“Yes.” Angie leans forward. “I would never lie to you about this.” There is a shuffle of feet outside my bedroom door but I tune them out, straining toward whatever Angie says next. “I’m so sorry, Marlena. Finn is dying.”
THIRTY-THREE
Angie and I haven’t said a word since we got in her car. We passed my mother in the hall on the way out of my room. I know she heard every word of what Angie told me. It was her feet I heard outside the door.
The seawall appears with the ocean beyond it, usually a comfort, but I stare at it as though I’m suddenly blind. I know it is there but I can’t take it in. I am ever the anchorite, but the heart in my chest is an anchor dragging my soul to the ground, one forged of crystal and glass that will shatter when it hits bottom. I don’t even know if it’s still beating. My senses have stopped working, everything numb. Perhaps I’m the one who is dying.
“Angie.” A great hard lump has lodged in my throat. I can barely swallow around it.
She is shaking her head. She turns down the road that leads to Finn’s neighborhood. “The rest is for Finn to tell you.” When she pulls up in front of his house and turns off the car, she says, “I’ll wait here. I’m not going anywhere. Take as long as you need. All day if you want.”
I get out of the car and walk up to the house, but it’s like I am underwater, that anchor pinning me to the ocean floor. My legs carry me forward up the porch stairs and my hand is reaching for the door to knock. When Finn answers and sees that it is me, his eyes light up. “Marlena,” he says with a smile. Then his eyes land on Angie, standing there by her car, and every bit of happiness fades, just like those colors in my vision paled as though draining away Finn’s life. I should have known. “What did you—” he calls out, but Angie gets in the driver’s side without a word. Slams the door.
“Finn,” I whisper. “How could you keep this from me?”
He stares down at me. I stare up at him. For a moment, a beautiful fleeting instant, I forget why I’m here. This is love, this is love is racing through my brain.
Finn’s hand twitches. His fingers cross the distance to mine, wrapping around them. My heart pounds all of a sudden, like someone has pulled up that anchor and is readying to cross the sea. Finn bends forward. At first I think he’s going to kiss me but instead he presses his forehead to mine. I close my eyes, soaking up the proximity of his face, his strong body, the smell of his skin, a dizzying feeling traveling over my limbs to the tips of my fingers and toes. I wonder if we are both angels with wings that will carry us away. I wish for this, despite all my wishing against just this for so long.
“Marlena.” He grasps my other hand, presses my palm into his chest, firmly against his heart. The pulse and pound of it reaches into me. “What did Angie say?”
“Just tell me it isn’t true.” I stare up at him and wait.
He says nothing.
“No, Finn, no.” My eyes cloud, everything turning the color of rust. I crumple forward, still pressing my palm into the center of his body. I yank my hand away and point to the heart tattoo peeking out from under Finn’s sleeve. A tinge of anger spreads through my voice, like a drop of stormy color. “I want the real story, because the one you told me is a lie.”
Finn’s eyes seek the porch floor. “Not entirely.” He raises his head, slumps against the wall of the porch. “I was born with a heart defect,” he says, and stops, as though this is the whole story.
I shake my head. Remember Finn’s body, his every inch of perfect skin, unmarred by scars. “But you’ve never had any surgeries.”
“The doctors didn’t discover it until I was older. There was nothing they could do, short of a heart transplant, which I will likely never live to see. The waiting list is too long.” He sighs. “It’s why I moved so far from home. Why my mother and I aren’t speaking. I was tired of hospitals and doctors, because believe me, every avenue has been explored. There is no fixing me. She wanted to keep trying to fix me and I needed her to stop.”
My breaths come in short, quick bursts, like I am running. “Every avenue but, say, a miracle saint girl.”
Finn fixes his stare on me. “Marlena.”
Tears pool in my eyes. “Is that why . . . ?”
“No, no.” He reaches out, maybe to put his arms around me, but I step backward. “Me and you,” he says. “My caring about you, my loving you, has nothing to do with you being a healer.”
A shiver rolls across my body, the shudder dislodging the tears in my eyes. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because it’s true.”
“You’ve tried everything else, so why not a healer? Is that why you work for Angie? Mr. I-don’t-believe-it-unless-I-can-knock-on-it Finn was hoping that one of Angie’s freak subjects might turn out not to be a fraud? Me, particularly?”
“I told you to stop saying that about yourself.”
I wish there was something I could hit hard enough to break a bone. “Like that matters. Like anything matters right now.” Finn tries to catch my hand but I don’t let him. “Look at me,” I demand. “You didn’t once think that maybe, just maybe, I could be the answer? That I could be the one to fix”—my eyes slide to the edge of his tattoo—“your heart? Not even on the day you came to my audience?”
“Of course it crossed my mind. Of course it did, and it still does. I’m not going to lie and say that I haven’t thought about it. I have. I’ve wondered.”
“Finn, you told me to stop healing. It was your idea that I take this . . . this vacation. You gave me the idea to quit!” My voice is rising and rising. “Why would you tell me to do something that goes against everything you need? How could you do that? How could you do that to yourself? What were you thinking?”
“It wasn’t about me,” he says quietly. “It’s what you needed.”
“No! What I needed—what I need—is for you to live a long and happy life! What I need is to keep on loving you and for you to keep on loving me! How could you do this to me, Finn? How could you allow me to love you in exchange for my not saving you?”
Finn’s lips part but nothing comes out. A single tear rolls down his cheek.
“Is it true what Angie said, that you’re dying? Dying?” There is a hysterical edge to that word the second time I say it.
He is still. But then he nods.
“When? How long?”
“I don’t know. Months at least.”
My knees start to buckle. “Months?”
He nods again.
“Give me your hand,” I demand. It comes out a bark. Finn doesn’t, so I say it again. “Give. Me. Your. Hand.”
He holds it out.
I do something I thought I might never do again. I get down on my knees. I inhale a long, hoarse breath, and I close my eyes tight. I reach up and take Finn’s hand. Press my forehead to the back of it. Feel his skin against me, inhale the dizzying scent of him.
And I wait.
I wait for that familiar tug in my body that signals the start of a vision. My heart and mind and soul together search for that familiar charm, wait for the reassurance of its presence, imagine it popping up to me from the floorboards where it’s lain hidden, hoping for me to call it back. I wait for the colors to start, to flood my being, followed by the scenes and that great surge of energy that passes through me into the person I touch. I wait for the healing process to begin, any part of it. I pray for it. As I hold Finn’s hand, press my cheek into his palm like my entire life depends on it, because his entire life depends on it. I silently call out to God, and as I beg and I plead, I realize something I have never before been able to say for sure.
I do believe in God.
But the God I know is a punishing God, a God using Finn to castigate me for forsaking my gift. My mother was right. She’s been right all along. This is what I get for wanting a life, for trying to have a life and love for even a few weeks. God is a being who is punishing both of us because of my hubris.
I sob into Finn’s hand.
There is nothing in me. No sign of my gift. The well of healing inside me is dry.
Finn’s arms are around me, pulling me up.
A jumble of words spills from my lips. “Maybe if I change my clothes, maybe the tank top, the jeans . . . maybe if I take my hair down . . . maybe . . . maybe . . .” I am face-to-face with Finn. Tears are streaming from his eyes. I jump back from him like his arms are made of red-hot iron. “Don’t touch me. You can’t . . . not like this . . . not anymore . . . I felt nothing, Finn, don’t you understand?” The full realization of the situation dawns like a monster rising, hulking and terrible between us. “There is nothing left in me. So we can’t . . . we have to stop.”
His face drains of color, and then I am gone, turning around and heading back the way I came toward Angie, running down the steps and across the yard as fast as I can. “Take me home,” I choke out when I get inside the car.
When I enter the house my mother is the first person I see. She is waiting, maybe since I left. “I overheard your conversation with that scientist,” she informs me. “I heard every bit of it.”
Before she can say anything else, I tell her the decision I made in the silence of Angie’s car. But I stop short of telling her the bargain I made with the punishing God.
I stare over my mother’s head at the self-portrait hanging on the wall, and I think of the shipwrecked girl I am once again. “Make the announcement. My audiences will resume next Saturday. I will heal again on the anniversary of the Day of Many Miracles.” My words are like a last, desperate prayer to Saint Jude, to Julian, to Hildegard, to all the women mystics who lived before me. I see the satisfaction on my mother’s face. “You have won. Mama,” I force myself to add. My eyes flicker toward heaven. Maybe my return to healing, to my life as it was before, exactly as it was before, will be enough to appease the angry God above me. Above all of us.
PART THREE
The In-Between
THIRTY-FOUR
All night I work.
I climb into the attic and take down the boxes marked “Marlena,” bring them to my room, and return my bedroom to its former appearance. I take everything out of my closet, remove every bit of color. I take the novels I will never have the chance to read, the bright-green thwacking flip-flops I love so much, the platform sandals, the teeny flowered bikini Fatima helped me pick out, the phone with the texts from Finn that keep lighting up its screen nonstop, and heap them onto the chairs and the shelves and the floor of the gift room. The only thing I can’t bear to part with is my Finn painting. That I bring to the attic and shut it away there tight.
I unpack the boxes with my books by mystics, about mystics, about healers like me. I set them on the table by my reading chair just so, line them up on the shelves as they were before. I try to remember their exact order. The Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross, on the bottom, followed by Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich, The Interior Castle, by Teresa of Ávila, Hadewijch’s slim volume of poems, The Book of Margery Kempe, by Margery Kempe. Finally, the thickest among them, The Showings, by Hildegard of Bingen. I return the paintings and collages of my visions to the wall. I put them in the same places they hung for years.
Will being so precise, so exact and so careful, help to restore my gift?
The last thing I do is the thing I loathe most. I unpack those horrible white shifts, the filmy long-sleeved dresses I thought I would never touch again. One by one I unfold them and hang them in my closet until my closet is full. The last one I put on, pulling it over my head and letting it slide down my body.
I go into the bathroom and look in the mirror, stare into the face of the girl who looks back. Once again she wears the uniform of Marlena the Healer. This Marlena looks exactly the same as before on the outside, dark hair falling around her shoulders, long-sleeved cotton dress, demure and tentlike, concealing all the curves of her body.
My body, the shape of it, is unchanged, my skin may be unmarked, but inside I am different.
A body that has been loved by another is somehow different from the body of someone who’s never felt love.
But maybe if I can go back to that other girl, then Finn will live.
There are some lines, Marlena, once you cross them there is no going back.
Those words from my mother have been ringing within me all night. Was my mother right? Did I cross too many lines? Have I ruined my gift?
But loving Finn didn’t feel like ruining myself.
It felt like finally making myself whole.
Helen’s words keep plaguing me, too, Helen the unassuming prophet. “But what if someone is sick?” she asked me the night of the party. “What if I came to you now in that chair? Would you turn me away?”
My answer had been a nonanswer, a sidestepping of the question to avoid staring the unthinkable in the face, the possibility that someday I would want those healing powers again because I would need them to save someone I love. I was naïve to think it wouldn’t happen because it had never happened before. It hadn’t happened, I guess, because before I never really had anyone to lose.
I see myself shudder in the mirror.
I turn away from my reflection, return to my room, and get in my chair without attempting to sleep, curling my legs up underneath me and pulling my cotton sheath over them to my toes. I look out over the sea, waiting. Waiting some more. Waiting for that feeling to come back to me, the feeling of healing. I wait for it to return to my body, for it to take me over again, to possess me like a demon.
How does a person who knows love unknow it? Can I unweave it from my being? The phrase steeling oneself crawls to the surface of my mind. Is that how I must do it? Become steel, a hard and cold unfeeling metal, in the face of Finn? Would hardening myself against Finn make me stop loving him? Would it help me forget what I’ve lost?
I hope so.
The thought of never being with Finn, never having him to myself, never feeling his eyes on me or his lips on my lips, makes me want to die. But isn’t that why I’m doing this? My life for Finn’s? Because if I don’t at least try, then Finn will surely die, because he is dying already. This is the bargain. I would rather be in a world where I know Finn is alive, even if I can’t have him. Even if that.
It is the middle of the night, but I find myself leaving the house.
I head down the stairs and onto the beach. My feet slip and slide in the dry sand as I walk toward the water. The sea is rough, the waves churning like a storm might be coming. I stop when I get to the high tide line and stare into the black ocean. I concentrate, prodding every corner of my body and soul for the hint of a vision, but I am blank. A vast white space of nothingness.
My gift has disappeared and I know it, as intimately as the lines on my own hand.
How do I get it back? What do I do?
God, God, if you are listening, I will do anything. Anything!
I’ve heard of artists getting blocked, of writers who can’t find words, painters who’ve lost their inspiration. But healers? Do we go through periods where the gift won’t come to us? I am inching my toes across the wet packed sand and toward the cold churning sea when it comes to me.
The dark night of the soul.
The mystics always talk about this. These long periods when they feel their connection to God—their ability to see God, to talk to God, to receive words and images and visions of God—has left them entirely. They write of total abandonment, being banished into silence and isolation, a despair beyond any consolation. For them, the dark night is torture. It is the loss of the will to believe, to have faith in anything.
I feel this darkness in me now, spreading through my veins.
A tiny wave crashes over my ankles, splashing my knees and shins with icy, salty droplets, soaking the bottom of my shift.
Maybe my mother knew something I didn’t. Maybe she always has known. Maybe that’s why she’s kept me in long white gowns and thin, fragile slippers, a girl from another era, a ghost from centuries long past. M
y gift belongs in another time, when people believed in such things. When religion was all the science they’d ever known. Maybe my mother has tried to keep me living not quite in this world because she knew that once I stepped foot into the world as it is today, the gift would die with me, an ancient object that can no longer withstand the air and the elements and gives way to nothing. For Finn’s sake, I should’ve stayed in that liminal place between then and now, between there and here. Maybe then he would be okay. Maybe then I could save him.
The black water rushes around my ankles and up to my knees. For the mystics, the dark night was a test from God, after which their visions returned with even more force, more glory, than ever before.
This is my test.
I must take the shipwrecked pieces that I am, hold them together with all my might, and weather whatever comes.
By the time I go downstairs in the morning, the sun is high. My mother is busy, Fatima is busy. Papers are everywhere. There is the feeling of anticipation, of urgency. Fatima keeps glancing at me from the kitchen, like she wants to say something. But she doesn’t.
“Oh good,” my mother says. “You’re up.”
“I’ve always been up. I never slept.”
My mother pushes a sheet of paper across the table. “We need to do this as soon as possible. To quell the rumors.”
I peer at the paper in front of me. On it in big capital letters above and below the photo it says, “The Anniversary of the Day of Many Miracles, a Special Audience with Marlena.” The photo is of me on that day last year. I am surrounded by seekers, everyone reaching out to me. My eyes are closed and my arms are extended. My forearms, my elbows, all the way to my shoulders, are covered with the hands of others.
My mother doesn’t ask if I like the announcement or if I approve. She just goes about the business of restoring things to their former state, goes about the business of me, like there has been no break or vacation. She snatches the paper back and studies it.
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