Miracles

We started in a truck. Nolan and me were both born in the same truck going to the same hospital on the exact same day four years apart. I think that if we would’ve had the same dad God would have made us twins. But since we didn’t I am lots older and Nolan is lots smaller.
He’s sleeping on the bed. I like on the floor and watch him. He looks happy when he’s sleeping. I like to pretend he’s normal.
He’s so small though, I’m scared. He’s getting smaller and smaller and he was already small because he’s only nine. Pretty soon he’ll be so small I wont be able to see him without a microscope.
Maybe it’ll stop. I close my eyes really tight and imagine Nolan really big, he’s a huge basketball player. I hope really bad that he will get well. I say a prayer before bed.
Dear God please bring a miracle and save Noley.
The moon comes in the room suddenly through a crack in the blinds and shines on his face. I feel very better. In my dreams he stands up again and he’s taller than me. Maybe he’ll be an astronaut and I’ll look at him through a telescope instead.
Nolan wakes up when the sun wakes up and he cries. He wakes me from sleep. He is all my dreams awake.
“Noley,” I sit up, “it’s ok.” I think he hurts bad sometimes.
I hug him hard. “I’m never going to let go.” If I never let go he could never leave me. I think I can feel him getting smaller the longer I hug him. I hope the miracle works soon but then again it’s never too late when it’s a miracle.
“Let’s go play,” I put him in the wheelchair and wheel him around. I wheel him everywhere because he can’t use his arms anymore.
Today we go to the store, the beach and the park. He likes to see and hear everything. I like to see and hear him.
When I put him to bed at night he clings around my neck and tries to hug me. He can only half do it. I hug him back twice as hard to make up.
His voice trembles when he talks. It’s something that started a little while ago and keeps getting worse. He buries his face into my shoulder and I hold him like I will never let go.
“I don’t want to leave,” he cries.
“I’ll never leave you,” I say,” I’ll stay with you forever.”
“I know. I’ll leave you.”
Sometimes he wakes up in the night and finds my hand wherever it is. He squeezes so tight he feels strong to me. I know he will always find me.

The next day is Monday. Monday is a no fun day because Nolan doesn’t like going to school. He’s in fourth grade. I’m in eighth. I ride the little bus to school with him every morning. It is the bus that only picks up disabled kids.
Nolan used to like school before he lived in the wheelchair. I think it used to make him feel normal. Nolan wants to be normal almost as much as he wants to live. But now he screams every time mom tries to get him to school.
“I don’t need school,” he says, “I’m going to die.” Mom doesn’t know how to deal with him.
I however know how to work him. “Everyone’s going to die.” I kneel down where I am eye level with him in his wheelchair and can look into his clear brown eyes. They are so perfect yet all wrong.
“You wouldn’t want to die stupid would you?” I ask. Which is impossible, he is already not stupid. “You have to learn as much as you can before you die because that is the only knowledge you can use in Heaven.”
“Really?”
“That’s why we’re alive.”
“Well I don’t believe you,” he says. “You’re lying. You’re just trying to get me to school and I don’t wanna go.”
O f course I am lying. I don’t care anything about school. I only care about him.
“Well then do it for me.”
He would do anything for me. I know he would. I would do anything for him and I do everything I can. That’s why he loves me. Mom doesn’t understand this.
“You’re a miracle Darcy,” she says when I help my brother on the bus.
I believe in miracles but I am not one. I cannot even save my brother. She is wrong.

In summer I stay with Nolan all the time. He is smaller now. When he was weak I stay with him in his room. I lay a cot by the bed and close my eyes and see prettier pictures. I never want to leave.
Nolan wants to leave. He talks about the pictures behind his eyes.
“I drive that truck all across the world and swim over the water. I deliver things. Food to starving people and medicine to sick people and toys to poor kids. I make everyone happy.”

When Nolan has trouble breathing he just gasps and coughs. But now he is too weak to cough, he suffocates.
“Mom!” I yell, “mom!”
Mom calls the paramedics. Nolan’s respiratory muscles are failing.
Nolan is very white and when mom is off the phone he is passed out.
When the ambulance arrives paramedics put him on a stretcher and take him away in the ambulance car.
“I want to go with him,” I say as the ambulance siren blares away. A little late now I realize. I feel so bad.
“We’re going right now,” my mother says. She is putting on her coat.
“Go get your shoes.”
“But I told him I’d never leave him,” I whine.
“Darcy, he’s unconscious,
Let’s just pray this isn’t the end.”
Dear God please save my brother.

It is not the end, not the very end.
They have Nolan hooked up to machines in the patient ward. Machines that help him breathe, machines that monitor the machines that breathe and machines that monitor the machines that monitor the machines that breathe.
Nolan is conscious now. He says it doesn’t hurt. But now it’s hard for him to talk and he stumbles over words and even sounds kind of, well, drunk.
Not that I would know.
Grandma’s come to visit, both of them and grandpa too. Then there’s my father’s brother and this really annoying cousin of mine named Becca whom I’ve never met.
“Go take Becca to meet Nolan,” my mother instructs me.
When we go down the hall she looks so bored and so totally uninterested and I want to make her cry.
“Hey Nolan,” I say when we enter his room, “this is our cousin Becca. Can you say hi?”
He tries for me. “H-h-hhi b-b-be-cc-ca.”
She bursts into tears and has to leave. It is just what I wanted. Except then he makes me cry too when he tries to say hi to me.

I read to him. I sing to him sometimes to help him fall asleep. He dreams of trucks and oceans and saving the world. I still dream of him.
He is so scared of death I think. He is scared of being by himself. He is so weak and when I hold him, so small. I try to comfort him but I know nothing of what’s coming for him and I know nothing of what is coming for me either. I am so scared of being by myself.
It astonishes me how little I know and I’m so powerless. My brother has more power than me and he is so weak. He has power though, like to change things. He changes me. And I cannot even change myself.

Still when we close our eyes we are anywhere in the world. When Nolan closes his eyes we are anything in the world. We close our eyes sometimes so hard it hurts. And maybe it is a miracle, that we can close our eyes and make everything okay.
“Do you see what I see Nolan? I see you. I see you and me forever. There is nothing in the world I love more than you. You are all my hopes, all my dreams, all my prayers and every miracle.” I love nothing else in the world.