The Miraculous

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About the Author

Copyright Page

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For my father,

who believed in this story

and in me

from the very beginning,

and who taught me

to approach this miraculous world

with curiosity, humility, and a sense of wonder.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

—E. E. Cummings

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.

—Mary Oliver

Part One

THE BIRD

Chapter 1

On the night before the funeral, Wunder Ellis stopped believing in miracles.

Before that, he had really and truly believed. In fact, he had been a miracologist.

He became a miracologist when he was five years old. It happened like this:

It was dusk, and he was walking with his mother and father through the woods on the edge of Branch Hill. He had been in the woods before—the woods full of sprawling oaks and knobbly kneed cypresses and Spanish moss that cascaded down branch after branch like so many gray-green waterfalls.

He had been in the woods before. But he had always stayed close to his parents.

That evening, full of after-dinner ice cream and end-of-the-day adventurousness, he ran ahead.

He ran down the path that was potholed and cracked, but paved nonetheless. Above him, a bird cawed out a sunset song.

Then he came to a particularly toweringly tall live oak. It was covered in brilliant green resurrection fern, and beside it there was a dirt trail.

From the path he could see that the trail led to a house, a house in the middle of the woods. He could still hear his parents not far behind him—his father’s voice low and slow, his mother’s faster and full of dips and rises. They were so close that he felt brave.

Brave enough to turn down the trail.

The house was like nothing Wunder had ever seen—a ramshackle, crumble-tumble collection of widow’s walks and towers and sagging porches and broken windows. It was made of a wood that looked black in the fading light.