By the time I am done with this collage of my vision, my face is soaked with tears.
I have never been happier.
My mother pokes her head into my room that evening.
I’ve fallen asleep on the bare wooden planks of the floor. I open my eyes when I hear her. “Mama?”
“Oh Marlena!” She is looking down at my newest artwork in the dusky shadows. “My miracle girl. This one is more beautiful even than the last.”
“That was from the man with the thick white hair,” I whisper, my throat thick with sleep. “The man with the rare blood disorder. He had a yellow shirt?”
My mother nods. “I remember.” She walks over to me. “Why collage this time, and not paint?”
“I don’t know. It just seemed right.”
A silence grows between us as the two of us take in the collage that lies between my narrow bed and the chair by the windows where I like to read. Layers of greens and blues radiate outward, big intersecting circles. It is what I first saw when I touched the man’s hands. My mother seems moved by it, and I am moved by this. “I’m so sorry, Mama, about before,” I tell her. “I don’t know why I was asking all those questions. I love you so much. You were right about everything. About me.”
“I know, querida,” she says, her voice smooth and forgiving. “I know you love me.” I know I was right, am right, we both hear her say without her actually saying it. But when she turns to me I don’t see love in her eyes. There is a hardness. A shrewdness.
I look away.
FIVE
I shimmy out of the slinky blue dress and trade it for the skinny jeans and a tank top. At the bottom of the garment bag are several pairs of shoes, including strappy, high heeled sandals covered in metal studs. I buckle them on and stare at myself again.
I really do look normal. Like maybe I could go out and be just Marlena, average teenager, with regular dreams of having a boyfriend and enjoying the beach at the end of a hot summer. Maybe even going for ice cream down on the pier, or a milkshake at Nana’s, or for a burger at the diner that is always packed when I walk by but where I’ve never eaten. I wonder what would happen if I quit being Marlena the Healer.
Can a miracle worker just quit her job? Can a living saint hand in her resignation?
On my way downstairs I hold the shoes in my hand. They would make such a racket against the wood and I have learned to move silently. This is the best way to avoid calling the attention of my mother. I round the corner into the big open space of the first floor and hear a sharp intake of breath.
Fatima, our maid, jumps up from the couch. “Marlena! I thought no one was home!” Her oval face and dark eyes are startled, her black hair hanging long and loose, when usually it is up in a tight bun.
I am frozen, contraband shoes in hand and contraband outfit on my body. There is no hiding any of it. “So did I.”
We stare at each other in silence, two criminal offenders taking each other in. I am dressed in forbidden clothing but Fatima was lounging in the living room on the furniture, her shoes off. Fatima’s eyes keep darting to my shoulders, which are bared in the tank top. My shoulders are never bared.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” I offer.
At first Fatima’s face is blank. Then she erupts into loud laughter.
I bite my lip. I’ve never seen Fatima laugh like this. But then I find myself giggling along with her.
She tries to catch her breath. “It’s a deal, Marlena. It’s a deal.”
I smile. Fatima smiles back.
Normally, we barely interact, only speak to each other when necessary. Those are the rules of the house, of my life, and everyone around me knows this. The Healer is meant to be left alone, to not be touched or approached unnecessarily. This is explained in the programs given out at my audiences so the seekers know what to do and what not to. I am the one who decides to go to them, to touch them, and not the other way around.
I am learning that I like breaking rules, and breaking them with someone else, like Fatima. Marlena the Rule Breaker. That sounds so much different than Marlena the Healer, Marlena the Virgin Miracle Worker. Marlena the Living Saint.
“What were you doing?” I ask Fatima, since we are already engaged in behavior that isn’t normal for us. “Were you taking in the view?” Before Fatima shot up off the couch she’d been staring toward the great picture windows, the ocean bobbing with whitecaps behind it, the sky hazy with humidity.
Fatima is Portuguese like we are. She and my mother could be sisters, with their matching dark features and rich olive skin. She is a talented cook, and sometimes I think she is even better than my mother at baking the sweet breads and little custard-filled pastéis de Belém that we eat on feast days.
“No, actually, not the view,” Fatima says, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Then what?”
Her face wears an expression I can’t read and the laughter is gone. She nods in the direction of the wall between the two big windows that look onto the sea. On that wall is a painting. One of mine.
“Oh,” I say.
She glances at me. Then, maybe because the two of us are already in uncharted territory, she explains. “I was thinking about what that image says about you.” She turns her attention back to it and the room grows quiet as we stand there, taking it in.
The painting is a self-portrait.
I made it when I was twelve. It is of a great ship, nearly an ark. On it are the little houses and shops that make up our town. People crowd its decks, some peering worriedly over the stern. Behind the ship is a violent storm, but the boat is pointed away from heavy gray clouds, driving rain, fierce waves. It will head fast and sure into the bright sun and the warm blue sea. In the painting, I am the figurehead attached to the prow of the ship. My hair flows long and wavy around the wooden upper decks, my foot wound by the thick metal chain attached to the iron anchor that reaches below to the bottom of the ocean.
I’ve long thought that being a healer is akin to protecting a ship’s occupants from storm and sea, from pirates and invaders, for being responsible for everyone’s safety, for guiding its people into calmer waters and better days, my job to anchor everything and everyone to this earthen floor like Julian of Norwich anchored her church to God. One day, I turned this vision of myself into a painting. Maybe it sounds arrogant. But it’s who I’ve always been.
The painting has been hanging on the living room wall only since the beginning of summer. My mother put it there to make a statement. To remind me of who I am. Or who she wants me to remain.
“What does it say about me, Fatima?”
She turns to me. “That you feel responsible for the well-being of the world. That you are an otherworldly being, with otherworldly powers.”
My cheeks prickle with heat hearing Fatima say this. Shame creeps up the bare skin of my arms. The painting doesn’t just make me sound arrogant, it makes me the embodiment of it.
“But,” Fatima goes on, “the girl I see before me is something different.” She sounds pleased.
Some of the shame recedes. “What is she then?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Me neither,” I say quickly.
Fatima’s smile is slow to appear but it gets wider and wider. “That’s okay, Marlena. You don’t need to know yet. You’re young and you have your whole life ahead of you.”
“Do I? What kind of life?”
My colliding questions make Fatima laugh. “You’ll just have to wait and see.” Then she shakes her head. “No, let me rephrase that. You’ll just have to go looking and find out.” She slips her shoes back onto her feet and picks up the duster she left on one of the side tables. “Remember, you didn’t see me and I didn’t see you,” she calls over her shoulder and disappears down the hall.
I stand there, staring after her. Our conversation was so strange, so out of the blue, but somehow it made me happy. Gave me a shot of hope. Of curiosity.
I have to go looking to find out what my life co
uld be, Fatima thinks.
Well, okay. Challenge accepted.
I run back upstairs, grab the house phone along the way, and call José, my driver. I have a driver because I’m not allowed to go anywhere outside of town without a chaperone. Also, there’s the part about how even though I’m eighteen I don’t know how to drive.
“José,” I say, when I hear the familiar sí on the other end of the line. “Can you come pick me up?”
There is a long sigh. “Señorita, your mother will not be happy you’ve gone out.”
“So what if she’s not happy?” I say. Then, “What about my happiness?”
“Marlena, you’re going to get me in trouble. You are going to get into trouble.”
I step into the bathroom and dab on the makeup I’m only supposed to use when I have a healing audience. “Please, Josélito? For me? I have to do something. Today. Now.”
There comes another long sigh. A string of colorful swears in Spanish.
I smile. José cannot resist me for long. Unlike Fatima, José has never tiptoed around me. He’s one of the few people who treat me like a real person. I don’t want to get him in trouble, but at the moment, I’m more concerned with my own needs.
“You are going to get me fired, amorcita.”
“My mother will never fire you,” I tell him. I go into my bedroom and grab one of my gauzy white dresses and shove it into a bag for later. “I wouldn’t let her if she tried.”
“Your mother will do what she wants, when she wants to,” José says.
“I’ll refuse to heal,” I throw out.
“Oh, Marlenita.” His voice is heavy, sagging like the center of a raft with too much cargo. “She would never allow that,” he says. The sound of the car starting comes through the phone, followed by silence.
SIX
José drives along the coast. The spray of the ocean leaps into the sky as waves crash against the rocks. A path winds by the side of the road and people are out taking walks, jogging, running. Occasionally a couple admires the view, hand in hand. I’ve never walked down this path, but I’d like to. I suppose José would stop the car and accompany me if I asked, but as much as I love José, he’s not the person with whom I imagine sharing this experience. Our destination isn’t too far away, but it takes us well beyond the distance my mother would approve.
When I’m not staring out the window, I’m staring at my legs. My jeans. My bare arms and shoulders. I put a finger to my lips and it comes away dark red. So many transgressions in a single day. First my swim. Now this.
“José?” I call up to the front of the car.
He glances in the rearview mirror. “Sí, Marlenita?”
“Has my mother noticed we’re gone? Has she texted or called?”
There is a long sigh—José is the master of the long sigh. “Not yet, guapa. Not yet.”
I don’t have a phone, so when my mother can’t find me she has to call José. There are a lot of things I don’t have or do that most people have and do. Television. Computers. A phone. I’ve always been homeschooled, which basically means I sit by myself all day reading books. I used to think this made me like Julian and Hildegard, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila, since women mystics studied alone in their cloistered, sheltered lives, their educations solely from books. But now it just makes me want to scream. It’s yet another thing I’ve missed out on, that separates me from everyone else.
“What’s different this year from other ones, that suddenly you want to go to school?” my mother said in July when I begged her to let me go this fall. “You’ve always been so happy to stay home with me. Besides, now is not a good time. You have a reputation to protect.”
I wiggle my toes, admiring the heeled sandals on my feet.
What reputation do these give me? Can a pair of skinny jeans and a tank top that shows off just a hint of cleavage really affect my image? Might it feel a little bit good to stop protecting it for a while?
“José?”
He harrumphs. “Sí, guapa?”
“Can I borrow your phone? Please?”
This time he doesn’t resist, reaches back to pass the phone to me. I take the crumpled business card from my purse, type the number into the keypad, and wait for it to ring. Someone picks up right away.
“Hello?”
I take a deep breath. “Dr. Holbrook.” My voice cracks. For a second I think I might pass out. I take another deep breath. “It’s me. Marlena Oliveira. Finally calling you.”
There is a long pause, long enough for me to wonder if I called the wrong number. But then she speaks. “Marlena!” She sounds happy. “What an unexpected surprise! What can I do for you?”
My heart pounds in my chest. “I’m actually on my way to see you. To your office, I mean. It’s kind of a spontaneous trip.” I close my eyes, suddenly feeling stupid. “I guess I should have called sooner. Before I left. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. You’re probably very busy.”
“No, no,” she responds. “I’m glad you’re coming. I can be at the office in ten minutes. I live just down the road. Does that sound good?”
My heart pounds harder. “That sounds perfect.”
“See you soon, Marlena,” she says, then hangs up.
I hand the phone back to José. She made that seem so easy.
“Everything okay, guapa?” José calls back.
“Yes.”
He holds my gaze in the rearview mirror, before his eyes return to the road.
After a few more minutes the Center for the Mind & Brain Sciences appears ahead and I press my face against the window. It is a beautiful glass box on the edge of the sea that calls the sun and the ocean to its windows. It is bright in the hazy heat of the day.
“We’re here,” José says, turning into the drive and pulling to a stop.
I loop my arm through the straps of my bag and scramble out of the car. “Bye, José,” I call, one foot already on the asphalt.
“Marlenita!” José sounds nervous. “I’ll be here waiting. No more than an hour or we’ll both be in trouble with your mother. Por favor.”
“Sure,” I reply, hoping that I can live up to his expectation. I really don’t want José to get in trouble. He sighs like he doesn’t believe me, but the whoosh of it is cut off when I slam the car door.
I practically run to the entrance, my legs strange and stiff in these jeans. I want to get inside before I change my mind.
“May I help you?” a pretty young woman asks, looking up from a thick textbook. She’s sitting at the front desk, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Dressed like me.
Or is it that I’m dressed like her?
Even our skin is the same color, our eyes and our hair. Maybe she is Portuguese, too. Maybe she eats toasted sweet bread on Sunday afternoons and malasadas during the summer as a special treat and endless amounts of kale soup during winter. Maybe soon we’ll find we have so much in common we’ll become best friends.
“Um,” I try, speechless.
Recognition dawns in her eyes. “You must be Marlena! Angie called and told me you were on your way. I’m Lexi.”
“Do you like malasadas?” I blurt.
“I don’t know.” She gets a funny look on her face, but her voice is still sunny and cheerful. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s kind of like a doughnut.”
Her smile helps me to stop feeling like such an idiot. “Well, I love doughnuts, so I’m sure I’d like one if I tried it.”
“Okay. It’s, um, nice to meet you. Lexi.”
She laughs. “Sure. Let me show you where you can wait for Angie.” Lexi leads me to a spacious room with a plaque outside with Dr. Holbrook’s name on it. She smiles again and tells me to have a seat. I do as I’m told. “I have to keep studying,” she says apologetically, but I am relieved when she disappears back down the hall.
When I am sure Lexi is gone, I jump up and go exploring. Around the corner is a lab. It’s enormous, with a beautiful view of the ocean. There are fou
r machines, strange and intimidating. I am glad to be in jeans. In my white sheath I would feel like an ancient relic surrounded by so much science.
One of the machines is an MRI. I’ve seen one of those before. The others I don’t recognize. They look like they would better outfit a spaceship than a room on earth. There is a long table and at the end of it a thick, doughnut-shaped white ring, nearly the size of a small car. There is what looks to be a stainless steel bathing cap, with wires coming out of it, and another cap made of a strange white mesh. In the far corner of the room is some sort of chamber, like the ones that scan the body at airports.
What is this place?
What am I doing here?
Maybe I should go. I feel like a foreigner, or an alien, new to this unfamiliar world and unsure how to inhabit it.
Then, out of the corner of my eyes I see the photos. They are side by side on the internal wall of the lab, away from the windows. They seem to hum, to pulse with light, and my feet pull me to them. Each one holds an image of a single person, with a tiny card below that gives their name followed by their age and talent. They aren’t normal talents. Not like gymnast or pianist or even math whiz. They are the strange kind that most people think are fake, the kind you might find in a circus or on a show about magic or, well, at a church like the one that grew up around me.
James Halloway. Sixteen. The Weatherman.
Nicole Matthews. Thirteen. Telekinesis.
Chastity Lang. Eighteen. Internal Sonar.
Will I end up on this wall? Is that what Dr. Holbrook hopes? To add me to her collection of freaks?
I am about to turn around and leave this place, grateful José promised to wait outside, when Dr. Holbrook appears in the doorway.
The Healer Page 3
