Angie has asked to scan my brain each time I’ve come. The thought of being inside that machine in her lab makes me shudder. I’m not ready for anyone to see inside my head, even though I’m also curious what Angie might find out. “Not today,” I say.
“What are you so afraid of, Marlena?” Finn’s tone is edged with something.
“Finn!” Angie scolds again. “Stop reminding me how young and difficult you are. If you weren’t so smart . . .” She trails off.
“I don’t know why I’m resisting it,” I answer. “I just know I’m not ready.”
Finn’s stare cuts through me. “Maybe you’re afraid we’ll find out you’re as normal as everyone else.”
“That’s enough from you, Finn.” Angie’s voice is firm, the topic closed. “That’s fine, Marlena. If and when you’re ready, please let me know.”
Finn sighs. I know he’s disappointed that Angie let me off the hook so easily. His gaze drifts to a pile of papers on Angie’s desk, then it returns to me.
Our eyes catch.
I take a step closer. “What?”
Finn shrugs. “We put out a public call for people you’ve supposedly healed to contact us for an interview. What it was like. How long it took before they were well again. Before-and-after reports from doctors. That sort of thing.” Finn stops there, but there is something else in his expression.
“What are you leaving out?”
Finn places a hand firmly on that stack, fingers wide and pressing down. “These are emails from people who think you’re a fake.”
Something in my chest tightens. “Really?” Finn nods. Angie’s eyes are on me. I guess I should have been prepared for something like this. There must be plenty of Mrs. Jacobses in the world. Maybe it is time I face them. “Um, what if I want to read them sometime?”
Angie’s eyebrows arch. “You don’t have to—”
“—maybe not,” I interrupt. “But at some point, I might want to.” My eyes seek the machines in the lab beyond Angie’s office door. “Kind of like the MRI, I guess. I’m not quite ready yet, but maybe I will be. Eventually.”
“Of course,” Angie says quietly.
“I really have to go. It’s getting late.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Finn offers.
I keep to the middle of the hallway, wanting to be close to him, but he stays all the way to the other side, his hand dragging against the wall.
“You’re a surprise, Marlena,” he says.
“Good. You could use a little excitement in your life, Finn.”
“I hear you could use a little yourself,” he shoots back.
I blush slightly. “Fair enough.” Then I announce, “I have an audience this Saturday.”
Finn stares straight ahead. “I know.”
I glance at him. “Aren’t you curious?”
“I’m skeptical,” he warns. “And maybe like the MRI, you’re not quite ready for me to be there yet.”
I slow my pace. “How can you work with Angie on this project and not come to see me?”
He grows quiet. We pass Lexi and get closer to the exit, closer to good-bye with every step. We reach the doors and I think I might leave without Finn saying another word. But just before I go he speaks.
“I am curious,” he admits.
I stare into the parking lot. José is standing next to the driver’s side of the car, arms crossed, looking anxious. Then I look at Finn, who’s leaning against the wall inside the vestibule of the entrance, arms crossed too. People are always crossing their arms around me. I think they’re afraid if they don’t, they’ll touch the sacred object that is me by accident. “Why don’t you come then? See for yourself what it’s like?” My heart pumps hard in my chest as I say this. It almost feels like I am asking Finn out. “You can be my special guest.”
Finn laughs. “You have special guests?”
“No.” I shake my head. “But I will make you one. I can do whatever I want. It’s my audience.”
“You sound spoiled,” Finn says.
“Probably,” I say, and look at him hard. “Or maybe it’s just that I am lonely and undersocialized and don’t know any better. I’ll see you on Saturday, Finn,” I add, before I hurry outside into the heat.
ELEVEN
The next morning when I go to the kitchen looking for breakfast, the best kind of surprise awaits me.
“Helen!” I yelp, and she looks up from the coffee she is drinking. Her hair has grown longer since the last time we saw each other. It is thick and lustrous, a cascade of brown butterscotch, and her skin is tan from the sun. From all that tennis she plays, I suppose.
“Hey there!” Helen gets up from the stool where she was sitting at the counter.
“I’ve never been so glad to see you,” I say. Helen is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend. Or maybe more of an older sister.
She eyes me, then she eyes my mother, who has just entered the kitchen. “Oh yeah?”
I nod.
Helen is the first person I remember healing.
My memories of that day are potent. I am six, Helen is nine. She is in a wheelchair, a tall thin man behind her, rolling her up the aisle. She wears a short, yellow dress, yellow like the sun in August. Her legs seem spindly, like they can’t hold her up. They are bent at sharp angles. Her eyes are sunken into her face. I skip toward her, liking the way my dress swirls around my knees. Does her father think I am mocking his daughter? Does the rest of the audience? By the time I am at her chair I can hear her quick puffs of breath.
“Saint Marlena, please heal me,” she begs. Then she lowers her gaze. “I am at your mercy.”
I am at your mercy.
I remember these words most of all. At the time I didn’t understand them. I had to ask my mother that night about mercy, what it was and why this little girl thought I had it.
I grab onto Helen’s armrest and look into her bottomless eyes. She blinks back, scared.
“Don’t be afraid,” I tell her. “I like your dress.”
“I like yours,” she whispers.
I get down on my knees. I’ve nearly forgotten the crowd around us, though now I can remember them, the way they seem to draw close, holding their breath. Helen watches me, big eyes stuck to mine, her father’s too. I study her legs, the way the muscle has withered away along the left calf, the way her kneecaps are plainly visible underneath pale, sagging skin. I press my hands flat against her shins.
That’s when the vision starts. A bright, pulsing red.
The color spreads like a sunburst, a whirling blur of images, of this little girl, her eyes, her mouth, her limbs. They swirl until they are me and I am them, until they are all that I am and ever will be. Until the girl and I are the same, an instance of perfect wholeness, like merging with the universe and taking another person with you.
As the vision settles, Helen’s future flashes before my eyes.
I see her legs. They are fleshy and healthy and shaped the way a young girl’s legs should be, the legs of a girl who plays soccer and tennis and goes out for runs. They are strong legs, beautiful legs, legs that any boy would admire, and they are, without a doubt, most definitely hers.
I look up at the girl again. “What’s your name?”
“Helen,” she says.
I gather her thin legs into my arms, the only hugs I am ever allowed. Rest my cheek against the bones of her shins. I feel the transformation begin, I can nearly see it happening, the shift from these sick and neglected legs to the legs that Helen will have someday soon. “Helen, you will walk. You will see. We will run together.” I let go and get up. “Come and see me when you’re better,” I tell her.
Helen did come back; she’s come back many times. On each visit she walks straight and tall on her beautiful legs, legs that run and jump and play soccer. Legs that all the boys admire at the college where she’s on the tennis team, but legs that all the girls admire, too. It turns out, Helen prefers the girls’ admiration to the boys’. Helen is living proo
f, I suppose, that my gift is real. Inexplicable maybe, but true.
As Helen and my mother exchange greetings, I notice a big white plastic bag sitting on the counter. I bet that inside is a lemon cake from a bakery where Helen lives. She knows I love them. “You don’t have to keep thanking me,” I tell Helen every time I see her, telling her to stop bringing gifts, that her friendship is plenty. She brings them anyway.
My mother places a stack of documents in front of her on the kitchen island. “Good morning, Marlena.” Her tone is formal. Polite. Helen will always be welcome in our home because of our history, but my mother doesn’t like it when I get close to someone else. “Did you sleep well?”
I shake my head. I had another vision of Finn, the same one as before. Another maybe-dream. “It was too hot in my room.”
“Why didn’t you turn on the air conditioning?” she asks. Her expression darkens. “You’re not getting sick, are you?”
“No, Mama,” I reply, my tone formal to match hers. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine for the audience on Saturday.”
She nods. “Good. We have important people coming and you need to be at your best.” There is a covered plate next to the sink. My mother points to it. “Fatima made some bollos for you.” Her voice is accusing, but the promise of Fatima’s Portuguese bollos, little individual round breads shaped like English muffins, overrides this.
“Helen, are you hungry?” I ask, even as I’m uncovering the plate and slicing one in half so I can toast it. Sometimes I’ll eat them only with butter, but often I make sandwiches with them.
“I ate on the way here,” Helen says.
I peer into the bag Helen brought, and I was right: lemon cake. I suddenly feel loved. “I’m starving,” I tell her. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She takes a small sip of her coffee. “Take your time.”
When my two halves of bollo pop up from the toaster I butter them and gobble them down. “You’re missing out, Helen. No one makes bollos like Fatima.”
She laughs. “Really. I don’t want to get in the middle of the romance you’re having with those.”
“Your loss,” I say, shoving the rest in my mouth, a too-big bite, but I don’t care. I wait for my mother to say something cutting about my poor manners, about talking with my mouth full, about eating too fast, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
I am about to dig into Helen’s lemon cake when my mother looks up from the documents she’s been studying. “Marlena, I have incredible news. One of the major networks is going to do an eight-part series about you for television! The lawyers sent over the proposal from the network.” She turns to Helen to share her joy, but Helen stares into her coffee cup like it might tell her fortune. “The producers of the show want to come here to follow you around for a few weeks, see you at home, film at your audiences. They want to tell the story of your life. You’ll be even more famous!”
A television show? Follow me around for weeks? I’d have no privacy. No chance of escaping to see Angie or Finn. I would have to be Marlena the Saint, Marlena the Healer, perfect and demure, performing my role 24/7. I feel Helen’s eyes on me. I slide the lemon cake away from me.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” my mother presses.
“Yes, Mama,” I agree.
No, Mama. It’s horrible.
“We will need an even bigger church than we have now after it airs!”
“I’m so excited,” I say, though my tone communicates the opposite. I refuse to look my mother in the eye. Instead I look at Helen. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.” I head out the back door of the house and into the garden, still in my robe and pajamas. I don’t care. I want to be in the fresh air. I hear Helen’s steps behind me, but I don’t slow down. I take the path in our yard that leads to a stairway down to the ocean. I sit on the top step and wait for Helen to join me.
She kicks her shoes off onto the grass and arranges herself at the other end of the wooden slat. “Marlena, what’s going on?”
I stare out at the water, at the way the sun shines across the ripples, creating moving slivers of light. I inhale the briny smell. I never tire of it. “I don’t know.” I turn to look at Helen, envious of the jean shorts that show off her long perfect legs, her clingy cotton T-shirt. The casual way she wears her clothes. “I don’t want to be on a television show. I don’t want the church to be any bigger. I don’t want any more attention than I already have.”
“Marlena . . . you sound so . . . so conflicted,” Helen says. “And upset.”
I close my eyes, tears welling. They spill down my cheeks and drip from my chin onto my robe. I wipe my hand across my face. “Let’s talk about something else. I want to hear about you. Why the visit? Shouldn’t you be starting fall classes or something?”
Helen rests her arms across her knees and leans forward. “I start school on Monday. But I’m here because I got a phone call from a Dr. Angela Holbrook, who wants to interview me about you.” She takes a deep breath. “Is she part of why you’re so upset?”
I sniffle. “No. Angie’s nice. You’ll like her.”
“Angie? So you are working with her. She told me she had your permission to interview people, but I wondered if it was true. I wanted to talk to you before I went to see her.” Helen is still bent forward, close but not close enough to touch. “I wanted to make sure you were okay if I spoke to her. That she wasn’t doing some shitty exposé on you, trying to prove you’re a fake or something.”
I mimic the way Helen sits, resting my arms across my knees. I scoot toward her, relieved when she doesn’t shift away. “It’s okay to talk to her. Really.”
Helen’s hair shines against the backdrop of blue sky. “Tell me about Dr. Holbrook then. What’s the deal?”
A seagull is pecking at a clamshell at the edge of the surf, trying to pry it open with its beak. “Angie is a neuroscientist and she studies the brain. She’s interested in my gift. Where it comes from. What it is. How it works. Whether it’s real,” I add.
Helen huffs. “You don’t need a scientist to tell you about your gift. And you certainly know for a fact that it’s real. I’m living proof!” She crosses and uncrosses her long tan legs as if to remind me. She places her hands on her bare, toned thighs.
I rest my chin against my forearms, watching the gull attack its breakfast. “But what if it wasn’t? What if everything is falling apart?”
Helen shifts so she can peer into my face. “Marlena, please tell me what’s going on. Stop talking in half statements. You can trust me. I’m your friend.”
Tears sting the backs of my eyes again. “You really are my friend, aren’t you? You’re the only one I have.” I nudge my foot against a pebble until it falls off the edge of the step, tumbling toward the rocks below. “You’re my friend despite the fact that you bring me gifts as payback. Friends don’t owe each other like that. Friends are equals.”
Helen looks away. “I know you always say that, but it’s tradition. An expectation. Not something I can simply decide not to do.”
“My mother’s tradition. Not mine.”
“Okay. I won’t do it anymore,” Helen says. “I’m sorry. You are my friend. You are.” She repeats this, as though she knows how hard it will be to convince me. But then she does the one thing that makes me believe what she says is true. She reaches out a hand and places it on my back. She leaves it there, her palm warm and soothing.
A sob escapes my chest, despite my trying to hold it in.
Helen reaches her arm around me and draws me into a hug. I feel her chin pressing on the top of my head. Soon I am crying hard.
“Oh, Marlena,” Helen says after a while, once my sobs turn to hiccups and my breaths grow more even. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Don’t let go of me.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” Helen says, rubbing her hand up and down my arm.
Eventually the tears dry and my body grows calm. Helen and I sit there in the quiet of the morning, pressed together, watching the waves as they
come into the shore and recede. I hope my mother doesn’t see us clutching each other. I try and memorize the feeling of being touched by someone who cares, someone who wants nothing from me other than to help, someone who calls herself my friend and means it. I wonder what life would be like if a comforting touch was a normal occurrence, if it would make me into a different person. Maybe there are other people who would be willing to comfort me, too, and not only because my touch could heal them.
“You are just as much a healer as I am,” I tell Helen.
She laughs softly. “I wish that were true. I wish I were gifted like you.”
“Sometimes it makes my life hateful.”
“But your ability to heal is something incredible. The kind of thing people want to do a television show about.”
I pull back. “Maybe they should do a television show about you and your tennis and your romantic girlfriends and your college friends and your nice college life.” My voice is fiery.
Helen stares at me, like she is trying to figure out if I’m kidding.
“I’m serious,” I tell her.
Helen laughs. “What in the world are you talking about?” Helen shifts and our knees touch. “Now you have to tell me what’s going on. No more stalling. I want to know everything.”
I stare at the place where our skin touches so casually. Wish that everyone in my life could act this way, grateful Helen mustered the courage. “Everything is changing. I’m changing, but maybe my gift is changing, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, it’s always been who I am. I’ve never known how to be anyone else other than Marlena the Healer, and before, I never wanted to be. It was enough. But lately I’ve wanted more, different things, the kinds of things other people take for granted, like school and friends and parties on weekends. Which makes me sound shallow, I know—”
“—Marlena—”
“—but then, I also can’t stop thinking about whether my gift is real, if it works, or if it only sometimes works.” The words are spilling out, and I let them. “And I wonder if that is a new thing, like, if my gift is a kind of reservoir in me, and I’ve almost used it up. Like maybe sometimes when I reach for it, I only touch dry land, and other times I reach the place within me where it still remains, but soon those places will have dried up too.” I tell Helen about Mrs. Jacobs. It feels good to get it out again, like when I discussed it with Angie, this thing my mother has forbidden us to speak about.
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