I really do look normal. Like maybe I could go out and be just Marlena, average teenager, with regular dreams of having a boyfriend and enjoying the beach at the end of a hot summer. Maybe even going for ice cream down on the pier, or a milkshake at Nana’s, or for a burger at the diner that is always packed when I walk by but where I’ve never eaten. I wonder what would happen if I quit being Marlena the Healer.
Can a miracle worker just quit her job? Can a living saint hand in her resignation?
On my way downstairs I hold the shoes in my hand. They would make such a racket against the wood and I have learned to move silently. This is the best way to avoid calling the attention of my mother. I round the corner into the big open space of the first floor and hear a sharp intake of breath.
Fatima, our maid, jumps up from the couch. “Marlena! I thought no one was home!” Her oval face and dark eyes are startled, her black hair hanging long and loose, when usually it is up in a tight bun.
I am frozen, contraband shoes in hand and contraband outfit on my body. There is no hiding any of it. “So did I.”
We stare at each other in silence, two criminal offenders taking each other in. I am dressed in forbidden clothing but Fatima was lounging in the living room on the furniture, her shoes off. Fatima’s eyes keep darting to my shoulders, which are bared in the tank top. My shoulders are never bared.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” I offer.
At first Fatima’s face is blank. Then she erupts into loud laughter.
I bite my lip. I’ve never seen Fatima laugh like this. But then I find myself giggling along with her.
She tries to catch her breath. “It’s a deal, Marlena. It’s a deal.”
I smile. Fatima smiles back.
Normally, we barely interact, only speak to each other when necessary. Those are the rules of the house, of my life, and everyone around me knows this. The Healer is meant to be left alone, to not be touched or approached unnecessarily. This is explained in the programs given out at my audiences so the seekers know what to do and what not to. I am the one who decides to go to them, to touch them, and not the other way around.
I am learning that I like breaking rules, and breaking them with someone else, like Fatima. Marlena the Rule Breaker. That sounds so much different than Marlena the Healer, Marlena the Virgin Miracle Worker. Marlena the Living Saint.
“What were you doing?” I ask Fatima, since we are already engaged in behavior that isn’t normal for us. “Were you taking in the view?” Before Fatima shot up off the couch she’d been staring toward the great picture windows, the ocean bobbing with whitecaps behind it, the sky hazy with humidity.
Fatima is Portuguese like we are. She and my mother could be sisters, with their matching dark features and rich olive skin. She is a talented cook, and sometimes I think she is even better than my mother at baking the sweet breads and little custard-filled pastéis de Belém that we eat on feast days.
“No, actually, not the view,” Fatima says, but doesn’t elaborate.
“Then what?”
Her face wears an expression I can’t read and the laughter is gone. She nods in the direction of the wall between the two big windows that look onto the sea. On that wall is a painting. One of mine.
“Oh,” I say.
She glances at me. Then, maybe because the two of us are already in uncharted territory, she explains. “I was thinking about what that image says about you.” She turns her attention back to it and the room grows quiet as we stand there, taking it in.
The painting is a self-portrait.
I made it when I was twelve. It is of a great ship, nearly an ark. On it are the little houses and shops that make up our town. People crowd its decks, some peering worriedly over the stern. Behind the ship is a violent storm, but the boat is pointed away from heavy gray clouds, driving rain, fierce waves. It will head fast and sure into the bright sun and the warm blue sea. In the painting, I am the figurehead attached to the prow of the ship. My hair flows long and wavy around the wooden upper decks, my foot wound by the thick metal chain attached to the iron anchor that reaches below to the bottom of the ocean.
I’ve long thought that being a healer is akin to protecting a ship’s occupants from storm and sea, from pirates and invaders, for being responsible for everyone’s safety, for guiding its people into calmer waters and better days, my job to anchor everything and everyone to this earthen floor like Julian of Norwich anchored her church to God. One day, I turned this vision of myself into a painting. Maybe it sounds arrogant. But it’s who I’ve always been.
The painting has been hanging on the living room wall only since the beginning of summer. My mother put it there to make a statement. To remind me of who I am. Or who she wants me to remain.
“What does it say about me, Fatima?”
She turns to me. “That you feel responsible for the well-being of the world. That you are an otherworldly being, with otherworldly powers.”
My cheeks prickle with heat hearing Fatima say this. Shame creeps up the bare skin of my arms. The painting doesn’t just make me sound arrogant, it makes me the embodiment of it.
“But,” Fatima goes on, “the girl I see before me is something different.” She sounds pleased.
Some of the shame recedes. “What is she then?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Me neither,” I say quickly.
Fatima’s smile is slow to appear but it gets wider and wider. “That’s okay, Marlena. You don’t need to know yet. You’re young and you have your whole life ahead of you.”
“Do I? What kind of life?”
My colliding questions make Fatima laugh. “You’ll just have to wait and see.” Then she shakes her head. “No, let me rephrase that. You’ll just have to go looking and find out.” She slips her shoes back onto her feet and picks up the duster she left on one of the side tables. “Remember, you didn’t see me and I didn’t see you,” she calls over her shoulder and disappears down the hall.
I stand there, staring after her. Our conversation was so strange, so out of the blue, but somehow it made me happy. Gave me a shot of hope. Of curiosity.
I have to go looking to find out what my life could be, Fatima thinks.
Well, okay. Challenge accepted.
I run back upstairs, grab the house phone along the way, and call José, my driver. I have a driver because I’m not allowed to go anywhere outside of town without a chaperone. Also, there’s the part about how even though I’m eighteen I don’t know how to drive.
“José,” I say, when I hear the familiar sí on the other end of the line. “Can you come pick me up?”
There is a long sigh. “Señorita, your mother will not be happy you’ve gone out.”
“So what if she’s not happy?” I say. Then, “What about my happiness?”
“Marlena, you’re going to get me in trouble. You are going to get into trouble.”
I step into the bathroom and dab on the makeup I’m only supposed to use when I have a healing audience. “Please, Josélito? For me? I have to do something. Today. Now.”
There comes another long sigh. A string of colorful swears in Spanish.
I smile. José cannot resist me for long. Unlike Fatima, José has never tiptoed around me. He’s one of the few people who treat me like a real person. I don’t want to get him in trouble, but at the moment, I’m more concerned with my own needs.
“You are going to get me fired, amorcita.”
“My mother will never fire you,” I tell him. I go into my bedroom and grab one of my gauzy white dresses and shove it into a bag for later. “I wouldn’t let her if she tried.”