“Hey there!” Helen gets up from the stool where she was sitting at the counter.
“I’ve never been so glad to see you,” I say. Helen is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend. Or maybe more of an older sister.
She eyes me, then she eyes my mother, who has just entered the kitchen. “Oh yeah?”
I nod.
Helen is the first person I remember healing.
My memories of that day are potent. I am six, Helen is nine. She is in a wheelchair, a tall thin man behind her, rolling her up the aisle. She wears a short, yellow dress, yellow like the sun in August. Her legs seem spindly, like they can’t hold her up. They are bent at sharp angles. Her eyes are sunken into her face. I skip toward her, liking the way my dress swirls around my knees. Does her father think I am mocking his daughter? Does the rest of the audience? By the time I am at her chair I can hear her quick puffs of breath.
“Saint Marlena, please heal me,” she begs. Then she lowers her gaze. “I am at your mercy.”
I am at your mercy.
I remember these words most of all. At the time I didn’t understand them. I had to ask my mother that night about mercy, what it was and why this little girl thought I had it.
I grab onto Helen’s armrest and look into her bottomless eyes. She blinks back, scared.
“Don’t be afraid,” I tell her. “I like your dress.”
“I like yours,” she whispers.
I get down on my knees. I’ve nearly forgotten the crowd around us, though now I can remember them, the way they seem to draw close, holding their breath. Helen watches me, big eyes stuck to mine, her father’s too. I study her legs, the way the muscle has withered away along the left calf, the way her kneecaps are plainly visible underneath pale, sagging skin. I press my hands flat against her shins.
That’s when the vision starts. A bright, pulsing red.
The color spreads like a sunburst, a whirling blur of images, of this little girl, her eyes, her mouth, her limbs. They swirl until they are me and I am them, until they are all that I am and ever will be. Until the girl and I are the same, an instance of perfect wholeness, like merging with the universe and taking another person with you.
As the vision settles, Helen’s future flashes before my eyes.
I see her legs. They are fleshy and healthy and shaped the way a young girl’s legs should be, the legs of a girl who plays soccer and tennis and goes out for runs. They are strong legs, beautiful legs, legs that any boy would admire, and they are, without a doubt, most definitely hers.
I look up at the girl again. “What’s your name?”
“Helen,” she says.
I gather her thin legs into my arms, the only hugs I am ever allowed. Rest my cheek against the bones of her shins. I feel the transformation begin, I can nearly see it happening, the shift from these sick and neglected legs to the legs that Helen will have someday soon. “Helen, you will walk. You will see. We will run together.” I let go and get up. “Come and see me when you’re better,” I tell her.
Helen did come back; she’s come back many times. On each visit she walks straight and tall on her beautiful legs, legs that run and jump and play soccer. Legs that all the boys admire at the college where she’s on the tennis team, but legs that all the girls admire, too. It turns out, Helen prefers the girls’ admiration to the boys’. Helen is living proof, I suppose, that my gift is real. Inexplicable maybe, but true.
As Helen and my mother exchange greetings, I notice a big white plastic bag sitting on the counter. I bet that inside is a lemon cake from a bakery where Helen lives. She knows I love them. “You don’t have to keep thanking me,” I tell Helen every time I see her, telling her to stop bringing gifts, that her friendship is plenty. She brings them anyway.
My mother places a stack of documents in front of her on the kitchen island. “Good morning, Marlena.” Her tone is formal. Polite. Helen will always be welcome in our home because of our history, but my mother doesn’t like it when I get close to someone else. “Did you sleep well?”
I shake my head. I had another vision of Finn, the same one as before. Another maybe-dream. “It was too hot in my room.”
“Why didn’t you turn on the air conditioning?” she asks. Her expression darkens. “You’re not getting sick, are you?”
“No, Mama,” I reply, my tone formal to match hers. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine for the audience on Saturday.”
She nods. “Good. We have important people coming and you need to be at your best.” There is a covered plate next to the sink. My mother points to it. “Fatima made some bollos for you.” Her voice is accusing, but the promise of Fatima’s Portuguese bollos, little individual round breads shaped like English muffins, overrides this.
“Helen, are you hungry?” I ask, even as I’m uncovering the plate and slicing one in half so I can toast it. Sometimes I’ll eat them only with butter, but often I make sandwiches with them.
“I ate on the way here,” Helen says.
I peer into the bag Helen brought, and I was right: lemon cake. I suddenly feel loved. “I’m starving,” I tell her. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She takes a small sip of her coffee. “Take your time.”
When my two halves of bollo pop up from the toaster I butter them and gobble them down. “You’re missing out, Helen. No one makes bollos like Fatima.”
She laughs. “Really. I don’t want to get in the middle of the romance you’re having with those.”
“Your loss,” I say, shoving the rest in my mouth, a too-big bite, but I don’t care. I wait for my mother to say something cutting about my poor manners, about talking with my mouth full, about eating too fast, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
I am about to dig into Helen’s lemon cake when my mother looks up from the documents she’s been studying. “Marlena, I have incredible news. One of the major networks is going to do an eight-part series about you for television! The lawyers sent over the proposal from the network.” She turns to Helen to share her joy, but Helen stares into her coffee cup like it might tell her fortune. “The producers of the show want to come here to follow you around for a few weeks, see you at home, film at your audiences. They want to tell the story of your life. You’ll be even more famous!”
A television show? Follow me around for weeks? I’d have no privacy. No chance of escaping to see Angie or Finn. I would have to be Marlena the Saint, Marlena the Healer, perfect and demure, performing my role 24/7. I feel Helen’s eyes on me. I slide the lemon cake away from me.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” my mother presses.
“Yes, Mama,” I agree.
No, Mama. It’s horrible.
“We will need an even bigger church than we have now after it airs!”
“I’m so excited,” I say, though my tone communicates the opposite. I refuse to look my mother in the eye. Instead I look at Helen. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.” I head out the back door of the house and into the garden, still in my robe and pajamas. I don’t care. I want to be in the fresh air. I hear Helen’s steps behind me, but I don’t slow down. I take the path in our yard that leads to a stairway down to the ocean. I sit on the top step and wait for Helen to join me.
She kicks her shoes off onto the grass and arranges herself at the other end of the wooden slat. “Marlena, what’s going on?”
I stare out at the water, at the way the sun shines across the ripples, creating moving slivers of light. I inhale the briny smell. I never tire of it. “I don’t know.” I turn to look at Helen, envious of the jean shorts that show off her long perfect legs, her clingy cotton T-shirt. The casual way she wears her clothes. “I don’t want to be on a television show. I don’t want the church to be any bigger. I don’t want any more attention than I already have.”