“Marlena . . . you sound so . . . so conflicted,” Helen says. “And upset.”
I close my eyes, tears welling. They spill down my cheeks and drip from my chin onto my robe. I wipe my hand across my face. “Let’s talk about something else. I want to hear about you. Why the visit? Shouldn’t you be starting fall classes or something?”
Helen rests her arms across her knees and leans forward. “I start school on Monday. But I’m here because I got a phone call from a Dr. Angela Holbrook, who wants to interview me about you.” She takes a deep breath. “Is she part of why you’re so upset?”
I sniffle. “No. Angie’s nice. You’ll like her.”
“Angie? So you are working with her. She told me she had your permission to interview people, but I wondered if it was true. I wanted to talk to you before I went to see her.” Helen is still bent forward, close but not close enough to touch. “I wanted to make sure you were okay if I spoke to her. That she wasn’t doing some shitty exposé on you, trying to prove you’re a fake or something.”
I mimic the way Helen sits, resting my arms across my knees. I scoot toward her, relieved when she doesn’t shift away. “It’s okay to talk to her. Really.”
Helen’s hair shines against the backdrop of blue sky. “Tell me about Dr. Holbrook then. What’s the deal?”
A seagull is pecking at a clamshell at the edge of the surf, trying to pry it open with its beak. “Angie is a neuroscientist and she studies the brain. She’s interested in my gift. Where it comes from. What it is. How it works. Whether it’s real,” I add.
Helen huffs. “You don’t need a scientist to tell you about your gift. And you certainly know for a fact that it’s real. I’m living proof!” She crosses and uncrosses her long tan legs as if to remind me. She places her hands on her bare, toned thighs.
I rest my chin against my forearms, watching the gull attack its breakfast. “But what if it wasn’t? What if everything is falling apart?”
Helen shifts so she can peer into my face. “Marlena, please tell me what’s going on. Stop talking in half statements. You can trust me. I’m your friend.”
Tears sting the backs of my eyes again. “You really are my friend, aren’t you? You’re the only one I have.” I nudge my foot against a pebble until it falls off the edge of the step, tumbling toward the rocks below. “You’re my friend despite the fact that you bring me gifts as payback. Friends don’t owe each other like that. Friends are equals.”
Helen looks away. “I know you always say that, but it’s tradition. An expectation. Not something I can simply decide not to do.”
“My mother’s tradition. Not mine.”
“Okay. I won’t do it anymore,” Helen says. “I’m sorry. You are my friend. You are.” She repeats this, as though she knows how hard it will be to convince me. But then she does the one thing that makes me believe what she says is true. She reaches out a hand and places it on my back. She leaves it there, her palm warm and soothing.
A sob escapes my chest, despite my trying to hold it in.
Helen reaches her arm around me and draws me into a hug. I feel her chin pressing on the top of my head. Soon I am crying hard.
“Oh, Marlena,” Helen says after a while, once my sobs turn to hiccups and my breaths grow more even. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Don’t let go of me.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” Helen says, rubbing her hand up and down my arm.
Eventually the tears dry and my body grows calm. Helen and I sit there in the quiet of the morning, pressed together, watching the waves as they come into the shore and recede. I hope my mother doesn’t see us clutching each other. I try and memorize the feeling of being touched by someone who cares, someone who wants nothing from me other than to help, someone who calls herself my friend and means it. I wonder what life would be like if a comforting touch was a normal occurrence, if it would make me into a different person. Maybe there are other people who would be willing to comfort me, too, and not only because my touch could heal them.
“You are just as much a healer as I am,” I tell Helen.
She laughs softly. “I wish that were true. I wish I were gifted like you.”
“Sometimes it makes my life hateful.”
“But your ability to heal is something incredible. The kind of thing people want to do a television show about.”
I pull back. “Maybe they should do a television show about you and your tennis and your romantic girlfriends and your college friends and your nice college life.” My voice is fiery.
Helen stares at me, like she is trying to figure out if I’m kidding.
“I’m serious,” I tell her.
Helen laughs. “What in the world are you talking about?” Helen shifts and our knees touch. “Now you have to tell me what’s going on. No more stalling. I want to know everything.”
I stare at the place where our skin touches so casually. Wish that everyone in my life could act this way, grateful Helen mustered the courage. “Everything is changing. I’m changing, but maybe my gift is changing, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, it’s always been who I am. I’ve never known how to be anyone else other than Marlena the Healer, and before, I never wanted to be. It was enough. But lately I’ve wanted more, different things, the kinds of things other people take for granted, like school and friends and parties on weekends. Which makes me sound shallow, I know—”
“—Marlena—”
“—but then, I also can’t stop thinking about whether my gift is real, if it works, or if it only sometimes works.” The words are spilling out, and I let them. “And I wonder if that is a new thing, like, if my gift is a kind of reservoir in me, and I’ve almost used it up. Like maybe sometimes when I reach for it, I only touch dry land, and other times I reach the place within me where it still remains, but soon those places will have dried up too.” I tell Helen about Mrs. Jacobs. It feels good to get it out again, like when I discussed it with Angie, this thing my mother has forbidden us to speak about.
Helen’s cheeks turn bright red as she listens. “I already hate this Mrs. Jacobs-lady.”
I shake my head. “I don’t. Maybe I needed her to do what she did. To open my eyes.”
“You don’t owe her anything.”
A tall, spindly blue flower rises through the steps and I catch the petals gently in my hand, admiring them. “You’re in good company hating her. My mother wants her banished from the town.”
“I bet. Your mother is a formidable woman. She is not to be messed with.”
I let go of the flower. “That’s the other thing. My mother and I are fighting constantly about the ways I’m changing. I’m just so tired, Helen, of being this person, performing Marlena the Saint all day, every day. The thought of a TV show following me around twenty-four seven. I can’t even . . . God, it would be horrible. Sometimes I feel like a machine that people use at will, that the whole town uses to generate itself.”
“Oh, Marlena,” Helen says carefully. “I don’t want you to feel that way.”
“My mother wishes I could still be ten years old,” I go on, “and tries to dress me like a little girl and says it’s to protect my reputation, but I don’t care about my reputation anymore. I want to be irreputable. Like not reputable at all. Disreputable.”