I nod. “I . . . I . . . realized that . . .” My eyes flicker upward, as though God is sitting there in heaven, looking down, arms crossed and judging. “I realized that everyone was right and that it was terribly selfish of me to have done what I’ve been doing. Healing is my true calling. People depend on me, people like you, and I have failed you. I’m sorry. I really am. I regret everything that’s happened. The letter says this more eloquently. I hope.” Tears fill my eyes, but they aren’t tears of apology or repentance. Everything I am saying to Gertie is one big lie. The only reason I’m here is because I don’t know how else to get my gift back. In truth, I regret nothing. Those were the best weeks of my life. My only regret is how they ended, that somehow I may have squandered Finn’s future.
“Now that my audiences are resuming,” I go on, with a catch in my voice that I try to swallow away, “the tourists will return and your shop can go back to normal.”
“Marlena.” Gertie sounds hesitant. Or maybe worried. It takes me back to that day when she didn’t recognize me and was concerned about my well-being.
Is she concerned about it now? Even though she knows it’s me this time?
“What?”
“This shop isn’t going ‘back to normal,’ as you put it. I’ve decided to stop selling souvenirs related to you.”
“But I need you to keep selling things! You have to.”
She studies me. “That doesn’t make any sense. The other day you . . . you were enraged, Marlena, that we’ve been taking advantage of you for years.” Her eyes lower to the counter. A sign is taped there that reads “Cash Only.” “You were right.”
Stars flare across my vision, and a rushing sound fills my ears. I grab the edge of the counter. “No,” I whisper. “No, I wasn’t. Please. Gertie, please.”
“Please what?”
“Please make things go back to the way they were.”
She tilts her head. “They can’t, Marlena. I decided I would do my best to sell the rest of what’s left in the shop until the day of the anniversary audience, and then I’d be making changes about what I sell. It’s about time.” She leans forward. “This town can’t survive on you forever. You made that clear, and it was good you did. We needed to hear it.”
As Gertie is speaking, it’s like she has one of those plastic beach shovels and is scooping my heart from my body and tossing it aside until there is nothing left of it.
She eyes my bag and the stack of envelopes sticking out of it. “If your plan is to go to the other store owners, I wouldn’t bother.”
“Why?” I croak.
“It’s up to you if you want to apologize, but if it’s your hope that we go back to the way things were, you’re too late.”
I try to swallow but I feel like I’m choking.
“We had a town meeting. We decided that it’s time for us to get out of the Marlena business.”
I don’t even remember taking the stack of letters out of my bag but I must do this, I must leave them with Gertie, drop them on the counter of her store, because when I get home later on they are gone.
For a long time, I sit, staring out the window.
Staring into space. Thinking.
This is all my fault.
I brought this on myself.
I brought this on Finn.
But then I am up, crossing the room like some robot, grabbing more of the mail I haven’t yet responded to, and getting down to work again.
Maybe things can’t go back exactly as they were, but maybe if they go back enough . . .
I bargain and bargain some more as I plead with my pen and paper. I bargain with myself, with these people I am writing to, with the world, the universe, the galaxy, and all the stars and planets within it. Most of all I bargain with God, this being, this divinity, whatever God is, that has chosen to reveal himself only when he wants to punish me.
I bargain about my gift.
I bargain about my future, the possibility that I will never get married and have children and my own family.
I bargain about sex and my body and all those things I was supposed to guard as though my entire gift depends on them.
In my bargaining I promise God to give everything up that has ever meant anything, I promise that I will never allow myself to be touched again, that I will be a good healer-saint for all the rest of my seconds on this earth, that I will live like those women mystics of the past, cloistered and obedient and utterly devoted to the service of God, a good anchorite even if I drown in the process. I promise God that if he will just spare Finn I will never ask for anything else again. I promise God everything, all that I am and ever will be, in exchange for Finn. I promise God my own life, because what is the point of a life if Finn is not there to live it with me?
Are you listening, God?
Are you?
Is this enough?
Send me a sign, God!
Send me a fucking sign!
My breath catches after this last thought echoes through my room and I realize I’ve actually said it out loud.
“I’m sorry, God,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean that last part.”
Yes I did.
I press my pen harder to the paper, blood trickling down my fingers and onto the clean white sheet. I wonder if the recipient will realize what those dark splotches are. I think about all the relics of saints I’ve read about, the tiny swatches of fabric claimed to hold the sacred drops of blood of one famous apostle or another, how worshippers have encased them in glass and exquisitely wrought jeweled containers in order to showcase them. I wonder how much a letter with my blood on it might fetch in one of the souvenir shops downtown. If anyone would try and sell it.
They certainly would have before.
My eyes sting as I write.
My fingers sting even more.
THIRTY-SIX
The anniversary of the Day of Many Miracles arrives. I’ve spent all my time preparing. Every letter has been answered. Main Street has gone back to something like normal, even if it’s only temporary. I have settled into the familiar routine of the life I used to know. Once again, my mother sticks to me like sand after a swim. She goes everywhere with me, does everything with me, setting things right, helping me make up for my crimes.
“Marlena,” my mother says. “Turn to the left. And suck in your stomach.”
I do as she asks as she buttons me into a wedding gown. It is fit for a ball, with a skirt that bells out wide and metal boning throughout.
“Suck in your stomach more. And your chest.”
I close my eyes as she tugs and tightens, careful not to brush my skin.
“You ate too much candy.”
The top of the dress is like a cage around my torso, imprisoning my ribs and my lungs, all the way up my neck to my chin. It is elaborate and conservative. I think of Catherine of Siena, who starved her body, and other women like her who purposely made their bodies uncomfortable, who harmed themselves, as penance for having bodies at all. Denial of the body and its physical needs is classic among these women. I try and imagine that my imprisonment in this dress, my inability to expand my lungs fully, is the same thing.
“There.” My mother finally sounds satisfied.
I open my eyes. There I am in the mirror. The dress, I admit, is beautiful, with its hand-sewn lace. But I swore to myself that I wouldn’t wear another wedding gown again. Not unless I decided marriage was for me and I was going to my own wedding. And maybe not even then.