The receiving line at the front of the church turns out to be consoling. Things seem to go back to normal. Maybe my mother was right.
“Don’t listen to that woman,” a man says to me early on.
I hear some version of this from so many people. Or some version of “You cured me once and it was real.” I nod like I agree until I hear this so much my faith comes crawling back from its cold hiding place at the bottom of the sea.
Then I notice a woman a few people back in the line. She is unlike everyone else. Her clothes are different. Jeans with a silky cream blouse, an expensive suit jacket over it, wire-rimmed glasses adorning her pretty, pale face, dressed so unlike the tourists in their shorts and T-shirts. She isn’t trying to take my picture or video me so she can post an image of the freak she saw on summer vacation. Tourists aside, the people who fill up the United Holiest Church are true believers, mainly Portuguese and Italians, with their brown and olive skin, Latinos and black people crowded together for worship, for the hope of my divine touch, dressed in their Sunday best even though audiences take place on Saturdays.
It is the woman’s turn in line.
The look in her eyes is a mix of skepticism and curiosity. “I’m Dr. Holbrook,” she says. Her makeup is perfect, despite the heat. She doesn’t offer her hand, so she must know enough not to try and touch me. “But everyone calls me Angie.”
I stare, trying to get a better read on her. “Hello. And what brought you here today?” I ask, as I always do. As I am trained to do.
“I was wondering if you believe in yourself.” She says this simply, as though every person asks this. “In your gift.”
A wave of dizziness passes over me. That shipwreckedness again. Everyone else has been quick to brush off Mrs. Jacobs’s protest, like it meant nothing. “Excuse me? Are you referring to . . . what happened earlier?”
“I don’t know what happened earlier,” she says. “I arrived late. My grad assistant is still looking for parking.” Her stare is unwavering, but also kind. “Now that you are college age, do you ever wonder about your abilities? If they are real?”
My lips part. College? Does she really think this life would allow me to go to college? “Of course not,” I try, but once again, I can feel myself breaking apart.
“Hmmm,” she replies, studying me with those kind blue eyes. She presses a small rectangular card into my hand. “Call me. I’d like to talk to you. Maybe you have some questions that I can help you answer.”
I take it.
In this moment, a boy comes rushing up to her. He is breathless. “I can’t find parking, so I’m in the car, idling outside.”
He hasn’t looked at me and maybe he won’t; his words and eyes are all for Dr. Holbrook. Angie. His hair is a mess, and a sheen of sweat is covering his skin. I want him to turn my way. I want to know him, to know his name, to know everything about him. I don’t know why. But the force of this want is powerful, immediate, and total. It comes on like one of my visions, lifting me up and out of my body and taking me over completely.
Is this love at first sight?
He glances my way for a brief second. No, a half. A quarter.
“I don’t want the car to get towed,” he says, looking between Angie and me, so I’m not sure to whom, exactly, he is telling this information.
He runs off.
“That’s the grad assistant I mentioned. Finn,” she says. “I’d better go. I hope you’ll call me.” She moves to exit the line but I stop her.
I reach out a hand and place it on her arm. A murmur of surprise ripples through the crowd behind her in line, followed by hushed whispers. The Healer doesn’t ever touch someone without purpose.
The professor turns back, eyebrows arched over those curious eyes.
I lean in close. “Do you believe in my gift?”
She looks at me for a long time. “I don’t know. But if you like, we can try and find that out together.”
This time, when she walks away, I let her go. I look down at the card.
Dr. Angela Holbrook, Neurobiologist
Director, Center for the Mind & Brain Sciences
There is a series of tall rocks, ledges really, near my house. You can reach them if you walk down a path lined with tall sea grasses and bright-pink beach roses that are pretty but will draw blood with their spiky stems. People are always jumping from those rocks into the churning ocean below. It looks reckless.
I’ve always wanted to try it. I feel as though I am standing on them now, the flat gray slate hot beneath my bare feet, looking down into the dark sea.
Of course I will go to this doctor, this scientist. How can I not, after today, after Mrs. Jacobs? It was decided the moment I laid eyes on her. Well, and after I laid eyes on him, too. Finn.
PART TWO
Now
EIGHT
The sun shines bright on Angie’s face. “Marlena? Why now?” she asks again.
“What do you want from me?” I ask in return.
“I have no agenda, one way or the other, aside from the truth.” She stops, then backtracks a bit. “I study the brain, Marlena. The brain is an amazing organ that we know so much—and so little about. I’m interested in understanding the full capacity of the brain, exploring the unusual talents some people are lucky enough to have. And you seem to be one of those lucky people.”
I stare at her, trying to take this in, her use of the word talent as opposed to gift or power. “But my ‘talent’ comes from God.” I say these words with confidence, but they suddenly sound crazy. Potentially fake, like Mrs. Jacobs claims.
The same mixture of curiosity and skepticism I saw in Angie’s eyes the day she came to my audience appears in them now. She leans forward, her clear lacquered nails gleaming. The warm breeze blows wisps of blond hair around her face. Even her eyebrows are blond. “Is that what you believe, or just what you’ve been told to believe all of your life?”
I stare at her, unsure how to answer.
I know this must sound weird, but I’ve never been a person of faith, someone who believes in God and prays to God or gods, if there is more than one. My mother grew up Catholic, but the church that grew up in my honor is not officially Catholic, and technically, it’s not even a real church. More of a sideshow with me as the star. But because of it, I’ve always been around people who believe, whose lives are devoted to prayer, to worshipping within a particular religion. People who have no qualms naming a girl like me a living saint.
Faith is a filmy thing, like a vapor or fog. You can see it, sort of, in the air, wafting around believers, but if you try to grab it your fingers close around nothing.
Healings, though, have substance. You can touch them, feel the newly strong muscles with the pads of your fingers, place your palm against a now-pounding heart, see the smile on someone’s face that was once vacant and despairing. Healings have physical markers, physical proof, like a smooth white stone at the beach or mother-of-pearl shimmering in a tide pool. You can reach out and pick them up, admire them.
Healings appear on us.
This, I suppose, is what you could call my faith. Maybe it’s why I began drawing my visions. To make them into something real. Something I can see and study and touch.
Lots of religions and cultures have healers. Shamans are healers, and the sangomas in South Africa fulfill this role. Catholics will pray to St. Jude or St. Peregrine. But when someone is desperate for help, desperate for hope, it doesn’t matter who I am or from what religion and culture I hail, if any. No one cares if I might be a witch, like the women they tortured and drowned and burned in Salem. All that matters is that I work my magic.
Healings, miracles, whatever they are, do not discriminate. Not the way people do and especially not the way religious people sometimes do. All these things we use to divide ourselves up, none of it matters. Healings don’t work like that.
They just are.
Angie is watching me, still waiting for me to say something.
“I believe
in my gift,” I tell her. I decide not to mention Mrs. Jacobs and her claims, which have been floating in and out of my brain like a tide of jellyfish all summer. “But being a healer will never let me be normal. And I’m tired of it.”
Angie nods, like she knows exactly what I mean. “You asked me what I want from you. Well, I want to study you. I want to understand your gift better and help you understand it better. I can’t promise what we’ll find out, but I can promise we’ll know more after we study your gift than if we never ask any questions.”
I nod. I believe her. I want what she offers. Understanding. Knowledge. I look straight into her curious blue eyes.
“Study me then,” I say.
Later, when I am leaving Angie’s office, I come around the corner and there he is, sitting in one of the chairs in the waiting room. Finn. He jumps up when he sees me, nearly stumbles, rights himself. Then he leans against the wall and crosses his arms. His lips stretch into a smile.
“Well, if it isn’t the fraudulent healer girl.”
His voice is playful, but I can detect the mistrust underneath it. It is a rude greeting, but I don’t care. I am too taken with him, with that smug look on his face—such a beautiful face—and the gleam in his eyes, intelligent, a little angry maybe, and curious. I recognize that gleam. Angie has it. I like seeing it there.
“I’m Marlena” is all I say to Finn in return.
He tilts his head. My face grows hot as we stand there, watching each other. I am so exposed in my stretchy jeans that show the outline of my knees and thighs, the tank top that forms itself along my body, with the too-large holes for my arms that open to the middle of my ribs, showing off the sides of my bra. I wonder what Finn is thinking. If he is noticing any of these things about me.
Then, out of nowhere, I stick out my hand. I know that’s what normal people do, but not me. If I go around touching everybody then the mystery of my healing hands might dissipate, my reputation diminished, according to my mother. My touch must be the rarest of gifts, she always says. I have lived without hugs and affection all my life.
Finn is looking at my hand like it is an alien thing. Maybe he is afraid of it. Maybe he is afraid of finding out I’m not actually a fraud. I wonder if he knows that I never do this, if Angie told him. I wonder if he realizes that this gesture makes him special. Finn uncrosses his arms and extends his hand to me, closes it around mine.
His touch goes straight to my brain and down through my torso into my legs, making them weak and wobbly. His fingers are warm, his palm is warm, and as it presses into me a filmy vision of Finn surrounded by light flashes in my mind, then is gone. The color of it is pale. Washed out. Maybe because I am so nervous.
“Hi, Marlena,” Finn says, still hanging on to me. “Nice to meet you. I’m Finn.”
I stare at our clasped hands. It is the first time I’ve ever touched a boy my own age voluntarily, because I want to, and not because I am meant to heal him.
Is this why I feel so many things at once?
My gaze shifts upward to Finn’s hazel eyes.
His body is surrounded by light.
I let go of his hand and the light disappears.
We don’t say anything else.
I head toward the exit.
Maybe Finn is the angel, not me.
NINE
José peels out of the driveway after dropping me at the house. He doesn’t want a run-in with the woman who is standing in the open front door, hands on hips, a scowl on her face. Even the scowl can’t ruin my mother’s beauty. Her long dark hair that waves just slightly. Her brown eyes and thick lashes, her delicate nose and lips like a bow. All that smooth, olive skin.
“Marlena Oliveira,” she barks, the moment I start toward her. She’s wearing a white short-sleeved blouse and loose white pants.
My long cotton dress billows around my ankles and wrists. I changed discreetly in the car, jeans and tank top shoved safely at the bottom of my bag. “Yes, Mama?”
“Don’t you yes, Mama me!”
I study the woman who is my mother, with whom I’ve grown so far apart this summer, who I now make so angry when before I made her so pleased. People see me in my mother and my mother in me. Some of the T-shirts and trinkets they sell in town show the two of us together. The image is usually of the classic Madonna and child sort, my mother holding me in her arms when I was a baby. Occasionally I see one of those little saint cards with me as a child of nine or ten, my mother sort of floating above me in the background. A divine figure watching over her blessed daughter.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
I breathe in, mustering innocence. “I was at the healing rocks,” I lie. The healing rocks are a place I like to go to think and watch the ocean, and where I sometimes prepare for an audience. “I asked José to take me there, Mama. Don’t be mad at him. I felt like I needed to recenter myself.”
The hard look in her expression softens. “Why didn’t you leave a note? Or better yet, why didn’t you wait so we could go together?”
I grip the sides of the white cotton dress, my hands sweaty with the humidity. “Next time I will.”
She nods, but she is still blocking the doorway. I’m not off the hook yet.
“You forgot that you had a private audience today.”
I bite my lip. Realize that my mother is right. I’ve never done this before. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I might be fighting my mother’s rules, but I don’t want other people to suffer because of this. “I did forget.”
A sheen covers my mother’s face. The sun is beating down on her directly but she doesn’t narrow her eyes against it. “They’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”
My legs grow unsteady. “They’re still here?”
“Yes, Marlena! Do you think they’d come all this way and then just leave?”
“I don’t know, Mama,” I say, shoulders starting to hunch. “I’ll go up to the receiving room now.”
I reach the landing on the front steps, about to pass my mother, when she drops, “I heard about your little escapade in town this morning.”
I stop. “Oh?”
“Don’t play dumb, Marlena.” She turns around. “Fatima!”
A long moment passes before Fatima appears. She’s looking at me, apology in her eyes. The dress from my swim, sandy and wrinkled, is in her arms. She holds it out to my mother.
My mother takes it, and sand glitters to the ground. Fatima hurries away. My mother holds the white sheath up to me. “What were you thinking?”
I hang my head.
“What in the world possessed you to go swimming? In front of all those people! In your dress! The tourists have come here to see the healer-saint, not the wild girl-child!”
“I don’t have a bathing suit,” I respond, which is true. It’s something my mother and I have fought over, so not the best answer. Especially since it produces another glare.
“It was hot,” I try again, which is also true. The rest of the truth is that I don’t really know what possessed me. Something did, something drew me into the water, something mysterious and unnameable. “I just wanted to go for a swim. I’m eighteen. I’m not a child anymore.”
I’ve said the wrong thing again.
“Marlena!” My mother takes a step forward, out of the doorway. The roar of the ocean is loud behind the house. “You must never forget who you are, and lately you can’t seem to remember! I don’t know what to do with you! I don’t know who you are anymore.” Her voice trails off, a soft tail of sadness.
“I need a little room to breathe, Mama.” My voice grows smaller and smaller.
“Just go,” she whispers.
Her quiet is worse than her upset. “Go?”
“Those people are waiting.” She finally steps aside to let me pass. As I move by she shrinks away, careful not to touch me.
I wish that instead she would reach out and hug me like other mothers hug their daughters. A storm surge of doubt and uncertainty rises through me. “And wha
t if I can’t heal today, Mama? What if my gift doesn’t work, like Mrs. Jacobs says? What if I fail? Would you tell me if I did? If you found out from them later?”
“Marlena.” My name from her mouth is hard, the pit of an olive.
We are not supposed to speak about that day with Mrs. Jacobs.
My mother closes her eyes. When she opens them they are glassy. “My gifted miracle of a daughter. You still do not know what it is like to love someone with all that you are and then lose them completely. You are lucky to have avoided such an experience, while so many others have had the misfortune of losing everything. Everything and everyone they’ve ever truly loved.” She is thinking of her own parents and my father. When people come asking for a healing audience, I know my mother feels a special connection because of her own losses. For that reason, she also feels a special rage that Mrs. Jacobs did what she did in front of those suffering, grieving people. “Those who come to us, who come to you,” she goes on, “most of them have lost hope. You are their last hope in this world.” My mother tilts her head, and wipes her fingers across the tears that have fallen down her cheeks. “You will heal and your gift will not fail you. It just can’t.”
“Yes, Mama,” I answer, and head inside.
The receiving room is in a special wing off the side of the house. Long gauzy white curtains billow in the breeze and in the center of it is a long couch, covered in pale-blue linen, where the petitioners sit. They face a single wooden chair, made by my grandfather with careful hands. That is where I am to sit. There is a big white vase on a side table. Fatima fills it with flowers whenever there is an audience. Today it is bursting with pink peonies.
Squeezed into one side of the couch today is a man, not too old, not too young. Maybe forty. He is clutching a woman who must be his mother. Her hair is graying but not totally gray, and she is dressed smartly, in dark-green pants and a cream-colored blouse, her wrists draped with bracelets and her fingers with rings. I see a big diamond on one, with a wedding band pressed tightly against it. She has the look of a woman with style and confidence, who cares for herself and her appearance. Yet to see her face, anyone would immediately know otherwise.
The Healer Page 5