles over and over the same patch of floor. It had worried Iris that he’d been so content with the car tracing its own tracks. What had happened to that car? She couldn’t remember.

She looked at the crucifix in her hand. The figure of Jesus didn’t seem to be in pain. If anything, he looked a little buoyant. She closed her eyes, trying to stop these thoughts, which were probably blasphemous and would bring on swift retribution. She remembered a holy card she had gotten in second grade, showing the Good Shepherd surrounded by dozens of children. His face had been beardless and full of light. Her friend Susan’s showed him walking on water, which Iris would have preferred.

“I guess this is your idea of a joke,” she said to the crucifix. Two months before she had been closing in on happiness like safe harbor. But now she was right back out in the deep water, and the lights on land were winking out. She got up, hung the crucifix back on the wall and turned away, fighting the habit to touch her lips and murmur “Ad majorem dei gloriam.” Old habits, she thought as she left the bedroom.

 

The local RiteBuy served as the neighborhood town square, and Iris could usually count on running into three neighbors in the cereal section alone. But remarkably, as she hurried through the aisles, she didn’t see any familiar faces. Sister must have called the whole town in, she thought. She picked up treats for the kids—cookies that were out of the budget, ice cream. She fingered the oranges, then let them drop back in the bin. She moved past the fish section briskly, but she couldn’t help glancing at the glazed eyes of trout, horrible, and beside them neat sets of shad roe.

Jack adored it. On their first anniversary he’d taken her to a restaurant that featured seafood as well as beef; Iris was sure she could stand to look at roe, as long as she wasn’t expected to eat it. But when the waiter brought their meals the sight of it, reddish and coiled like intestines, was too much for her, and she’d spent the rest of the night retching, first in the restaurant and then back at home.

Now she stepped back when the butcher told her how much the sets cost. She gazed at them, rich and heart colored. Peerless as a peace offering. After a moment she told the butcher she’d take a single set. She would present it to Jack that night for dinner, and tell him it was a miracle.

In high spirits Iris sped through the store, escaping unnoticed until she made it to the parking lot, where she was unloading groceries—gently, trying to spare her back. The sound of a wheelchair motor burred in her ear; “If it isn’t the talk of the town,” Kay Wendell said.

Iris let the groceries in her hands drop. “Kay. What a surprise.”

“Do you know what people are saying?”

“I feel like I have to go out with a bag over my head.” She smiled, but Kay refused to be drawn in.

“The parish is half lunatic about this. Six people have told me that you’re performing miracles.”

“Well, Kay, you know—people.” Kay was squinting, her face twisted and wild, and Iris edged back.

“What really happened?”

“There was more food than we thought. We wound up being able to feed the patients. We were all glad.” Iris squeezed her mouth into a smile.

“People are acting like it’s the second coming.”

“That’s not my doing. But it’s surprising that one little ham could go so far.”

“So you’re calling this divine intervention.” Kay snickered.

“I’m not calling it anything.” Iris stretched out her hand to brush back hair from Kay’s eyes, but the other woman turned and began chugging away.

“Don’t try to touch me.” Kay called over her shoulder. “Do you think I’m waiting for a miracle? I know what to expect from the world.”

It occurred to Iris that this was Kay’s whole problem, and she was irritated enough to catch up and tell her so. As Iris hurried behind the chair, Kay snapped at her. “Get away from me. I’m not looking for your grubby cures. Get away!” She flapped her hands at Iris, who stopped the chair, caught Kay’s frail wrists in one hand, the top of her skull with the other, and bore down.

“I’ve never known anyone who deserved curing more,” Iris said, twisting Kay’s wrists a little.

Kay stopped struggling, and in its sudden collapse her body seemed even tinier. “Go on, then,” she said. “Make me dance.”

“It’s not so easy . . .” Iris began.

“I know, walk a mile in your shoes. Well, Mrs. Miracle Worker, I wouldn’t mind trading in my shoes for yours.”

“Fine,” Iris said, and picked Kay up out of her chair before she had any idea what to do with her. The woman was heavier than she looked, and Iris staggered, shoving Kay onto the hood of a sedan before her own legs folded and she dropped into Kay’s chair.

“Am I supposed to walk to you? You must have gotten some of the mumbo wrong.” Kay pointed to her flaccid legs. “They still don’t work.”

“Fine,” said Iris again, examining the switches on the arm of the chair. “You stay put. I’m just going to put on your shoes here.”

“You idiot,” Kay snarled. “It’s not a Disneyland ride.”

But it might as well have been; Iris found the lever to lift the brake, then turned and whirred up the slight incline of the parking lot, away from Kay.

“You’ll burn the motor out!” Kay yelled. “Are you planning to take care of me when it’s broken?” Iris leaned forward in the chair to urge it along. She felt pleasantly mischievous. When she came to a speed bump she had to take two runs before the chair cleared it, making a harsh, mechanical cough. It stopped on the other side. Kay was squalling from the sedan, attracting attention. To get away, Iris nudged the lever; the engine coughed again but the chair only slid back an inch, settling at the speed bump.

“See?” Kay was shrieking. “See?”

Iris jabbed at the switches, but the little motor whined, the sound all wrong. “Please,” Iris muttered, knowing already she was done for. “Damn.”

Exhaling unevenly, she tried to stand, to wheel the chair back to Kay and face the music. It was then that her back, dazzling with pain, seized Iris so that she gasped, unable to move. She looked up to see Kay crying and waving her arms. Iris was crying herself; hot blades seemed to be carving channels on either side of her spine. She knew she needed to reach Kay, who would get help for her. But she couldn’t move, and had to watch Kay screaming and pointing at her before people finally came out from the store to save them.

 

Visit Erin McGraw as Image Artist of the Month for July 2000

Issue #5 •Spring 1994