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Four months later PART FOUR Now & Then

FORTY

The day of the funeral is sunny and warm. One of the first nice days of spring. The snow is gone; the air smells like grass and flowers. The ocean sparkles with light.

We gather at the beach to remember him. Angie, of course. Helen. Fatima and José. Friends of Finn’s from graduate school. Finn’s mother, who I had the fortune of meeting during his last months alive—estrangement makes no sense at the end, I guess. Finn was loved, this much is clear. But there are other people here, people I didn’t expect. People who came for me. Mrs. Lewis. Gertie. The Almeidas and some of the other shop owners from Main Street. A lot can change in a few months.

Everything, really.

We stand there on the rocks as the sun rises in the sky. We laugh and we cry, and after everyone has said what they need to say, Angie, Finn’s mother, and I spread Finn’s ashes into the sea.

When it is my turn to let Finn go, I stare out onto the water for a while. And I talk to him. I don’t care if I seem crazy or strange. Finn is with me still, and I don’t need to see him to know this, to take that leap of faith. I feel it in my heart and soul and mind and all throughout my body. I still don’t know what I believe, exactly, with regard to miracles and gods, but I know that I believe in this world and the people in it. I believe that love and loving others is the most important part, the one command we must obey if we are going to think in those terms. I know that the people here on this beautiful morning have taught me this. Flesh-and-blood people who are ready with a hand, a hug, a soothing touch, to reassure me that this much is real. Finn, most of all, taught me this. How to love and how to give myself over to a life of love. I will be forever grateful for this lesson.

“I love you, Finn,” I say out loud. “Thank you for every minute.” I let the last of Finn’s ashes be taken by the breeze, and I watch as they float out toward the sea.

Angie glances at me as we walk toward the cars parked on the side of the road. “I’ve never known anyone like Finn,” she says, with a sad smile. “He was exceptional. So smart.”

I smile a little. “I know.”

We grow silent. Our arms brush as we walk. My days of no touching are over. I welcome the reassurance of so much humanity.

Something catches my eye.

At first I think I am seeing things.

Then I realize that no, it’s definitely her. My mother came to the funeral. Her back is to me and she is about to vanish around the curve of the road. But before she turns I catch her gaze.

Tears sting my eyes. I’ve spent a lot of angry tears because of my mother, but these are strangely hopeful. In her expression I see something I’ve longed to see but never have. Or maybe I’ve never let myself. There is an understanding there on her face that can only come from having known the pain of grief herself. If there is anything my mother knows, it is loss.

Maybe there is hope for my mother and me.

“Bye, Marlena,” Angie says when she reaches the car. “Don’t be a stranger.”

I nod. Then watch as she drives away.

The end came fast for Finn, but it was also slow.

It’s difficult to explain what it’s like, to be with someone so constantly during the last days of their life, until they take their last breath, especially when that person is someone you love. I used to think that describing my visions was hard, talking about what it was like to heal, but even that doesn’t compare. How could mere words capture the extraordinary beauty that is, was, the life of Finn? His last days? The two of us together?

We moved into my grandparents’ house.

The two of us worked fixing it up. We dusted and polished my grandmother’s things, cleaned the kitchen, the shelves, the workshop where my grandfather had his carpentry business in the basement, still full of his old tools. We found his sign for it there, the letters hand stenciled with a pencil, his name Manuel Oliveira painted tall and proud at the top, the word CARPENTRY in all caps underneath it. Finn set the sign on one of the shelves in the living room.

All during that winter, we lit fires in the fireplace, and we cooked dinner as the snow fell during a blizzard. He told me about his life growing up in Oregon, how he discovered his love of the brain and decided to become a scientist. I told Finn about my mother’s stories of my grandparents, about growing up on São Miguel in the middle of the Atlantic, and then immigrating to America, and trying to make a life here.

“I wish I could get to know your mother,” Finn said once.

“I wish I could get to know yours,” I said to him back.

Finn looked away. He and I were so similar in so many ways. Even the painful ones.

We had visitors. Fatima and José. Helen and Sonia. Angie, of course. One afternoon, José came over with something I asked him to retrieve from my mother’s house. It took some effort to get it through the door.

“Okay, Marlenita.” José offered me a quick kiss on the cheek and gave a wave to Finn. “I hope I got the right one,” he called out as he shut the door behind him.

I took the thin rectangular package and brought it to the couch where Finn was sitting. “I made this for you. Because of us,” I told him.

Finn peeled back the brown paper wrapping.

“Marlena,” he breathed. “What is this?”

The two of us held it there, looking at it together. Thick swirls of red and pink and white danced across the canvas, abstract peonies bursting in their bright and dizzy glory.

I got up and propped the painting against the wall. “You know how I’ve always painted my visions.” I let my eyes settle on his. “I painted this because of us. It’s my vision of loving you, of being with you, of us together.”

“It’s beautiful,” Finn said.

That night, he took the tools from my grandfather’s workshop and hung the painting on the wall of the living room so we would always see it.

It’s still hanging there today.

I live alone now, in my grandparents’ house. When the weather is warm I sit on the porch swing that Finn fixed for me. Remembering him, and us together.

“We make an ironic pair,” I told him once.

It was mid-February, just after Valentine’s Day. I’d filled the cottage walls with paper collage hearts. I’d never had a valentine before.

“How so?” he asked me.

“I’m a washed-up healer dating a dying boy.” I tried for a laugh. It came out a sob.

Finn didn’t laugh either. “Don’t think like that.”

“But it’s true,” I said, then changed the subject.

I learned a lot of things about Finn while we lived together. Like the fact that when Finn was still alive, he slept like the dead. Not funny, I know, but also true. Every night we spent in this house, I would wait for Finn to fall asleep. Then, quietly and ever so slowly, I would place my hand on his chest, right over the smooth skin that covered his ribs, slightly to the right, until I felt the pulse of his heart underneath my palm.

And then, I would call upon my gift.

I called and I waited. Called and waited.

Again and again, I tried to heal Finn, even though he made me promise I wouldn’t. I couldn’t help myself. How could I not at least try? What Finn didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, I decided. But my knowing that I gave up would hurt me.

Eventually, I would retract my hand.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t heal Finn. Maybe I never will. Maybe that is just life. Normal life.

It’s what I always wanted, isn’t it?

Then one night, late in March, I had a vision. That charm of mine, the charm that is my gift, was suddenly, magically, back in my pocket. One palm closed around it, tight, while the other pressed into Finn, seeking the heart within his chest.

First came the pain that filled up my body, and the exhaustion that forced my eyes closed. But soon I was awash in colors, so many colors.

At first they were only shades of gray, but I fought beyond this darkness to the brighter shades, the reds and the pinks and the vibrant roses. I settled into this vision like the comfiest of chairs, like going home after the longest of absences. That’s when the scenes came to me, came for me, and I was content to see all that was there, to watch as hope bloomed under my fingertips. One after the other I saw them, scenes of Finn and me on the beach, of Finn and me with friends, of Finn cooking dinner while I watched over his shoulder, of Finn and me walking through the snow, through the rain, through the neighborhood where my grandparents and mother once lived and where I live now, of Finn and me talking late into the night as we lay in bed. It was a moment of true ecstasy, of union between our souls. I don’t know how many scenes I experienced before I realized what every single one of them had in common.

I retracted my hand.

They were all scenes from the past.

I swallowed around the thick lump in my throat. Watched the labored breathing of the boy I loved, the rise and fall of his chest.

I should feel consoled, I suppose.

Even after everything, I am still a visionary.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the girl I used to be knelt down to take the hand of the girl I am today. The one who walks the beach on this evening, looking out at the sea.

What would that girl see and feel if she pressed her forehead to my skin, against the back of my hand? Would the vision start in the heart like so many others? Or might it begin in the chambers of the soul, darkened by grief? Would there be colors, and if so, which ones? Would the scenes she saw be an endless stretch of emptiness, or would they be laced with a love that carries a person forward, like an endless swell across the ocean?

There are some people who will never forgive me for letting the healer that I was go. They send bags of letters saying I shouldn’t have given her up, that I owed the world more miracles and that I turned away from the responsibility that comes with being a living saint. There are people who believe I was rightly punished by God by having to face the loss of someone I love. By not being able to save him. That being unable to save Finn is a fitting payment for the lives I have taken.

But there is one thing I know, and that is that I do not regret Finn.

I could never.

“I thought I was protecting you,” my mother said the other day, nearly at this very same spot on the beach where I stand now.

She and I are speaking again. Or trying to.

“I knew that I wouldn’t be around forever, but the church, your gift, the house, the money, your legacy as a healer, they would still be there for you after I was gone.”

I nodded. I’ve been doing my best to understand my mother’s logic, because she’s been doing her best to explain it to me.

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“And your Finn isn’t,” she said back. “I’m sorry for that.”

“I know, Mama.”

“Remember what you promised, Marlena,” Finn said to me during one of the last days we shared together. He took my hand into his across the table.

His was shaking.

Not long before, I’d told Finn a secret.

“I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll become a doctor,” I said.

We were tangled together on the porch swing, under a blanket. It creaked as it moved.

“A doctor like Angie? A doctor like . . .” Finn trailed off.

Like me. That’s what he was going to say but didn’t.

“Not like Angie,” I told him. “Like, in a hospital.”

Finn tightened his arms around me. “So the healing kind.”

“Yes,” I said. “You know, Hildegard was a medicine woman. She studied herbs and plants. She cared about healing the bodies of her fellow nuns.”

“I did not know that.”

I laughed. “I’ve always admired her. I used to kind of wish I was more like her than like Julian.” I thought about my self-portrait on the wall of the living room in my mother’s house, wondering what new one I might paint if I was to try again. “And then, I keep dreaming about those brain scans, the way they remind me of my visions. Maybe they were . . . are . . . a sign of sorts.”

“Look at me,” Finn said.

I shook my head.

“Marlena, come on.”

Slowly, I shifted so I could meet Finn’s eyes.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” he said. “I think it’s perfect.”

The next day when Finn came home, he had a present for me. “You have to promise me you’ll use this someday.”

I looked at the gift he’d placed on the table. It was wrapped in bright pink paper, the same pink of the peonies in the painting on the wall of the living room. “What is it?”

“Just open it.”

I removed the paper carefully, and opened the box inside. Took out what was waiting for me.

“Do you like it?” he wanted to know.

I nodded. Held it up in my hands. Finn helped to put it around my neck. I picked up the round metal circle that dangled like a heavy charm down the front of my chest and pressed it against Finn’s. And I listened.

I looked into his eyes, heard the thump of his heart quicken.

“It’s perfect,” I told him.

Finn gave me a stethoscope.

I am twenty. It’s October. The trees are a fiery red and orange and yellow. It’s drizzling outside, the leaves wet and sticking to my shoes. I don’t care.

Big thick textbooks are hugged to my chest.

I am a college student.

The campus is buzzing with people hurrying to the cafeteria. To class. To the library. To their residence halls.

“Hi, Professor Carse,” I say when I enter the biology lab.

“Marlena,” she says, nodding.

Professor Carse doesn’t smile much. She’s all business, so unlike Angie. But she’s also all brilliance, so very like Angie.

I take my seat on the stool by the tall black table I share with Kelsey, another first-year student. She is my lab partner. My books land with a loud thump. “They should give us carts to carry these things around.”

Kelsey laughs. “Speak for yourself. The late nights and lack of partying are enough to distinguish us premed people, I think.”

“Probably,” I say, laughing along with her.

Kelsey and I are becoming friends.

My first friend at college.

My mother was wrong about so many things, but she was right about this:

I was born to heal.

Knitting together the bones of the body, the muscles, the flesh, ridding a person of what ails them, soothing the pain in people’s hearts and minds, is what I am called to do, what I have always been called to do.

But Fatima was right, too. It’s possible to be both things, to both have a life and use one’s gifts, to be a person of faith and a person of science. If there is anything I’ve learned over this last, complicated year of love and of loss, it is this:

There are many ways to be a healer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo credit Allen Murabayashi

DONNA FREITAS is the author of the Unplugged series as well as other young adult and middle grade novels, including The Possibilities of Sainthood, The Survival Kit, and Gold Medal Summer. Donna is also a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson’s MFA program and at Hofstra’s Honors College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can visit her online at www.donnafreitas.com.

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COPYRIGHT

HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE HEALER. Copyright © 2018 by Donna Freitas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Cover art by Bose Collins

Cover design by Michelle Taormina

Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-266213-2

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266211-8

1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321

FIRST EDITION