“He’s going to be fine,” I tell her, because he is.
I rise up from my crouch, arranging my dress, and await the next petitioner, and the next and then the next. One after the other, they come to me, and the process repeats. I go and go and go until I am near collapse, until I am dry as a riverbed in drought, until my mother announces to everyone that my audience is over. My brain barely registers her words because it has grown murky, shot through with the ink of exhaustion. But a satisfied current of peace buoys me. The posture of my body is proud and sure.
As I ready to leave the room, I know the eyes of the boy in the front row are still on me, that his eyes have been on me for hours because somehow I could feel them underneath everything else. I wish I could see if his mockery has transformed into awe. I wish I could know his name. I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could have the conversation with him that I keep imagining, which goes something like Hello, my name is Marlena, and he responds, Hi, I’m Guillaume, because for some reason I decide he is French, and then says to me, I have so many questions—would you like to go for coffee? I wish I could banish these wishes, because healers are meant to walk among the people but not be of them. My only purpose is to protect my gift. To live for it and only it. To let it be enough for me. Like Julian. Like Hildegard. Like all the mystics and saints.
The backstage door is open and I sweep through it in a streak of expensive white satin, disappearing from the church and all those watchful eyes. His eyes.
I am safe.
THREE
I sneak inside the house, hoping my mother is out, or taking a nap. She likes taking naps on the hot, humid days of this heat wave. Our house is enormous, an old coastal New England beauty, graying and weathered, with views to the ocean on three sides. In every room with the windows open you can hear the waves crashing against the rocks. Even with the windows closed you can hear them if the water is rough enough. I will never tire of hearing the ocean.
I tiptoe into the kitchen, leaving a trail of sand behind me.
It’s quiet.
“Hello?” I call out.
There is no response.
My mother isn’t here. Fatima, our maid, must be out for the afternoon, too.
I let out a long breath.
While the house is all traditional New England on the outside—long wooden clapboards, rustic and worn from the salty sea air and the harsh winter storms—the inside is newly renovated with every comfort a person could want. The kitchen is state-of-the-art, spotless, stainless-steel appliances gleaming alongside white countertops and cabinets, the exact kitchen my mother picked out of a design magazine. The floors in the house are heated. Plush couches and chairs with their perfectly puffed and color-coordinated pillows sit there invitingly in the living room, an arrangement also plucked straight from one of my mother’s magazines. The entire first floor is open, so we can see the ocean out of every window whether we are in the kitchen or lounging reading a book. Gauzy white curtains flutter in the hot breeze. Fresh flowers dot the tables, arrangements delivered weekly from the best florist in town.
My mother spares no expense. She loves to spend our money. My money.
I fill a glass with water and guzzle it down, gasping for breath when it’s empty. Then I fill it again and drink this one slowly. My cheeks still feel warm with the sun.
We used to live in a tiny cottage built by the hands of my grandfather, Manuel Oliveira, the next town over. My mother grew up in that house, cramped by the endless clutter of my grandmother, who filled the space with glass figurines and other knickknacks, displayed on shelves also built by my grandfather. There was a chicken coop in the yard, and they raised pigs and fished.
My grandparents and Mama immigrated from a tiny archipelago of islands called the Azores when she was six, determined to make a new and better life. On a map, the archipelago is midway between the west coast of Portugal and Morocco, but the islands are so far from land they may as well be their own country. My mother was born on São Miguel, the biggest one. It is an ancient place, small and isolated, where people live simply off the food they catch from the sea and the land, their days divided by the sacred rituals of the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of the sea. It is a religious place, where it is as likely as not that the entire population will be gathered in the streets parading a statue of Jesus across the island, holding candles and singing in harmony. A place where a healer like me could easily emerge, where people are as ready and willing to believe in miracles as they believe the sun will rise every morning after the moon disappears from the sky.
When my mother and I lived in her childhood house, she did her best to keep the rooms tidy, the one bedroom, the living room with the kitchen along the back wall, the narrow bathroom at the other end. I slept on a bed next to hers and played on the worn shag carpet near the kitchen, my mother stepping around me as she cooked. Steaming soups stocked with bitter greens and beans, spicy sausages cradled in bright roasted sweet peppers, great domed sweet breads steaming and fresh from the oven. My grandmother’s glass figurines sat there on the shelves, dusty ballerinas twisting and turning, spinning their tulle tutus for an audience of two, perched in between the elaborate portraits of Mary and Jesus that my grandmother hand carried from Portugal. I used to love to play with the great cookie tin of buttons my grandmother left behind when she died, spreading them on the floor in lines and circles, counting them, admiring their colors and shine.
I was happy in that house. It was perfect for my child-sized self, small and cozy. I loved feeding the chickens. I gave them names. Charlotte. Jason. Alvina. Josépha. I would go and hide under the bed when my mother would wring their necks before we would eat them for dinner. She would talk to me about her life with my grandparents while I sat on the floor of the kitchen, surrounded by the buttons of my grandmother, sorting the pink ones from the rest like raisins from a box of cereal. Mama would wash the kale that would go into the soup for lunch, telling stories about the pigs they’d raised, about the toys my grandfather made for her in his carpentry workshop in the basement, about my grandmother’s talent for cooking. Eventually she’d pull the big bitter leaves out of the icy water, soaked and dripping, to dry in a colander that sat on the counter. I would arrange and rearrange the buttons, forming them into a coil like the pearly pink insides of a snail.
This was before I became famous, before the roadside stands hawking candles with my face painted on the glass, the T-shirts and coffee mugs and wooden signs to hang above mantels and altars. Before the news of my gift spread far beyond our town and my mother moved us to a new and bigger house, this giant house where we live now, and she became obsessed with my growing renown and all that it could offer us.
Somewhere during those early years, I’d become my mother’s hope, her own salvation, the perfect child healer, as devout as Julian of Norwich. I let my gift mold everything that I was, let my mother mold everything about me, happy that my gift seemed to ease the pain of her past. That it pulled us up and out of the hardship of poverty and gave my mother riches she thought she would never see. In return, she loved me with all that she was and I was never lonely. But lately, the more I begin to love the world, the more my mother begins to hate me.
I put the empty glass in the sink and head upstairs to my room. It’s on a different floor than my mother’s. She likes her privacy, and the grandiosity of having an entire wing to herself. She used to invite me to sleep in her bed, but the last time she did was years ago.
There is a step that creaks loudly and I avoid it out of habit and keep on going. I grab some underwear from a drawer and head into the bathroom to strip off my dress, the fabric coarse and itchy with sand, and get in the shower. Soon I am washed clean, my hair free of its knots and tangles, of my forbidden swim. I dry off, put on a new white sheath, and wander down the hall to a room at the far end of the house.
The gift room.
It’s where we store the offerings we can’t use or that I’m not supposed to use, until the
appointed day each month when Goodwill comes to pick them up. You’d be surprised how quickly this room fills, sometimes the gifts stacked nearly to the ceiling, teetering like a misshapen wedding cake.
There’s one gift in particular that draws me. My mother scoffed at it, was shocked that someone would think it appropriate. Ever since it arrived in its big box carried by the UPS man I’ve been thinking about it, and wishing we didn’t have to give it away.
I move past the unopened boxes filled with iPads and game consoles, lamps and blenders and other household objects, until I get to the clothing. People send us piles and piles of clothing, some of it fit for a girl ten years my junior. I search until I find what I’m looking for buried under a stack of dresses I would have liked when I was eight. I carry the garment bag to my room and lay it across the bed. The woman who sent this was from New York City. She worked for some fashion magazine. I healed her young son. Somehow she saw beyond Marlena the Healer to the teenage girl underneath when she chose this gift. I appreciated this. My mother did not.
I unzip the bag and my heart flutters. Skinny jeans and fashionable tank tops are laid out before me, the kinds I’ve seen girls in town wearing when they’re walking with their boyfriends. There are bright summer dresses with spaghetti straps and a couple of tiny skirts and tops, everything so different from the clothing I always wear.
White gauzy nightgowns hang in a narrow row one after the other on the left side of my closet. On the right side are wedding gowns. For each audience, I’m dressed like a bride. The audience comes expecting a pageant, and they ooh and aah when I sweep onstage in a big, beautiful gown. The white is supposed to emphasize my saintliness, my purity. But the paintings I’ve created from my visions are a riot of color on the wall of my room, interrupting so much blankness, the daily blandness of my attire. They are a rebellion without being a rebellion that gets me in trouble with my mother.
I run my hand across the items in the garment bag. A short, blue slip of a dress catches my eye, perfect for a hot day. I pluck it from the hanger and set it on the bed. Then I pull my white sheath off and throw it on the floor. I stand there in my underwear, hovering over the pretty blue silk, the same blue as the sky today. I slide the new dress over my head, shimmying it down my body. There is a long mirror on the wall and I check out my reflection.
Even with my hair still wet from the shower, I look almost normal.
No. I look almost sexy.
Like I, too, have the kind of legs that boys would admire, just like they admire the girls on the beach who flaunt their bodies in tiny bikinis. I think about Finn, the boy who refuses to leave my heart and my mind, wonder if he would admire me in this, and tug the hem a little higher up my thighs. The dress shows off my smooth olive skin, and the subtle curves of my chest and hips. Would it make him notice me in the way I want him to? Would he love me in this? I don’t know.
But I love me in it.
And my mother would hate me in it. This makes me love it even more.
FOUR
I am seventeen. It is last summer.
We are getting ready for my Saturday audience and my mother is helping me into the wedding dress she’s picked out for this afternoon. She’s working through the tiny pearl buttons that take forever to close, and I am staring at my reflection. I am wondering if I am pretty. If other people find me pretty. If other people my age find me pretty or if they just think I’m some freak show. I don’t want to be a freak show. I want to be attractive to others, to the boys I can’t stop noticing of late, as though they’ve been invisible all these years and suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like the hidden things of the sea after a hurricane spills them onto shore.
I’ve learned to stop asking my mother questions about boys and my appearance because they upset her. We used to be on the same page about who I was, who I am. But the minute I started asking questions my mother grew obsessed with stamping them out, with forbidding me the thoughts that she didn’t like. She sees them as threats to our life, to my life, to my reputation as a healer.
But I am a hermit crab grown too big for its shell. And today I am feeling stifled.
I catch my mother’s eye in the mirror. “So, Mama, when I fall in love, do you think my healing powers will evaporate? Do you think the visions will stop?”
My mother halts the work of buttoning. Her face grows pained.
“Marlena,” she whispers. “Don’t say things like that. You should never tempt God.”
I lower my eyes. “Okay, Mama,” I say softly. “I’m sorry.”
And I am sorry. I don’t want to do or say anything to make my visions go away. They are as real to me as the floor under my feet. During a vision I am never more certain of why I am here on this earth, never more me, and never more not me. Most of the time I want to protect my gift, hold it close so no one else can use it. But in the real world people try and take this tender part of me to capitalize on it, even my own mother, and I am tired. People twist it so it’s no longer something I recognize, no longer beautiful or mine. They turn my healings into something to sell for profit and they sell me for profit with it. I don’t want to be sold and branded and merchandized. I don’t like what my life is becoming.
I’ve started to wonder, too, whether the life of a healer really does mean I have to cloister myself like Julian of Norwich. Does it really require me to be homeschooled and removed from other people my age? Do I need to live apart from the rest of the world, with only my mother for company? Isn’t there another way to do this? To be who I am?
My mother goes back to buttoning.
“But you do want me to fall in love one day, don’t you?” I ask.
We stare at each other in the mirror.
My mother lifts the traditional Portuguese veil that she will pin in my hair from the top of the dresser, the kind of veil you might see placed over the head of a statue of a saint or on the women who march in the parades of São Miguel. I don’t always wear it, but I guess today my mother wants to make a point by ensuring I do. It is a delicate thing, nearly weightless, hand sewn by my grandmother. It does not go over my face but stands up a bit from the top of my head because of the white pearl comb to which it is attached, fixed just so that it cascades down my hair. A treasured heirloom made for me before I was born, as though my grandmother knew that her daughter would give birth to a girl whose hands would make miracles. Or maybe she simply thought that someday I would wear it at my First Communion, or even my wedding.
My mother disappears behind me in the reflection as she fixes the veil. “Marlena, stop being selfish. You can’t have everything. Look around you.” She pauses, I suppose to allow me to take a moment and focus on the beauty of the room, with its stunning ocean views and accompanying ocean sounds, its tasteful, understated decor. “Your gift has given you more than most people dream of having.”
It has given you more, I think, but manage not to say.
My very first healing, I healed my mother. At least, this is what I’ve been told.
It was right after the accident that killed my father and my mother’s parents. Her entire family and everyone my mother loved gone in an instant. She was pregnant with me, and the trauma of the accident forced her into labor. The doctors delivered me, tried to save my mother, but couldn’t. They waited for her breathing to fade, and a kind nurse set me onto my mother’s chest so she could feel her baby once before death. As the story goes, I placed my hands flat against my mother’s skin. Within seconds her breaths quickened, her lids slid open, her limbs stirred, and her hands found my little body. The nurse called the doctors.
My mother was completely well within hours. No one could explain what had happened, though the nurse was convinced that whatever it was, it had to do with me. My mother took me home to the now empty cottage she’d shared with her parents and my father, the little house my grandfather built and where I would spend my first years of life. It was a while before my mother understood, before she really believed it was me who’d fetched he
r from the brink of death. She’d always been a person of faith, but it took several more healings—a few kind neighbors who’d come to check on my mother after the accident, who held me, and who’d been sick or hurt at the time—before my mother began to wonder if she’d given birth to a saint. If her baby might be a miracle worker. She began to offer my gift to others with more confidence, and that gift began to offer my mother a new sense of purpose after so much tragic death.
For so many of my healings, I was too young to comprehend what I was doing, what was being done to me, taken from me. My mother has photo albums from that time. There are pictures of people—an old man, a young mother, a boy my age—laying their hands on my downy baby’s head, eyes closed, willing whatever divine power might reside in my little brain and body to pass into their own. Sometimes my tiny fist curls around one of their fingers. Sometimes I am crying, wailing loudly, mouth wide, gums bared. My mother is always standing nearby, or she is holding me out to the miracle seekers like she might be giving me away.
“Your gift saved me,” my mother always says. Though as I get older she says it less and less.
I am grateful that my gift could give my mother’s broken heart relief.
But do I ever get to stop saving her?
It is after my audience.
Colorful bits of paper clutter my room. They cover every surface in a fractured mosaic of greens and blues, some pale, some bright, some saturated with yellow, like sunlight beaming over the sea. I step right, my bare toes kicking scraps of aqua and navy confetti into the air, making a soft shush as they slide across the floor. I am chasing after a picture that I hold in my mind, a vision from one of my healings. It is like trying to catch a fish with bare hands as it swims through dark water. My fingers are coated in sticky shellac as I work, piecing the image together. I tear the pieces of paper smaller and smaller, until they are just right.
I call the healing down from the sky, pull it up from the floor of the ocean. My hands are frantic trying to capture it before it can dart away, like a shy crab burrowing deep into the sand and disappearing from human eyes forever. I can’t let that happen. My whole being yearns to express it, to bring it into existence. The sun descends bit by bit, then disappears from the window as it slides toward the horizon. My mother was right earlier today. I was being selfish. I already have everything I need. My gift alone has given me more than most people dream about.
The Healer Page 2