“Is this true?” I ask the group.
The entire church is deadened with silence. No one moves. The people Mrs. Jacobs has brought are stone-faced. A tall man, the only one whose eyes are full of grief, twists his mouth, like the words behind it are distasteful so he refuses to let them out.
“It is true,” Mrs. Jacobs snaps.
“I didn’t ask you,” I snap right back.
One of the women has her head bowed. Now she looks up. “You said my son was cured,” she whispers, her voice nearly too hoarse for me to hear.
I reach out. Place the edges of my fingers on her forearm. Peer into her eyes. “And was he?”
There is a gaping pause, and I feel it like the jaws of a shark opening wide around me. “My child died,” she says quickly.
My mother is suddenly next to me. “But how long after the Healer cured him? Days, weeks, months? Did he die of something unrelated?”
I grab my mother’s arm to make her stop saying such things. “Does it really matter?” I hiss.
She looks my way, peeling back my hand. “Of course it does. It means everything.”
My mother beckons for José to hurry. A chasm opens between her and me. In the beat of this silence, chaos erupts in the church, people standing, talking, shouting over each other, debating my existence as though I’m not here. My mother is called away to try and calm people down, a role she is good at. The chaos creates a moment of intimacy between Mrs. Jacobs and me. We are like the eye in the hurricane. Everyone seems to have forgotten us. She reaches out, nearly touching me, but stops just shy of my elbow. Mrs. Jacobs lowers her head toward mine.
“Marlena, it is not you I’m against, it’s your mother.” Her words are a quickly whispered stream. “Well, I don’t believe in your gift, but I do feel sorry that you’ve been trapped into such a life. It’s a shame for such a young girl like you. You need to open your eyes and see what is really happening around you.”
“Okay,” I find myself saying. “What do you think is happening?”
José has almost reached us.
Mrs. Jacobs leans closer. “Did you know your mother won’t let you cure anyone unless they pay ahead of time? Do you even know what she charges?”
“She does not,” I say, but my voice is faltering. “People sometimes send money in gratitude following a healing, which is where the money we have comes from.”
“That’s what she wants you to believe. But it’s not the truth. Somewhere deep down you know this. She tells you who to heal before each audience, does she not?”
“Yes, but only because they’ve come from so far away,” I reason, which is of course my mother’s reason.
“Stop lying to yourself.”
“Señora, ma’am, please come with me,” José says. He doesn’t wait for her to answer, just places two hands on Mrs. Jacobs and begins to steer her away.
Mrs. Jacobs’s words crash through me, questions and doubts piling up haphazardly, punching holes through my skin. I am a ship, taking on water through this series of fissures and seams. I can feel myself listing to the side, going down, down, down to the dark ocean floor as my mother finally seems to be gaining control of the room. I almost wish she wouldn’t. I want to lie down. Disappear, never to be seen again. I am no longer the brave girl steering the massive ship toward tranquility and peace. The emotions swirling in the room are sharp spikes, piercing my sides, my ribs, my heart. I pitch and keel and falter.
By the time I reach the stage again, I am a shipwreck.
Afterward, my mother is all business.
“You’re going to keep your head high, your chin up, and you are going to go out there and do the receiving line just as you do every Saturday. Sarah Jacobs or no, this is what everyone expects from you.”
I look up from the floor, where I’ve collapsed in a heap of tulle and satin. My mother’s expression is determined. There is that sharp glint in her eyes, love that will cut and maim. I pull myself to standing, dazed. Fatima and my mother tug and fix the skirt of my dress.
The receiving line at the front of the church turns out to be consoling. Things seem to go back to normal. Maybe my mother was right.
“Don’t listen to that woman,” a man says to me early on.
I hear some version of this from so many people. Or some version of “You cured me once and it was real.” I nod like I agree until I hear this so much my faith comes crawling back from its cold hiding place at the bottom of the sea.
Then I notice a woman a few people back in the line. She is unlike everyone else. Her clothes are different. Jeans with a silky cream blouse, an expensive suit jacket over it, wire-rimmed glasses adorning her pretty, pale face, dressed so unlike the tourists in their shorts and T-shirts. She isn’t trying to take my picture or video me so she can post an image of the freak she saw on summer vacation. Tourists aside, the people who fill up the United Holiest Church are true believers, mainly Portuguese and Italians, with their brown and olive skin, Latinos and black people crowded together for worship, for the hope of my divine touch, dressed in their Sunday best even though audiences take place on Saturdays.
It is the woman’s turn in line.
The look in her eyes is a mix of skepticism and curiosity. “I’m Dr. Holbrook,” she says. Her makeup is perfect, despite the heat. She doesn’t offer her hand, so she must know enough not to try and touch me. “But everyone calls me Angie.”
I stare, trying to get a better read on her. “Hello. And what brought you here today?” I ask, as I always do. As I am trained to do.
“I was wondering if you believe in yourself.” She says this simply, as though every person asks this. “In your gift.”
A wave of dizziness passes over me. That shipwreckedness again. Everyone else has been quick to brush off Mrs. Jacobs’s protest, like it meant nothing. “Excuse me? Are you referring to . . . what happened earlier?”
“I don’t know what happened earlier,” she says. “I arrived late. My grad assistant is still looking for parking.” Her stare is unwavering, but also kind. “Now that you are college age, do you ever wonder about your abilities? If they are real?”
My lips part. College? Does she really think this life would allow me to go to college? “Of course not,” I try, but once again, I can feel myself breaking apart.
“Hmmm,” she replies, studying me with those kind blue eyes. She presses a small rectangular card into my hand. “Call me. I’d like to talk to you. Maybe you have some questions that I can help you answer.”
I take it.
In this moment, a boy comes rushing up to her. He is breathless. “I can’t find parking, so I’m in the car, idling outside.”
He hasn’t looked at me and maybe he won’t; his words and eyes are all for Dr. Holbrook. Angie. His hair is a mess, and a sheen of sweat is covering his skin. I want him to turn my way. I want to know him, to know his name, to know everything about him. I don’t know why. But the force of this want is powerful, immediate, and total. It comes on like one of my visions, lifting me up and out of my body and taking me over completely.
Is this love at first sight?
He glances my way for a brief second. No, a half. A quarter.
“I don’t want the car to get towed,” he says, looking between Angie and me, so I’m not sure to whom, exactly, he is telling this information.
He runs off.
“That’s the grad assistant I mentioned. Finn,” she says. “I’d better go. I hope you’ll call me.” She moves to exit the line but I stop her.