The Miraculous Page 7

  “They’re all open to the obituaries,” Faye whispered to him.

  “The tea is almost ready,” the witch said from the counter where she was selecting teacups. “And I have much to talk about with you two. Yes, yes, yes. There is much to discuss.”

  Wunder looked from his sister’s eyes to the other newspapers. More faces gazed up at him. Family pictures and individual portraits, a man in a military uniform, a young woman smiling in front of a red-roofed house. Faye was right. They were all obituaries.

  “I have to go,” Wunder said. “We have to go.”

  He stood up. Faye stood up too.

  “I see,” the old woman said. She was holding two teacups, one in each hand. “But you will return? I would like for you to return. Both of you.”

  “Maybe,” Wunder said. He edged toward the kitchen door. “I guess. Sure. We’ll come back. We just have to go now.”

  The old woman started forward. “Before you leave,” she said, “I have something for you.” She set the teacups on the kitchen table, shifted around some of the newspapers, and then held something up.

  Something black with white letters.

  The Miraculous.

  “I think you lost this,” she said.

  Wunder took the book, wordless, wide-eyed.

  “And I also wondered,” the witch said, “if you would do me a favor.” She reached into the folds of her white clothing and pulled out an envelope. “Would you deliver this for me?”

  She held it out to Wunder.

  “‘Deliver this,’” Wunder echoed. “Sure. I can do that.” But he didn’t take the envelope. He kept his grip on The Miraculous.

  “What is it?” Faye asked, her voice high and tight.

  “It’s … an invitation,” the witch said.

  “For what? A party?”

  “A party? I suppose it will be a party of sorts,” the witch said. “But also something else.” She leaned closer to them. She smelled like the woods. “You will see. I have letters for both of you too. When you are ready for them.”

  Her black eyes gleamed. And Wunder stared back, stared into those eyes—until Faye jabbed him in the side.

  Then he grabbed the envelope, shoved it into his pocket, and ran.

  He ran through the dining room where the chandelier swung ever so slightly and through the parlor with its vacant shelves and through the long fun-house-mirror hallway.

  For a moment, the front doorknob wouldn’t turn under his sweat-slippery hand, and panic rose up in him. But then it did and the door opened and he flung himself through it and into the brightness of the outside.

  Faye was right behind him. She slammed the door shut, and as she did there was the sudden sound of spinning.

  But the sound came from the path ahead, not from the house behind. Through the trees, Wunder could see a head of curly dark hair and a neon-green bicycle zooming away.

  “What was that?” Faye gasped. “What’s going on?”

  “Davy, I think,” Wunder replied. “He must have followed us.”

  They hurried down the dirt trail, then onto the path, where the woods pulled them in. The cool breeze blew over them, the green light—now tinted, tainted as the leaves turned—washed over them. Wunder wondered why Davy had come there; he was terrified of the woods. The only time he ever ventured in was when Wunder helped him on his Sunday paper route.

  Then Wunder stopped thinking about Davy. Because there were far more pressing issues at hand.

  “Now we know for sure that she is a witch or”—Faye gave him a sideways look—“or someone else.”

  Wunder started to say what he always said, that she was just an old woman, but then he stopped.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel what I felt in that house,” Faye said.

  Wunder wiggled the fingers of the hand that had been clutching his side. He let his breathing slow as his heart grew stiller and stiller.

  And he listened as above them a bird cawed and cawed and cawed.

  “I don’t know what I feel,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  When Wunder turned onto his street, the first thing he saw was flashing light. Red-and-blue flashing light. There was a police car in front of his house.

  Officer Soto was sitting in the living room. Officer Soto was Tomás’s dad. He was one of three police officers in Branch Hill, so Wunder had figured that if the police were called about the town hall break-in, Officer Soto would know about it. But he hadn’t expected to see him at his house.

  Wunder’s mother was in the chair across from him. Neither of them was speaking, even though they had known each other for years.

  “Oh, hey, Wunder.” Officer Soto jumped to his feet as Wunder entered. He looked relieved. “You’re here.”

  “Hi, Officer Soto,” Wunder said. He put his hands in his pockets. His heart was pounding. “How are you? How’s Tomás? Everything okay?”

  “I’m fine, Tomás is fine.” Officer Soto cracked his knuckles. “But actually, everything’s not okay.”

  “Officer Soto says you broke into the town hall, Wunder.”

  Officer Soto and Wunder both turned to look at Wunder’s mother. She was still sitting, and she was still staring across the room. It was almost as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “Well,” Officer Soto said, “I said we think it was him. The clerk, Ms. Eugenia Simone, she says someone who claimed he was you was in there the day before with a”—he consulted the small notebook he was carrying—“‘foul-tempered, profanely garbed vampire girl.’ Says the two asked to see a particular set of records, which she refused to let them see. And now those records are missing…”

  Officer Soto waited for Wunder to respond, but not for very long. “Things being what they are,” he continued, “circumstances being a certain way—if we got those records back, the whole thing could just be over and done with. Papers go missing every day, no big deal. So…”

  He cracked his knuckles again, loud, painful-sounding pops. Wunder tried frantically to think of what to say. But what could he say? He had broken into the town hall. He had taken the cemetery records. And he had never been any good at lying.

  “Well, you let me know if you think of anything, Wunder,” the officer finally said. He nodded at Wunder’s mother. “Mrs. Ellis.”

  Then he walked out the front door.

  Wunder waited, uncertain, conflicted. His mother stayed in the chair. More than anything, what he wanted right then was for her to look at him, to tell him what to do. She had always helped him figure things out.

  But she didn’t look at him. The way she was sitting there, she might as well have been a stranger. She might as well have been someone who had nothing to do with him, someone who wasn’t connected to him at all.

  Then she said, “I’m sorry, Wunder, but I’m not sure I can handle this.” She turned to him finally, and her eyes were red. “It’s hard to—this is a lot for me right now.”

  Now Wunder knew what his father had felt like yesterday, knocking on the door and apologizing to his mother. He couldn’t remember ever making her cry before. It was a horrible feeling. “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

  Then he ran outside.

  “Officer Soto!” he called. “When I was walking home—I saw—in an alley near the town hall. There was a binder there. Maybe—maybe that’s what you’re looking for.”

  Officer Soto studied him for a minute, his brow furrowed. He looked like he was going to say something, but not something angry. Then he nodded.

  “Okay, Wunder,” he said. “I’ll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.”

  When Wunder came back into the house, his mother was gone. His parents’ door was shut.

  Chapter 19

  That night Wunder sat at his desk in his bare room and tried to sort through what had happened that day. Everything was so jumbled though, so twisted and distorted, like the hallway of the DoorWay House.

  There were no answers.

  Just
questions, more and more questions.

  Why did the witch have The Miraculous? Why had she been looking at the obituaries? Why had she ordered the cemetery stone?

  And other questions, questions that had to do with the way the DoorWay House made him feel and how the witch’s eyes reminded him of his sister.

  “Now I have a black-eyed baby,” his mother had whispered to him on the night his sister was born, “to go with my blue-eyed baby.” She had hugged him tight there in the hospital room as they stood watch over Milagros’s incubator, as they watched her sleep in a nest of wires and tubes, both still believing that a miracle was on its way no matter what the doctors said.

  Wunder jumped out of his chair and paced his room. He should never have gone to the DoorWay House. He should never have broken into the town hall. He had hurt his mother even more and for what? Questions with no answers.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets—and there it was. An answer.

  The envelope from the witch.

  The envelope was cream-colored with darker, discolored edges, as if it had sat somewhere for a long time. It was held shut by a wax seal. The wax was black and imprinted with the shape of a tree, a mostly bare tree with deep, spread-out roots and a few flowers on its long-reaching limbs.

  Wunder ran his fingers over the seal, tracing from roots to branches and back again. Then he turned the envelope over.

  On the other side there was a name written in black sprawling script:

  Sylvester Dabrowski

  Branch Hill was a small town, but it was big enough that the average resident couldn’t possibly know everyone. But Wunder was a former miracologist. He had spent countless hours reading the local newspaper and gathering stories from his neighbors. They had written him letters, agreed to interviews, called him on the phone.

  He didn’t know everyone in Branch Hill. But he knew their miracles.

  And, of course, he had kept track of them all.

  Wunder pulled The Miraculous out of his backpack. The book’s familiar worn cover looked even more worn now. There was dirt caked over the white lettering and the silver edges were crushed in places.

  He carried the book to his bed, where he opened to the first page—Entry #1—and began to flip through.

  The miracles passed before his eyes. A news story from Colorado of a three-year-old girl found alive in the woods five days after she went missing. A letter from his neighbor Susan Holt telling him about the starling who had sung her to sleep every night since she was a little girl, even following her when she moved across town. An anecdote about the philosopher-poet Rumi silencing some impertinent frogs copied from a book his mother had given him. An entry about Davy’s mother and how the doctors had told her that her tumor was shrinking.

  And then there it was—a clipping from his church’s bulletin and then his own words. It read like this:

  Miraculous Entry #603

  PRAISES THIS WEEK FROM ST. GERARD’S:

  Luis Aritza

  Florence Dabrowski

  Edith Greenwald

  Robert Ozols

  Every week for a long time Florence Dabrowski has been listed in the Prayer Requests section of the bulletin. And then at church today I saw her name again—but it wasn’t in the Prayer Requests section. It was in the Praises section. She must have gotten better!

  It wasn’t Sylvester, but it was something. Florence Dabrowski went to his church.

  And she was a miracle.

  What did the witch want with Sylvester, the other Dabrowski? Did it have something to do with Florence?

  The answer was there, right there in his hands. The answer to those questions and maybe others.

  But Wunder didn’t open the envelope.

  He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to look for the bright in the dark. He would just throw the letter away, along with The Miraculous.

  But he didn’t.

  He put The Miraculous in his backpack.

  And he put the letter on his nightstand.

  * * *

  He had another dream that night.

  He was holding the envelope in his hand when the tree on the wax seal began to grow. Its branches spread up and out, through the ceiling. Its roots reached the floor and tunneled down, into the floorboards. The tree grew and grew until it was enormous, wider than his house, taller than the tallest tower of the DoorWay House.

  And covering it, round and perfect and bright, were the spirals. It was a DoorWay Tree. And on the very top branch, half-hidden behind white flowers, was the old woman.

  “‘We will all be changed!’” she cawed from her perch. “Changed! Changed!”

  Chapter 20

  Wunder put the letter in his pocket the next morning. Then he took his time getting ready. He wanted to be late because he was worried about the questions that would be waiting for him at school. Because by now Tomás would probably know about the town hall break-in.

  And he did. When Wunder slipped into his seat in first period English right before the bell rang, Tomás swung around to face him.

  “Wunder!” he whispered. “What’s going on?”

  But then Mr. Groves—who was known for giving detentions for even the slightest infractions, like sneezing without covering your nose—started taking roll. Tomás frowned, flipped his hair, and turned back around.

  At the end of class, Wunder rushed from the room while everyone was still packing up. He saw Davy watching him leave, front teeth chewing on his lip. He thought about asking what Davy had been doing in the woods, but then he didn’t. It would be easier to avoid him.

  All day, he dodged his old friends. He ate lunch in the stairwell, then told Ms. Shunem he had a stomachache and needed to go see the school nurse, because her science class was small and informal and Tomás would have plenty of time to talk to him there. When the last bell rang, Wunder was relieved that he had made it through the day without having to explain himself to anyone—

  But Tomás was waiting for him at his locker. And when Wunder tried to walk right past, Tomás stepped in front of him.

  “So did you really do it?” he asked.

  “Do what?” Wunder went to his locker and focused on spinning the combination dial.

  “You know what,” Tomás said.

  “Your dad isn’t supposed to talk about police stuff with you,” Wunder said. He pulled his earth sciences book out, put his English composition book back in. “It’s confidential. That’s the law.”

  Tomás snorted. Wunder wasn’t looking at him, but he was almost sure he could hear the sound of hair being flipped.

  “Come on, Wunder,” Tomás said. “If I robbed the town hall and your dad knew about it, you’d know about it too. My dad thought I might have been with you. I almost got in serious trouble!” Wunder didn’t say anything. He knelt to shove his books into his backpack. “Hello? Wunder? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “I’m sorry you almost got in trouble,” Wunder said.

  Tomás snorted again, but this time more forcefully. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  Davy came up then. “Wunder, I heard—” He stammered to a stop, blinking back and forth between Tomás, who had his arms raised in disbelief, and Wunder, who had stood and was glaring at his friend. “Snack Shack?” he finally squeaked.

  “All I’m going to say?” Wunder said. “Me? I’m not the one who doesn’t want to talk about anything!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tomás demanded. “I’ve been at your locker every day, and I’m always asking you to hang out, even though you hardly talk now and you never smile and you don’t want to go anywhere. It’s not like I don’t have better things to do! It’s not like I don’t have other friends!”

  Wunder reeled at these words—but because Tomás was right. They always used to meet at Tomás’s locker, never his. And Tomás had been asking him to do things. Wunder’s anger started to die down.

  Then, with one thought, it flared up again. “That may
be true, but you haven’t said anything—not one thing—about my sister. You haven’t mentioned her once, neither of you! You’re both just pretending like nothing happened!”

  “What are we supposed to say?” Tomás cried. “If you wanted to talk about it, you should have brought it up. And anyway, it’s not like it was your dad or someone you really knew. She was alive for what—a day? Two days? What’s the big deal?”

  It seemed like the hallway went silent after these words. If there was noise, Wunder couldn’t hear it. All he could hear was the sound of his blood rushing past his ears and the sound of his own breathing, fast and tight. He saw Davy’s face, hands pressed to his mouth, aghast.

  “Eight days,” he said. He might have been screaming or whispering, he couldn’t tell. He could hardly hear his own voice. “It was eight days.”

  Then he left.

  As he went out the front door, he felt someone touch his arm.

  “Wunder. Wait.” He turned to see Davy following him. He looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  And Wunder never would have thought that he would make Davy cry, not Davy, who had been his best friend his whole life, who brought him newspaper cuttings of miracle stories, who would do anything for him. Never, ever, not in a million years.

  But he did.

  “Just leave me alone!” he yelled.

  He ran to the bicycle rack, where, of course, Faye was waiting for him. She watched impassively as he unlocked his bike chain and yanked it off, as he jerked his bike free.

  “Wundie,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  Wunder didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to keep asking himself question after question. He didn’t want to keep trying not to ask himself question after question. He didn’t want to wander around his house, the cemetery, his town like a ghost, angry and lonely and confused.

  He was ready for some answers.