A line forms in the center aisle. Each week, there is a waiting list for healings, a list I am supposed to stick to. My mother informs me who is at the top and seats them in a special section. A woman holding a baby moves through the masses to the end of the platform. The staff helps to make room for her. I walk to the edge and crouch down. The wide skirt of my dress billows around me, suspends my body on an exquisite silken raft. I can already feel my gift gathering strength.
The woman lowers her eyes. She is shaking, the tiny baby wrapped in blue shaking with her.
I reach out and touch her cheek. “Please. Don’t be afraid.”
She returns her eyes to me. “Mijo, Miguel, es . . .” She doesn’t finish. Tears roll down her face, wetting my fingers.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I know what to do.”
The mother holds the baby out to me and I take him in my arms. I adjust my position so I am cross-legged underneath my dress. I cradle him, I whisper to him, I press the soft skin of his forehead to my own. I kiss his tiny nose and each one of his fingertips. He squirms and whimpers. His suffering makes my eyes sting with tears. It is a rusty color, a putrid halo edged around his little form.
The crowd hushes, watching, hovering, a curious school of fish.
The wave of my gift is gentle, rippling from my heart like a soft swell on a day when the ocean is glass. It moves easily through the shore of the infant’s sickness. I can see everything inside him, straight to the sandy bottom of his blue-green soul. I close my eyes until his soul is all I know, until I am standing inside it, until all of its secrets are also my secrets. My gift presses right through his suffering, until everything about this baby in my arms is as blue-green and calm as the beautiful glass-ocean.
When I open my eyes and look into his, they are wide and looking back at me, his face no longer scrunched in pain. “You are precious, aren’t you?” I say to him, before handing the tranquil bundle back to his mother. Her tears have dried and she is watching me with an uncertain expression.
“He’s going to be fine,” I tell her, because he is.
I rise up from my crouch, arranging my dress, and await the next petitioner, and the next and then the next. One after the other, they come to me, and the process repeats. I go and go and go until I am near collapse, until I am dry as a riverbed in drought, until my mother announces to everyone that my audience is over. My brain barely registers her words because it has grown murky, shot through with the ink of exhaustion. But a satisfied current of peace buoys me. The posture of my body is proud and sure.
As I ready to leave the room, I know the eyes of the boy in the front row are still on me, that his eyes have been on me for hours because somehow I could feel them underneath everything else. I wish I could see if his mockery has transformed into awe. I wish I could know his name. I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could have the conversation with him that I keep imagining, which goes something like Hello, my name is Marlena, and he responds, Hi, I’m Guillaume, because for some reason I decide he is French, and then says to me, I have so many questions—would you like to go for coffee? I wish I could banish these wishes, because healers are meant to walk among the people but not be of them. My only purpose is to protect my gift. To live for it and only it. To let it be enough for me. Like Julian. Like Hildegard. Like all the mystics and saints.
The backstage door is open and I sweep through it in a streak of expensive white satin, disappearing from the church and all those watchful eyes. His eyes.
I am safe.
THREE
I sneak inside the house, hoping my mother is out, or taking a nap. She likes taking naps on the hot, humid days of this heat wave. Our house is enormous, an old coastal New England beauty, graying and weathered, with views to the ocean on three sides. In every room with the windows open you can hear the waves crashing against the rocks. Even with the windows closed you can hear them if the water is rough enough. I will never tire of hearing the ocean.
I tiptoe into the kitchen, leaving a trail of sand behind me.
It’s quiet.
“Hello?” I call out.
There is no response.
My mother isn’t here. Fatima, our maid, must be out for the afternoon, too.
I let out a long breath.
While the house is all traditional New England on the outside—long wooden clapboards, rustic and worn from the salty sea air and the harsh winter storms—the inside is newly renovated with every comfort a person could want. The kitchen is state-of-the-art, spotless, stainless-steel appliances gleaming alongside white countertops and cabinets, the exact kitchen my mother picked out of a design magazine. The floors in the house are heated. Plush couches and chairs with their perfectly puffed and color-coordinated pillows sit there invitingly in the living room, an arrangement also plucked straight from one of my mother’s magazines. The entire first floor is open, so we can see the ocean out of every window whether we are in the kitchen or lounging reading a book. Gauzy white curtains flutter in the hot breeze. Fresh flowers dot the tables, arrangements delivered weekly from the best florist in town.
My mother spares no expense. She loves to spend our money. My money.
I fill a glass with water and guzzle it down, gasping for breath when it’s empty. Then I fill it again and drink this one slowly. My cheeks still feel warm with the sun.
We used to live in a tiny cottage built by the hands of my grandfather, Manuel Oliveira, the next town over. My mother grew up in that house, cramped by the endless clutter of my grandmother, who filled the space with glass figurines and other knickknacks, displayed on shelves also built by my grandfather. There was a chicken coop in the yard, and they raised pigs and fished.
My grandparents and Mama immigrated from a tiny archipelago of islands called the Azores when she was six, determined to make a new and better life. On a map, the archipelago is midway between the west coast of Portugal and Morocco, but the islands are so far from land they may as well be their own country. My mother was born on São Miguel, the biggest one. It is an ancient place, small and isolated, where people live simply off the food they catch from the sea and the land, their days divided by the sacred rituals of the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of the sea. It is a religious place, where it is as likely as not that the entire population will be gathered in the streets parading a statue of Jesus across the island, holding candles and singing in harmony. A place where a healer like me could easily emerge, where people are as ready and willing to believe in miracles as they believe the sun will rise every morning after the moon disappears from the sky.
When my mother and I lived in her childhood house, she did her best to keep the rooms tidy, the one bedroom, the living room with the kitchen along the back wall, the narrow bathroom at the other end. I slept on a bed next to hers and played on the worn shag carpet near the kitchen, my mother stepping around me as she cooked. Steaming soups stocked with bitter greens and beans, spicy sausages cradled in bright roasted sweet peppers, great domed sweet breads steaming and fresh from the oven. My grandmother’s glass figurines sat there on the shelves, dusty ballerinas twisting and turning, spinning their tulle tutus for an audience of two, perched in between the elaborate portraits of Mary and Jesus that my grandmother hand carried from Portugal. I used to love to play with the great cookie tin of buttons my grandmother left behind when she died, spreading them on the floor in lines and circles, counting them, admiring their colors and shine.