And it is in the words of the young woman's grandfather, Mike Farley, who looks at Mandy and says quietly, "Maybe we'll have a Christmas miracle."

It is hope, and you can see it in Mandy Bradshaw herself.

Though she is 20 now, there is wonder in her face. Her dark eyes follow visitors around the room. Her mouth curls into a smile. She lets out little bursts of laughter at silliness and frivolity and irony. A small figure in a wheelchair, she manages to seem both vulnerable and inexplicably strong.

"She's always been non-stop, vivacious, always making jokes, always laughing," says her mother, Pam Bradshaw. "If Mandy was at church and she saw someone standing by themselves, she'd go introduce herself and strike up a conversation."

Farley nods. "She's the type who walks into a room and lights it up," he says.

At Longwood's Northland Community Church, not far from her home, Mandy was among a half-dozen singers handpicked to perform for the worship service, and she volunteered as a mentor to middle-school kids. In 1998, she graduated from Lyman High School, where she was voted funniest girl in the senior class. Her nickname, "Mouth of the South," was a comment on goofiness, not sarcasm.

It was typical Mandy that when a boy with a learning disability was shunned by prospective dates for the Lyman prom, she happily invited him to go with her.

She was taking classes at Seminole Community College, hoping to become an elementary school teacher, when her life was catastrophically interrupted. On Aug. 3, 1999, while Mandy was heading to a church service with a friend, a driver in an oncoming lane suffered a seizure, crossed the median, and hit Mandy's Nissan Sentra head on.

Mandy had been sitting, as she usually did, quite close to the steering wheel. Between the impact with the other car and the inflation of her air bag, the crash snapped her head forward and back, bouncing her brain against her cranium. Doctors describe it as an adult version of shaken-baby syndrome.

She spent the first five months in the hospital, much of it in a coma.

But within two hours of the accident, 100 or more friends and family members gathered in the waiting room, the news spread by word of mouth.

They held a candlelight vigil the next night. The pastor at Northland gave updates during his weekly sermon. The church -- where Mandy's dad, Rick, is an usher and Mandy's 16-year-old brother, Joey, volunteers -- even set up a telephone hotline for progress reports.

The doctors urged the family not to hope, but every time they looked at Mandy, they couldn't stop themselves.

The first smile came two months after the crash.

"She smiled at my nephew, who is a year and a half old, and everybody just started screaming for joy," Pam says. "But then it took another month to see the next one."

Last January, Mandy came home to the family's crowded, single-story block house in an older neighborhood of Longwood. Her bedroom was too small to accommodate the hospital bed and wheelchair and oxygen tanks, so she stays in the living room, a tiny Christmas tree perched on an armoire in the corner.

All around her, there are signs of the outpouring. There is the hardwood floor a church member donated so Mandy's wheelchair could be pushed about. There is the legion of volunteers, now 104 strong, who take turns manning the thrice-daily therapy sessions that keep Mandy's limbs flexible and her mind and spirit stimulated. There is the van in the driveway -- complete with wheelchair lift -- willed to the family by a Northland member who passed away.

There is Ellen Kaslewicz, who comes to clean house once a week, though she has four kids of her own and runs a business. There is Sue Hilinski, who sits with Mandy for hours to stroke her face and tell her jokes. There are neighbors who, like the Bradshaws, tied red ribbons around a tree or lamppost or mailbox and vowed to leave them there until Mandy is healed.

There is an anonymous contractor who is building a $38,000 addition to the Bradshaw's home, free of charge, so Mandy can have her own room and private bath.

And there is Fred Langer, who designed a Web site -- www.pray4mandy.com -- to ask visitors to implore their maker for a miracle. In two months, it has drawn nearly 2,000 people.

So while Pam lost her job as a bank teller because she missed too much work caring for her daughter, and while the family now lives on Rick's salary from a carpet-cleaning and restoration firm, and while the mound of bills grows taller and the insurance companies threaten to take away the $5,000 air mattress that has spared Mandy bed sores -- there are little victories.

Mandy has beaten double pneumonia, a staph infection and endured surgery to remove an intravenous guide wire that had lodged in her aorta. She began to move her head, then her arms, and in the last couple of months she said her first word. "The only thing she can say so far is `hi,' " Kaslewicz says. "And it takes about 20 seconds to get the `hi' out. But it's a start."

And there is nothing wrong with Mandy's vocal cords, so Pam Bradshaw prays that one day in the not-so-distant future she will hear her daughter's voice lift in song, the way it used to.

"Sometimes I still think, `Why did it have to be my daughter?' " she admits. "Sometimes I still get angry."

She is, after all, only human. But these days the anger doesn't come as often, nor does it stay long.

"Every time I start to doubt, God shows me a way to keep going," she says. "There is always hope."

Kate Santich is a writer for Florida Magazine.

Copyright © 2000, Orlando Sentinel
(reprinted with permission)