Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

by Nancy Christie

  But today, she turned a deaf ear to the words, hardening her heart to the emotion behind the plea. She had to. Otherwise, there would be nothing of her left at the end of the day. She would be in a million separate pieces, scattered to the four corners of the earth, a disembodied force forever longing for a body in which to once again reside.

  Cassie was a healer. At least, that was what the people who touched her said. She never touched anyone—just stood there while they approached, hardly daring to breathe for fear they would find a way to take away even the breath from her body. Then, with one or two trembling fingers, these people—these needy, needy people—would tentatively reach out and lightly caress the sleeve of her jacket, the back of her neck, her forehead where every day, new wrinkles scarred their way across the thin skin.

  Every time they touched her, Cassie would shiver, as though, molecule by molecule, life-giving heat was being drained from her. But then it passed (it always passed) and she would be warm again—maybe not as warm as she would like to be but then, as her Granny had always reminded her when she complained of the cold, drained feeling that followed a touching, “You have a gift and with a gift comes cost. That’s just the way it is, Cassandra, and you’d better get used to it.”

  She ought to be used to it by now. People had been touching her for twenty years, since she was just a child of eight—the first time she had done a healing, the first time, in fact, that she knew she possessed such a strange power. A woman had handed her a cat—really just a dirty white mass of fleas and fur and bones—begging her to “please fix it! She won’t eat or drink and my kids are beside themselves! She can’t die!”

  The mother looked as half-starved as the animal, her eyes wild with misery and pain and fear. Cassie didn’t know what to do. She had never done a healing before, although often enough she had watched her grandmother work her touch on the old, infirm, damaged dregs of humanity who would cross the threshold of their secluded farmhouse.

  How they had found Cassie’s grandmother, she never understood. The two of them lived far from town, down a rutted dirt road that was muddy in the spring, hard and rocky in the summer and dangerously icy when winter whistled its way through the mountains.

  But find her they did, and now, they were finding Cassie as well, hoping against hope that the gift had passed from grandparent to grandchild—the gift that couldn’t save her mother who had died giving Cassie life.

  Cassie used to wonder if she was not, in some way, responsible for her mother’s death. Had she taken the breath her mother needed to live into her own fragile lungs? Had her birth drained her mother of life? Or was she her mother’s final healing? By taking the gift from her mother into her own tiny body, had Cassie freed her mother from the draining existence that her life had become?

  Her mother hated being a healer. Cassie knew that, had heard her grandmother say it often enough.

  “She fought it—with every bit of her being, she fought against the gift. When she laid with that man”—“that man” was how Cassie’s grandmother referred to the person who had co-created Cassie—“she thought it would free her from it. ‘I just want to be normal, Mama’ she used to cry but I told her that, for her, this was normal; this was the way it had to be. And she had to accept it.”

  But she never had. And now it was Cassie’s turn to either accept or forever fight against what she had not asked for—a future she could never avoid.

  That cat—Cassie remembered how it looked at her wearily, mutely asking for death, before closing its eyes. She had touched it, brushing the fleas from the scabby skin, running her fingers across the head and down the back until she reached its tail. The animal gave one convulsive gasp and then went limp in her arms and, for a moment, she was certain that she had killed it. But then, the tail began to flicker, ever so weakly, like a tree branch responding to a gentle breeze and she heard the telltale hum that vibrated from its throat. The cat was purring—and she had handed it back to the woman and then turned, shivering, to go into the house.

  That was the beginning of Cassie’s life as a healer—and the end of her life as a normal child. Not that she did a healing every day—sometimes weeks would go by before anyone approached her, asking her for help, begging her to touch their sick pet, their ill child, their dying parent.

  Sometimes the healing didn’t work and the people would leave as hurt as they arrived, although oddly enough, they didn’t hold her responsible for the failure. Perhaps they thought the gods who had granted her the gift of healing had judged them unworthy of its use. Cassie didn’t ask. But when a healing failed, she couldn’t help feeling that somehow it was her fault that they couldn’t get what they wanted.

  “But then who does?” asked her grandmother unsympathetically when Cassie would broach the subject. “Who on this earth gets what they ask for every time they ask for it? No one does. Anyone who says they do is a liar and anyone who thinks they will is a fool.”

  Cassie used to wonder how someone so devoid of sympathy, empathy, genuine caring could be a healer. But that was in the early days, before she knew what a toll the healings would take on her. As more and more bits of her disappeared, she saw the need to put up a wall between herself and the people who wanted something from her that she did not want to give.

  She hated her gift. She never wanted it and couldn’t understand what evil she had done to be cursed with such a talent. “I just want to be like everyone else!” she had cried late one night after a particularly draining healing. But her grandmother only shrugged her bony shoulders before turning back to the long mirror in her bedroom to finish braiding her iron gray hair.

  “You are as you are, Cassandra. You can’t change what you have, what you can do. Don’t fight it. Just accept it.”

  No sympathy there—no pity for the bewildered child who was expected to fix conditions beyond her understanding, no comfort for the adolescent who wanted to be like everyone else her age, worrying about school and boyfriends and clothes. No, Cassie’s concerns rose far above that—each day she worried that someone would come with that begging desperate look in their eyes, while, each time, she worried that this healing would be her last, that it would drain her of life once and for all.

  And now, since her grandmother was gone, she had no one to talk to, no one who understood. All she could do is hope that the world would forget about Cassie-the-healer and let her live what was left of this life.

  “My neighbor told me you helped her. Please. Can’t I just touch you?”

  The woman in front of her (and why were there so many more women than men who came to her for help?) was well dressed, her shoes unscuffed, the rings on her manicured fingers sparkling in the sunlight. Yet the look in her eyes was the same as all the other fearful frightened people.

  Cassie remembered her. She had seen her in the store when she was buying her milk and bread, had noticed her in the congregation when she attended church, had recognized the familiar expression of desperation, anger and fear that characterized those who visited her. Once, she had come within three feet of Cassie, who waited there with the hopelessness of a trapped animal to see what would happen, what she wanted, how much she would take.

  But then the woman had turned and walked away and Cassie breathed again. There was something about her, something about that woman that Cassie feared, more than she feared the gift itself.

  “I need help. You have to help me! I’ve waited so long to speak to you, touch you. Please, can I touch you?”

  This was a woman who could pay for medical care for whatever problem was plaguing her. So why did she come to Cassie?

  For a moment, Cassie considered letting it happen—a healing or not, but certainly a draining. But it had been a long, hard month and she had nothing left, no reserves that would keep her alive should she allow one more person to touch her. Ever since she buried her grandmother four weeks ago, she had been running on empty.

  A simple graveside service, the words “We are dust and unto dust we sha
ll return,” the sound of the dirt falling on the coffin top like sleet—and Cassie standing there, alone.

  “I can’t help you,” she said to the woman before turning to walk away, conscious of the pervasive weakness that dogged her waking hours. Every day it was a little harder to move through life, her gift a growing weight on her shoulders. She wished it would go away. Or that she could go away.

  But the woman blocked her path, saying all the while, “You have to! You have to help me! I need it! You have to!” her voice rising in volume.

  Cassie looked at the woman—the wild-eyed, desperate woman—and saw danger in her face, heard it in her voice, felt it emanating from her body like a treacherously cold chill.

  Something was wrong here. If she healed this woman—if she let her touch her even for a moment—Cassie feared there would be nothing left of her. She would die as surely as her grandmother did, as her mother did—her life force sucked from her fragile body by someone who rated her own need for help as more important than Cassie’s need to live.

  “I can’t go on! I can’t bear it anymore! You have to help me!” all the while coming closer to Cassie until it seemed she was sucking in Cassie’s every exhalation. “You’ve helped other people—I know because I asked and they said you were a healer. What right do you have to refuse me? I can pay—I have money! But you have to heal me!” insistent, as though by force of her words she could make the healing energy slip from Cassie’s body into hers.

  “Let me pass!” Cassie tried to escape but she was no match for the desperation that drove the woman. “I can’t heal you! I can’t! You don’t understand! I’ll die if I heal you!”—the last a cry from Cassie’s heart that, as she voiced it, she knew to be true. One more healing and she would die. It was just too much—too many years, too much drained from her, with not enough, never enough, going back into that well that was her soul.

  “You’ll die if you don’t!” and Cassie saw it then, the thin flashing blade that was wielded by those manicured, beringed fingers, by the hand that came even closer to her. “You will heal me! I tell you, you will! I came all this way and you can’t say no to me! I demand a healing! Now!”

  Cassie stood there, mutely shaking her head. She couldn’t—she just couldn’t.

  The blade was quite sharp—it must have been to slice so quickly, cleanly through the faded white t-shirt Cassie wore, through her skin, her muscles, into her heart. In the end it was sharp enough to cut the ties that kept her gift bound to her. Cassie felt it leaving with each spurt of blood that pumped onto the grass where she lay.

  “There! Now heal yourself!” and the woman vanished from sight. Or was she still there, but invisible in the darkness that obscured Cassie’s vision?

  This must be how a healing feels, thought Cassie.

  First a shock, almost a pain but not quite—more like an electrical current jolting through her body, mind, soul. Then a lightness, a sense of buoyancy, weightless—the burden of her gift no longer pulling at her, dragging at her.

  All her energy was running full blast like fire through her veins. Cassie didn’t know when she had ever felt so alive, so light. With each drop of blood that stained the earth, with each pulse of her heart, slowing now, beat by infinitesimal beat, Cassie felt herself losing the tortuous gift that had drained her for so many years.

  She breathed in the healing, drank it like a thirsting man gulps down cool, fresh water, wrapped it around her like a blanket on a cold winter night, until darkness came and she was finally free, finally healed.

  The Clock

  “Harold,” said Margaret, sneaking up behind him and startling him so he lost his place in the Sunday crossword, “how many times do I have to tell you to wind the clock? Do I have to do all your thinking for you?”

  “Harold!” rapping the top of his head where his gray hair had thinned to expose vulnerable pink flesh. “Are you listening to me? Wind the clock!”

  Harold stirred his seventy-five-year-old body from the safe depths of his easy chair and headed toward the offending timepiece. There would be no rest until the clock was wound and set ticking again.

  “Yes, Margaret, I’ll wind the clock. Although,” he ventured, rummaging in the side drawer for the key, “I really think it should be repaired. It never seems to stay running very long.”

  “‘You think, you think’,” mimicked Margaret, her words tiny thorns unaccompanied by roses. After fifty-five years together, Harold had stopped searching for flowers. “You’re just too lazy to wind it! You don’t do anything else and now you even want to pay somebody to do this for you!”

  Harold climbed onto the low footstool to reach the clock, trying with limited success to ignore her words. He had learned long ago not to argue but just to let her words engulf him. So far, they had always stopped short of drowning him, although sometimes it was awfully close. Then, when her tirade would finally subside, he would have to go outside for a breath of fresh air.

  “The least you can do around here is drag your useless body out of that damned chair and wind the clock when it runs down!”

  I wish you’d run down, you old bitch, thought Harold, surprised at the sudden, almost overwhelming hatred that ran through him like lifeblood.

  Reaching up, he carefully inserted the small brass key into the clock face. As he turned it slowly and methodically, he pictured his wife winding down—her words coming slower and slower until she stopped altogether and he was blest with the welcome absence of sound.

  “Harold, are you done yet? Why does it always take you so long to finish every little job?” Margaret’s voice lashed Harold, jerking him back to reality as his daydream faded.

  She came up beside him to peer shortsightedly at the clock, which hadn’t yet begun to run.

  “Are you winding it right, Harold?” jabbing him in the side to catch his attention. “You know you have to turn the key clockwise or it will stop again” and she poked him once more for emphasis.

  Harold winced. He wished she wouldn’t keep hitting him there. After all these years, his side had become very tender.

  He removed the key from the clock and gently tapped the pendulum, setting the small brass circle swaying. With luck, the clock would continue to run, forcing Margaret to spend several silent minutes finding something else to complain about and gaining him a brief measure of much-needed quiet.

  Harold slipped the key back into the cluttered drawer and resumed his seat in the easy chair, determined to finish the puzzle before Margaret used the paper to wrap garbage. Sometimes she would seize it just when he was almost through and spill coffee grounds across the neatly filled-in blocks, obliterating what small victories he had achieved.

  But peace, so long awaited, lasted only until he picked up his pencil. Then the clock stopped.

  “There, Harold,” gloated Margaret, “I told you to be careful and now listen! The clock has stopped again! I can’t even depend on you to wind a clock right!”

  Her words prodded him from his chair and toward the clock once more. He touched the pendulum hopefully, but it refused to maintain an even arc of motion, only swaying a bit before stopping altogether.

  And all the while, Margaret’s voice relentlessly attacked his unprotected back—letting loose a volley of poison-tipped verbal darts that would kill a less experienced man.

  “You’re good for nothing, Harold! I’ve known that for years! To think I’ve wasted my whole life with someone as useless as you!”

  Perhaps a screwdriver would loosen it—Harold reached back into the side drawer, pushing aside the key that had been no help at all, and found the thin-bladed tool. He climbed awkwardly back onto the stool, holding the screwdriver tightly in his clenched fist.

  “What do you think you’re going to do with that, Mr. Fix-It? You think you can make it work now? Haven’t you done enough damage for one day?”

  Harold inserted the metal edge into the narrow opening. Maybe if he turned it just a bit, the clock would start and Margaret would stop—at
least for awhile.

  She came up beside him, her words flooding from her as though from a broken dam.

  “Harold, leave it alone already! You don’t know what you’re doing anyway! I don’t know why I talk to you, you stupid old man!”

  Her words spilled over his ankles. The tide was rising and Harold knew from experience it would flow higher yet. He slowly turned the screwdriver as Margaret continued, although he was finding it harder to breathe against the weight of her words, now reaching his chest.

  “Damn it, Harold, turn it the other way! You’re doing it wrong!” and now the tide was higher and stronger than it had ever been before. Harold had to stop for a moment to catch his breath before trying once more to wind the clock.

  “Are you deaf, Harold? I told you a thousand times already—turn it clockwise or it will stop again!”

  Harold plunged the screwdriver in as far as it would go, carefully turning it counter-clockwise until the handle was too slippery to grasp.

  Then, he lightly stepped off the stool, breathing easier in the silence.

  “You’re right, Margaret,” he remarked, looking down at the crumpled figure. “It did stop.”

  Anything Can Happen

  “Where are my keys?”

  Charlotte always put them on the hook right near the front door. Each night when she came home from work, she followed the same exact procedure.

  First, she would check to make sure the door was locked, that she had bolted it securely against any intruders.

  Then quickly, before anyone could come up behind her, she would unlock all three bolts, slip inside and quickly lock them behind her, before hanging her key ring on the small brass hook next to the doorframe.

  Only then would she set her handbag—the one she had chosen specifically because of its multiple zippered compartments inside a larger section that itself was secured with two clasps—on the side table.