The Healer

ONE

People say I am a saint.

They sell T-shirts with my image. They come to me with gifts and offerings. A vase full of flowers. A beautiful dress. A flat-screen TV that sits unwatched because I am not allowed the luxury of television. They mean well, but sometimes I hate them. Sometimes, when some earnest soul comes to wash my feet because this is all the person has to give, I want to lash out. I want to kick them in the jaw with my brown bony foot. I don’t, of course. But I think about it.

“Hello, Marlena,” Gertie says, reverently, from the doorway of her shop.

I am strolling by on the street, parting the seas of people like Moses. No one dares get too close.

Gertie wrings her hands, eyeing me.

I stop before her, and she takes a step back out of respect. I wish she wouldn’t. The breeze carries the briny scent of seaweed baking in the sun, of the clean cold ocean, of fish being pulled in by the boats.

The tail of a kite with my name stitched across it flutters in the open window of Gertie’s store. She has it on sale for $34.99. Gertie hesitates, then offers, “I think maybe these are the last days of summer, yeah?”

I tear my gaze from the kite, from the seven-day candle she has burning on the sill emblazoned with a photograph of me when I was seven. In it, I’m wearing a white shift, much like the one I have on now, which will be much like the one I wear tomorrow. My mother insists these cotton sheaths are simple ways of reminding others of who I am, of my purity, of the great gift bestowed upon me at birth. Lately I’m tempted to lie down in the dirt and roll around like a dog. Then I would arrive home filthy and cackling to my scandalized mother, hair wild, a devil child.

My long sleeves cling to my skin in the humidity. “Do you think so?” I say to Gertie, mostly to be polite, but her comment about the end of summer has my brain churning like a waterspout.

She nods. Stares like I am a ghost, or a wraith come to carry her away to some fearful place. “Sometimes I think this heat wave is never leaving us. But they’re saying that once it does, summer is over.”

I nod. “I’m sure you’re right. See you later, Gertie.”

I hurry down the street, past the other shops selling their framed photographs of the most famous moments of my life, little china babies that are supposedly me, tiny bottles of water I purportedly blessed but didn’t. In the window of the Almeidas’ bakery is a stone statue of me, nearly as tall as I am. It is covered in colorful slips of paper, prayers that the sick have left behind in the hope that petitioning this replica of me is as good as petitioning the real thing. As I walk, the hem of my dress gets taken up by the hot breeze, baring my knees. The tourists stare and whisper. They pull out their phones to snap pictures. I raise an arm, bury my face in the crook of my elbow. They step back when I get close, like Gertie did, as if I might be contagious. I remind myself they are only doing this out of respect.

So much respect, everywhere I turn.

I am sick of this, sick with it, sick from it.

What happens when the Healer gets sick? Who will cure her?

I reach the edge of Main Street and turn down the hill, cross the street toward the beach. A car stops to let me pass, the driver’s eyes widening when he recognizes me. His hands are gripping the steering wheel like it’s the only tether holding him to earth.

I keep on going until I get to the rickety wooden ramp that leads down to the sand, ignoring the stares of nearby families, children playing with pails and shovels, splashing happily in tide pools. I do my best to ignore the other boys and girls my age, the way they look at me, girls in bikinis showing off so much tanned skin, boys touching their arms, even their flat stomachs. I try not to be jealous. I try not to think of the boy named Finn who I wish would touch my stomach and make the skin all over my body flush. I try to not care about how strange I must look in my thin cotton dress, like some child from another time and place, a girl escaped from an asylum.

One by one, I take the slippers from my feet and toss them aside. My legs move me forward with purpose, right to the ocean’s edge. I hesitate there, wondering how long it will be before the rumors reach my mother’s ears, knowing that I don’t have much time, so I shouldn’t waste any. The waves coming into the shore sizzle as they stretch toward my bare toes, and I inhale the pungent scent of seaweed. My hair flies in the wind, its knots and tangles visible in my shadow.

I’ve longed for the heat wave to be over, I’ve wished for it, even prayed for it, but suddenly I take it all back, wanting this stretch of humidity to go on and on, willing away the icy winter cold that will surely come to our New England town within a few months and not leave us until the first warm days of spring.

A little girl stares at me from the place where she sits, building a dribble castle across her legs. “Are you an angel?” she asks.

I watch the way the castle slides down her knees. Then I shake my head.

“No,” I tell her.

I’m tired of being the angel.

This is the thought that pushes me forward again, that compels my feet until I am ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then waist-deep in the waves, white dress and all. When the ocean swirls up around my chest, I dive under.

A too short while later, I pick my way across the sand, everything dripping, dress and hair and skin, shoes in hand. I go the back way toward home to avoid the eyes greedy for gossip, the people hoping for a photo. This is not the image of me they expect or want, my white dress turned nearly transparent by the sea and clinging to the curves of my body, curves my mother wishes she could pray away. I used to try to pray them away, too. It’s far better when a healer has the stick-straight figure of an innocent girl. When the girl starts to look like a young woman, some people fear she is a witch. I pull the soaking dress away from my skin, but it only puckers back against me. I look around but thankfully I see no one else to disappoint.

The town, the tourists, they all want the angel Marlena.

The Healer Marlena, virginal and pure and divine.

And I have behaved badly today.

The guilt cuts across me in the wind and I hang my head, wrap my arms around my middle. The town’s survival depends on my existence, my continued ability to heal the old lady who cannot walk, the young boy who seems trapped inside his mind. The broken heart of a man who has lost his wife and the deadened eyes of the woman who cannot see. The sick and the grief-stricken come to me and I lay my hands on them, my precious, God-touched, miracle-making hands. The contact between my skin and theirs, my flesh and theirs, somehow sets them free. People come from all over to be at one of my audiences. They fly, they drive, they hitchhike. Some even walk, the most devout making the last mile on their knees, arriving scraped and bloodied, pebbles embedded in their skin. Just for a glimpse. Just to be near me.

Hundreds of years ago, men and women claimed visions, special gifts that allowed them to heal, to have intimate knowledge of the divine, of God, to live suspended in ecstasy. They were called mystics. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about them. Most wrote about their experiences in poetry, in prose, reaching for anything and everything to describe what they saw, how they felt, who they were. Hildegard of Bingen is my favorite. She was a real doctor, studying the way that plants and herbs could heal the sick. Her visions led her to write, like everyone else, but also to compose music. And make art. She drew and painted her visions.

I, too, am an artist.

But I am more like Julian of Norwich. She enclosed herself in the walls of a church and lived there in a tiny stone cell. Isolated, in prayer. People would pilgrimage to speak to her through a sliver in the stone, to ask for her intercession, for her help. Being near Julian was like being near God. She was an anchorite, drawing down God from the heavens to the earthen floor and pinning him there. Her life’s purpose was to hold the world steady with her body and soul.

A car turns the corner up ahead and slows as it approaches. It’s Mrs. Jacobs. A knowing smile spreads across her lips. Mrs. Jacobs is one of my doubters. She thinks I am a fake.

I raise my arm. A cascade of water drips from my sleeve as I wave. I can’t stop trying to win over Mrs. Jacobs.

She drives off without waving back.

What will she say to others? What rumors will she spread?

My mother is always reminding me how it only takes one misstep to ruin a girl with a reputation like mine. I must be above reproach, holier-than-thou in being and word. I used to agree, used to be so obedient. Happy to shut myself away from the things of this world like Julian did. Grateful to be chosen.

My shoulders curve forward as I trudge up the hill, sand chafing my calves.

When I was a child, I used to love the stature that comes with my gift, that people brought me shiny toys to thank me, that when I got up on the stage at the United Holiest Church, the audience would hush. I could do no wrong. I could scream. I could writhe and faint. I could cry out with joy and laughter. People expect this from me. Apparently, the power to heal lies in frenzy.

Now that I am older, I am more subdued.

My mother has taken to complaining about this.

“Marlena Imaculada Oliveira,” she’ll say, using my full name so I know we are talking business. “People don’t come to our church to see you standing there, like a child afraid to enter the water.” Then she’ll sigh and look at me with those familiar black eyes, eyes identical to mine. “You could at least raise your arms and call out to God now and then. You used to be so good at this. You used to love this work.”

“Yes, Mama,” I respond. “I know.”

I still do love it. The visions, I will always love. The colors and emotions that flood my body along with them. But lately my gift feels tainted. A weight I carry, an anchor chaining me to the seafloor.

This thought nearly makes me laugh.

I really am an anchor, like Julian.

I, too, draw down miracles from the heavens. But unlike Julian I also draw tourists from all around to spend their money in the shops. Through my gift and the sacrifices that go with it, I anchor the town and everyone in it. That is my job, has always been my life’s purpose. It’s all I’ve ever known.

But I want to know more. I want to know other things.

The heat of the sun bears down on me, the salt from the sea turning the cotton of my dress stiff and rough. The house where I live with my mother appears ahead, perched on a bluff above the sparkling ocean. As I pass the sea grass and the cattails that border our yard, I stretch my arms wide and high and turn my face toward the sky. Soak up the world around me. Let the world lift me up.

I am unmoored.

TWO

It is three years ago. I am fifteen and there is a boy my age in the front row of the church.

He is the first person I see when I step out onto the stage. His eyes are the pale gray color of glass worn smooth by the sea, his long legs bent at sharp angles in the chair that is too small for him. The outline of his shoulders shows through the fabric of his T-shirt. His mouth forms a small smile. A mocking one.

My skin burns hot. It prickles under the heavy dress I’m wearing. I will show him who I am and then we’ll see if he still wears a grin. I am not someone to be ridiculed. My gift is a thing of beauty. Worthy of reverence.

I lift my chin. Take a step forward. Walk until I am parked in front of him on the stage, looking down at his shiny black hair. I want him to see me. To study the girl who is about to perform miracles.

The boy tilts his head upward, watches me with a stare that is unwavering. Like he can see straight through the fabric covering my body. Like he might want to do just this if only I’d let him.

How dare he? I think.

Then, What would it be like, if I let him?

His eyes travel across me, head to toe. I feel them like fingertips on skin. I swallow. The flush rolls over my cheeks. What does he think when he looks at me? Why can’t I stop looking back at him?

But I can and I will and I do.

I turn slightly, move in a different direction, take in the crowd gathered for my Saturday audience. The church is packed. People kneel in the aisles, stand crushed together in the back like fish. All of them are here for me, to see me, to experience the healing power of my hands. My mother stands off to the right side of the room. She catches my eye and nods.

My entire body tingles with static. I am a lightning bolt readying to brighten the world. To strike at the sea. The storm of emotion in the room rises upward, pressing outward, filling every corner and hidden space.

I move through it.

Walking into the audience is like wading into the ocean. Waves roll across the room and over my body, my skin a sponge. Hope, then despair. More hope, fear, dismay, relief, joy. Hope again. Disappointment. Resolve. Bitterness. Sorrow. Love. Pain. Rage. More hope. Five minutes pass, ten, fifteen. I am soaked with emotion. I take it in without falter. Each feeling is a long strand of seaweed, swirling around my limbs, wrapping around my knees and my thighs. Clinging. Covering me.

People get up from their seats and swell toward me, some of them shouting.

“Marlena!”

“¡Aquí, aquí!”

“I need you!”

I lean forward. Raise my arms to them. “I am here!”

A line forms in the center aisle. Each week, there is a waiting list for healings, a list I am supposed to stick to. My mother informs me who is at the top and seats them in a special section. A woman holding a baby moves through the masses to the end of the platform. The staff helps to make room for her. I walk to the edge and crouch down. The wide skirt of my dress billows around me, suspends my body on an exquisite silken raft. I can already feel my gift gathering strength.

The woman lowers her eyes. She is shaking, the tiny baby wrapped in blue shaking with her.

I reach out and touch her cheek. “Please. Don’t be afraid.”

She returns her eyes to me. “Mijo, Miguel, es . . .” She doesn’t finish. Tears roll down her face, wetting my fingers.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I know what to do.”

The mother holds the baby out to me and I take him in my arms. I adjust my position so I am cross-legged underneath my dress. I cradle him, I whisper to him, I press the soft skin of his forehead to my own. I kiss his tiny nose and each one of his fingertips. He squirms and whimpers. His suffering makes my eyes sting with tears. It is a rusty color, a putrid halo edged around his little form.

The crowd hushes, watching, hovering, a curious school of fish.

The wave of my gift is gentle, rippling from my heart like a soft swell on a day when the ocean is glass. It moves easily through the shore of the infant’s sickness. I can see everything inside him, straight to the sandy bottom of his blue-green soul. I close my eyes until his soul is all I know, until I am standing inside it, until all of its secrets are also my secrets. My gift presses right through his suffering, until everything about this baby in my arms is as blue-green and calm as the beautiful glass-ocean.

When I open my eyes and look into his, they are wide and looking back at me, his face no longer scrunched in pain. “You are precious, aren’t you?” I say to him, before handing the tranquil bundle back to his mother. Her tears have dried and she is watching me with an uncertain expression.

“He’s going to be fine,” I tell her, because he is.

I rise up from my crouch, arranging my dress, and await the next petitioner, and the next and then the next. One after the other, they come to me, and the process repeats. I go and go and go until I am near collapse, until I am dry as a riverbed in drought, until my mother announces to everyone that my audience is over. My brain barely registers her words because it has grown murky, shot through with the ink of exhaustion. But a satisfied current of peace buoys me. The posture of my body is proud and sure.

As I ready to leave the room, I know the eyes of the boy in the front row are still on me, that his eyes have been on me for hours because somehow I could feel them underneath everything else. I wish I could see if his mockery has transformed into awe. I wish I could know his name. I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could have the conversation with him that I keep imagining, which goes something like Hello, my name is Marlena, and he responds, Hi, I’m Guillaume, because for some reason I decide he is French, and then says to me, I have so many questions—would you like to go for coffee? I wish I could banish these wishes, because healers are meant to walk among the people but not be of them. My only purpose is to protect my gift. To live for it and only it. To let it be enough for me. Like Julian. Like Hildegard. Like all the mystics and saints.

The backstage door is open and I sweep through it in a streak of expensive white satin, disappearing from the church and all those watchful eyes. His eyes.

I am safe.

THREE

I sneak inside the house, hoping my mother is out, or taking a nap. She likes taking naps on the hot, humid days of this heat wave. Our house is enormous, an old coastal New England beauty, graying and weathered, with views to the ocean on three sides. In every room with the windows open you can hear the waves crashing against the rocks. Even with the windows closed you can hear them if the water is rough enough. I will never tire of hearing the ocean.

I tiptoe into the kitchen, leaving a trail of sand behind me.

It’s quiet.

“Hello?” I call out.

There is no response.

My mother isn’t here. Fatima, our maid, must be out for the afternoon, too.

I let out a long breath.

While the house is all traditional New England on the outside—long wooden clapboards, rustic and worn from the salty sea air and the harsh winter storms—the inside is newly renovated with every comfort a person could want. The kitchen is state-of-the-art, spotless, stainless-steel appliances gleaming alongside white countertops and cabinets, the exact kitchen my mother picked out of a design magazine. The floors in the house are heated. Plush couches and chairs with their perfectly puffed and color-coordinated pillows sit there invitingly in the living room, an arrangement also plucked straight from one of my mother’s magazines. The entire first floor is open, so we can see the ocean out of every window whether we are in the kitchen or lounging reading a book. Gauzy white curtains flutter in the hot breeze. Fresh flowers dot the tables, arrangements delivered weekly from the best florist in town.

My mother spares no expense. She loves to spend our money. My money.

I fill a glass with water and guzzle it down, gasping for breath when it’s empty. Then I fill it again and drink this one slowly. My cheeks still feel warm with the sun.

We used to live in a tiny cottage built by the hands of my grandfather, Manuel Oliveira, the next town over. My mother grew up in that house, cramped by the endless clutter of my grandmother, who filled the space with glass figurines and other knickknacks, displayed on shelves also built by my grandfather. There was a chicken coop in the yard, and they raised pigs and fished.

My grandparents and Mama immigrated from a tiny archipelago of islands called the Azores when she was six, determined to make a new and better life. On a map, the archipelago is midway between the west coast of Portugal and Morocco, but the islands are so far from land they may as well be their own country. My mother was born on São Miguel, the biggest one. It is an ancient place, small and isolated, where people live simply off the food they catch from the sea and the land, their days divided by the sacred rituals of the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of the sea. It is a religious place, where it is as likely as not that the entire population will be gathered in the streets parading a statue of Jesus across the island, holding candles and singing in harmony. A place where a healer like me could easily emerge, where people are as ready and willing to believe in miracles as they believe the sun will rise every morning after the moon disappears from the sky.

When my mother and I lived in her childhood house, she did her best to keep the rooms tidy, the one bedroom, the living room with the kitchen along the back wall, the narrow bathroom at the other end. I slept on a bed next to hers and played on the worn shag carpet near the kitchen, my mother stepping around me as she cooked. Steaming soups stocked with bitter greens and beans, spicy sausages cradled in bright roasted sweet peppers, great domed sweet breads steaming and fresh from the oven. My grandmother’s glass figurines sat there on the shelves, dusty ballerinas twisting and turning, spinning their tulle tutus for an audience of two, perched in between the elaborate portraits of Mary and Jesus that my grandmother hand carried from Portugal. I used to love to play with the great cookie tin of buttons my grandmother left behind when she died, spreading them on the floor in lines and circles, counting them, admiring their colors and shine.

I was happy in that house. It was perfect for my child-sized self, small and cozy. I loved feeding the chickens. I gave them names. Charlotte. Jason. Alvina. Josépha. I would go and hide under the bed when my mother would wring their necks before we would eat them for dinner. She would talk to me about her life with my grandparents while I sat on the floor of the kitchen, surrounded by the buttons of my grandmother, sorting the pink ones from the rest like raisins from a box of cereal. Mama would wash the kale that would go into the soup for lunch, telling stories about the pigs they’d raised, about the toys my grandfather made for her in his carpentry workshop in the basement, about my grandmother’s talent for cooking. Eventually she’d pull the big bitter leaves out of the icy water, soaked and dripping, to dry in a colander that sat on the counter. I would arrange and rearrange the buttons, forming them into a coil like the pearly pink insides of a snail.

This was before I became famous, before the roadside stands hawking candles with my face painted on the glass, the T-shirts and coffee mugs and wooden signs to hang above mantels and altars. Before the news of my gift spread far beyond our town and my mother moved us to a new and bigger house, this giant house where we live now, and she became obsessed with my growing renown and all that it could offer us.

Somewhere during those early years, I’d become my mother’s hope, her own salvation, the perfect child healer, as devout as Julian of Norwich. I let my gift mold everything that I was, let my mother mold everything about me, happy that my gift seemed to ease the pain of her past. That it pulled us up and out of the hardship of poverty and gave my mother riches she thought she would never see. In return, she loved me with all that she was and I was never lonely. But lately, the more I begin to love the world, the more my mother begins to hate me.

I put the empty glass in the sink and head upstairs to my room. It’s on a different floor than my mother’s. She likes her privacy, and the grandiosity of having an entire wing to herself. She used to invite me to sleep in her bed, but the last time she did was years ago.

There is a step that creaks loudly and I avoid it out of habit and keep on going. I grab some underwear from a drawer and head into the bathroom to strip off my dress, the fabric coarse and itchy with sand, and get in the shower. Soon I am washed clean, my hair free of its knots and tangles, of my forbidden swim. I dry off, put on a new white sheath, and wander down the hall to a room at the far end of the house.

The gift room.

It’s where we store the offerings we can’t use or that I’m not supposed to use, until the appointed day each month when Goodwill comes to pick them up. You’d be surprised how quickly this room fills, sometimes the gifts stacked nearly to the ceiling, teetering like a misshapen wedding cake.

There’s one gift in particular that draws me. My mother scoffed at it, was shocked that someone would think it appropriate. Ever since it arrived in its big box carried by the UPS man I’ve been thinking about it, and wishing we didn’t have to give it away.

I move past the unopened boxes filled with iPads and game consoles, lamps and blenders and other household objects, until I get to the clothing. People send us piles and piles of clothing, some of it fit for a girl ten years my junior. I search until I find what I’m looking for buried under a stack of dresses I would have liked when I was eight. I carry the garment bag to my room and lay it across the bed. The woman who sent this was from New York City. She worked for some fashion magazine. I healed her young son. Somehow she saw beyond Marlena the Healer to the teenage girl underneath when she chose this gift. I appreciated this. My mother did not.

I unzip the bag and my heart flutters. Skinny jeans and fashionable tank tops are laid out before me, the kinds I’ve seen girls in town wearing when they’re walking with their boyfriends. There are bright summer dresses with spaghetti straps and a couple of tiny skirts and tops, everything so different from the clothing I always wear.

White gauzy nightgowns hang in a narrow row one after the other on the left side of my closet. On the right side are wedding gowns. For each audience, I’m dressed like a bride. The audience comes expecting a pageant, and they ooh and aah when I sweep onstage in a big, beautiful gown. The white is supposed to emphasize my saintliness, my purity. But the paintings I’ve created from my visions are a riot of color on the wall of my room, interrupting so much blankness, the daily blandness of my attire. They are a rebellion without being a rebellion that gets me in trouble with my mother.

I run my hand across the items in the garment bag. A short, blue slip of a dress catches my eye, perfect for a hot day. I pluck it from the hanger and set it on the bed. Then I pull my white sheath off and throw it on the floor. I stand there in my underwear, hovering over the pretty blue silk, the same blue as the sky today. I slide the new dress over my head, shimmying it down my body. There is a long mirror on the wall and I check out my reflection.

Even with my hair still wet from the shower, I look almost normal.

No. I look almost sexy.

Like I, too, have the kind of legs that boys would admire, just like they admire the girls on the beach who flaunt their bodies in tiny bikinis. I think about Finn, the boy who refuses to leave my heart and my mind, wonder if he would admire me in this, and tug the hem a little higher up my thighs. The dress shows off my smooth olive skin, and the subtle curves of my chest and hips. Would it make him notice me in the way I want him to? Would he love me in this? I don’t know.

But I love me in it.

And my mother would hate me in it. This makes me love it even more.

FOUR

I am seventeen. It is last summer.

We are getting ready for my Saturday audience and my mother is helping me into the wedding dress she’s picked out for this afternoon. She’s working through the tiny pearl buttons that take forever to close, and I am staring at my reflection. I am wondering if I am pretty. If other people find me pretty. If other people my age find me pretty or if they just think I’m some freak show. I don’t want to be a freak show. I want to be attractive to others, to the boys I can’t stop noticing of late, as though they’ve been invisible all these years and suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like the hidden things of the sea after a hurricane spills them onto shore.

I’ve learned to stop asking my mother questions about boys and my appearance because they upset her. We used to be on the same page about who I was, who I am. But the minute I started asking questions my mother grew obsessed with stamping them out, with forbidding me the thoughts that she didn’t like. She sees them as threats to our life, to my life, to my reputation as a healer.

But I am a hermit crab grown too big for its shell. And today I am feeling stifled.

I catch my mother’s eye in the mirror. “So, Mama, when I fall in love, do you think my healing powers will evaporate? Do you think the visions will stop?”

My mother halts the work of buttoning. Her face grows pained.

“Marlena,” she whispers. “Don’t say things like that. You should never tempt God.”

I lower my eyes. “Okay, Mama,” I say softly. “I’m sorry.”

And I am sorry. I don’t want to do or say anything to make my visions go away. They are as real to me as the floor under my feet. During a vision I am never more certain of why I am here on this earth, never more me, and never more not me. Most of the time I want to protect my gift, hold it close so no one else can use it. But in the real world people try and take this tender part of me to capitalize on it, even my own mother, and I am tired. People twist it so it’s no longer something I recognize, no longer beautiful or mine. They turn my healings into something to sell for profit and they sell me for profit with it. I don’t want to be sold and branded and merchandized. I don’t like what my life is becoming.

I’ve started to wonder, too, whether the life of a healer really does mean I have to cloister myself like Julian of Norwich. Does it really require me to be homeschooled and removed from other people my age? Do I need to live apart from the rest of the world, with only my mother for company? Isn’t there another way to do this? To be who I am?

My mother goes back to buttoning.

“But you do want me to fall in love one day, don’t you?” I ask.

We stare at each other in the mirror.

My mother lifts the traditional Portuguese veil that she will pin in my hair from the top of the dresser, the kind of veil you might see placed over the head of a statue of a saint or on the women who march in the parades of São Miguel. I don’t always wear it, but I guess today my mother wants to make a point by ensuring I do. It is a delicate thing, nearly weightless, hand sewn by my grandmother. It does not go over my face but stands up a bit from the top of my head because of the white pearl comb to which it is attached, fixed just so that it cascades down my hair. A treasured heirloom made for me before I was born, as though my grandmother knew that her daughter would give birth to a girl whose hands would make miracles. Or maybe she simply thought that someday I would wear it at my First Communion, or even my wedding.

My mother disappears behind me in the reflection as she fixes the veil. “Marlena, stop being selfish. You can’t have everything. Look around you.” She pauses, I suppose to allow me to take a moment and focus on the beauty of the room, with its stunning ocean views and accompanying ocean sounds, its tasteful, understated decor. “Your gift has given you more than most people dream of having.”

It has given you more, I think, but manage not to say.

My very first healing, I healed my mother. At least, this is what I’ve been told.

It was right after the accident that killed my father and my mother’s parents. Her entire family and everyone my mother loved gone in an instant. She was pregnant with me, and the trauma of the accident forced her into labor. The doctors delivered me, tried to save my mother, but couldn’t. They waited for her breathing to fade, and a kind nurse set me onto my mother’s chest so she could feel her baby once before death. As the story goes, I placed my hands flat against my mother’s skin. Within seconds her breaths quickened, her lids slid open, her limbs stirred, and her hands found my little body. The nurse called the doctors.

My mother was completely well within hours. No one could explain what had happened, though the nurse was convinced that whatever it was, it had to do with me. My mother took me home to the now empty cottage she’d shared with her parents and my father, the little house my grandfather built and where I would spend my first years of life. It was a while before my mother understood, before she really believed it was me who’d fetched her from the brink of death. She’d always been a person of faith, but it took several more healings—a few kind neighbors who’d come to check on my mother after the accident, who held me, and who’d been sick or hurt at the time—before my mother began to wonder if she’d given birth to a saint. If her baby might be a miracle worker. She began to offer my gift to others with more confidence, and that gift began to offer my mother a new sense of purpose after so much tragic death.

For so many of my healings, I was too young to comprehend what I was doing, what was being done to me, taken from me. My mother has photo albums from that time. There are pictures of people—an old man, a young mother, a boy my age—laying their hands on my downy baby’s head, eyes closed, willing whatever divine power might reside in my little brain and body to pass into their own. Sometimes my tiny fist curls around one of their fingers. Sometimes I am crying, wailing loudly, mouth wide, gums bared. My mother is always standing nearby, or she is holding me out to the miracle seekers like she might be giving me away.

“Your gift saved me,” my mother always says. Though as I get older she says it less and less.

I am grateful that my gift could give my mother’s broken heart relief.

But do I ever get to stop saving her?

It is after my audience.

Colorful bits of paper clutter my room. They cover every surface in a fractured mosaic of greens and blues, some pale, some bright, some saturated with yellow, like sunlight beaming over the sea. I step right, my bare toes kicking scraps of aqua and navy confetti into the air, making a soft shush as they slide across the floor. I am chasing after a picture that I hold in my mind, a vision from one of my healings. It is like trying to catch a fish with bare hands as it swims through dark water. My fingers are coated in sticky shellac as I work, piecing the image together. I tear the pieces of paper smaller and smaller, until they are just right.

I call the healing down from the sky, pull it up from the floor of the ocean. My hands are frantic trying to capture it before it can dart away, like a shy crab burrowing deep into the sand and disappearing from human eyes forever. I can’t let that happen. My whole being yearns to express it, to bring it into existence. The sun descends bit by bit, then disappears from the window as it slides toward the horizon. My mother was right earlier today. I was being selfish. I already have everything I need. My gift alone has given me more than most people dream about.

By the time I am done with this collage of my vision, my face is soaked with tears.

I have never been happier.

My mother pokes her head into my room that evening.

I’ve fallen asleep on the bare wooden planks of the floor. I open my eyes when I hear her. “Mama?”

“Oh Marlena!” She is looking down at my newest artwork in the dusky shadows. “My miracle girl. This one is more beautiful even than the last.”

“That was from the man with the thick white hair,” I whisper, my throat thick with sleep. “The man with the rare blood disorder. He had a yellow shirt?”

My mother nods. “I remember.” She walks over to me. “Why collage this time, and not paint?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed right.”

A silence grows between us as the two of us take in the collage that lies between my narrow bed and the chair by the windows where I like to read. Layers of greens and blues radiate outward, big intersecting circles. It is what I first saw when I touched the man’s hands. My mother seems moved by it, and I am moved by this. “I’m so sorry, Mama, about before,” I tell her. “I don’t know why I was asking all those questions. I love you so much. You were right about everything. About me.”

“I know, querida,” she says, her voice smooth and forgiving. “I know you love me.” I know I was right, am right, we both hear her say without her actually saying it. But when she turns to me I don’t see love in her eyes. There is a hardness. A shrewdness.

I look away.

FIVE

I shimmy out of the slinky blue dress and trade it for the skinny jeans and a tank top. At the bottom of the garment bag are several pairs of shoes, including strappy, high heeled sandals covered in metal studs. I buckle them on and stare at myself again.

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.”

“Your mother will do what she wants, when she wants to,” José says.

“I’ll refuse to heal,” I throw out.

“Oh, Marlenita.” His voice is heavy, sagging like the center of a raft with too much cargo. “She would never allow that,” he says. The sound of the car starting comes through the phone, followed by silence.

SIX

José drives along the coast. The spray of the ocean leaps into the sky as waves crash against the rocks. A path winds by the side of the road and people are out taking walks, jogging, running. Occasionally a couple admires the view, hand in hand. I’ve never walked down this path, but I’d like to. I suppose José would stop the car and accompany me if I asked, but as much as I love José, he’s not the person with whom I imagine sharing this experience. Our destination isn’t too far away, but it takes us well beyond the distance my mother would approve.

When I’m not staring out the window, I’m staring at my legs. My jeans. My bare arms and shoulders. I put a finger to my lips and it comes away dark red. So many transgressions in a single day. First my swim. Now this.

“José?” I call up to the front of the car.

He glances in the rearview mirror. “Sí, Marlenita?”

“Has my mother noticed we’re gone? Has she texted or called?”

There is a long sigh—José is the master of the long sigh. “Not yet, guapa. Not yet.”

I don’t have a phone, so when my mother can’t find me she has to call José. There are a lot of things I don’t have or do that most people have and do. Television. Computers. A phone. I’ve always been homeschooled, which basically means I sit by myself all day reading books. I used to think this made me like Julian and Hildegard, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila, since women mystics studied alone in their cloistered, sheltered lives, their educations solely from books. But now it just makes me want to scream. It’s yet another thing I’ve missed out on, that separates me from everyone else.

“What’s different this year from other ones, that suddenly you want to go to school?” my mother said in July when I begged her to let me go this fall. “You’ve always been so happy to stay home with me. Besides, now is not a good time. You have a reputation to protect.”

I wiggle my toes, admiring the heeled sandals on my feet.

What reputation do these give me? Can a pair of skinny jeans and a tank top that shows off just a hint of cleavage really affect my image? Might it feel a little bit good to stop protecting it for a while?

“José?”

He harrumphs. “Sí, guapa?”

“Can I borrow your phone? Please?”

This time he doesn’t resist, reaches back to pass the phone to me. I take the crumpled business card from my purse, type the number into the keypad, and wait for it to ring. Someone picks up right away.

“Hello?”

I take a deep breath. “Dr. Holbrook.” My voice cracks. For a second I think I might pass out. I take another deep breath. “It’s me. Marlena Oliveira. Finally calling you.”

There is a long pause, long enough for me to wonder if I called the wrong number. But then she speaks. “Marlena!” She sounds happy. “What an unexpected surprise! What can I do for you?”

My heart pounds in my chest. “I’m actually on my way to see you. To your office, I mean. It’s kind of a spontaneous trip.” I close my eyes, suddenly feeling stupid. “I guess I should have called sooner. Before I left. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. You’re probably very busy.”

“No, no,” she responds. “I’m glad you’re coming. I can be at the office in ten minutes. I live just down the road. Does that sound good?”

My heart pounds harder. “That sounds perfect.”

“See you soon, Marlena,” she says, then hangs up.

I hand the phone back to José. She made that seem so easy.

“Everything okay, guapa?” José calls back.

“Yes.”

He holds my gaze in the rearview mirror, before his eyes return to the road.

After a few more minutes the Center for the Mind & Brain Sciences appears ahead and I press my face against the window. It is a beautiful glass box on the edge of the sea that calls the sun and the ocean to its windows. It is bright in the hazy heat of the day.

“We’re here,” José says, turning into the drive and pulling to a stop.

I loop my arm through the straps of my bag and scramble out of the car. “Bye, José,” I call, one foot already on the asphalt.

“Marlenita!” José sounds nervous. “I’ll be here waiting. No more than an hour or we’ll both be in trouble with your mother. Por favor.”

“Sure,” I reply, hoping that I can live up to his expectation. I really don’t want José to get in trouble. He sighs like he doesn’t believe me, but the whoosh of it is cut off when I slam the car door.

I practically run to the entrance, my legs strange and stiff in these jeans. I want to get inside before I change my mind.

“May I help you?” a pretty young woman asks, looking up from a thick textbook. She’s sitting at the front desk, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Dressed like me.

Or is it that I’m dressed like her?

Even our skin is the same color, our eyes and our hair. Maybe she is Portuguese, too. Maybe she eats toasted sweet bread on Sunday afternoons and malasadas during the summer as a special treat and endless amounts of kale soup during winter. Maybe soon we’ll find we have so much in common we’ll become best friends.

“Um,” I try, speechless.

Recognition dawns in her eyes. “You must be Marlena! Angie called and told me you were on your way. I’m Lexi.”

“Do you like malasadas?” I blurt.

“I don’t know.” She gets a funny look on her face, but her voice is still sunny and cheerful. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s kind of like a doughnut.”

Her smile helps me to stop feeling like such an idiot. “Well, I love doughnuts, so I’m sure I’d like one if I tried it.”

“Okay. It’s, um, nice to meet you. Lexi.”

She laughs. “Sure. Let me show you where you can wait for Angie.” Lexi leads me to a spacious room with a plaque outside with Dr. Holbrook’s name on it. She smiles again and tells me to have a seat. I do as I’m told. “I have to keep studying,” she says apologetically, but I am relieved when she disappears back down the hall.

When I am sure Lexi is gone, I jump up and go exploring. Around the corner is a lab. It’s enormous, with a beautiful view of the ocean. There are four machines, strange and intimidating. I am glad to be in jeans. In my white sheath I would feel like an ancient relic surrounded by so much science.

One of the machines is an MRI. I’ve seen one of those before. The others I don’t recognize. They look like they would better outfit a spaceship than a room on earth. There is a long table and at the end of it a thick, doughnut-shaped white ring, nearly the size of a small car. There is what looks to be a stainless steel bathing cap, with wires coming out of it, and another cap made of a strange white mesh. In the far corner of the room is some sort of chamber, like the ones that scan the body at airports.

What is this place?

What am I doing here?

Maybe I should go. I feel like a foreigner, or an alien, new to this unfamiliar world and unsure how to inhabit it.

Then, out of the corner of my eyes I see the photos. They are side by side on the internal wall of the lab, away from the windows. They seem to hum, to pulse with light, and my feet pull me to them. Each one holds an image of a single person, with a tiny card below that gives their name followed by their age and talent. They aren’t normal talents. Not like gymnast or pianist or even math whiz. They are the strange kind that most people think are fake, the kind you might find in a circus or on a show about magic or, well, at a church like the one that grew up around me.

James Halloway. Sixteen. The Weatherman.

Nicole Matthews. Thirteen. Telekinesis.

Chastity Lang. Eighteen. Internal Sonar.

Will I end up on this wall? Is that what Dr. Holbrook hopes? To add me to her collection of freaks?

I am about to turn around and leave this place, grateful José promised to wait outside, when Dr. Holbrook appears in the doorway.

“Marlena! How wonderful to see you.” The warmth in her voice is soothing. She is dressed in a loose-fitting button-down shirt and flowing pants that end at her calves.

“Hi, Dr. Holbrook.” I tug at the bottom of my tank top, then hook my fingers into the belt loops of my jeans. It’s so strange to do these things with my clothing. It’s strange not to be dressed like a ghost who might haunt someone’s attic.

“Please call me Angie. Let’s talk in my office.” She beckons me into the big bright space around the corner.

There is a simple white table that must be her desk, with only a laptop and a lamp on it. Facing the glass walls and the ocean are an overstuffed white chair and a fluffy couch to match. They seem out of place among the minimalism and machinery. A thick knotted white-gray rug lies across the floor. Dr. Holbrook, Angie, slides open a tall glass door in the wall, and the warm breeze and the sounds of the waves surround us. She gestures for me to sit in the big white chair. I watch as she kicks off her heels and sits on the couch, tucking her legs underneath her like we are friends having a visit. I sink down into the soft cushions, my feet still flat on the floor, hands tight on my knees. My muscles are tense. I am still ready to flee.

“What brought you here today? Why now?” Angie asks, when I don’t speak.

I shake my head, side to side. I don’t know where to start.

How can I possibly start?

SEVEN

I am eighteen. It is three months ago, in early June, the start of summer. This is the day everything around me comes crashing down. The day I meet Finn.

So many things about my audience are typical that morning. The church is packed to the brim. My mother, ever more the expert pageant director, has everything under control, fitting more and more seekers inside the room. In the corner, petitioners chant and pray on their knees. Their pant legs are grass- and dirt-stained and shredded. There are people from the town. I see Mr. and Mrs. Almeida, who own the bakery. I don’t need to see Gertie to know she has a table set up out front, selling her souvenirs.

But one thing is unusual. Mrs. Jacobs is here, arms crossed tight, wearing an unreadable expression. She’s never come to an audience, not that I remember. Maybe she decided to see what in the world we do here on Saturdays. Most people in the town have come at least once.

José is helping with crowd control. During the audience, he plays the part of bodyguard, always somewhere nearby, making sure that no one takes a dive at me, some desperate soul who has no idea where else to turn. But now he is making sure I will have space to walk through the aisles. Gently, he clears a path. The room is tender, like a wound. Tourists aside, the people who fill the seats toward the front are the vulnerable, the needy, the sick. I watch the preparations through a hidden window backstage. I am ready for them.

Fatima futzes with my dress as I stand there. The air has grown warmer, the heat capturing the smells of the sea and drawing them inside.

“Marlena,” Fatima commands. “Stay still.”

I do as I’m told at first, but not for long.

“Stop touching your hair. You’re going to make the comb fall out, and the veil is just right!”

I don’t have to look at Fatima to see her exasperated expression. I do my best to stop moving as she begins the labored work of figuring out the complicated bustle.

My mother knows exactly where I am, exactly where to look. She catches me watching through the window and smiles. I give her a wave.

The roller coaster of our relationship has flattened itself into a taut sense of peace. I’ve been painting and creating my visions on a near constant basis. Collages take over the house and I’ve even tried my hand at sculpture, though only once and probably not again. The work occupies me, brain and body, heart and soul. It pushes other things out of view. When I give myself over to my work, those strange and uncomfortable questions and thoughts fade so far into the background of my mind they’ve nearly disappeared. My mother is only too happy to get me whatever materials I need to feed my art. Clay. Metal. Paper. Oils, watercolors, canvas, paper.

It was probably just a phase.

That’s what my mother said the other day, in passing, with respect to our recent fights and friction, with respect to the things that were upsetting the balance of our lives. Her words have been ringing through my insides since.

“Turn and look at me,” Fatima says.

Fatima stares down her nose at me, since she is taller, appraising my dress, the state of my hair, the artful folds of the veil that trails down my back. She makes a circling gesture with her finger and I do one slow twirl. “Lovely,” she says, more to herself than me.

“Really?” I ask.

She looks at me strangely. “You always look lovely at your audiences, Marlena. Don’t you feel lovely in your beautiful dress?”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “How I look is not supposed to matter,” I say, parroting my mother’s words.

Fatima is on the verge of saying something else when José enters the back room. He nods to tell me that we are about to begin. I resume my place at the window, watching for my mother’s cue.

In the third row on the right are five girls dressed the same, with ponytails high on their heads. They are wearing some sort of sports uniform. They must play together on a team. Maybe soccer or lacrosse or field hockey. I decide that it’s soccer, and wonder how they found their way to doing something like getting up on a Saturday morning, putting their hair up, and running around outside chasing after a ball and trying to make a goal in a net. How do normal girls decide who and what they’d like to be and do? What would it be like to wear a soccer jersey? To kick the ball as hard as I could, shouting to other girls on my team? To let my limbs go wild instead of keeping everything so still and controlled?

The girls stare at their phones, occasionally sharing whatever is on their little screens, pressing their heads together and laughing. Jealousy scuttles across my insides on its little crab legs.

My mother is on the stage making her opening remarks, talking to people about the history of my healings. “The History of Marlena the Living Saint,” it actually says in the program.

One of the soccer girls leans her head on the shoulder of the one next to her.

No one has ever asked me what I want to be or do with my life. The question has never occurred to anyone, I suppose. It’s never even occurred to me before now. What would I be if I wasn’t a healer? What if I could be anyone I wanted? Maybe I would work as a waitress in a diner, and wear my name on a pin stuck to the pocket of my uniform shirt, or be a teacher of mathematics, or even a competitive swimmer who goes out each morning to practice different strokes, gliding through the ocean. Or maybe I would be a doctor, like Hildegard, but the real kind who wear stethoscopes around their necks and do things like deliver wailing, squirming babies to their exhausted but happy mothers.

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.

“Is this true?” I ask the group.

The entire church is deadened with silence. No one moves. The people Mrs. Jacobs has brought are stone-faced. A tall man, the only one whose eyes are full of grief, twists his mouth, like the words behind it are distasteful so he refuses to let them out.

“It is true,” Mrs. Jacobs snaps.

“I didn’t ask you,” I snap right back.

One of the women has her head bowed. Now she looks up. “You said my son was cured,” she whispers, her voice nearly too hoarse for me to hear.

I reach out. Place the edges of my fingers on her forearm. Peer into her eyes. “And was he?”

There is a gaping pause, and I feel it like the jaws of a shark opening wide around me. “My child died,” she says quickly.

My mother is suddenly next to me. “But how long after the Healer cured him? Days, weeks, months? Did he die of something unrelated?”

I grab my mother’s arm to make her stop saying such things. “Does it really matter?” I hiss.

She looks my way, peeling back my hand. “Of course it does. It means everything.”

My mother beckons for José to hurry. A chasm opens between her and me. In the beat of this silence, chaos erupts in the church, people standing, talking, shouting over each other, debating my existence as though I’m not here. My mother is called away to try and calm people down, a role she is good at. The chaos creates a moment of intimacy between Mrs. Jacobs and me. We are like the eye in the hurricane. Everyone seems to have forgotten us. She reaches out, nearly touching me, but stops just shy of my elbow. Mrs. Jacobs lowers her head toward mine.

“Marlena, it is not you I’m against, it’s your mother.” Her words are a quickly whispered stream. “Well, I don’t believe in your gift, but I do feel sorry that you’ve been trapped into such a life. It’s a shame for such a young girl like you. You need to open your eyes and see what is really happening around you.”

“Okay,” I find myself saying. “What do you think is happening?”

José has almost reached us.

Mrs. Jacobs leans closer. “Did you know your mother won’t let you cure anyone unless they pay ahead of time? Do you even know what she charges?”

“She does not,” I say, but my voice is faltering. “People sometimes send money in gratitude following a healing, which is where the money we have comes from.”

“That’s what she wants you to believe. But it’s not the truth. Somewhere deep down you know this. She tells you who to heal before each audience, does she not?”

“Yes, but only because they’ve come from so far away,” I reason, which is of course my mother’s reason.

“Stop lying to yourself.”

“Señora, ma’am, please come with me,” José says. He doesn’t wait for her to answer, just places two hands on Mrs. Jacobs and begins to steer her away.

Mrs. Jacobs’s words crash through me, questions and doubts piling up haphazardly, punching holes through my skin. I am a ship, taking on water through this series of fissures and seams. I can feel myself listing to the side, going down, down, down to the dark ocean floor as my mother finally seems to be gaining control of the room. I almost wish she wouldn’t. I want to lie down. Disappear, never to be seen again. I am no longer the brave girl steering the massive ship toward tranquility and peace. The emotions swirling in the room are sharp spikes, piercing my sides, my ribs, my heart. I pitch and keel and falter.

By the time I reach the stage again, I am a shipwreck.

Afterward, my mother is all business.

“You’re going to keep your head high, your chin up, and you are going to go out there and do the receiving line just as you do every Saturday. Sarah Jacobs or no, this is what everyone expects from you.”

I look up from the floor, where I’ve collapsed in a heap of tulle and satin. My mother’s expression is determined. There is that sharp glint in her eyes, love that will cut and maim. I pull myself to standing, dazed. Fatima and my mother tug and fix the skirt of my dress.

The receiving line at the front of the church turns out to be consoling. Things seem to go back to normal. Maybe my mother was right.

“Don’t listen to that woman,” a man says to me early on.

I hear some version of this from so many people. Or some version of “You cured me once and it was real.” I nod like I agree until I hear this so much my faith comes crawling back from its cold hiding place at the bottom of the sea.

Then I notice a woman a few people back in the line. She is unlike everyone else. Her clothes are different. Jeans with a silky cream blouse, an expensive suit jacket over it, wire-rimmed glasses adorning her pretty, pale face, dressed so unlike the tourists in their shorts and T-shirts. She isn’t trying to take my picture or video me so she can post an image of the freak she saw on summer vacation. Tourists aside, the people who fill up the United Holiest Church are true believers, mainly Portuguese and Italians, with their brown and olive skin, Latinos and black people crowded together for worship, for the hope of my divine touch, dressed in their Sunday best even though audiences take place on Saturdays.

It is the woman’s turn in line.

The look in her eyes is a mix of skepticism and curiosity. “I’m Dr. Holbrook,” she says. Her makeup is perfect, despite the heat. She doesn’t offer her hand, so she must know enough not to try and touch me. “But everyone calls me Angie.”

I stare, trying to get a better read on her. “Hello. And what brought you here today?” I ask, as I always do. As I am trained to do.

“I was wondering if you believe in yourself.” She says this simply, as though every person asks this. “In your gift.”

A wave of dizziness passes over me. That shipwreckedness again. Everyone else has been quick to brush off Mrs. Jacobs’s protest, like it meant nothing. “Excuse me? Are you referring to . . . what happened earlier?”

“I don’t know what happened earlier,” she says. “I arrived late. My grad assistant is still looking for parking.” Her stare is unwavering, but also kind. “Now that you are college age, do you ever wonder about your abilities? If they are real?”

My lips part. College? Does she really think this life would allow me to go to college? “Of course not,” I try, but once again, I can feel myself breaking apart.

“Hmmm,” she replies, studying me with those kind blue eyes. She presses a small rectangular card into my hand. “Call me. I’d like to talk to you. Maybe you have some questions that I can help you answer.”

I take it.

In this moment, a boy comes rushing up to her. He is breathless. “I can’t find parking, so I’m in the car, idling outside.”

He hasn’t looked at me and maybe he won’t; his words and eyes are all for Dr. Holbrook. Angie. His hair is a mess, and a sheen of sweat is covering his skin. I want him to turn my way. I want to know him, to know his name, to know everything about him. I don’t know why. But the force of this want is powerful, immediate, and total. It comes on like one of my visions, lifting me up and out of my body and taking me over completely.

Is this love at first sight?

He glances my way for a brief second. No, a half. A quarter.

“I don’t want the car to get towed,” he says, looking between Angie and me, so I’m not sure to whom, exactly, he is telling this information.

He runs off.

“That’s the grad assistant I mentioned. Finn,” she says. “I’d better go. I hope you’ll call me.” She moves to exit the line but I stop her.

I reach out a hand and place it on her arm. A murmur of surprise ripples through the crowd behind her in line, followed by hushed whispers. The Healer doesn’t ever touch someone without purpose.

The professor turns back, eyebrows arched over those curious eyes.

I lean in close. “Do you believe in my gift?”

She looks at me for a long time. “I don’t know. But if you like, we can try and find that out together.”

This time, when she walks away, I let her go. I look down at the card.

Dr. Angela Holbrook, Neurobiologist

Director, Center for the Mind & Brain Sciences

There is a series of tall rocks, ledges really, near my house. You can reach them if you walk down a path lined with tall sea grasses and bright-pink beach roses that are pretty but will draw blood with their spiky stems. People are always jumping from those rocks into the churning ocean below. It looks reckless.

I’ve always wanted to try it. I feel as though I am standing on them now, the flat gray slate hot beneath my bare feet, looking down into the dark sea.

Of course I will go to this doctor, this scientist. How can I not, after today, after Mrs. Jacobs? It was decided the moment I laid eyes on her. Well, and after I laid eyes on him, too. Finn.