It happens, you know. Everywhere. It’s only called a miracle because no one knows why. Once you know the facts, it stops being miraculous. Just a strange occurrence. A coincidence. After my experience, I have to wonder what the difference is.
A seventy-nine-year-old woman in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania developed a growth on the back of her neck. The original diagnosis was glandular swelling, but a biopsy revealed otherwise. The tumor was spreading into her jaw and down her spine. Surgery after surgery they removed tissue, but the Big C moved faster. She was told the fight was over, and was sent home to die. Palliative care. Hospice. A never-ending carousel of kind strangers with needles. Her greatest comfort was a heating pad her friend Lou Ann had given her. She made home goods from recycled materials. Glass, paper, plastic, Lou Ann could make it useful again. She’d made a neck pillow, a sachet of ground ceramic you put in the microwave. It helped with the pain.
By the time the insurance company showed concern about the duration of her care, others were asking questions as well. She’d lived months beyond the weeks they’d given her. Her caregivers suggested she receive further testing. CAT and MRI showed nothing. She was healed. Until a curious intern looked into the details of her care, notes compiled from the various nurses and technicians who were hired to provide her end-of-life care, it was clearly a divine intervention. This intern had a hunch about the woman’s constant use of the pillow. Her investigation determined that the ceramic was from an old Fiesta Ware bowl, known to contain uranium oxide in the glaze. Before microwaving, the pillow registered above caution levels on a Geiger counter. After a minute on high it was crackling like Chernobyl.
That was not my intention when I bought the house in Virginia. I didn’t know about this isotope stuff when I signed the papers, when I hired the contractor who failed to disclose the whole “it might be radioactive” thing.
I’d moved there to get away from the soft, wet eyes. The mewling get-well messages. The bouquet and balloon bombardment after the doctor started using words like terminal and inoperable. Big M words like metastatic and malignant. I was flooded with flowers and tweets, visits from aunts and cousins I’d never met before. Old friends called out of the blue, “just touching base.” They were fulfilling an obligation to each other, not me. A disingenuous concern is worse than no concern at all.
Makes sense they’d never heard of Saint Silven. They wouldn’t know that the dais his body has lain on, perfectly preserved for centuries, is Alpine limestone veined with gypsum, mica, and uranium. The patron saint of fast-food fries you find under your car seat that are still inexplicably fries.
I bought the house to do what dogs do: wander off and die alone. It seemed so serene, so natural. If it weren’t for my devout mother and the fear of eternal damnation she’d beaten into me, I’d have just eaten a bullet. I was childless, unmarried. I had my friends and family, but had long ago determined that humanity was doomed and I was on a sinking ship. The inevitable outcome that terrified others enticed me, and all their misplaced optimism was driving me insane. They hovered over me like sympathetic flies.
I sold them on my decision by telling them that the old homestead was a wellness retreat, that somewhere on those eighty acres were hot springs, long purported to have restorative properties. It wasn’t entirely a lie. There were rumors.
I had the old farmhouse gutted and remodeled as an off-the-grid ecolodge by a contractor who specialized in reused materials. It seemed only fair that I do my best before I do my last. Pine plank, beadboard, scrolled mahogany and burled walnut – all replaced with marble, limestone, travertine, granite. My hidden mausoleum in the Appalachians, miles from the nearest neighbor and time zones away from anyone I knew.
It’s hard to say how long I was there before I noticed. With no one around to cluck and bitch at me, I went on a relentless bender. Real Leaving Las Vegas-style wanton abandon.
It wasn’t the fading rashes and lesions that sparked my curiosity. I was too drunk to notice I was feeling stronger.
It wasn’t the trees growing closer to the house, stretching skinny limbs until they scratched the windows.
It was the flowers.
When I moved in, despite my wishes, I’d been bombarded afresh with bouquets of carnations, lilies, forget-me-nots, the kitchen counter resembling a florist’s stockroom.
I’d lost track of time, but it was clear the days had grown hotter and longer. The bony brown wilderness had exploded with blossoms, then settled into vibrant green. Still, the cut flowers remained fresh and bold.
At first, I suspected the water. I vaguely recalled filling the vases from the tap.
I roamed the hills in the summer heat, returning home in the dark to drink until I passed out on the floor. Eventually I found them.
Deep in a brambly hollow, the springs bubbled up through a bald pate of granite dotted with holes. Obsidian pools steaming in the morning haze. They were too close to the house, visible if you knew where to look.
I hired a geologist, a young professor from Richmond. He ran tests and took samples, radar, sonar, large equipment and crews of strange people. A total nightmare. They were there for weeks, and only when vans were packed and the gaggle of researchers had departed, clouds of dust following them down the rutted road, did the professor tell me what he had found.
I listened as he told me that the pools and my well were fed from the same aquifer, but that nothing beyond common mineral concentration had been detected. My throat tightened when he said his crew had made some strange observations.
They’d noticed that the few houseplants I had – a fig tree, an acacia, and some ferns – had grown enormous in size. Sonar readings near the house showed that the trees encroaching above ground were doing the same below, jeopardizing the plumbing and foundation. One keen intern noted leaves that fell on the patio, yellow limestone pavers relocated from some Turkish aristocrat’s garden, never dried and decayed.
I struggled to concentrate as he told me he thought it might be something inside the house. I chuckled at the irony when he said gamma levels, trace uranium oxide.
He died last winter, the professor, and I am still here. The quiet stone of this house now echoes padding little feet and the idle humming of a wife half my age, clanking cookware in the kitchen. Cinnamon and cardamom assail the air, filling the rooms with bakery warmth.
Tonight, when I put my son to bed, I will tell him the story of us. It’s his favorite. I have told him many times, because I am old and may not be around when he is grown. I will tell him that some things happen for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is. And when all his eyes are closed, and his mouths snore in little puffs, before I tiptoe down the stairs and pull his mother’s body close to mine, I will kiss his head and breathe deeply the haystack smell of his hair. Because he reminds me that miracles happen all the time.
Really cool piece. Thanks for sharing