The accumulated weight of evidence was getting too heavy to brush off as mere coincidence.
He glanced at José and noticed he still looked glum.
“So how come you’re not happy?”
“Because when I gave Rider and Dandy the news they gave me all the credit.”
“So?”
“So I didn’t do anything. And if they go around blabbing that Dr. Martinez can cure AIDS, it’s going to raise a lot of false hopes. And worse, my little clinic is going to be inundated with people looking for a miracle.”
A miracle...that word again.
Dan clapped him on the shoulder, trying to lighten him up.
“Who knows. Maybe you’ve got the healing touch.”
“Not funny, Dan. I don’t have the resources to properly treat the people I’m seeing now. If the clinic starts attracting crowds I don’t know what I’ll do.” Suddenly he grinned. “Maybe I’ll direct them all to Saint Joe’s Loaves and Fishes. If they’re looking for a miracle, that’s the place to find it.”
A knot of dread constricted in Dan’s chest, stopping him in his tracks.
“Don’t even kid about that!”
José laughed. “Hey, think about it: It all fits. Preacher regained his sight there, and both Dandy and Rider are regulars. Maybe the cure-all can be found at Loaves and Fishes. Maybe Sister Carrie’s stirring some special magical ingredient into that soup of hers.”
Dan forced a smile. “Maybe. I’ll have to ask her.”
‡
Carrie held up two zip-lock bags.
“Here they are. The magic ingredients.”
When he’d mentioned José’s remarks to her this morning, she’d smiled and crooked a finger at him, leading him down to the subcellar. It was the first time he’d been down here since he’d carried in the Virgin. After Carrie lit the candles, Dan saw that the Virgin looked different. Her hair was neater, tucked away under her wimple, and those long, grotesque fingernails had been clipped off. The air was suffused with the sweet scent of the fresh flowers that surrounded the bier.
Carrie then reached under her bier and produced these two clear plastic bags.
Dan took them from her and examined them. One contained an ounce or so of a fine, off-white powder; the other was full of a feather-light gray substance that looked for all the world like finely chopped...hair.
He glanced back at Carrie and found her smiling, staring at him, her eyes luminous in the candle glow.
“What are these?” he said, hefting the bags.
“Hers.”
“I don’t get it.”
Carrie reached out and gently touched the bag of fine, gray strands. “This one’s her hair.” She then touched the bag with the powder. “And this is what’s left of her fingernails.”
“Fingernails?”
“I trimmed her nails and filed the cuttings down to powder.”
“Why on earth...?”
Carrie explained about the strand of hair in Preacher’s soup, and how he’d begun to see again almost immediately after.
“But that was coincidence,” Dan said. “It had to be.”
She trapped him with those eyes. “Are you sure?”
“No. I’m not sure. I no longer know what I’m sure of or not sure of. I haven’t been sure of much for a long time, and now I’m not even sure about the things I’ve been sure I couldn’t be sure of.”
Carrie started to laugh.
Dan shook his head. “Sounds like a country-western song, doesn’t it?” Then he too started to laugh.
“Oh, Lord,” Carrie said after a moment. “When was the last time we laughed together?”
“Before Israel.”
Slowly, she sobered. “That seems like so long ago.”
“Doesn’t it.”
Silence hung between them.
“Anyway,” Carrie finally said, “I’ve been dosing the soup with tiny bits of her hair and her ground-up fingernails every day since she arrived.”
Dan couldn’t help making a face. “Carrie!”
“Don’t look at me like that, Dan. If I put in a couple of snippets of hair I mix it with the rosemary. If I use some fingernail, I rub it together with some pepper. Tiny amounts, unnoticeable, completely indistinguishable from the regular spices.”
“But they’re not spices.”
“They are indeed! You can’t deny that things have changed upstairs since the Virgin arrived.”
Dan thought about that and realized she was right. In fact, strange things had been happening at the Loaves and Fishes during the past month or so. Nothing so dramatic as the return of Preacher’s sight, but the place had changed. Nothing that would be apparent to an outsider, but Dan knew things were different.
First off, the mood—the undercurrent of suspicion and paranoia that had prevailed whenever the guests gathered was gone. They no longer sat hunched over their meals, one arm hooked around the plate while the free hand shoveled food into the mouth. They ate more slowly now, and they talked. Instead of arguments over who was hogging the salt or who’d got a bigger serving, Dan had actually heard civil conversation along the tables.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t had to break up a fight in two weeks—a record. The previously demented, paranoid, and generally psychotic guests seemed calmer, more lucid, almost rational. Fewer of them were coming in drunk or high. Rider had stopped talking about finding his old Harley and had even mentioned checking out a Help Wanted sign he’d seen outside a cycle repair shop.
But the biggest change had been in Carrie.
She’d withdrawn from him. It had always seemed to Dan that Carrie had room in her life for God, her order, St. Joe’s Loaves and Fishes, and one other. Dan had been that one other for a while. Now he’d lost her. The Virgin had supplanted him in that remaining spot.
Yet try as he might he could feel no animosity. She was happy. He couldn’t remember seeing her so radiant. His only regret was that he wasn’t the source of that inner light. Part of him wanted to label her as crazy, deranged, psychotic, but then he’d have to find another explanation for the changes upstairs... and the cures.
He stepped past her to stare down at the prone, waxy figure. She looked so much neater, so much more...attractive with her hair fixed and her nails trimmed.
“You think she’s responsible.”
“I know she is.”
Dan’s gaze roamed past the flickering candles to the flower-stuffed vases that rimmed the far side and clustered at the head and foot of the makeshift bier.
“You’ve done a wonderful job with her. But how do you keep sneaking off with all these flowers? Aren’t you afraid one of these trips somebody in the church is going to catch you and ask you what you’re up to?”
“One of what trips? I haven’t borrowed any flowers from the church since she arrived.”
Dan turned back to the flowers—mums, daffodils, gardenias, gladiolus, their stalks were straight and tall, their blossoms full and unwrinkled—then looked at Carrie again.
“But these are...”
“The same ones I brought down the first day.” Her smile was blinding. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Dan continued to stare into those bright, wide, guileless eyes, looking for some hint of deception, but he found none. Suddenly he wished for a chair. His knees felt rubbery. He needed to sit down.
“My God, Carrie.”
“No. Just His mother.”
That wasn’t what he needed to hear. Things like this didn’t happen in the real world, at least not in Dan’s real world. God stayed in His heaven and watched His creations make the best of things down here while priests like Dan acted as go-betweens. There was no part in the script for His mother—especially not in the subcellar of a Lower East Side church.
“Is it her, Carrie? Can it really be her?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, beaming, unhindered by the vaguest trace of doubt. “It’s her. Can’t you feel it?”
The only thing Dan could feel right now was an uneasy chill seeping into his soul.