The Healer

by Donna Freitas

  NINETEEN

  When I get home, my mother is sitting on the couch in front of the windows, still in her white suit and heels. The ocean is a stormy dark blue behind her. The workers and television people are gone. The shattered mug and coffee in the kitchen have been cleaned up, the papers piled onto the counter.

  “Did you have a nice day, Marlena?” Her gaze goes to the grass stains on my dress, then up to the gray scarf around my neck. Finn’s scarf. I’m still wearing it. “Where did you get that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “It does to me. Whose is it?”

  I shake my head.

  Anger flickers across my mother’s face. “Tell me that some boy didn’t give it to you. You know that boys are off-limits. We both agreed.”

  “Yes, back when I was twelve.” Finn’s words from earlier about my having power pulse through me. “It’s none of your business where I got the scarf. So stop asking.”

  “Marlena!”

  I unwind it from my neck and fold it. “Yes, Mama?”

  She rises from the couch. Her suit is wrinkled. “You do not talk to me like that!”

  I hold the scarf to my middle. It warms the place where it presses against me. I glance around the room at the remnants of today’s failed television shoot, at the cameras mounted to the corners of the ceiling, darkened and off. “Well, you don’t get to use me anymore. I’m not some doll, Mama! Some toy you offer people to play with in exchange for fame and money.”

  My mother inhales sharply. “That’s not how this is.”

  I take a step toward her. “Maybe it wasn’t before, when I was younger, but that’s exactly how it is now. I know what you tell people, Mama. Stop denying it.”

  My mother raises her hand. For a second, I think she might be about to hit me, but then something comes over her and her expression shifts. “Such gifts,” she whispers. “Such gifts and they are wasted on you.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But maybe it’s time I get to decide how and when to use them, instead of being used by them.” And by you, I think.

  She crosses her arms, like she doesn’t trust them. “What are you saying?”

  I inhale, readying to tell her what I’ve been thinking about on the way home in Finn’s truck. “I want things to change.”

  The muscles in my mother’s body tense. “Change how?”

  “My gift, the healing, it’s a part of me, a big part.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “But I want to do things other girls my age do, Mama. I want to have friends. I want to go out for ice cream like a normal person.” I tug at my sheath. “I want to wear normal clothes. I want access to some of my money, so I have the freedom to make my own decisions, to buy something I might need or, God, just something I want to eat if I’m hungry.” There is still one thing I haven’t yet said. “I’m . . . I’m stopping. I’m quitting healing. For now. Saturday was my last audience for a while.” This proclamation rings through the room.

  My mother shakes her head, back and forth. “Marlena, you can’t.”

  “I can and I am. You can’t force me to do anything I don’t want.” I cross my arms now. “Not anymore.”

  “Gifts don’t work that way. God gave you this gift to use. You have no idea what will happen if you stop.”

  “You mean God gave me this gift without my asking, so you can use me to make money. And the rest of the town can, too. Let’s be honest.”

  My mother throws up her hands. “Forget about the money for a minute! Gifts like yours aren’t to be played with. You can’t just turn them on and off.”

  “Well, I am.”

  Her head is still shaking. “It’s not right.” She takes a step back and drops heavily onto the couch. “Marlena, I’m . . . I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of what? That you can’t live off your daughter anymore? That you can’t ask seekers and the suffering to pay up or I won’t heal them?”

  Her hands grip her knees. She suddenly looks so young. “I’m afraid you will come to regret this.”

  I close my eyes a moment. I hear honesty in her words. Honesty and worry. Real motherly concern. “If I do, Mama, it can’t be worse than the regret of missing out on a normal childhood, a normal life. I regret that most of all. More than anything else that could possibly happen from this decision.”

  My mother’s gaze drops to her lap. “You say that now.”

  “It’s the truth.” I watch her there, so still, like she’s not breathing. “I don’t want television specials, Mama. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be needed by everyone. I just want to be like everyone else.”

  “You’ve never been like everyone else and you shouldn’t want to be. I saw you on Saturday, Marlena. I saw what you did. We all saw. You should be . . .”

  “Grateful?” I supply with a long sigh.

  My mother’s eyes flicker up at me. “Proud. I was going to say proud.” Then, “Being a healer is who you are.”

  My throat grows tight. “But it’s not all that I am, Mama.”

  There is a long pause, the two of us staring at each other, roles reversed, my mother slumped on the couch, rumpled and defeated, me standing before her, confident and unyielding. “You’re not a little girl anymore,” she says. There is sadness in her tone. Real sadness, and longing.

  The air around us is fragile. I’m afraid to move through it.

  Carefully, I step out of my stained white slippers. “No, I’m not,” I say. Silently, I turn away.

  “Marlena,” my mother calls after me as I climb the stairs. “I do love you, you know. Never forget that. I always have.”

  In my room, I take down the evidence of my visions, the things I’ve painted and made and drawn. I carry them to the gift room, setting them on a shelf and stacking them in the corner. I take my collection of books about healers and mystics, the writings of Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Margery Kempe, even Hildegard, and bring them to the gift room, too. Next come the white sheaths. I ball them into a big heap on the floor by the paintings and the books. I don’t care if they get ruined. I go back and forth, back and forth, replacing the stuff of my life as a healer with the stuff of normalcy. Jeans. T-shirts. Platform sandals and baggy sweaters and flip-flops and short skirts. I pick through the offerings for anything I like. Stacks of novels that people thought I might like to read, probably because other girls my age do like to read them. Soon, aside from the clothes and the books, my room is nearly bare of everything that ever marked my life as a healer.

  My mother is right. I know nothing else aside from healing. But so much blank space is more exciting than daunting. The change makes me feel different.

  Lighter.

  Freer.

  More hopeful.

  But it’s also strange.

  I’m strange. Like I’m not quite here. Like I’m floating in some in-between space, wedged between reality and the unseen. Teresa of Ávila wrote of this place she called the interior castle, which she had to move through, fight through, to get to God. Maybe I’ve entered something of a castle myself, but an exterior one. I must pass through it to finally enter the outside world. I wonder how hard I’ll have to fight, or if I’ll have to fight at all. Maybe it will be easy.

  As the day wears into night, I feel a shift, my entire being changing. All the cells in my body are remaking themselves to reflect the girl I am going to be from this day forward. The girl who is not a healer. The girl who is not too sacred to touch. The girl who is not responsible for the livelihood of an entire town, for the future of so many seekers. The figurehead, removed from her ship.

  It’s like the cells in my body know what is happening.

  Does God know?

  Will God throw a tantrum, taking my gift away and more besides? Sometimes I think, if there is a God, he is a salesman on the side of the road, a con artist hawking shiny baubles, acting as though you already promised to purchase them, as though you begged for them when you never did. Yet somehow he still tricks you
into thinking it was your idea to hang them around your neck in the first place.

  A shiver runs through me.

  I sit in my chair by the window, curl my feel underneath me, and look out onto the water and the darkening sky.

  The human body, our muscles, our hands, have their own memories. Healing is like that, a muscle I’ve been flexing my entire life. I don’t even have to think about it. Calling on my gift has always been as simple as rustling around in a pocket for a charm I know is always there. But it’s also strange to have a gift whose source remains a mystery. A charm I’ve come to depend on, but one I’ve never fully understood.

  Is it possible that just as I can call on my gift at will, I can as easily will it away? That in removing the stuff of my life as a healer, I can remove the gift from my body? Or is it more like the charm getting lost, fallen through a hole in my pocket? And if so, where will it go? Will it be resting between the floorboards, waiting for me to find it again?

  TWENTY

  When I wake up on the first morning of my new life as Marlena Not the Healer, I do a number of things.

  I pick and choose from the clothing now hanging in my closet. There is a glittery tank top I might never wear but decided I wanted anyway. There are jeans and jeans and more jeans. Skinny. Ripped at the knees. Cut off at the bottom. Jeans with studs. Jeans with embroidered flowers. T-shirts are piled on my shelves and cute, colorful dresses hang in a row, a bright tempting rainbow of choices. I decide on one of the T-shirts. Pale violet, with a V-neck. A pair of jeans with studs in the shape of tiny stars. Bright-green flip-flops. I’ve always wanted to wear flip-flops. I’ve seen girls wearing them at the beach, in town, on the boardwalk by the wharf, on the way to some takeout restaurant, thwacking along as they chat with their friends or hold hands with their boyfriends.

  Boyfriends.

  Am I going to have a boyfriend?

  T-shirts, jeans, flip-flops, and a boyfriend, too?

  There is a rush in my ears, a dizzying lightness in my head to accompany it.

  I grab a deep-fuchsia sweater in case I get cold. I love the bright color.

  So much color!

  The sun shines through my bedroom window. I turn my face to it, my whole body, a flower discovering warmth and light.

  My stomach grumbles low and loud.

  I thwack my way down the hall and the steps and into the kitchen, smiling.

  What do healers on vacation eat?

  Candy bars? Ice cream? Cheeseburgers and fries?

  “Marlena, you look nice.” Fatima looks up from the counter where she is chopping vegetables. Carrots. Celery. Onion. Kale. Kale, of course. She is making one of those Portuguese stews that take forever to cook, that she makes sometimes when my mother is feeling homesick for her own mother’s cooking, though she never admits this out loud.

  Is Mama feeling homesick today?

  “You really think so?” I ask Fatima. She smiles an uncertain smile, like she’s not quite sure what the rules are at the moment. I wonder what she overheard yesterday. If she overheard everything. What my mother told her, if anything.

  “Yes. But Marlena?” Fatima comes around the counter to where I’m standing. “May I? Fix something?”

  “Sure,” I say. But she hesitates. “Fatima, please don’t be afraid. I’m not a sacred object.” Fatima blinks. She looks around the kitchen like she’s expecting my mother to jump out of the fridge and scold her for being too close. “Besides, I need your advice on my outfit. Too much color?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I think the color is nice. Different, but a good different.” She tugs a little at my T-shirt, where I’ve tucked it in. Once it’s completely untucked, she fixes it so it hangs to the edge of my hips. “That’s all. But it’s better.”

  “Thank you.” I shrug on the bright sweater and hold out my arms, wait for Fatima’s verdict.

  “I like the pink,” she says, then places a hand over her mouth.

  We both start to laugh. I don’t know why.

  Fatima returns to the other side of the counter. I think our conversation is over, but then she says something else. “Your mama told me this morning that things would be different, but she didn’t tell me how. Do you want to talk about it? I . . . I won’t tell her.”

  My good feeling falters. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. She left early. She didn’t say where she was going.” Fatima has gone back to chopping carrots, but she keeps looking up.

  “I decided I’m not going to be a healer anymore, Fatima.”

  A startled sound escapes her and the knife clatters to the counter. “Marlena? Really? But that is a big change.”

  “I just . . . I needed a break. It’s just for a while.”

  She takes a dish towel and wipes her hands. “Tudo bem, tudo bem,” Fatima says while nodding. “I suppose it makes sense, querida. I can imagine you might want a break. It’s a lonely life you’ve had.” Fatima draws in a deep breath. “Marlena, I . . .”

  I climb onto one of the stools in front of the kitchen island and wait for her to continue.

  “. . . I’ve always thought that things could be different for you.”

  I lean my elbows on the counter. “What do you mean?”

  “That being a healer, being who you are, doesn’t require that you live how you do. That you could be a normal girl, but one who is also a healer. That you could be both things.” She’s not looking me in the eye. “It’s your mama who’s made it seem like it’s one or the other. Your mama and maybe those books you’re always reading by those ancient women. Like it’s all or nothing.”

  What Fatima has said is so simple it should be obvious, but it’s never been obvious to me. “I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think of things any other way. So, for now, I think it just has to be all or nothing. And I want it to be nothing.”

  Fatima sighs, picking up her knife again. “That makes me sorry, Marlena. And sad. I hope you can find your way to a place where you can be both.”

  I tug at the bright-pink ends of my sweater sleeves. “Do you think it’s real, Fatima? My gift? Ever since Mrs. Jacobs . . . I’ve wondered about it.”

  Fatima’s eyes shift upward, toward heaven, then flicker back to me. “Yes, Marlena. I do.”

  I go out the back of the house.

  José is on his way to pick me up. I want to tell Angie about my decision. I feel like she should know that I’m quitting healing for a while. But I’m also going because Finn told me not so casually he’d be there today, and that maybe—if I stopped by to see Angie—he and I could hang out afterward. Do one of the things on my list of normal.

  The ocean shines with sunlight, the waves lapping at the shore.

  The air smells warm.

  Inviting.

  What’s that saying again?

  The world is my oyster.

  I take a step forward, and another, walk through the world, let myself be absorbed into it, embraced and beckoned and called. I wonder if today I am its pearl.

  The moment I get in the car, José reaches his arm back and hands me an envelope. His eyebrows arch, his round face searches mine.

  On it is my mother’s handwriting. “Marlena.”

  I open it. Inside is a pile of cash. No note. Just money.

  “Rosado, cariño,” José says. “I like you in pink. I think it’s your color.”

  “I didn’t know I had a color.”

  “I didn’t know either. But maybe you do now. Maybe you have more than one.”

  “Maybe.”

  José is still watching me. “¿A dónde vamos?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Your friend Angie’s center?”

  “Yes. Please,” I add.

  I count the money. Then I count it again. Twenties, tens, fives. There is six hundred dollars. I’ve never held so much money in my hands. Huh. I told my mother I wanted money, and here it is, like magic.

  Apparently I do have power.

  I count the money ag
ain. I can’t help it.

  With money, a girl can do things. Go places. Buy stuff.

  Maybe I’ll go shopping. Maybe I’ll go to a store and try on outfits like other people do when they’re looking for what to wear. Maybe I’ll find something I like that isn’t the choice of someone I’ve healed. Something that isn’t a thank-you, an offering, for services rendered, miracles completed. Maybe I’ll buy it just because I like it.

  “José?”

  “Sí, Marlenita?”

  “Will you pull over at that gas station?”

  “Por supuesto.”

  He stops and I hop out. Before I go inside, I gesture for him to roll down the window. “Do you want anything?”

  José seems surprised. He’s not used to me asking such things. I’m not used to being able to offer. “Limonada,” he says. “Con gas. You know which ones I mean?”

  I nod. I do know. I’ve seen Fatima drinking them in the kitchen.

  Suddenly, an image of Fatima and José hanging out after work, drinking fizzy lemonades by the seawall, pops into my head. I wonder if they spend time together when they are off the clock.

  “Gracias.”

  “Sure thing, José,” I say, and go into the little store.

  First, I head to the fridges and find the familiar soda can I always see in Fatima’s hand on her break. The cool air rushes out when I open the door. I don’t take anything for myself. I’m not here for a drink.

  I want magazines. Fashion magazines.

  I’ve never looked at one.

  I’ve never been allowed. It’s just not what healers do, I guess.

  There is a shelf at the front of the store full of them and I go to it now, cold soda sweating in my hand. I pick up Vogue. I know it’s famous and I’ve actually heard of it, so I figure it’s a good place to start. I tuck it under my arm and keep looking. Glamour. Elle. Harper’s Bazaar. Marie Claire. There are so many and they are so shiny and beautiful. I skip over the wedding ones, feeling allergic to anything white and sparkly and weddingy. When I go to the register I have a pile of seven magazines to go with José’s fizzy lemonade. They are heavy and the stack makes a loud thud when it hits the counter. Before the man rings up the total, I add two chocolate bars. One for me, one for José. Twixes. I’ve seen José eating them. The man keeps totaling and then asks for way more money than I expect. I guess magazines are expensive. I fish two twenties from the envelope. He hands me back a five, two ones, and change, which I put away while he’s placing everything into a plastic bag. I grab the lemonade before he can put that away, too, say thank you, and head outside.