As if to prove the strength of her perfect legs, Helen steps gingerly across a series of low, flat boulders that line a neighbor’s garden, agile as a gymnast. “What was it like?” She guides me left, her hand still holding mine. “My soul, I mean.”
“It was painted with hope and happiness,” I say. “With openness. Love.”
“I think you’re biased,” Helen says. Then she asks, “Are all souls like that?”
I shake my head. A cottage appears far down the street, lit up, dozens of cars parked outside and clotting the road. “Some souls are full of despair and darkness. Hopelessness. Sometimes they are gray with it, deadened by whatever troubles or sickens them. But all souls are beautiful, regardless. I feel guiltier now that I’m older, that I’ve reached into so many, and without anyone’s permission.”
“But you did have permission. All those people wanted something from you.”
The noise from the party grows louder as we get closer. “I guess. But I’m not sure people realize that by asking me to heal them, they’re opening the doors of their soul to me. Sometimes it feels like stealing, like I’m some thief who is rummaging around in their most hidden parts, prying into a place where no one else should be allowed.”
Helen stops at the edge of the yard. Music and laughter pour through the open windows. Two people, a guy and a girl, get out of a car and head up the walkway and into the front door of the cottage. “It’s okay, Marlena. It’s okay with me, if that’s what you really want to know. I’ve always felt”—she pauses a moment, blinking—“lucky to have this lasting connection with you, after everything I went through when I was little.” The shoes sway from her fingers. “I know you’ve lived a lonely life, but mine was lonely, too. It would have been lonely always, I think, if it weren’t for you.” Helen’s eyes shine in the light of the moon. “I know you don’t like thinking of yourself as a saint, but sometimes I’ve wondered how you are walking this earth as though you’re a normal girl.”
I shake my head, hard. “Don’t do that to me, Helen. It’s my mother’s dream that I act like an angel. The cost of being a healer is this”—I gesture between us—“friendship. Going to parties. Going anywhere at all. And I want to be free.”
“I want those things for you, too, Marlena, you know that,” Helen says.
I hear her hesitation. “But?”
“But what if someone is sick? What if I came to you now, in that chair? Would you turn me away?”
This question chills me. I stand there, bare feet planted in the lush, dewy grass, the cool air of evening brushing my skin, trying to figure out what to say. It is one thing to turn my back on people I’ve never met, but it is something else to think of doing that to Helen, a person I love, someone whose soul still twirls inside me like a child. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to answer that question. Not with what I know of you now, and who you are to me.” But what if it happened? What if I did have to face that situation? These questions whisper through me. “I hope I never have to worry about it.”
“I hope so, too,” Helen says. Then she forces the clouds from her gaze and eyes my feet. “Shoes, Marlena,” she commands.
I obey, grateful for the end of this inquiry. Helen slips hers on expertly, and strides up to the front door of the cottage. I totter behind her, letting the thrill of the party flow through my limbs and push all worries aside.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Finn walks onto the deck, I wave at him, trying to catch his attention.
It’s a relief to see someone I know amid Helen’s college-partying friends. She is dancing in the living room, beer in hand, jumping up and down, hair flying around her face. Sonia is there with her, dancing just as hard. I’ve been watching them through the window. Helen keeps coming to check on me, but I keep sending her back to her dancing and Sonia. They both look so happy.
I’m learning a lot tonight, like why people are always taking out their phones when they’re alone. I’d take out mine, but the only people I know to text are here, or before, they were driving. It’s not that people haven’t talked to me, or that Helen hasn’t introduced me around. But it’s strange to try to make small talk with someone I’ve just met when we have nothing obvious in common, and when the person doesn’t need something from me, like healing. I can change my clothes and read fashion magazines and buy bikinis and hold a beer and even sip it in public, but that doesn’t stop me from being the Marlena I’ve always been, which is a Marlena who has no idea, really, how to be at a party.
It’s like I am at the party, but not of the party. Just like I’ve always been in the world, not of it. I don’t like how difficult it is to shake my healer life, my healer outsiderness. I am ever the anchorite, heavy curving iron wrapped around my ankle and dragging me down to the bottom of the sea.
Finn finally sees me waving and smiles.
“Hi,” he says when he reaches the edge of the deck. He eyes the beer in my hand and holds up his own. “I didn’t know you drank beer.”
I laugh. “I don’t. Not really. This one is mainly for show.”
“I think that’s probably a good thing. You don’t want to drink too much.”
“Spoken like Helen,” I say.
“Sounds like Helen knows what she’s talking about.”
“Helen told me a party stops being a party when you start puking your guts out.”
“Wise woman,” Finn says.
I want to fling myself on Finn, throw my arms around him. What is my problem? How does this work, this liking-a-boy thing? I have no idea how to behave or control myself when with one. I lean forward on the railing, because I don’t trust my limbs, and look onto the beach. Finn does the same. The moonlight shines off the ocean. We glance at each other briefly. I want to touch his cheek. His neck.
I hold up my beer instead. “Cheers?” I say, then add, “I’ve always wanted to make a toast.”
“Then you shall.” Finn tips the neck of his beer bottle until it makes a glassy thunk against mine. He grins. “I thoroughly enjoyed getting your messages tonight.”
“Well, yours were confusing.”
Finn laughs. “You’ll get the hang of it. Besides”—he pulls his phone out of his pocket to show me, then puts it back—“these things are overrated.”
I study him. “I guess, now that I think of it, I never really see you on yours.”
“I try my best to pay attention to the people I’m with. I try not to look at it too much, in general.”
“But what if I text you later? Will you look at my message?”
He leans a little closer to me. “If I know it’s from you, then definitely.”
My heart does a little spin at this, at his nearness and his words.
“If it isn’t the famous Finn,” Helen calls out from behind us. She is making her way through the crowd on the deck. I’m grateful for the interruption, because without it I may soon act on my inappropriate impulses. Helen is barefoot again. She doesn’t hold out her hand to Finn and instead reaches around him for a hug. How does she do that so easily?
“I feel like I already know you,” she says to him.
“Nice to meet you, Helen.”