The nod finally comes for me to start.
“Thank you, Fatima,” I say on my way to the door.
“It’s okay if it matters, Marlena,” Fatima whispers from behind me, just loud enough that I hear. “It’s okay to care whether you are lovely.”
For a second I stop, wanting to give her words a chance to physically enter my body and take hold, but my mother is gesturing for me to hurry and now I am on the stage, and Fatima’s comments slide off me. My eyes immediately go to the soccer girls, curious if maybe one of them is here for a healing, but they seem bored, three of them staring down at their phones, two with their eyes closed, maybe asleep.
“Marlena!” and “Over here!” begin the usual chorus.
I head toward the special guests my mother has gathered. They seem to mostly be babies held by one of their parents. As I lay my hands on each one, I think about the doctors who delivered them, trying to imagine myself as a kind of doctor. All that is missing is my white coat, a pen in my breast pocket, and the stethoscope. The church is full of that delicious scent of summery ocean, and once again I am that figurehead on a ship, carrying the people across a storm toward calmer seas. My arms are spread wide, angled backward, protective toward this precious cargo I must ferry to safety. Rich shades of wood-smelling brown and fresh clean green wash through me to replace the fiery, rancid pain of suffering and sickness under each of my hands.
You’d think I wouldn’t be able to heal on demand, but I can.
As long as the person who needs me is willing and open.
As long as I remain open.
I have tried describing what it’s like, but I’m always falling short. Miracles are fleeting, fickle things, and the words we use to try and depict them, or the drawings, the poetry, are just as fickle. For the mystics I’m always reading it’s the same. They strain and grasp at the miraculous but it never turns out quite right. Like, in their attempts to tell the world what they know and have seen, to reveal it in all its glory, they’ve instead offered a puzzle with key pieces missing. A treasure map without the X.
Healing usually starts in my body.
The tingling in a fingertip or the very end of a toe. A static that runs across my left thigh or my right kneecap. Sometimes it’s the back of my neck or the base of my spine. Usually the place it begins corresponds to the person in need of healing. If it’s a leg that is withered, I will feel something in my own leg. If the problem is in a person’s speech, my lips will grow numb. It’s the same thing with the eyes or the ears. At the beginning of a healing, I may grow blind or deaf, or the reverse might occur. My senses will be heightened, like I can suddenly hear every single thing in the room, the softest whispers, even the unspoken thoughts in people’s heads. Or my sight gets sharper, so sharp I nearly want to close my eyes against seeing so much at once.
Then comes the color, followed by the scenes, usually of the future, of what will be or should be for the person, if the healing involves part of the body, or if the healing involves grief, the possibility of happiness again. I can’t decide which is the best part. Sometimes I think it’s the colors but sometimes it’s the scenes. When I am seeing into the person I am healing, it’s like a window into their soul, like I’ve somehow found the door to the core of who they are, and there I am, Marlena, just a girl wandering around in the deepest parts of their being. The intimacy of it, the access, the burst of hope and wonder, is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever felt. It is why the experiences of mystics like Hildegard and Julian are described as ecstatic. It is ecstasy to know a moment of pure unity. To have that with another person for even a single second. I’ve often wondered if love is something like this.
When this moment of intimacy, of ecstasy, falls away, the person is healed.
The way I’ve described it makes it sound like a process with steps, first this, then this, and then this and this. One, two, three, four, five. In a way it is like this, but also in a way, everything happens at once.
There is one part, though, that usually comes last.
The healing, or whatever you want to call it, eventually spreads into me, to my body, and for a while, I take on whatever it is that left the person I’ve healed. That’s the part that hurts. It’s like the postmiracle hangover I get, because God or whatever divine being exists is exacting payment for drawing on his (or her?) power for a few precious moments on earth. I am the conduit drawing down the divine to the people around me, and that conduit eventually sparks and flares and burns out from too much energy flowing through it. It’s like God is laughing, or angry, at the audacity of it, great belly laughs, speaking between them and saying things like You thought I wouldn’t notice what you were doing, Marlena? Well, you thought wrong and now you will pay. The pain in my own body, my own heart, my own mind and soul is the punishment for having the audacity to make miracles happen with my human hands.
Sometimes, in the darkest moments, I wonder if there is a larger punishment out there waiting for me, something far worse and more horrible than these hangovers. One I can’t yet conceive of because it is still being cooked up to account for a lifetime of miracles, of hubris, of taking from where I shouldn’t. Sometimes I wonder if that punishment is close, but then I wake up to heal another day. And then I am left to wonder, how many more healing days do I have left?
“Faker!”
I open my eyes. It feels like I’ve woken from a trance. My vision is blurred.
The soccer girls’ heads shoot up from their phones.
“Faker! She’s a faker!”
The words grow clearer, louder, marching toward me from a distance. I turn toward the voice.
“Marlena the Saint is no saint. She’s a liar!”
Murmurs and gasps swirl through the church like pollution in the sea. My vision clears. I see the person who is shouting. Mrs. Jacobs. It’s Mrs. Jacobs.
“I’ve brought proof,” she yells.
Nine, no, maybe ten people stand up. I don’t recognize any of them, not outright, though a few seem vaguely familiar. I head in their direction, and I see José and Mama doing the same from their corners of the room, but the crowd is thick and they are struggling to move forward. I make sure to get there first.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Jacobs,” I say quietly, looking into her face, trying to read her expression. There is triumph in her eyes.
My greeting seems to unsettle her, and her expression falters, her face growing blank before returning to its fiery red righteousness.
“Marlena,” she says, this time without yelling.
“Yes.”
“I’ve brought some people you supposedly cured.”
My heart clenches, but I remain steady, the weight of my gown on either side of me like scaffolding. “Supposedly?”
“Yes, supposedly, because you didn’t cure them. They suffer just as much as before. And one of them has since died. Your gift is one big lie.”
I look into the faces of the people around her, tempted to touch the hands of each one to try and read their souls, their pain, their sicknesses. I search their eyes and the space between them as though the ghost of the person Mrs. Jacobs said has died might be hovering there.