“Yes, back when I was twelve.” Finn’s words from earlier about my having power pulse through me. “It’s none of your business where I got the scarf. So stop asking.”
“Marlena!”
I unwind it from my neck and fold it. “Yes, Mama?”
She rises from the couch. Her suit is wrinkled. “You do not talk to me like that!”
I hold the scarf to my middle. It warms the place where it presses against me. I glance around the room at the remnants of today’s failed television shoot, at the cameras mounted to the corners of the ceiling, darkened and off. “Well, you don’t get to use me anymore. I’m not some doll, Mama! Some toy you offer people to play with in exchange for fame and money.”
My mother inhales sharply. “That’s not how this is.”
I take a step toward her. “Maybe it wasn’t before, when I was younger, but that’s exactly how it is now. I know what you tell people, Mama. Stop denying it.”
My mother raises her hand. For a second, I think she might be about to hit me, but then something comes over her and her expression shifts. “Such gifts,” she whispers. “Such gifts and they are wasted on you.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But maybe it’s time I get to decide how and when to use them, instead of being used by them.” And by you, I think.
She crosses her arms, like she doesn’t trust them. “What are you saying?”
I inhale, readying to tell her what I’ve been thinking about on the way home in Finn’s truck. “I want things to change.”
The muscles in my mother’s body tense. “Change how?”
“My gift, the healing, it’s a part of me, a big part.”
“Yes? And?”
“But I want to do things other girls my age do, Mama. I want to have friends. I want to go out for ice cream like a normal person.” I tug at my sheath. “I want to wear normal clothes. I want access to some of my money, so I have the freedom to make my own decisions, to buy something I might need or, God, just something I want to eat if I’m hungry.” There is still one thing I haven’t yet said. “I’m . . . I’m stopping. I’m quitting healing. For now. Saturday was my last audience for a while.” This proclamation rings through the room.
My mother shakes her head, back and forth. “Marlena, you can’t.”
“I can and I am. You can’t force me to do anything I don’t want.” I cross my arms now. “Not anymore.”
“Gifts don’t work that way. God gave you this gift to use. You have no idea what will happen if you stop.”
“You mean God gave me this gift without my asking, so you can use me to make money. And the rest of the town can, too. Let’s be honest.”
My mother throws up her hands. “Forget about the money for a minute! Gifts like yours aren’t to be played with. You can’t just turn them on and off.”
“Well, I am.”
Her head is still shaking. “It’s not right.” She takes a step back and drops heavily onto the couch. “Marlena, I’m . . . I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what? That you can’t live off your daughter anymore? That you can’t ask seekers and the suffering to pay up or I won’t heal them?”
Her hands grip her knees. She suddenly looks so young. “I’m afraid you will come to regret this.”
I close my eyes a moment. I hear honesty in her words. Honesty and worry. Real motherly concern. “If I do, Mama, it can’t be worse than the regret of missing out on a normal childhood, a normal life. I regret that most of all. More than anything else that could possibly happen from this decision.”
My mother’s gaze drops to her lap. “You say that now.”
“It’s the truth.” I watch her there, so still, like she’s not breathing. “I don’t want television specials, Mama. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be needed by everyone. I just want to be like everyone else.”
“You’ve never been like everyone else and you shouldn’t want to be. I saw you on Saturday, Marlena. I saw what you did. We all saw. You should be . . .”
“Grateful?” I supply with a long sigh.
My mother’s eyes flicker up at me. “Proud. I was going to say proud.” Then, “Being a healer is who you are.”
My throat grows tight. “But it’s not all that I am, Mama.”
There is a long pause, the two of us staring at each other, roles reversed, my mother slumped on the couch, rumpled and defeated, me standing before her, confident and unyielding. “You’re not a little girl anymore,” she says. There is sadness in her tone. Real sadness, and longing.
The air around us is fragile. I’m afraid to move through it.
Carefully, I step out of my stained white slippers. “No, I’m not,” I say. Silently, I turn away.
“Marlena,” my mother calls after me as I climb the stairs. “I do love you, you know. Never forget that. I always have.”
In my room, I take down the evidence of my visions, the things I’ve painted and made and drawn. I carry them to the gift room, setting them on a shelf and stacking them in the corner. I take my collection of books about healers and mystics, the writings of Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Margery Kempe, even Hildegard, and bring them to the gift room, too. Next come the white sheaths. I ball them into a big heap on the floor by the paintings and the books. I don’t care if they get ruined. I go back and forth, back and forth, replacing the stuff of my life as a healer with the stuff of normalcy. Jeans. T-shirts. Platform sandals and baggy sweaters and flip-flops and short skirts. I pick through the offerings for anything I like. Stacks of novels that people thought I might like to read, probably because other girls my age do like to read them. Soon, aside from the clothes and the books, my room is nearly bare of everything that ever marked my life as a healer.
My mother is right. I know nothing else aside from healing. But so much blank space is more exciting than daunting. The change makes me feel different.
Lighter.
Freer.
More hopeful.
But it’s also strange.
I’m strange. Like I’m not quite here. Like I’m floating in some in-between space, wedged between reality and the unseen. Teresa of Ávila wrote of this place she called the interior castle, which she had to move through, fight through, to get to God. Maybe I’ve entered something of a castle myself, but an exterior one. I must pass through it to finally enter the outside world. I wonder how hard I’ll have to fight, or if I’ll have to fight at all. Maybe it will be easy.
As the day wears into night, I feel a shift, my entire being changing. All the cells in my body are remaking themselves to reflect the girl I am going to be from this day forward. The girl who is not a healer. The girl who is not too sacred to touch. The girl who is not responsible for the livelihood of an entire town, for the future of so many seekers. The figurehead, removed from her ship.
It’s like the cells in my body know what is happening.
Does God know?
Will God throw a tantrum, taking my gift away and more besides? Sometimes I think, if there is a God, he is a salesman on the side of the road, a con artist hawking shiny baubles, acting as though you already promised to purchase them, as though you begged for them when you never did. Yet somehow he still tricks you into thinking it was your idea to hang them around your neck in the first place.
A shiver runs through me.
I sit in my chair by the window, curl my feel underneath me, and look out onto the water and the darkening sky.
The human body, our muscles, our hands, have their own memories. Healing is like that, a muscle I’ve been flexing my entire life. I don’t even have to think about it. Calling on my gift has always been as simple as rustling around in a pocket for a charm I know is always there. But it’s also strange to have a gift whose source remains a mystery. A charm I’ve come to depend on, but one I’ve never fully understood.