“Marlena! How wonderful to see you.” The warmth in her voice is soothing. She is dressed in a loose-fitting button-down shirt and flowing pants that end at her calves.
“Hi, Dr. Holbrook.” I tug at the bottom of my tank top, then hook my fingers into the belt loops of my jeans. It’s so strange to do these things with my clothing. It’s strange not to be dressed like a ghost who might haunt someone’s attic.
“Please call me Angie. Let’s talk in my office.” She beckons me into the big bright space around the corner.
There is a simple white table that must be her desk, with only a laptop and a lamp on it. Facing the glass walls and the ocean are an overstuffed white chair and a fluffy couch to match. They seem out of place among the minimalism and machinery. A thick knotted white-gray rug lies across the floor. Dr. Holbrook, Angie, slides open a tall glass door in the wall, and the warm breeze and the sounds of the waves surround us. She gestures for me to sit in the big white chair. I watch as she kicks off her heels and sits on the couch, tucking her legs underneath her like we are friends having a visit. I sink down into the soft cushions, my feet still flat on the floor, hands tight on my knees. My muscles are tense. I am still ready to flee.
“What brought you here today? Why now?” Angie asks, when I don’t speak.
I shake my head, side to side. I don’t know where to start.
How can I possibly start?
SEVEN
I am eighteen. It is three months ago, in early June, the start of summer. This is the day everything around me comes crashing down. The day I meet Finn.
So many things about my audience are typical that morning. The church is packed to the brim. My mother, ever more the expert pageant director, has everything under control, fitting more and more seekers inside the room. In the corner, petitioners chant and pray on their knees. Their pant legs are grass- and dirt-stained and shredded. There are people from the town. I see Mr. and Mrs. Almeida, who own the bakery. I don’t need to see Gertie to know she has a table set up out front, selling her souvenirs.
But one thing is unusual. Mrs. Jacobs is here, arms crossed tight, wearing an unreadable expression. She’s never come to an audience, not that I remember. Maybe she decided to see what in the world we do here on Saturdays. Most people in the town have come at least once.
José is helping with crowd control. During the audience, he plays the part of bodyguard, always somewhere nearby, making sure that no one takes a dive at me, some desperate soul who has no idea where else to turn. But now he is making sure I will have space to walk through the aisles. Gently, he clears a path. The room is tender, like a wound. Tourists aside, the people who fill the seats toward the front are the vulnerable, the needy, the sick. I watch the preparations through a hidden window backstage. I am ready for them.
Fatima futzes with my dress as I stand there. The air has grown warmer, the heat capturing the smells of the sea and drawing them inside.
“Marlena,” Fatima commands. “Stay still.”
I do as I’m told at first, but not for long.
“Stop touching your hair. You’re going to make the comb fall out, and the veil is just right!”
I don’t have to look at Fatima to see her exasperated expression. I do my best to stop moving as she begins the labored work of figuring out the complicated bustle.
My mother knows exactly where I am, exactly where to look. She catches me watching through the window and smiles. I give her a wave.
The roller coaster of our relationship has flattened itself into a taut sense of peace. I’ve been painting and creating my visions on a near constant basis. Collages take over the house and I’ve even tried my hand at sculpture, though only once and probably not again. The work occupies me, brain and body, heart and soul. It pushes other things out of view. When I give myself over to my work, those strange and uncomfortable questions and thoughts fade so far into the background of my mind they’ve nearly disappeared. My mother is only too happy to get me whatever materials I need to feed my art. Clay. Metal. Paper. Oils, watercolors, canvas, paper.
It was probably just a phase.
That’s what my mother said the other day, in passing, with respect to our recent fights and friction, with respect to the things that were upsetting the balance of our lives. Her words have been ringing through my insides since.
“Turn and look at me,” Fatima says.
Fatima stares down her nose at me, since she is taller, appraising my dress, the state of my hair, the artful folds of the veil that trails down my back. She makes a circling gesture with her finger and I do one slow twirl. “Lovely,” she says, more to herself than me.
“Really?” I ask.
She looks at me strangely. “You always look lovely at your audiences, Marlena. Don’t you feel lovely in your beautiful dress?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “How I look is not supposed to matter,” I say, parroting my mother’s words.
Fatima is on the verge of saying something else when José enters the back room. He nods to tell me that we are about to begin. I resume my place at the window, watching for my mother’s cue.
In the third row on the right are five girls dressed the same, with ponytails high on their heads. They are wearing some sort of sports uniform. They must play together on a team. Maybe soccer or lacrosse or field hockey. I decide that it’s soccer, and wonder how they found their way to doing something like getting up on a Saturday morning, putting their hair up, and running around outside chasing after a ball and trying to make a goal in a net. How do normal girls decide who and what they’d like to be and do? What would it be like to wear a soccer jersey? To kick the ball as hard as I could, shouting to other girls on my team? To let my limbs go wild instead of keeping everything so still and controlled?
The girls stare at their phones, occasionally sharing whatever is on their little screens, pressing their heads together and laughing. Jealousy scuttles across my insides on its little crab legs.
My mother is on the stage making her opening remarks, talking to people about the history of my healings. “The History of Marlena the Living Saint,” it actually says in the program.
One of the soccer girls leans her head on the shoulder of the one next to her.
No one has ever asked me what I want to be or do with my life. The question has never occurred to anyone, I suppose. It’s never even occurred to me before now. What would I be if I wasn’t a healer? What if I could be anyone I wanted? Maybe I would work as a waitress in a diner, and wear my name on a pin stuck to the pocket of my uniform shirt, or be a teacher of mathematics, or even a competitive swimmer who goes out each morning to practice different strokes, gliding through the ocean. Or maybe I would be a doctor, like Hildegard, but the real kind who wear stethoscopes around their necks and do things like deliver wailing, squirming babies to their exhausted but happy mothers.
The nod finally comes for me to start.
“Thank you, Fatima,” I say on my way to the door.
“It’s okay if it matters, Marlena,” Fatima whispers from behind me, just loud enough that I hear. “It’s okay to care whether you are lovely.”
For a second I stop, wanting to give her words a chance to physically enter my body and take hold, but my mother is gesturing for me to hurry and now I am on the stage, and Fatima’s comments slide off me. My eyes immediately go to the soccer girls, curious if maybe one of them is here for a healing, but they seem bored, three of them staring down at their phones, two with their eyes closed, maybe asleep.
“Marlena!” and “Over here!” begin the usual chorus.
I head toward the special guests my mother has gathered. They seem to mostly be babies held by one of their parents. As I lay my hands on each one, I think about the doctors who delivered them, trying to imagine myself as a kind of doctor. All that is missing is my white coat, a pen in my breast pocket, and the stethoscope. The church is full of that delicious scent of summery ocean, and once again I am that figurehead on a ship,
carrying the people across a storm toward calmer seas. My arms are spread wide, angled backward, protective toward this precious cargo I must ferry to safety. Rich shades of wood-smelling brown and fresh clean green wash through me to replace the fiery, rancid pain of suffering and sickness under each of my hands.
You’d think I wouldn’t be able to heal on demand, but I can.
As long as the person who needs me is willing and open.
As long as I remain open.
I have tried describing what it’s like, but I’m always falling short. Miracles are fleeting, fickle things, and the words we use to try and depict them, or the drawings, the poetry, are just as fickle. For the mystics I’m always reading it’s the same. They strain and grasp at the miraculous but it never turns out quite right. Like, in their attempts to tell the world what they know and have seen, to reveal it in all its glory, they’ve instead offered a puzzle with key pieces missing. A treasure map without the X.
Healing usually starts in my body.
The tingling in a fingertip or the very end of a toe. A static that runs across my left thigh or my right kneecap. Sometimes it’s the back of my neck or the base of my spine. Usually the place it begins corresponds to the person in need of healing. If it’s a leg that is withered, I will feel something in my own leg. If the problem is in a person’s speech, my lips will grow numb. It’s the same thing with the eyes or the ears. At the beginning of a healing, I may grow blind or deaf, or the reverse might occur. My senses will be heightened, like I can suddenly hear every single thing in the room, the softest whispers, even the unspoken thoughts in people’s heads. Or my sight gets sharper, so sharp I nearly want to close my eyes against seeing so much at once.
Then comes the color, followed by the scenes, usually of the future, of what will be or should be for the person, if the healing involves part of the body, or if the healing involves grief, the possibility of happiness again. I can’t decide which is the best part. Sometimes I think it’s the colors but sometimes it’s the scenes. When I am seeing into the person I am healing, it’s like a window into their soul, like I’ve somehow found the door to the core of who they are, and there I am, Marlena, just a girl wandering around in the deepest parts of their being. The intimacy of it, the access, the burst of hope and wonder, is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever felt. It is why the experiences of mystics like Hildegard and Julian are described as ecstatic. It is ecstasy to know a moment of pure unity. To have that with another person for even a single second. I’ve often wondered if love is something like this.
When this moment of intimacy, of ecstasy, falls away, the person is healed.
The way I’ve described it makes it sound like a process with steps, first this, then this, and then this and this. One, two, three, four, five. In a way it is like this, but also in a way, everything happens at once.
There is one part, though, that usually comes last.
The healing, or whatever you want to call it, eventually spreads into me, to my body, and for a while, I take on whatever it is that left the person I’ve healed. That’s the part that hurts. It’s like the postmiracle hangover I get, because God or whatever divine being exists is exacting payment for drawing on his (or her?) power for a few precious moments on earth. I am the conduit drawing down the divine to the people around me, and that conduit eventually sparks and flares and burns out from too much energy flowing through it. It’s like God is laughing, or angry, at the audacity of it, great belly laughs, speaking between them and saying things like You thought I wouldn’t notice what you were doing, Marlena? Well, you thought wrong and now you will pay. The pain in my own body, my own heart, my own mind and soul is the punishment for having the audacity to make miracles happen with my human hands.
Sometimes, in the darkest moments, I wonder if there is a larger punishment out there waiting for me, something far worse and more horrible than these hangovers. One I can’t yet conceive of because it is still being cooked up to account for a lifetime of miracles, of hubris, of taking from where I shouldn’t. Sometimes I wonder if that punishment is close, but then I wake up to heal another day. And then I am left to wonder, how many more healing days do I have left?
“Faker!”
I open my eyes. It feels like I’ve woken from a trance. My vision is blurred.
The soccer girls’ heads shoot up from their phones.
“Faker! She’s a faker!”
The words grow clearer, louder, marching toward me from a distance. I turn toward the voice.
“Marlena the Saint is no saint. She’s a liar!”
Murmurs and gasps swirl through the church like pollution in the sea. My vision clears. I see the person who is shouting. Mrs. Jacobs. It’s Mrs. Jacobs.
“I’ve brought proof,” she yells.
Nine, no, maybe ten people stand up. I don’t recognize any of them, not outright, though a few seem vaguely familiar. I head in their direction, and I see José and Mama doing the same from their corners of the room, but the crowd is thick and they are struggling to move forward. I make sure to get there first.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Jacobs,” I say quietly, looking into her face, trying to read her expression. There is triumph in her eyes.
My greeting seems to unsettle her, and her expression falters, her face growing blank before returning to its fiery red righteousness.
“Marlena,” she says, this time without yelling.
“Yes.”
“I’ve brought some people you supposedly cured.”
My heart clenches, but I remain steady, the weight of my gown on either side of me like scaffolding. “Supposedly?”
“Yes, supposedly, because you didn’t cure them. They suffer just as much as before. And one of them has since died. Your gift is one big lie.”
I look into the faces of the people around her, tempted to touch the hands of each one to try and read their souls, their pain, their sicknesses. I search their eyes and the space between them as though the ghost of the person Mrs. Jacobs said has died might be hovering there.
“Is this true?” I ask the group.
The entire church is deadened with silence. No one moves. The people Mrs. Jacobs has brought are stone-faced. A tall man, the only one whose eyes are full of grief, twists his mouth, like the words behind it are distasteful so he refuses to let them out.
“It is true,” Mrs. Jacobs snaps.
“I didn’t ask you,” I snap right back.
One of the women has her head bowed. Now she looks up. “You said my son was cured,” she whispers, her voice nearly too hoarse for me to hear.
I reach out. Place the edges of my fingers on her forearm. Peer into her eyes. “And was he?”
There is a gaping pause, and I feel it like the jaws of a shark opening wide around me. “My child died,” she says quickly.
My mother is suddenly next to me. “But how long after the Healer cured him? Days, weeks, months? Did he die of something unrelated?”
I grab my mother’s arm to make her stop saying such things. “Does it really matter?” I hiss.
She looks my way, peeling back my hand. “Of course it does. It means everything.”
My mother beckons for José to hurry. A chasm opens between her and me. In the beat of this silence, chaos erupts in the church, people standing, talking, shouting over each other, debating my existence as though I’m not here. My mother is called away to try and calm people down, a role she is good at. The chaos creates a moment of intimacy between Mrs. Jacobs and me. We are like the eye in the hurricane. Everyone seems to have forgotten us. She reaches out, nearly touching me, but stops just shy of my elbow. Mrs. Jacobs lowers her head toward mine.
“Marlena, it is not you I’m against, it’s your mother.” Her words are a quickly whispered stream. “Well, I don’t believe in your gift, but I do feel sorry that you’ve been trapped into such a life. It’s a shame for such a young girl like you. You need to open your eyes and see what is really happening around you.”
“Okay,” I find myself saying. “What do you think is happening?”
José has almost reached us.
Mrs. Jacobs leans closer. “Did you know your mother won’t let you cure anyone unless they pay ahead of time? Do you even know what she charges?”
“She does not,” I say, but my voice is faltering. “People sometimes send money in gratitude following a healing, which is where the money we have comes from.”
“That’s what she wants you to believe. But it’s not the truth. Somewhere deep down you know this. She tells you who to heal before each audience, does she not?”
“Yes, but only because they’ve come from so far away,” I reason, which is of course my mother’s reason.
“Stop lying to yourself.”
“Señora, ma’am, please come with me,” José says. He doesn’t wait for her to answer, just places two hands on Mrs. Jacobs and begins to steer her away.
Mrs. Jacobs’s words crash through me, questions and doubts piling up haphazardly, punching holes through my skin. I am a ship, taking on water through this series of fissures and seams. I can feel myself listing to the side, going down, down, down to the dark ocean floor as my mother finally seems to be gaining control of the room. I almost wish she wouldn’t. I want to lie down. Disappear, never to be seen again. I am no longer the brave girl steering the massive ship toward tranquility and peace. The emotions swirling in the room are sharp spikes, piercing my sides, my ribs, my heart. I pitch and keel and falter.
By the time I reach the stage again, I am a shipwreck.
Afterward, my mother is all business.
“You’re going to keep your head high, your chin up, and you are going to go out there and do the receiving line just as you do every Saturday. Sarah Jacobs or no, this is what everyone expects from you.”
I look up from the floor, where I’ve collapsed in a heap of tulle and satin. My mother’s expression is determined. There is that sharp glint in her eyes, love that will cut and maim. I pull myself to standing, dazed. Fatima and my mother tug and fix the skirt of my dress.
The Healer Page 4