I wince. I don’t need to see the self-portrait hanging behind me to remember what it looks like. To know that my mother is there on that ship, too, with the rest of the town, needing me to ferry her to safety. “You know that’s not true,” I say, though I’m not sure which question I’m addressing. Maybe all of them at once.
“God gave you a gift, Marlena—”
“—stop talking to me about God!” I scream, and she jumps. “I don’t want to hear about God anymore!”
“Marlena! God does not—”
My hands go to my ears, pressing against them. “I hate God!” I am shouting over her, trying to drown her out. “I hate God and his stupid gifts! If God wants his gift back he can have it!”
This stops my mother’s words. Her lips part in shock.
My chest is heaving. I close my eyes. This is what my “gift” brings out in me. I do not want to be this person. Why can’t I stop being this person?
“I don’t know you right now,” my mother says.
“No, you don’t,” I say, determined not to lose control again. “Because I am just now getting to know who I am and what I want after eighteen years of my so-called gift defining everything I do. No more. Never again. Never ever.”
My mother and I are eye to eye over the coffee table, locked in a staring contest. “You can pretend you’re normal, but you aren’t. You never will be. You’ll see.”
“I am seeing, Mother. Like I’ve never seen before. Like my eyes have been closed my entire life and they are just now opening.”
A flicker of fear appears on her face. She thought she would win this argument. She thought I would bend and I haven’t. “You must stop seeing that boy.”
“No.”
“You will regret it.”
“I will never.”
My mother’s expression hardens. Her eyes harden. “There are some lines, Marlena, once you cross them there is no going back.”
I stare at her for a long time, my expression just as hard. “Are we talking about sex here, Mother? Is that what this is about? The possibility that I might actually have love in my life? That someone might want me and I might want him back, for something other than a healing? Are you worried God will see and get angry and jealous that I am no longer under his thumb? That God will be disappointed that I am not his modern-day Julian of Norwich after all?”
I say this because I know how to bait my mother, too. But I also say it because deep down I am stung. It is always God, God, God with my mother and what God wants and what God needs and talk of my godforsaken reputation and my godforsaken gift and how it is really all about her. It is never, ever about me. It is never Marlena, what do you need? Or, Marlena, what would make you happy?
Everything about me hurts, like what she says can cause actual, physical pain to my flesh and my bones.
“I’m going back to bed.” I get up from the couch. I take one step, then another, each one getting farther away from her. All I want is to go forward, forward, forward. Onward to everything she’s tried to take away from me again. That she’ll always try to take away.
Sometime during the night, I don’t know exactly when, my mother enters my room again.
“Please don’t take this from me,” she whispers over me as I lie in my bed. Pain slices a deep crevasse through her words.
I hear her because since our fight I haven’t been able to sleep. I guess she hasn’t either.
She hovers there, maybe in the hopes that I am awake and will respond with reassurances, that I will console her with promises that of course things will go back to our version of normal. That our fight made me rethink everything, that I have a duty not only to those in need, but to her. For a split second I think I might do exactly this. My heart hurts to notice the pain in her voice, the loss piled upon loss, layered with despair. To be reminded my mother is not invincible; that she is, in fact, terribly fragile. I feel soft with her sadness, vulnerable to it, absorbing it like liquid. But it isn’t long before the sadness turns back to anger.
It has always been my mother enclosed with me in my healer’s cell, because she’s enclosed us there together, happy to shut out the world and the loss she’s endured with it.
I hear her breaths above me in the dark, short and labored.
I say nothing.
TWENTY-EIGHT
When I wake in the morning, it’s late and I’m covered in sweat.
The sun is high, and I can already tell that the day will be warm. I inhale the air coming through the window. It still smells like summer even though it’s September, a combination of newly cut grass with the crisp cleanness of ocean.
I sit up and the world tilts as I remember my middle-of-the-night visits from my mother. I get out of bed and rummage around in the bathroom cabinets until I find the plastic bag I stashed in the back. Inside it is a jumble of makeup I bought at the drugstore. I take out the bottles of nail polish. There must be ten. I couldn’t decide which color I liked best so I bought all the ones I liked. There is a bright blue that beckons, but instead I settle on a shiny candy-apple red because I know it’s the color that will most bother my mother when she sees it. And I feel like pissing her off. Because I am a terrible, unfeeling daughter. Obviously.
I sit on the toilet seat and put my foot up on the counter.
Soon it looks like someone has taken an ax to my toes.
Armed with some cotton balls and remover, I decide to start over, but this only succeeds in dying the skin around all of my ten toes a dull red. Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing. My mother has always painted my nails for me, but only with clear polish. Never blue or green or pink. Especially not red. Red makes a girl look like a slut. My mother never actually said this, but it was always understood that wearing red nail polish would affect my reputation. It’s all about perception, I’ve learned well.
“You want to appear like you have it together,” my mother always said. “Like nothing can faze you. That is what people expect of you, as a healer.”
I get up from the toilet seat and look down at my feet and laugh. “I look so together,” I say out loud to the bathroom floor. “Like my toes have just bled out.” I hear Fatima rustling around and I poke my head into the hallway. “Help?”
Fatima’s eyes travel to my feet. “What did you do?” She sounds alarmed. She sets the mop in her hand against the wall.
“It’s just nail polish.”
She nods and pushes past me into the bathroom and picks up the bottle of remover. “This stuff is worthless,” she says, then pushes past me again and disappears. When she returns she’s holding a different bottle and tells me to sit back down on the toilet seat. Several more cotton balls and a lot of rubbing my toes later and they are back to their normal color. “This stuff is terrible for your nails but it’s the only thing that works.” She hands me the bottle she used and throws the one I bought in the trash.
The label on the one that actually removes polish says “acetone” in big warning letters, like it might be poison. “Is that yours?”
Fatima shakes her head. “It’s your mother’s.” She whisks it out of my hands and disappears again, presumably to return it before anyone notices.
Leave it to my mother to know the difference between the good-for-you kind of remover that doesn’t work and the bad-for-you kind that does. I wonder what other womanly forms of wisdom my mother knows that she’s never taught me about?