The woman’s eyes are vacant. Her mouth is twisted in pain. She is nearly catatonic. When the man hears the soft brush of my slippers on the wood floor he turns. While his mother’s face displays a bottomless emptiness, his has the full bloom of desperation and hopelessness, like a black flower that swallows all the light around it. He is quiet and hesitant, uncertainty on his face as he takes me in and I stand there, in front of my grandfather’s chair.
“Hello . . .” His mouth is a round O, but nothing else comes out.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him, because I know just what to do. I have remembered, once again, who I am. I am ready to perform the duties of my gift. In an instant, I am Marlena the Healer. It is like slipping on old, comfortable shoes.
“What is your name?” I ask him.
“Pedro,” he says quietly.
“And your mother?”
“Guadalupe.”
I nod. I don’t bother to sit. There will be no small talk like sometimes with seekers who are nervous, who have questions, who want to have a conversation with the Healer before anything else happens. The son, Pedro, looks at me with fear, afraid to let his mother go, to cede her to me, even though this is what he came here to do.
“Really, don’t worry,” I tell him again.
“But don’t you need to know what—”
“—please,” I say, and he presses his lips together into a tight straight line, his arms retracting from his mother. He gets up from the couch and stands aside. She still hasn’t looked at me. Not with eyes that can see.
My mother was right.
I have never known grief, or loss, not personally. Not the kind that breaks a heart, never to be the same again, or that immerses someone in a fog for months, even years, the world dimmed and dull and cloaked in perpetual gloom. But I know when I see grief on the face of another person, and it is what I see in Guadalupe, who sits, shoulders slouched, body leaning to one side now that her son is no longer there to support it.
Pedro is pacing in front of the couch, eyes on the floor.
I sit down next to Guadalupe and take her hands into mine. She doesn’t acknowledge my presence, doesn’t flinch or react. But I think touch must be a basic human instinct. I know just how to smooth my fingers over the lined palms of this sad woman, how to rest my forehead against the thickly veined backs of her brown hands, how to coax the person hidden inside this shell of a body into the world outside again.
I clutch at my chest when I feel the sharp pain of Guadalupe’s grief in my heart, and as the colors come. A burned rust sweeps through me first, burned like the dead leaves of fall that turn to dust in your hand. It’s followed by the dark red and orange of age, of exhaustion, of a forest after a fire has swept through it. I push past these scenes, the despair that enshrouds Guadalupe in darkness. I see that she has lost a son, her youngest, and her husband, too. My heart cries out at the depth of her pain. Pedro has lost a father and a brother, but people move through grief in different ways, and some, like Guadalupe, enter it as though it is an underworld that traps them in its grip forever.
Visions of tragedy, of untimely good-byes and trauma, wash over me in sepia tones. I draw them into myself, into my own body, taking the burden from Guadalupe into my mind and heart and soul, into the hands that hold tight to hers. I absorb the worst of it, the depths of her affliction. That is my job.
Then, I see a glimmer of yellow. Then another of green and blue. Hues of pink and lilac, accompanied by happy memories, the beautiful and the bright, the ones that lie buried under the cloak of Guadalupe’s despair. They are there. The life and future of Guadalupe is buried deep, but waiting. I uncover it for her. I draw it back into view.
And I stay, holding her hands, forehead pressed against her skin, chasing away the thick storm of her affliction until I feel the hope stirring in her again, until I feel the sight returning to her eyes, and until I feel the life in my own body draining away.
When I wake I am staring up into the face of Fatima.
I am lying on the couch on my back in the receiving room. Pedro and Guadalupe are gone. I must have passed out.
“Marlena,” Fatima says. “Are you okay?”
She holds a glass of water. I struggle to sit up. My head swirls and tips. “I’m fine,” I croak.
She nods.
I take the water and gulp it down. Watch as Fatima leaves. Wait for enough strength to stand and to walk. Did I heal Guadalupe’s pain? Did I remove enough of the despair from her heart so she can make her way back into the realm of the living?
Will my mother tell me if I did or didn’t?
I get up slowly, my legs unsteady. The sun is on its way down along the horizon. I wonder where my mother is, if she showed Guadalupe and Pedro out while I was asleep. I pass by the kitchen on my way to my room. Fatima is there, standing behind the island. Her hands are powdered with flour, palms pressed into a fat ball of dough for the sweet bread she knows is my favorite.
She stops kneading when she sees me. “I didn’t show your mother that dress from your swim, Marlena,” she says. “I would never. She found it on her own. If I’d found it first, I would have washed it before she could have known.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “It’s okay.”
Fatima’s dark hair is streaked with gray even though she is not yet forty. Like Mama, Fatima came here from São Miguel as a child, with her fisherman father and her seamstress mother. She has four children at home and no husband to help her. Mama pays Fatima well, pays her quadruple what anyone else would because she knows how difficult it is to make a new life in a place where you weren’t born, when you are alone and have people who depend on you. It is good to remember that Mama has a lot of kindness in her. Kindness she shows to Fatima.
Fatima is still watching me, hands balling and pushing at that pillowy dough. “Marlena, is there anything you want to talk about?” she asks. There is a beat of silence, broken only by the hollow sound of her palm against the dough, but she seems to want to say something else. “You can talk to me. I’m . . . I’m here for you.”
I stare at her, considering this strange new offer, and the deal Fatima and I made earlier today to not tell on each other. But then the handle on the front door turns, my mother about to enter the house from wherever she’s been. “See you later,” I say and run to the stairs before Fatima can respond and before my mother sees me there.
A big bag of mail, of letters and petitions, has been deposited outside my bedroom door. It rises nearly to the top of my knee, a drawstring pulling it closed at the top. I get one every month. Tonight I walk by without touching it. I’ve had enough of healing today.
I shut the door of my room carefully, hoping my mother will think I’m asleep and not come up to see me. I wonder if Fatima is telling her she found me passed out on the receiving room couch. I wonder what my mother will think it means that I did, or if she won’t think it means anything at all.
I grab a book and sit in the chair by the open windows, grateful for the evening breeze. My attention floats from the pages to the wall. Across it are my careful drawings, my paintings, my collages of favorite visions. More than one—if you look closely—take the shape of a human heart, hearts I’ve healed. Colors define them. Hues of purple, green, yellows and reds and oranges. One is dominated by bright, hot pinks. Some of the drawings are a collection of the tiny scenes that sometimes accompany the vision about the life and future of a person I’ve healed. But mostly they are intricate, detailed bursts of light and color. I have never chosen to paint the dark gray and black storm of despair like I saw today. I’ve always tried to capture the light that peeks out from those murky depths, the yellow of hope and the aqua blue and pink of joy.