“Hi, Marlena,” Finn says, still hanging on to me. “Nice to meet you. I’m Finn.”
I stare at our clasped hands. It is the first time I’ve ever touched a boy my own age voluntarily, because I want to, and not because I am meant to heal him.
Is this why I feel so many things at once?
My gaze shifts upward to Finn’s hazel eyes.
His body is surrounded by light.
I let go of his hand and the light disappears.
We don’t say anything else.
I head toward the exit.
Maybe Finn is the angel, not me.
NINE
José peels out of the driveway after dropping me at the house. He doesn’t want a run-in with the woman who is standing in the open front door, hands on hips, a scowl on her face. Even the scowl can’t ruin my mother’s beauty. Her long dark hair that waves just slightly. Her brown eyes and thick lashes, her delicate nose and lips like a bow. All that smooth, olive skin.
“Marlena Oliveira,” she barks, the moment I start toward her. She’s wearing a white short-sleeved blouse and loose white pants.
My long cotton dress billows around my ankles and wrists. I changed discreetly in the car, jeans and tank top shoved safely at the bottom of my bag. “Yes, Mama?”
“Don’t you yes, Mama me!”
I study the woman who is my mother, with whom I’ve grown so far apart this summer, who I now make so angry when before I made her so pleased. People see me in my mother and my mother in me. Some of the T-shirts and trinkets they sell in town show the two of us together. The image is usually of the classic Madonna and child sort, my mother holding me in her arms when I was a baby. Occasionally I see one of those little saint cards with me as a child of nine or ten, my mother sort of floating above me in the background. A divine figure watching over her blessed daughter.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
I breathe in, mustering innocence. “I was at the healing rocks,” I lie. The healing rocks are a place I like to go to think and watch the ocean, and where I sometimes prepare for an audience. “I asked José to take me there, Mama. Don’t be mad at him. I felt like I needed to recenter myself.”
The hard look in her expression softens. “Why didn’t you leave a note? Or better yet, why didn’t you wait so we could go together?”
I grip the sides of the white cotton dress, my hands sweaty with the humidity. “Next time I will.”
She nods, but she is still blocking the doorway. I’m not off the hook yet.
“You forgot that you had a private audience today.”
I bite my lip. Realize that my mother is right. I’ve never done this before. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I might be fighting my mother’s rules, but I don’t want other people to suffer because of this. “I did forget.”
A sheen covers my mother’s face. The sun is beating down on her directly but she doesn’t narrow her eyes against it. “They’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”
My legs grow unsteady. “They’re still here?”
“Yes, Marlena! Do you think they’d come all this way and then just leave?”
“I don’t know, Mama,” I say, shoulders starting to hunch. “I’ll go up to the receiving room now.”
I reach the landing on the front steps, about to pass my mother, when she drops, “I heard about your little escapade in town this morning.”
I stop. “Oh?”
“Don’t play dumb, Marlena.” She turns around. “Fatima!”
A long moment passes before Fatima appears. She’s looking at me, apology in her eyes. The dress from my swim, sandy and wrinkled, is in her arms. She holds it out to my mother.
My mother takes it, and sand glitters to the ground. Fatima hurries away. My mother holds the white sheath up to me. “What were you thinking?”
I hang my head.
“What in the world possessed you to go swimming? In front of all those people! In your dress! The tourists have come here to see the healer-saint, not the wild girl-child!”
“I don’t have a bathing suit,” I respond, which is true. It’s something my mother and I have fought over, so not the best answer. Especially since it produces another glare.
“It was hot,” I try again, which is also true. The rest of the truth is that I don’t really know what possessed me. Something did, something drew me into the water, something mysterious and unnameable. “I just wanted to go for a swim. I’m eighteen. I’m not a child anymore.”
I’ve said the wrong thing again.
“Marlena!” My mother takes a step forward, out of the doorway. The roar of the ocean is loud behind the house. “You must never forget who you are, and lately you can’t seem to remember! I don’t know what to do with you! I don’t know who you are anymore.” Her voice trails off, a soft tail of sadness.
“I need a little room to breathe, Mama.” My voice grows smaller and smaller.
“Just go,” she whispers.
Her quiet is worse than her upset. “Go?”
“Those people are waiting.” She finally steps aside to let me pass. As I move by she shrinks away, careful not to touch me.
I wish that instead she would reach out and hug me like other mothers hug their daughters. A storm surge of doubt and uncertainty rises through me. “And what if I can’t heal today, Mama? What if my gift doesn’t work, like Mrs. Jacobs says? What if I fail? Would you tell me if I did? If you found out from them later?”
“Marlena.” My name from her mouth is hard, the pit of an olive.
We are not supposed to speak about that day with Mrs. Jacobs.
My mother closes her eyes. When she opens them they are glassy. “My gifted miracle of a daughter. You still do not know what it is like to love someone with all that you are and then lose them completely. You are lucky to have avoided such an experience, while so many others have had the misfortune of losing everything. Everything and everyone they’ve ever truly loved.” She is thinking of her own parents and my father. When people come asking for a healing audience, I know my mother feels a special connection because of her own losses. For that reason, she also feels a special rage that Mrs. Jacobs did what she did in front of those suffering, grieving people. “Those who come to us, who come to you,” she goes on, “most of them have lost hope. You are their last hope in this world.” My mother tilts her head, and wipes her fingers across the tears that have fallen down her cheeks. “You will heal and your gift will not fail you. It just can’t.”
“Yes, Mama,” I answer, and head inside.
The receiving room is in a special wing off the side of the house. Long gauzy white curtains billow in the breeze and in the center of it is a long couch, covered in pale-blue linen, where the petitioners sit. They face a single wooden chair, made by my grandfather with careful hands. That is where I am to sit. There is a big white vase on a side table. Fatima fills it with flowers whenever there is an audience. Today it is bursting with pink peonies.
Squeezed into one side of the couch today is a man, not too old, not too young. Maybe forty. He is clutching a woman who must be his mother. Her hair is graying but not totally gray, and she is dressed smartly, in dark-green pants and a cream-colored blouse, her wrists draped with bracelets and her fingers with rings. I see a big diamond on one, with a wedding band pressed tightly against it. She has the look of a woman with style and confidence, who cares for herself and her appearance. Yet to see her face, anyone would immediately know otherwise.