José’s window is still open.
“Your drink, señor,” I say, handing the can through the window.
He chuckles and takes it.
“Marlenita,” he laughs, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Nothing, cariño.” He eyes the bag, which is sagging with the weight of the magazines. “What else did you buy?”
“Girly things,” I say, and shrug.
I’m about to get into the back seat when I stop and bend forward again, looking through the passenger-side window. “Can I sit up front? Or is that weird?”
José’s eyebrows arch again. “Of course you can. It’s not weird.”
I open the door and settle in. I’ve never sat up front. I guess because Mama always set the precedent of sitting in the back. This seems silly now that I think of it.
José puts the car in gear and pulls onto the road. I glance over at him, but his eyes are facing forward. I reach into the bag and pull out Vogue, with its glossy cover and a woman in a frilly, strapless black gown with her head thrown back laughing. She’s frolicking among some trees, their leaves golden and red and a fiery orange of fall.
If I put on a dress like this, would it make me that happy, too?
I flip through it, mesmerized by so many beautiful things.
“You looking for style advice, eh?” José asks as I’m reaching into the bag to pull out another glossy tome.
I nod, a little embarrassed by how many magazines I bought. It makes me look either desperate or like I have no impulse control. Maybe both. But maybe it doesn’t matter? It feels like I’ve been let out of jail. Maybe, on my first day of freedom, I’m allowed to go a little crazy. Maybe on my second day, too.
The pictures on the pages are so exquisite. The women, the clothes. They are elegant and funky and sexy and so many other things I’m not used to. The wedding gowns for my audiences are lovely, sure, but they make me into the portrait of innocence, the virginal bride. Of course, I am a virgin, but still. These clothes make me wonder whether, if I put them on, I’d become a different person, like putting on a new skin.
I page through the magazines like a hungry monster. I gobble them up.
I want everything at once. Clothes, friends, boyfriends, road trips, shopping trips, parties, lazy days at the beach, cookouts, school, homework, epic makeout sessions, and movie nights. It’s like I’ve been starving for years, but just realized I’m ravenous. The world has always been there, but it feels like I am only now seeing it. My heart pounds.
I need to calm down.
“Oh!” I dig around at the bottom of the bag until my hands close around the candy bars. I nearly forgot I bought them. “Here.” I drop one of the Twixes into the cup holder. “That’s for you.”
“My favorite!”
“I know.”
José’s palm rests on top of the wheel as he steers us alongside the ocean. He’s quiet for a bit and doesn’t reach for the chocolate, but then I hear him take a breath. “Did something happen between you and your mama? Well, I know something happened, but are you okay, mi niñita? This seems like a lot of sudden change.”
I look down at the pile of magazines in my lap, slipping and sliding around with the movement of the car. “I’m okay,” I tell him. “Maybe for the first time in a while.”
“That’s good to hear,” he says, but I can sense hesitation. “Your mama,” he starts, but then stops.
I almost don’t want him to continue.
Is it weird that I don’t wonder where my mother is? Or when I’ll see her again? Or what will happen when I do? Like, what in the world will we talk about or say to each other if it’s not about the audience coming up this coming Saturday or, I don’t know, a television special about me? Will we suddenly talk about boys and clothes and get manicures and hang out in the lawn chairs in the back of the house and sun ourselves? Will she ever forgive me for stopping being her perfect child-daughter-healer?
Instead of asking José what he was going to say about my mother, I change the subject to something that has just occurred to me in my newly freed state. I watch as José turns the wheel, just slightly, but enough to round the bend in the road. “José, would you teach me how to drive one of these days?”
José belly laughs so hard it’s nearly a minute before he answers, and so long that Angie’s boxy glass center has come into view. “I’d love to, cariño. I thought you’d never ask.”
TWENTY-ONE
I thwack my way through the front door. I decide I love flip-flops, the way they are seemingly so low-key and unassuming, flat and rubbery and made so you can get them caked with sand and wash them off later with a garden hose if you want, but at the same time just a little bit obnoxious because of the constant, rhythmic noise they make as you step. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Rhythmic like the ocean waves, yet plastic and man-made and entirely unnatural. Profane.
People can hear me coming, I think.
Unlike before, when I wore my silent, white ballet flats.
I am no longer a ghost.
As usual, Lexi is buried in a thick book on her desk. She glances up. “Hi, Marlena. Look at you!”
“Colorful?” I say, getting used to everyone’s surprise. “Um, too colorful?”
She smiles. “No. Cheerful. Different. I like it.”
Lexi might be lying, but I don’t care. “Thank you.”
“Angie’s on a call. She should be off in a few minutes. You can wait wherever you like. You know your way around.” She drops her eyes back to her reading.
I resist inquiring whether Finn is with Angie in the office and instead head into the wide open lab. The MRI machine glows bright as always in the stark sunlight streaming through the glass. Before I can decide otherwise, I kick off my flip-flops and climb onto the hard table and lie down. Then I inch myself along the platform until I’m inside the dome. The machine is off, so the effect is unremarkable. It’s just dark and quiet and still.
I place my hands on the inside of the dome and wait, bracing myself.
I wait and wait.
Nothing.
Just silence. Lifelessness. No visions. No sensing other people who’ve been inside this machine, no wounds either physical or emotional. The visions were here just the other day. So where did they go?
I swallow.
There is tension in my muscles, my shoulders especially. I let my hands fall away from the hard, cold metal. They come to rest on my chest.
“Marlena?” Angie’s voice is muffled by the machine. “What are you doing?”
I inch my way out, using my bare feet to pull myself and sit up. Angie is standing by the wall of the lab, seemingly frozen. I suppose it’s not something that happens every day, a girl randomly climbing inside her MRI.
“Hi.” The bright-green flip-flops are still on the floor, waiting for me. I hop down from the table, acting like me being inside an eerie MRI without it being turned on is the most ordinary thing in the world. I slip my feet into the shoes and thwack over to her. I will never tire of that sound.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, slowly coming back to life. I wonder if she notices how today I’m sporting an outfit other than my typical dressed-for-bed attire. I try to look around inconspicuously for Finn to see if he’s hiding in some corner of the lab, but I don’t see him anywhere.
Maybe he’s not coming? Maybe he changed his mind about hanging out with me?
Angie searches my face like she’s trying to see inside my mind. Her eyes shift to the machine and she nods her chin at it. “Thinking about getting an MRI?”
“Maybe?” I say.
Angie’s hair is long and loose today, and it brushes her shoulders. She’s wearing a blue button-down blouse that matches her eyes. Casual but somehow dressed up. Like she could go to the fanciest restaurant around and fit right in. “Did it feel scary, to be inside of it?” she asks me. “Or not as bad as you thought?”
“Not as bad as I thought, I guess?”
“At least
this time, you didn’t faint when you touched it.”
I nod. I didn’t. How can a person feel this different overnight? Be this different? Maybe it’s all in my imagination. My attention drifts to the photos on the wall behind Angie. James Halloway. Nicole Matthews. Chastity Lang. All teenagers with gifts like mine, or something like it. “What are you really looking for when you talk to us?”
Angie’s brow furrows. “Who do you mean by ‘us’?”
“You know. All the weirdos you study.” I point to their photos. “Sonar girl and telekinesis boy. The weatherman. And me,” I add.
“You’re not a weirdo,” Angie says. “None of you are.”
“Did you put them in these crazy machines?”
Angie clasps her hands. “Eventually. Yes.”
I think about how an MRI is designed to allow someone to see through you, to literally see through your skin and muscles and bone. Designed to expose all of your secrets, to photograph them in black and white. What would an MRI reveal about me? What’s inside me that you can’t see just by looking? “What do you think you might find in my brain?”
Angie cocks her head. “I don’t know,” she says, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. She has a theory. She’s not telling me what it is. “That’s why I want to do an MRI.”
“Do you have any scans I can look at?” I ask, realizing I’m curious what they look like. “You know, so I can see what I’d be getting into?”
Her expression brightens. “Sure. Of course I do.” She beckons me to follow. We pass her office and keep on going, into a different part of the center. She leads me into another lab of sorts, but this one is small. Three of its walls are covered with giant screens. Angie picks up a tablet from the table in the middle of the room. The lights go dim and the screens grow bright. My eyes take a second to adjust.
“Oh wow!” I reach out instinctively, toward the glow suddenly emanating from the wall. “That’s. . . . those . . . they’re beautiful!” All across the screens are images of human brains. Well, images in the shape of a human brain. The colors are startling. I didn’t know they would be so colorful! Lines and splotches and lakes of red, blue, green, yellow, purple saturate the scans like maps, like winding bodies of water, like . . . “Angie, I . . . I . . . they . . .”
“What?”
Longing, as powerful as a wave crashing into shore, permeates my every cell. I swallow, I breathe, I try to start over. “This probably won’t make any sense, but I recognize these.”
Angie is close in the dark. She’s watching me, not the screens. “I don’t understand, Marlena. Say more.”
“I recognize them from my visions. My visions look like this. Not exactly. But very similar. Like, incredibly, incredibly similar.”
“Really.” Angie’s voice drops an intensely interested octave.
“Yes.” I walk up to the screen to my right, until this one image is only inches from my nose. It almost looks like a sea anemone. There is a stem—the brain stem, I assume—that mushrooms up into a million tiny waving threads, which are dominated by blues and bright purples. I want to touch it, like I might touch a person during a healing. It’s like I am looking at something that came from inside me, that is somehow mine, yet there it is on the wall, as though I painted it and hung it there. “Why does the brain do that? Light up aqua here, and lilac there?”
“It has to do with a person’s activities at the time of the scan, and what emotions they are feeling, their thoughts. Different emotions will light up different parts of the brain.” She points to the purple sections. “These colors can indicate sadness, depression. The blue is associated with anger.” She points to another scan on the wall full of pinks and reds. “Those colors indicate happiness, excitement, engagement with the world.”
I stand on my toes to look at another scan, this one a wild swirl of rainbows. “It really is like one of my visions. And the colors from my visions tell me something, too, about the person I’m healing. What they’re feeling or going through. Though shades of gray and black are what indicate pain and grief in my, um, scan of a person.” I turn to Angie. For once, she’s staring at me like she doesn’t know how to respond. “I’ll show you them sometime,” I offer, wishing she’d stop looking at me that way. “My art, I mean. If you ever come to my house—not that my mother would be happy about that.”
“Maybe you can take photos and send them to me.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe I’m like a living, breathing MRI machine?” I try to laugh. Maybe all this time I’ve been painting scans of people’s brain activity? Or maybe I’ve been painting images of my own brain, how it lights up during a healing? “That sounds crazy.”
Just then, Finn walks in. “Um, sorry to interrupt. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
My entire body swoops like I’m flying. I wonder how this would show up on one of these brain scans. A bright saturated red? A pink as intense as the color of my sweater? The same hue as my cheeks now that Finn is here? “Hi, um, hi,” I say, eloquently.
Angie skips right over greetings and goes straight to the point. “Marlena was just telling me that her visions look like brain scans,” she tells Finn. Then to me, she says, “Finn has a photographic memory. I’ve never seen anyone who can grasp the map of someone’s brain like he does. I’m sure he’d love to take a look at your brain scan just as much as I would.”
In this moment, I remember Angie is a scientist, like a really serious scientist, and I wish she hadn’t just revealed this thing about me to Finn, the boy I’m obsessing over, like it isn’t a big deal. Though I do like that she just revealed this other, fascinating detail about Finn to me.
“Angie, come on!” Finn rolls his eyes.
I guess he must be feeling the same way I do. “You have a photographic memory?”
He nods.
“Wow,” I say.
He shrugs.
Then, maybe because I’m so nervous about everything, I drop, “So I’ve decided to take a break from healing.” After which I wonder if this lands like a bomb or just more of a somewhat-interesting revelation that fizzes and sputters.
Angie was about to say something else and instead she closes her mouth.
“Well, that’s quite the news,” Finn says, finding his voice.
I avoid looking directly at him and instead search Angie’s face, trying to guess what she is thinking. I don’t want to disappoint her. I worry that I am.
“Why don’t we go to my office and talk about this?” she suggests. “We’ll leave Finn to his scans.”
On my way out of the lab, Finn speaks softly to me. “See you later. Right?”
“Yes,” I say, just as softly.
When Angie and I get to her office she sits cross-legged on the floor, and I take a spot on the couch. I almost wish she would sit next to me like a mother might. “Does that mess up . . . this?” By this, I mean the project of Angie studying me.
“Well, that depends.” She says this calmly, like what I’ve just informed her of is no big deal. “Just because you’ve stopped healing doesn’t mean that my research and our conversations have to end. As long as you’re okay with it, we can continue as before.”
My breath quickens. I’m afraid to tell her the truth. “I don’t know. I think I want a break. Not from you. But even from thinking about healing. At least for now.”
Angie inhales deeply. “Marlena?”
“Yes?”
“What prompted this decision?”
Everyone keeps asking this.
“And just a moment ago,” she goes on, “you seemed so excited to talk about your visions and how you saw them in those scans.”
“I know.” I straighten my jeaned legs, study my toes against the green of my shoes, the windows and the sea beyond them outlining everything. My flip-flops are a glaring hue against the monochrome white of everything in Angie’s office. I used to match the decor, blend right into it, and now I’m an interruption. “Yesterday I got into a fight with my mother,” I
start. “She has, or maybe had, plans for a television special about me. Film crews following me for weeks. She didn’t consult me, she just planned it. I got angry at her, like I’ve never gotten angry in my life. I threw a mug. It broke and it was a mess.”
Angie nods as she listens, always pulling stories through quiet and the need people have to fill the gaps in conversation.
“Sometimes I think my mother depends on me more than I depend on her. She just wants me to keep going, healing, so our life never has to change. It doesn’t even matter to her if my gift is real or not.”
“Do you want your mother to believe in you?” Angie asks.
I let my legs relax again. Slump into the cushions of the comfy couch. “I don’t know. Her belief in me has come at such a cost. Like, she doesn’t really see me as her daughter. I’m a healer first. A healer only.”
“Is this why you decided to take a break?”
I force myself to be the silent one now, afraid of what I might say. Yes, and also because I want to go out on dates with your research assistant.
“Is there anything else?” Angie presses.
“Probably.” I only allow myself the one word.
“Are you sure about your decision?”
“Yes,” I say, even though inside of me is a jumble of uncertainties. Do I really want a life without my visions, visions that look strangely similar to those beautiful scans? “You know a lot about the brain, right?” I find myself asking.
“I hope so, Marlena, since I’ve devoted my life to studying it.” Angie says. “Why?”
“Do you think the brain can . . . change?”
The Healer Page 14