The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-six

By the time she got back to the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying, Catie Washington felt exhausted again, or at least her body was. Her mind was still racing, and her emotions were still in a rising, swirling white tornado of their own. Her thoughts were floating, her feelings were sailing, they were riding out ahead of her body’s ability to keep up with them. She felt alive. Emotionally, she couldn’t wait to get back to her bedroom in the B &B and open her laptop computer and log on to write her story down as fast as she could, in the hope of remembering every detail of the miracle while it was still incredibly vivid in her mind. But physically, she felt terrible again, ill, worn down to the marrow, drained of the tiny bit of remaining energy that had driven her to Small Plains in desperation.

Was it a miracle? she wondered, though she didn’t really feel any doubt that it was. But other people might question her, so she needed to be able to answer them. Was it still a miracle if your body didn’t feel healed, but you felt happier than you ever had in all your life, and you felt lifted up onto a higher plane of existence where amazing things could happen, like fresh flowers raining directly onto you, only onto you, from out of a terrifying sky?

A few of the flowers lay around her on the floor of the van.

When she had risen from the grave, she had gathered into her hands some of the flower heads and stalks, leaves, and buds that had fallen on her. When she got to the car, she let them fall into her lap, from where most of them had tumbled around her as she drove the van. Now she bent, painfully, to pick up as many of them as she could carry again.

But she couldn’t force her body to move after that, and finally she gave up the effort, and simply pressed the horn until the proprietor of the inn came running out to help her.

In her room, seated in a straight-backed chair in front of a scarred old wooden desk, Catie logged onto thevirgin.org, which was the most popular of the small number of websites that had sprung up about the Virgin of Small Plains. Without even stopping to read through the entries from that day, she opened a new window to type up her own account of the astonishing thing that had truly happened to her.

“I have a miracle to report,” she typed. “Some of you know me, because I have participated in this blog before today. If you recognize my blog name, then you know that I have advanced breast cancer that has spread to my lymph nodes, my lungs, and most recently, my brain. I drove down here to Small Plains two days ago after my doctors told me I was going to have to go through another round of surgery, chemo, and radiation, and that there wasn’t much chance left that any of those miserable things would do any good for me. Like you guys, I had heard about the Virgin, and how she had helped lots of people in this town over many years. So here I came, and here I am.”

After that preface, she typed what had happened to her that day, ending her story with, “I survived a tornado that flew directly above me! I actually looked up into the cone of it! And it released flowers on me! I have never felt so protected, so blessed. I know now that no matter what happens in regard to my cancer-even if I die tomorrow, or today-I will be all right. Something in the universe is watching out for me, keeping me safe from the most terrifying harm there could possibly be. Until today, I thought that was cancer. But I have looked up into a deadly tornado, and it has sprinkled flowers onto me, and I have lived to tell you my story. If that’s not a miracle, then I don’t know what is.

“I wish blessings on all of you, as I have been blessed today. May the storms of life fly safely over you and may the flowers of the Virgin bring you beauty and peace as they have done for me today. I don’t know if you will ever hear from me again, but when the storm clouds gather around you, think of me, and know there are flowers in the storm.”

She signed it with the only name by which they knew her, “Love, Catie.”

Slowly, feeling ill but calm, she closed out the blog window.

Then she turned off her computer and lowered the lid of it.

Too ill to get back into her wheelchair, or even to crawl to the bed, she slid as carefully as she could out of the chair, and slipped to the worn, flowered carpet. There, she lay on her side, curling up against the pain she felt, closed her eyes, and grasped some flowers in her hands. Breathing in a shallow, careful way to keep her chest from hurting, Catie lay on the carpet wondering if she could sleep, wondering if she would ever wake again. She felt so transcendent, so peaceful to the depths of her soul, that she wasn’t sure she cared.