The Age of Miracles Read Online Free PDF Page A

moment. I wondered what it might mean to come into the world on this of all nights.
    Soon the streetlights flashed off, sucking the low glow from my room. This should have marked dawn, but the neighborhood remained submerged in the dark. It was a new kind of darkness for me, a thick country black, unseen in cities and suburbs.
    I left my room and crept into the hall. Through the crack beneath my parents’ door, I could see the sickly blue light of the television leaking onto the hall carpet.
    “You’re not sleeping, either?” said my mother when I opened the door. She looked slouchy and worn in an old white nightgown. Bouquets of fine wrinkles fanned out from her eyes.
    I climbed into bed beside her. “What’s all that wind?” I asked.
    We spoke in low tones as if someone were sleeping nearby. The television was on mute.
    “It’s just a Santa Ana,” she said, rubbing my back with the palm of her hand. “It’s Santa Ana season. It’s always like this in the fall, remember? That part, at least, is normal.”
    “What time is it?” I asked.
    “Seven-forty-five.”
    “It should be morning,” I said.
    “It is,” she said. The sky remained dark. There was no hint of dawn.
    We could hear the cats, restless in the garage. I could hear a scratching at the door and Tony’s persistent, uncertain wailing. He was nearly blind from cataracts, but I could tell that even he knew something was wrong.
    “Did Daddy call?” I asked.
    My mother nodded. “He’s going to work another shift because not everyone showed up.”
    We sat for a long time in silence while the wind blew around us. The light from the television flashed on the white walls.
    “When he gets home, let him rest, okay?” said my mother. “He’s had a very rough night.”
    “What happened?”
    She bit her lip and kept her eyes on the television.
    “A woman died,” she said.
    “Died?”
    I’d never heard of such a thing happening under my father’s care. To die in childbirth seemed to me a frontier woman’s death, as impossible now as polio or the plague, made extinct by our ingenious monitors and machines, our clean hands and strong soaps, our drugs and our cures and our vast stores of knowledge.
    “Daddy feels it never would have happened if they were working with a full staff. They were stretched too thin.”
    “What about the baby?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
    For some reason, it was right then and not earlier that I really began to worry. I rolled over in my parents’ bed, and the scent of my father’s earthy cologne wafted up from the sheets. I wanted him home.
    On the television screen, a reporter was standing in a desert somewhere, the sky pinkening behind her. They were charting the sunrise as they would a storm—the sun had reached the eastern edge of Nevada, but there was no sign of it yet in California.
    Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never
is
what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

4
    At last, like a fever, the night broke. Sunday morning: The sky glowed a delicate blue.
    Our backyard was littered in pine needles from the wind. A pair of potted marigolds lay overturned on the patio, the soil spilling from the pots. The umbrella and the lawn chairs had been strewn around the deck. Our eucalyptus trees stood listing and windblown. The dead blue jay remained unchanged.
    In the distance, a wisp of smoke was puffing up from the horizon, floating quickly westward with the wind. I remembered then that this was fire season, too.
    A news helicopter circled the plume like a fly. It was reassuring to know that at least one crew had been assigned to cover this most ordinary of