Immaculate (7 page)

“I'm so sorry that your picnic was ruined, girls,” my mom said, resting the back of her hand on my forehead to check for a fever. “And only a few days before school starts, too. Such awful timing.” She pulled back and frowned, her eyes looking misty, before leaning over to kiss the top of my head. She was so delicate, so careful, pecking me as if I was a fragile treasure that could crack under the weight of her lips at any second.

A horn honked from out front, and Hannah's face looked torn between relief and guilt.

“Have fun tonight, Hannah bear,” I said, catching her eye. I winked at her and mouthed a silent thank-you, and she gave a small, tight smile back, probably more for my mom's benefit than my own. She didn't need to bother—my mom was too absorbed in her nursing duties, already taking inventory of whether we had enough saltines and ginger ale to get me through the night.

“Bye, Mina. Bye, Mrs. Dietrich,” Hannah said, another round of honks firing from the driveway.

“Bye bye now, Hannah. Tell your parents I said hello, please, and thanks again for taking care of my Meen today.”

“Of course, Mrs. D. Anything for your daughter,” Hannah said, turning to push open the screen door that led to our side porch. “And, Mina, I'm sure I'll talk to you soon.”

I nodded to myself as the door closed behind her, leaving me far too alone in the kitchen with my mom.

“Where's Dad?”

“Picking up Gracie from the birthday party and then bringing a pizza home from Frankie's for dinner,” she said, distracted, her head buried in the depths of our cluttered, overflowing pantry. “They should be here any minute, actually.”

I didn't want to see either of them, any of them, not then, not that night.

“I'm going to go lie down,” I said, pushing myself up from the table. “I just want to sleep for a while, and hopefully I'll feel better when I wake up.”

“Are you sure I can't make you something first?” She pulled her head out of the cabinet to face me, her brow wrinkled in concern. “Scramble some eggs, maybe? Chicken broth? I'd feel better if you had a little something in you.”

“I'll take some crackers upstairs with me, okay? I'll be fine.”

She nodded as she came over to give me a long hug, and I could feel her eyes following me as I disappeared up the narrow winding staircase.

• • •

I lay in bed until long after the sun went down and long after the hum of crickets and the flicker of fireflies started up in the darkness just beyond my window screen. I could have turned on the air conditioner, but I wanted to hear the sounds of the night, the familiar country chorus that made me feel less alone. I had listened, too, as Mom chatted to her sister Vera on the phone downstairs in the kitchen, and as Gracie and Dad laughed their way through
Toy Story
. I had listened to Gracie's inevitable grumbling as she was sent upstairs for bedtime against her will. She had tapped on my door a few times, cautiously called out my name. I could hear the worry laced in her soft, sweet voice, but I had still stayed silent, playing the sick girl who was too dead asleep to be disturbed, until she gave up and shuffled off to her room. Finally, sometime after nine, I had heard my parents both come up, brush their teeth, and talk quietly in their room for a few minutes before the bedside lamps clicked off.

After sending a few frantic apology texts to Nate for missing all his calls that day, and explaining how
terribly
sick I was, I shut off my phone for the night.

I couldn't think about him or about anyone else right now.

How?
How could this be my life? How could this be real?

Miracles, divine intervention, supernatural phenomena, whatever you wanted to label it, didn't really happen—not in the real world, certainly not in the twenty-first century.

And even if somehow, some way, genuine miracles occurred that were totally inexplicable and defied everything we knew about science and the human body—and there couldn't be, my mind just couldn't comprehend that for a second—why would God, or whoever was in control of this decision, pick
me
? Who was Mina Dietrich in the grand scheme of things?

Sure, I was raised as a Lutheran, and my mom and dad were both fairly religious. I went to church a few times a month and volunteered at Vacation Bible School, more to appease my parents and to be a good role model for Gracie than because of any strict religious code of my own. Some of the stories were interesting and entertaining and all, but that was what they'd always felt like, ever since I was old enough to really think about them on my own—
stories
. Very old, very distant stories that had never seemed wildly relevant to my personal existence.

Had I ever
really
believed in God, though? In Jesus? Did I believe in them now—did I have to believe after this? The Virgin Mary had always seemed like a character to me, a sweet, muted woman draped in blue for the nativity play, a pretty porcelain face in old paintings and stained-glass windows—not a living, breathing woman who had once walked this very same earth. Who had once had her own life yanked out from under her and turned upside down by the truth of her destiny, a baby with no human father. Did I believe in
her
?

I realized now how odd it was that I'd gone through the motions of Christianity for my entire life without ever really dissecting what I felt about any of it. There had always been more crucial things to think about—school and grades and cold, hard indisputable facts, geometry and physics, grammar and history. But there had to be something, didn't there? Some force that brought us here, some sort of higher power that knew what could become of all the atoms and molecules and compounds floating around in the universe?

It was unlike me to not have an answer. It was unlike me to have somehow let such a big question go.

My room was sweltering, but still I was wrapped up in my blankets, sweaty and buried, hiding beneath the nest of feathers. The person I wanted to hide from most was
me
, and I didn't know how to make that happen. Because even in my dreams—that is, if I would ever be able to fall asleep again—I knew I couldn't escape myself, my thoughts, my fears. My body.

By the time I counted twelve chimes from the old grandfather clock downstairs in our living room, I couldn't be alone in my room anymore. I couldn't be alone with myself. More than anything or anyone else in the world, I needed my mom. I needed her arms around me, and I needed her to know everything that I knew. Because as terrible as everything in my life felt in that moment, the most terrible, excruciating part was keeping it all a secret from my mom. I'd never hidden anything important from her before, and I couldn't hide this, either. Not even for a night.

I kicked off the blankets and rose from the bed like a sleepwalker, lifted up and tugged toward the hallway by invisible hands. A bright shaft of moonlight spilled through my thin, gauzy curtains, illuminating the full-length mirror that hung from my door. I reached out for the knob, but froze, caught by my reflection.

Was I showing? Could I see? Could other people see?

I was shocked that the idea hadn't occurred to me earlier, not once during the countless hours of solitude I'd spent in my room that night, reflecting and analyzing, poring over every last detail, every piece of evidence again and again and again.

Goose bumps prickled up my arms, the hairs standing on end, as I carefully, little by little, lifted up the edge of my T-shirt. I stared at myself, first from the front, then from the side. Front, side, front, side. My stomach looked so pale, so ghostly white against the shadows behind me. I cupped my hands over my belly and studied my profile. Was that a bump? A tiny, minuscule, almost entirely nonexistent bulge, but still, could it be the beginnings of a bump? I dug my palms harder, deeper against my skin, and closed my eyes to concentrate. I felt rounder, fuller somehow, I was sure of it. It was certainly nothing that anyone else would be able to see, not yet.

But it was only a matter of time.

I pulled my shirt back down and crept into the hallway, my bare feet knowing every creaking wooden floorboard, every slope and splinter, every inch of the way along the pitch-black path to my parents' bedroom. They always left the door slightly open while they slept, a habit from the days when Gracie and I were little and helpless—a nightly routine that they'd never been able to leave behind, no matter how old we'd gotten or how independent we'd become. I had hated this on the nights when Nate and I were downstairs together, cuddling on the sofa, wanting at least the veil of privacy, but seeing the crack now made my heart swell.

I pushed the door open farther, just far enough that I could poke my head through and peek into the room. My mom flinched and jerked herself up at the first squeak of the hinge. I could make out her panicked face in the moonlight, her eyes darting around the room until she found me standing in the doorway. I put one finger on my lips and pointed to Dad, and then motioned for her to follow me out. She fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand and swung her legs over the side of the bed, an instant transition from deep, sound sleep to active and alert motherhood. Within seconds we were both safely down the hall and inside of my room, and I closed the door behind us.

“What's going on, Mina?” she asked, her tired face tense with worry. I noticed wrinkles that I hadn't seen before, furrowed around her eyes and fanning out from her frown. “Are you feeling worse? Can I get you anything?”

“No, I'm fine. I don't need you to get me anything,” I said, sitting down on the edge of my bed. “I just need to talk to you. I need to tell you something.”

“Okay, then tell me something,” she said, her voice sounding confused but still patient as always, and she walked over to lean in next to me. “What's this all about, Meeny? You're scaring me.”

“I'm scaring myself, too,” I said. My voice cracked. But I couldn't dissolve into tears, not until I'd pushed the whole story out into the void between us. I closed my eyes and forced myself to speak. For the second time that day, two times more than I would have ever liked, I described everything that had happened—meeting Iris, what she had said, what I had said. I told her about the last few months, all the strange symptoms, and I told her about that morning, that afternoon out in the woods.

She didn't say anything. No questions or observations. Not a single word the entire way through.

After I finished talking, ending right at the point when Hannah and I had walked back into the kitchen and lied about our day, I lifted my head up and turned to face her. She was staring at me, her golden brown eyes fixed on mine and burning with a kind of motherly love that even I had rarely seen, and only in fleeting glimpses. A look that was so raw and unfiltered, a look that captured so many instincts and so many emotions—passion, devotion, fear, distress, adoration, sympathy. I was stunned that someone could feel so much—feel so much
for me
.

“Mina . . .” she said, her voice quiet but firm.

I breathed in and held the air deep inside of my lungs.

“Mina, I believe you.”

She
believed
me. And I hadn't even needed to ask.

She reached out before I could react, and rested her palm against my flushed cheek. “Mina, I may not understand one bit of why this is happening to you or how this is happening to you or what any of this craziness means for any of us at all . . . but I do know one thing in this world, without a doubt, without any uncertainty”—she shifted to face me straight on and wrapped her hands tight around both of my shoulders—“I trust in you. I believe in you. You're my Mina, my baby girl, and I can see right through those amazing blue eyes of yours. I can see exactly what's inside, and I know like only a mother could know for sure that you're not hiding a thing from me, not a thing. So if you're crazy, then I'm crazy, and we're just going to have to be crazy together, all right?”

“All right.” I nodded hard, up and down, up and down, still amazed by her reaction. “So . . . so what should we do next?”

We.
The word felt so right on my lips.

“Well, I think I should call Dr. Keller on Monday, tell her we need an appointment as soon as possible. We have her run the standard tests, make sure we know exactly what we're dealing with. I think it's best we don't tell her too much at this point. Just the basics, the symptoms, the tests you took today. We'll fill in the gaps when we need to. I don't want to raise too many unnecessary questions—not yet, anyway.”

I nodded again. She hadn't said anything that I wasn't already thinking on my own, but it all sounded much more solid and sensible coming out of her mouth instead. “And what about Dad?” I asked. And Gracie. I wasn't sure which of them would be the most agonizing to tell, both conversations feeling so equally impossible.

“I think . . . I think we should wait to tell Dad, at least until after we've seen the doctor,” my mom said, her words slow, hesitant. I didn't think that she'd ever kept anything from my dad before, certainly not something this significant. I hated that I was the reason. “I think it's better to keep this between us and the girls until we know more.”

The more I thought about my dad and Gracie and watching their faces as they heard my news, watching their eyes lose their glow, all their pride and trust, the more I started to shake—a shattering tremble from the tips of my toes to my knuckles to my eyelids. I could feel my heartbeat pounding, banging in my temples.

Why me?

I curled up into a ball on my bed, closing in on myself and hoping that I could somehow black out and escape my body, even for a few minutes.

But then I felt my mom curve herself around me, my smaller body completely folded into and against hers, my limbs, my head, my heart no longer just a part of
me
. With her touch we'd become one: my body, her body; my pain, her pain; and as she absorbed me into her, the shaking slowed.