I’ve started to wonder, too, whether the life of a healer really does mean I have to cloister myself like Julian of Norwich. Does it really require me to be homeschooled and removed from other people my age? Do I need to live apart from the rest of the world, with only my mother for company? Isn’t there another way to do this? To be who I am?
My mother goes back to buttoning.
“But you do want me to fall in love one day, don’t you?” I ask.
We stare at each other in the mirror.
My mother lifts the traditional Portuguese veil that she will pin in my hair from the top of the dresser, the kind of veil you might see placed over the head of a statue of a saint or on the women who march in the parades of São Miguel. I don’t always wear it, but I guess today my mother wants to make a point by ensuring I do. It is a delicate thing, nearly weightless, hand sewn by my grandmother. It does not go over my face but stands up a bit from the top of my head because of the white pearl comb to which it is attached, fixed just so that it cascades down my hair. A treasured heirloom made for me before I was born, as though my grandmother knew that her daughter would give birth to a girl whose hands would make miracles. Or maybe she simply thought that someday I would wear it at my First Communion, or even my wedding.
My mother disappears behind me in the reflection as she fixes the veil. “Marlena, stop being selfish. You can’t have everything. Look around you.” She pauses, I suppose to allow me to take a moment and focus on the beauty of the room, with its stunning ocean views and accompanying ocean sounds, its tasteful, understated decor. “Your gift has given you more than most people dream of having.”
It has given you more, I think, but manage not to say.
My very first healing, I healed my mother. At least, this is what I’ve been told.
It was right after the accident that killed my father and my mother’s parents. Her entire family and everyone my mother loved gone in an instant. She was pregnant with me, and the trauma of the accident forced her into labor. The doctors delivered me, tried to save my mother, but couldn’t. They waited for her breathing to fade, and a kind nurse set me onto my mother’s chest so she could feel her baby once before death. As the story goes, I placed my hands flat against my mother’s skin. Within seconds her breaths quickened, her lids slid open, her limbs stirred, and her hands found my little body. The nurse called the doctors.
My mother was completely well within hours. No one could explain what had happened, though the nurse was convinced that whatever it was, it had to do with me. My mother took me home to the now empty cottage she’d shared with her parents and my father, the little house my grandfather built and where I would spend my first years of life. It was a while before my mother understood, before she really believed it was me who’d fetched her from the brink of death. She’d always been a person of faith, but it took several more healings—a few kind neighbors who’d come to check on my mother after the accident, who held me, and who’d been sick or hurt at the time—before my mother began to wonder if she’d given birth to a saint. If her baby might be a miracle worker. She began to offer my gift to others with more confidence, and that gift began to offer my mother a new sense of purpose after so much tragic death.
For so many of my healings, I was too young to comprehend what I was doing, what was being done to me, taken from me. My mother has photo albums from that time. There are pictures of people—an old man, a young mother, a boy my age—laying their hands on my downy baby’s head, eyes closed, willing whatever divine power might reside in my little brain and body to pass into their own. Sometimes my tiny fist curls around one of their fingers. Sometimes I am crying, wailing loudly, mouth wide, gums bared. My mother is always standing nearby, or she is holding me out to the miracle seekers like she might be giving me away.
“Your gift saved me,” my mother always says. Though as I get older she says it less and less.
I am grateful that my gift could give my mother’s broken heart relief.
But do I ever get to stop saving her?
It is after my audience.
Colorful bits of paper clutter my room. They cover every surface in a fractured mosaic of greens and blues, some pale, some bright, some saturated with yellow, like sunlight beaming over the sea. I step right, my bare toes kicking scraps of aqua and navy confetti into the air, making a soft shush as they slide across the floor. I am chasing after a picture that I hold in my mind, a vision from one of my healings. It is like trying to catch a fish with bare hands as it swims through dark water. My fingers are coated in sticky shellac as I work, piecing the image together. I tear the pieces of paper smaller and smaller, until they are just right.
I call the healing down from the sky, pull it up from the floor of the ocean. My hands are frantic trying to capture it before it can dart away, like a shy crab burrowing deep into the sand and disappearing from human eyes forever. I can’t let that happen. My whole being yearns to express it, to bring it into existence. The sun descends bit by bit, then disappears from the window as it slides toward the horizon. My mother was right earlier today. I was being selfish. I already have everything I need. My gift alone has given me more than most people dream about.
By the time I am done with this collage of my vision, my face is soaked with tears.
I have never been happier.
My mother pokes her head into my room that evening.
I’ve fallen asleep on the bare wooden planks of the floor. I open my eyes when I hear her. “Mama?”
“Oh Marlena!” She is looking down at my newest artwork in the dusky shadows. “My miracle girl. This one is more beautiful even than the last.”
“That was from the man with the thick white hair,” I whisper, my throat thick with sleep. “The man with the rare blood disorder. He had a yellow shirt?”
My mother nods. “I remember.” She walks over to me. “Why collage this time, and not paint?”
“I don’t know. It just seemed right.”
A silence grows between us as the two of us take in the collage that lies between my narrow bed and the chair by the windows where I like to read. Layers of greens and blues radiate outward, big intersecting circles. It is what I first saw when I touched the man’s hands. My mother seems moved by it, and I am moved by this. “I’m so sorry, Mama, about before,” I tell her. “I don’t know why I was asking all those questions. I love you so much. You were right about everything. About me.”
“I know, querida,” she says, her voice smooth and forgiving. “I know you love me.” I know I was right, am right, we both hear her say without her actually saying it. But when she turns to me I don’t see love in her eyes. There is a hardness. A shrewdness.
I look away.
FIVE
I shimmy out of the slinky blue dress and trade it for the skinny jeans and a tank top. At the bottom of the garment bag are several pairs of shoes, including strappy, high heeled sandals covered in metal studs. I buckle them on and stare at myself again.