The Healer

by Donna Freitas

  I stare at her. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding.”

  I don’t want my mother to get the best of me, but I can’t resist. “You’ve given me what I’ve asked for, for a couple of weeks! When set against, I don’t know, the rest of my eighteen years, I’m not sure that counts as generous, Mother.”

  Mother.

  I never call her that.

  Her body goes rigid. She doesn’t like it. Good. “Eighteen years spent building your reputation, which you squander in a few minutes of losing your temper in public.” She is seething, but manages to control her voice, unlike me. “Not to mention all the other damage you’re doing on this vacation. Going out with that boy.”

  A little yelp of surprise escapes me.

  “I’m not stupid, Marlena,” my mother says. “We may not talk, you may go off on your own as though the rules no longer apply, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on. How you’re willing to jeopardize everything because you’re mooning over some idiot.”

  “He’s not an idiot.”

  My mother smirks.

  “He’s not,” I repeat. “Most mothers would be happy if their daughters brought him home. Proud even.”

  Her I knew it face appears. “Don’t play with your reputation, Marlena.”

  She makes me want to scream. “You mean your reputation? Isn’t that what we’re really talking about? And by the way, I’m not a thirteenth-century nun. So stop treating me like one!”

  My mother gets up from the couch and leaves the room. When she returns she’s dragging the mailbag. She must’ve taken it from my room. “Do you see this?”

  “I’m not blind.”

  “Well. Lucky you. Some of the people who’ve written to you are blind. And they would like your help.”

  I look away. How could I ever have thought my mother might change?

  My mother huffs. “You don’t even have the decency to face the people who need you.”

  My fist closes around the edge of a blanket draped over the couch, squeezing it until my fingernails press through it into my palm. I force myself to turn back to her. I don’t speak.

  My mother gets a satisfied expression. “I knew it.”

  “You knew what?” I snap.

  She points at the bag. “You do feel guilty about abandoning these people.”

  “I haven’t abandoned anyone.”

  “Oh? Then how would you put it? That you’ve sent them in another direction, seeking their last desperate hope elsewhere? Did you refer them to a different healer, Marlena? One I didn’t know about?”

  “Mother.” A warning loud and clear.

  “Don’t worry. They’ve all received a reply.”

  Breathe, breathe, breathe. “What are you talking about?”

  “They’ve been notified that your healing powers have waned as you get older.”

  I jump up from the couch and stare at her. “Why would you do that? Why would you lie to them?” But is that even a lie? Could it be the truth? The back of my neck is hot and prickly. The blood in my veins sears through my body.

  My mother is calm and poised. As though it isn’t the middle of the night. “You’d rather I just tell them that you don’t feel like healing? That you’ve stopped caring about their lives and their futures? That you’ve turned your back on God? On your gift?” She hesitates. “On me? And after everything . . .”

  I wince. I don’t need to see the self-portrait hanging behind me to remember what it looks like. To know that my mother is there on that ship, too, with the rest of the town, needing me to ferry her to safety. “You know that’s not true,” I say, though I’m not sure which question I’m addressing. Maybe all of them at once.

  “God gave you a gift, Marlena—”

  “—stop talking to me about God!” I scream, and she jumps. “I don’t want to hear about God anymore!”

  “Marlena! God does not—”

  My hands go to my ears, pressing against them. “I hate God!” I am shouting over her, trying to drown her out. “I hate God and his stupid gifts! If God wants his gift back he can have it!”

  This stops my mother’s words. Her lips part in shock.

  My chest is heaving. I close my eyes. This is what my “gift” brings out in me. I do not want to be this person. Why can’t I stop being this person?

  “I don’t know you right now,” my mother says.

  “No, you don’t,” I say, determined not to lose control again. “Because I am just now getting to know who I am and what I want after eighteen years of my so-called gift defining everything I do. No more. Never again. Never ever.”

  My mother and I are eye to eye over the coffee table, locked in a staring contest. “You can pretend you’re normal, but you aren’t. You never will be. You’ll see.”

  “I am seeing, Mother. Like I’ve never seen before. Like my eyes have been closed my entire life and they are just now opening.”

  A flicker of fear appears on her face. She thought she would win this argument. She thought I would bend and I haven’t. “You must stop seeing that boy.”

  “No.”

  “You will regret it.”

  “I will never.”

  My mother’s expression hardens. Her eyes harden. “There are some lines, Marlena, once you cross them there is no going back.”

  I stare at her for a long time, my expression just as hard. “Are we talking about sex here, Mother? Is that what this is about? The possibility that I might actually have love in my life? That someone might want me and I might want him back, for something other than a healing? Are you worried God will see and get angry and jealous that I am no longer under his thumb? That God will be disappointed that I am not his modern-day Julian of Norwich after all?”

  I say this because I know how to bait my mother, too. But I also say it because deep down I am stung. It is always God, God, God with my mother and what God wants and what God needs and talk of my godforsaken reputation and my godforsaken gift and how it is really all about her. It is never, ever about me. It is never Marlena, what do you need? Or, Marlena, what would make you happy?

  Everything about me hurts, like what she says can cause actual, physical pain to my flesh and my bones.

  “I’m going back to bed.” I get up from the couch. I take one step, then another, each one getting farther away from her. All I want is to go forward, forward, forward. Onward to everything she’s tried to take away from me again. That she’ll always try to take away.

  Sometime during the night, I don’t know exactly when, my mother enters my room again.

  “Please don’t take this from me,” she whispers over me as I lie in my bed. Pain slices a deep crevasse through her words.

  I hear her because since our fight I haven’t been able to sleep. I guess she hasn’t either.

  She hovers there, maybe in the hopes that I am awake and will respond with reassurances, that I will console her with promises that of course things will go back to our version of normal. That our fight made me rethink everything, that I have a duty not only to those in need, but to her. For a split second I think I might do exactly this. My heart hurts to notice the pain in her voice, the loss piled upon loss, layered with despair. To be reminded my mother is not invincible; that she is, in fact, terribly fragile. I feel soft with her sadness, vulnerable to it, absorbing it like liquid. But it isn’t long before the sadness turns back to anger.

  It has always been my mother enclosed with me in my healer’s cell, because she’s enclosed us there together, happy to shut out the world and the loss she’s endured with it.

  I hear her breaths above me in the dark, short and labored.

  I say nothing.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When I wake in the morning, it’s late and I’m covered in sweat.

  The sun is high, and I can already tell that the day will be warm. I inhale the air coming through the window. It still smells like summer even though it’s September, a combination of newly cut
grass with the crisp cleanness of ocean.

  I sit up and the world tilts as I remember my middle-of-the-night visits from my mother. I get out of bed and rummage around in the bathroom cabinets until I find the plastic bag I stashed in the back. Inside it is a jumble of makeup I bought at the drugstore. I take out the bottles of nail polish. There must be ten. I couldn’t decide which color I liked best so I bought all the ones I liked. There is a bright blue that beckons, but instead I settle on a shiny candy-apple red because I know it’s the color that will most bother my mother when she sees it. And I feel like pissing her off. Because I am a terrible, unfeeling daughter. Obviously.

  I sit on the toilet seat and put my foot up on the counter.

  Soon it looks like someone has taken an ax to my toes.

  Armed with some cotton balls and remover, I decide to start over, but this only succeeds in dying the skin around all of my ten toes a dull red. Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing. My mother has always painted my nails for me, but only with clear polish. Never blue or green or pink. Especially not red. Red makes a girl look like a slut. My mother never actually said this, but it was always understood that wearing red nail polish would affect my reputation. It’s all about perception, I’ve learned well.

  “You want to appear like you have it together,” my mother always said. “Like nothing can faze you. That is what people expect of you, as a healer.”

  I get up from the toilet seat and look down at my feet and laugh. “I look so together,” I say out loud to the bathroom floor. “Like my toes have just bled out.” I hear Fatima rustling around and I poke my head into the hallway. “Help?”

  Fatima’s eyes travel to my feet. “What did you do?” She sounds alarmed. She sets the mop in her hand against the wall.

  “It’s just nail polish.”

  She nods and pushes past me into the bathroom and picks up the bottle of remover. “This stuff is worthless,” she says, then pushes past me again and disappears. When she returns she’s holding a different bottle and tells me to sit back down on the toilet seat. Several more cotton balls and a lot of rubbing my toes later and they are back to their normal color. “This stuff is terrible for your nails but it’s the only thing that works.” She hands me the bottle she used and throws the one I bought in the trash.

  The label on the one that actually removes polish says “acetone” in big warning letters, like it might be poison. “Is that yours?”

  Fatima shakes her head. “It’s your mother’s.” She whisks it out of my hands and disappears again, presumably to return it before anyone notices.

  Leave it to my mother to know the difference between the good-for-you kind of remover that doesn’t work and the bad-for-you kind that does. I wonder what other womanly forms of wisdom my mother knows that she’s never taught me about?

  When Fatima enters the bathroom again I am still sitting on the toilet seat.

  “All right,” she says. “I’m going to show you how to do this. Let’s switch.”

  “What?”

  “Up, up. We’re switching places.” Fatima kicks off one of her shoes.” You’re going to do my nails as practice; then you can do your own.”

  “You want me to give you a pedicure?”

  Fatima chuckles and kicks off the other shoe. “Yes. Why not?” When I hesitate, Fatima says something else. “I know you’re used to other people kneeling before you, but I’m not going to do that. And maybe it’s time you kneel before someone else for a change?”

  My cheeks burn. I nod, getting up but not speaking. Fatima has stolen my words. She’s right. I set out the range of colors and Fatima chooses a pale pink, so pale it’s almost white.

  “That way it won’t look like my toes are bleeding if you go outside the lines,” she says. Then she plops herself down.

  I get on the floor before Fatima’s feet and begin to work, silently, while she offers instructions and I listen, doing my best to obey. Start there. In the center. Then work to the edges. Go over that one again. Take your time—this isn’t a race. After a few botched toes I think I’m getting the hang of it.

  “I’m sorry about what I said before,” Fatima says.

  I pause, not sure if I can paint nails and talk at the same time. “It’s okay. I deserved it. It’s true.”

  “Look at me,” she says.

  I finish the nail I’m painting, and return the brush to the bottle. Then I sit back on the bathroom tiles and meet Fatima’s gaze.

  “You don’t deserve anything,” she says. Her dark eyes are full of concern. “You’ve lived a complicated life, you’re young, and you’re doing the best that you can.”

  “Do you think I’m a bad person?” I ask.

  Fatima takes a long time to answer. Too long.

  I try not to feel betrayed. “You do.”

  “No,” she says quickly. “No, no, no, Marlena. I meant what I said, that you don’t deserve anything. You don’t deserve to feel badly about your choices, especially since it’s the first time you’ve had the opportunity to make choices for yourself.”

  I slump against the tub behind me. “Yeah, but now that I have the opportunity, am I making bad choices? All the wrong ones?”

  Fatima thinks for a long time before answering this question, too. I try to be patient, and not jump to conclusions.

  “Not necessarily,” she says.

  I curl my knees into my chest and wait for Fatima to say more. She’s in her uniform skirt for work. Her shins are veined and there is a long scar up the side of one.

  Fatima’s eyes drift to the bathroom counter. The array of nail polish bottles lined up by the sink. “I think that your mother raised you to believe there is only one way of you being you, Marlena. And that way is very extreme, in my opinion. Very restrictive. Now that you have some freedom, you being you has come to mean you being the opposite of how your mother raised you. Which is also a bit extreme.”

  This assessment I do not like. “You think I’m being extreme?”

  Fatima’s eyes shift back to me. Little wisps of hair have escaped her bun and frame her face. “Honestly? In a way, I think you’re being like every other teenager I know, because you’re rebelling.”

  This perks me up. “So I’m normal?”

  “Oh, Marlena.” Fatima takes a peek at her unfinished toes. “I think you are you, which is different than most of the other girls your age—and there is nothing wrong with that,” she adds quickly. “But it’s like I said before, I don’t think that you have to make this choice between a life as a healer, or a life as a ‘normal’ girl, as you like to say. I wish you would take a step back, maybe slow down a bit, and give yourself time to listen to whatever it is that heart of yours is telling you. The choice between healer and ‘normal’ might not be that stark, when you get a bit of distance.”

  I shift position until I am on my knees again, bent before Fatima’s feet, carefully brushing the pale-pink polish across her remaining toenails. At one point, I say, “Maybe I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing anymore. Maybe my gift is gone.”

  I hear a sharp intake of breath, but I keep my eyes on Fatima’s feet. “Or maybe it’s that your gift is changing,” she says. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Changing to spite me,” I say.

  “Changing along with you,” she says without hesitation. “Changing to accommodate the young woman you are becoming.”

  I bend closer to the floor, doing my best to paint Fatima’s tiny pinkie nail, which requires all my attention. Then I sit back onto my feet and look up. “Done,” I say. Before she can evaluate my careful work, I ask something else. “Do you think God punishes us for our mistakes? If he thinks we’re being ungrateful?”

  Fatima’s eyes widen. “Marlena!” She leans forward. Puts her hands on my shoulders. “If you are asking me if I think God will punish you for . . . for painting your nails red and wearing a bikini on the beach and going out with a boy, the answer is no. I do not believe God is that way and I don’t want you
to either.”

  “My mother does.”

  “She may indeed, but you don’t need to believe everything she does.”

  Fatima lets go of my shoulders.

  “Do you ever wonder if there’s a God at all?”

  She sighs, then starts to chuckle. “Meu Deus, you ask difficult questions.”

  “You give difficult answers, Fatima.”

  She chuckles again. “Well, I guess that makes us a good pair.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “For everything. For being honest.”

  “Oh, stop thanking me.” She gets up and straightens her skirt. She looks down, wiggling her toes. “Thank you for the pedicure. It’s not bad for your first time.” Fatima nods at the red nail polish on the counter. “Now it’s your turn. I’ll supervise. But hurry up. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  I open the bottle of polish and, as Fatima stands over me, watching, pointing, barking instructions, I listen as best as I can until I have ten toes that gleam a shiny candy-apple red. The entire time Fatima’s words about having to get back to work ring in my ears. That means this, what we are doing here, painting each other’s nails, talking, she doesn’t consider as work. Which means that I am not work for Fatima. When I am finished, she slips her shoes onto her feet again and walks out the bathroom door.

  Within an hour I am in my new bathing suit, big Hollywood sunglasses covering my eyes, hair pulled back, bright-green towel in my bag, bright-green flip-flops thwacking a trail across the house. My red toenails clash and make my feet look like Christmas, but I don’t care. I don’t care if my mother sees me in this bikini and I don’t care if the townspeople recognize me and do a double take at all of the skin I’m showing.

  Well, I try not to care. In truth, I do feel self-conscious. But it’s time I go for a swim in an actual bathing suit, and today it’s warm enough. I walk to the beach, and as I breathe in the ocean air and hear the sound of the waves, the self-consciousness fades, replaced by excitement.

  I’m going to the beach.

  I’m going to walk in the sand. I’m going to lie in the sun and feel the burn on my skin. I’m going to put my newly red toes in the water and then the rest of myself too. Just me. Just because I want to. The second I’m on the sand a series of what if questions pop in and out of my head.