Mrs. Lewis’s pain is physical, not emotional. She is dying, or will die soon. I hold the vision of her heart steady, and see the way the left side is collapsing, caving in on itself, the blood in her veins unable to reach it with the force her heart needs. As we sit there, me on the floor, Mrs. Lewis in the chair, scenes begin, first from the past, of doctors and hospitals, the helpless faces of her husband and her grown son, her grandchildren still small, the swell of responsibility to care for them in this graying, kind lady.
But then, nearly eclipsed by this expanding bubble of misery, something else stirs, powerful and certain and full of light. The blacks and dark grays gradually turn green and blue, as bright and strong as new blades of grass and as light and delicate as a robin’s egg. I can see her, literally see her. She watches her grandchildren graduate high school and college, she has dinner with her son, whose own hair is now gray with age. Little by little, her breathing eases.
I get up, knees shaky. In the far back of the room I see Mrs. Jacobs start to stand, shaking her head. I am not afraid. I lean in toward Mrs. Lewis so I can whisper, “You’re going to be okay.” I kiss her cheek.
When I pull back, something else starts to happen inside me.
The tingling, the colors, the scenes from Mrs. Lewis’s future are pulsing through me and won’t stop, even though I’ve let her go. Everything in me shifts, expands to include other people, the other seekers who are here. I can see all their need at once, their wounds, their pain, the same as when I touched the MRI in Angie’s lab.
I am once again that figurehead on the ship. I carry them on my back.
I hold my arms wide and begin to speak. I can’t not speak. Names fall from my mouth. “Joseph. Benicia. Amanda. Christiano. Malcolm. Pilar. Jeremy. Concetta.” The names come from everywhere and nowhere.
Soon I am surrounded by a crowd, someone in a wheelchair, others limping, one man with a woman sagging in his arms. Someone grasps my left hand and another my right. There are hands along my forearms and hanging on my elbows and shoulders. Across my back. People are everywhere, reaching for me.
I welcome it. I welcome them, all of them. I have never been less afraid and I have never been more myself. The world is full of color and music and beauty and I am at the center of it all.
Somewhere in the room, sounding far, far away, I hear Mama’s voice calling out. “Marlena, Marlena, Marlena! What are you doing?”
“Dennis. Sarah. Claudio,” I say.
The crowd around me grows and grows. They murmur, they pray, and I am taken up into their prayers and whispers. Taken over by them.
“That is all for today,” my mother is saying into the microphone on the stage. No, she is shouting. “That is all. José? Help me here!” My mother cries for people to pull back. Eventually they obey, falling away, letting go of my hands and my arms, until once again, I am alone in the aisle. All that beauty and life, gone.
I begin to weep. I am empty. Hollow without it. Without them.
Everything grows silent.
I place a hand to my temple. It feels like my head has split apart, straight in half, like a dropped bowl that hits the floor just right. I am depleted.
But I am real.
And now I am weeping for joy. I have never been more certain that I am real, that my gift is real. This is my job, my purpose, my reason for being. Nothing else matters. I don’t need Angie to study me, to prove whether my gift is real or a fraud. I am a healer and I always will be. It is what I am made for.
How could I ever have doubted this? Doubted myself?
“Back away. This audience is over,” my mother is saying, her voice booming through the church. José is next to me, gingerly taking my arm even though he’s not supposed to touch me, lifting me off the ground and carrying me away.
Time goes by as I gather my strength backstage, enough to walk. Thirty minutes. An hour. My mother has yet to appear and I don’t know why she hasn’t come to speak to me, to scold me. Despite José’s protests, I make my way out into the church for the receiving line. I emerge into the sea of seekers and tourists who have waited for photos. People erupt into chatter and shouts.
“Marlena!”
“Marlena, I need you!”
“Marlena, over here!”
“Amazing,” shouts a woman.
“I didn’t believe, but now . . .”
I stand on the stage and look out over everyone. Then, in the very back, I see Finn, his face, the tilt of his head, the intensity of his eyes. I take in the fact that he just witnessed what happened. Witnessed me.
What did he think?
I descend the stairs and move through the crowd. “I’m sorry, excuse me,” I tell the people swirling around me. “I’m tired,” I tell them, in apology. It’s not a lie.
I plow through everyone, and they scurry to move from my path. I am making a scene and I don’t even care if my mother witnesses it. I see Finn, hold him there with my eyes. I know he’s not going anywhere, that he’s waiting for me, but I feel as though he might slip away before I can get to him, that I will be unable to reach him before he does. He is beyond me somehow, beyond me already, or at some future date.
What, what, what is this feeling? Where is it coming from?
It’s like a half vision, an unformed premonition.
When I reach him I head straight through the exit and signal for him to follow. I wait under one of the gnarled old trees whose branches are a canopy from the September sun. Me, in my wedding dress, breaths short and bursting, hem dragging through the dirt. Finn comes through the door and looks around.
“Over here,” I call out.
He heads toward me. “Well, that was dramatic.”
“I guess it was,” I agree. Was he referring to my audience, the swell of people around me, or the way the crowd parted as I moved through it? Or maybe the fact that I look like some runaway bride, and Finn the boy come to rescue me. “I don’t have much time. My mother . . . she’s angry about what happened in there.” The feeling that Finn might disappear is ever more potent now. It makes me want to place my hands on his shoulders and hold him there.
A leaf flutters to the ground between us. “How could she be angry after that?” he asks. “Whether it was real or not, you have this way with people. You help them. You have something they need.”
A pain spreads through my body. “Whether it was real or not?”
Finn takes a step closer. The sunlight shines through the spaces between branches, the dappled light giving him an otherworldly look. “After what I saw today,” he says, with a mixture of fear and reverence and maybe a little bit of awe, “it’s difficult even for me not to believe.”
SIXTEEN
It is Monday, and I wake to noise throughout the house. Not the kind from Fatima cleaning, dragging the vacuum over the plank floors that double as sand catchers in the summer, or the use of a blender in the kitchen. I hear scraping and banging, like builders are getting ready for a renovation.
There is a knock on my door. It opens a crack. “Marlena?” It’s Fatima. “Your mother wants you downstairs.”
My mother and I aren’t speaking. Not since Saturday. In the tension and silence, I’ve been painting nonstop.
“You’re supposed to shower and get dressed.” She shuts the door again.