Anatomy of a Miracle Read online

  Smokes, beer, Cap’n Crunch, a half-gallon jug of milk: This was Tanya’s shopping list that afternoon. For other staples, she sometimes drove her red Kia to the Winn-Dixie on Pass Road or to the Walmart Supercenter down by the beach, but because she was ten months into a one-year driver’s license suspension, owing to a DUI conviction, driving anywhere was a sizable risk. She tried to limit herself to shuttling Cameron back and forth to the VA medical center in Biloxi, which was not only necessary but seemed less likely to result in her arrest or at least in her conviction. For day-to-day shopping, however, it was safer to load up at the Biz-E-Bee, which stocks most of what you want if you don’t want much. Moreover, she figured the sunlight and salt air were good for her brother, whose moods tended to blacken in the late afternoon before the beer and the pills got to fermenting in his bloodstream. Sometimes during those hours, when he’d be playing the video game “Halo,” she’d notice that neck-vein of his seething, and a violent froth of drool bubbling at the corner of his mouth, and think: Time to make some groceries.

  Today, however, wasn’t one of those days. Today wasn’t about “distraction therapy,” the clinical term that she’d later hear applied to her Biz-E-Bee excursions. Today was listless, hot, unremarkable. And, at around three thirty p.m., with none of the guests on that day’s episode of Dr. Phil tugging a single one of her heartstrings, Tanya Harris had stubbed out the last of her cigarettes. Her brother, down to a single beer in the fridge, shrugged his lukewarm consent.

  Like the afternoon in question, the Biz-E-Bee store can seem, at a passing glance, unremarkable. It sits low-slung and slabbish on the corner, with steel bars shielding a random few front windows and neon beer signs and cigarette posters and local flyers crowding the remaining windows with a look of equal impenetrability. On some afternoons, this one included, shrink-wrapped pallets of soft drinks and cases of beer are parked out front. Most often it falls to a fifty-four-year-old semi-employee named Ollie Morgan to unpack the pallets and haul their contents into the store. Ollie is more or less homeless—if you ask him where he lives, he’ll point west; ask him again, the next day, and that same finger points east—and the Biz-E-Bee’s owners, a Vietnamese immigrant couple named Lê Nhu Quỳnh and Lê Thị Hat, pay him in cash or merchandise, depending on his wants. Sometimes it’s a twenty- or fifty-dollar bill; other times, a pickled egg and a Yoo-hoo. In exchange for this fluctuant compensation Ollie also scoops up parking-lot litter and hauls the trash out to the dumpster, and occasionally babysits the Lês’ three-year-old daughter, Kim, who spent much of the first two years of her life confined to a playpen in a back corner of the store, by the mop closet, where her favorite activity was rolling a cold unopened can of Red Bull around the playpen. (Once the can warmed she’d lose interest, at which point her parents or Ollie would replace it in the cooler and fetch her a fresh one, cycling through a dozen or more cans a day.) More than anything else, however, Ollie appears to merely hang out, smoking cigarettes or chewing toothpicks outside by the front door, looking half security guard and half loiterer, his gaze sweeping the parking lot like that of a convenience-store Argos. Newcomers to the store sometimes mistake his silence for surliness, but Ollie is mute. When he tries to speak, a bass monotone bleat emerges, like a foghorn. Little Kim sometimes imitates him, though the effect is more goatish—to her parents’ delight, and, to judge by his exuberant clapping, to Ollie’s delight as well.

  Ollie was inside the store when Tanya entered that afternoon. The broil of the slanted sunlight looked to be defeating him; he was clinging to the front counter with a Yoo-hoo in one hand, his complexion liquid with sweat. She’d parked Cameron outside by the newspaper machine, beneath a window on which was hand-painted—not quite legibly, owing to the bars striating the words—WE ACCEPT EBT. The brightness level of Cameron’s mood tended to dictate whether Tanya wheeled him in or left him outside, and today’s mood, while not overly dark, was lethargic enough to dissuade her from bringing him in. It didn’t seem worth the trouble. She asked if he’d be okay out there, to which he nodded vacantly—a groggy and almost pained-looking single nod. This brought a frown to her face, because while Cameron often seemed to “hole up inside of himself” in this way, as Tanya describes it, he usually did so in private—in their living room, or in the backyard by the grill where on breezier days he often retreated with a six-pack and some cigs with his ears plugged with Patsy Cline songs. That she was over-vigilant with his moods was established fact, but the six months that followed Cameron’s release from Brooke Army Medical Center—when the phrase “suicidal ideation” entered her life, hanging there like a spiral of storm clouds banked out in the Gulf—had left her with an acute fearfulness that felt as permanent as her tattoos. Even four years later, she couldn’t help but interpret sustained moping as the potential prelude to self-annihilation. A case of indigestion had once been enough to spark panic in her; it had taken Cameron half an hour to convince the VA social worker Tanya’d called that it was diarrhea, not suicide, currently threatening his existence.

  She asked him again, with her hands on his forearms: “Cam, you sure you okay? You want something besides beer?”

  “Naw,” he said, and without looking up flicked his left hand to dismiss her. “I’m all good.” All good: To her that’s what he’d always been, her all-good little brother. People hadn’t always gotten Cameron, who’d been a little too “sensitive”—her word—to fully connect with his high-school football teammates but not quite sensitive enough to click with softer-minded guys, the guitar players and tattooists Tanya favored. She’d never seen anyone fight harder than she’d seen Cameron fight one awful night after their mother died when he put Tommy Landry into the emergency room with what even the doctors called a “broken face,” but she’d never seen anyone cry harder than him, either: When their mother died he wept for twenty-four hours straight, came out of his room to smoke half a cigarette, then went back in and cried for twelve hours more. At the age of eight, he spent three days and nights camped beside the backyard grave of his run-over dog, to assist in case of the dog’s resurrection; for the entirety of that time his cheeks remained so wet and streaky that their mother fretted about mold developing. Their mother always said Cameron had a “low boiling point,” as well as “skin thinner than an onion’s,” and, as opposed to the Grinch on that Christmas show, a “heart one size too big.” People didn’t tend to see the bulge of that XXL heart much anymore, Tanya thought, probably because Cameron was so quiet—and he’d only grown more taciturn since coming back from Afghanistan, his quietude sometimes competing with Ollie’s. And those who did see it, like some of his nurses and therapists, seemed to ascribe it to his injury, because every veteran confined to a wheelchair gets awarded a heart one size too big. Tanya figured that was why the Purple Heart was a heart.

  She turned to soak up one more look at him before entering the store. In retrospect, she says, he looked so bleak out there, slumped in his wheelchair, his T-shirt already splotched with sweat stains, his chin drooping toward his chest, his shoulders slumped inward, his expression betraying not a single forward thought—just the same backward thoughts he constantly recycled through his head, the what-if-I’d…questions with which he quizzed himself daily. But she doesn’t believe she considered all that then, in those few seconds before she slipped into the air-conditioning. Maybe some of it; Tanya’s mind tends to dart, like a bullfrog navigating lily pads. If anything, she was double-checking to make sure she’d parked him in the shade.

  She was inside the store, by her own estimate, for five, maybe six minutes. A more precise measurement of the time, however, comes from the Biz-E-Bee’s co-owner, Lê Thị Hat, known as Hat, who received a call from the store’s tobacco distributor at nearabout the same moment Tanya entered. A billing dispute kept her on the phone, according to her call history, for seven minutes and forty-seven seconds. She ended the call almost immediately after Tanya’s first scream.

  D
uring those seven minutes and forty-seven seconds, Tanya gathered up the milk and beer and Cap’n Crunch. Another customer was in the store at the time, a middle-aged man unfamiliar to Tanya and the owners. He purchased a pack of cigarettes and a Slim Jim and was out of the store by the time Tanya arrived with her arms full at the register. Ollie, she recalls, was standing a little too close to the register, appearing to be analyzing the nutrition label of his drained bottle of Yoo-hoo. If she hadn’t known Ollie was Ollie, she might’ve lined up behind him, but instead she squeezed herself into the aromatic space beside him and dumped her groceries onto the counter. Behind the counter, back toward the office door, Hat was scowling hard at whatever she was hearing over the phone or possibly from the way Little Kim was yanking her leg and pleading for something in Vietnamese, possibly both. After waving to Tanya, Hat’s descending hand morphed into a single-fingered wait gesture that she aimed at her daughter, who ignored it. Quỳnh, hunching on a swivel stool behind the counter, tallied Tanya’s purchase while half-listening to his wife’s conversation, at one point snapping, “Tell him I say bullshit,” which Hat ignored just as thoroughly as Kim had ignored her. Then, with a sudden whipcrack of a smile, Quỳnh focused on Tanya and her request for two packs of Bonus Value Lights, which he had to stand up to fetch from the overhead cigarette bays, emitting a wheezy but accommodating groan as he did so.

  For the remaining four minutes, they talked. Neither Tanya nor Quỳnh can recall precisely what they talked about, which isn’t unusual when Tanya is involved: almost certainly the heat, they say; probably the amount of that week’s Powerball lottery, for which Quỳnh planned to drive to Louisiana the next day, as lottery tickets are illegal to purchase in Mississippi; and perhaps Little Kim, whom Quỳnh, by his own admission, relentlessly brags about. Kim’s had been a perilous birth, owing to underdeveloped lungs that landed her in a neonatal intensive care unit for her first three weeks, so for Quỳnh every benchmark of growth—first steps, first words, first Coca-Cola—feels doubly momentous, a strike against fate that he savors trumpeting. At some point, they agree, Quỳnh must surely have asked about Tanya’s brother; whatever answer she gave, however, is lost to their memories. The unpaid total—$31.94, in blocky red numerals—shone on the register display as they kept talking, and as Ollie, beside her, gave up assessing his Yoo-hoo and turned his attention out the window.

  Outside in his wheelchair, Cameron’s head lolled from a sudden burst of nausea—or rather, from some unfamiliar subspecies of nausea-like feeling—that rolled through him from the bottom up, from his gut northward to his head. But then, just as quickly and mysteriously as it struck him, the sensation disappeared. Maybe a weird spurt of heatstroke, he thought, or a late-blooming pharmaceutical side effect; or more likely some kind of gas bubble, a common hazard with Tanya’s cooking; or maybe it wasn’t anything worth diagnosing at all, because he seemed fine again. He fished out a cigarette and lit it. The parking lot was empty now, the dude who’d been in the store having left in a Ford F150 bearing Hancock County plates. From the truck window the dude had chucked an empty sixteen-ounce Coke bottle on his way out. Below a vibrant yellow billboard for Taaka vodka across Division Street, traffic coursed east and west, all those cars and pickups glinting drearily in the shimmy-shimmy heat. Someone pulled into the sno-ball stand across Division and hopped out of the car fast, as though to remedy a bona fide case of heatstroke.

  With the second or third drag Cameron sucked from the cigarette, the nausea returned, striking so hard and so fast that as if with singed fingers he tossed away the cigarette. He heard himself groan, and, as he’d taught himself to do with pain during his long convalescence, he clamped shut his eyelids to shove blackness into his mind. This blackness had always helped, for reasons he suspected were uniquely personal and maybe a little weird: Without it, the juxtaposition of the pain and the visible world compounded everything, because that visible world as he’d always known it had never included the varieties of pain he’d experienced. Plus the world, peopled or unpeopled, staring back at him in those moments added a layer of anxiety, left him feeling vulnerable, intruded upon, and in some peculiar way ashamed. Closing his eyes, he’d found, allowed him to meet the pain on a more neutral field—by taking the fight inside, rather than out, and away from prying eyes.

  Except that it wasn’t pain, or really even related to nausea—not exactly, anyway. The sensation was more like an interior lightness or ethereality, as though helium were being slowly released inside him, or as though his bodily fluids were transforming into a buoyant vapor—a yeasty, floaty feeling. To try to extinguish it he produced a vigorous belch, but this had no effect. The not-nausea wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, he realized, yet it was alien and powerful, and wanted alleviating. A sudden gush of saliva swirled around and beneath his tongue as he felt himself beset with dizziness or faintness—again, something airy. Leaning forward in his wheelchair yielded some incremental relief, Cameron found. Leaning farther forward granted him another fraction of ease. He rocked himself forward to magnify this effect, swinging his head between his knees and feeling a slick rope of drool slap his chin.

  And then. God, then.

  Cameron Harris has gone over what happened next a thousand-plus times in his mind, in thunderstruck variations of his what-if-I’d quiz, and then hundreds more times to doctors, nurses, friends, strangers, reporters, television producers, to his parish priest, to the investigator from Rome, to the people who wrote him emails and letters and to the people who telephoned him in the darkest hours of the night from places like Malaysia and Albania plus the ones who showed up unannounced and trembling on his doorstep, but still, to this day, he cannot say if there was a signal, a command, a moment of purpose or clarity, or even an awareness of what he was doing. The closest comparison, he says, is a mindset that can sometimes develop during combat, when, flooded with the effects of adrenaline, the brain shifts into a state he likens to autopilot, and you find you’re obeying your body rather than directing it, that your hands and arms and legs are doing things you didn’t wittingly instruct them to, and you feel like a passenger in your own body, swept along by the force of action and some bone-marrow urge to stay alive.

  What Cameron did, then, wasn’t conscious. He didn’t decide to do it. He says he didn’t even know he was doing it until after he’d done it.

  Where his memory kicks in is the Taaka vodka billboard. Whether or not his eyes were open before then, his first visual recollection is the billboard, and his first sensation was the bizarre instability he felt staring at it, because the billboard was moving—was shifting within his frame of vision as though tilting from the collapse of its support structure, as though sliding off its struts. He was simultaneously aware of a strange and very close sound: the faint scritch of something on the asphalt beneath him. The tilting billboard above, the scrape-sound below: Neither made sense to him until he glanced down, but what he saw there didn’t make sense to him either, because those were his own red Nikes on the asphalt, which meant he was out of his chair.

  Which meant he was asleep, and dreaming. Except that he wasn’t. He was awake, and he was standing. And what’s more—he was walking. He watched his left foot rise and then descend back to the asphalt a few inches ahead of its former position: That was walking, yes, that was its very definition. He matched that step with his right foot—by now he was consciously controlling his feet, his heart flopping in his chest like a mullet in a bucket. Cameron Harris, whose spine had been severed in Afghanistan, who’d been assured and reassured by brigades of medical authorities that he would never walk again, was walking slowly but steadily across the Biz-E-Bee parking lot, his chest so frenzied with fear and disbelief and incipient exultation that he felt himself gasping for oxygen.

  At that very moment, just across Reconfort Avenue, Mrs. Dooley glanced up from her quilting for no other reason than that Mrs. Dooley was always glancing up. What she spotted across the street caused her
hands to bunch and shake, her quilting needle drawing a speckle of blood from a fingertip. For a moment she sat frozen, suspicious of hallucinations; in his final dementia-wracked years her husband, Bobby, had claimed to have seen his mother roaming their house, all the more remarkable and disturbing because as an orphan Bobby had never met his mother. She adjusted her glasses as a further guard, this time against a trick of the eye—but no, there he was, little almost-trouble Cameron Harris, his bottom half rendered useless by war, taking another fragile step forward like someone negotiating a high ledge or the thin ice of a frozen pond, each step cautious and consequential. “Holy Jesus,” she whispered, rising from her chair and shuffling in her house slippers to her porch rail. And then, when he managed another step, this one longer and more confident and all but graceful save the buckling of his bony out-of-practice legs, she raised her head and with the same strength on which she’d drawn to survive four hours in a floating refrigerator she bellowed across Reconfort Avenue: “HOLY JESUS PRAISE YOUR NAME.”