Anatomy of a Miracle Read online

  Also by Jonathan Miles

  Want Not

  Dear American Airlines

  This is actually a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously; any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is wholly coincidental. Some of the facts presented in this book are not factual, though many others are, or could be.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Miles.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Hardcover ISBN 9780553447583

  Ebook ISBN 9780553447590

  International Edition 9780525574354

  Cover design by Ben Wiseman

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jonathan Miles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note on Methodology

  Epigraph

  What Happened

  Chapter One

  After, Pt. 1

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  After, Pt. 2

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  After, Pt. 3

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Before, Pt. 4

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  After, Pt. 5

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  this is for

  JOHN H. TIDYMAN

  who made smoking Camel straights while

  cursing at a typewriter look like fun, even if it isn’t

  (sometimes it is)

  and also for

  MARK RICHARD

  the good Reverend Blotoad

  A Note on Methodology

  All the scenes and dialogue contained herein were reconstructed from the recollections of participants and observers and further supported, whenever possible, by audio recordings, video footage, diaries, notes, court transcripts, and other corroborating materials. In scattered instances where there remains a dispute in recollection, this discrepancy is parenthetically noted.

  One who believes all these tales is a fool;

  but one who denies them is a heretic.

  HASIDIC SAYING

  CREDITED TO RAV SHLOMO OF RADOMSK

  one

  On the afternoon of August 23, 2014, Tanya Harris wheeled her younger brother, Cameron, to the Biz-E-Bee store on the corner of Reconfort Avenue and Division Street in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nothing about the afternoon or about Cameron or about Tanya herself suggested this would be her final time doing so; she was merely out of cigarettes, and her brother, slack-faced and sulky on a day that felt lethally humid, short on beer.

  Tanya Harris is a squat, wide-hipped woman of twenty-nine whose gently popped eyes lend her face an expression of perpetual surprise or amazement, and whose flat-footed manner of walking appears consciously orchestrated, as though she’s never outgrown the fear of stepping on a crack thereby breaking her mother’s back. She’d recently dip-dyed one side of her hair, which is naturally a dingy shade of blond faintly slashed with premature gray, and on this afternoon streaks of a vividly chemical pink spilled down one side of a white T-shirt on which was printed HAP-PAY HAP-PAY HAP-PAY. Some of her many tattoos were already ridging from the heat, their edges swelling as though the ink was approaching a simmer. Pushing her brother’s wheelchair down the center of Reconfort Avenue, to avoid the uneven jags of the sidewalk and the mini-dunes of sand swept there, she maintained the freewheeling stream of humming, commentary, rhetorical questioning, and singing that is her hallmark to family and friends. (“She does not shut up,” grumbles her brother, with acerbic affection. “Not ever.”) The chorus to Jay Z’s song “99 Problems” came flitting between observations about the “swampy-ass” August heat and her sharp denunciation of a neighbor whose neglected laundry, drooping on a mildewed clothesline, had already weathered, by Tanya’s reckoning, its third rainstorm. “Gonna need to re-wash every one of those shirts,” she muttered, over the fwap fwap fwap of her flip-flops spanking the asphalt. The sight of a chow mix, chained to a ginkgo tree in another neighbor’s front yard, elicited the same cluck of pity it had been eliciting from her for almost a decade.

  Her brother, Cameron, wasn’t listening; or, if he was, he doesn’t remember it. As he explains: “She repeats things two or three times if you’re supposed to answer.” But Cameron was also, by his own admission, “a little out of it.” He’d popped his first can of Bud Light at noon, to wash down the Klonopin and Concerta he was taking for anxiety and memory loss, and he’d followed that beer with three, maybe five more. “Thermal angel blood,” he calls it, a reference to a blood and intravenous fluid warmer he’d seen medics use during his combat tour in Afghanistan.

  Afghanistan was the last place Cameron ever walked—more precisely, on a ridge outside the mountain village of Sar-Dasair, in the Darah Khujz District of Zabul Province, where, in the early hours of March 22, 2010, Private First Class Harris and a fellow soldier wandered off-course during a foot patrol. Cameron was roughly twelve yards away when the soldier, a staff sergeant, stepped on a PMN-2 land mine—a buried remnant from the former Soviet occupation. The explosion sheared off the staff sergeant’s legs, genitals, and right forearm and blasted seventy-nine pieces of shrapnel, along with bone shards from the sergeant’s legs, into Cameron’s body. One or more of those fragments severed the nerves of his lower vertebrae, instantly paralyzing him below the waist. Two doctors at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany divulged the permanence of his condition to him on the evening of his twenty-second birthday, bookending the news with brief and awkward apologies for the poor timing.

  Cameron’s most prominent physical feature, paralysis aside, might be the long alabaster scar that runs down the side of his face, from just below his left temple almost to his jawline. It’s a squiggly, sinuous scar, evoking a river’s course on a map, but it’s not, as one might reasonably presume, collateral residuum from Afghanistan. The scar dates to his early childhood, when he slipped while running on a slick fishing pier and snagged his face on a nail. The scar only adds to the rugged, almost harsh cast of his face, which is further amplified by his high cliffside cheekbones, sharp-cornered jaw, the military-specs trim of his blond hair, and an angry vein in his neck that pulses and squirms from even the mildest aggravation. His eyes, however, cast a different spell: They’re wide and large like his sister’s, with a peculiar boyishness to them, as though his eyes retired their development at puberty
while the rest of his features forged ahead. They impart a dissonance to his expressions that can sometimes be jarring; his temper, when it flares, can seem both fearsome and puerile. Most of all, however, those eyes highlight the gross tragedy of what happened to him in Afghanistan—that he had yet to fully graduate from boyhood when he was struck down in the Darah Khujz.

  On this particular August afternoon, Cameron was dressed in his usual way: a T-shirt, this one advertising the Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, atop a pair of baggy black knee-length nylon shorts, and on his sockless feet a pair of red Nike tennis shoes that he sometimes called his “front bumpers.” The home that he and Tanya share is a narrow, half-century-old shotgun-style house that wasn’t designed with a wheelchair in mind, and, without shoes, his insensate feet often bore bruises from colliding with sheetrock and doorframes.

  Their hometown of Biloxi occupies a skinny, six-mile-long peninsula that juts eastward into the Gulf. For most of its history Biloxi was a fishing village, with canneries lining the water and shrimp boats and oyster luggers docked in its harbor. Immigrants drawn by jobs in this seafood industry—Slavs and Italians especially—lent the city an idiosyncratic seasoning, tilting its spirit more toward south Louisiana than to the rest of Mississippi lying north of the salt line. “Most were Catholic,” as the former Biloxian Jack Nelson explained in Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter, “and they brought with them a more relaxed attitude toward drinking, sex, gambling, and other human frailties.” In the 1950s, when the state dumped leftover dredging sand on the coastline to create an artificial beach, Biloxi began advertising itself as “the Poor Man’s Riviera,” a Deep South analog to Coney Island. Elvis Presley vacationed here. Jayne Mansfield had just left a Biloxi supper club, in 1967, when she died in a car wreck on U.S. 90. Casinos arrived in the 1990s, adding another layer of sheen, and yet, for all its synthetic, tropical-print ease and its tolerance for frailties, Biloxi has never comported itself like a resort town. It bears no illusions of itself as a paradise. It doesn’t mind the smell of fish guts. Its hands are cracked and calloused and it sweats a lot.

  The Harris house, near the end of Reconfort Avenue, where the street dead-ends at the CSX railroad tracks, is the only house Cameron and his sister have ever known. Their parents bought it in 1985, just after Tanya was born. After their father left for an oilfield job in Texas when Cameron was three, and failed to return, the children remained in the house with their mother. They remained in it, too, after their mother was killed in a car accident on I-10 when Cameron was sixteen. And they remained in it as well—if more accurately beside it for a time, during the year they spent living in a FEMA trailer—after the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina devastated their East Biloxi neighborhood, their house included, just fourteen months after their mother’s death. “The back bay kinda swallowed up the whole street, and flooded us up to the ceiling pretty much,” Tanya explains, with a detachment that seems oddly clinical until you consider that Katrina, following so closely their mother’s death, was, for them, less disaster than aftershock, loss tailing loss.

  The hurricane also explains why the house—which a group of volunteers from an Indiana church, with Cameron’s help, put back together—is so starkly devoid of family history. The living room, once a shrine to their mother’s porcelain collectibles, contained on this day a black vinyl couch, purchased at a Rent-A-Center closeout; a television propped on cinder blocks; a blue plastic coffee table upon which an Xbox video game console sat nestled amid its black burrow of cords; and nothing else. The walls, like those of every other room in the house, were unadorned and painted the blunt white shade of mold-resistant primer. The only photographs of Cameron and Tanya on display were the sole images, predating Katrina, that they know to exist: a half-dozen snapshots, taped to the refrigerator door, that came in the mail from an aunt in Alabama whom the Harrises visited twice as children. Every one of them is a group shot, with Cameron and Tanya posed beside cousins whose names they don’t remember. “That’s all we got,” Tanya says, pressing a fingertip to one of the photos—the only image of their mother they possess—as if to sponge a nano-droplet more memory from it. She hums, grunts, smiles. “Poor Cameron’s gotta take my word for it that he was such an ugly little kid.”

  The outside shows minor neglect—curls of peeling paint, a cracked windowpane, knee-high weeds poking through the concrete—but no more than some of the other surviving houses on the street. At least half didn’t survive the storm surge: Nine years later, Reconfort Avenue remains pocked with empty lots. Forgotten-looking FOR SALE signs stand wiltingly in a few of these sand-and-scrub parcels, occasionally joined by newer-looking signs advertising, in English and Vietnamese, legal counsel for OIL SPILL CLAIMS resulting from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the spring of 2010. The effects of that spill greeted Cameron’s return home from Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, adding insult to very literal injury—or loss tailing loss tailing loss tailing loss, an interminable freight train of misfortune. “I remember Tanya bringing home a sack of oysters, for this ‘Welcome Home’ deal she did for me, and saying, ‘Well, Tippo says these might be the last Gulf oysters we eat in our lifetimes,’ ” Cameron recalls. “And I’m thinking, well, shit. A lotta fucked-up shit’s happened to me, right? I mean, I could go down the list, you know. But no more oysters? Goddamn, man. I was just like: Maybe life’s really over now.” It’s unclear how earnest he is when he credits the oysters’ comeback for his endurance of a six-month murk of depression, though oysters—invariably cornmealed, fried, and slathered with ketchup—do comprise a notable share of his diet.

  Of the street’s pre-Katrina residents, only two other households remain. One is a large Vietnamese fishing family known to Cameron and Tanya as “the Ducks” (a mangling of their surname), who keep sharply to themselves. The other is Mrs. Dooley.

  Eulalie Dooley is a ninety-one-year-old African-American woman who’s lived on the corner of Reconfort and Division, directly across from the Biz-E-Bee, since 1965, when her late husband, Bobby, took a job with a local seafood processor. While working as a housekeeper and later as a home-health aide, she raised four children in that house, and later three grandchildren as well. She was the only resident of Reconfort Avenue who refused to evacuate for Katrina, which she survived—just barely, and, when one considers her age and frailty, rather magnificently—by climbing into her floating refrigerator. As the water rose, she punched out ceiling tiles using the sponge mop with which she’d armed herself for the storm. (The only chore Hurricane Camille had required of her, in 1969, was swabbing the floors; she’d expected similarly light duty for Katrina.) That feat of survival, reported on CNN, drew the Indiana church group to her home. A surplus of its volunteers moved down the block until they found the Harris house, teeter-tottering amid a sunbaked slosh of debris and yellowy mud, which they set upon with reciprocating saws and hammers and Midwestern Methodist cheer.

  To longtime residents of Reconfort Avenue, Mrs. Dooley has always been known, fondly, as “Neighborhood Watch.” This is owing to her omnipresent vigils on her compact front porch, which, by her request, was the first thing the church volunteers rebuilt on her house. It’s not uncommon to see Mrs. Dooley on her porch at sunrise, quilting or crocheting while rocking in a chair that a charitable CNN viewer shipped to her “all the way from Florida,” nor is it unusual to see her there after dark, beneath the bluesy glow of a bug zapper, needles still flashing in her ever-kinetic hands. Despite the intricate demands of her stitch work, every passing car, whether familiar or not, is accorded a generous salute, her left arm fully raised, her arthritic wrist avidly swishing. As Cameron says: “It’s like our street’s got its own Walmart greeter.”

  To him and Tanya, making their daily and sometimes twice- or thrice-daily walks to the Biz-E-Bee, Mrs. Dooley tended to offer more than a wave. “How y’all babies doing?” she’d call out, leaning forward in her chair, or, “What you babies out shopping for to
day?” From Cameron in his wheelchair she’d usually get a wan thumbs-up, or a meek and uncomfortable-looking shrug. He’s never quite outgrown his fear of Mrs. Dooley, dating back to when she caught him, at the age of ten, setting off fireworks beneath cars, after which she ordered him onto her porch and slapped him three times hard on his backside then told him to head straight home and have his mama slap him there another three times. For years thereafter, up until Cameron’s mother died, instead of waving Mrs. Dooley would point a stern and crooked finger at Cameron as he’d pass by on foot or on his bicycle, denoting her surveillance. “That boy was never really trouble,” she says of the young Cameron. “More like he was always almost trouble.”

  From Tanya, on the other hand, Mrs. Dooley’s greetings yielded reams of small talk, the kind of blithe sentiments you holler across a front yard, and oftentimes requests for Mrs. Dooley to hold up her latest stitching project for Tanya to see. On the afternoon of August 23, Mrs. Dooley was halfway through a lighthouse-themed quilt, which she was proud to exhibit. Tanya, whose mother collected porcelain lighthouses (“pretty much porcelain everythings”), told her it was looking beautiful. As artists are prone to do, Mrs. Dooley challenged the compliment by inventorying all the mistakes she’d made, forcing Tanya to pause the wheelchair in the street in order to acknowledge them all and politely object to some.

  Cameron, Mrs. Dooley recalls, never glanced up. His expression looked dazed and bleary to her, but she didn’t think much of it; she knew he took painkillers, and chalked his torpor up to their effects. She didn’t know, or didn’t remember knowing, exactly what’d happened to Cameron or where it’d happened—just that he’d walked off to war, the same way her husband had back in 1942, but, unlike Bobby, Cameron hadn’t come walking back, he’d come rolling. Roughly twenty years before that she’d watched Cameron totter around the Harrises’ front yard in his diapers, his little pale legs fat like stacks of donuts, Tanya always shuffling alongside him with her arms splayed wide like a basketballer guarding against the fast break, Cameron’s high-pitched giggles audible even from the corner. Mrs. Dooley preferred, however, not to think about that hard trajectory, the jinxed there-to-here. The world, like her quilts, was riddled with imperfections, but the reasons for these were known only to its creator. You just had to trust that the intentions were good. She sank back into her rocker and watched Tanya push Cameron’s wheelchair into the parking lot of the Biz-E-Bee. His elbows darted out, momentarily, as Tanya jostled the chair over a crumbled curb, reminding Mrs. Dooley of someone startled from a particularly vivid dream.