I reach out a hand and place it on her arm. A murmur of surprise ripples through the crowd behind her in line, followed by hushed whispers. The Healer doesn’t ever touch someone without purpose.
The professor turns back, eyebrows arched over those curious eyes.
I lean in close. “Do you believe in my gift?”
She looks at me for a long time. “I don’t know. But if you like, we can try and find that out together.”
This time, when she walks away, I let her go. I look down at the card.
Dr. Angela Holbrook, Neurobiologist
Director, Center for the Mind & Brain Sciences
There is a series of tall rocks, ledges really, near my house. You can reach them if you walk down a path lined with tall sea grasses and bright-pink beach roses that are pretty but will draw blood with their spiky stems. People are always jumping from those rocks into the churning ocean below. It looks reckless.
I’ve always wanted to try it. I feel as though I am standing on them now, the flat gray slate hot beneath my bare feet, looking down into the dark sea.
Of course I will go to this doctor, this scientist. How can I not, after today, after Mrs. Jacobs? It was decided the moment I laid eyes on her. Well, and after I laid eyes on him, too. Finn.
PART TWO
Now
EIGHT
The sun shines bright on Angie’s face. “Marlena? Why now?” she asks again.
“What do you want from me?” I ask in return.
“I have no agenda, one way or the other, aside from the truth.” She stops, then backtracks a bit. “I study the brain, Marlena. The brain is an amazing organ that we know so much—and so little about. I’m interested in understanding the full capacity of the brain, exploring the unusual talents some people are lucky enough to have. And you seem to be one of those lucky people.”
I stare at her, trying to take this in, her use of the word talent as opposed to gift or power. “But my ‘talent’ comes from God.” I say these words with confidence, but they suddenly sound crazy. Potentially fake, like Mrs. Jacobs claims.
The same mixture of curiosity and skepticism I saw in Angie’s eyes the day she came to my audience appears in them now. She leans forward, her clear lacquered nails gleaming. The warm breeze blows wisps of blond hair around her face. Even her eyebrows are blond. “Is that what you believe, or just what you’ve been told to believe all of your life?”
I stare at her, unsure how to answer.
I know this must sound weird, but I’ve never been a person of faith, someone who believes in God and prays to God or gods, if there is more than one. My mother grew up Catholic, but the church that grew up in my honor is not officially Catholic, and technically, it’s not even a real church. More of a sideshow with me as the star. But because of it, I’ve always been around people who believe, whose lives are devoted to prayer, to worshipping within a particular religion. People who have no qualms naming a girl like me a living saint.
Faith is a filmy thing, like a vapor or fog. You can see it, sort of, in the air, wafting around believers, but if you try to grab it your fingers close around nothing.
Healings, though, have substance. You can touch them, feel the newly strong muscles with the pads of your fingers, place your palm against a now-pounding heart, see the smile on someone’s face that was once vacant and despairing. Healings have physical markers, physical proof, like a smooth white stone at the beach or mother-of-pearl shimmering in a tide pool. You can reach out and pick them up, admire them.
Healings appear on us.
This, I suppose, is what you could call my faith. Maybe it’s why I began drawing my visions. To make them into something real. Something I can see and study and touch.
Lots of religions and cultures have healers. Shamans are healers, and the sangomas in South Africa fulfill this role. Catholics will pray to St. Jude or St. Peregrine. But when someone is desperate for help, desperate for hope, it doesn’t matter who I am or from what religion and culture I hail, if any. No one cares if I might be a witch, like the women they tortured and drowned and burned in Salem. All that matters is that I work my magic.
Healings, miracles, whatever they are, do not discriminate. Not the way people do and especially not the way religious people sometimes do. All these things we use to divide ourselves up, none of it matters. Healings don’t work like that.
They just are.
Angie is watching me, still waiting for me to say something.
“I believe in my gift,” I tell her. I decide not to mention Mrs. Jacobs and her claims, which have been floating in and out of my brain like a tide of jellyfish all summer. “But being a healer will never let me be normal. And I’m tired of it.”
Angie nods, like she knows exactly what I mean. “You asked me what I want from you. Well, I want to study you. I want to understand your gift better and help you understand it better. I can’t promise what we’ll find out, but I can promise we’ll know more after we study your gift than if we never ask any questions.”
I nod. I believe her. I want what she offers. Understanding. Knowledge. I look straight into her curious blue eyes.
“Study me then,” I say.
Later, when I am leaving Angie’s office, I come around the corner and there he is, sitting in one of the chairs in the waiting room. Finn. He jumps up when he sees me, nearly stumbles, rights himself. Then he leans against the wall and crosses his arms. His lips stretch into a smile.
“Well, if it isn’t the fraudulent healer girl.”
His voice is playful, but I can detect the mistrust underneath it. It is a rude greeting, but I don’t care. I am too taken with him, with that smug look on his face—such a beautiful face—and the gleam in his eyes, intelligent, a little angry maybe, and curious. I recognize that gleam. Angie has it. I like seeing it there.
“I’m Marlena” is all I say to Finn in return.
He tilts his head. My face grows hot as we stand there, watching each other. I am so exposed in my stretchy jeans that show the outline of my knees and thighs, the tank top that forms itself along my body, with the too-large holes for my arms that open to the middle of my ribs, showing off the sides of my bra. I wonder what Finn is thinking. If he is noticing any of these things about me.
Then, out of nowhere, I stick out my hand. I know that’s what normal people do, but not me. If I go around touching everybody then the mystery of my healing hands might dissipate, my reputation diminished, according to my mother. My touch must be the rarest of gifts, she always says. I have lived without hugs and affection all my life.
Finn is looking at my hand like it is an alien thing. Maybe he is afraid of it. Maybe he is afraid of finding out I’m not actually a fraud. I wonder if he knows that I never do this, if Angie told him. I wonder if he realizes that this gesture makes him special. Finn uncrosses his arms and extends his hand to me, closes it around mine.
His touch goes straight to my brain and down through my torso into my legs, making them weak and wobbly. His fingers are warm, his palm is warm, and as it presses into me a filmy vision of Finn surrounded by light flashes in my mind, then is gone. The color of it is pale. Washed out. Maybe because I am so nervous.