The Miracle

Paradise Valley, Arizona
Friday, December 22, 2023
(10:00 am)

"We could leave the Christmas lights up till January...This is our place; we make the rules..."

The sound of a Taylor Swift song Lindsey recognized from the car radio greeted him when he came downstairs and into Stevie's kitchen the next morning in his boxers and t-shirt. Stevie had informed him that school had gone out for Christmas vacation the previous afternoon, and she'd reminded him of that fact some time around midnight, when they'd gone downstairs to get the dogs and Lindsey had sent his daughter a text telling her not to worry, that he wouldn't be coming home that night and to go ahead and lock up before she went to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night he'd woken up and was holding Stevie in his arms from behind, and realizing it wasn't a dream, he'd begun to kiss her along her shoulder and up to her neck, and she'd turned around before long and they'd made love again.

Now Stevie was standing in the middle of the kitchen in a black silk robe, two little white dogs happily munching from two pink bowls, and the room smelled like coffee and pancakes. She held a spatula in her hand and was using it for a microphone as she sang along to the radio.

"There's a dazzling haze and a mysterious way about you, dear...Have I loved you twenty seconds or twenty years? Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close forever and ever and oh, take me out, and take me home...You're my, my, my, my...lover."

"More like forty-nine years," he reminded her as he entered the room and kissed her where she stood at the counter.

"Hey listen, Taylor Swift is half our age; she'll catch up," Stevie teased. Pulling a coffee mug down from the cabinet, she turned to him where he was sitting at the table, holding his phone. "Milk and one sugar?" she asked, remembering the way he took his coffee once upon a time.

"Milk but no sugar," he said. "I got used to it after everything happened with my heart a few years ago, and it stuck."

"Well okay then, because I just got you back so now you need to stick!" She presented him with a cup of coffee at the table in a mug that read Paradise Valley Regional High School Outstanding Teacher Award 1999. He smiled at the mug before taking a sip.

"Outstanding Teacher of 1999, huh?" he said, and then, teasing, "Not any of the other forty-eight years, huh?" They both laughed and Stevie stuck her tongue out at him.

"Hey, pal, I'll have you know I have seven of these mugs up here in my cabinet, thank you very much! Last one was in 2001, right after the towers fell."

Lindsey recalled a conversation they'd had about September 11 on Monday night, talking about where they had been when the World Trade Center had been attacked by two planes hijacked by terrorists. Stevie had actually been in New York when it happened with a group of ten students auditioning for music scholarships to Juilliard, and she'd hidden her emotions from the kids as much as possible and collapsed into tears that night in her hotel room, calling her parents to ask their advice about continuing the trip and the program.

"Don't you dare come home," Jess had told his daughter as she'd sobbed into the phone, searching for answers to questions she couldn't name. "This is what you do, Stephanie Lynn. You are a teacher, you are the reason those kids have a love of literature and music and the reason that love of music will give them a future. You came home to Phoenix and found out who you are, and now those kids NEED who you are. You've got this, kiddo."

Four nights later in Atlantic City, New Jersey, ten of the most ambitious and talented kids in Stevie's music program had put on their show for the board, culminating in a last-minute addition to the evening's entertainment - Ms. Nicks singing "Smile" by Nat King Cole, the perfect cathartic moment for everyone after the national tragedy as tears fell from everyone's eyes - including hers - when she sang, "Smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it's breaking...When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by."