So why do I continue to feel nothing?
“Marlena?”
I lift my head. Alma is watching me, eyes curious. Like Finn. I draw in a breath. “Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
Alma’s concern reaches around my heart. Suddenly my arms are around her boxy brace and I am hugging her. “I don’t know,” I find myself saying. I pull back. “Not really.”
“You seem sad.”
“I am sad.”
“Why?”
Alma’s statements, her questions, are straightforward. Spoken so simply and honestly. I can’t help but answer. “Someone I love is sick. His name is Finn.”
“I’m sorry. I know that it’s hard to love someone who is sick.”
I study Alma. We are nearly the same age. I am grateful she didn’t ask me why I don’t heal Finn and make things better. “It is the hardest thing I’ve ever known.”
Alma sighs the sigh of someone far older than her years. “It’s so hard on my mother.”
“Did I . . . did I help?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really feel any different.” Alma adjusts her blanket. The hospital air is thick with a stifling heat. “Do you think you helped?”
I shrug. “I’m not a doctor, Alma. I don’t know the answer. I wish I did.”
“You don’t know how your gift works?”
This is the question, right? How does it work? How did it, if it’s gone?
“I used to think I understood it, but lately, I don’t know anymore. Maybe it’s real. But maybe it never was.”
“Maybe it all depends on the person you’re healing,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it takes two people to make a miracle. You might be the one to initiate it, but maybe the other person has to meet you halfway and finish it. Maybe you didn’t heal me because I don’t need you to.”
This theory swirls in the heavy air. I try to take it in. “But why wouldn’t you want to be healed, Alma?”
Alma takes a labored breath. “Because I’m tired of people trying to fix me. I’ve accepted my death and I’m ready for it.”
It is true—even with all the tubes and the beeping machines, Alma radiates a sense of peace. “But your mother . . .”
Now her eyes become sad. “I wish she could accept this reality, and accept my life, and its end, for what it is. I don’t mean to hurt her. And I know she doesn’t mean to hurt me. Love is complicated that way.”
“It is,” I tell her. “Alma, thank you.”
This makes her laugh. “For what?”
“For your wisdom.”
“You’re funny,” she says. “I’m glad you came to see me.”
I stand up, memorizing everything I can about Alma’s face, her open expression, the swoop of her hair and the shape of her body beneath the brace and the blanket. “I’m glad I did, too. Twice now, you’ve been there for me when I needed understanding.”
Alma’s smile is weak. “It’s nice to know that you are real.”
“It’s nice to know you are, too.” My last words come out hoarse. I turn to go. The reality that Alma will not be there for us to meet again goes unspoken between us.
José drops me off at the seawall instead of taking me home. I want to walk. I stare out at the ocean, the beach, at the way the dark gray clouds collide with the horizon. No one is around except for a few surfers, straddling their boards, bobbing up and down over the swells.
It’s been nearly three months since I said good-bye to Finn.
Months.
Finn only has months left to live.
Months. Not years. Months, months, months.
Three have passed.
What are you doing, Marlena?
This voice, the voice of doubt, is suddenly contradicting all that I’ve done, the constant bargaining with the God who never stops punishing. The God I don’t even like.
The God I don’t even believe in.
Why should I?
Why would I give such a terrible God so much power?
Why would anyone?
All this time, I have been drowning in darkness, waiting for God to turn the lights on again, to return my gift and make me whole again. Turning to some divine asshole for forgiveness I don’t even want, because maybe I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Maybe it’s God that’s wrong. Maybe that’s been the problem this whole time.
My whole, sheltered life.
I wonder if Hildegard, or Julian, or any of them ever felt any relief that in those dark nights of the soul they were finally free of God’s grasp, of the responsibility their visions brought to their lives. If they did, they kept it to themselves.
Snow starts to fall. Flakes of it cling to my eyelashes and melt against my cheeks. I walk through it, veer right. At first I don’t realize where I’m going, my feet taking over.
But I walk and walk for miles until I am tired and sore, and then I am there and I know.
I stop in front of the house. Study it in a way I couldn’t when I was a child.
The snow is falling heavier now.
Why haven’t I returned here before? Why hasn’t my mother taken me?
The little cottage has white siding, some of it eaten away with age. Forest-green metal shades arc outward from the windows. A big wooden swing hangs on the porch, tilted and in need of repair. The gray shingles on the roof are blackened with age and neglect. The grass has been regularly cut, but the bushes along the front are so wide and tall they nearly cover the windows. There is nothing remarkable to distinguish this place from the other houses around it, save the disrepair. And the fact that my grandfather built it with his own hands when my family came here from the Azores, when my mother was still just a girl, her whole life ahead of her, unknown and still unfolding.
My feet take me forward again, this time up to the windows. I wedge myself between the overgrown bushes and wipe a hand across the glass. It comes away smeared with dirt. I peer inside.
Everything is there, just as I remember it. My grandmother’s figurines. The shelves my grandfather built. The chairs and the furniture he shaped and sanded and pieced together in an effort to make this modest cottage a home for their new life in America. It’s just that the carpet is caked with mildew and the figurines are covered in a thick coat of dust. From here I can see into the kitchen in the back. The plates stacked on the shelves above the sink. Pots and pans hanging from the ceiling.
How would life have been different if I’d grown up here? If my grandparents had never died? If my father hadn’t either? If my mother had never had to mourn them? Would I have grown up a healer, or something else entirely? Would I be happier if I had?
THIRTY-NINE
“You have to be totally still, Marlena,” Angie warns. “No touching the insides.”
My heart is hammering. “But—”
“Do not move a muscle. I mean it.”
“Okay.” The ceiling of Angie’s center is far above, the light around us a strange, bright gray from the snow and the pale white sky. She’s wearing a thick cable-knit sweater and jeans, her hair in a messy knot.
I am in a wedding dress.
“Are you ready?” Angie asks.
“Yes,” I tell her.
Soon the machine is on and whirring and Angie is blocked from view as the platform where I lie moves. For the second time I enter the hulking, curved chamber, this human-made cave. I am as unmoving as I can be while still breathing, and while I listen to all the loud banging and knocking and whirring of the machine. The seconds tick by, tick toward the hour of my Saturday audience. I am supposed to be there right now. José and I didn’t talk in the car, he didn’t ask why we were headed to Angie’s center instead of the church where my mother is waiting for me to appear right now. But when I got out of the car in front of Angie’s big glass box of a building for the first time in ages, doing my best not to step on the lavish white gown billowing around my legs, he spoke to me.