Free Some Kind of Miracle by Iris R. Dart Page A

at Dahlia.
    “This way I can die three times as fast,” she said. Then she laughed at her own joke and turned and walked up the steps, and a chill swept through Dahlia at the familiarity of the raspy family voice. It was the way Aunt Ruthie sounded when she used to holler upstairs at midnight to tell them to stop singing and go to sleep.
    Dahlia sighed. Oh, my God. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought, hating to admit to herself that Louie the weasel had been right. This woman was too far gone to remember a thing. There was probably no point in staying here one more minute. She clearly didn’t know Dahlia. This was a colossal waste of time. Dahlia’s mouth felt dry, and when she reached into her purse to look for a piece of gum, she saw the contract Marty Melman had sent over from the studio sitting there as a reminder of the reason she’d come, and she sighed. Don’t be a jerk, she said to herself. At least give it a try.
    After all, if Sunny would sign the paper, who caredif she remembered Dahlia or didn’t remember her? This person didn’t have to like her or want be taken to lunch by her. This was not some sentimental trip down memory lane. This was a business transaction, and Dahlia would have to treat it as one. To hell with feeling nostalgic. That wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She was talking to a woman who was smoking three frigging cigarettes at a time, for God’s sake, so how much sense did she have to make? Okay, she told herself, deep breath. Jump right in.
    “Sunny,” Dahlia said, following her up the steps. This has to work, she thought, or I’ll be back watching Marty Melman pee. “I’m your cousin Dahlia. When I was born, you stood outside the nursery and told everyone they had to wash their hands before they came in to touch the baby. Remember? Everyone said I was your little doll.”
    She could hear the television blasting inside. A doctor was talking to Oprah and the women in the audience about rescuing their relationships. It would be so easy to run down the steps, get back in the van, and admit this was a mistake.
    But she couldn’t take her eyes from this woman’s face. It was so eerie to look at her and see Uncle Max’s eyes and Aunt Ruthie’s nose and her own mother’s pout. A blend of her entire family was in this face, her long-gone family. This person, this poor specimen of a person—unless you counted that monster Louie—was all she had left of that family, and look at her. She was a beaten shell of a human being, with eyes that didn’t seem to be able to focus when she looked at Dahlia. Unblinking, glazed-over eyes that madeDahlia certain she didn’t connect her in any way to her past. It was a past that for Sunny had been blown away years ago.
    As a child Dahlia had asked, she had tried, sometimes forcing herself to ask the questions even though she was afraid of what the answers might be.
    “Mom, where is Sunny?”
    “Sunny is in as good a place as she can be under the circumstances, but don’t worry, you won’t ever have to go there,” Rose would tell her.
    “But I want to go there. To see her.”
    “No,” Dahlia’s father would say, wearing an expression that meant, When you’re old and wise like we are, you’ll understand.
    Well, it didn’t do her any good to feel guilty about all those years of staying away from Sunny. That’s what happened to everybody, wasn’t it? They got caught up in the minutiae of their own days and didn’t spend time thinking about anyone else’s. Unless the “anyone else” was their kids or their husband. Cousins didn’t fall into that category. Dahlia wondered if Sunny had any idea how many of the others in the family were gone. Her parents and Dahlia’s and all of the Gordon aunts and uncles.
    Sunny was still holding those three cigarettes between yellow fingers, and now she took a deep puff, shaped her lips into a tight circle, and blew out a large O of a smoke ring. Then she leaned over and stubbed out all