Immaculate

Then the angel departed from her.

But what did Mary really think after the angel just up and departed, vanished back into thin, heavenly air? I wanted to read about her struggles, her shock, her disbelief—that she was “much perplexed” didn’t quite cut it for me. I wanted thoughts and feelings that would make her real and three-dimensional, a human being rather than a character meant to impart some kind of lesson in faith and obedience.

After I exhausted the relevant Bible passages, I started reading about miracles across the centuries, across religions, and across the globe, the history of the beliefs and the history of the word miracle itself. Miracle—mir-a-cle—a mid-twelfth-century Middle English word derived from the Old French miracle; from Latin miraculum, “object of wonder”; from mirari, “to wonder at”; and from mirus, “wonderful.” Mary, it turns out, wasn’t even the first symbol of miraculous birth to be found in historical and religious literature—the idea of divine conception had been around long before her, in Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Japanese, Greco-Roman and Hellenistic mythologies, Hinduism, and Buddhism. There were commonalities laced throughout all of these ancient belief systems—deities emerging through physically impossible conceptions, and the inexplicable nature of divinity itself.

But why is this a narrative that human beings keep latching onto, keep grasping at as truth, as proof of some supreme being? Why did the divine need a womb at all, really? Why not just spring out of the ground, or fall from the sky? Materialize out of nothing and nowhere?

I kept hoping that something would jump out at me from a page, a word or an image, some cryptic message that would somehow illuminate everything I was going through. But so far—nothing. I wasn’t closer to any sort of explanation than I’d been in August, staring at those damn pee sticks in the woods.

I grabbed my English notebook from the rubble pile and flipped open the front cover. An essay with a big red C stared up at me, and I quickly jammed it in the back pages where I could at least temporarily pretend it didn’t exist. It was my first C in the history of my education, and in English of all classes, my strongest subject. My favorite subject. Reading and writing had always just come so naturally to me, so effortlessly, like breathing and walking and eating. English was the only college major I had ever seriously considered, the only future I could picture for myself. Teaching, editing, writing—anything that involved words on paper, thoughts pi

But now I had proof that I couldn’t even count on a guaranteed A in English, not if I pla

I felt as if I should care more than I did. I should care enough to beg the teacher for a redo. I should care enough to start reading the copy of Heart of Darkness, the next book on our list, that was sitting on my nightstand. I should care—but I didn’t. I was scared of what my parents would say if they knew, and of what other students would think about my stu

I was on my own now, with no clearly set marks to validate my progress. Real life didn’t quite work like that, I was learning. Real life seemed much more pass or fail to me.

I sighed and tossed my English notes back in the heap. Tomorrow would be Friday, and then I’d have the whole weekend to catch up. I would make to-do lists for each of my classes and systematically cross off each assignment, one by one, powering through all of Saturday night if I had to. I’d worked too hard for too many years to ruin it all so close to the end. I didn’t need all As, but I still needed to pass. I still needed to get into college. As soon as the most urgent schoolwork was done, I’d go back to the applications. Reassess, reevaluate. Come up with a new, more functional plan of attack. A plan that somehow figured in caring for and supporting a tiny, helpless, fatherless baby on my own.

I sat down at my desk in front of the computer, sca

There were the standard stories about miraculous healing, and who was to say what really happened in those cases? Amazing genius doctors and brain-numbingly i

A knock at the door made me jump.

“Mina?” my mom called out from the hallway, her voice low and tentative. Before this had all happened, she would have opened the door without giving me the chance to respond, the knock more on principle, an alert rather than an actual question. But privacy lines had changed. My life inside my room was suddenly much more my own, my one free space to think and cry and breathe.

“You can come in, Mom,” I said, closing the window on my computer screen and turning in my seat to face her. She stepped in and shut the door, glancing at me briefly before looking away, her eyes twitchy and unfocused.

“What’s up?” I asked, nervous because she was nervous. Her anxiety was contagious. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

She nodded as she perched herself on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been wanting to talk about this ever since . . . well, ever since we found out the news. But I also wanted to give you time to think on it by yourself, to come to your own decisions. I didn’t want to push you.” She paused, and we both stared down at her hands, her fingers spi