I was happy in that house. It was perfect for my child-sized self, small and cozy. I loved feeding the chickens. I gave them names. Charlotte. Jason. Alvina. Josépha. I would go and hide under the bed when my mother would wring their necks before we would eat them for dinner. She would talk to me about her life with my grandparents while I sat on the floor of the kitchen, surrounded by the buttons of my grandmother, sorting the pink ones from the rest like raisins from a box of cereal. Mama would wash the kale that would go into the soup for lunch, telling stories about the pigs they’d raised, about the toys my grandfather made for her in his carpentry workshop in the basement, about my grandmother’s talent for cooking. Eventually she’d pull the big bitter leaves out of the icy water, soaked and dripping, to dry in a colander that sat on the counter. I would arrange and rearrange the buttons, forming them into a coil like the pearly pink insides of a snail.
This was before I became famous, before the roadside stands hawking candles with my face painted on the glass, the T-shirts and coffee mugs and wooden signs to hang above mantels and altars. Before the news of my gift spread far beyond our town and my mother moved us to a new and bigger house, this giant house where we live now, and she became obsessed with my growing renown and all that it could offer us.
Somewhere during those early years, I’d become my mother’s hope, her own salvation, the perfect child healer, as devout as Julian of Norwich. I let my gift mold everything that I was, let my mother mold everything about me, happy that my gift seemed to ease the pain of her past. That it pulled us up and out of the hardship of poverty and gave my mother riches she thought she would never see. In return, she loved me with all that she was and I was never lonely. But lately, the more I begin to love the world, the more my mother begins to hate me.
I put the empty glass in the sink and head upstairs to my room. It’s on a different floor than my mother’s. She likes her privacy, and the grandiosity of having an entire wing to herself. She used to invite me to sleep in her bed, but the last time she did was years ago.
There is a step that creaks loudly and I avoid it out of habit and keep on going. I grab some underwear from a drawer and head into the bathroom to strip off my dress, the fabric coarse and itchy with sand, and get in the shower. Soon I am washed clean, my hair free of its knots and tangles, of my forbidden swim. I dry off, put on a new white sheath, and wander down the hall to a room at the far end of the house.
The gift room.
It’s where we store the offerings we can’t use or that I’m not supposed to use, until the appointed day each month when Goodwill comes to pick them up. You’d be surprised how quickly this room fills, sometimes the gifts stacked nearly to the ceiling, teetering like a misshapen wedding cake.
There’s one gift in particular that draws me. My mother scoffed at it, was shocked that someone would think it appropriate. Ever since it arrived in its big box carried by the UPS man I’ve been thinking about it, and wishing we didn’t have to give it away.
I move past the unopened boxes filled with iPads and game consoles, lamps and blenders and other household objects, until I get to the clothing. People send us piles and piles of clothing, some of it fit for a girl ten years my junior. I search until I find what I’m looking for buried under a stack of dresses I would have liked when I was eight. I carry the garment bag to my room and lay it across the bed. The woman who sent this was from New York City. She worked for some fashion magazine. I healed her young son. Somehow she saw beyond Marlena the Healer to the teenage girl underneath when she chose this gift. I appreciated this. My mother did not.
I unzip the bag and my heart flutters. Skinny jeans and fashionable tank tops are laid out before me, the kinds I’ve seen girls in town wearing when they’re walking with their boyfriends. There are bright summer dresses with spaghetti straps and a couple of tiny skirts and tops, everything so different from the clothing I always wear.
White gauzy nightgowns hang in a narrow row one after the other on the left side of my closet. On the right side are wedding gowns. For each audience, I’m dressed like a bride. The audience comes expecting a pageant, and they ooh and aah when I sweep onstage in a big, beautiful gown. The white is supposed to emphasize my saintliness, my purity. But the paintings I’ve created from my visions are a riot of color on the wall of my room, interrupting so much blankness, the daily blandness of my attire. They are a rebellion without being a rebellion that gets me in trouble with my mother.
I run my hand across the items in the garment bag. A short, blue slip of a dress catches my eye, perfect for a hot day. I pluck it from the hanger and set it on the bed. Then I pull my white sheath off and throw it on the floor. I stand there in my underwear, hovering over the pretty blue silk, the same blue as the sky today. I slide the new dress over my head, shimmying it down my body. There is a long mirror on the wall and I check out my reflection.
Even with my hair still wet from the shower, I look almost normal.
No. I look almost sexy.
Like I, too, have the kind of legs that boys would admire, just like they admire the girls on the beach who flaunt their bodies in tiny bikinis. I think about Finn, the boy who refuses to leave my heart and my mind, wonder if he would admire me in this, and tug the hem a little higher up my thighs. The dress shows off my smooth olive skin, and the subtle curves of my chest and hips. Would it make him notice me in the way I want him to? Would he love me in this? I don’t know.
But I love me in it.
And my mother would hate me in it. This makes me love it even more.
FOUR
I am seventeen. It is last summer.
We are getting ready for my Saturday audience and my mother is helping me into the wedding dress she’s picked out for this afternoon. She’s working through the tiny pearl buttons that take forever to close, and I am staring at my reflection. I am wondering if I am pretty. If other people find me pretty. If other people my age find me pretty or if they just think I’m some freak show. I don’t want to be a freak show. I want to be attractive to others, to the boys I can’t stop noticing of late, as though they’ve been invisible all these years and suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like the hidden things of the sea after a hurricane spills them onto shore.
I’ve learned to stop asking my mother questions about boys and my appearance because they upset her. We used to be on the same page about who I was, who I am. But the minute I started asking questions my mother grew obsessed with stamping them out, with forbidding me the thoughts that she didn’t like. She sees them as threats to our life, to my life, to my reputation as a healer.
But I am a hermit crab grown too big for its shell. And today I am feeling stifled.
I catch my mother’s eye in the mirror. “So, Mama, when I fall in love, do you think my healing powers will evaporate? Do you think the visions will stop?”
My mother halts the work of buttoning. Her face grows pained.
“Marlena,” she whispers. “Don’t say things like that. You should never tempt God.”
I lower my eyes. “Okay, Mama,” I say softly. “I’m sorry.”
And I am sorry. I don’t want to do or say anything to make my visions go away. They are as real to me as the floor under my feet. During a vision I am never more certain of why I am here on this earth, never more me, and never more not me. Most of the time I want to protect my gift, hold it close so no one else can use it. But in the real world people try and take this tender part of me to capitalize on it, even my own mother, and I am tired. People twist it so it’s no longer something I recognize, no longer beautiful or mine. They turn my healings into something to sell for profit and they sell me for profit with it. I don’t want to be sold and branded and merchandized. I don’t like what my life is becoming.