Page 28 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

The Universe speaks in shouts and whispers. The whispers are fine, but I honestly think it’s got some work to do on its inside voice.

—Evie Oxby, Come at Me, Boo

A startled-looking Reno stood on the deck of Beatrice’s houseboat sanding a long piece of wood as Beatrice raced down the dock.

Reno took one look at her face. “Just about done. Leaving now.”

Beatrice waved her hand in what she hoped was a Don’t worry about it motion but didn’t wait to see if it was received that way.

She boiled water for a cup of tea, watching her hands shake as she waited. Strangely, they didn’t feel connected to her body. It was as if she were watching someone else move through the boat. These were her hands? Really?

She peeked out the blinds—Reno was already heading up the ramp, away from the boat, and that was probably for the best.

Then she flipped on the lamp, got in bed, and opened her laptop.

Miracles were fucking real.

And Beatrice was going to die.

She was going to die , as in she would die soon .

Everyone was going to die, yes, and everyone knew that, but Beatrice had never realized until this very moment how much she’d enjoyed the denial she’d cultivated.

Decades in the future, yeah, she’d known she would die.

But it wouldn’t happen until she was old, until she was tired, until she was ready.

It had never been anything to worry about, not really, even though at any moment of her life so far, her breath could have been snatched away unexpectedly.

A drive-by shooting, a medication mix-up, a subway derailment.

So nothing had changed, not really. She even had a clean bill of health, something that should have reassured her. But all possible reassurance had been stripped from her when Dario had flown into her arms.

Impossible things didn’t happen. That was simply their nature. Unless they were miracles.

After a lifetime of nothing impossible occurring to her, Beatrice had experienced four miracles. Numbers were important; numbers made sense. To zoom from zero to four? Miracles were real, and numbers didn’t lie. That meant three miracles remained. Then her own death.

Beatrice opened a new Google Sheet, poising her fingers over the new, blank cells.

Spreadsheets were where she could lay her brain down, setting each thought into its own discrete block so that she could fly up and look down on everything from a great height.

It worked so beautifully with math—when each number was contained in its perfect little box, she could see where the problems were.

Then she could make them work better, or best case, fix them entirely.

It wasn’t just addition and subtraction.

Even though Iris had teased her mercilessly for doing it, when Beatrice had been trying to decide whether it was a good idea to marry Grant, she’d used a spreadsheet to enumerate the pros and cons.

She’d assigned each pro a number between one and ten, and had done the same thing for the cons.

Pro: they had good, rambunctious sex. That earned an eight.

Con: he was a man, and she honestly preferred the clean softness of women.

That got a six. Pro: Naya was sick, and she and Dad wanted to live closer to Beatrice than ninety minutes away.

Grant helped them find an affordable house just a block away from his place.

That was a huge ten in the pro column. (It would have been an eleven if Beatrice exaggerated in columns, but she never had, and she never would.) Con: after a year of trying to engage with Grant’s boys, the closest she’d come was when she learned to lace a lacrosse stick and Josh had said, “Not bad. For a girl.” Four.

In the end, the pro column had 101 points, the con column had 97. So she’d married Grant.

And even now, the numbers probably still held.

Numbers were never at fault. Grant had changed, that was all.

No, wait, he hadn’t changed—she’d simply failed to notice that Dulcina had claimed a higher numerical ranking than Beatrice had.

And that, had she known it, would have earned a big fat ten in the cons, which would have put her final total at 101 pro, 107 con.

With that result, she wouldn’t have married him.

So. Could a spreadsheet help manage mortal doom?

There was only one way to find out.

Beatrice took a too-large sip of her tea and typed, Life Expectancy Checklist.

In the first column, she typed, How many years left?

In the second column, she typed, Things to do with this time.

Out the window, a sailboat chugged past under motor power, and her bed rocked slowly in the light wake. The tea in her cup moved gently in the same rhythm.

Okay, it was always better to start with the focus dialed all the way out.

Zoom out and up, then look down from a bird’s-eye view.

She was forty-five. Her doctor had said she was healthy.

Did that mean she could live to a hundred?

Not very likely, but if she didn’t factor in the prediction, it wasn’t totally impossible.

Under How many years left? she typed, If I have 55 years left.

To the right of that, she started her list, each item getting its own vertically centered, left-justified text box.

Travel to every continent, including Antarctica.

Learn to draw.

Be able to play two instruments well and one badly but with enthusiasm [guitar, ukulele, and accordion?].

Have a strong community around me that I love, a community that loves me for who I am.

A whole community? How did someone get that? How was it made?

In school, it came built in, she supposed, though she never saw the people she went to high school or college with anymore.

Presumably it happened at the workplace, but for her whole career, she’d been employed by Barnard Family Finance in their two-person office.

Other than Dad, she’d never had workmates with whom to gather around a watercooler.

She’d never been tasked with bringing a carrot cake for a coworker’s birthday.

True, she’d always enjoyed that she didn’t have to deal with annoying associates she couldn’t escape.

But maybe bringing donuts and huddling in a break room had a greater purpose?

It had been easier when she and Iris had been together.

Iris couldn’t walk into a café without running into a best friend or ex-lover, and she couldn’t walk out without making a new pal destined to become another bestie.

She and her buddies had included Beatrice in the things they did.

Then Grant and his group had done the same.

Beatrice was forty-five, and had never had to build her own circle of friends.

Idly, Beatrice typed into an empty box, Dulcina, go fuck yourself.

Delete, delete, delete.

Building her own community would probably take fifty-five years. At least.

Next up: If I have 25 years left.

She’d be seventy when she died—okay, that was creeping into the age range she’d consider actually old. When she’d been twenty, seventy wasn’t old, it was ancient . (And forty-five was old then.)

To the right, she slipped new goals into their tidy text boxes:

Visit beautiful places I’ve never been. Sublist: Venice, Paris, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, San Miguel de Allende.

Read one book a week for pleasure, not for learning.

Take a pottery class.

Make one new friend a year.

Beatrice sighed and pushed her feet more firmly under her new down comforter. The duvet cover was dark purple with bright red poppies. Grant would have hated it, but that’s not why she’d bought it. She’d bought it because she loved it.

She typed: If I have ten years left.

If she died in ten years, she’d be fifty-five.

Learn to braid my hair like Cordelia’s.

Ice skating lessons.

Live in a home filled with things that make my heart happy, no justifications needed.

Beatrice looked around—could this be that home?

Some of the old timber still needed fixing and painting, and there wasn’t a single knickknack on any surface, and anyway, she had none to place on a surface even if she’d wanted to.

What had happened to her tchotchkes? Maybe she had a box of them somewhere.

Grant had hated clutter—he’d always wanted his home to make anyone feel welcome.

Like the best kind of hotel, neutral and inclusive.

The problem was that “neutral and inclusive” equaled absolutely zero personality.

Fuck that. Maybe she’d go to a flea market or thrift store this week and actively search out something just for her .

Minna would surely know the best places to go—perhaps she’d come, too?

Would Cordelia have the time to go with them?

She could see it: Cordelia poking through a rack of polyester blouses, pulling out a pair of linen overalls covered in avocados, holding them up with the non-ironic intent to buy them.

Minna with a book on sailing the West Indies under her arm and a cracked incense burner in her hands, peering eagerly at the creepy doll Beatrice would joke about buying (but would never), approving of the small blue paperweight Beatrice would buy instead.

Soon, hopefully, Reno would install the bookshelves that Beatrice would fill with things she loved: funky lamps from the sixties, framed postcards of places she’d explored, maybe a glass frog that was objectively ugly but meant something to her because of how she felt the day she found it.

That was, if she didn’t keep running Reno off like she just had.

And if Beatrice lived long enough.

She shook her head.

Next: If I have five years left.

Know where I belong.

Know who I love.

Be a good friend.

Be a great family member.

Why was this exercise getting scarier?

She didn’t want to think about the answer, so she rushed ahead to the next one: If I have one year left.

Help Minna decide on colleges to apply to, if she wants to go.

Help Cordelia with a problem. Any problem.

Learn how Reno takes her coffee and surprise her with a cup.

Do that Book Concierge thing at Keelia’s shop.

Accept Astrid’s offer to teach me how to knit.

Slowly, Beatrice double-clicked Astrid’s name and replaced it with Cordelia’s. She wasn’t ready to want anything from Astrid. Maybe in a year. But maybe not.

A boat’s horn blared outside. She jumped so much, she spilled tea into her lap, just missing the keyboard.

Then she typed the next time frame:

If I have one month left.

What would she do, honestly, if she knew for an absolute fact that she had thirty days to live?

Beatrice closed her eyes and breathed, trying to still the throb that rose in her chest.

If she had just one month left, would she curl her body into a fetal shape and cry with the covers over her head? Would she take up smoking and drink herself to sleep each night? Why wouldn’t she?

Slowly, she typed:

I would tell Cordelia, Minna, and Reno that I want to know them.

I would try to be myself with them. Truly myself.

I would try to be brave.

I would try to be open.

Okay, this was definitely the most difficult spreadsheet she’d ever made, even harder than the taxes she’d filed for the ex–gambling addict who’d come clean after forty-one years of dodging the IRS.

If I have one week left.

She took what was perhaps the deepest breath of her life.

I would ask each of them (Cordelia, Minna, Reno, maybe even Astrid) to spend as much time telling me their stories as they could spare.

I would listen.

I would—

She deleted the words in the box.

Then she typed the full phrase.

I would let myself love them.

Her chest thudded—was this a heart attack? Would she even live to type another line? Would she ever get used to this fear?

Then:

If I have one day left.

But her fingers gave up. Beatrice couldn’t fill in the boxes to the right.

Nothing came except stupid words like Maybe and If I could just , ridiculous words she erased, one by one, words with no attached phrases.

She couldn’t do it.

Beatrice closed the laptop and then her eyes.

What if…

She let the big thought come.

I got myself into this mess.

All of her best thinking had gotten her to this exact place. She’d worked her whole life to do the right thing, making sure her sums were correct, but now, after all that careful work, she’d lost her husband. She’d lost her home. She’d lost the person she’d thought her father was.

With all of the best, most thoughtful plans she could make, this was where she’d ended up. In a houseboat that for all she knew leaked like a colander in the winter.

Alone.

For a person who needed proof, this seemed pretty indisputable. Her old way of thinking and living hadn’t worked.

Up till now, she’d needed proof to believe in something. But what if wanting proof that something existed was simply a different kind of belief, just the belief it didn’t exist?

What would happen if, instead of insisting on evidence, she did the opposite?

For once in her goddammed life, what if she decided to believe in things until they were disproved ?

Miracles—she’d seen four of them happen right in front of her.

So… until someone could show her how they weren’t miracles, what if she just believed in them, too?

A psychic prophesying her early death?

What if she chose to believe it unless it could be proved false?

If Cordelia said that magic existed, what if Beatrice believed in magic until she was shown actual hard proof that she shouldn’t?

This meant that there was an action item she could take now, if she decided to do this.

She could learn everything there was to know about magic.

If she believed in it, she would need to understand it.

Beatrice flipped open the laptop again.

If someone told her she had only one day left…

Fuck.

No, she still had no idea what she’d do.

But—if magic and miracles existed, if the dead could speak to the living, that meant that there was an order to the universe that she didn’t understand.

Did that, in turn, imply that there was a greater, orderly force in charge of it all?

What if that force could hear her?

In the box to the right of If I have one day left , Beatrice typed one simple word.

Please.