She arrived at her parents’ house just shy of six. She’d spent her teen years in this house in the Berkeley foothills, but as an adult, she saw it through different eyes. The house was diminutive and absolutely charming. It resembled a Mexican adobe, with its straight, angled roofline. The stucco was painted a color that fell somewhere between blue and white, and deep blue tiles flanked the front door and the large arched window of the living room.
Joelle parked in the driveway and walked across the small half circle of green grass to the front door, which was, as always, unlocked.
“Hello!” she called as she stepped into the small foyer.
“We’re in here, Shanti,” her mother called from the kitchen.
The kitchen was at the rear of the house, and she walked into the room to find her father in an apron, skewering vegetables for kebabs, and her mother in jeans and a T-shirt, stirring a pitcher of lemonade. Both her parents were slender, sharp-featured and gray-haired, and as usual, they looked so happy with their lot in life that she couldn’t help but smile at seeing them.
“Hey, baby.” Her father set down the skewer he was working on, wiped his hand on the dish towel hanging from the refrigerator door, and pulled Joelle into one of his familiar bear hugs.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said, her head resting against his shoulder.
“Thanks for coming, honey,” he said, emotion in his voice. He was not a typical male, never one to hide his feelings, and she adored him for that.
“Shanti, I want to show you something.” Her mother grabbed her hand as soon as Joelle had let go of her father. “You’ve got to see what I made.”
She led Joelle out the back door and down the steps to the small yard.
“Look,” she said, pointing. “Up there.”
Joelle raised her eyes to see a birdhouse atop a pole in the center of the yard. She walked toward it for a closer look. The little house was an exact replica of her parents’, and she laughed.
“How did you do that?” she asked. “It’s adorable.”
“Oh, a little bit of paint and plaster and ingenuity. I’m hoping it will attract some songbirds.” Her mother stood next to her, her arm around Joelle’s shoulders, and Joelle suddenly felt her eyes begin to tear. Would she ever be able to give her child the unconditional love and devotion that her parents had lavished on her? She slipped her arm around her mother’s waist and rested her head on her shoulder with a sigh.
“What’s that about, love?” her mother asked.
“Just…a long week,” she said. “Glad to be up here with you and Dad. That’s all.”
“That’s plenty,” her mother said, giving her shoulders a squeeze.
She stayed in the yard for a while, surreptitiously wiping the tears from her eyes as her mother led her around the garden, telling her what vegetables and flowers she was planting this year. For the first time, Joelle thought it would be nice to have a small yard of her own, someplace where she could watch things come to life. She had never cared about that before, but suddenly she felt a need to dig in the earth, to get her hands dirty.
“Come and get it!” her father called from the patio, where he was grilling their dinner.
Vegetable kebabs, Joelle thought with a smile as she and her mother crossed the yard to the patio. What would her parents say if she told them she’d eaten liver this week?
They sat at the rickety, aging picnic table on the patio, talking about Joelle’s old Berkeley friends as they ate, running down the list of who was living where and doing what. Joelle slipped inside her own head as they talked, wishing she could tell them about her pregnancy, even if she was not ready to talk about a possible move to Berkeley. She knew they would not chastise or judge her, and they would support whatever choices she made for herself. They had been an incredible help to her during the divorce from Rusty, even though they had never understood her desire to marry him in the first place. He was too conservative, they’d said, too rigid, and ultimately, they’d been right.
Her parents’ solutions to her problems, though, were often not “of this world.” Her mother would probably load her up with herbs and teas and tell her which acupressure points she should stimulate, perhaps even talk her into having her tarot cards read. Joelle wasn’t ready for all that, and so she wasn’t ready to share her bittersweet secret with them. Instead, she found herself telling them about the patient whose baby had been stillborn.
“I feel terrible for her,” she said after describing the woman’s situation. Again, she felt her eyes burn with tears, and she knew that this time her parents noticed.
“You see things like that every day, honey,” her father said gently as he rested his empty skewer on the side of his plate, and Joelle thought he was eyeing her suspiciously. “You don’t usually get so upset over them.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I don’t know why this time it’s so hard for me. Maybe because they had fertility problems, and I can relate to that.”
“How did this baby die?” her mother asked, pouring more lemonade into her glass.
“They don’t know why it happened,” Joelle said.
“I just wondered if it might have been the cord. You know, like it was with you.”
Joelle shook her head with a smile. Leave it to her mother to imagine a metaphysical connection between this woman’s loss and her own problematic birth. She waited for the next words, wondering which of her parents would say them first. Her father, most likely.
“You should get in touch with the healer,” he said.
Bingo.
“I knew you were going to say that, Dad.” She smiled at him with a mixture of affection and annoyance.
“So why don’t you ever take my advice about contacting her?” he asked.
“You know why.” She didn’t want to get into this with her parents tonight. To her way of thinking, healers were right up there with UFOs and magic tricks. “It’s hardly my role, as a medical social worker, to suggest that anyone engage the services of a healer,” she said. “That’s all.”
Her mother leaned forward, the expression in her blue eyes both serious and sincere. “If you’d been there the day you were born, you wouldn’t be so skeptical,” she said. “Well, you were there,” she added, “but you know what I mean.”
“Mom, I started breathing because I was lucky,” Joelle said. “Or maybe Carlynn Shire was holding me in a position that stimulated my taking in air. I doubt anything magical happened.”
“And what about all those other people she healed?” her father asked.
“You remember Penny, don’t you?” her mother asked, mentioning the name of one of the women who had lived in the commune.
“Penny was gone by the time Joelle was old enough to know her,” her father said.
“Oh, that’s true.” Her mother laughed. “She was only there about a year. Maybe even less. But, anyway, she’d lost her voice, and Carlynn gave it back to her. There were many other times she healed people. And there was that little boy who was written up in Life Magazine.”
Joelle was afraid they might pull out the old issue of Life, which they’d found in a used bookstore and kept preserved in a plastic wrapper. She vaguely remembered them showing her the yellowed article at some time over the years. Long before Joelle’s birth, Carlynn Shire had supposedly healed a sick little boy, who turned out to be the son of someone who worked on the magazine. That someone wrote a glowing article about her, which apparently launched Carlynn Shire’s fame and fortune.
Sliding the vegetables off one of the skewers, she listened to her parents tell their stories about Carlynn Shire, and quite unexpectedly, she saw Liam’s face in her mind. She saw him with Mara in the nursing home, where he would touch his wife with affection, making himself smile at her when he felt anything but happy. It broke Joelle’s heart to see him that way. There had always been so much love in Liam’s eyes when he was with Mara, and that love was still there these days, although Mara couldn’t return it with anything more than puppy squeals. Then there was Sam and his ingenuous acceptance of his mother just the way she was. Soon, he would realize what he was missing. Soon he would be old enough to be embarrassed about it.