Her mention of Finn makes my eyes fill. “I keep thinking . . . this whole time I keep thinking . . . if I’d just . . . if I’d just . . .”
“If you’d just what, Marlena? Never come to my office and met him? Never cared for him at all? Never tried to live a little?” She sighs. “There’s no way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt whether your gift is ‘real,’ as you put it, or was. Not scientifically. Not in the way you wish for. I can do all the interviews in the world with every single person who believes to be healed by you, before Finn, after Finn, but that still doesn’t mean you will be able to heal him. And if you can’t, I would never be able to pinpoint why that is.”
“What I can’t do,” I whisper, tears starting to spill down my cheeks, “is accept that he might die. That he will die. I don’t know how.”
Angie takes my hand. “Oh, honey. You have to. This is life, the hardest part of it, but it is life. Your life. His life. You can’t turn away from it.”
I stare at her fingers on mine. I try to breathe. “I need to go find the bathroom. I need . . . I need a minute.”
“I’ll be right here,” Angie says. “Take your time.”
I get up and leave her office, her words swirling through me like the snow outside. I head down the hall and round the corner. Then I come to a halt.
Finn.
There he is. After all this time.
His face pales as he takes me in, dressed in a wedding gown. “Marlena, what are you doing here—” and “—I didn’t expect you to be here today,” the two of us blurt at the same time.
We stand there, looking at each other. I know I can’t accept a world without Finn, and I know that I have to try to heal him again, to keep trying. How can I not? What do I have to lose? What does Finn? I go to him and take his hand, grab it, because he resists.
“Marlena, no.”
I refuse to let it go, pull it to my cheek and press it there. Close my eyes and wait. I pray and I hope and I pray some more. But just like before, I am dry inside. Colorless. When I open my eyes, tears are streaming down my face and down Finn’s as well. “Did anything happen?” I ask him. “Did you feel anything change?” I hear how pathetic I sound. “Because maybe, the people at my audiences . . . they seem to think that . . . that I can still heal. . . .” I think of what Alma said. “Maybe it’s not working because of you. You need to try, too. Maybe I can only heal if you want to be healed. Finn, Finn?”
He is shaking his head.
I can feel him pulling back his hand.
This only makes me hold on harder.
“Please?” My eyes are raised toward the windows of the center, toward the cold gray sky above. “Just one more time. I will do anything. Give anything. Everything.”
“Marlena.” Finn’s tone is decisive. “You have to stop.”
“I can’t,” I sob. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
He peers into my tear-filled eyes. “Yes, you can. I need you to.”
I shake my head. My nose is running. I don’t even care. What does it matter? What does anything matter if I can’t save Finn?
“I’m okay with this,” he says.
I stare up at him, sniffling. Wiping at my cheeks. “You’re okay with what?”
“With . . . my situation.”
“With dying?”
There. The word is out. Between us. Gleaming.
“Yes, with dying,” Finn says quietly.
“But, but how? Why? You can’t be! You’re too young!” I choke out words between sobs. “You’re so smart! You’re supposed to change the world! You’re a genius!”
You’re mine, I think, and sob harder.
He takes my hands and holds them lightly in his. “But this is my life. It’s the only life I have. The doctors can’t do anything else. I have to accept this. So do you.”
“No.” I am shaking my head back and forth. He sounds just like Alma.
“Yes.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Marlena,” he says. His hands tighten around mine. “It has to be.”
“But what if—”
“No more what-ifs, no more begging God to help you save me. No more trading with God, your life for mine. No more promising God you’ll never sleep with me again so that you may be able to heal me. No more regretting our time together because maybe God is punishing you for it. No more.” Emotion thunders across his face. “I do not give a shit what you told God you’d do in order to save me or whatever it is you promised that good-for-nothing deity people are always promising things to. What I care about is what you promise me. Right now, during my last days on this planet.”
I’ve nearly stopped breathing. “What do you want me to promise you?”
“I want you to promise to love me until the very end. Like you did before all this—” He sweeps a hand across my white dress.
“You want me to love you,” I whisper. “That’s all you want?”
Finn nods. “That, to me, is plenty. More than enough.”
“And in loving you, you also want me to give up on you? While you give up on you, too?”
“It’s not giving up,” he says. “It’s a choice to live.”
“No,” I say forcefully. “It’s a choice to die.”
“If you want to look at it that way, that’s your decision. But in my mind, it’s choosing to live every one of the last days I have with the person I love the most in the world. Which is you. What more could I ask for in life?”
More days. More years.
Finn takes my hands again. “Promise me, Marlena,” he says. “Please? I need you to stop trying to heal me. I want you to accept me the way that I am. I want you to accept that the best thing for me to do right now is to enjoy the time I have left.”
“I don’t know if I can.” I close my eyes. The press of Finn’s fingers on my skin causes my heart to skip and stutter.
A vision starts right then. I haven’t had one in so long that I nearly don’t recognize it. It reaches out to me like the hand of an old friend and I take it, eagerly, letting it spread through my body and my heart and my mind like a salve, wondering if maybe this is it, the moment when I am going to heal Finn. But then it’s not like the visions from before all of this started, from my audiences during a healing. This vision is more of a memory.
In it, I see the beach and the wet sand, smell the warm air and the bright-blue sky. I see the gentle, crystal waves of the sea swelling toward me. There I am in my bathing suit, alone, the remnants of a toppled dribble castle on my legs, asking so many questions—what-ifs about God and the world and God versus the world. And then, as I get up and wade into the water, one foot in front of the other, I am making a decision that the world is enough for me, that this one glorious day is enough for me, that the promise of seeing Finn is enough for me. I am deciding I don’t need anything more than that, this. Me. Finn. What is right in front of me, here and now.
I open my eyes and find myself deciding this once again. I want what is right in front of me now, for however long it is mine to have. And that is enough. It has to be. Finn is not just enough, he is more than enough.
Finn blinks back at me, waiting for my answer.
“Finn,” I begin, slowly, carefully, knowing that each word, each syllable matters. “You are right. Every day I have with you is more than I’ve ever hoped for.” He steps forward and curls into my chest, pulls my arms around his body, and we stay there, holding each other. I whisper one more thing, as though it’s a prayer, a holy vow, the most loving of promises, because Finn deserves to hear this truth from my lips. “I promise to never let you go. Not for another second that you have on this earth. For all of those I will be with you, until the very last one.”