A shiver rolls across my body, the shudder dislodging the tears in my eyes. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because it’s true.”
“You’ve tried everything else, so why not a healer? Is that why you work for Angie? Mr. I-don’t-believe-it-unless-I-can-knock-on-it Finn was hoping that one of Angie’s freak subjects might turn out not to be a fraud? Me, particularly?”
“I told you to stop saying that about yourself.”
I wish there was something I could hit hard enough to break a bone. “Like that matters. Like anything matters right now.” Finn tries to catch my hand but I don’t let him. “Look at me,” I demand. “You didn’t once think that maybe, just maybe, I could be the answer? That I could be the one to fix”—my eyes slide to the edge of his tattoo—“your heart? Not even on the day you came to my audience?”
“Of course it crossed my mind. Of course it did, and it still does. I’m not going to lie and say that I haven’t thought about it. I have. I’ve wondered.”
“Finn, you told me to stop healing. It was your idea that I take this . . . this vacation. You gave me the idea to quit!” My voice is rising and rising. “Why would you tell me to do something that goes against everything you need? How could you do that? How could you do that to yourself? What were you thinking?”
“It wasn’t about me,” he says quietly. “It’s what you needed.”
“No! What I needed—what I need—is for you to live a long and happy life! What I need is to keep on loving you and for you to keep on loving me! How could you do this to me, Finn? How could you allow me to love you in exchange for my not saving you?”
Finn’s lips part but nothing comes out. A single tear rolls down his cheek.
“Is it true what Angie said, that you’re dying? Dying?” There is a hysterical edge to that word the second time I say it.
He is still. But then he nods.
“When? How long?”
“I don’t know. Months at least.”
My knees start to buckle. “Months?”
He nods again.
“Give me your hand,” I demand. It comes out a bark. Finn doesn’t, so I say it again. “Give. Me. Your. Hand.”
He holds it out.
I do something I thought I might never do again. I get down on my knees. I inhale a long, hoarse breath, and I close my eyes tight. I reach up and take Finn’s hand. Press my forehead to the back of it. Feel his skin against me, inhale the dizzying scent of him.
And I wait.
I wait for that familiar tug in my body that signals the start of a vision. My heart and mind and soul together search for that familiar charm, wait for the reassurance of its presence, imagine it popping up to me from the floorboards where it’s lain hidden, hoping for me to call it back. I wait for the colors to start, to flood my being, followed by the scenes and that great surge of energy that passes through me into the person I touch. I wait for the healing process to begin, any part of it. I pray for it. As I hold Finn’s hand, press my cheek into his palm like my entire life depends on it, because his entire life depends on it. I silently call out to God, and as I beg and I plead, I realize something I have never before been able to say for sure.
I do believe in God.
But the God I know is a punishing God, a God using Finn to castigate me for forsaking my gift. My mother was right. She’s been right all along. This is what I get for wanting a life, for trying to have a life and love for even a few weeks. God is a being who is punishing both of us because of my hubris.
I sob into Finn’s hand.
There is nothing in me. No sign of my gift. The well of healing inside me is dry.
Finn’s arms are around me, pulling me up.
A jumble of words spills from my lips. “Maybe if I change my clothes, maybe the tank top, the jeans . . . maybe if I take my hair down . . . maybe . . . maybe . . .” I am face-to-face with Finn. Tears are streaming from his eyes. I jump back from him like his arms are made of red-hot iron. “Don’t touch me. You can’t . . . not like this . . . not anymore . . . I felt nothing, Finn, don’t you understand?” The full realization of the situation dawns like a monster rising, hulking and terrible between us. “There is nothing left in me. So we can’t . . . we have to stop.”
His face drains of color, and then I am gone, turning around and heading back the way I came toward Angie, running down the steps and across the yard as fast as I can. “Take me home,” I choke out when I get inside the car.
When I enter the house my mother is the first person I see. She is waiting, maybe since I left. “I overheard your conversation with that scientist,” she informs me. “I heard every bit of it.”
Before she can say anything else, I tell her the decision I made in the silence of Angie’s car. But I stop short of telling her the bargain I made with the punishing God.
I stare over my mother’s head at the self-portrait hanging on the wall, and I think of the shipwrecked girl I am once again. “Make the announcement. My audiences will resume next Saturday. I will heal again on the anniversary of the Day of Many Miracles.” My words are like a last, desperate prayer to Saint Jude, to Julian, to Hildegard, to all the women mystics who lived before me. I see the satisfaction on my mother’s face. “You have won. Mama,” I force myself to add. My eyes flicker toward heaven. Maybe my return to healing, to my life as it was before, exactly as it was before, will be enough to appease the angry God above me. Above all of us.
PART THREE
The In-Between
THIRTY-FOUR
All night I work.
I climb into the attic and take down the boxes marked “Marlena,” bring them to my room, and return my bedroom to its former appearance. I take everything out of my closet, remove every bit of color. I take the novels I will never have the chance to read, the bright-green thwacking flip-flops I love so much, the platform sandals, the teeny flowered bikini Fatima helped me pick out, the phone with the texts from Finn that keep lighting up its screen nonstop, and heap them onto the chairs and the shelves and the floor of the gift room. The only thing I can’t bear to part with is my Finn painting. That I bring to the attic and shut it away there tight.
I unpack the boxes with my books by mystics, about mystics, about healers like me. I set them on the table by my reading chair just so, line them up on the shelves as they were before. I try to remember their exact order. The Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross, on the bottom, followed by Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich, The Interior Castle, by Teresa of Ávila, Hadewijch’s slim volume of poems, The Book of Margery Kempe, by Margery Kempe. Finally, the thickest among them, The Showings, by Hildegard of Bingen. I return the paintings and collages of my visions to the wall. I put them in the same places they hung for years.
Will being so precise, so exact and so careful, help to restore my gift?
The last thing I do is the thing I loathe most. I unpack those horrible white shifts, the filmy long-sleeved dresses I thought I would never touch again. One by one I unfold them and hang them in my closet until my closet is full. The last one I put on, pulling it over my head and letting it slide down my body.