My easel stands nearby, in the far corner of my room, waiting for me to go to it.
Tonight I’m too tired to paint.
I try to focus on the book that sits open in my lap, but my mind keeps drifting. My thoughts shift to Finn. The waves beyond my windows are crashing against the rocks, and I hear his voice intermingled with these sounds, calling me a fraud. Images of him fill my vision, a flush starting to burn across my skin.
Who am I kidding?
Gorgeous, genius Finn surely has a million girlfriends, probably has a girlfriend now. Why would he ever want someone like me? These thoughts send me into bed, pulling the covers up to my chin. I don’t care that it’s humid, that my body sweats, that I haven’t eaten dinner.
A strange thing happens while I sleep.
I have a vision, the kind I get when I’m about to perform a healing. The strange part is that I’m not about to perform a healing and the vision is about Finn. I’ve only had visions of people I’m meant to heal, and usually that is only while I’m touching them.
In the vision I see Finn, clear as day, as though he is standing in front of me. He’s looking at me in a way that no one has ever looked at me. This vision is less about color and more about scenes, scenes of the future, but in this one, I am a part of Finn’s future. In Finn’s eyes, I see love. Real love. Romantic love. Finn loves me, my vision reveals. But then, I watch as Finn turns and walks into a dark tunnel, or maybe it’s a dark wood. I try to follow him but I can’t. I’m rooted to the spot where I stand. I call out, but he keeps on going, walking until he disappears into the darkness.
It’s so vivid, so powerful, so upsetting, that it wakes me.
I sit up in bed, covered in sweat, sheets drenched. My stomach groans with emptiness and my heart is pounding and pounding in my chest. I get up and stand by the open windows and let the breeze cool my hot skin. Try to breathe.
If my vision is right, it means something wonderful and terrible at once.
Finn will fall in love with me.
And then he’ll break my heart.
I press my hands against the frame of the window.
Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t a vision at all.
Maybe, maybe, it was only a dream.
TEN
Over the next two weeks, I go to see Angie every afternoon.
I am an addict, José my reluctant dealer.
Finn and I have reached an unspoken agreement to remain at a safe distance. I think he is keeping this distance out of respect. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish for less respect.
I learn bits and pieces about him. He’s three years older. He’s a prodigy. At twenty-one he’s already far along in his PhD in neuroscience. He finished his undergrad at nineteen, just one year older than I am now. He is an actual, living, breathing genius. He and Angie are close, almost like a mother and son. I am jealous.
Today when I enter Angie’s office she is sitting cross-legged on the floor, piles of paper spread in front of her. Finn is nowhere to be seen. The windows are open even though it is hot. Angie doesn’t like the air conditioning. The sounds of the sea help her concentrate, she told me.
Angie pats the spot next to her on the rug.
I sit down and cross my legs like Angie’s, sink into the luxurious wool of the rug and wait for her to speak. I can tell she is thinking about something. Her eyes are halfway closed, and she breathes slowly, like she might be meditating. Angie’s blond hair is loose and falling around her shoulders, all that thick butter yellow.
Her lids fall open and her eyes are on me. “Tell me something, Marlena. What do you think about our visits so far?”
“I don’t know,” I answer carefully. “It’s weird, to be studied. By someone who doesn’t believe in me,” I add.
Angie doesn’t seem offended by my comment. “You think I don’t believe in you?”
“Well, you’re a scientist.”
Her fingers press deep into the rug. “And you think scientists can’t believe in the unseen?”
“I think scientists don’t believe in miracles.”
“Do you believe in miracles?”
Her question comes so quickly, so easily, it almost seems she hasn’t just asked me whether I believe in the very thing that has defined my entire life. “Of course I do,” I say.
Angie switches the cross of her legs. “You don’t sound certain, though.”
She’s right. If she’d asked me several months ago, the certainty would have been plain. “There was this woman who came to my audience in June. Actually the same day you showed up.” I tell her about Mrs. Jacobs and what Mrs. Jacobs claimed.
“Do you think she might be right?” Angie asks.
“No. I mean, I didn’t think so before.” I pull my knees into me and wrap my arms around my shins. “But I don’t know anymore. So many people come in and out of my life at my audiences, it’s not as though I keep track of everyone. Maybe some of my healings work, and some don’t. That would make sense, right? For me not to have a perfect track record?”
“It seems reasonable,” Angie agrees. “But what do you think might make the difference between a healing that ‘worked,’ as you said, and one that didn’t?”
Her question makes me laugh. “Talking to you is like what I’ve imagined it would be to talk to a therapist.”
Angie waits for me to say more, the good scientist-therapist she always is.
I roll my eyes. “Okay. Your question is good, but I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t think I’ve ever articulated out loud that some of my healings might work and some might not, until right now.”
She picks up a pen and takes a few quick notes. “Would you feel okay if it turned out that you didn’t have a ‘perfect track record,’ as you put it?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“You seem pretty certain of that.”
I think of what my mother said the other day, about how I am people’s last hope. How my gift isn’t allowed to fail. “It wouldn’t be fair to those who depend on me.”
“You feel responsible for a lot of people.”
I rest my chin on my knees. Grip my shins tighter. The understanding on Angie’s face, the sympathy, makes me want to hug her. Like I wanted to hug Fatima the other day. Does growing up and turning eighteen make you more affectionate?
“I am responsible,” I tell her simply, but there is a force behind those words. A strong gale of something not quite identifiable. “To the townspeople and their shops, to people I haven’t even met who need me, or who will. What if I suddenly couldn’t help them? What if they died and it was all my fault?”
Angie leans forward, the papers in her lap sliding off. “But . . .”
She does this. Angie inserts a single word, then a pause, because she wants me to finish my thought. I do my best to keep going, to give her a real answer, the gale slicing through me. “Sometimes I don’t want to be responsible for anybody. Sometimes I want to go to school like everyone else my age. Sometimes I want to walk down the streets of town and not see a single image of my face on a T-shirt or a key chain or . . . or even a kite. Sometimes I want to know what it’s like to not have people whispering about me, or treating me like I’m special, or worse, treating me like I’m some freak.” The list pours from me like a poison my body needed to purge. “I’ve had healing audiences every week since before I can remember. I’ve been given gifts and treated like I’m a saint and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but . . .”