The Question of Miracles by Elana K. Arnold Read Free Book Online

and shuffled the cards for a while, liking the sound they made when she split the deck, arched the cards, and fanned them back together. Apart, together. Apart, together. She liked that—how you could take a deck of cards and divide it into pieces and then put it together again, in a completely different order, but that it was still the same deck.
    As long as all the cards were there, she reminded herself. If you lose just one card, then all you have is a bunch of laminated rectangular pieces of paper. It’s not really a deck anymore at all. She supposed that this wasn’t exactly true with Magic cards. In that game, you
could
switch out one card for another. But, Iris thought, that would feel traitorous.
    Â 
    Iris woke up briefly when her parents came in to check on her later. The cards had spilled from her hands all over the bedspread and onto the floor, and Iris heard herself say, “Make sure they’re all there. All sixty of them,” and she felt her mom pull off her socks while her dad turned back the covers and tucked her in.
    She had no idea what time it was when she woke again, and she wasn’t sure what woke her. It wasn’t the sound of rain against the roof, which had turned into a downpour. She was certain of it. Whatever it was came from beneath her, not above.
    Iris swung up to sitting. She sat very still on the edge of her bed, waiting for the sound to come again.
    It didn’t.
    She knew she should lie down and go back to sleep. Instead, Iris lowered her feet to the cold, wooden-planked floor and felt her way across the room. She pulled her fleece robe from its hook on the back of the door and cinched the belt before running her hand along the wall, finding the light switch and flipping it on, squeezing her eyes tightly at first and then slowly opening them, just a crack, then a little more, until at last she could open them all the way.
    Her room all around her looked perfectly average—the boxes still stacked in the corners because she hadn’t bothered to unpack yet and wouldn’t let her dad do it for her, the crumpled clothes in the hamper next to her dresser, a messy desk underneath the night-black window.
    Immediately upon leaving her room, Iris regretted letting her eyes adjust to the light. She blinked into the hallway’s darkness and felt her way to the banister, then down the steep staircase. There were seventeen stairs. She counted them every time.
    On the sixteenth stair, Iris stopped and listened. At last she heard the sound again—it was a lament, a wail, a beseeching prayer.
    It came, she thought, from the closet under the stairs.
    She stepped down the final stair.
    Her eyes were readjusting to the dark. She couldn’t see perfectly, but she could make out the six separate panels of the closet door. The knob. The thin, horizontal strip of darkness where the door didn’t quite meet the floor.
    â€œSarah?” she whispered.
    Nothing.
    Iris imagined what was behind the door—the tennis racket, the rod of hangers each holding a body-shaped coat, the basket of gloves and hats.
    â€œSarah,” she said again. “Are you there?”
    She heard another sound. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight. Her heart either pounded harder or missed a beat—she couldn’t tell which. Her stomach roiled with fear.
    All children are miracles,
Katherine had said.
    And though her family wasn’t religious, Iris closed her eyes and prayed.
Give me a miracle.
    Then she opened the closet door.
    The coats on the rack swung gently, though there was no draft.
    Iris blinked back tears. “Sarah?”
    It wasn’t Sarah; not this time. The coats parted and the cat emerged from the shadows.
    â€œCharles,” Iris said.
    His
meow
was pitiful. He shivered and rubbed against Iris’s leg.
    Iris picked him up and tucked him into her robe. He started purring immediately, like he was too relieved to worry about conserving