The Healer

EIGHT

The sun shines bright on Angie’s face. “Marlena? Why now?” she asks again.

“What do you want from me?” I ask in return.

“I have no agenda, one way or the other, aside from the truth.” She stops, then backtracks a bit. “I study the brain, Marlena. The brain is an amazing organ that we know so much—and so little about. I’m interested in understanding the full capacity of the brain, exploring the unusual talents some people are lucky enough to have. And you seem to be one of those lucky people.”

I stare at her, trying to take this in, her use of the word talent as opposed to gift or power. “But my ‘talent’ comes from God.” I say these words with confidence, but they suddenly sound crazy. Potentially fake, like Mrs. Jacobs claims.

The same mixture of curiosity and skepticism I saw in Angie’s eyes the day she came to my audience appears in them now. She leans forward, her clear lacquered nails gleaming. The warm breeze blows wisps of blond hair around her face. Even her eyebrows are blond. “Is that what you believe, or just what you’ve been told to believe all of your life?”

I stare at her, unsure how to answer.

I know this must sound weird, but I’ve never been a person of faith, someone who believes in God and prays to God or gods, if there is more than one. My mother grew up Catholic, but the church that grew up in my honor is not officially Catholic, and technically, it’s not even a real church. More of a sideshow with me as the star. But because of it, I’ve always been around people who believe, whose lives are devoted to prayer, to worshipping within a particular religion. People who have no qualms naming a girl like me a living saint.

Faith is a filmy thing, like a vapor or fog. You can see it, sort of, in the air, wafting around believers, but if you try to grab it your fingers close around nothing.

Healings, though, have substance. You can touch them, feel the newly strong muscles with the pads of your fingers, place your palm against a now-pounding heart, see the smile on someone’s face that was once vacant and despairing. Healings have physical markers, physical proof, like a smooth white stone at the beach or mother-of-pearl shimmering in a tide pool. You can reach out and pick them up, admire them.

Healings appear on us.

This, I suppose, is what you could call my faith. Maybe it’s why I began drawing my visions. To make them into something real. Something I can see and study and touch.

Lots of religions and cultures have healers. Shamans are healers, and the sangomas in South Africa fulfill this role. Catholics will pray to St. Jude or St. Peregrine. But when someone is desperate for help, desperate for hope, it doesn’t matter who I am or from what religion and culture I hail, if any. No one cares if I might be a witch, like the women they tortured and drowned and burned in Salem. All that matters is that I work my magic.

Healings, miracles, whatever they are, do not discriminate. Not the way people do and especially not the way religious people sometimes do. All these things we use to divide ourselves up, none of it matters. Healings don’t work like that.

They just are.

Angie is watching me, still waiting for me to say something.

“I believe in my gift,” I tell her. I decide not to mention Mrs. Jacobs and her claims, which have been floating in and out of my brain like a tide of jellyfish all summer. “But being a healer will never let me be normal. And I’m tired of it.”

Angie nods, like she knows exactly what I mean. “You asked me what I want from you. Well, I want to study you. I want to understand your gift better and help you understand it better. I can’t promise what we’ll find out, but I can promise we’ll know more after we study your gift than if we never ask any questions.”

I nod. I believe her. I want what she offers. Understanding. Knowledge. I look straight into her curious blue eyes.

“Study me then,” I say.

Later, when I am leaving Angie’s office, I come around the corner and there he is, sitting in one of the chairs in the waiting room. Finn. He jumps up when he sees me, nearly stumbles, rights himself. Then he leans against the wall and crosses his arms. His lips stretch into a smile.

“Well, if it isn’t the fraudulent healer girl.”

His voice is playful, but I can detect the mistrust underneath it. It is a rude greeting, but I don’t care. I am too taken with him, with that smug look on his face—such a beautiful face—and the gleam in his eyes, intelligent, a little angry maybe, and curious. I recognize that gleam. Angie has it. I like seeing it there.

“I’m Marlena” is all I say to Finn in return.

He tilts his head. My face grows hot as we stand there, watching each other. I am so exposed in my stretchy jeans that show the outline of my knees and thighs, the tank top that forms itself along my body, with the too-large holes for my arms that open to the middle of my ribs, showing off the sides of my bra. I wonder what Finn is thinking. If he is noticing any of these things about me.

Then, out of nowhere, I stick out my hand. I know that’s what normal people do, but not me. If I go around touching everybody then the mystery of my healing hands might dissipate, my reputation diminished, according to my mother. My touch must be the rarest of gifts, she always says. I have lived without hugs and affection all my life.

Finn is looking at my hand like it is an alien thing. Maybe he is afraid of it. Maybe he is afraid of finding out I’m not actually a fraud. I wonder if he knows that I never do this, if Angie told him. I wonder if he realizes that this gesture makes him special. Finn uncrosses his arms and extends his hand to me, closes it around mine.

His touch goes straight to my brain and down through my torso into my legs, making them weak and wobbly. His fingers are warm, his palm is warm, and as it presses into me a filmy vision of Finn surrounded by light flashes in my mind, then is gone. The color of it is pale. Washed out. Maybe because I am so nervous.

“Hi, Marlena,” Finn says, still hanging on to me. “Nice to meet you. I’m Finn.”

I stare at our clasped hands. It is the first time I’ve ever touched a boy my own age voluntarily, because I want to, and not because I am meant to heal him.

Is this why I feel so many things at once?

My gaze shifts upward to Finn’s hazel eyes.

His body is surrounded by light.

I let go of his hand and the light disappears.

We don’t say anything else.

I head toward the exit.

Maybe Finn is the angel, not me.

NINE

José peels out of the driveway after dropping me at the house. He doesn’t want a run-in with the woman who is standing in the open front door, hands on hips, a scowl on her face. Even the scowl can’t ruin my mother’s beauty. Her long dark hair that waves just slightly. Her brown eyes and thick lashes, her delicate nose and lips like a bow. All that smooth, olive skin.

“Marlena Oliveira,” she barks, the moment I start toward her. She’s wearing a white short-sleeved blouse and loose white pants.

My long cotton dress billows around my ankles and wrists. I changed discreetly in the car, jeans and tank top shoved safely at the bottom of my bag. “Yes, Mama?”

“Don’t you yes, Mama me!”

I study the woman who is my mother, with whom I’ve grown so far apart this summer, who I now make so angry when before I made her so pleased. People see me in my mother and my mother in me. Some of the T-shirts and trinkets they sell in town show the two of us together. The image is usually of the classic Madonna and child sort, my mother holding me in her arms when I was a baby. Occasionally I see one of those little saint cards with me as a child of nine or ten, my mother sort of floating above me in the background. A divine figure watching over her blessed daughter.

“Where have you been?” she asks.

I breathe in, mustering innocence. “I was at the healing rocks,” I lie. The healing rocks are a place I like to go to think and watch the ocean, and where I sometimes prepare for an audience. “I asked José to take me there, Mama. Don’t be mad at him. I felt like I needed to recenter myself.”

The hard look in her expression softens. “Why didn’t you leave a note? Or better yet, why didn’t you wait so we could go together?”

I grip the sides of the white cotton dress, my hands sweaty with the humidity. “Next time I will.”

She nods, but she is still blocking the doorway. I’m not off the hook yet.

“You forgot that you had a private audience today.”

I bite my lip. Realize that my mother is right. I’ve never done this before. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I might be fighting my mother’s rules, but I don’t want other people to suffer because of this. “I did forget.”

A sheen covers my mother’s face. The sun is beating down on her directly but she doesn’t narrow her eyes against it. “They’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”

My legs grow unsteady. “They’re still here?”

“Yes, Marlena! Do you think they’d come all this way and then just leave?”

“I don’t know, Mama,” I say, shoulders starting to hunch. “I’ll go up to the receiving room now.”

I reach the landing on the front steps, about to pass my mother, when she drops, “I heard about your little escapade in town this morning.”

I stop. “Oh?”

“Don’t play dumb, Marlena.” She turns around. “Fatima!”

A long moment passes before Fatima appears. She’s looking at me, apology in her eyes. The dress from my swim, sandy and wrinkled, is in her arms. She holds it out to my mother.

My mother takes it, and sand glitters to the ground. Fatima hurries away. My mother holds the white sheath up to me. “What were you thinking?”

I hang my head.

“What in the world possessed you to go swimming? In front of all those people! In your dress! The tourists have come here to see the healer-saint, not the wild girl-child!”

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” I respond, which is true. It’s something my mother and I have fought over, so not the best answer. Especially since it produces another glare.

“It was hot,” I try again, which is also true. The rest of the truth is that I don’t really know what possessed me. Something did, something drew me into the water, something mysterious and unnameable. “I just wanted to go for a swim. I’m eighteen. I’m not a child anymore.”

I’ve said the wrong thing again.

“Marlena!” My mother takes a step forward, out of the doorway. The roar of the ocean is loud behind the house. “You must never forget who you are, and lately you can’t seem to remember! I don’t know what to do with you! I don’t know who you are anymore.” Her voice trails off, a soft tail of sadness.

“I need a little room to breathe, Mama.” My voice grows smaller and smaller.

“Just go,” she whispers.

Her quiet is worse than her upset. “Go?”

“Those people are waiting.” She finally steps aside to let me pass. As I move by she shrinks away, careful not to touch me.

I wish that instead she would reach out and hug me like other mothers hug their daughters. A storm surge of doubt and uncertainty rises through me. “And what if I can’t heal today, Mama? What if my gift doesn’t work, like Mrs. Jacobs says? What if I fail? Would you tell me if I did? If you found out from them later?”

“Marlena.” My name from her mouth is hard, the pit of an olive.

We are not supposed to speak about that day with Mrs. Jacobs.

My mother closes her eyes. When she opens them they are glassy. “My gifted miracle of a daughter. You still do not know what it is like to love someone with all that you are and then lose them completely. You are lucky to have avoided such an experience, while so many others have had the misfortune of losing everything. Everything and everyone they’ve ever truly loved.” She is thinking of her own parents and my father. When people come asking for a healing audience, I know my mother feels a special connection because of her own losses. For that reason, she also feels a special rage that Mrs. Jacobs did what she did in front of those suffering, grieving people. “Those who come to us, who come to you,” she goes on, “most of them have lost hope. You are their last hope in this world.” My mother tilts her head, and wipes her fingers across the tears that have fallen down her cheeks. “You will heal and your gift will not fail you. It just can’t.”

“Yes, Mama,” I answer, and head inside.

The receiving room is in a special wing off the side of the house. Long gauzy white curtains billow in the breeze and in the center of it is a long couch, covered in pale-blue linen, where the petitioners sit. They face a single wooden chair, made by my grandfather with careful hands. That is where I am to sit. There is a big white vase on a side table. Fatima fills it with flowers whenever there is an audience. Today it is bursting with pink peonies.

Squeezed into one side of the couch today is a man, not too old, not too young. Maybe forty. He is clutching a woman who must be his mother. Her hair is graying but not totally gray, and she is dressed smartly, in dark-green pants and a cream-colored blouse, her wrists draped with bracelets and her fingers with rings. I see a big diamond on one, with a wedding band pressed tightly against it. She has the look of a woman with style and confidence, who cares for herself and her appearance. Yet to see her face, anyone would immediately know otherwise.

The woman’s eyes are vacant. Her mouth is twisted in pain. She is nearly catatonic. When the man hears the soft brush of my slippers on the wood floor he turns. While his mother’s face displays a bottomless emptiness, his has the full bloom of desperation and hopelessness, like a black flower that swallows all the light around it. He is quiet and hesitant, uncertainty on his face as he takes me in and I stand there, in front of my grandfather’s chair.

“Hello . . .” His mouth is a round O, but nothing else comes out.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, because I know just what to do. I have remembered, once again, who I am. I am ready to perform the duties of my gift. In an instant, I am Marlena the Healer. It is like slipping on old, comfortable shoes.

“What is your name?” I ask him.

“Pedro,” he says quietly.

“And your mother?”

“Guadalupe.”

I nod. I don’t bother to sit. There will be no small talk like sometimes with seekers who are nervous, who have questions, who want to have a conversation with the Healer before anything else happens. The son, Pedro, looks at me with fear, afraid to let his mother go, to cede her to me, even though this is what he came here to do.

“Really, don’t worry,” I tell him again.

“But don’t you need to know what—”

“—please,” I say, and he presses his lips together into a tight straight line, his arms retracting from his mother. He gets up from the couch and stands aside. She still hasn’t looked at me. Not with eyes that can see.

My mother was right.

I have never known grief, or loss, not personally. Not the kind that breaks a heart, never to be the same again, or that immerses someone in a fog for months, even years, the world dimmed and dull and cloaked in perpetual gloom. But I know when I see grief on the face of another person, and it is what I see in Guadalupe, who sits, shoulders slouched, body leaning to one side now that her son is no longer there to support it.

Pedro is pacing in front of the couch, eyes on the floor.

I sit down next to Guadalupe and take her hands into mine. She doesn’t acknowledge my presence, doesn’t flinch or react. But I think touch must be a basic human instinct. I know just how to smooth my fingers over the lined palms of this sad woman, how to rest my forehead against the thickly veined backs of her brown hands, how to coax the person hidden inside this shell of a body into the world outside again.

I clutch at my chest when I feel the sharp pain of Guadalupe’s grief in my heart, and as the colors come. A burned rust sweeps through me first, burned like the dead leaves of fall that turn to dust in your hand. It’s followed by the dark red and orange of age, of exhaustion, of a forest after a fire has swept through it. I push past these scenes, the despair that enshrouds Guadalupe in darkness. I see that she has lost a son, her youngest, and her husband, too. My heart cries out at the depth of her pain. Pedro has lost a father and a brother, but people move through grief in different ways, and some, like Guadalupe, enter it as though it is an underworld that traps them in its grip forever.

Visions of tragedy, of untimely good-byes and trauma, wash over me in sepia tones. I draw them into myself, into my own body, taking the burden from Guadalupe into my mind and heart and soul, into the hands that hold tight to hers. I absorb the worst of it, the depths of her affliction. That is my job.

Then, I see a glimmer of yellow. Then another of green and blue. Hues of pink and lilac, accompanied by happy memories, the beautiful and the bright, the ones that lie buried under the cloak of Guadalupe’s despair. They are there. The life and future of Guadalupe is buried deep, but waiting. I uncover it for her. I draw it back into view.

And I stay, holding her hands, forehead pressed against her skin, chasing away the thick storm of her affliction until I feel the hope stirring in her again, until I feel the sight returning to her eyes, and until I feel the life in my own body draining away.

When I wake I am staring up into the face of Fatima.

I am lying on the couch on my back in the receiving room. Pedro and Guadalupe are gone. I must have passed out.

“Marlena,” Fatima says. “Are you okay?”

She holds a glass of water. I struggle to sit up. My head swirls and tips. “I’m fine,” I croak.

She nods.

I take the water and gulp it down. Watch as Fatima leaves. Wait for enough strength to stand and to walk. Did I heal Guadalupe’s pain? Did I remove enough of the despair from her heart so she can make her way back into the realm of the living?

Will my mother tell me if I did or didn’t?

I get up slowly, my legs unsteady. The sun is on its way down along the horizon. I wonder where my mother is, if she showed Guadalupe and Pedro out while I was asleep. I pass by the kitchen on my way to my room. Fatima is there, standing behind the island. Her hands are powdered with flour, palms pressed into a fat ball of dough for the sweet bread she knows is my favorite.

She stops kneading when she sees me. “I didn’t show your mother that dress from your swim, Marlena,” she says. “I would never. She found it on her own. If I’d found it first, I would have washed it before she could have known.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “It’s okay.”

Fatima’s dark hair is streaked with gray even though she is not yet forty. Like Mama, Fatima came here from São Miguel as a child, with her fisherman father and her seamstress mother. She has four children at home and no husband to help her. Mama pays Fatima well, pays her quadruple what anyone else would because she knows how difficult it is to make a new life in a place where you weren’t born, when you are alone and have people who depend on you. It is good to remember that Mama has a lot of kindness in her. Kindness she shows to Fatima.

Fatima is still watching me, hands balling and pushing at that pillowy dough. “Marlena, is there anything you want to talk about?” she asks. There is a beat of silence, broken only by the hollow sound of her palm against the dough, but she seems to want to say something else. “You can talk to me. I’m . . . I’m here for you.”

I stare at her, considering this strange new offer, and the deal Fatima and I made earlier today to not tell on each other. But then the handle on the front door turns, my mother about to enter the house from wherever she’s been. “See you later,” I say and run to the stairs before Fatima can respond and before my mother sees me there.

A big bag of mail, of letters and petitions, has been deposited outside my bedroom door. It rises nearly to the top of my knee, a drawstring pulling it closed at the top. I get one every month. Tonight I walk by without touching it. I’ve had enough of healing today.

I shut the door of my room carefully, hoping my mother will think I’m asleep and not come up to see me. I wonder if Fatima is telling her she found me passed out on the receiving room couch. I wonder what my mother will think it means that I did, or if she won’t think it means anything at all.

I grab a book and sit in the chair by the open windows, grateful for the evening breeze. My attention floats from the pages to the wall. Across it are my careful drawings, my paintings, my collages of favorite visions. More than one—if you look closely—take the shape of a human heart, hearts I’ve healed. Colors define them. Hues of purple, green, yellows and reds and oranges. One is dominated by bright, hot pinks. Some of the drawings are a collection of the tiny scenes that sometimes accompany the vision about the life and future of a person I’ve healed. But mostly they are intricate, detailed bursts of light and color. I have never chosen to paint the dark gray and black storm of despair like I saw today. I’ve always tried to capture the light that peeks out from those murky depths, the yellow of hope and the aqua blue and pink of joy.

My easel stands nearby, in the far corner of my room, waiting for me to go to it.

Tonight I’m too tired to paint.

I try to focus on the book that sits open in my lap, but my mind keeps drifting. My thoughts shift to Finn. The waves beyond my windows are crashing against the rocks, and I hear his voice intermingled with these sounds, calling me a fraud. Images of him fill my vision, a flush starting to burn across my skin.

Who am I kidding?

Gorgeous, genius Finn surely has a million girlfriends, probably has a girlfriend now. Why would he ever want someone like me? These thoughts send me into bed, pulling the covers up to my chin. I don’t care that it’s humid, that my body sweats, that I haven’t eaten dinner.

A strange thing happens while I sleep.

I have a vision, the kind I get when I’m about to perform a healing. The strange part is that I’m not about to perform a healing and the vision is about Finn. I’ve only had visions of people I’m meant to heal, and usually that is only while I’m touching them.

In the vision I see Finn, clear as day, as though he is standing in front of me. He’s looking at me in a way that no one has ever looked at me. This vision is less about color and more about scenes, scenes of the future, but in this one, I am a part of Finn’s future. In Finn’s eyes, I see love. Real love. Romantic love. Finn loves me, my vision reveals. But then, I watch as Finn turns and walks into a dark tunnel, or maybe it’s a dark wood. I try to follow him but I can’t. I’m rooted to the spot where I stand. I call out, but he keeps on going, walking until he disappears into the darkness.

It’s so vivid, so powerful, so upsetting, that it wakes me.

I sit up in bed, covered in sweat, sheets drenched. My stomach groans with emptiness and my heart is pounding and pounding in my chest. I get up and stand by the open windows and let the breeze cool my hot skin. Try to breathe.

If my vision is right, it means something wonderful and terrible at once.

Finn will fall in love with me.

And then he’ll break my heart.

I press my hands against the frame of the window.

Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t a vision at all.

Maybe, maybe, it was only a dream.

TEN

Over the next two weeks, I go to see Angie every afternoon.

I am an addict, José my reluctant dealer.

Finn and I have reached an unspoken agreement to remain at a safe distance. I think he is keeping this distance out of respect. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish for less respect.

I learn bits and pieces about him. He’s three years older. He’s a prodigy. At twenty-one he’s already far along in his PhD in neuroscience. He finished his undergrad at nineteen, just one year older than I am now. He is an actual, living, breathing genius. He and Angie are close, almost like a mother and son. I am jealous.

Today when I enter Angie’s office she is sitting cross-legged on the floor, piles of paper spread in front of her. Finn is nowhere to be seen. The windows are open even though it is hot. Angie doesn’t like the air conditioning. The sounds of the sea help her concentrate, she told me.

Angie pats the spot next to her on the rug.

I sit down and cross my legs like Angie’s, sink into the luxurious wool of the rug and wait for her to speak. I can tell she is thinking about something. Her eyes are halfway closed, and she breathes slowly, like she might be meditating. Angie’s blond hair is loose and falling around her shoulders, all that thick butter yellow.

Her lids fall open and her eyes are on me. “Tell me something, Marlena. What do you think about our visits so far?”

“I don’t know,” I answer carefully. “It’s weird, to be studied. By someone who doesn’t believe in me,” I add.

Angie doesn’t seem offended by my comment. “You think I don’t believe in you?”

“Well, you’re a scientist.”

Her fingers press deep into the rug. “And you think scientists can’t believe in the unseen?”

“I think scientists don’t believe in miracles.”

“Do you believe in miracles?”

Her question comes so quickly, so easily, it almost seems she hasn’t just asked me whether I believe in the very thing that has defined my entire life. “Of course I do,” I say.

Angie switches the cross of her legs. “You don’t sound certain, though.”

She’s right. If she’d asked me several months ago, the certainty would have been plain. “There was this woman who came to my audience in June. Actually the same day you showed up.” I tell her about Mrs. Jacobs and what Mrs. Jacobs claimed.

“Do you think she might be right?” Angie asks.

“No. I mean, I didn’t think so before.” I pull my knees into me and wrap my arms around my shins. “But I don’t know anymore. So many people come in and out of my life at my audiences, it’s not as though I keep track of everyone. Maybe some of my healings work, and some don’t. That would make sense, right? For me not to have a perfect track record?”

“It seems reasonable,” Angie agrees. “But what do you think might make the difference between a healing that ‘worked,’ as you said, and one that didn’t?”

Her question makes me laugh. “Talking to you is like what I’ve imagined it would be to talk to a therapist.”

Angie waits for me to say more, the good scientist-therapist she always is.

I roll my eyes. “Okay. Your question is good, but I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t think I’ve ever articulated out loud that some of my healings might work and some might not, until right now.”

She picks up a pen and takes a few quick notes. “Would you feel okay if it turned out that you didn’t have a ‘perfect track record,’ as you put it?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“You seem pretty certain of that.”

I think of what my mother said the other day, about how I am people’s last hope. How my gift isn’t allowed to fail. “It wouldn’t be fair to those who depend on me.”

“You feel responsible for a lot of people.”

I rest my chin on my knees. Grip my shins tighter. The understanding on Angie’s face, the sympathy, makes me want to hug her. Like I wanted to hug Fatima the other day. Does growing up and turning eighteen make you more affectionate?

“I am responsible,” I tell her simply, but there is a force behind those words. A strong gale of something not quite identifiable. “To the townspeople and their shops, to people I haven’t even met who need me, or who will. What if I suddenly couldn’t help them? What if they died and it was all my fault?”

Angie leans forward, the papers in her lap sliding off. “But . . .”

She does this. Angie inserts a single word, then a pause, because she wants me to finish my thought. I do my best to keep going, to give her a real answer, the gale slicing through me. “Sometimes I don’t want to be responsible for anybody. Sometimes I want to go to school like everyone else my age. Sometimes I want to walk down the streets of town and not see a single image of my face on a T-shirt or a key chain or . . . or even a kite. Sometimes I want to know what it’s like to not have people whispering about me, or treating me like I’m special, or worse, treating me like I’m some freak.” The list pours from me like a poison my body needed to purge. “I’ve had healing audiences every week since before I can remember. I’ve been given gifts and treated like I’m a saint and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but . . .”

“But?” Angie presses again.

Anger flashes in a fiery orange ball and I wish I could hurl it at something. “But sometimes I hate it, I hate all of it.” The word hate comes out hard and cold and vicious. I dig my fingernails into the woolen knots of the rug. “I don’t have any friends. I’ve never been out, just to have fun. I’m never, ever touched.” I push my fingers deeper into the rug, prying the fibers apart. “I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’m eighteen and I’ve never kissed anyone and I probably never will.” I look up. “All because of my gift.” My breaths come fast. “Sometimes I don’t care if not being a healer means that people will die,” I add, these words flying out of me.

Right then, Finn slinks around the corner.

Our eyes meet.

Then mine flee his.

How much did he hear? The last part surely. But the part about never having a boyfriend, never having been kissed or touched? I wait for Finn to tell me I’m a horrible person, who he’d never consider touching if I was the last girl on earth.

All Finn says is “Nice outfit.”

Angie gets up, a little awkwardly. Her eyes narrow at him.

But Finn’s eyes are on me. I am wearing one of my white dresses today.

“The girl-in-an-asylum look really suits you,” he says.

Angie looks like she wants to kill him. “Finn!”

I cover my mouth and start to laugh, and Finn grins.

“Ignore him, Marlena,” Angie says.

“No, he’s right.” I pull myself off the floor. “I’ve often thought I have that escaped-from-an-asylum thing going on.”

Finn’s grin settles into a smile and it’s hard not to smile back. “What, did your mother drive you here instead of your chauffeur today?” He makes finger quotes around the word chauffeur.

“He’s not a chauffeur, he’s José,” I say. “And no, my mother didn’t drive me. She’d never let me come here if she knew about it.”

“Marlena!” Now Angie turns her exasperation on me. “You have to tell your mother.”

I lift my chin. “I’m eighteen. I’m not a minor. I signed those release forms you gave me, so it’s none of her business whether I do this.”

Finn whistles, then eyes Angie.

Angie shakes her head. “That may be true, but you are not just a study subject. You are a person, a girl, and one who depends on her mother. I do not want to put your well-being at home in jeopardy. I’d be a bad researcher if I did.”

“More like she depends on me,” I say under my breath. Then I glance at the clock on the wall of the office. An hour has gone by already. “I should go, actually.”

“How do you feel about an MRI before you leave?” Angie searches my face for a reaction.

Angie has asked to scan my brain each time I’ve come. The thought of being inside that machine in her lab makes me shudder. I’m not ready for anyone to see inside my head, even though I’m also curious what Angie might find out. “Not today,” I say.

“What are you so afraid of, Marlena?” Finn’s tone is edged with something.

“Finn!” Angie scolds again. “Stop reminding me how young and difficult you are. If you weren’t so smart . . .” She trails off.

“I don’t know why I’m resisting it,” I answer. “I just know I’m not ready.”

Finn’s stare cuts through me. “Maybe you’re afraid we’ll find out you’re as normal as everyone else.”

“That’s enough from you, Finn.” Angie’s voice is firm, the topic closed. “That’s fine, Marlena. If and when you’re ready, please let me know.”

Finn sighs. I know he’s disappointed that Angie let me off the hook so easily. His gaze drifts to a pile of papers on Angie’s desk, then it returns to me.

Our eyes catch.

I take a step closer. “What?”

Finn shrugs. “We put out a public call for people you’ve supposedly healed to contact us for an interview. What it was like. How long it took before they were well again. Before-and-after reports from doctors. That sort of thing.” Finn stops there, but there is something else in his expression.

“What are you leaving out?”

Finn places a hand firmly on that stack, fingers wide and pressing down. “These are emails from people who think you’re a fake.”

Something in my chest tightens. “Really?” Finn nods. Angie’s eyes are on me. I guess I should have been prepared for something like this. There must be plenty of Mrs. Jacobses in the world. Maybe it is time I face them. “Um, what if I want to read them sometime?”

Angie’s eyebrows arch. “You don’t have to—”

“—maybe not,” I interrupt. “But at some point, I might want to.” My eyes seek the machines in the lab beyond Angie’s office door. “Kind of like the MRI, I guess. I’m not quite ready yet, but maybe I will be. Eventually.”

“Of course,” Angie says quietly.

“I really have to go. It’s getting late.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Finn offers.

I keep to the middle of the hallway, wanting to be close to him, but he stays all the way to the other side, his hand dragging against the wall.

“You’re a surprise, Marlena,” he says.

“Good. You could use a little excitement in your life, Finn.”

“I hear you could use a little yourself,” he shoots back.

I blush slightly. “Fair enough.” Then I announce, “I have an audience this Saturday.”

Finn stares straight ahead. “I know.”

I glance at him. “Aren’t you curious?”

“I’m skeptical,” he warns. “And maybe like the MRI, you’re not quite ready for me to be there yet.”

I slow my pace. “How can you work with Angie on this project and not come to see me?”

He grows quiet. We pass Lexi and get closer to the exit, closer to good-bye with every step. We reach the doors and I think I might leave without Finn saying another word. But just before I go he speaks.

“I am curious,” he admits.

I stare into the parking lot. José is standing next to the driver’s side of the car, arms crossed, looking anxious. Then I look at Finn, who’s leaning against the wall inside the vestibule of the entrance, arms crossed too. People are always crossing their arms around me. I think they’re afraid if they don’t, they’ll touch the sacred object that is me by accident. “Why don’t you come then? See for yourself what it’s like?” My heart pumps hard in my chest as I say this. It almost feels like I am asking Finn out. “You can be my special guest.”

Finn laughs. “You have special guests?”

“No.” I shake my head. “But I will make you one. I can do whatever I want. It’s my audience.”

“You sound spoiled,” Finn says.

“Probably,” I say, and look at him hard. “Or maybe it’s just that I am lonely and undersocialized and don’t know any better. I’ll see you on Saturday, Finn,” I add, before I hurry outside into the heat.

ELEVEN

The next morning when I go to the kitchen looking for breakfast, the best kind of surprise awaits me.

“Helen!” I yelp, and she looks up from the coffee she is drinking. Her hair has grown longer since the last time we saw each other. It is thick and lustrous, a cascade of brown butterscotch, and her skin is tan from the sun. From all that tennis she plays, I suppose.

“Hey there!” Helen gets up from the stool where she was sitting at the counter.

“I’ve never been so glad to see you,” I say. Helen is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend. Or maybe more of an older sister.

She eyes me, then she eyes my mother, who has just entered the kitchen. “Oh yeah?”

I nod.

Helen is the first person I remember healing.

My memories of that day are potent. I am six, Helen is nine. She is in a wheelchair, a tall thin man behind her, rolling her up the aisle. She wears a short, yellow dress, yellow like the sun in August. Her legs seem spindly, like they can’t hold her up. They are bent at sharp angles. Her eyes are sunken into her face. I skip toward her, liking the way my dress swirls around my knees. Does her father think I am mocking his daughter? Does the rest of the audience? By the time I am at her chair I can hear her quick puffs of breath.

“Saint Marlena, please heal me,” she begs. Then she lowers her gaze. “I am at your mercy.”

I am at your mercy.

I remember these words most of all. At the time I didn’t understand them. I had to ask my mother that night about mercy, what it was and why this little girl thought I had it.

I grab onto Helen’s armrest and look into her bottomless eyes. She blinks back, scared.

“Don’t be afraid,” I tell her. “I like your dress.”

“I like yours,” she whispers.

I get down on my knees. I’ve nearly forgotten the crowd around us, though now I can remember them, the way they seem to draw close, holding their breath. Helen watches me, big eyes stuck to mine, her father’s too. I study her legs, the way the muscle has withered away along the left calf, the way her kneecaps are plainly visible underneath pale, sagging skin. I press my hands flat against her shins.

That’s when the vision starts. A bright, pulsing red.

The color spreads like a sunburst, a whirling blur of images, of this little girl, her eyes, her mouth, her limbs. They swirl until they are me and I am them, until they are all that I am and ever will be. Until the girl and I are the same, an instance of perfect wholeness, like merging with the universe and taking another person with you.

As the vision settles, Helen’s future flashes before my eyes.

I see her legs. They are fleshy and healthy and shaped the way a young girl’s legs should be, the legs of a girl who plays soccer and tennis and goes out for runs. They are strong legs, beautiful legs, legs that any boy would admire, and they are, without a doubt, most definitely hers.

I look up at the girl again. “What’s your name?”

“Helen,” she says.

I gather her thin legs into my arms, the only hugs I am ever allowed. Rest my cheek against the bones of her shins. I feel the transformation begin, I can nearly see it happening, the shift from these sick and neglected legs to the legs that Helen will have someday soon. “Helen, you will walk. You will see. We will run together.” I let go and get up. “Come and see me when you’re better,” I tell her.

Helen did come back; she’s come back many times. On each visit she walks straight and tall on her beautiful legs, legs that run and jump and play soccer. Legs that all the boys admire at the college where she’s on the tennis team, but legs that all the girls admire, too. It turns out, Helen prefers the girls’ admiration to the boys’. Helen is living proof, I suppose, that my gift is real. Inexplicable maybe, but true.

As Helen and my mother exchange greetings, I notice a big white plastic bag sitting on the counter. I bet that inside is a lemon cake from a bakery where Helen lives. She knows I love them. “You don’t have to keep thanking me,” I tell Helen every time I see her, telling her to stop bringing gifts, that her friendship is plenty. She brings them anyway.

My mother places a stack of documents in front of her on the kitchen island. “Good morning, Marlena.” Her tone is formal. Polite. Helen will always be welcome in our home because of our history, but my mother doesn’t like it when I get close to someone else. “Did you sleep well?”

I shake my head. I had another vision of Finn, the same one as before. Another maybe-dream. “It was too hot in my room.”

“Why didn’t you turn on the air conditioning?” she asks. Her expression darkens. “You’re not getting sick, are you?”

“No, Mama,” I reply, my tone formal to match hers. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine for the audience on Saturday.”

She nods. “Good. We have important people coming and you need to be at your best.” There is a covered plate next to the sink. My mother points to it. “Fatima made some bollos for you.” Her voice is accusing, but the promise of Fatima’s Portuguese bollos, little individual round breads shaped like English muffins, overrides this.

“Helen, are you hungry?” I ask, even as I’m uncovering the plate and slicing one in half so I can toast it. Sometimes I’ll eat them only with butter, but often I make sandwiches with them.

“I ate on the way here,” Helen says.

I peer into the bag Helen brought, and I was right: lemon cake. I suddenly feel loved. “I’m starving,” I tell her. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She takes a small sip of her coffee. “Take your time.”

When my two halves of bollo pop up from the toaster I butter them and gobble them down. “You’re missing out, Helen. No one makes bollos like Fatima.”

She laughs. “Really. I don’t want to get in the middle of the romance you’re having with those.”

“Your loss,” I say, shoving the rest in my mouth, a too-big bite, but I don’t care. I wait for my mother to say something cutting about my poor manners, about talking with my mouth full, about eating too fast, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

I am about to dig into Helen’s lemon cake when my mother looks up from the documents she’s been studying. “Marlena, I have incredible news. One of the major networks is going to do an eight-part series about you for television! The lawyers sent over the proposal from the network.” She turns to Helen to share her joy, but Helen stares into her coffee cup like it might tell her fortune. “The producers of the show want to come here to follow you around for a few weeks, see you at home, film at your audiences. They want to tell the story of your life. You’ll be even more famous!”

A television show? Follow me around for weeks? I’d have no privacy. No chance of escaping to see Angie or Finn. I would have to be Marlena the Saint, Marlena the Healer, perfect and demure, performing my role 24/7. I feel Helen’s eyes on me. I slide the lemon cake away from me.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” my mother presses.

“Yes, Mama,” I agree.

No, Mama. It’s horrible.

“We will need an even bigger church than we have now after it airs!”

“I’m so excited,” I say, though my tone communicates the opposite. I refuse to look my mother in the eye. Instead I look at Helen. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.” I head out the back door of the house and into the garden, still in my robe and pajamas. I don’t care. I want to be in the fresh air. I hear Helen’s steps behind me, but I don’t slow down. I take the path in our yard that leads to a stairway down to the ocean. I sit on the top step and wait for Helen to join me.

She kicks her shoes off onto the grass and arranges herself at the other end of the wooden slat. “Marlena, what’s going on?”

I stare out at the water, at the way the sun shines across the ripples, creating moving slivers of light. I inhale the briny smell. I never tire of it. “I don’t know.” I turn to look at Helen, envious of the jean shorts that show off her long perfect legs, her clingy cotton T-shirt. The casual way she wears her clothes. “I don’t want to be on a television show. I don’t want the church to be any bigger. I don’t want any more attention than I already have.”

“Marlena . . . you sound so . . . so conflicted,” Helen says. “And upset.”

I close my eyes, tears welling. They spill down my cheeks and drip from my chin onto my robe. I wipe my hand across my face. “Let’s talk about something else. I want to hear about you. Why the visit? Shouldn’t you be starting fall classes or something?”

Helen rests her arms across her knees and leans forward. “I start school on Monday. But I’m here because I got a phone call from a Dr. Angela Holbrook, who wants to interview me about you.” She takes a deep breath. “Is she part of why you’re so upset?”

I sniffle. “No. Angie’s nice. You’ll like her.”

“Angie? So you are working with her. She told me she had your permission to interview people, but I wondered if it was true. I wanted to talk to you before I went to see her.” Helen is still bent forward, close but not close enough to touch. “I wanted to make sure you were okay if I spoke to her. That she wasn’t doing some shitty exposé on you, trying to prove you’re a fake or something.”

I mimic the way Helen sits, resting my arms across my knees. I scoot toward her, relieved when she doesn’t shift away. “It’s okay to talk to her. Really.”

Helen’s hair shines against the backdrop of blue sky. “Tell me about Dr. Holbrook then. What’s the deal?”

A seagull is pecking at a clamshell at the edge of the surf, trying to pry it open with its beak. “Angie is a neuroscientist and she studies the brain. She’s interested in my gift. Where it comes from. What it is. How it works. Whether it’s real,” I add.

Helen huffs. “You don’t need a scientist to tell you about your gift. And you certainly know for a fact that it’s real. I’m living proof!” She crosses and uncrosses her long tan legs as if to remind me. She places her hands on her bare, toned thighs.

I rest my chin against my forearms, watching the gull attack its breakfast. “But what if it wasn’t? What if everything is falling apart?”

Helen shifts so she can peer into my face. “Marlena, please tell me what’s going on. Stop talking in half statements. You can trust me. I’m your friend.”

Tears sting the backs of my eyes again. “You really are my friend, aren’t you? You’re the only one I have.” I nudge my foot against a pebble until it falls off the edge of the step, tumbling toward the rocks below. “You’re my friend despite the fact that you bring me gifts as payback. Friends don’t owe each other like that. Friends are equals.”

Helen looks away. “I know you always say that, but it’s tradition. An expectation. Not something I can simply decide not to do.”

“My mother’s tradition. Not mine.”

“Okay. I won’t do it anymore,” Helen says. “I’m sorry. You are my friend. You are.” She repeats this, as though she knows how hard it will be to convince me. But then she does the one thing that makes me believe what she says is true. She reaches out a hand and places it on my back. She leaves it there, her palm warm and soothing.

A sob escapes my chest, despite my trying to hold it in.

Helen reaches her arm around me and draws me into a hug. I feel her chin pressing on the top of my head. Soon I am crying hard.

“Oh, Marlena,” Helen says after a while, once my sobs turn to hiccups and my breaths grow more even. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Don’t let go of me.”

“I won’t, I won’t,” Helen says, rubbing her hand up and down my arm.

Eventually the tears dry and my body grows calm. Helen and I sit there in the quiet of the morning, pressed together, watching the waves as they come into the shore and recede. I hope my mother doesn’t see us clutching each other. I try and memorize the feeling of being touched by someone who cares, someone who wants nothing from me other than to help, someone who calls herself my friend and means it. I wonder what life would be like if a comforting touch was a normal occurrence, if it would make me into a different person. Maybe there are other people who would be willing to comfort me, too, and not only because my touch could heal them.

“You are just as much a healer as I am,” I tell Helen.

She laughs softly. “I wish that were true. I wish I were gifted like you.”

“Sometimes it makes my life hateful.”

“But your ability to heal is something incredible. The kind of thing people want to do a television show about.”

I pull back. “Maybe they should do a television show about you and your tennis and your romantic girlfriends and your college friends and your nice college life.” My voice is fiery.

Helen stares at me, like she is trying to figure out if I’m kidding.

“I’m serious,” I tell her.

Helen laughs. “What in the world are you talking about?” Helen shifts and our knees touch. “Now you have to tell me what’s going on. No more stalling. I want to know everything.”

I stare at the place where our skin touches so casually. Wish that everyone in my life could act this way, grateful Helen mustered the courage. “Everything is changing. I’m changing, but maybe my gift is changing, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just, it’s always been who I am. I’ve never known how to be anyone else other than Marlena the Healer, and before, I never wanted to be. It was enough. But lately I’ve wanted more, different things, the kinds of things other people take for granted, like school and friends and parties on weekends. Which makes me sound shallow, I know—”

“—Marlena—”

“—but then, I also can’t stop thinking about whether my gift is real, if it works, or if it only sometimes works.” The words are spilling out, and I let them. “And I wonder if that is a new thing, like, if my gift is a kind of reservoir in me, and I’ve almost used it up. Like maybe sometimes when I reach for it, I only touch dry land, and other times I reach the place within me where it still remains, but soon those places will have dried up too.” I tell Helen about Mrs. Jacobs. It feels good to get it out again, like when I discussed it with Angie, this thing my mother has forbidden us to speak about.

Helen’s cheeks turn bright red as she listens. “I already hate this Mrs. Jacobs-lady.”

I shake my head. “I don’t. Maybe I needed her to do what she did. To open my eyes.”

“You don’t owe her anything.”

A tall, spindly blue flower rises through the steps and I catch the petals gently in my hand, admiring them. “You’re in good company hating her. My mother wants her banished from the town.”

“I bet. Your mother is a formidable woman. She is not to be messed with.”

I let go of the flower. “That’s the other thing. My mother and I are fighting constantly about the ways I’m changing. I’m just so tired, Helen, of being this person, performing Marlena the Saint all day, every day. The thought of a TV show following me around twenty-four seven. I can’t even . . . God, it would be horrible. Sometimes I feel like a machine that people use at will, that the whole town uses to generate itself.”

“Oh, Marlena,” Helen says carefully. “I don’t want you to feel that way.”

“My mother wishes I could still be ten years old,” I go on, “and tries to dress me like a little girl and says it’s to protect my reputation, but I don’t care about my reputation anymore. I want to be irreputable. Like not reputable at all. Disreputable.”

The serious look on Helen’s face evaporates, replaced by laughter. It makes me laugh with her, a laughter that feels good. “Yeah, I’m sure your mother wouldn’t like that,” she says, rolling her eyes. “No way. No boyfriends—or girlfriends—not for saints.” She seems thoughtful. “How about this for a title for their television special: Marlena Oliveira: The Ruining of a Former Saint.”

This makes me laugh even more. “Or: The Miracle Healer of New England: Depurified Before Your Very Own Eyes!”

“I’d watch either one of those shows,” Helen says.

My arm is wrapped around my middle from laughing so hard. “Maybe Angie will prove I’m a fake and then no one will want to do any television shows about me.”

Helen’s brow furrows. “But why would you want that? Without you, without your miracles, my life wouldn’t be my life.” She sounds slightly betrayed.

This is the last thing I want. “I’m sorry Helen. I promise that’s not what this is about. But sometimes, lately, my gift feels like a curse. I wouldn’t want to trade my visions. But I don’t want to be a business anymore, to be the center of an entire church.” I think of Guadalupe yesterday, and the desperation inside her son’s eyes. “I want a normal life. A television show would kill that.” I pick up a stone and grip it tightly in the center of my palm. “Sometimes I want to wish away this so-called gift.”

“But Marlena, can you even imagine life without your gift? It would be such a drastic change.”

“Sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I just want to be free.”

Helen sighs. “You may not always feel that way. You may not like the life that comes afterward.”

“Yes,” I say, sure this is true. “Yes I will.”

“So you trust this Dr. Holbrook?” Helen asks after a long silence.

I nod. “I do.”

“All right. I’ll make an appointment to talk to her.”

I suddenly think about Helen meeting Finn. All thoughts of Finn make my heart flutter, and I smile.

“Marlena.” Helen draws out my name. “What else aren’t you telling me?”

Warmth creeps up my neck. “There might be a boy.” I try and keep my eyes on the ocean. “Dr. Holbrook has a grad assistant. I kind of might . . . like him.”

Helen drums her thighs. “You have a crush!”

I cover my eyes with my hands. “He’s so gorgeous. And tall. And perfect. His name is Finn.” I love the way his name sounds when I say it.

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-one.”

“An older crush!”

“Yes.” I slide my hands down my face and look at her over the tips of my fingers. “He doesn’t believe in me. He thinks I’m a fake.”

The playfulness in Helen’s eyes dims. “That doesn’t bother you?”

I shake my head. “If anything, it’s a relief.”

Helen stands up. “Okay then. Get dressed. We’re going out.”

I rise to my feet. “Where?”

“To Dr. Holbrook’s center so I can make an appointment in person, since I already came all the way out here. I may as well, right?”

“But—”

“Marlena! Because maybe Finn will be there and I want to check him out!”

“Oh!” I put my hand over my mouth.

“And afterward we’re going out to eat. I want all the gory details about this crush of yours. Then I can offer my expert advice.” Helen’s eyelashes flutter. “I am rather an expert in the romance and love department.”

“You really want to do all that stuff?”

Helen smiles and stands up from the step. “Of course I do. Friends are there for each other where romance is concerned.”

“I wouldn’t know.” I get up to join her.

Helen is already heading across the lawn toward the house. Her hair swings from side to side as she walks. “Well, now you do,” she calls back.

TWELVE

“What, exactly, did you tell my mother so I could spend the afternoon with you?” I ask from the passenger seat of Helen’s old, beat-up Volvo.

She shifts into gear when the stoplight turns green. “Just that I wanted to take you to lunch as an offering after the healing walk we’ll be going on.” The car speeds up. “I told her my legs have been bothering me.”

I look at Helen, at her long legs, the way her right foot moves easily between the gas pedal and the brake. “Have they?”

She laughs. “No, absolutely not.”

“So you just lied to my mother?”

“Yup,” Helen says with a shrug. “People lie to their parents all the time. Today, we’re giving you an education in normalcy. First, hugs while you’re crying. Next, your friend—because I am your friend—lies to your mother on your behalf, so we can get the hell out of your house for a few hours.” Helen reaches behind my seat and pulls a bright-green bag off the floor and plops it into my lap. “Now, you’re going to go through my stuff and pick out a real outfit to wear and not this nightgown thing”—Helen pinches the gauzy material at my shoulder—“because this just will not do, and also, one of the most typical things girls do in high school is go out of the house wearing what their mothers approve of, and immediately change clothes into something totally slutty once they’re with their friends.”

My jaw has fallen open as Helen goes through this list, her eyes still on the road, driving us past the town as naturally as José. “I’ve done that a couple of times now.”

“You’ve done what?”

“Gone out in an outfit my mother would never approve of, and on the way home changed back into one of my hateful nightgowns so she wouldn’t know.”

Helen smiles. “You’re getting more normal by the minute. And you don’t even have to stop being a healer, Marlena. You can be both, see?”

I ignore this comment. Helen means well, but it’s hard for anyone to understand what it’s like to be me. I think back to my outfit yesterday. “I haven’t worn anything slutty, though.”

“That part doesn’t matter. I was mostly kidding about the slutty part.”

“But,” I go on, “one time, the jeans were skinny jeans, and you could see my bra through the armholes of the tank top.”

“Just the right bit of slutty then.” Helen rounds the corner and heads down the road along the sea. “Perfectly normal where someone you have a crush on is concerned.”

A question has been brewing in me and I muster the courage to ask it, reminding myself that I can talk to Helen about anything. That she’s a friend. She says so herself. “In the vein of helping me be normal,” I start, then trail off when I see where we are.

“Tell me.”

“But we’re almost to Angie’s center.”

Helen pulls the car over and turns off the ignition. “We have time.” She grabs the bag from my lap and starts digging through it. “Besides, you need to change clothes. What if Finn is there when you go to see Dr. Holbrook?” She pulls out a green dress with spaghetti straps and a wide scoop neck. “Put this on and talk.”

My eyebrows arch. “Now?”

Helen turns away. “In the effort to not overwhelm you with so much normalcy, I won’t watch. Now say what you wanted to say.”

I unbutton the sleeves of my white cotton shift, trying as best I can to wiggle out of it in the passenger seat of the car. At least the road is deserted. “My question,” I begin, but again can’t manage to finish the sentence. I’m not used to having someone I can really talk to, especially about things that are slightly embarrassing.

“Marlena . . .”

I pull the sundress over my head and slide it down my body. Everything I’ve been wondering comes pouring out. “What’s it like to kiss someone? I mean, how do you even do it? How does it work? Like, is there a magic formula or something?” I wait for Helen’s laughter, for her to mock me.

But she doesn’t. “Such excellent questions. So you want to kiss Finn.”

My cheeks grow hot. I yank the hem of the sundress as far as it will go over my thighs. “He doesn’t think of me that way. But I wish I could kiss him. I’ve thought about it. Or tried to think about it. I don’t really have much experience to draw on. Or any,” I add, my eyes on my bare, knobby knees.

“If you really like him, and he likes you back, experience won’t matter,” Helen says. “You’ll find your way.”

The sound of the waves crashing comes through the windows and fills the silence. “I want him to like me so badly.”

Helen sighs. “I want him to like you, too.”

I shake my head slightly. “Why would he? I’m such a freak.”

“You are not. Don’t try and convince yourself of things that aren’t true.”

Helen sounds so sure of this, and I want to believe her. “The whole town thinks I’m a freak. The other kids my age talk about me like I am one. I hear Fatima and José discussing the gossip about me that goes around town.”

“They’re just jealous of what you can do,” Helen says.

“Right. Everyone must wish to live in total isolation, then draw crowds hoping for photos and begging for help on the weekends. It’s such a blast. Way better than going to homecoming and prom.”

Helen turns the key in the ignition and the car rumbles back to life. “Marlena, you perform miracles.” She glances in the side mirror and pulls onto the road. “You may not believe that people could be jealous. But trust me, to have the ability to change someone’s life, as you do over and over, is amazing. Something you can’t dismiss without at least a little admiration.”

I try and take in what Helen said. “You really believe in me.”

“Of course I do,” she responds, with the same confidence as earlier. “Don’t you?” she asks. It sounds almost like an afterthought, a question she doesn’t expect me to answer because the truth, at least to her, is so obvious.

So I let the question hang there, suspended on the sounds of the ocean as it rises and falls around us, beautiful and loud and unpredictable.

We get out of the car. Goose bumps rise along my arms and legs even though it’s hot outside. It seems like this heat isn’t ever going away. “This dress is so short.”

Helen appraises me. “Calm down. That dress is perfect for you.”

I try to ignore the strange feeling of air along the skin of my shins, my knees, my thighs. “If you say so.”

Helen heads to the door of the center. “Are you coming or what?”

“I’m right behind you.”

We head inside, Helen first, all confidence, like she’s been here before and knows exactly what she’s doing, where to go. She marches right up to Lexi, who I now know is studying neuroscience, like Finn, and who told me once while I was waiting for Angie that Angie has dozens of students competing for the chance to answer phones at the center. Just to be in Angie’s vicinity.

Helen explains to Lexi why she’s here and I wander down the hall, skin prickling with static, curious if Finn is around somewhere, if he might be sitting on the floor of Angie’s office sorting papers, like he often is. I enter the lab with the machines, the blinding sunlight pouring through the windows and giving everything an otherworldly glow. There’s something about the MRI machine that both calls and repels me. Today I am drawn to that big white tunnel. It looks like something you would see on a spaceship.

I put my hand out, nearly touching it, but not quite.

I wonder what it would be like to be inside it.

What would it discover about my brain? Anything useful? Would it show that my brain is as normal as the next person’s? Maybe I should just let Angie test me and be done with it. Maybe I would learn something important.

I lean closer, pressing my palm against the cold metal. A blinding shock goes through me and I retract my hand. The skin is an angry red, like I’ve just laid it against a hot iron skillet. I flex my fingers, then rub them, trying to soothe the burning.

Did I touch something I shouldn’t have?

Maybe I’m stupid, but I reach out and press my hand against the metal again. I want to know if the burning was real or my imagination playing tricks. At first, there is nothing more than the feeling of cold contact between me and the machine. One minute passes, then two, and the sunlight shifts, just enough so that it beams directly at me through the windows, thick rays of it, hot and blinding. I turn my face toward it and close my eyes, absorbing the warmth on my skin.

Images dance across the back of my eyelids. Glowing shapes, figures and objects surrounded by halos of light. There isn’t one color that dominates, but many. Pinks and pale blues and yellows, greens and a deep magenta; some hues are shades of gray and a black that nearly swallows the light and all other color. At first, I can’t tell what the figures are. Then, slowly, they become clear.

Minds. Brains.

I’m seeing into the brains of the people who’ve been inside this machine. The ways that certain pathways pulse with light and others are dark as night, as though they’ve died. I see growths with sinister tentacles reaching through every part of the mind, and tiny tumors, contained and compact. They flash faster, one after the other, bright and dizzying. I can’t pull myself away. It’s like the machine is playing a movie it produced only for me.

A loud rushing fills my ears and my entire body starts to tingle.

“Oh no,” I hear myself say.

Then everything, the noise, the flashes, goes blank.

“Marlena?”

It’s Helen’s voice, but it sounds far away.

“Are you okay?”

“Marlena.” This time, I recognize Angie.

I open my eyes. The two of them are peering down at me, worried looks on their faces. I am lying on the couch in Angie’s office, a blanket thrown over my body. Cool air is pouring into the room from the vent, despite Angie’s prohibition on air conditioning. My head is pounding. Spots shine across my eyes. “Hi,” I manage, but it comes out hoarse. I try and use my hands to stabilize myself so I can sit up.

“Don’t,” Angie says. “You should stay lying down.”

Helen shoves a bag of pretzels at me. “Eat these.”

I shake my head. “I’m fine.” I tug the blanket around my legs, though not because I am cold. My legs feel bare in this dress. Angie and Helen are skeptical. “Really,” I add. Then I gesture between the two women. “Angie, this is Helen, by the way.”

Helen crosses her arms. “This isn’t a joke. You passed out. You’re not fine.”

I look at Angie and try for a laugh. “Wow, I must have really scared you for you to put on the air conditioning.” No one else is smiling. I proceed to shed the blanket so I can stand up. I want to reassure everyone. At first I’m unsteady, but then the dizziness subsides. With my bare feet planted on the soft rug, I am feeling stronger. “Really. It’s no big deal. That happens sometimes.”

“What happens?” Angie asks.

“I faint. You know.” But the two of them don’t seem to get it. “After I have visions? It started a year or two ago.”

“Is this part of what you meant when you said your gift might be changing?” Helen asks.

“Maybe?”

“You’ve never told me about this before,” Angie says. “Not so explicitly. You’ve talked of getting tired, but not of passing out.”

“Because it’s not that big a deal?”

“Wait—did you say you had a vision, Marlena?” Helen asks before Angie can say anything else. “What prompted it?”

I pull the blanket from the couch and drape it around my shoulders. Angie touches a panel on the wall and the vents stop working. “It was the MRI machine. I had my hand on it, and, I don’t know, I responded almost like it was a person in need of healing, except I started seeing all the people who’d ever been inside it, and what was going on in their brains. It was a lot to take in. So, eventually I passed out, I guess?” Angie is opening each of the windows in her office.

“I really wish you’d let me see inside your brain,” she says. “And not just because I’m curious about you. It worries me that you’re passing out.”

I wave her off. “This is just another day in the life of a healer. I swear.” Something occurs to me. “Um, where’s Finn? He wasn’t around to witness my dramatic collapse?”

Angie looks away suddenly. “No. He had somewhere to be this afternoon.”

As much as I want to see Finn, I’m relieved he wasn’t here to find me crumpled on the ground, skirt hiked who knows how high, my face slack.

Helen is staying at a safe distance. Like she’s afraid to touch me again, like my fainting and talk of visions reminded her of who I am. “You really are okay?”

I nod.

“All right.” To Angie she says, “Call me and we’ll set up that time to talk. I’m going to take Marlena out for a big meal, since I think she needs one.”

“I agree.” Angie stares at me hard. “Marlena, promise you’ll think about an MRI soon. Not for my sake, for yours. For your health.”

“Sure,” I say as though I’m really considering it, as though it’s no big deal. But as Helen and I are walking toward the exit, a rolling shiver passes over my body. I can’t bring myself to look in the direction of that big white tunnel that has the power to reveal all the secrets of the mind.

THIRTEEN

Helen takes a call on her phone after we arrive in town and get out of the car.

“Sorry,” she mouths. “I have to take this. Give me ten, fifteen minutes?”

I nod, and wander along the sidewalk of Main Street to kill time. A weird sensation stirs. Not like a vision. More like déjà vu, or when a place you know well suddenly seems unfamiliar, like if you leave your house and come back and someone has rearranged the furniture, but only a little. It takes me a minute to pinpoint what’s different. It’s seeing Gertie that does it.

She’s standing in the doorway of her shop, like always. The kite in the window is gone, replaced by long-sleeved T-shirts emblazoned with an image of me as a baby surrounded by a glowing halo, my tiny fist reaching, one finger outstretched. Next to it is something else I’ve never seen before. A doll, maybe a foot and a half tall, on a shelf. It’s made to look like me in one of the wedding gowns I wore at a healing. I recognize the dress from an audience last year.

It was an unusual audience, because it went on for hours longer than normal and I’d healed forty people instead of my usual six or seven. It caused a sensation, both for the sheer number of people I cured and also because I collapsed at the end of it. It wasn’t the first time I ever fainted, but the only time this has happened during an audience. The people present for my marathon healing began to call it the Day of Many Miracles. Word spread and the anniversary is coming up in October. My mother has been preparing for triple the number of people and tourists as usual.

Maybe that’s why this doll has appeared, with a perfect miniature replica of that dress. Gertie and the rest of the town plan to make money from the anniversary.

Of course they do.

A burning starts across my skin. Splotches of color dot my vision and all I can see are the rocks that pepper the garden lining the sidewalk. The urge to take one of those rocks into my palm and shatter Gertie’s window rises as the burning spreads deeper and hotter. I want to break the doll into a million pieces. I crouch down, push my head between my knees, and try to breathe slowly.

“Honey, are you all right?” Gertie asks.

I let out another long breath before I stand up again. When I turn to Gertie, I realize what is out of place. She doesn’t recognize me. She’s looking at me like I might be anyone, some tourist girl who wandered off from her parents. “Do you need me to call someone, sweetheart? Your mother?”

The burning I felt before retreats like a cool cloth across my skin. “Sorry. No. I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” I stare at her, unable to believe she doesn’t know that it’s me. A giddiness bubbles into my throat.

It’s my outfit.

The blue sundress. The sandals. The thin cardigan sweater I shrugged over my shoulders so I wouldn’t feel so bare, and that swallows me in a way Helen swore was both fashionable and practical after my fainting spell. The oversized movie-star sunglasses Helen lent me in the car, so big they practically cover the top half of my face. The fact that my long hair is pulled up into a high knot.

I look like a regular girl. Like I could be anybody.

Like I might be nobody. Nobody special.

But Gertie is looking at me strangely now, and I can’t decide if it’s because I am acting strangely or if I am starting to seem familiar and she’s trying to place me.

“I’m fine. Really.” I hurry off before it dawns on Gertie she’s talking to the real version of that stupid doll in her window.

I continue down Main Street. People pass by like it isn’t me they are seeing. Like they can’t see me at all. Like I’m not worth noticing.

Is this all it takes to become anonymous? To be free?

A pair of sunglasses? A sundress? A topknot?

I glance behind me. In the distance, Helen is still on the phone, waving her hand in the air, as though the person she’s talking to can see her. I veer a little, like I might be drunk. One after the other, the souvenir shops of the town appear and recede. I am tempted to enter, to see what else people are hawking in my name, something I don’t usually do. But I don’t want to press my luck and risk someone recognizing me, bringing this unexpected reprieve to an end. The ice cream shop appears on my right and I can’t resist. I duck inside and the cool air makes me shiver.

I’ve always wanted to go out for ice cream, to visit this place not as me, but as a person in the mood for a treat. The bell on the door rings as I enter, but Mrs. Lewis, the owner, is engrossed in her magazine. Some of the ice cream flavors are fluorescent in color, others more muted. There are the normal ones, like strawberry and chocolate. But some of the names have a theme.

Miracle Mash and Healing Hazelnut.

Espresso Ecstasy and Raspberry Rapture.

Visionary Vanilla.

Whatever. I don’t care. It’s not as though I’m surprised the flavors are like everything else in this town. This is my hour off from being Marlena the Healer and I’m going to enjoy it.

Mrs. Lewis must sense a customer, because she looks up. “Would you like to try anything?” She takes a pink spoon from a cup that is full of them, ready for me to direct her to a flavor I want to taste.

“Sure,” I say slowly, surveying the possibilities. There are so many and they all look so good. “How about . . . Miracle Mash.” I have to cover my mouth to stop from giggling. I have a secret. Anonymity, I decide, is my new best friend.

Mrs. Lewis smiles. “Miracle Mash is one of my favorites.” She leans forward to scrape some ice cream out of its tub. “Are you here on vacation with your family?”

“Um. Yes,” I say, a little uncertain. I’m not used to lying. Or pretending. At least not with anyone other than my mother.

Mrs. Lewis reaches over the counter to hand me the spoon, now covered in what looks like chocolate ice cream dotted with a million things. Toffee. Chips. Marshmallow. Maybe streaks of peanut butter? I take it from her.

“Will you and your parents be going to the Healer’s audience this Saturday?” Mrs. Lewis asks as I lick the spoon clean. “Most people who visit our town attend even if it’s not their thing. They go out of curiosity. It’s not like you have to believe to go.”

The ice cream melts on my tongue and I chew all the delicious things in it, made even more so because Mrs. Lewis doesn’t know that it’s me. Freedom is tasty. I swallow, and realize that Mrs. Lewis is waiting for me to answer. “Do you believe in the Healer?” I ask, realizing I genuinely want to know what she says.

Mrs. Lewis glances at the candy-coated pink ceiling of her shop. “I do.”

My heart speeds up. I drop the used plastic spoon into a container on the counter for them. “You sound so sure. Why? What makes you believe?” Why do I suddenly care so much about the opinions of the nice lady who owns the ice cream shop?

“It’s difficult to describe, but . . . I suppose there’s a couple of reasons,” she starts. “I think miracles are possible and they happen all the time.” My eyebrows arch and she laughs. “Not necessarily big miracles like walking on water, but little, everyday ones. Someone smiles at you for seemingly no reason, out of the blue, when you are having the worst moment of your life, and somehow that smile gives you the strength to get through the afternoon. You know?”

No one ever talks to me like this. “I think so.”

“But I also think bigger miracles are possible. That they’re rare, but they exist, and sometimes lucky people who walk among us are their source. I believe something sacred resides in them, that they have the power to connect us, to remind us that life is a beautiful mystery. They can transform us into something better. Something whole.”

My eyes are getting watery. I blink. “Do you think that . . . the Healer can do those things?”

Mrs. Lewis’s eyes are glistening a little, too. “Yes.”

My heart is galloping, stars are exploding and blurring my vision. “Is there anything you’ve ever wished for Marlena to heal?”

Mrs. Lewis grows quiet. She takes a long, labored breath before speaking again. “It wouldn’t work for me.”

“Why not?” For the first time in as long as I can remember, the desire to heal someone, to do it of my own free will and because I want to help, not because my mother is making me, rises up as powerful as any vision I’ve ever had. “You live right here. Maybe you should take your own advice and go to one of the Healer’s audiences. Just to see.”

Mrs. Lewis goes completely still. The statue of a late middle aged lady, humble and sad. “It costs money,” she informs me. “To get a healing. Like everything else in this life. If you can’t pay, the Healer won’t attend you at an audience.”

I shake my head back and forth. “That’s not right. It’s just not.”

“I agree,” Mrs. Lewis says, misunderstanding my meaning.

“No, that’s literally not right. I mean, I read up on the Healer and how the audiences work before my family came here.” My cheeks flush a little with the lie. “And that’s not how it works. You have to ask to get on the list for an audience. But you don’t have to pay to be on the list! And afterward, people send their gratitude in donations and offerings, which is why the Healer’s family lives so well.”

Mrs. Lewis is studying me. I bet she’s wondering why a tourist would know so much. “I don’t want to upset your idealism, sweetheart, but I promise you, the money gets paid up front. No money, no healings. And they are expensive. That is why the Healer and her family live so well. I tried myself once, and the mother turned me away because I didn’t have the funds.”

My lips part.

Could she be right?

It would make so much sense. How we could afford all that we have. That the money is so consistent. Shame pours through me that my mother would turn away this nice lady, that she is charging for healings up front, like they are a mattress or a new car, making me into the car salesman. This shame covers every inch of skin. I can smell it, taste it, hear it. “If this Marlena girl is worth anything at all, she’ll heal you for free.”

Mrs. Lewis smiles weakly. She thinks I’m being idealistic again. She sniffles and a tear rolls down her cheek.

“Go to the audience,” I say. “Really.”

“Maybe I will.” She wipes a hand across her face and starts to laugh. Shakes her head. “Look at me, getting all emotional with a customer who just came in to get some ice cream! You poor thing!” She sniffles again and this makes her laugh more. “Did you like Miracle Mash or do you want to try another flavor? I want people to be sure when they choose their ice cream. I like them to enjoy it.”

I laugh a little, too, the sound of it releasing us from some of the intensity of our conversation. Mrs. Lewis seems serious about the business of picking flavors. Like choosing the right ice cream is as important as anything else. As important, even, as a miracle.

It occurs to me I don’t have any money. I never do.

“Um, I, um, my parents have all my money. I’m so sorry.” The last word comes out a squeak.

“No worries, honey. Really.” Mrs. Lewis plucks a baby-sized cup from a teetering stack and reaches into the tub of Miracle Mash. She comes up with a scoop that she plops into the cup. She plants another pink spoon into the ice cream and hands it over the counter. “This one is on me.”

I stare at it.

“Take it,” she says. “Really. It was nice talking to you, sweetheart. I’m glad you stopped in. You made a slow day more interesting. Besides, it’s nice to see a girl your age with an interest in big things like faith and miracles and doing the right thing.”

I reach out and she hands me the cup. As she does, I make it a point to touch her hand, to press my fingers against her own, hoping that some relief for Mrs. Lewis, even a little bit, might be transferred to her in this brief instant. “Thank you so much,” I tell her, holding on a beat longer, as long as I can. “This is so nice of you.”

“Sweetheart, it’s nothing. You have a good rest of your day.”

I nod, my throat tight. “You should go to one of those audiences. If anyone deserves to be healed, it’s you,” I say, then head out the door. It chimes with my exit.

I make my way back toward Helen, taking one bite after the other, wondering if ice cream always tastes this good or if the way I received it, like a gift, a tiny, miraculous offering given freely and joyfully and without the need for anything in return, makes all the difference.

“Are you ready to eat?” Helen asks when I reach her.

I nod. “I’m starving.” The word starving comes out with emphasis on star. I adjust the sunglasses higher on the bridge of my nose.

Sunglasses are my new favorite thing. But not only because they give me precious anonymity. I guess because that anonymity turned out to mean more than freedom from recognition. It gave me that conversation with Mrs. Lewis, allowed me to realize that I could find it inside myself to want to be Marlena the Healer. Not out of obligation. Just because. That it is more important than ever that I stop allowing my mother to control my gift and all that comes with it. To put a price on it.

Helen searches my face. “What happened between now and twenty minutes ago? I was worried about you. You looked so out of it and now you look so much better.”

I shrug.

“I thought you’d be disappointed about missing your chance to see Finn,” she says.

“I guess I just needed to take a walk.”

“Marlena?” Helen’s voice is singsong. She draws out each syllable of my name playfully. “Did you see Finn or something?”

“No. But I did eat some delicious ice cream.”

Helen flips her sunglasses up onto her head. “Well, that’s it, then. I bet your body needed the sugar.” She pushes her hair behind her ears. “Now let’s eat something healthy so you don’t faint on me again.”

“Let’s,” I agree, and slip the sweater from my shoulders, hanging it over my arm as we walk. We pass groups of tourists window-shopping on Main Street. Not one of them turns in my direction. Maybe it’s because Helen and I are unremarkable in the way we’re chatting, two girls who want nothing more than to tell each other their secrets on a beautiful day by the sea.

FOURTEEN

“I don’t want this lipstick.” I pluck the tube from my mother’s hand and pick up a different one from the box of makeup. I am staring into the long mirror hanging in my mother’s bedroom, the two of us engaging in the weekly ritual of dressing me for my audience. “I’ll wear this one.”

My mother is looking at me like she doesn’t know who I am. “You never care which lipstick you wear. You never care which dress either. You let me do everything.”

Earlier, I rejected one gown after the other until I found the one I liked best. “Well, today, I’m not letting you.”

“That dark shade will be lovely with your coloring,” my mother says. She doesn’t seem to notice I’m being cold. Or she’s choosing not to. Ever since that talk with Mrs. Lewis, I can’t look at her without getting angry. “A bit of smoky shadow would be lovely, too. It will help make your features stand out against those bright stage lights.” Our eyes meet in the mirror. “It’s good to see you taking your audiences seriously again. Whatever has gotten into you, I hope it keeps up.”

Finn. The hope of seeing Finn at my audience has gotten into me.

All I respond is “Yes, Mama.”

My mother turns to the tiny buttons of the sleeves on my dress.

The gown I chose is simpler than the typical princess dress that bells at the waist that my mother always picks. She thinks they make me look regal. This one drops straight to the floor. The lace makes it beautiful. Hand sewn and so intricate it’s difficult to believe someone was born with the talent for such masterful work. My hands might be able to heal, but there is plenty of other amazing artistry that human hands can produce.

My mother takes out a small brush and begins painting my lips. I try to imagine the moment when Finn sees me. I wonder if he will think I am beautiful, if he doesn’t mind when a girl wears makeup, if he might like the cascade of my long dark hair against so much lace.

I smile at myself in the mirror and imagine that I am smiling at him.

“It’s good to see you happy, Marlena.” My mother starts to hum a song she used to sing when I was small.

I wish I could enjoy it. But it’s difficult not to snap at her.

“Mama, do you charge money for my healings? Up front?” I ask. My mother is still humming, like she hasn’t heard my question. “I thought people made offerings after healings. You’ve always told me they were donations. Not payments. That you couldn’t put a price on a healing.”

She sings to herself, softly, in Portuguese.

Cheia de penas, cheia de penas me deito.

It’s “Lágrima,” one of the beautiful, sad ballads from the fado tradition, sung by a single voice, often with only a guitar or even without any accompaniment.

“Mama,” I press through the lyrics of her singing. “Answer me.”

“Yes,” she says simply. She doesn’t raise her head. Returns to her song.

My heart beats hard against the pristine lace of my gown. “Mama, are you serious? Is there a specified fee? Do you turn people away who can’t pay? Do you tell them I won’t heal them?”

Desespero, Tenho por meu desespero . . .

“Yes,” she drops, nearly imperceptibly, between lyrics.

“Mama!” She is down by my feet, fixing the hem of my gown. “I can’t believe you’ve been lying to me all this time! If my ‘gift’ is really that, a gift, then shouldn’t it be given freely? If there’s money involved, shouldn’t it be offered afterward? In gratitude but not in payment? Mama, you turn people away!”

She doesn’t speak now, or sing. The room goes quiet, as she works on the bustle of the dress.

“If the healing doesn’t work, do you give the money back?” I whisper.

My mother rises up from behind me in the mirror. “Sometimes it surprises me, how naïve you are, Marlena.”

Everything in me hardens against her. “But isn’t that how you like me, Mama? A child, naïve and stupid and sweet?”

Bright hot lights flood the stage.

One of the staff at the United Holiest Church has thrown the light switch, signaling that another audience is about to begin. Other staff scurry around, sweeping, moving pots of plants from here to there, placing great cascading flower arrangements at the entrance of the church and at the end of each aisle. Two women heave a small tree toward the stage. I am ashamed to admit that I don’t know their names. Shouldn’t I?

“Marlena?”

José is at my elbow, beckoning me into the back room.

“Marlena?” José prompts.

“Sorry. I was just thinking.”

He chuckles. “Don’t do too much of that, cariño. Too much thinking is never good for anyone.”

I follow him, nodding at Fatima, who is waiting for me. “Hello, Marlena,” she says. “You look especially pretty today.”

I want to reach out to her, but I settle for words. “Thank you, Fatima.”

She picks up the veil that is draped across the chair.

“I’m not wearing that today,” I tell her.

“But your mother—”

“—my mother has no say in the matter.”

Fatima’s mouth closes.

I turn around, look out across the stage through the open door. This place was once just a garage, with folding chairs that my mother, Fatima, and José would set up, forming rows theater style. There was no stage, no other staff, no floodlights. If there were flowers, they were daisies or black-eyed Susans, handpicked from a nearby field. Occasionally there was a cactus, because they’re easy to maintain. A rickety table served as an altar. There was no platform. Audiences were simple affairs.

I wonder if my mother was demanding money back then, too. Or if it was something that started gradually. Every now and then we’ve gotten an enormous donation from a wealthy benefactor. That’s how we built this church, in fact, and how my mother bought our beautiful house. Maybe those experiences gave my mother a taste of something she decided she wanted all the time.

“Marlena?” José asks from behind me.

I don’t answer. My eyes seek out my mother. She is in the middle aisle talking to one of the staff, gesturing at the seats she wants reserved for the people on her list. I wonder how much they paid her, how much she demanded, how much she promised. I wonder how many people she turned away who didn’t have the money, people like Mrs. Lewis. My mother looks every bit the queen, beautiful and thin and tall, confident and self-assured as she talks to the man who is roping off those seats. A plan forms in my head.

“Marlena.” José is sounding desperate, like he gets when I have conned him yet again into taking me to Angie’s center. “People will start arriving and you cannot be seen here when they do.”

“Sorry.” I turn around. “I was just thinking about the audience and how I want it to go.”

José shakes his head. “I told you, cariño, too much thinking will get you in trouble. It’s not worth it, whatever is going through your head. Your mother will not like it.”

I go to him now, shutting the door behind me. “You’re right. But maybe that’s the point.”

Later, when I walk out, the crowd is hushed but murmuring.

I take one step, then another, left, right, until I can grip the edge of the altar. Beautiful, flowered branches sit in a tall cylindrical vase. Cherry blossoms, which cost a fortune because they aren’t in season. My eyes adjust to the bright lights. Mama is standing at the podium, talking. I’ve come out before I’m supposed to. She hasn’t noticed me yet. She’s still reading a history of my healings, a litany of proof that my miracles are real, to convince people that I am truly a saint. She’s always loved this part, the proving, the convincing.

Am I the only one who can see the snakes curling through her hands?

Or am I the snake she’s handling?

I reach the end of the stage.

My mother turns, sees me, stops speaking. The eyes of the crowd have forgotten she is there. They are only for me.

I look around.

Finn. I wonder where he is. If he’s coming.

There is the usual crush of tourists, craning their necks to catch a better glimpse, some of the children giggling, hands over their mouths. Some of the adults, too. The rest are seated, or half seated, since plenty rise from their chairs, or sit on the edges. I see Gertie way in back, table set with souvenirs to sell when seekers are at their most vulnerable, their most likely to hand over cash for a memory. I wonder if Gertie gives Mama a cut. In the last row I see Mrs. Jacobs, arms crossed, defiant, her entire posture seeming to say, I dare you, Marlena. I dare you to convince me. I stare at her until she is squirming in her seat. It’s the first time I’ve seen her at an audience since June.

I am not worried. Something is happening in me, to me.

I’m done with obedience.

I put a hand over my eyes to shield them from the glare.

Soon I am in the aisle.

The front row of seekers has gotten to their knees, heads bowed. They look to be of the same family. They have shiny black hair and their round, brown faces match. A little girl glances up at me, afraid.

I don’t want her to be afraid.

I go to her, rest my palm on her head, feel the soft silky base of her ponytail, remembering the child on the beach who asked if I was an angel. Her mother and father gasp that I have chosen to grace their little one. As I let my hand fall from the girl, the rest of her family draws around her, touching her on her arms and back, like I anointed her the saint and they can touch me through touching their child.

To my right, my mother is gesturing at the seats occupied by the people I am supposed to heal. The ones my mother promised miracles in exchange for cash. They sit there, backs straight, eyes on me, two women, one man, an older man with a girl, who might be my age. They don’t shout. They are quiet.

Confident.

But others jockey for my attention, shouting my name, some of them begging in the aisles until José forces them back.

“Marlena! Please!”

“Please, miss!”

“Over here!” A woman in the middle of the fourth row to my left is waving a photo of a man in a military uniform. “I need your help!” She is wailing.

There are people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, people with dark glasses over their eyes to cover their blindness. The tourists, the unbelievers, glance around; some of them are laughing, some of them have hands on the pockets where their phones are kept, like they’re reaching for a gun, fingers twitching. Mama doesn’t allow videos or photos during healings, only before an audience and afterward if you wait in line. Everyone always wants proof, wants a souvenir, a piece of me they can show to others.

“Marlena!”

“Marlena!”

“Marlena!”

The room is a cacophony of need, of desperation, of hope and hopelessness. The paying guests watch me, wait for me quietly, secure that their money has guaranteed my attention.

I turn away from them, and two things happen.

My eyes meet Finn’s. At the end of the center aisle.

He stares intently. Like he can’t tear his eyes from me.

A flood of emotion flows underneath my feet and lifts me up until I am floating. I am carried away even though I haven’t moved an inch.

“Marlena,” my mother hisses, from the side of the room. “What are you doing?”

And then, sitting in the very last row, I see Mrs. Lewis.

Her eyes are deadened, so unlike the woman I spoke to in the ice cream shop, who sent me away with a treat, kind and sweet and earnest, a woman full of love, ready to give it away. Her face is tilted down into her lap, like she wants to disappear, or is ashamed to have come. I stare until finally, her hands balled into fists, she looks up.

I move in her direction.

FIFTEEN

“Why me?” Mrs. Lewis and I are standing in the aisle, face-to-face. She is shaking. Her deep-brown skin is covered in goose bumps.

I don’t want to frighten her away, but I don’t answer her question. I don’t mention the ice cream she gave me, our conversation about faith and miracles. Our conversation about me. I want the chance to walk the town again anonymous and free. I want this so much I let sweet Mrs. Lewis hover in doubt and confusion. The saint is selfish.

Mrs. Lewis’s eyeglasses hang on a metal chain along her front. She’s wearing pale green like she is dressed for Easter, the straight skirt reaching down to wrinkled knees. Her shoes are the same green, with heels maybe two inches high. Her hair is set, like she took the time to put in rollers last night, to sleep in them, and carefully take them out before making her way to this church.

“Shhhhhhhh,” I tell her. I hold out my hands, palms up.

So many people grab at me once it is allowed, once they are sure they are not violating Mama’s laws about touching the Healer. But Mrs. Lewis is reluctant. She twists the gold ring she wears, round and round.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“But . . . but I don’t . . . I don’t have . . .” The metal chain she wears shifts and shudders with uncertain, worried breaths.

Money.

Mama turned her away once, because she couldn’t pay.

Before she can stutter more words of hesitation, I stop the wringing of her hands with my own. The second I do, the vision starts.

Black is the color that dominates, black and gray, charcoal gray and light gray. I hear the rough, hoarse breaths from her lungs, sense the shaking in those wrinkled knees. The world spins, I am barely able to see. Someone, some merciful person—José I think—brings Mrs. Lewis a chair and she sits. I kneel down before her, never letting go of her hands. The blacks and grays grow shiny, bright and glaring like a newly washed car in the sun. They take the shape of a human heart.

Mrs. Lewis’s pain is physical, not emotional. She is dying, or will die soon. I hold the vision of her heart steady, and see the way the left side is collapsing, caving in on itself, the blood in her veins unable to reach it with the force her heart needs. As we sit there, me on the floor, Mrs. Lewis in the chair, scenes begin, first from the past, of doctors and hospitals, the helpless faces of her husband and her grown son, her grandchildren still small, the swell of responsibility to care for them in this graying, kind lady.

But then, nearly eclipsed by this expanding bubble of misery, something else stirs, powerful and certain and full of light. The blacks and dark grays gradually turn green and blue, as bright and strong as new blades of grass and as light and delicate as a robin’s egg. I can see her, literally see her. She watches her grandchildren graduate high school and college, she has dinner with her son, whose own hair is now gray with age. Little by little, her breathing eases.

I get up, knees shaky. In the far back of the room I see Mrs. Jacobs start to stand, shaking her head. I am not afraid. I lean in toward Mrs. Lewis so I can whisper, “You’re going to be okay.” I kiss her cheek.

When I pull back, something else starts to happen inside me.

The tingling, the colors, the scenes from Mrs. Lewis’s future are pulsing through me and won’t stop, even though I’ve let her go. Everything in me shifts, expands to include other people, the other seekers who are here. I can see all their need at once, their wounds, their pain, the same as when I touched the MRI in Angie’s lab.

I am once again that figurehead on the ship. I carry them on my back.

I hold my arms wide and begin to speak. I can’t not speak. Names fall from my mouth. “Joseph. Benicia. Amanda. Christiano. Malcolm. Pilar. Jeremy. Concetta.” The names come from everywhere and nowhere.

Soon I am surrounded by a crowd, someone in a wheelchair, others limping, one man with a woman sagging in his arms. Someone grasps my left hand and another my right. There are hands along my forearms and hanging on my elbows and shoulders. Across my back. People are everywhere, reaching for me.

I welcome it. I welcome them, all of them. I have never been less afraid and I have never been more myself. The world is full of color and music and beauty and I am at the center of it all.

Somewhere in the room, sounding far, far away, I hear Mama’s voice calling out. “Marlena, Marlena, Marlena! What are you doing?”

“Dennis. Sarah. Claudio,” I say.

The crowd around me grows and grows. They murmur, they pray, and I am taken up into their prayers and whispers. Taken over by them.

“That is all for today,” my mother is saying into the microphone on the stage. No, she is shouting. “That is all. José? Help me here!” My mother cries for people to pull back. Eventually they obey, falling away, letting go of my hands and my arms, until once again, I am alone in the aisle. All that beauty and life, gone.

I begin to weep. I am empty. Hollow without it. Without them.

Everything grows silent.

I place a hand to my temple. It feels like my head has split apart, straight in half, like a dropped bowl that hits the floor just right. I am depleted.

But I am real.

And now I am weeping for joy. I have never been more certain that I am real, that my gift is real. This is my job, my purpose, my reason for being. Nothing else matters. I don’t need Angie to study me, to prove whether my gift is real or a fraud. I am a healer and I always will be. It is what I am made for.

How could I ever have doubted this? Doubted myself?

“Back away. This audience is over,” my mother is saying, her voice booming through the church. José is next to me, gingerly taking my arm even though he’s not supposed to touch me, lifting me off the ground and carrying me away.

Time goes by as I gather my strength backstage, enough to walk. Thirty minutes. An hour. My mother has yet to appear and I don’t know why she hasn’t come to speak to me, to scold me. Despite José’s protests, I make my way out into the church for the receiving line. I emerge into the sea of seekers and tourists who have waited for photos. People erupt into chatter and shouts.

“Marlena!”

“Marlena, I need you!”

“Marlena, over here!”

“Amazing,” shouts a woman.

“I didn’t believe, but now . . .”

I stand on the stage and look out over everyone. Then, in the very back, I see Finn, his face, the tilt of his head, the intensity of his eyes. I take in the fact that he just witnessed what happened. Witnessed me.

What did he think?

I descend the stairs and move through the crowd. “I’m sorry, excuse me,” I tell the people swirling around me. “I’m tired,” I tell them, in apology. It’s not a lie.

I plow through everyone, and they scurry to move from my path. I am making a scene and I don’t even care if my mother witnesses it. I see Finn, hold him there with my eyes. I know he’s not going anywhere, that he’s waiting for me, but I feel as though he might slip away before I can get to him, that I will be unable to reach him before he does. He is beyond me somehow, beyond me already, or at some future date.

What, what, what is this feeling? Where is it coming from?

It’s like a half vision, an unformed premonition.

When I reach him I head straight through the exit and signal for him to follow. I wait under one of the gnarled old trees whose branches are a canopy from the September sun. Me, in my wedding dress, breaths short and bursting, hem dragging through the dirt. Finn comes through the door and looks around.

“Over here,” I call out.

He heads toward me. “Well, that was dramatic.”

“I guess it was,” I agree. Was he referring to my audience, the swell of people around me, or the way the crowd parted as I moved through it? Or maybe the fact that I look like some runaway bride, and Finn the boy come to rescue me. “I don’t have much time. My mother . . . she’s angry about what happened in there.” The feeling that Finn might disappear is ever more potent now. It makes me want to place my hands on his shoulders and hold him there.

A leaf flutters to the ground between us. “How could she be angry after that?” he asks. “Whether it was real or not, you have this way with people. You help them. You have something they need.”

A pain spreads through my body. “Whether it was real or not?”

Finn takes a step closer. The sunlight shines through the spaces between branches, the dappled light giving him an otherworldly look. “After what I saw today,” he says, with a mixture of fear and reverence and maybe a little bit of awe, “it’s difficult even for me not to believe.”

SIXTEEN

It is Monday, and I wake to noise throughout the house. Not the kind from Fatima cleaning, dragging the vacuum over the plank floors that double as sand catchers in the summer, or the use of a blender in the kitchen. I hear scraping and banging, like builders are getting ready for a renovation.

There is a knock on my door. It opens a crack. “Marlena?” It’s Fatima. “Your mother wants you downstairs.”

My mother and I aren’t speaking. Not since Saturday. In the tension and silence, I’ve been painting nonstop.

“You’re supposed to shower and get dressed.” She shuts the door again.

Uh-oh.

Fatima didn’t even wait for me to reply.

Intentionally slowly, I get ready. I step across the art supplies on the floor, careful not to kick anything over. I spend a nice long time under the hot water in the bathroom, then dry my hair until there isn’t a bit of moisture. I pull one of the white sheaths over my head and a long pale sweater over it. The weather has changed, the temperature finally dropping. Something in me has changed, too. I search inside my soul for what it is until I find it.

Faith. A kind of faith.

I am awash in it, in the tender, bright green of its newness. But it’s not a faith in God. A faith in myself is unfurling. My doubts have browned and turned to dust, replaced by the sense that using my gift can be a choice of my own making.

A shrill, high-pitched burring noise pierces my ears.

Is that a drill?

I shove my feet into my white ballet slippers, hurry out of my room and down the long hallway, past the rustic walls painted white. Now there is a banging sound, like a hammer. Did I miss the memo about a renovation? But why would I be needed downstairs for that? I stand at the top of the stairs, listening.

Fatima emerges from the gift room, duster in hand. She won’t look at me.

“Fatima,” I say. “Please tell me what’s happening.”

She scurries away. Before she heads into one of the guest rooms on this floor—not that we ever have guests—she calls back, “Just go see your mother. You know how she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“All right,” I tell her, not wanting Fatima to get in trouble. I descend the staircase, step by step. Thump. Thump. Dread is a mist wafting up from the first floor. I walk straight into it.

“Marlena!” my mother is shouting. “Get down here!”

When I head into the living room there are workers everywhere. Some with tool belts, building some sort of freestanding wall in the corner. Two others are dressed professionally, women in sophisticated skirts and heels. There’s even a man in a suit, like the kind someone would wear on Wall Street. They barely notice me.

“We need that to be just a little bit taller,” says a woman in cobalt blue to a man who is working on the wall.

People navigate around me like I’m a column or a piece of furniture. Someone is fitting a long, thick roll of paper, or maybe canvas, in two hooks on either side of the wall.

Then I notice the cameras.

Tiny video cameras have been attached to the ceiling in every corner of the room.

“Yes, exactly,” the woman in blue says to the man who’s straightening the backdrop.

“Marlena!” my mother yells.

Since Saturday I’ve enjoyed the fresh taste of independence, bright on my tongue. But this—this is my mother’s effort to regain control. To press me under her thumb.

“Marlena!”

I take a deep breath, and walk into the kitchen. The man in the business suit is standing next to my mother, joined by one of the women. In front of them the kitchen island is covered by stacks of paper, grouped in neat piles.

“Good morning, Mama,” I say.

She looks over. “Finally, you’re here. I’ve been calling for you for an hour. Você está sendo mal educado,” she adds in Portuguese.

I ignore her comment about my being rude. “What’s going on? Why are all of these people here?”

My mother sighs. “I tried to tell you last week but you didn’t want to hear it.” She takes a big gulp of her coffee. She always drinks it lukewarm because it’s nearly three-quarters milk. She’s wearing her favorite white suit. Mama has lots of white suits. I am the miracle healer in white, and she is the mother of the miracle healer, also in white. “You were too caught up with Helen to care what I had to say.”

The woman and man are staring at me.

Finally, the woman smiles tightly and moves in my direction. “Hello. I’m Dana Reisner.” She obviously thinks I should know who she is, or at least recognize her name, but I don’t. She’s reaching out her hand to shake mine when my mother barks.

“No! Remember what I told you about my daughter!”

The woman, Dana, yanks her arm away.

I glare at my mother. “It’s not like I have leprosy.”

My mother turns to the woman and speaks quietly. “My daughter doesn’t like to be touched unless she’s performing a healing.”

“Of course. I’m so sorry,” Dana says to my mother, not to me, and the tight smile reappears. Everything about this Dana seems fitted so as to be exact, her suit along the shape of her body, the way her hair is coiffed into a kind of helmet, not a strand loose. Even the expression on her face seems to take up as little space as possible. “Marlena, it is very nice to finally meet you,” she tries again. “I’ve been hearing about you and researching you for a long time.”

I take a step closer, and she takes a step back, like I really do have some terrible communicable disease. “Well, that’s interesting. I don’t know anything about you.”

My mother sets her coffee onto the counter and it makes a loud thunk. “Marlena, remember what I said about your attitude.”

“And you are?” I ask the man, ignoring her.

His arms are crossed. They don’t even twitch as he introduces himself. “I’m Joseph Hurwitz. I’m the producer for the television series you and your mother have agreed to do with us. Dana is our lead host.” His voice is upbeat, like he expects me to be thrilled.

“You mean my mother agreed to do with you.” I start to laugh. Their faces grow confused. Maybe I should do something to scare them, cackle, or start chewing on my hair, or run and scream through the house. Maybe if they think I’m insane they’ll be less interested in doing a serious show about the crazy girl-healer.

“Marlena.” My mother’s tone is ever more frustrated. “I told you about this! We need you to sign these documents before any of the filming can begin.” She places a hand on top of one of the stacks of paper.

“Don’t I need to read them first?”

“I’ve already read them for you.” She looks at the television people with apology. To me, she says, “All you need is to add your signature.”

Lead Host Dana holds a shiny silver pen out to me.

I let her hand hang there until she realizes I’m not taking the pen and retracts it. “I’m eighteen. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. I’m not signing my privacy away because you ask me to.”

“This is one of the most respected producers in the country, Marlena. And Dana is one of the most important journalists on television. You will be famous, after this airs.” My mother says this like it is the most wonderful news.

“I’m already famous,” I snap.

My mother shakes her head, communicating to the television people once again that I’m obviously the insolent child who doesn’t know anything. The bratty, temper-tantrum-throwing, difficult miracle healer. “But you’re not a household name yet.” She swipes her hand into the air, like she’s brushing something worthless away. Dana and Joseph follow this back-and-forth like my mother and I are a riveting show in our own right. Perhaps they are salivating about the juicy conflict between mother and daughter they will get to explore on camera. “I know you feel powerful after that . . . stunt of yours on Saturday. But with this deal, we’re talking about turning you into a celebrity. You’ll be famous beyond your wildest dreams.”

My fists clench. “You mean famous beyond your wildest dreams, Mama. This is about you, not me.”

My mother’s face is the picture of calm, and she manages a smile. But her eyes are arctic. “Can I have a moment alone with my daughter?” My mother asks this politely, sweetly.

Joseph nods. “Of course,” he says, though Dana seems crestfallen to be barred from the rest of this mother-daughter performance.

Before they can leave the room I go on. “And what will my celebrity fame bring us this time, Mama? A vacation home in Turks and Caicos? A castle in France? Diamonds and emeralds to wear around your wrist and your neck? Will this special come with a national merchandising deal, too? Will I be gracing the breakfast tables of people across the nation? Will I be healing on demand soon, by television and online? Is that the master plan for ‘us’?”

My mother’s eyes narrow to match my own. “Stop being so selfish—”

“—selfish?”

“—you’ve been given a miraculous gift from God. Don’t you think you owe the world access to it? Do you really want to keep it to yourself, make this all about you and not the needs of others and the grace that God has given you?”

I lean over the counter toward my mother, who’s standing on the other side. I stretch my long arms across the marble, the neat stacks of paper shifting as I move, wrinkling as I press into them. “So, Mama, you’d rather I heal until I drop dead? Is my death included in this deal I’ll be signing?”

My mother’s face drains of color. “Marlena,” she hisses. “This is not the time.”

“Well, I disagree. I disagree with everything. With all of it. With all of you.” With every bit of force in me I swipe my arms across the counter, sending those reams of paper sailing into the air and cascading to the ground. Then I grab the coffee mug near my mother’s hand, still half full, and hurl it across the kitchen. It shatters against the wall, leaving behind a tiny dent in the plaster, the shape of a small scallop shell. Coffee splatters everywhere. The mug lies in jagged pieces on the floor.

The sounds in the living room come to a stop.

Without another word or glance at anyone, I walk to the front door of the house, open it, and head into the heat, slamming it shut so hard behind me, the entire frame around it shudders.

SEVENTEEN

I walk and walk and walk. I don’t even know where I’m going. The ocean appears ahead, the seawall alongside it, and I force my breaths to mimic the slow swells of the water, calm even though the day is gray. No one is at the beach on this cloudy school day, and everything is quiet. I start up the sidewalk that leads into town and the short strip that counts as Main Street. My mind is racing. It won’t stop turning over the events of this morning, the workers, the television people. The look on my mother’s face when I threw her mug, when it smashed against the wall with that great ugly crash.

I reach the store that sells beachy souvenirs at the beginning of Main Street, one of the few places that doesn’t trade off my image. Gertie’s shop is open but she’s not in the doorway, maybe because the tourists are sleeping late, or because the clouds are keeping them away. I pass Maxwell’s Card Shop, Almeida’s Bakery, followed by Marinelli’s Religious Icon & Candle Store, which is full of pendants and mass cards with the Catholic saints, but which specializes in ones with my photo on them. My destination is next, on the right.

Mrs. Lewis is sitting on the stool by the register, same as the other day, a newspaper in her lap. The bell on the top of the door dings and she looks up. Her face, her eyes, are rested. Calm and relaxed.

Is she healed?

“Marlena?” She sounds surprised. A little wary.

The Healer has never entered her shop as far as she knows. She doesn’t realize we had a conversation last week, that she gave me an ice cream out of kindness. She probably thinks our only encounter was at my audience. She glances at her purse.

She thinks I’m here to collect.

“I don’t want any money,” I blurt. It pains me to have stressed her, especially after what I know about her heart. “I’m sorry. I . . . I’m just so sorry to worry you.” I look around. My head pulses with something. I don’t know what. I wish I had a disguise. I should’ve run to my room to get one before storming off. “I can’t really go anywhere, can I? Not as me. Not without causing problems.”

Mrs. Lewis comes around the counter. “Are you okay, sweetheart?” She plucks a napkin from a dispenser and dabs at my cheeks. “You’ve been crying.”

“Oh,” I say. “Yes.” I stare up at her. Mrs. Lewis stops wiping my cheeks, then folds the napkin neatly into a small triangle and places it on the counter.

Ugly, arrogant thoughts whisper through my mind.

Will she save it? The napkin that dried the tears of the Healer?

Will she sell it?

I reach out to the counter to grab it, crush it in my fist. Mrs. Lewis startles at this.

“Can I use your phone?” I ask her.

Without a word, she hands her cell to me and I make the call I’ve thought about since stepping over the shards of china on the kitchen floor, intentionally muddying my soft white ballet slippers in spilt coffee, hoping my mother winced as she witnessed me doing it. After I hang up and hand the phone back to Mrs. Lewis, I tell her thank you and head toward the exit. I shove the napkin, still in a tight ball, into the trash can. I actually stick my arm down into it, pushing the remnants of my tears deep into the garbage.

“Sweetheart.” The unwavering kindness in Mrs. Lewis’s voice kills me. “If you’re in trouble, or if you ever need anything, you can come to me.” I hear rustling behind me. A little square of paper appears, gripped by wrinkled, spotted fingers. Hands I held on Saturday. “That’s my cell number and my home number and the number to this shop. My email is there, too. I mean what I say.”

I don’t look at her. But I manage to speak. “I know you do.” I take the paper. Slip it into the pocket of my sweater.

Then I walk out and wait.

The happy jingle of the bell on the door rings in my ears long after I’m gone.

I’ve never seen his car before. It’s an old blue truck, beat up and scratched, with a dent over one of the back wheels.

Finn leans over from the driver’s side and pushes the passenger door open. He’s wearing jeans and an old gray T-shirt. A tattoo of a human heart is visible on his arm. I’ve never seen him in short sleeves. “Get in,” he says.

I climb into the seat and slam the door. The space between us is small. Intimate. I am shaking. I can’t stop staring at Finn’s tattoo. It’s not something I’d expect him to have.

His eyes are curious as always. I love how his curiosity never leaves him.

I am curious too. I reach out and lift the edge of Finn’s sleeve to better view the tattoo.

My hands are not my own today.

I lean closer, careful not to touch his skin, studying the beautiful red color of the heart, the skill of the artist, the detail. It is at once real and otherworldly. The kind of thing I might see in a vision and do my best to capture on canvas.

Finn’s chest is still.

I force myself to let go of his shirt, to sit back and stare out of the windshield, focusing on the great maple tree growing up in the sidewalk garden next to the car, its roots raising the bricks around it into a jagged hill.

“Where do you want to go?” Finn asks.

“I don’t care. Just drive.”

He maneuvers to the end of Main Street and out onto the road beyond it. Finn reaches into the narrow back seat of the truck and comes up with a long, gray scarf. He hands it to me. “Wrap this around you. You’re shivering.”

I take it and wind it around my neck and shoulders. It’s soft, maybe cashmere, and smells of trees and wood, mixed with something sweet. I imagine myself wearing it to school, if I was a girl who went to school, proudly displaying it to my friends, the treasure of having the scarf of the boy I like.

“The other day, did you mean what you said?” I ask him.

Finn turns right, heading toward the ocean. “What did I say?”

“After my audience. About maybe believing in me.”

“Yes.”

My heart lifts.

“At the time,” he adds.

It crashes. “But not anymore?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not the type to believe in miracles. But I also can’t get the spectacle of it out of my head.”

I don’t speak. I can’t move. I don’t want to be a spectacle to Finn.

His breaths are clipped. “Do you want me to? Believe in you?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes. Yes, I think.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on? What prompted this urgent outing?”

“Later,” I say. Then, “Can we just be quiet for a while?”

“Okay,” he says.

We fall silent. Listen to the rumble of the engine. The town recedes in the side mirror and eventually disappears. I slip out of my coffee-spattered shoes and pull my knees to my chest, wrap the hem of my white dress under my bare feet. Turn my head toward Finn and watch as he drives. There is stubble on his cheek, unlike when I see him at Angie’s center. His hair is a bit messy, like he’s been running his fingers through it. His eyelashes are long, his lips a pale red. Something unidentifiable swells quickly and instantly and I am dizzy with it. I want to touch Finn. I want to possess him. I want to—

“—pull over,” I say.

“Marlena, what? Are you okay—”

“—please?”

He shifts the truck into the breakdown lane along the seawall, where people in the town like to park and drink coffee or eat lunch while they look out at the ocean. We come to a stop in a deserted stretch of it. Seagulls circle over a spot in the water where there must be lots of fish. I uncurl my legs. Look at Finn. Stare at him. Grip the ends of his scarf like my life depends on it. My hands can’t be trusted. He turns to me.

“Kiss me,” I say.

His eyes widen. “What?”

I lean closer. “Kiss me.”

Finn blinks.

“I want you to kiss me,” I say a third time, like he didn’t understand the first or the second, like this one might magically get through to him. I edge closer, nearly climbing over the gear shift, desperate with wanting, wanting him to be mine, wanting to know what it’s like to love and be loved. The want is a wave and it’s lifting me up, threatening to tumble me straight into the rocky shore. “Finn . . . just . . . just do it. I’ve never . . . just . . . please . . .”

“Marlena.” My name is a statement, soft and gentle.

It’s also a no.

I pull back, ashamed. My cheeks burn. Tears sting my eyes. What is happening to me? What is wrong with me? “I’m sorry. That was so stupid.” My voice is a tiny round pebble. “I’m so stupid and I’ve ruined everything.” I shift my body toward the window, pressing my forehead against the glass. My breaths create a fog across it, a pale round disk of crystals. I fumble for the latch on the door. Before I can open it, I feel a hand on my arm.

“Don’t go,” Finn says.

I stop.

He doesn’t move his hand. Instead, he presses it more firmly against me. His touch sends stars streaming before my eyes, bright and bursting. I can’t tell the difference between desire, longing, and visions when I’m with Finn. Maybe they’re one and the same with him.

“Please stay.”

“I’m such an idiot,” I whisper.

“You’re not.”

“Stop being so nice to me. I know. I know the deal. You’ll never want me now.” The glass has gone warm against my forehead. I slump back against the passenger seat. “And why would you? I try to pretend like I might be normal, like I could be, but I’m not and never will be. I was crazy to think someone like me might have a chance with someone like you.” My eyes are on my lap. “I’m so mortified,” I whisper.

“Marlena,” Finn says. “You’re not crazy. Don’t be embarrassed. Please.” His fingers slide along my arm until they reach my hand. He takes it into his and holds it. “I’ve thought about kissing you,” he says.

Red, pink, and orange flashes before me. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. I turn to Finn, see him through the sunrise in my eyes. “You have?”

He stares out the front of the truck, but doesn’t let go of my hand. “Since the first moment I saw you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You think you feel crazy, but I’m the one who’s felt crazy. I . . . I shouldn’t be thinking of you this way.”

“Why? Because of Angie’s study?”

He returns my hand to my lap and places his on the gear shift. The colors in my vision fade. He shakes his head. “Mostly it’s because of me. And because of who you are. Because I don’t know what to make of you.”

His words are vague, but I know where he’s going. “Because you don’t believe in me.”

Finn sighs. “That’s pretty much the first thing I said to you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Shouldn’t you?”

“What I care about is that you see me as Marlena. Not Marlena the Healer or Marlena the Saint, but just as me.”

“But you’re not . . .”

“I’m not normal?” I finish. I wait for Finn to confirm this, that no, I could never be normal to him, that he could never see me as just Marlena. Or to convince me that he could see me this way. That one day he will. Instead of responding to my question, Finn changes the subject. “Are you going to tell me what happened to make you call me?”

The air deflates from my lungs. Answers enter my mind and leave the other side.

It wasn’t because I wanted to try and kiss you.

It wasn’t to confess my feelings for you.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Finn rolls down his window. I roll down mine. We sit there, watching gulls circle and dive, circle and dive. The sound of the waves slapping the rocks helps to lessen the tension. I hope the fire in my cheeks is fading.

Eventually Finn speaks. “Let’s go get something to eat. You won’t tell me what happened, but I’m assuming you’re not ready to go home yet. Right?”

“Yes. Right. I don’t want to go home.”

Finn shifts into gear and backs up the truck a little. “Okay, then.”

We pull out into the street.

“Where are we going?”

He shrugs. “You’ll see.”

I stare at my gauzy white sheath, the long pale sweater over it. The ends of Finn’s soft gray scarf. I wish I could go home and change my clothes. This is definitely not how I thought this day would turn out. The truck rumbles over a pothole and the two of us bounce. The bottom of his heart tattoo is visible, then hidden, visible, then hidden under his sleeve as Finn shifts and turns the wheel. It has the effect of seeming to beat.

“Marlena . . .”

I bite my lip. The heart on his skin flashes bright as the red sun of morning. Or maybe my eyes are playing tricks. “What?”

“I do see you as Marlena. But you are still Marlena the Healer. This . . . this magical creature who I watched walk among the sick on Saturday, like some sort of apostle. I can’t exactly forget that part.”

“Can you try?” I ask.

I expect him to say yes, but he doesn’t.

He presses his lips tight and concentrates on the road.

EIGHTEEN

“I’ve always wanted to do simple things,” I tell Finn.

He looks up, mouth full of lemon merengue. He swallows. “What do you mean?”

We are sitting at a picnic table by the ocean. Long flat rocks jut out toward the sea. The sky is still gray. This setting, the peace and beauty of it, clashes with the angry chaos of my morning. My heart keeps speeding up, skipping, then abruptly slowing down, a child playing tag. But I like the world at this odd, heady angle.

Finn brought us to a ramshackle cottage on the side of the road, painted a pale blue. On the shingled wall next to the windows is a homemade sign that says “THE PIE SHOP” in block letters. Each one is a bit imperfect, slanting to the left or right, wider in some places and narrower in others. Inside the shelves are packed floor to ceiling with chocolate bars from all over the world, the kind that are hard to find. The rest is a kitchen where three people are hard at work cutting and chopping and baking. A long display case brims with all kinds of pies. Savory, sweet. Some vegan, some vegetarian, and plenty for carnivores.

I’ve lived here my entire life, but I didn’t know this place existed.

Shows how much I get out.

I look down at the oblong pie I’ve been devouring, half of it gone, the crust crumbling where I’ve attacked it with my fork. Steak and cheddar. I don’t know why I picked it, but it’s delicious. “Simple things like, I don’t know, this, for example,” I tell Finn. “Eating with a friend.”

“So we’re friends?” Finn asks.

Something flutters in me. Do I want to confirm that we’re friends, when what I really want is for us to be more? Finn answers before I can respond.

“Wow, I see how it is, Marlena,” he says, but he is laughing. “Don’t let me pressure you or anything. We don’t have to be friends.”

I hesitate, sensing this moment is important. An image flashes. Is it a vision or a simple thought? It’s of me, reaching out, taking a step. Finn is waiting for me, a few feet away. The picture fades. “It’s just that, well, um.” How can I explain? “It’s difficult for me to know what a friend is. I’m only recently learning what it means to have one. I’ve been sheltered from other people. Everyone but my mother. She keeps me, our life, very private. But lately I don’t want to live like this anymore, and the more I want to be free, the more my mother wants to imprison me.” I stab at the pie to give myself something to concentrate on other than Finn. “Hence, I do things like demand a kiss from a boy I hardly know at the absolute wrong moment because I have no idea what I’m doing. Or what other people do in such situations.”

Finn lays his fork on the table. “I wasn’t making fun of you. Or, if it seemed that way, I didn’t mean it to.”

I resist the urge to dig into my plate again to distract myself from the nervous feeling in my chest. “I know. It’s okay.”

Finn’s hand is flat across the weather-worn boards, not far from my own. “I’m glad you called me,” he says quietly. “You should consider me a friend.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” At first I don’t realize the different ways this question might be interpreted, but I don’t take it back. The breeze floats around us. As I wait for Finn to answer, I want to inch my fingers toward his hand. A car drives by on the road beside us. It sounds loud, like someone turned up the volume on the world. Finn’s eyes drop to the table, and he pushes the conversation in a different direction.

“Tell me about the simple things you’ve wanted to try. I want a list.”

I grab my fork, stabbing the pie, trying not to be disappointed. “I don’t want to bore you. Or make you think I’m even more of a freak than you already do.”

Finn raises one eyebrow, something I’ve read about in books but never seen anyone do. “I don’t think you’re a freak, but obviously you think you are. And I’ll remind you that technically, I’m kind of freakish, given my age and that I’m already getting my PhD. So let’s just say I want to know some of the things on your list so maybe I can assist in the effort to defreak you. Or maybe we can normalize each other, since it hasn’t occurred to you that I also might need help in that department.”

I swallow the bite I’ve just taken, then laugh. “I’ll tell you some of the things on my list, but only in the effort to help you out.”

“Of course. I really appreciate that.”

Things pop into my mind. I try to pick through them. There are so many and they appear at random. “Going for a swim on the beach.”

“You’ve never been swimming?”

“Not like a normal person. Not in a bathing suit.”

“Normal for you is skinny-dipping?” Finn asks, laughing again.

“That’s not what I meant.” I shake my head, cracking up. “Okay, moving on. Going to a party. You know, with people my age.” I keep going. “School. I’ve never been to school or class or had a locker. I’ve only read about those things in books.” Finn is staring like he wants to speak, but has decided to be patient so I can get through my list. “I’ve never been to a movie. I’ve never gone on a road trip. I’ve never had a sleepover. I’ve never been allowed to dress like a normal person, at least not openly.” My heart rushes forward, beating at the insides of my rib cage. “Even though I’m eighteen, I’ve never driven a car, never even sat behind the wheel of one. And I’ve never been . . . out on a date.” My eyes dart toward the spray of ocean rising up from the rocks. “There’s plenty more but I’ll stop there.”

Finn says nothing.

“What? Now you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into, offering to help me out with this list?” My question sounds cheerful, but underneath it is insecurity.

“No. It just makes me sad that being a healer has kept you from . . . from living.”

“I’m living.” I swallow. “Right now.”

The silence that follows is frustrating. I can tell Finn is holding back again. He’s like a soda can that started gushing after being shaken but then somehow stopped. I want to shake him up again, like I did when I told him I wanted to kiss him in his truck.

“You’ve never been out on a date?” Finn asks finally.

And here we are. Where I want to be. But will the outcome be bad or good?

I bite my lip. Then shrug. “Maybe not.”

“Ever?”

What is the right answer here?

“Maybe never?”

“Okay,” Finn says.

“Does that freak you out?”

There’s a beat before he answers. “Stop saying that word. And no.”

“Does it surprise you?”

“No,” he answers, this time too quickly.

“Is this a date?” I ask, just as quickly.

There is a long pause.

“Maybe?” Now it’s Finn’s turn to be uncertain. “Do you want it to be?”

I nod, but don’t speak. Words might shatter the moment.

“I want it to be, too,” he says quietly.

I smile, but only a little so as not to wear my joy too boldly. I look down at my thin cotton sheath and pull at the ends of Finn’s scarf. “This isn’t how I imagined I’d be dressed for my first date. Like an escaped mental patient.”

Finn laughs, loud this time. “You do not look like an escaped mental patient.”

“You said it yourself once, when I was visiting Angie’s office!”

“I was kidding!” He holds out his arms and appraises his T-shirt. The heart tattoo is in full view.

“You literally wear a heart on your sleeve,” I observe.

“Oh.” He drops his arms and it disappears under his shirt. “Yeah.”

“What’s the tattoo about?”

He looks at the sea. A little slice of sun has peeked out from the clouds and soft yellow rays slant over the water. “I’ll tell you another time.”

“Look who’s being mysterious.”

He shakes his head. I guess he’s not giving out this information today.

The breeze has picked up. The afternoon is waning. “My mother is going to kill me when I go home.”

Finn’s eyes narrow.

“What?” I ask him.

“Your mother . . .”

“My mother . . . ?”

“You can’t let her rule you.”

I press my fingertip into one of the crumbs on my plate. “Easier said than done.”

“You have more power than you realize.”

“Right.”

“Of course you do. I was at your audience. You have all the power, not your mother. I saw what you did.”

My eyes flicker up. Seek Finn across the table. “And what did you see?”

“I saw . . .”

What?

“What?”

“I saw a girl performing . . . miracles.” This last word is a disbelieving whisper.

“Did you?”

His eyebrows arch. “Did I?”

I remember the rush of faith I felt this morning. “Yes,” I tell him, and in this moment, it is the truth. I believe in myself. I was there, after all, on Saturday. I am Marlena, the Healer, the Saint. It isn’t a fairy tale. I am not a fairy tale.

“What does it feel like?” Finn asks.

I push my plate to the side and lean my elbows onto the table. “Honestly, it feels amazing. Like the most intimate moment you’ve ever had with another person, like your soul and theirs are connected. An instance of perfect unity.”

“Wow.”

“And it’s not just emotional. I see so much. There are colors, and I can hear everything. Like the essence of a person is composed of music.”

“Marlena,” Finn breathes.

I can tell he is rapt. “Yes?”

“But?”

He knows. He knows there is more. And there is. The anger, the uncertainty bubbles up, as I think of how to go on. “But there is a dark side to my healings. It’s exhausting, and it gets more so as I get older.” I think of the people Mrs. Jacobs brought to my audience a few months back. “Sometime I wonder if my gift is waning, or growing more unpredictable, if sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes I’ve wondered if my gift is not from God like my mother says, but from the devil, like I might be dipping into a spring in hell and pulling up water from its fires for people to drink.” I shiver. “Wow, that is something I’ve never said out loud.” I pause, and Finn leans forward. “Sometimes, I wonder if the cost of healing someone is my own well-being. Like, I’m draining my health and passing it on to them. Like, maybe one day, I’ll end up depleted and sick and incurable. That death will be my punishment for keeping people alive.”

“That’s horrible.”

“But even worse,” I go on, because I can’t seem to stop, “I’m just . . . alone. We don’t even have other family. I have my mother and . . . no one. Nothing. Healing and some books about women who lived hundreds of years ago. It’s been nice to have Angie. And you. It’s the first time I’ve disobeyed the rules of this life so that I can do something I want. Something my mother didn’t approve.”

Finn is thoughtful. Calm. Some of that calm reaches across the table and flows into me, like a balm. “Why don’t you take a break?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, take some time off from healing?”

I shake my head. The idea seems ridiculous. Impossible. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because being a healer doesn’t work that way. Because my mother would never allow it,” I add, realizing this is true.

“You said she would never allow you to meet with Angie, but you’re doing it. You’re eighteen. You can make your own decisions.”

A giant wave slaps into the rocks, followed by a loud splash. The force of it matches the feelings surging in me. “But I’ve never known anything different.”

“And you never will, unless you allow yourself to.”

Could I really do what Finn is suggesting?

“But my mother . . .”

“Can’t force you to do anything you’re unwilling to do.”

“It’s complicated,” I say.

He takes a deep breath. “Life is complicated. That’s never going to change. It’s not a reason to avoid doing something you want to do. And need to.” The look in Finn’s eyes is sincere and beautiful and open. No one has ever looked at me like this, not even at my healings. I don’t think I knew until now how much I’ve yearned for someone to see me this way. I don’t know what to say. I almost want to run away.

“Finn.”

He waits for me to go on.

“I should go,” I whisper.

“Oh.” He sounds disappointed. “I’ll take you home.”

He starts to get up and so do I, but my dress gets caught on the bench and I go tumbling to the ground.

“Are you all right?”

I try to laugh off my spill. “I’m fine.” There are grass stains on the white sheath to add to the coffee-stained slippers. What a mess. I hope that Finn will hold out his hand to help me get up, but he doesn’t.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about.” I look at him from my crouch on the ground. “But there’s one thing I don’t have to think about.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to see you again. I mean, not just at Angie’s center.”

“Okay,” he says.

“All right.”

“All right.”

Finn reaches toward me.

When I take his hand, as he pulls me up, I see suns and stars, streaks of color. I see a swirl of red at Finn’s center, vibrant and beautiful. But there is something else. Sorrow. A sorrow I can’t quite explain or express, a pool of it collecting behind the red.

Once I am standing, Finn lets go. The joyful colors, the suns and stars, the watery sorrow fade. I wait and breathe, breathe and wait, until eventually they disappear. The only thing that remains is the knowledge, the certainty, that my life, my real life, is finally about to begin. That, in fact, it already has.

NINETEEN

When I get home, my mother is sitting on the couch in front of the windows, still in her white suit and heels. The ocean is a stormy dark blue behind her. The workers and television people are gone. The shattered mug and coffee in the kitchen have been cleaned up, the papers piled onto the counter.

“Did you have a nice day, Marlena?” Her gaze goes to the grass stains on my dress, then up to the gray scarf around my neck. Finn’s scarf. I’m still wearing it. “Where did you get that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

“It does to me. Whose is it?”

I shake my head.

Anger flickers across my mother’s face. “Tell me that some boy didn’t give it to you. You know that boys are off-limits. We both agreed.”

“Yes, back when I was twelve.” Finn’s words from earlier about my having power pulse through me. “It’s none of your business where I got the scarf. So stop asking.”

“Marlena!”

I unwind it from my neck and fold it. “Yes, Mama?”

She rises from the couch. Her suit is wrinkled. “You do not talk to me like that!”

I hold the scarf to my middle. It warms the place where it presses against me. I glance around the room at the remnants of today’s failed television shoot, at the cameras mounted to the corners of the ceiling, darkened and off. “Well, you don’t get to use me anymore. I’m not some doll, Mama! Some toy you offer people to play with in exchange for fame and money.”

My mother inhales sharply. “That’s not how this is.”

I take a step toward her. “Maybe it wasn’t before, when I was younger, but that’s exactly how it is now. I know what you tell people, Mama. Stop denying it.”

My mother raises her hand. For a second, I think she might be about to hit me, but then something comes over her and her expression shifts. “Such gifts,” she whispers. “Such gifts and they are wasted on you.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But maybe it’s time I get to decide how and when to use them, instead of being used by them.” And by you, I think.

She crosses her arms, like she doesn’t trust them. “What are you saying?”

I inhale, readying to tell her what I’ve been thinking about on the way home in Finn’s truck. “I want things to change.”

The muscles in my mother’s body tense. “Change how?”

“My gift, the healing, it’s a part of me, a big part.”

“Yes? And?”

“But I want to do things other girls my age do, Mama. I want to have friends. I want to go out for ice cream like a normal person.” I tug at my sheath. “I want to wear normal clothes. I want access to some of my money, so I have the freedom to make my own decisions, to buy something I might need or, God, just something I want to eat if I’m hungry.” There is still one thing I haven’t yet said. “I’m . . . I’m stopping. I’m quitting healing. For now. Saturday was my last audience for a while.” This proclamation rings through the room.

My mother shakes her head, back and forth. “Marlena, you can’t.”

“I can and I am. You can’t force me to do anything I don’t want.” I cross my arms now. “Not anymore.”

“Gifts don’t work that way. God gave you this gift to use. You have no idea what will happen if you stop.”

“You mean God gave me this gift without my asking, so you can use me to make money. And the rest of the town can, too. Let’s be honest.”

My mother throws up her hands. “Forget about the money for a minute! Gifts like yours aren’t to be played with. You can’t just turn them on and off.”

“Well, I am.”

Her head is still shaking. “It’s not right.” She takes a step back and drops heavily onto the couch. “Marlena, I’m . . . I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what? That you can’t live off your daughter anymore? That you can’t ask seekers and the suffering to pay up or I won’t heal them?”

Her hands grip her knees. She suddenly looks so young. “I’m afraid you will come to regret this.”

I close my eyes a moment. I hear honesty in her words. Honesty and worry. Real motherly concern. “If I do, Mama, it can’t be worse than the regret of missing out on a normal childhood, a normal life. I regret that most of all. More than anything else that could possibly happen from this decision.”

My mother’s gaze drops to her lap. “You say that now.”

“It’s the truth.” I watch her there, so still, like she’s not breathing. “I don’t want television specials, Mama. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be needed by everyone. I just want to be like everyone else.”

“You’ve never been like everyone else and you shouldn’t want to be. I saw you on Saturday, Marlena. I saw what you did. We all saw. You should be . . .”

“Grateful?” I supply with a long sigh.

My mother’s eyes flicker up at me. “Proud. I was going to say proud.” Then, “Being a healer is who you are.”

My throat grows tight. “But it’s not all that I am, Mama.”

There is a long pause, the two of us staring at each other, roles reversed, my mother slumped on the couch, rumpled and defeated, me standing before her, confident and unyielding. “You’re not a little girl anymore,” she says. There is sadness in her tone. Real sadness, and longing.

The air around us is fragile. I’m afraid to move through it.

Carefully, I step out of my stained white slippers. “No, I’m not,” I say. Silently, I turn away.

“Marlena,” my mother calls after me as I climb the stairs. “I do love you, you know. Never forget that. I always have.”

In my room, I take down the evidence of my visions, the things I’ve painted and made and drawn. I carry them to the gift room, setting them on a shelf and stacking them in the corner. I take my collection of books about healers and mystics, the writings of Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Margery Kempe, even Hildegard, and bring them to the gift room, too. Next come the white sheaths. I ball them into a big heap on the floor by the paintings and the books. I don’t care if they get ruined. I go back and forth, back and forth, replacing the stuff of my life as a healer with the stuff of normalcy. Jeans. T-shirts. Platform sandals and baggy sweaters and flip-flops and short skirts. I pick through the offerings for anything I like. Stacks of novels that people thought I might like to read, probably because other girls my age do like to read them. Soon, aside from the clothes and the books, my room is nearly bare of everything that ever marked my life as a healer.

My mother is right. I know nothing else aside from healing. But so much blank space is more exciting than daunting. The change makes me feel different.

Lighter.

Freer.

More hopeful.

But it’s also strange.

I’m strange. Like I’m not quite here. Like I’m floating in some in-between space, wedged between reality and the unseen. Teresa of Ávila wrote of this place she called the interior castle, which she had to move through, fight through, to get to God. Maybe I’ve entered something of a castle myself, but an exterior one. I must pass through it to finally enter the outside world. I wonder how hard I’ll have to fight, or if I’ll have to fight at all. Maybe it will be easy.

As the day wears into night, I feel a shift, my entire being changing. All the cells in my body are remaking themselves to reflect the girl I am going to be from this day forward. The girl who is not a healer. The girl who is not too sacred to touch. The girl who is not responsible for the livelihood of an entire town, for the future of so many seekers. The figurehead, removed from her ship.

It’s like the cells in my body know what is happening.

Does God know?

Will God throw a tantrum, taking my gift away and more besides? Sometimes I think, if there is a God, he is a salesman on the side of the road, a con artist hawking shiny baubles, acting as though you already promised to purchase them, as though you begged for them when you never did. Yet somehow he still tricks you into thinking it was your idea to hang them around your neck in the first place.

A shiver runs through me.

I sit in my chair by the window, curl my feel underneath me, and look out onto the water and the darkening sky.

The human body, our muscles, our hands, have their own memories. Healing is like that, a muscle I’ve been flexing my entire life. I don’t even have to think about it. Calling on my gift has always been as simple as rustling around in a pocket for a charm I know is always there. But it’s also strange to have a gift whose source remains a mystery. A charm I’ve come to depend on, but one I’ve never fully understood.

Is it possible that just as I can call on my gift at will, I can as easily will it away? That in removing the stuff of my life as a healer, I can remove the gift from my body? Or is it more like the charm getting lost, fallen through a hole in my pocket? And if so, where will it go? Will it be resting between the floorboards, waiting for me to find it again?

TWENTY

When I wake up on the first morning of my new life as Marlena Not the Healer, I do a number of things.

I pick and choose from the clothing now hanging in my closet. There is a glittery tank top I might never wear but decided I wanted anyway. There are jeans and jeans and more jeans. Skinny. Ripped at the knees. Cut off at the bottom. Jeans with studs. Jeans with embroidered flowers. T-shirts are piled on my shelves and cute, colorful dresses hang in a row, a bright tempting rainbow of choices. I decide on one of the T-shirts. Pale violet, with a V-neck. A pair of jeans with studs in the shape of tiny stars. Bright-green flip-flops. I’ve always wanted to wear flip-flops. I’ve seen girls wearing them at the beach, in town, on the boardwalk by the wharf, on the way to some takeout restaurant, thwacking along as they chat with their friends or hold hands with their boyfriends.

Boyfriends.

Am I going to have a boyfriend?

T-shirts, jeans, flip-flops, and a boyfriend, too?

There is a rush in my ears, a dizzying lightness in my head to accompany it.

I grab a deep-fuchsia sweater in case I get cold. I love the bright color.

So much color!

The sun shines through my bedroom window. I turn my face to it, my whole body, a flower discovering warmth and light.

My stomach grumbles low and loud.

I thwack my way down the hall and the steps and into the kitchen, smiling.

What do healers on vacation eat?

Candy bars? Ice cream? Cheeseburgers and fries?

“Marlena, you look nice.” Fatima looks up from the counter where she is chopping vegetables. Carrots. Celery. Onion. Kale. Kale, of course. She is making one of those Portuguese stews that take forever to cook, that she makes sometimes when my mother is feeling homesick for her own mother’s cooking, though she never admits this out loud.

Is Mama feeling homesick today?

“You really think so?” I ask Fatima. She smiles an uncertain smile, like she’s not quite sure what the rules are at the moment. I wonder what she overheard yesterday. If she overheard everything. What my mother told her, if anything.

“Yes. But Marlena?” Fatima comes around the counter to where I’m standing. “May I? Fix something?”

“Sure,” I say. But she hesitates. “Fatima, please don’t be afraid. I’m not a sacred object.” Fatima blinks. She looks around the kitchen like she’s expecting my mother to jump out of the fridge and scold her for being too close. “Besides, I need your advice on my outfit. Too much color?”

She shakes her head. “No. I think the color is nice. Different, but a good different.” She tugs a little at my T-shirt, where I’ve tucked it in. Once it’s completely untucked, she fixes it so it hangs to the edge of my hips. “That’s all. But it’s better.”

“Thank you.” I shrug on the bright sweater and hold out my arms, wait for Fatima’s verdict.

“I like the pink,” she says, then places a hand over her mouth.

We both start to laugh. I don’t know why.

Fatima returns to the other side of the counter. I think our conversation is over, but then she says something else. “Your mama told me this morning that things would be different, but she didn’t tell me how. Do you want to talk about it? I . . . I won’t tell her.”

My good feeling falters. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She left early. She didn’t say where she was going.” Fatima has gone back to chopping carrots, but she keeps looking up.

“I decided I’m not going to be a healer anymore, Fatima.”

A startled sound escapes her and the knife clatters to the counter. “Marlena? Really? But that is a big change.”

“I just . . . I needed a break. It’s just for a while.”

She takes a dish towel and wipes her hands. “Tudo bem, tudo bem,” Fatima says while nodding. “I suppose it makes sense, querida. I can imagine you might want a break. It’s a lonely life you’ve had.” Fatima draws in a deep breath. “Marlena, I . . .”

I climb onto one of the stools in front of the kitchen island and wait for her to continue.

“. . . I’ve always thought that things could be different for you.”

I lean my elbows on the counter. “What do you mean?”

“That being a healer, being who you are, doesn’t require that you live how you do. That you could be a normal girl, but one who is also a healer. That you could be both things.” She’s not looking me in the eye. “It’s your mama who’s made it seem like it’s one or the other. Your mama and maybe those books you’re always reading by those ancient women. Like it’s all or nothing.”

What Fatima has said is so simple it should be obvious, but it’s never been obvious to me. “I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think of things any other way. So, for now, I think it just has to be all or nothing. And I want it to be nothing.”

Fatima sighs, picking up her knife again. “That makes me sorry, Marlena. And sad. I hope you can find your way to a place where you can be both.”

I tug at the bright-pink ends of my sweater sleeves. “Do you think it’s real, Fatima? My gift? Ever since Mrs. Jacobs . . . I’ve wondered about it.”

Fatima’s eyes shift upward, toward heaven, then flicker back to me. “Yes, Marlena. I do.”

I go out the back of the house.

José is on his way to pick me up. I want to tell Angie about my decision. I feel like she should know that I’m quitting healing for a while. But I’m also going because Finn told me not so casually he’d be there today, and that maybe—if I stopped by to see Angie—he and I could hang out afterward. Do one of the things on my list of normal.

The ocean shines with sunlight, the waves lapping at the shore.

The air smells warm.

Inviting.

What’s that saying again?

The world is my oyster.

I take a step forward, and another, walk through the world, let myself be absorbed into it, embraced and beckoned and called. I wonder if today I am its pearl.

The moment I get in the car, José reaches his arm back and hands me an envelope. His eyebrows arch, his round face searches mine.

On it is my mother’s handwriting. “Marlena.”

I open it. Inside is a pile of cash. No note. Just money.

“Rosado, cariño,” José says. “I like you in pink. I think it’s your color.”

“I didn’t know I had a color.”

“I didn’t know either. But maybe you do now. Maybe you have more than one.”

“Maybe.”

José is still watching me. “¿A dónde vamos?”

“Where do you think?”

“Your friend Angie’s center?”

“Yes. Please,” I add.

I count the money. Then I count it again. Twenties, tens, fives. There is six hundred dollars. I’ve never held so much money in my hands. Huh. I told my mother I wanted money, and here it is, like magic.

Apparently I do have power.

I count the money again. I can’t help it.

With money, a girl can do things. Go places. Buy stuff.

Maybe I’ll go shopping. Maybe I’ll go to a store and try on outfits like other people do when they’re looking for what to wear. Maybe I’ll find something I like that isn’t the choice of someone I’ve healed. Something that isn’t a thank-you, an offering, for services rendered, miracles completed. Maybe I’ll buy it just because I like it.

“José?”

“Sí, Marlenita?”

“Will you pull over at that gas station?”

“Por supuesto.”

He stops and I hop out. Before I go inside, I gesture for him to roll down the window. “Do you want anything?”

José seems surprised. He’s not used to me asking such things. I’m not used to being able to offer. “Limonada,” he says. “Con gas. You know which ones I mean?”

I nod. I do know. I’ve seen Fatima drinking them in the kitchen.

Suddenly, an image of Fatima and José hanging out after work, drinking fizzy lemonades by the seawall, pops into my head. I wonder if they spend time together when they are off the clock.

“Gracias.”

“Sure thing, José,” I say, and go into the little store.

First, I head to the fridges and find the familiar soda can I always see in Fatima’s hand on her break. The cool air rushes out when I open the door. I don’t take anything for myself. I’m not here for a drink.

I want magazines. Fashion magazines.

I’ve never looked at one.

I’ve never been allowed. It’s just not what healers do, I guess.

There is a shelf at the front of the store full of them and I go to it now, cold soda sweating in my hand. I pick up Vogue. I know it’s famous and I’ve actually heard of it, so I figure it’s a good place to start. I tuck it under my arm and keep looking. Glamour. Elle. Harper’s Bazaar. Marie Claire. There are so many and they are so shiny and beautiful. I skip over the wedding ones, feeling allergic to anything white and sparkly and weddingy. When I go to the register I have a pile of seven magazines to go with José’s fizzy lemonade. They are heavy and the stack makes a loud thud when it hits the counter. Before the man rings up the total, I add two chocolate bars. One for me, one for José. Twixes. I’ve seen José eating them. The man keeps totaling and then asks for way more money than I expect. I guess magazines are expensive. I fish two twenties from the envelope. He hands me back a five, two ones, and change, which I put away while he’s placing everything into a plastic bag. I grab the lemonade before he can put that away, too, say thank you, and head outside.

José’s window is still open.

“Your drink, señor,” I say, handing the can through the window.

He chuckles and takes it.

“Marlenita,” he laughs, shaking his head.

“What?”

“Nothing, cariño.” He eyes the bag, which is sagging with the weight of the magazines. “What else did you buy?”

“Girly things,” I say, and shrug.

I’m about to get into the back seat when I stop and bend forward again, looking through the passenger-side window. “Can I sit up front? Or is that weird?”

José’s eyebrows arch again. “Of course you can. It’s not weird.”

I open the door and settle in. I’ve never sat up front. I guess because Mama always set the precedent of sitting in the back. This seems silly now that I think of it.

José puts the car in gear and pulls onto the road. I glance over at him, but his eyes are facing forward. I reach into the bag and pull out Vogue, with its glossy cover and a woman in a frilly, strapless black gown with her head thrown back laughing. She’s frolicking among some trees, their leaves golden and red and a fiery orange of fall.

If I put on a dress like this, would it make me that happy, too?

I flip through it, mesmerized by so many beautiful things.

“You looking for style advice, eh?” José asks as I’m reaching into the bag to pull out another glossy tome.

I nod, a little embarrassed by how many magazines I bought. It makes me look either desperate or like I have no impulse control. Maybe both. But maybe it doesn’t matter? It feels like I’ve been let out of jail. Maybe, on my first day of freedom, I’m allowed to go a little crazy. Maybe on my second day, too.

The pictures on the pages are so exquisite. The women, the clothes. They are elegant and funky and sexy and so many other things I’m not used to. The wedding gowns for my audiences are lovely, sure, but they make me into the portrait of innocence, the virginal bride. Of course, I am a virgin, but still. These clothes make me wonder whether, if I put them on, I’d become a different person, like putting on a new skin.

I page through the magazines like a hungry monster. I gobble them up.

I want everything at once. Clothes, friends, boyfriends, road trips, shopping trips, parties, lazy days at the beach, cookouts, school, homework, epic makeout sessions, and movie nights. It’s like I’ve been starving for years, but just realized I’m ravenous. The world has always been there, but it feels like I am only now seeing it. My heart pounds.

I need to calm down.

“Oh!” I dig around at the bottom of the bag until my hands close around the candy bars. I nearly forgot I bought them. “Here.” I drop one of the Twixes into the cup holder. “That’s for you.”

“My favorite!”

“I know.”

José’s palm rests on top of the wheel as he steers us alongside the ocean. He’s quiet for a bit and doesn’t reach for the chocolate, but then I hear him take a breath. “Did something happen between you and your mama? Well, I know something happened, but are you okay, mi niñita? This seems like a lot of sudden change.”

I look down at the pile of magazines in my lap, slipping and sliding around with the movement of the car. “I’m okay,” I tell him. “Maybe for the first time in a while.”

“That’s good to hear,” he says, but I can sense hesitation. “Your mama,” he starts, but then stops.

I almost don’t want him to continue.

Is it weird that I don’t wonder where my mother is? Or when I’ll see her again? Or what will happen when I do? Like, what in the world will we talk about or say to each other if it’s not about the audience coming up this coming Saturday or, I don’t know, a television special about me? Will we suddenly talk about boys and clothes and get manicures and hang out in the lawn chairs in the back of the house and sun ourselves? Will she ever forgive me for stopping being her perfect child-daughter-healer?

Instead of asking José what he was going to say about my mother, I change the subject to something that has just occurred to me in my newly freed state. I watch as José turns the wheel, just slightly, but enough to round the bend in the road. “José, would you teach me how to drive one of these days?”

José belly laughs so hard it’s nearly a minute before he answers, and so long that Angie’s boxy glass center has come into view. “I’d love to, cariño. I thought you’d never ask.”

TWENTY-ONE

I thwack my way through the front door. I decide I love flip-flops, the way they are seemingly so low-key and unassuming, flat and rubbery and made so you can get them caked with sand and wash them off later with a garden hose if you want, but at the same time just a little bit obnoxious because of the constant, rhythmic noise they make as you step. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Rhythmic like the ocean waves, yet plastic and man-made and entirely unnatural. Profane.

People can hear me coming, I think.

Unlike before, when I wore my silent, white ballet flats.

I am no longer a ghost.

As usual, Lexi is buried in a thick book on her desk. She glances up. “Hi, Marlena. Look at you!”

“Colorful?” I say, getting used to everyone’s surprise. “Um, too colorful?”

She smiles. “No. Cheerful. Different. I like it.”

Lexi might be lying, but I don’t care. “Thank you.”

“Angie’s on a call. She should be off in a few minutes. You can wait wherever you like. You know your way around.” She drops her eyes back to her reading.

I resist inquiring whether Finn is with Angie in the office and instead head into the wide open lab. The MRI machine glows bright as always in the stark sunlight streaming through the glass. Before I can decide otherwise, I kick off my flip-flops and climb onto the hard table and lie down. Then I inch myself along the platform until I’m inside the dome. The machine is off, so the effect is unremarkable. It’s just dark and quiet and still.

I place my hands on the inside of the dome and wait, bracing myself.

I wait and wait.

Nothing.

Just silence. Lifelessness. No visions. No sensing other people who’ve been inside this machine, no wounds either physical or emotional. The visions were here just the other day. So where did they go?

I swallow.

There is tension in my muscles, my shoulders especially. I let my hands fall away from the hard, cold metal. They come to rest on my chest.

“Marlena?” Angie’s voice is muffled by the machine. “What are you doing?”

I inch my way out, using my bare feet to pull myself and sit up. Angie is standing by the wall of the lab, seemingly frozen. I suppose it’s not something that happens every day, a girl randomly climbing inside her MRI.

“Hi.” The bright-green flip-flops are still on the floor, waiting for me. I hop down from the table, acting like me being inside an eerie MRI without it being turned on is the most ordinary thing in the world. I slip my feet into the shoes and thwack over to her. I will never tire of that sound.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, slowly coming back to life. I wonder if she notices how today I’m sporting an outfit other than my typical dressed-for-bed attire. I try to look around inconspicuously for Finn to see if he’s hiding in some corner of the lab, but I don’t see him anywhere.

Maybe he’s not coming? Maybe he changed his mind about hanging out with me?

Angie searches my face like she’s trying to see inside my mind. Her eyes shift to the machine and she nods her chin at it. “Thinking about getting an MRI?”

“Maybe?” I say.

Angie’s hair is long and loose today, and it brushes her shoulders. She’s wearing a blue button-down blouse that matches her eyes. Casual but somehow dressed up. Like she could go to the fanciest restaurant around and fit right in. “Did it feel scary, to be inside of it?” she asks me. “Or not as bad as you thought?”

“Not as bad as I thought, I guess?”

“At least this time, you didn’t faint when you touched it.”

I nod. I didn’t. How can a person feel this different overnight? Be this different? Maybe it’s all in my imagination. My attention drifts to the photos on the wall behind Angie. James Halloway. Nicole Matthews. Chastity Lang. All teenagers with gifts like mine, or something like it. “What are you really looking for when you talk to us?”

Angie’s brow furrows. “Who do you mean by ‘us’?”

“You know. All the weirdos you study.” I point to their photos. “Sonar girl and telekinesis boy. The weatherman. And me,” I add.

“You’re not a weirdo,” Angie says. “None of you are.”

“Did you put them in these crazy machines?”

Angie clasps her hands. “Eventually. Yes.”

I think about how an MRI is designed to allow someone to see through you, to literally see through your skin and muscles and bone. Designed to expose all of your secrets, to photograph them in black and white. What would an MRI reveal about me? What’s inside me that you can’t see just by looking? “What do you think you might find in my brain?”

Angie cocks her head. “I don’t know,” she says, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. She has a theory. She’s not telling me what it is. “That’s why I want to do an MRI.”

“Do you have any scans I can look at?” I ask, realizing I’m curious what they look like. “You know, so I can see what I’d be getting into?”

Her expression brightens. “Sure. Of course I do.” She beckons me to follow. We pass her office and keep on going, into a different part of the center. She leads me into another lab of sorts, but this one is small. Three of its walls are covered with giant screens. Angie picks up a tablet from the table in the middle of the room. The lights go dim and the screens grow bright. My eyes take a second to adjust.

“Oh wow!” I reach out instinctively, toward the glow suddenly emanating from the wall. “That’s. . . . those . . . they’re beautiful!” All across the screens are images of human brains. Well, images in the shape of a human brain. The colors are startling. I didn’t know they would be so colorful! Lines and splotches and lakes of red, blue, green, yellow, purple saturate the scans like maps, like winding bodies of water, like . . . “Angie, I . . . I . . . they . . .”

“What?”

Longing, as powerful as a wave crashing into shore, permeates my every cell. I swallow, I breathe, I try to start over. “This probably won’t make any sense, but I recognize these.”

Angie is close in the dark. She’s watching me, not the screens. “I don’t understand, Marlena. Say more.”

“I recognize them from my visions. My visions look like this. Not exactly. But very similar. Like, incredibly, incredibly similar.”

“Really.” Angie’s voice drops an intensely interested octave.

“Yes.” I walk up to the screen to my right, until this one image is only inches from my nose. It almost looks like a sea anemone. There is a stem—the brain stem, I assume—that mushrooms up into a million tiny waving threads, which are dominated by blues and bright purples. I want to touch it, like I might touch a person during a healing. It’s like I am looking at something that came from inside me, that is somehow mine, yet there it is on the wall, as though I painted it and hung it there. “Why does the brain do that? Light up aqua here, and lilac there?”

“It has to do with a person’s activities at the time of the scan, and what emotions they are feeling, their thoughts. Different emotions will light up different parts of the brain.” She points to the purple sections. “These colors can indicate sadness, depression. The blue is associated with anger.” She points to another scan on the wall full of pinks and reds. “Those colors indicate happiness, excitement, engagement with the world.”

I stand on my toes to look at another scan, this one a wild swirl of rainbows. “It really is like one of my visions. And the colors from my visions tell me something, too, about the person I’m healing. What they’re feeling or going through. Though shades of gray and black are what indicate pain and grief in my, um, scan of a person.” I turn to Angie. For once, she’s staring at me like she doesn’t know how to respond. “I’ll show you them sometime,” I offer, wishing she’d stop looking at me that way. “My art, I mean. If you ever come to my house—not that my mother would be happy about that.”

“Maybe you can take photos and send them to me.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe I’m like a living, breathing MRI machine?” I try to laugh. Maybe all this time I’ve been painting scans of people’s brain activity? Or maybe I’ve been painting images of my own brain, how it lights up during a healing? “That sounds crazy.”

Just then, Finn walks in. “Um, sorry to interrupt. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

My entire body swoops like I’m flying. I wonder how this would show up on one of these brain scans. A bright saturated red? A pink as intense as the color of my sweater? The same hue as my cheeks now that Finn is here? “Hi, um, hi,” I say, eloquently.

Angie skips right over greetings and goes straight to the point. “Marlena was just telling me that her visions look like brain scans,” she tells Finn. Then to me, she says, “Finn has a photographic memory. I’ve never seen anyone who can grasp the map of someone’s brain like he does. I’m sure he’d love to take a look at your brain scan just as much as I would.”

In this moment, I remember Angie is a scientist, like a really serious scientist, and I wish she hadn’t just revealed this thing about me to Finn, the boy I’m obsessing over, like it isn’t a big deal. Though I do like that she just revealed this other, fascinating detail about Finn to me.

“Angie, come on!” Finn rolls his eyes.

I guess he must be feeling the same way I do. “You have a photographic memory?”

He nods.

“Wow,” I say.

He shrugs.

Then, maybe because I’m so nervous about everything, I drop, “So I’ve decided to take a break from healing.” After which I wonder if this lands like a bomb or just more of a somewhat-interesting revelation that fizzes and sputters.

Angie was about to say something else and instead she closes her mouth.

“Well, that’s quite the news,” Finn says, finding his voice.

I avoid looking directly at him and instead search Angie’s face, trying to guess what she is thinking. I don’t want to disappoint her. I worry that I am.

“Why don’t we go to my office and talk about this?” she suggests. “We’ll leave Finn to his scans.”

On my way out of the lab, Finn speaks softly to me. “See you later. Right?”

“Yes,” I say, just as softly.

When Angie and I get to her office she sits cross-legged on the floor, and I take a spot on the couch. I almost wish she would sit next to me like a mother might. “Does that mess up . . . this?” By this, I mean the project of Angie studying me.

“Well, that depends.” She says this calmly, like what I’ve just informed her of is no big deal. “Just because you’ve stopped healing doesn’t mean that my research and our conversations have to end. As long as you’re okay with it, we can continue as before.”

My breath quickens. I’m afraid to tell her the truth. “I don’t know. I think I want a break. Not from you. But even from thinking about healing. At least for now.”

Angie inhales deeply. “Marlena?”

“Yes?”

“What prompted this decision?”

Everyone keeps asking this.

“And just a moment ago,” she goes on, “you seemed so excited to talk about your visions and how you saw them in those scans.”

“I know.” I straighten my jeaned legs, study my toes against the green of my shoes, the windows and the sea beyond them outlining everything. My flip-flops are a glaring hue against the monochrome white of everything in Angie’s office. I used to match the decor, blend right into it, and now I’m an interruption. “Yesterday I got into a fight with my mother,” I start. “She has, or maybe had, plans for a television special about me. Film crews following me for weeks. She didn’t consult me, she just planned it. I got angry at her, like I’ve never gotten angry in my life. I threw a mug. It broke and it was a mess.”

Angie nods as she listens, always pulling stories through quiet and the need people have to fill the gaps in conversation.

“Sometimes I think my mother depends on me more than I depend on her. She just wants me to keep going, healing, so our life never has to change. It doesn’t even matter to her if my gift is real or not.”

“Do you want your mother to believe in you?” Angie asks.

I let my legs relax again. Slump into the cushions of the comfy couch. “I don’t know. Her belief in me has come at such a cost. Like, she doesn’t really see me as her daughter. I’m a healer first. A healer only.”

“Is this why you decided to take a break?”

I force myself to be the silent one now, afraid of what I might say. Yes, and also because I want to go out on dates with your research assistant.

“Is there anything else?” Angie presses.

“Probably.” I only allow myself the one word.

“Are you sure about your decision?”

“Yes,” I say, even though inside of me is a jumble of uncertainties. Do I really want a life without my visions, visions that look strangely similar to those beautiful scans? “You know a lot about the brain, right?” I find myself asking.

“I hope so, Marlena, since I’ve devoted my life to studying it.” Angie says. “Why?”

“Do you think the brain can . . . change?”

“Well.” The breeze from the open windows floats between us. “It depends on how you mean. The brain is always changing, remaking itself, depending on how we use it. Kind of like the colors that light up differently in the scans, depending on what a person is feeling.” She pulls her phone from her pocket. “For example, these things are changing our brains in ways we’re only now starting to comprehend. We have a long way to go in understanding this, and no idea what the long-term consequences will be. How they might literally remake our brains.” She sets the phone on the ground next to her. “But that’s not what you were asking me, is it?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I wonder if we can will our brains to change.”

“Say more,” Angie says.

I search for the right words. “Like, let’s say there’s a part of your brain you’re drawing on all the time? And suddenly you stop drawing on it? Will it forget how to be used in that way?” A thought occurs to me. One I don’t like. “Will it go dark of all its color?”

“You’re thinking about how your break might affect the way your brain works.”

I nod.

“The brain doesn’t change overnight, Marlena. Not like you’re suggesting.”

Angie sounds so sure, like even the possibility it might is just magical thinking. But then, Angie is a scientist, even though she’s also a scientist who dabbles with the mysterious and the unbelievable. “Okay,” I say, somewhat relieved, but not entirely convinced. I am somehow lighter today than I was yesterday. It’s as though the anchor of my gift has been pulled up from the ocean floor, allowing me to float out to sea.

“What would really help to answer your question is if you allowed me to do an MRI,” Angie suggests, yet again.

Before I can answer, the door opens and Finn pops his head inside Angie’s office. “Can I come in?”

“Of course,” Angie says.

Finn’s eyes dart to me. “Are you ready, Marlena? Or should I come back later?”

“Finn is giving me a ride home,” I explain to Angie, and as a way of giving Finn an answer that yes, I’m ready. I watch for Angie’s reaction. I don’t want Angie to think that Finn and me leaving together is a big deal, even though it’s the hugest deal. The biggest deal in my entire, sheltered life.

“Okay,” Angie says, the wheels of her mind clearly turning. I wish I knew what it was telling her. She stands up and so I do. “When will I see you next, Marlena?”

I bite my lip. “I don’t know.”

Angie looks at me hard. “Don’t forget, I’m here if there’s anything you need. If you have questions. You don’t even have to call.”

I nod. We hold each other’s stare a moment longer.

Then Angie goes to her desk, picks up a book, and flips through it, looking for something, as though Finn and I are already gone. But as he and I exit the center and cross the parking lot toward his truck, I wonder if she has made the connection, the one that has to do with my break from healings and Finn and me spending time together. This thought prompts me to glance back. When I do, I see Angie standing by the windows of her office, watching us. I can’t make out her face. The shine on the glass obscures her expression.

TWENTY-TWO

The envelope of money cracks and crinkles in my pocket as I hop into the passenger seat of Finn’s truck, like it keeps wanting to remind me that it’s there. The driver’s side door slams shut and Finn looks at me. He’s in jeans again, and a black T-shirt, sleeves long enough that no ink from his tattoo peeks out from under them. “So, Marlena, I had some thoughts about our outing today.”

The sound of his voice is like an on button, erasing everything else in my mind. I’m with Finn. He said outing, but we both know what this really is. We’re going on a sort of date. “I’m up for anything.”

“I thought we’d start simple, from your list.”

“Oh?”

We are both acting casual. I don’t know about Finn, but I don’t feel casual right now. I feel like there’s a million things I want to ask him. That I want to know.

Finn puts the truck into gear and soon we are on our way out of the parking lot and driving down the road by the sea. “An afternoon movie, and then maybe something to eat?”

“A movie in a movie theater?”

Finn laughs. “Yes, since you said you’ve never been to one.”

“I haven’t. We don’t even have television in my house. Or a computer. Well, my mother has a tablet, but I’m not allowed to use it.” But my life is changing. Maybe soon I’ll have this, too, and more. Oh yeah, and Finn, you have a photographic memory, huh?

He shifts gears and the truck goes a little faster. I roll down my window. The breeze is cool and soft.

“So you decided to take a break from healing,” he says.

I watch him as he drives, so relaxed at the wheel, and wonder if I’ll ever drive like this one day, if it will feel second nature. “I told my mother that I’m on vacation. And, surprisingly, you were right. I told her I wanted a break and now I’m on one. It’s weird, how it was so easy.” The movie theater comes into view ahead. It’s a huge gray cube of cement designed to keep out the light. The very opposite of Angie’s glass-windowed center. The sign next to it boasts sixteen options for what we might see.

Finn turns into the parking lot. “I’m hurt you’re surprised I was right. You do know I’m pretty much a genius.” He smirks a little. “Seeing that I’ve got a photographic memory and all.”

“Yeah, I did hear that.” I try not to smile. “But we’ll have to see. I have a lot of questions and I’m just not sure if I believe in your genius or not. Yet.”

He laughs as he drives down an aisle looking for a spot, then pulls into one not far from the entrance. “Touché, Marlena.”

By the time the theater goes dark, I am holding a bucket of buttery popcorn, my second candy bar of the day, and a large sugary soda. So much to take in, to eat, and so very gluttonous of me. As Finn and I sit down in the middle of one of the rows, what I really want is to hold his hand. We decided to see some romantic comedy that I’ve never heard of, because it’s not like I’m up on the latest movies. I pop the crunchy, squeaky puffs of popcorn into my mouth to give my fingers something to do, in between sips of Coke, eyes on the screen, not really seeing anything. My brain can only process Finn, Finn, Finn, the nearness of his shoulder, his skin, his palm on the armrest, so close. I want to touch him, turn my head and stare.

At one point I actually think, My mother was right about boys. Having an interest in a boy, desiring his attention, just wanting one can apparently become so all-consuming that I can think of nothing else. I don’t know if it’s just because Finn’s my first crush or if it’s specific to him, but I do know that I am consumed by Finn in a way I’ve never been consumed by anyone in my life. I mean, who could perform miracles in such a state?

My insides are fluttery and woozy and drunk. Teresa of Ávila believed she had to shut out the world so she could wind her way to the center of her soul where she believed God awaited her, while all sorts of creatures and obstacles battled her progress. In Teresa’s visions, she fought her soul demons with sword in hand. But I feel like I’ve been residing at the center of my soul for years, and my task is to fight my way out, push past Teresa on my way.

The darkness of the theater makes everything surreal and magical, makes me bolder, like how my anger yesterday made me throw mugs and call Finn and get in his truck. I set the bucket of popcorn on the floor and shift just a little in his direction, tiny increments, closing some of the distance between us. I lean on the armrest.

What will happen if I touch him, this time? What will I see? Something? Anything? Nothing at all?

His cheek is so close. If I turn my head my lips will brush his skin.

The movie plays in the background. I hear it like music in a restaurant, distant and faint. “Is this really happening?” I ask Finn, and I don’t mean the movie.

He turns. The two of us stare at each other in the shadows. “This is really happening,” he says.

“Can we go?” I ask.

“But the movie,” he starts, yet he’s already up out of his seat.

I’m up in a flash, too, following him out of the theater, my heart tripling the speed of my steps, my breath doubling it, the air and my mind fizzy and sparkling. The light of the theater lobby is blinding, my surroundings a blur as we push our way through the doors into the afternoon, returning to Finn’s truck. He drives out of the parking lot without speaking. It isn’t until we are on the road by the sea that he asks, “Where to, Marlena?”

“I know a place,” I say. And I do. I want to share something of me with Finn. No, I want to share everything. “Just a little farther down the street, there’s a place to pull over.” Finn lets me guide him where to go. He parks in a narrow lot along the low-lying park by the ocean. “This way,” I tell him after we’ve gotten out of the truck.

We slip off our shoes and pick our way across the grassy bank and over the rocks, some of them round and difficult to cross, all of them ringed by seashells underneath, some broken, some whole, and small white pebbles, smooth from the ocean. The rocks are dry, the tide low, everything dusty with sand and salt. We keep going, me leading, until we reach three great boulders that rise up to form a wall of sorts, a tiny cove of granite and slate. Beyond it is a wide gray ledge. This is where we stop.

“What is this place?” Finn asks.

“I’ve always called it the healing rocks,” I tell him. “I’ve been coming since I was small. I love it here.”

Finn nods, taking in the view of the ocean, wild with whitecaps, but far enough away to keep us safe from the crashing waves. Seagulls glide overhead, the air is brisk and tangy, the sun bright and high. The sky is blue, streaked with white cotton clouds. “It’s beautiful,” he says.

I look at Finn’s hand, tempted to take it, but I keep my arms pinned to my sides.

How do people do this? Is it always this fraught? This confusing?

“Over here,” I tell him, tiptoeing across the wide, rough stone until I reach the edge of it and sit down. I’ve always loved how the tall boulders that shelter this place are close enough that I can lean back against them, like sitting in a comfy chair. A sofa made from the life of the shore.

“You didn’t like the movie?” Finn asks after he’s settled next to me.

“I don’t remember much of it, so I don’t know. Maybe I would in another circumstance?” I glance at Finn. “If I was there with someone else?”

Finn’s eyes shift from me to the sea. “I don’t remember any of it, either,” he says. Then, “Can I ask you something?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

I pick up one of the smooth stones sitting on the ledge and begin to press it into the center of my palm. “Is it a Finn-and-Angie-research question, or just a Finn-who-is-curious-about-Marlena question?”

Finn sighs. “Maybe a bit of both. I want to understand you better. If it’s something you don’t want to answer, then just tell me.”

“Okay. But you can ask me something, if I can ask you something afterward. I have questions, too, Finn.”

He smiles. “All right. It’s a deal. But me first.” Finn leans over and picks through the pile of shells and pebbles next to the rocks, and comes up with one that is small and flat. Perfect for skipping. “So, how did you end up this way? I mean, as a healer?” He laughs. “Let me be more specific. Did you sign up somewhere at church? Did you go to healer school?”

I give a laugh, too, but it’s more of a nervous one. “No, it doesn’t work that way. Performing miracles is not a profession a person chooses. It chooses you, and you submit to it. You know the story of Mary, right? And the angel Gabriel? You can be a scientist and still know that story, right?”

“Yes, I’ve heard it once or twice,” Finn says. “An angel showed up and told Mary she was going to have the son of God, like it or not, and she would end up an unwed mother. Not a very nice situation. God’s kind of an asshole like that, I think.”

“Maybe.” The white stone in my palm is warm against my skin. “But, at least in theory, Gabriel gave Mary a choice, and she accepted it as a gift. That’s one of the reasons why people venerate her.” I pass the stone from one hand to the other as I continue to talk. “Being a healer, or a visionary, can work like that. There are famous visionaries who resisted their visions, or who thought they were sicknesses, but later came to accept and understand them as gifts. For me, it was a little different. I was just a baby when my gift revealed itself, or so I’ve been told, so there was no choice. I was too little to make choices. My mother made them for me. And then, the community around you sort of ratifies your gift, as they did with me.”

Finn’s legs are longer than mine and they scrape the rocks below. “What do you mean, they ratify it?”

While we talk I set my stone down and search for a perfect clamshell the size of a coin, pearly on the inside. Then I search for something else I like. It’s easier to do this than to look at Finn while I answer. “They confirm that it’s real, that your touch is miraculous, that you are capable of healings, and they tell others about your gift. Spread the word. I guess you could say they anoint you as holy, or sacred.” I select another treasure, this one a pale-pink rock. “Also, faith healers are a big business. Child healers can make money for their families, for the churches affiliated with them. It’s the same with me. It wasn’t long after I started healing before I became a business for Mama, for this entire community. People will pay a lot of money for hope. Even a little bit of it.”

The waves roll into shore, rising and disappearing, mimicking the feeling of this day, my newfound freedom raising me up with possibility, then spilling me to shore and rocking me with confusion, complication, uncertainty.

I look up from my growing pile of rocks and shells. Finn is watching me with a look I’ve seen before. Yesterday, when we were talking about my visions at the picnic table, he wore the same expression. “And you’ve become an image of hope, which is why you’re on T-shirts and candles and things around here.”

“Even kites,” I say with a shrug. “Please tell me you don’t own any of them.”

“Not yet.” Finn chuckles. “I have another question.”

“Not fair, you’ve asked a lot! One more and that’s it. Then it’s my turn.”

“Fine,” he agrees, a bit reluctantly. A tiny green crab scuttles across the corner of the ledge where we sit. “You called these the healing rocks. Do you, I guess, no, is it easier for you to heal here? Does it put you in the mood to heal? Do you want to heal right now?” His questions spill out in a jumble. There is something there, underneath his words. Something other than sheer curiosity.

I shake my head, my eyes never leaving him. The smell of sea permeates the air and I wonder if the skin on Finn’s neck will taste of salt and sun. “No. It was just something I told my mother so she would let me come here. Healing doesn’t work like that. It’s just something I have inside me, like a treasure in a box I have hidden, but only I know where to find it. It’s hard to explain.” I change position, crossing my legs. “Now, you get to tell me about you.”

Finn slumps further against the rock supporting his back, head tilted toward the sky. “My life is boring. I’m just a graduate student.”

“It’s not boring,” I protest. “Not to me.”

“What do you want to know, Marlena?”

“Well, for one, what’s it like to have a photographic memory? Is that part of why you’re so . . . geniusy?”

He reaches up and grips the back of his neck.

Stalling.

“I answered your questions, Finn!”

“I know.” He sighs. “Fine. It has certainly helped me get where I am in my studies. And, I mean, it’s pretty much like it sounds. I remember everything I see, like a photograph. You know, snapshots. Images of what’s on the pages of books I’ve read.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.” He says this ominously, like it’s not always a good thing.

“It sounds a little bit like having visions.”

This makes Finn smile. “See, Marlena, I told you we were more similar than different.”

I shift position so that I am facing Finn rather than the ocean. “Give me an example of how it works.”

He’s thoughtful for a moment. “Have you ever heard of synesthesia?”

“No. Is that, like, a disease?”

Finn shakes his head, laughing. “It’s more like a condition, but a cool one. Sometimes I’ve wondered if you have some version of it, if that might explain your visions, and I’m wondering it now, especially since Angie said your visions look kind of like the brain scans you saw today.”

Of course I want to hear his theory, but I’m torn. “Um, Finn, I hate to tell you this, but you just turned things back to me, which again isn’t fair, and you still haven’t answered my question!”

He bites his lip. “Hmmm. You noticed that?”

“Yes.”

“You just need a little more patience, because I was about to return to me when you interrupted.” Now Finn is grinning.

I try hard not to return the grin. “It’s also true that I’m intrigued about what you said. So? I’m waiting.”

“All right. Photographic memory, how does it work?” He takes a deep breath, then starts to talk like he’s reciting something to a teacher who is quizzing him. “Synesthesia is a condition that affects the senses, where the stimulation of one of the senses has a corresponding effect on a different one. For example, a synesthete might say that they can ‘taste’ the round shape of an orange, or ‘hear’ the color of the sky. The way a synesthete’s senses blend together is usually consistent. The person will always ‘hear’ the blue hue of the sky, or will always ‘taste’ the round shape on an orange. If the person is a lexical synesthete, then each different word they hear or see will have its own particular color.”

I wait to make sure that he’s done. Then I say, “You sound like a dictionary.”

Finn shrugs. “A photographic memory can work like that. I’ve read about synesthesia before, and I can recall exactly what I read as though I’m reading it now.” Before I can respond, he goes on. “Doesn’t synesthesia sound a little like what you experience with your visions?”

A big wave crashes loud against the rocks, spray darting high in the air. “Maybe? There’s certainly a lot of color, and there’s often sound, and my senses are definitely all involved and seem connected to the colors. But even though that’s an interesting theory, you said that synesthetes experience color and the senses the same, always. And my visions aren’t predictable like that.”

Finn is nodding. But he looks a bit disappointed.

I raise my eyebrows. “Sad you couldn’t scientifically diagnose my situation?”

“Maybe a little? I liked my theory.”

I laugh. “So what does your mother think of your, um, abilities? And the rest of your family, for that matter, since you haven’t told me anything about them.”

His expression darkens. “Things with my family are complicated. They don’t exactly appreciate my ‘abilities,’ as you put it, or my path to becoming a neuroscientist.”

“What? That’s crazy! How could they not! What you do is—”

“—Marlena,” Finn interrupts.

I stop speaking.

He closes his eyes. “Let’s talk about something else. I’ll tell you about my family some other day.”

I study Finn’s profile, lit by the sun. “Okay,” I say quietly. “But there is something else I’m really curious about.”

Finn’s eyes flicker open and he turns back to me. “And what is that?”

I point to his sleeve. “I want to know about the heart you have under there.”

“My tattoo?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t tell me about it yesterday, but today you have to.”

“It’s just a heart.”

I know when someone is not telling the truth, and Finn is not telling me the truth right now. Like my healings, there is something intimate about inking an image onto one’s skin. Something permanent and alive with meaning. “Is it about another girl?” I ask, then wish the gulls overhead had chosen this moment to cry out, drowning my words.

A smile dusts Finn’s lips. “No, nothing like that. It’s just a reminder, I guess. Not to be all up in my head.”

I pull my knees tight to my chest. “What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “I’m already a doctoral student, and I graduated college when I was nineteen. The intellectual side of me has always been what dominates. I got the tattoo so that I’d have a visual reminder of this other part of me and of life, a reminder that there’s more to me than just my brain. Every time I look at my arm or see myself in the mirror, I also remember that it’s okay to feel.” Finn runs a hand through his hair. “I told you yesterday, I’m also a bit of a freak. People have treated me differently all my life. They have ‘great hopes for me’”—he flicks two fingers around this phrase—“so the heart tattoo is there also to remind other people that I’m more than my brain. Even Angie.”

Finn’s words fade. “I’ve never needed that reminder,” I tell him. “From the moment I first saw you, all I could sense was the heart in you.” I exchange this confession in turn for his. The way the sun shines on Finn’s face makes me wonder if he is human or something else, an ethereal creature that doesn’t belong to this earth, that might disappear into the fabric of this universe at any minute.

“Really, Marlena?”

“Yes,” I say.

His hand reaches for mine. “What else did you see, visionary girl?”

The tips of his fingers find the center of my palm. I watch as they slide across my skin. I wait for those half visions I always have with Finn to appear, the sense of something with Finn. But this time is different. A feeling in my belly awakens, an unfamiliar warmth, and I find myself leaning into him, reaching my hand to his shoulder, then his neck, snaking my arm around him and pulling him close until our faces are inches apart, his half-lidded eyes watching mine.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Finn,” I tell him.

I say this, but then, I also absolutely do know, in the same way I’ve always known how to heal. Wanting another person is like a tiny stirring of the soul, a spark that spins outward until it is lighting up your insides with fireworks. They spill through the thin layer of skin that contains the body and outward, straight into the body of another. Just like a healing, but also not.

“I think you do, Marlena,” he breathes.

When our lips touch, I discover a new way to encounter the soul of another person, to walk within its gorgeous depths, to play hide-and-seek with the most secret parts of who they are. If there were colors, they’d be bright reds and pinks and they would light up my brain like a sunset. Maybe they are doing just that, right now.

TWENTY-THREE

When I walk into the house later on, I stop, as usual, to listen.

There isn’t a sound.

But as I head to the stairs, still light-headed from saying good-bye to Finn, I see her. My mother is outside in the backyard, sitting on one of the lawn chairs she never uses, staring at the ocean. Her knees are pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins. Her dark hair is long and loose and some of it falls down her back, some of it over her shoulders. Once again I am struck by how young she seems, vulnerable almost. This and that her clothing is different. She’s wearing jeans and a big billowy black top.

She never wears black. It’s the color of mourning, she always says. It reminds her of those terrible days after I was born.

Is my mother in mourning?

I open the screen door and step outside.

She turns her head. “Marlenita.”

My mother hasn’t called me that in ages. I walk over to her chair, the grass a luscious sea underneath my feet in the fading light. “Hi.”

“How was your day?” Her voice is soft, her words are soft, but her eyes are difficult to read.

I think about my answer, worrying that her simple question is also a trap. I decide to tell her the truth. “It was good. Really good. The best day I’ve had in a long, long time.”

My mother’s face goes blank. Like someone attached a line to her and drained away all signs of life. “José told me you got the money I left.”

“I did. Thank you.”

“It’s yours, Marlena. Just like you said yesterday.” She rests a cheek on her knees as she talks. “Today I set up a bank account for you. The paperwork is on the counter. There’s an ATM card with the code written next to it. There’s more money in it than you could ever need.”

“Okay—”

“—also,” my mother interrupts, voice monotone, “I alerted the necessary parties that your audiences are canceled until further notice. And Fatima moved all those things you piled into the gift room up to the attic.”

I inhale to protest, to inform her that some of those things, like the books, my paintings, I didn’t want to be inaccessible, but my mother is still not done.

She lifts her head and stares at me. “You wanted freedom, querida—well, now you have it.”

My insides go to war, debating what my mother is really up to with such lavish offerings, offerings that were just yesterday totally and utterly forbidden. One side of me thinks she has a larger plan, and that just when I think everything is all right she will swoop in and take everything back. The other side of me doesn’t know what to think, but I long to believe she is doing these things only because I asked for them, because she thinks that after all this time I deserve a little reward for how patient and obedient I’ve been during the entirety of my childhood.

“Are we going to talk at all?” I ask her now.

“About what?”

“About this.” I gesture between the two of us, and in doing so I guess I’m also pointing at our clothing, which has changed drastically between yesterday and today.

“I thought we said all that needed saying last night.”

“Oh. You do? Okay.”

I stare at my mother, study her, and finally see what I’ve been missing since I stepped out the screen door. It’s defeat. My mother is defeated. There are dark circles underneath her eyes, purple and bruised. The way she sits may make her look younger, more vulnerable, but the woman I see up close seems like she’s aged. It nearly makes me want to go to her, to give her a hug.

I don’t.

Maybe I could after she’s proven I can trust her. If I can have faith that somewhere inside her, Saint Teresa is waging a battle to release the mother that she is, the mother she used to be. Maybe Saint Teresa is fighting right now, this minute, to release her from the hidden place where she’s dwelled for so long. I hope Teresa is prepared, sword in hand, with a spare tucked away.

That night after I get into bed, I can’t sleep. I poke around in my body, my heart, my mind, for that familiar feeling of my gift. Sensing it there, waiting for me when I need it, has always been a strange kind of comfort. I do my best not to panic when I can’t find it anywhere. Not even a little trace or tug.

TWENTY-FOUR

If I’ve been an angel before, I am no longer. Every day I am shedding feathers, until my shoulders are so light I can finally stand up straight and tall. With each one gone I become more visible, more human, a thing of flesh and bone.

I smile at myself in the mirror. I like being a real, human girl.

Fatima takes me shopping for a bathing suit. She wears a simple white top and matching slim skirt that reaches her knees. Her black hair is pulled into a bun, frizzled wisps escaping around her face. She looks like the typical Portuguese lady, with her long face and smooth, dark features. Everything is on sale because it’s the end of the season, and she has me try on what seems like the entire store. She knows how big a deal it is for me to pick something out that will be all my own. That I’ve dreamed of wearing a bikini like other girls on the beach. In the dressing room I struggle with the ties and the hooks around my neck and back, but I refuse the help she offers.

“It’s okay, Marlena,” she says through the door. “I’m a lady, too.”

I know this, but I can’t let her help. I’ve been shamed about my body for too many years. After I try on the first bathing suit, I’m almost too embarrassed to look at myself in the mirror.

“Marlena, you’re going to wear this in public, but you’re afraid to show me now?” Fatima calls from the chair she’s been sitting in while she waits. “If I still had a body like yours I’d be prancing all over this store and around town in only a two-piece!”

“Fatima, you’re not helping,” I call back, but I’m laughing. Then, “Fine,” I say and slink outside.

She puts her hands to her cheeks. “¡Ai, querida! Look at you! You’re so skinny! I wish I had a behind like that.”

My cheeks burn. “Fatima!”

She stands up and starts barking orders. “Stop slouching and stand up straight. Now walk a few steps. Stop hunching over, Marlena! Now swivel your hips a bit.”

“I didn’t know there’d be catwalk lessons today,” I tell her.

Fatima waves her hands as she speaks. “You should be proud of what you look like. You have nothing to hide! Not anymore,” she adds, but under her breath. “Go change into the other ones. I want to see all of them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When I come out wearing a bathing suit with tiny flowers that ties around my neck, back, and hips, Fatima’s face lights up.

“That’s the one!” She smiles. “It has the same green as those flip-flops you’re always stomping around in. And it’s perfect with your coloring.”

“I love my flip-flops!”

She chuckles. “I know you do.” She plops back into her chair. “Go change into your clothes. We have a winner.”

I do as I’m told. With the chosen bikini in hand, Fatima makes me pick out a big fluffy beach towel, also green, and sunglasses. I decide on a pair with giant lenses, just like the ones that Helen let me borrow.

“Here comes the movie star,” Fatima says as she surveys my choice.

“Here comes the nobody,” I counter, remembering the bliss of anonymity.

We go up to the register with my purchases.

“You should call that nice girl, Helen, who loves you so much,” Fatima says while we wait in line. “You need some friends your age to spend time with and take you places. Not old fogies like José and me. You need to get out more.”

I nod. “I know I do.”

She eyes the colorful bathing suit in our basket. “Wait till that boy of yours sees you in that little thing.”

How could she know about Finn? He’s never been near the house. “What boy?”

“Oh, Marlena. I’ve been working for your mama for nearly a decade. I see you and I see your mother every day. I know things. More than you realize. And I don’t need to see the boy to know that he’s there.”

“But—”

“Querida.” She turns my chin with her hand so I am looking at her, touching me so easily. “Just like there is nothing wrong with that beautiful body of yours, there is also nothing wrong with you having a boyfriend. I know your mother taught you that you can’t like a boy because of your gift. But the only thing that is going to ruin your life is you never living it.”

I stare up into Fatima’s dark eyes, take in the gray streaks in her hair that reach toward her knot. I don’t know what to say in response to this simple offer of love. My answer is as wordless as I feel, but I hope it says to Fatima exactly what I want it to. I wrap my arms around her soft middle right there in the line at the store.

“Ai, querida,” she whispers, burying a kiss into the top of my head.

“Next!” the lady at the register barks, and it’s our turn to pay.

“Turn a little—no, that way—to the right.” Helen stands behind me, twisting a lock of my hair and pinning it against my head. She’s already done my makeup. It’s Friday and we are at her house and she’s been working on “my look,” as she put it, for twenty minutes. We are going to a party, another thing on my list.

Helen lives only an hour’s drive from my town, not far by most standards, but it may as well be an entire continent away. It’s the first time I’ve been this far from home without my mother or José as a chaperone. Helen picked me up and brought me here, to her house. It’s small—a bedroom, living room with a kitchen attached, a porch out front—but it seems perfect. It is Helen’s and only Helen’s. She rents it for college, and it’s a five-minute walk from the beach where the party is.

“Now a little to the left,” she says.

I’ve been doing Helen’s bidding as I watch my transformation in the bathroom mirror, in between glancing down at my new phone, trying to figure out how to send a text. I took it from the gift room before I left. Helen helped me to set it up. I bring it close to my face. Then I tap the screen. “Oh! I did it!”

“Marlena, stop moving. You did what?”

I am concentrating too hard on tapping the screen in the right place for each letter to answer her at first. Then I finish what I want to say and hit Send. “I figured out how to send a text!”

Helen laughs right as her phone dings. She picks it up from the counter and reads it and laughs harder. “Marlena, I’m right here. You don’t need to text me.”

My text said: Hi, Helen, it’s me, Marlena! I’m so excited we’re going to a party! “I know, but I wanted to test it out.”

“You also don’t need to spell everything out exactly,” she advises. “Or use punctuation.”

“Yes, I do. How else is the person I’m texting supposed to understand me?”

Helen shakes her head and goes back to fixing my hair. My eyes return to the screen, tapping slowly. This time a text to Finn, which appears inside a little yellow bubble.

My first text to Finn!

Hi Finn. This is Marlena. I got a phone today.

I hit Send and stare at the screen like it’s a magical object, waiting for it to do tricks.

“Turn a little again,” Helen directs.

I obey, never taking my eyes from the phone.

Then, suddenly, a waving smiley face, a tiny image of a truck, followed by a picture of a phone with an exclamation point appears, but nothing else. The name next to the blue quotation bubble tells me it’s Finn. My first text from Finn! “What does this mean?” I hold the screen so Helen can look at it.

“That Finn is happy to hear from you, that he’s excited you got a phone, and that he’s driving, which is probably why it doesn’t say anything else.”

“Oh. Okay. I’m glad you understand it. Thanks for the translation.” I type out a really long message this time. It takes me forever.

I’ve seen so many people staring down at these things and I always think they’re going to bump into a pole or a tree but now I know why! I CAN’T BELIEVE I CAN JUST WRITE YOU THINGS! Also, please don’t get in an accident!

This time Finn’s answer is nearly immediate.

LOL.

I tap my response. I am so slow. Finn, what does LOL mean?

Finn: LOL, LOL!!!! Laugh out loud, Marlena. That’s what it means.

Me: Stop laughing at me! I’m new at this! Where are you? Will you be at the party, when you said?

Finn: Yes. (Still LOL.) But only if we stop texting so I can get back on the road. I pulled over to answer you.

Me: OH! Good idea. Sorry. That’s all from me.

I look up from the screen. I feel breathless. “I can totally see how these are addicting.”

Helen plucks the phone from my hand and sets it on the counter next to hers. “You are not allowed to become one of those people who never look up from their phones, Marlena.” She slides another pin into my hair. “There.” She grabs her beer bottle for another sip. She gestures at the mirror. “What do you think?”

I stare at the girl I see. My hair is up but it’s also falling around my face. Wine-colored lipstick stains my mouth and my eyes are dark and smoky. “I look older.”

Helen studies her work. “I’d say you look your age. And hot.” She laughs and takes another sip. “Perfect for a party.”

I roll my eyes. “I have never looked hot in my life.”

She plucks at the strap of the black top she gave me to wear. She paired it with jeans and black heels. I can barely walk in them. “Well, congratulations. You do now.” Helen gets a knowing look on her face. “Finn is going to faint.”

“I don’t want him to faint,” I say, but I’m smiling.

“Not literally.” She’s laughing. “But you do want to make his heart pound.”

“Maybe. Will Sonia be there tonight?” I ask, dragging out the name of the girl Helen likes. “Are you going to make her heart pound?”

Helen sweeps a hand across her body. “Damn, I hope so! I mean, look at this! What girl wouldn’t want this?”

I laugh. “I wish I had your confidence.” I reach for Helen’s beer bottle and wait to see if she swats my hand away. When she doesn’t, I take a sip. It makes me wince. It’s only my second sip of beer in the entirety of my life and this one seems even more disgusting than the first.

“Good thing you can’t really get that down,” Helen says. “I don’t want you drunk and puking at your first party.” She makes a warning face. “You need to be careful, my darling. You have zero tolerance and the alcohol will go straight to your head, and fast.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Seriously. You are not getting sick on my watch. Parties are supposed to be fun, not vomit-inducing. There’s a difference, and it all depends on this”—she grabs the bottle and holds it up as evidence—“and how much or how little of it you drink. Besides, you can’t get sick, because I need to hit on Sonia tonight!”

I stand up and nearly topple over on these heels. “I know, I know.” I slide the phone into the pocket of my jeans and follow Helen out of the bathroom, through the front door, and onto the porch, almost falling again. “You really think I can handle these on the beach?”

She glances over her shoulder. “We’ll be on the deck in the back. And until then”—Helen stops and slips her own heels off her feet—“we can go barefoot. And if you want to walk the beach, then voila!” She dangles the straps from a single finger.

I slip mine from my feet too, grateful to be rid of them, imitating the way Helen holds hers. The two of us set off across the grass. Everything about today, this evening, the promise of a party, thrums through me. The sun has just set, and the sky is the bright aqua blue of early evening, the stars like crystals across the expanse of night ahead. As we walk from yard to yard, the soft scuffing sounds of our steps break the quiet. I reach out and grab Helen’s hand.

She turns to me, hair curling over her shoulders. “What, Marlena?”

I weave my fingers through hers, searching inside myself, searching for the healing touch that has always been as familiar as the lines on my palm, even the shape of my own face. I find something else instead. “I’ve seen inside your soul,” I tell Helen. “I think I even saw this moment between us, all those years ago when you first came to me in that chair.”

As if to prove the strength of her perfect legs, Helen steps gingerly across a series of low, flat boulders that line a neighbor’s garden, agile as a gymnast. “What was it like?” She guides me left, her hand still holding mine. “My soul, I mean.”

“It was painted with hope and happiness,” I say. “With openness. Love.”

“I think you’re biased,” Helen says. Then she asks, “Are all souls like that?”

I shake my head. A cottage appears far down the street, lit up, dozens of cars parked outside and clotting the road. “Some souls are full of despair and darkness. Hopelessness. Sometimes they are gray with it, deadened by whatever troubles or sickens them. But all souls are beautiful, regardless. I feel guiltier now that I’m older, that I’ve reached into so many, and without anyone’s permission.”

“But you did have permission. All those people wanted something from you.”

The noise from the party grows louder as we get closer. “I guess. But I’m not sure people realize that by asking me to heal them, they’re opening the doors of their soul to me. Sometimes it feels like stealing, like I’m some thief who is rummaging around in their most hidden parts, prying into a place where no one else should be allowed.”

Helen stops at the edge of the yard. Music and laughter pour through the open windows. Two people, a guy and a girl, get out of a car and head up the walkway and into the front door of the cottage. “It’s okay, Marlena. It’s okay with me, if that’s what you really want to know. I’ve always felt”—she pauses a moment, blinking—“lucky to have this lasting connection with you, after everything I went through when I was little.” The shoes sway from her fingers. “I know you’ve lived a lonely life, but mine was lonely, too. It would have been lonely always, I think, if it weren’t for you.” Helen’s eyes shine in the light of the moon. “I know you don’t like thinking of yourself as a saint, but sometimes I’ve wondered how you are walking this earth as though you’re a normal girl.”

I shake my head, hard. “Don’t do that to me, Helen. It’s my mother’s dream that I act like an angel. The cost of being a healer is this”—I gesture between us—“friendship. Going to parties. Going anywhere at all. And I want to be free.”

“I want those things for you, too, Marlena, you know that,” Helen says.

I hear her hesitation. “But?”

“But what if someone is sick? What if I came to you now, in that chair? Would you turn me away?”

This question chills me. I stand there, bare feet planted in the lush, dewy grass, the cool air of evening brushing my skin, trying to figure out what to say. It is one thing to turn my back on people I’ve never met, but it is something else to think of doing that to Helen, a person I love, someone whose soul still twirls inside me like a child. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to answer that question. Not with what I know of you now, and who you are to me.” But what if it happened? What if I did have to face that situation? These questions whisper through me. “I hope I never have to worry about it.”

“I hope so, too,” Helen says. Then she forces the clouds from her gaze and eyes my feet. “Shoes, Marlena,” she commands.

I obey, grateful for the end of this inquiry. Helen slips hers on expertly, and strides up to the front door of the cottage. I totter behind her, letting the thrill of the party flow through my limbs and push all worries aside.

TWENTY-FIVE

When Finn walks onto the deck, I wave at him, trying to catch his attention.

It’s a relief to see someone I know amid Helen’s college-partying friends. She is dancing in the living room, beer in hand, jumping up and down, hair flying around her face. Sonia is there with her, dancing just as hard. I’ve been watching them through the window. Helen keeps coming to check on me, but I keep sending her back to her dancing and Sonia. They both look so happy.

I’m learning a lot tonight, like why people are always taking out their phones when they’re alone. I’d take out mine, but the only people I know to text are here, or before, they were driving. It’s not that people haven’t talked to me, or that Helen hasn’t introduced me around. But it’s strange to try to make small talk with someone I’ve just met when we have nothing obvious in common, and when the person doesn’t need something from me, like healing. I can change my clothes and read fashion magazines and buy bikinis and hold a beer and even sip it in public, but that doesn’t stop me from being the Marlena I’ve always been, which is a Marlena who has no idea, really, how to be at a party.

It’s like I am at the party, but not of the party. Just like I’ve always been in the world, not of it. I don’t like how difficult it is to shake my healer life, my healer outsiderness. I am ever the anchorite, heavy curving iron wrapped around my ankle and dragging me down to the bottom of the sea.

Finn finally sees me waving and smiles.

“Hi,” he says when he reaches the edge of the deck. He eyes the beer in my hand and holds up his own. “I didn’t know you drank beer.”

I laugh. “I don’t. Not really. This one is mainly for show.”

“I think that’s probably a good thing. You don’t want to drink too much.”

“Spoken like Helen,” I say.

“Sounds like Helen knows what she’s talking about.”

“Helen told me a party stops being a party when you start puking your guts out.”

“Wise woman,” Finn says.

I want to fling myself on Finn, throw my arms around him. What is my problem? How does this work, this liking-a-boy thing? I have no idea how to behave or control myself when with one. I lean forward on the railing, because I don’t trust my limbs, and look onto the beach. Finn does the same. The moonlight shines off the ocean. We glance at each other briefly. I want to touch his cheek. His neck.

I hold up my beer instead. “Cheers?” I say, then add, “I’ve always wanted to make a toast.”

“Then you shall.” Finn tips the neck of his beer bottle until it makes a glassy thunk against mine. He grins. “I thoroughly enjoyed getting your messages tonight.”

“Well, yours were confusing.”

Finn laughs. “You’ll get the hang of it. Besides”—he pulls his phone out of his pocket to show me, then puts it back—“these things are overrated.”

I study him. “I guess, now that I think of it, I never really see you on yours.”

“I try my best to pay attention to the people I’m with. I try not to look at it too much, in general.”

“But what if I text you later? Will you look at my message?”

He leans a little closer to me. “If I know it’s from you, then definitely.”

My heart does a little spin at this, at his nearness and his words.

“If it isn’t the famous Finn,” Helen calls out from behind us. She is making her way through the crowd on the deck. I’m grateful for the interruption, because without it I may soon act on my inappropriate impulses. Helen is barefoot again. She doesn’t hold out her hand to Finn and instead reaches around him for a hug. How does she do that so easily?

“I feel like I already know you,” she says to him.

“Nice to meet you, Helen.”

We form a circle. Me and two of the people I care about most in the world. A tiny party of three.

Helen looks Finn up and down. “So you’re the genius.”

Finn nudges me. “Aw, Marlena? Really?”

I like the casual way he touches me and I want to nudge him back. But what if I fell on top of him in the process? “Why are you embarrassed about being smart?”

“Yeah,” Helen says, laughing. She gestures behind her at the rest of the party. “There aren’t too many other geniuses here. I think it’s good to have at least one present. You know, just in case things get out of hand.” Helen grabs my beer and holds the bottle up to the light coming from the house. “Wow, it’s practically still full.” She puts an arm around my shoulder. “Good job. I told this one no puking.”

All of this casual touching is bolstering my spirit. And making me wonder how I ever lived without it.

Finn chuckles. “Yes, Marlena reiterated this excellent advice.”

Helen lets go of my shoulder and turns to me. “You guys should walk to the old bridge. They took down most of it when they built the new one, but they left a bit for the fishermen.” Helen points into the darkness toward a rectangle of lights over the water. “It’s just over there.” Finn turns to look and Helen leans into me to whisper, “He’s supercute. You should take advantage and go be alone with him!” Then she takes a step back, addressing us both again. “Okay, lovebirds,” she sings. “I’m back to my dancing and my Sonia!”

“Enjoy. We’ll be around,” Finn says.

“It’s okay if you’re not,” Helen tells him. “Marlena has keys to my place and no curfew. But be good to her or I’ll sic Mama Oliveira on you,” she adds with a twirl and begins weaving her way across the deck, beer held high over her head.

“Helen!” I shout after her, but she’s already heading into the house. I turn to Finn. “I can’t be held responsible for anything that comes out of her mouth.”

But Finn is laughing. “I think I like Helen. I think we should take her advice and check out the bridge.” The deck is more and more crowded, the biggest group of people circling a keg. “Unless you want to stay?”

I shake my head. “I think I’ve had enough of my first party.” I sigh. “I can’t manage to sit through a movie and now I’m ready to leave a party after an hour.”

Finn grins. “I think you’d just rather be alone with me.”

I bite my lip to hide my smile. “Whatever you say, genius.” I gesture toward the stairs on the deck that lead to the beach. “After you.”

Finn and I push through the crowd. Before my feet hit the sand, I take off my shoes and dangle them from my finger like Helen showed me. As Finn and I walk, he slips his hand into my free one. A rush flows over my skin all the way up the back of my neck. Each time we touch, something happens to me. I feel happiness, I feel hope, I feel possessive. Like I want Finn to myself and for nobody else. As we step across the cool sand, I’m proud of myself for not tackling him.

How do people know what to do? Why aren’t there boyfriend instructions?

Is Finn even my boyfriend?

He squeezes my hand. “What are you thinking? You look lost in thought.”

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing I’ll tell you.”

“In that case, I’ll have to convince you otherwise.”

We reach the old bridge and sit down on a bench at the very end of it, one that looks onto the blackness of the ocean. Out here, it’s silent aside from the soft sound of waves lapping against the pilings beneath us, and the occasional splash of a fish. “Thank you for coming to rescue me from my first party.”

“I didn’t know you needed rescuing,” Finn says.

His profile is lit by the moon. I wish I had the guts to inch closer. “You’ve saved me more than once. The first time was after I fought with my mother and you came to pick me up in your truck.”

Finn shifts, and his thigh presses lightly against mine. I make sure not to move. “Well, I’m happy to ‘save’ you or ‘rescue’ you whenever you want,” he says. “It’s about time someone else does the saving in your life.”

I close my eyes to let Finn’s words sink in. Without having to ask, without even really knowing, Finn just gave me a gift I’ve been yearning for as long as I’ve been old enough to wish for it.

He reaches out and tilts my chin upward with his finger. “What just happened, Marlena? Where did you go?”

“I’m still here,” I tell him, opening my eyes. There is longing in his, and I wonder if he can see the longing in mine. People have always looked at me with longing, but the kind I see in Finn is different. It makes me feel real.

The stars are bright in this dark place over the ocean. There’s no nearby city to block them out. The night glimmers.

I place a hand over my own heart, feeling it pound. “What’s happening, Finn?”

Finn turns to face me. He leans closer. “What do you mean?”

The air is velvety as it moves between us. “I almost can’t catch my breath. It’s like I’ve gone running.”

A smile drifts across Finn’s lips. “I think it means you want to kiss me.”

I laugh softly. “I’ve been wondering how people manage to make second kisses happen after first ones.”

“Oh, Marlena, you really are funny,” he says.

“Is your heart pounding, too?” I decide not to resist my urges any longer and reach out, placing my hand against Finn’s shirt, right where I know his heart resides behind the cage of his ribs. He closes his eyes. I press my palm into his chest until I feel it beating.

Finn lets out a whoosh of breath and moves my hand away. He shifts farther from me on the bench.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he says, but too quickly.

I study him in the darkness. What is he holding back? “Okay,” I say. Finn will share when he’s ready. I can wait. I need to. It’s what normal people do.

There is relief on his face when I don’t press him. Then his eyebrows arch and he inches my way again, until his face is all I see. “You were talking about kissing me?”

I lean toward him. “You were talking about kissing me back?”

Our lips are close. I can feel the warmth of his breath. Finn’s hands find the small of my back and he draws me to him. His lips brush mine, barely, before they press a little harder. His hands find their way into my hair and my hands find their way inside his shirt, across his smooth, warm skin. We stay there, gripping each other, holding each other close, until everything becomes urgent, our breathing, our mouths, our tongues. This is unlike our first kiss at the healing rocks, which was slow and sweet and short. But also like it, too, because somehow I know exactly how to kiss Finn, even though the way we are kissing is completely new. I let my body think for me, speak for me, with words I didn’t know I had.

The instinct to heal, the one that flips on in me so my body can take over and reach out to the body of another, is similar to the one that switches on in me now. I didn’t know the body could feel hunger like this, for a kiss, for someone’s presence, to see their face. I am greedy for Finn as I look at him between our equally greedy kisses. It’s all I know and all I can think. I feel like I can see inside Finn’s soul, inside his heart, but not in the way I’m used to. It burns red like the setting sun and is as beautiful and powerful as the ocean. I let it warm me. I let myself bask in it. I find myself wanting to paint it.

When the two of us pull apart, I start to laugh.

“What?”

“Wow,” I say.

“I know.” Finn’s hands are still wrapped around me. “Lately, I forget that you’re a famous healer. I told you I didn’t think I could, but it turns out I can.”

“Lately, I forget I was, too,” I say, trying not to linger too long on the fact that, without even intending to, I phrased my life as a healer in the past tense.

Maybe my mother was right: it is all or nothing. Either a life as a healer or a life as a normal girl. How could I be satisfied with being a healer after this? I need more, I am more, want more, maybe even if it destroys the person I was. I will only be satisfied with Finn.

This truth blooms like the most beautiful vision I’ve ever had.

But I don’t tell Finn this. I’ll tell him soon. We have plenty of time for the secrets hidden inside us to emerge when they are ready, one by one, like bright-red cherries picked from a summer tree.

TWENTY-SIX

My new life as a normal person isn’t all candy and fashion magazines and parties. All Finn and freedom. A big bag of mail has been sitting outside my door for days. At first I ignored it. But it grows bigger and fuller every time I see it. The bigger it gets, the greater the wave of guilt that consumes me, like an ocean swell that could topple a massive fishing boat. It is a constant reminder that a healer might decide to take a break, but the pains and sicknesses of others never subside.

One morning I can’t resist any longer. I drag the bag inside my room. Then I sit down in my chair by the windows and open it, pulling up the letters and cards one by one.

Dear Marlena, you are my last hope in this world. . . .

Dear Marlena, without you, I may not see the end of this year. . . .

Dear Marlena, I’ve lost the will to go on, please help me. . . .

Most of the letters are pleading, but some are angry and full of accusations.

You should be ashamed of yourself! God has chosen you and yet you turn away from HIM!

God will surely punish you for having spit in His face!

There’s no such thing as a healer! And now you’ve proven this!

I hope YOU find out what it’s like to face down death and have no other choice but to go forward into it! You or SOMEONE YOU LOVE!

This last one I read over and over. It’s from a man my mother had promised a private audience, who was later told not to come.

Will there be a punishment for my freedom? Revenge on the part of God?

I’ve always wondered if I’d be punished for healing. For using my gift, and acting the part of God when I’m only a girl. Maybe there’s punishment in this life no matter which path I take. Maybe loss and sorrow and grief are simply a part of what it means to live as humans on this earth, and it is our duty to accept this. We can try to outsmart such things, yet they will eventually catch up, no matter what we do. Even if we are living girl-saints.

Then a letter from a girl named Alma goes straight to my heart in a way that none of the others have. Dear Marlena, it begins, like the others do. This is where the similarities end.

My name is Alma. My mother has spoken of your miracles since I was little. Sometimes I’ve thought you must be a witch like in stories. I’ve always wanted to see if you can really do the things my mother says. I have muscular dystrophy. I don’t know if you know what that is, but I’m in a wheelchair. My mother keeps telling me you are going to heal me soon, because the doctors say I don’t have long to live. Most people like me don’t live past eighteen.

The other day my mother heard that you’ve stopped healing. She doesn’t know why. “What God gives us, He sometimes takes away,” she said. She cried a lot. My mother really believed you’d save me in a way that none of the doctors can.

I’m writing because I wanted to tell you that I think it’s okay. With so many people needing you, it must be difficult. And I’m not sure if it’s right to wish for miracles, or to want to be different than I am. I might not be like other kids my age, but I’m living the life that I have and this is enough, even if other people don’t think it should be. The life I have is beautiful in its own way. People who aren’t like me will never understand, I guess.

I wish you the best. Maybe we’ll meet, if you ever start healing again. Even if you don’t, maybe we’ll meet anyway. I don’t need anything from you. But I would love to see you, so I know you are real and not just a character from one of the novels I’m always reading.

Sincerely, Alma

I set her letter in my lap and stare out the window.

Alma’s words remind me of a girl who came to one of my audiences. Though it’s truer to say she was dragged by her parents. Her name was Heather, she was fourteen at the time, and she was deaf. When I touched her that day I was—I don’t know how to describe it—repelled? I could tell right away she didn’t want to be there. That she didn’t think of being deaf as a disability, as something that needed curing. I could feel the rage inside her that her mother wished her different. I dropped her hands and stepped away. The mother looked at me with dismay, but the daughter had this expression of tremendous relief.

“I thought you were a healer,” the mother said to me. “I was promised you could help!”

I shook my head. “Your daughter isn’t sick.”

The mother turned and stomped away.

But the daughter lingered. I was younger than she was and she was at least six inches taller. She leaned toward me and pointed to her lips. I watched them intently.

“Thank you,” she mouthed slowly, “for not doing to me whatever it is you do to others.”

Is healing something I do to others? This made healings sound like something I might afflict on someone. A disease or virus in its own right. Something that I do to people, sometimes against their will.

I pick up Alma’s letter again. Like with the angry words from the man who wants me punished, I read hers over and over, until my eyes blur. Then I pick up a pen and a piece of paper. Shouldn’t I say something to her? Shouldn’t I write back? But then I put the pen and paper away. If I answer Alma, shouldn’t I answer all the others? Why should one child matter more than everyone else?

The thought that I could find a way to be both healer and girl pushes its way to the surface of my mind. That there might be another version of being a healer I’ve yet to discover. But then it sinks to the bottom again when the echo of my mother’s favorite refrain rings even louder. You are a saint and a healer, Marlena. Or you are no one at all.

Ever since the announcement about my break from healing, I’ve avoided going to Main Street. But like with the bag of mail, today I can’t seem to resist. Soon I find myself walking up the hill toward the shops. I look through the windows of Almeida’s Bakery. There is barely a loaf of bread in the glass case. The streets are empty of tourists. It’s like the town has gone dormant before a storm. As I walk down Main Street, I almost expect to see a single dark rain cloud following me, since I am the beneficiary of dirty looks from more than one of the shopkeepers.

Gertie is the first one to accost me. Of course, Gertie.

Her voice calls out from the doorway. “You couldn’t have waited for winter?”

I stop midstride, the clacking of my platform shoes stopping with me. I consider ignoring her, but then I take the bait. “What do you mean?”

Gertie steps onto the sidewalk, her loose gray dress rustling. “This so-called vacation. You couldn’t wait until January? Until after the Day of Many Miracles in October?”

“I . . . I . . .” I trail off. The truth is, I’m caught off guard by the clear sense of betrayal in her voice. It doesn’t matter that my sentence goes unfinished, because Gertie is ready to keep talking.

“It’s September, Marlena! This is still high tourist season for us! And you”—she points a finger—“are the main attraction in this town! Without your audiences, our sales plummet. People don’t come. Tourists don’t bother.” Gertie throws her right arm up and out. “We’ll go broke because of you!”

Some of the other shop owners have joined her on the sidewalk. Old Mrs. Marinelli, stooped and shaky, has left her store that sells icons and other religious memorabilia. Mr. Maxwell is next to her, giving her his elbow. Mr. Almeida is here with his wife. I search the crowd for Mrs. Lewis, for a single ally, but don’t find anyone.

“Gertie’s right,” Mr. Almeida says. “You’ll ruin us with this . . . this selfishness.”

People are nodding.

The word selfish is like a punch to my stomach.

I think about the party with Helen, with Finn, the changed way Fatima and José are treating me. Is it really wrong of me to enjoy life for a bit? For even a few days? Then I think of the unanswered bag of mail, all those seekers disappointed, despairing, maybe even dying. All because I wanted time off. All because I got tired of people needing me. Maybe Gertie and Mr. Almeida are right and I am being selfish.

Gertie takes a step closer. “We depend on you, Marlena. We all do.”

For a split second I think something ridiculous, that I should have worn the sunglasses, put up my hair, worn a disguise like before. Stupid me. I thought I could just waltz into town as Marlena, the girl they’ve known for years as a healer, but with jeans on instead of a long white dress, and people would respect the change. Even be kind. But not everyone is José or Fatima.

I guess in the effort to live a normal life, I lose the respect of the townspeople, too.

What else do I lose? Who else?

I try and silence these thoughts, but they linger anyway. My face tilts toward the sky, causing the townspeople to murmur as they wait for me to say something.

When my eyes return to the crowd, a rage to match theirs fills me like plumes of smoke. I can make all the decisions in the world to change my life, but if the community around me refuses to accept them, then I am always and only Marlena the Saint. As long as I am here, in this town, I will never escape.

“Well?” Mr. Almeida’s face is red with anger. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I press my lips into a thin line, not trusting myself to speak. I don’t want to lose my temper. I remind myself that Mrs. Lewis is one of the townspeople who trade off my reputation, and she has only been kind. In a way, we are all caught in the same situation—me as a healer, them as people who need me to heal for their financial survival. I start toward home, wanting to end this confrontation before it gets uglier, but Gertie shouts at my back.

“You are rich and we are not! You and your mother live in that gigantic house as though you are too good for us! You act as if you are better than all of us!”

“It’s not our fault we’re beholden to you!” This is from Mr. Almeida. “This place used to be different, before your mother went and built that damn church and turned this town into a circus, and now the tourists only come for the freak show on Saturdays!”

I stop walking. Their words are like darts. I can hear a few murmurs of dissent that he’s gone too far, but I no longer have it in me to hold back. I turn around to shout the response that has been brewing inside me.

“It is not my responsibility to take care of this entire town! You are the ones who should be ashamed of yourselves! You should be ashamed! You’ve been making your living off a child! Don’t you think it’s time that you stop?” I walk closer to the crowd, left foot, right foot, as I keep speaking. “You still want to live off me? Well”—I take the fat envelope of cash I’ve grown used to carrying in my pocket and hold it out to them—“here!” I shake it once, then again. “Take my money! Take all of it! Apparently it’s yours anyway!” Tears begin to stream down my face as I yell. No one moves to take the money, so I walk up and shove the envelope at Gertie.

She flinches. Her eyes are frightened. “I can’t take this!”

I shove it at her again, and she steps back. “Why not? It’s what you want!”

“I just can’t!”

“Yes you can.” Now I hold it out to Mr. Almeida, but his hands go up in the air, a gesture of refusal. People keep wincing each time I come near, and this makes me even angrier. “Fine! Be that way!” I take the money out of the envelope and throw it at the crowd. Bills fly into the air, then flutter to the ground. No one dares speak. I look into each of their shocked faces, and as I do, they avert their eyes. “What? This wasn’t about the money?” I am screaming now, even louder than before, growing hoarse, but I don’t care. “Would it be easier for you to take it if I bought something? If I bought the objects you sell to make a profit off my lonely life as the freakish saint girl?”

Before anyone can say anything, I storm into Gertie’s shop, grab one of the metal baskets inside the door, and begin shoving things into it. Candles, tiny plastic statues, T-shirts, little dolls, even that stupid kite, which is on sale. When I come out, people are still frozen. They watch me silently. The money lies there, untouched, scattered all over the sidewalk and the road. I go into each shop and take things to add to the basket. Charms. Photos. Cards. Even the few remaining sweet breads in the glass case at Almeida’s. After I come out of the last store on Main Street, the basket is overflowing, and things are falling out of it as I walk. When I reach the crowd again, I hold the basket out to them.

“There! Now do you feel better about taking my money?”

No one moves.

“Did you think I wasn’t human?” I shout. It’s as if an entire decade of rage is spilling out of me. I should be ashamed to admit how good it feels, but it feels so good I’m not ashamed at all. “Did you really think I was an angel like these stupid statues you sell of me with wings?” I grab a plaster souvenir from the basket and raise it high. Then my arm comes down in a flash and I smash it all over the blacktop of the street. The shards go everywhere and the crowd jumps. “Did you think I was too good for all of you? That I was perfect? That it was okay to exchange my life and my happiness for the money you take home at night?” One by one I start taking things from the basket and smashing them to the ground. Mugs. Key chains. Framed photographs. Candles. Those that are breakable shatter and the rest just land with a loud thump. “Well, now you know what I’m really like! That I can be just as human as you, or worse!” I tip the basket over so the rest tumbles to the ground, and then I hurl the basket as hard as I can. It lands with a great crash a few feet away.

“Marlena . . .” A soft voice, a kind voice, speaks my name.

Mrs. Lewis. To my left. Hers was the one shop I avoided. She must have heard all the shouting and come to see what was happening.

“Marlena,” she says again, and I can’t bear it.

I can’t bear that Mrs. Lewis has seen me act this way. I can’t even look at her. I burst into tears.

When I hear her steps approaching, I put my hands over my face and run away. I run from the worried-sounding Mrs. Lewis and past the crowd of shopkeepers until I’ve reached the end of Main Street. As I descend the hill, all I can think is that while I might have quit healing, I am still the same bratty saint girl I was a few weeks ago. Prone to temper tantrums. The kind of girl who grows enraged and throws her mother’s mug across the kitchen so it splatters coffee everywhere and breaks into a million jagged pieces. That I might be a healer, but apparently I’m also a destroyer.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Hands shake me awake. “Marlena.”

“Mama?” I sit up. The room is dark. No light seeps from underneath the shades. My head is groggy with sleep. It must be the middle of the night. As my eyes adjust, I can make out the shape of my mother sitting on the edge of my bed. She is fully dressed, as though it’s daytime. I can’t remember the last time she came to my room. “Did something happen? Are you okay?”

“We need to talk.”

“Now?” All this time I’ve wondered if my mother and I would have a conversation, and instead we’ve barely seen each other aside from passing in the living room and kitchen, unspeaking, like ghosts.

“Yes, now. Come downstairs. I’ll expect you in five minutes.” She gets up without looking at me and leaves. Her steps are heavy and tired.

I crawl out of bed and throw on a robe. I want to know what has my mother awake in the middle of the night. Throughout all of these recent changes, I’ve wanted my mother to somehow change with me.

The house is dark, except for the lamps in the living room. My mother is sitting in the center of one of the couches, making it impossible for us to both sit there, or at least, highly awkward. This will obviously not be the heart-to-heart I’ve been waiting for. I sit across from her on the other couch, a large white coffee table between us. Tastefully decorated with a short candle and a big round silver plate.

“What, Mama?” A breeze presses against the back of my head from the open windows. It’s strong enough that it feels like a hand. “What’s so urgent?”

Her eyes narrow. “As if you don’t know.”

I swallow. Someone told her that Marlena the Saint is now Marlena the Destroyer. But I shake my head. She’s not making this easy for me, so I’m not going to make it easy for her.

“Mrs. Lewis came to speak to me tonight, after you’d gone to bed.”

I sink lower on the couch to avoid the breeze. This I wasn’t expecting. I thought it would be Gertie or Mr. Almeida. Anyone but Mrs. Lewis.

“She told me about your little performance.”

I’m absolutely sure Mrs. Lewis did not use the word performance to describe what I did. That is my mother’s interpretation. Mrs. Lewis is too kind to speak that way.

My mother crosses her legs, getting comfortable. Now I see that these last couple of weeks my mother was just regrouping, like a shrewd soldier facing a setback but who would never consider a retreat. My mother was gathering her strength and recalibrating her methods. She shakes her head. “Poor Mrs. Lewis was worried about you. And you know she has a bad heart.”

Did I not heal her?

“Has or had?” I am unable to stop myself from asking this.

My mother knows she’s gotten to me and I can see she likes it. “Marlena, I’m not sure. That’s not what she wanted to discuss.”

I force myself to breathe, in, out. This conversation isn’t going anywhere good.

“Well?” she presses.

“Well, what?”

My mother seems buoyed by the couch cushions, rather than sinking into them. “I’ve given you all you’ve asked for in this little experiment. This ‘vacation.’ And you repay my generosity by making a fool of both of us in front of the entire town?”

I stare at her. “Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding.”

I don’t want my mother to get the best of me, but I can’t resist. “You’ve given me what I’ve asked for, for a couple of weeks! When set against, I don’t know, the rest of my eighteen years, I’m not sure that counts as generous, Mother.”

Mother.

I never call her that.

Her body goes rigid. She doesn’t like it. Good. “Eighteen years spent building your reputation, which you squander in a few minutes of losing your temper in public.” She is seething, but manages to control her voice, unlike me. “Not to mention all the other damage you’re doing on this vacation. Going out with that boy.”

A little yelp of surprise escapes me.

“I’m not stupid, Marlena,” my mother says. “We may not talk, you may go off on your own as though the rules no longer apply, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on. How you’re willing to jeopardize everything because you’re mooning over some idiot.”

“He’s not an idiot.”

My mother smirks.

“He’s not,” I repeat. “Most mothers would be happy if their daughters brought him home. Proud even.”

Her I knew it face appears. “Don’t play with your reputation, Marlena.”

She makes me want to scream. “You mean your reputation? Isn’t that what we’re really talking about? And by the way, I’m not a thirteenth-century nun. So stop treating me like one!”

My mother gets up from the couch and leaves the room. When she returns she’s dragging the mailbag. She must’ve taken it from my room. “Do you see this?”

“I’m not blind.”

“Well. Lucky you. Some of the people who’ve written to you are blind. And they would like your help.”

I look away. How could I ever have thought my mother might change?

My mother huffs. “You don’t even have the decency to face the people who need you.”

My fist closes around the edge of a blanket draped over the couch, squeezing it until my fingernails press through it into my palm. I force myself to turn back to her. I don’t speak.

My mother gets a satisfied expression. “I knew it.”

“You knew what?” I snap.

She points at the bag. “You do feel guilty about abandoning these people.”

“I haven’t abandoned anyone.”

“Oh? Then how would you put it? That you’ve sent them in another direction, seeking their last desperate hope elsewhere? Did you refer them to a different healer, Marlena? One I didn’t know about?”

“Mother.” A warning loud and clear.

“Don’t worry. They’ve all received a reply.”

Breathe, breathe, breathe. “What are you talking about?”

“They’ve been notified that your healing powers have waned as you get older.”

I jump up from the couch and stare at her. “Why would you do that? Why would you lie to them?” But is that even a lie? Could it be the truth? The back of my neck is hot and prickly. The blood in my veins sears through my body.

My mother is calm and poised. As though it isn’t the middle of the night. “You’d rather I just tell them that you don’t feel like healing? That you’ve stopped caring about their lives and their futures? That you’ve turned your back on God? On your gift?” She hesitates. “On me? And after everything . . .”

I wince. I don’t need to see the self-portrait hanging behind me to remember what it looks like. To know that my mother is there on that ship, too, with the rest of the town, needing me to ferry her to safety. “You know that’s not true,” I say, though I’m not sure which question I’m addressing. Maybe all of them at once.

“God gave you a gift, Marlena—”

“—stop talking to me about God!” I scream, and she jumps. “I don’t want to hear about God anymore!”

“Marlena! God does not—”

My hands go to my ears, pressing against them. “I hate God!” I am shouting over her, trying to drown her out. “I hate God and his stupid gifts! If God wants his gift back he can have it!”

This stops my mother’s words. Her lips part in shock.

My chest is heaving. I close my eyes. This is what my “gift” brings out in me. I do not want to be this person. Why can’t I stop being this person?

“I don’t know you right now,” my mother says.

“No, you don’t,” I say, determined not to lose control again. “Because I am just now getting to know who I am and what I want after eighteen years of my so-called gift defining everything I do. No more. Never again. Never ever.”

My mother and I are eye to eye over the coffee table, locked in a staring contest. “You can pretend you’re normal, but you aren’t. You never will be. You’ll see.”

“I am seeing, Mother. Like I’ve never seen before. Like my eyes have been closed my entire life and they are just now opening.”

A flicker of fear appears on her face. She thought she would win this argument. She thought I would bend and I haven’t. “You must stop seeing that boy.”

“No.”

“You will regret it.”

“I will never.”

My mother’s expression hardens. Her eyes harden. “There are some lines, Marlena, once you cross them there is no going back.”

I stare at her for a long time, my expression just as hard. “Are we talking about sex here, Mother? Is that what this is about? The possibility that I might actually have love in my life? That someone might want me and I might want him back, for something other than a healing? Are you worried God will see and get angry and jealous that I am no longer under his thumb? That God will be disappointed that I am not his modern-day Julian of Norwich after all?”

I say this because I know how to bait my mother, too. But I also say it because deep down I am stung. It is always God, God, God with my mother and what God wants and what God needs and talk of my godforsaken reputation and my godforsaken gift and how it is really all about her. It is never, ever about me. It is never Marlena, what do you need? Or, Marlena, what would make you happy?

Everything about me hurts, like what she says can cause actual, physical pain to my flesh and my bones.

“I’m going back to bed.” I get up from the couch. I take one step, then another, each one getting farther away from her. All I want is to go forward, forward, forward. Onward to everything she’s tried to take away from me again. That she’ll always try to take away.

Sometime during the night, I don’t know exactly when, my mother enters my room again.

“Please don’t take this from me,” she whispers over me as I lie in my bed. Pain slices a deep crevasse through her words.

I hear her because since our fight I haven’t been able to sleep. I guess she hasn’t either.

She hovers there, maybe in the hopes that I am awake and will respond with reassurances, that I will console her with promises that of course things will go back to our version of normal. That our fight made me rethink everything, that I have a duty not only to those in need, but to her. For a split second I think I might do exactly this. My heart hurts to notice the pain in her voice, the loss piled upon loss, layered with despair. To be reminded my mother is not invincible; that she is, in fact, terribly fragile. I feel soft with her sadness, vulnerable to it, absorbing it like liquid. But it isn’t long before the sadness turns back to anger.

It has always been my mother enclosed with me in my healer’s cell, because she’s enclosed us there together, happy to shut out the world and the loss she’s endured with it.

I hear her breaths above me in the dark, short and labored.

I say nothing.

TWENTY-EIGHT

When I wake in the morning, it’s late and I’m covered in sweat.

The sun is high, and I can already tell that the day will be warm. I inhale the air coming through the window. It still smells like summer even though it’s September, a combination of newly cut grass with the crisp cleanness of ocean.

I sit up and the world tilts as I remember my middle-of-the-night visits from my mother. I get out of bed and rummage around in the bathroom cabinets until I find the plastic bag I stashed in the back. Inside it is a jumble of makeup I bought at the drugstore. I take out the bottles of nail polish. There must be ten. I couldn’t decide which color I liked best so I bought all the ones I liked. There is a bright blue that beckons, but instead I settle on a shiny candy-apple red because I know it’s the color that will most bother my mother when she sees it. And I feel like pissing her off. Because I am a terrible, unfeeling daughter. Obviously.

I sit on the toilet seat and put my foot up on the counter.

Soon it looks like someone has taken an ax to my toes.

Armed with some cotton balls and remover, I decide to start over, but this only succeeds in dying the skin around all of my ten toes a dull red. Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing. My mother has always painted my nails for me, but only with clear polish. Never blue or green or pink. Especially not red. Red makes a girl look like a slut. My mother never actually said this, but it was always understood that wearing red nail polish would affect my reputation. It’s all about perception, I’ve learned well.

“You want to appear like you have it together,” my mother always said. “Like nothing can faze you. That is what people expect of you, as a healer.”

I get up from the toilet seat and look down at my feet and laugh. “I look so together,” I say out loud to the bathroom floor. “Like my toes have just bled out.” I hear Fatima rustling around and I poke my head into the hallway. “Help?”

Fatima’s eyes travel to my feet. “What did you do?” She sounds alarmed. She sets the mop in her hand against the wall.

“It’s just nail polish.”

She nods and pushes past me into the bathroom and picks up the bottle of remover. “This stuff is worthless,” she says, then pushes past me again and disappears. When she returns she’s holding a different bottle and tells me to sit back down on the toilet seat. Several more cotton balls and a lot of rubbing my toes later and they are back to their normal color. “This stuff is terrible for your nails but it’s the only thing that works.” She hands me the bottle she used and throws the one I bought in the trash.

The label on the one that actually removes polish says “acetone” in big warning letters, like it might be poison. “Is that yours?”

Fatima shakes her head. “It’s your mother’s.” She whisks it out of my hands and disappears again, presumably to return it before anyone notices.

Leave it to my mother to know the difference between the good-for-you kind of remover that doesn’t work and the bad-for-you kind that does. I wonder what other womanly forms of wisdom my mother knows that she’s never taught me about?

When Fatima enters the bathroom again I am still sitting on the toilet seat.

“All right,” she says. “I’m going to show you how to do this. Let’s switch.”

“What?”

“Up, up. We’re switching places.” Fatima kicks off one of her shoes.” You’re going to do my nails as practice; then you can do your own.”

“You want me to give you a pedicure?”

Fatima chuckles and kicks off the other shoe. “Yes. Why not?” When I hesitate, Fatima says something else. “I know you’re used to other people kneeling before you, but I’m not going to do that. And maybe it’s time you kneel before someone else for a change?”

My cheeks burn. I nod, getting up but not speaking. Fatima has stolen my words. She’s right. I set out the range of colors and Fatima chooses a pale pink, so pale it’s almost white.

“That way it won’t look like my toes are bleeding if you go outside the lines,” she says. Then she plops herself down.

I get on the floor before Fatima’s feet and begin to work, silently, while she offers instructions and I listen, doing my best to obey. Start there. In the center. Then work to the edges. Go over that one again. Take your time—this isn’t a race. After a few botched toes I think I’m getting the hang of it.

“I’m sorry about what I said before,” Fatima says.

I pause, not sure if I can paint nails and talk at the same time. “It’s okay. I deserved it. It’s true.”

“Look at me,” she says.

I finish the nail I’m painting, and return the brush to the bottle. Then I sit back on the bathroom tiles and meet Fatima’s gaze.

“You don’t deserve anything,” she says. Her dark eyes are full of concern. “You’ve lived a complicated life, you’re young, and you’re doing the best that you can.”

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” I ask.

Fatima takes a long time to answer. Too long.

I try not to feel betrayed. “You do.”

“No,” she says quickly. “No, no, no, Marlena. I meant what I said, that you don’t deserve anything. You don’t deserve to feel badly about your choices, especially since it’s the first time you’ve had the opportunity to make choices for yourself.”

I slump against the tub behind me. “Yeah, but now that I have the opportunity, am I making bad choices? All the wrong ones?”

Fatima thinks for a long time before answering this question, too. I try to be patient, and not jump to conclusions.

“Not necessarily,” she says.

I curl my knees into my chest and wait for Fatima to say more. She’s in her uniform skirt for work. Her shins are veined and there is a long scar up the side of one.

Fatima’s eyes drift to the bathroom counter. The array of nail polish bottles lined up by the sink. “I think that your mother raised you to believe there is only one way of you being you, Marlena. And that way is very extreme, in my opinion. Very restrictive. Now that you have some freedom, you being you has come to mean you being the opposite of how your mother raised you. Which is also a bit extreme.”

This assessment I do not like. “You think I’m being extreme?”

Fatima’s eyes shift back to me. Little wisps of hair have escaped her bun and frame her face. “Honestly? In a way, I think you’re being like every other teenager I know, because you’re rebelling.”

This perks me up. “So I’m normal?”

“Oh, Marlena.” Fatima takes a peek at her unfinished toes. “I think you are you, which is different than most of the other girls your age—and there is nothing wrong with that,” she adds quickly. “But it’s like I said before, I don’t think that you have to make this choice between a life as a healer, or a life as a ‘normal’ girl, as you like to say. I wish you would take a step back, maybe slow down a bit, and give yourself time to listen to whatever it is that heart of yours is telling you. The choice between healer and ‘normal’ might not be that stark, when you get a bit of distance.”

I shift position until I am on my knees again, bent before Fatima’s feet, carefully brushing the pale-pink polish across her remaining toenails. At one point, I say, “Maybe I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing anymore. Maybe my gift is gone.”

I hear a sharp intake of breath, but I keep my eyes on Fatima’s feet. “Or maybe it’s that your gift is changing,” she says. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Changing to spite me,” I say.

“Changing along with you,” she says without hesitation. “Changing to accommodate the young woman you are becoming.”

I bend closer to the floor, doing my best to paint Fatima’s tiny pinkie nail, which requires all my attention. Then I sit back onto my feet and look up. “Done,” I say. Before she can evaluate my careful work, I ask something else. “Do you think God punishes us for our mistakes? If he thinks we’re being ungrateful?”

Fatima’s eyes widen. “Marlena!” She leans forward. Puts her hands on my shoulders. “If you are asking me if I think God will punish you for . . . for painting your nails red and wearing a bikini on the beach and going out with a boy, the answer is no. I do not believe God is that way and I don’t want you to either.”

“My mother does.”

“She may indeed, but you don’t need to believe everything she does.”

Fatima lets go of my shoulders.

“Do you ever wonder if there’s a God at all?”

She sighs, then starts to chuckle. “Meu Deus, you ask difficult questions.”

“You give difficult answers, Fatima.”

She chuckles again. “Well, I guess that makes us a good pair.”

“Thank you,” I say. “For everything. For being honest.”

“Oh, stop thanking me.” She gets up and straightens her skirt. She looks down, wiggling her toes. “Thank you for the pedicure. It’s not bad for your first time.” Fatima nods at the red nail polish on the counter. “Now it’s your turn. I’ll supervise. But hurry up. I’ve got to get back to work.”

I open the bottle of polish and, as Fatima stands over me, watching, pointing, barking instructions, I listen as best as I can until I have ten toes that gleam a shiny candy-apple red. The entire time Fatima’s words about having to get back to work ring in my ears. That means this, what we are doing here, painting each other’s nails, talking, she doesn’t consider as work. Which means that I am not work for Fatima. When I am finished, she slips her shoes onto her feet again and walks out the bathroom door.

Within an hour I am in my new bathing suit, big Hollywood sunglasses covering my eyes, hair pulled back, bright-green towel in my bag, bright-green flip-flops thwacking a trail across the house. My red toenails clash and make my feet look like Christmas, but I don’t care. I don’t care if my mother sees me in this bikini and I don’t care if the townspeople recognize me and do a double take at all of the skin I’m showing.

Well, I try not to care. In truth, I do feel self-conscious. But it’s time I go for a swim in an actual bathing suit, and today it’s warm enough. I walk to the beach, and as I breathe in the ocean air and hear the sound of the waves, the self-consciousness fades, replaced by excitement.

I’m going to the beach.

I’m going to walk in the sand. I’m going to lie in the sun and feel the burn on my skin. I’m going to put my newly red toes in the water and then the rest of myself too. Just me. Just because I want to. The second I’m on the sand a series of what if questions pop in and out of my head.

What if I’d always been allowed to do this? Would I be a different person? What if Fatima is right, and there are ways to be both a saint and a normal girl? What would that life look like? Would it be a life where boyfriends and long days of swimming and hanging out with friends are allowed? What if my reputation did change? Would it really erode my gift?

What if my mother’s words from last night came true and just by telling people my gift was waning, it did?

What if God is really the kind of God that Fatima believes in, a God who doesn’t punish?

I halt at the shoreline, my feet sinking into the dark wet sand, erasing my bright-red shiny nails from view. I kneel down, the cold of it nice in the heat. The waves are small and gentle, a child’s hiccups. They thin to a pleasant sizzle as they near the place where I am, hands digging into the sand, disturbing a delicate white crab that buries itself again, disappearing into the mud. The sunshine against the water is almost blinding but I don’t take the sunglasses from the top of my head. I like the glare. The heat on my bare skin. The emptiness of the beach because it’s a school day and a workday and it’s September, not August. I crawl closer to the water, until the edges of the waves almost reach me as they come in. I park myself there, legs extended toward the sea. I remember the little girl on the afternoon of my forbidden, rule-breaking swim. She was sitting just like I am now. Are you an angel? she asked. She was piling wet sand onto her legs, making a dribble castle.

I dig my hand deep into the sand, then hold it high above my right thigh, letting it seep through my fingers. When it lands on my skin it is cold and smooth and it hardens as I keep going, dig, dribble, dig, dribble. Soon a spiny tower rises up from each leg, like layers of melting frosting. The sun beats down on me and my castle, drying us both. The tide gets closer. When it seems like my dribble castle is high enough that another layer will topple it, I lie back, propping myself with my elbows, and survey my work. I am covered nearly head to toe with dark, shiny sand, like so many kids I’ve seen over the years at the beach. Patches of shiny red nail polish peek out from under the mess. Not exactly a sexy look, but maybe that’s okay since I’m trying to make up for years of missed childhood. Besides, I practically have the whole beach to myself. The sun is high, the cool water a perfect relief. The sky is blue everywhere I look.

What if this is all there is? No God at all, but instead just this world in all its beauty and joy and horrors and pain? I dig up another handful of sand and watch as it drips through my fingers, shiny flecks of mica flashing as it falls. Could this be enough? Is it possible to love a life, to live a life, however imperfect and short it happens to be?

A wave bigger than all the others rushes into shore and bowls right over me, knocking my dribble castle to pieces, splashing sand up my body all the way to the side of my face. I start to laugh. I lie back on my elbows again as another rushes up behind it and covers me nearly to my chin. White foam swirls and bubbles around my body, the ties of my bikini bottom rising, then falling, heavy and wet as the wave recedes.

Yes, I think, as I get up, the remaining sand sliding down my legs. I think this could be enough for me. I wade into the water as another wave crests, so gentle and slow I can see right through it.

Why are we always looking upward and elsewhere when all of this is right here? If this is all I have, this day on this beach, skin salty and sandy, the promise of seeing Finn later on stretching ahead of me, then yes, I am satisfied with “just” this. This, right here, right now, is all I could ever ask for and more than I’ve ever dreamed.

TWENTY-NINE

“Okay, now put it in reverse.”

I look over at José, then down to my hand as I shift into gear. Ever so slowly, I inch the car backward. Then I shift the gear again so I can go forward a teensy bit. Backward, forward, backward, forward. It feels like it’s taking forever, but José seems pleased. That’s it, he keeps saying. Muy bien!

He’s teaching me to parallel park, even though we are miles from a city and the only parallel parking spots are along the seawall, and those aren’t even real ones. My hair is still damp from being in the water, my legs sandy from the beach. I’m still in my bathing suit, too, but I put on a tank top and skirt over it.

I pull out of the spot that José chalked—that he actually chalked—onto the asphalt of the big empty lot where we are practicing my driving.

“Nice job!” he says. “Now, let’s try it again.”

I look at him like he must be kidding, but he is grinning. He gulps a sip of the limonada I brought him, then a big bite of the Twix I also brought him—payment for driving lessons. I tried to offer him more but he said that was all he wanted.

He swallows his chocolate. “Once you master this,” he says, “you will be able to do anything, cariño. Trust me. Go ahead.” He nods at the wheel. “Pull back into the space and then we’ll work on getting out of it again. Just imagine there’s a very expensive Mercedes in front of the car. And how about a Ferrari behind us? You don’t want to scratch those things. A new paint job would cost a fortune.”

“Great,” I mutter under my breath.

“Hey now,” he says. “Do this well and I might let you drive the car over to that boy’s house.”

“Really?” I asked José if he would take me to Finn’s place afterward.

“He’s obviously desperate to see you since your phone keeps pinging like mad in your bag.” He chuckles. “¡Ahhh, el amor!”

I barely bring the phone anywhere, but today it’s with me. “It could be someone else.”

José’s entire face registers his skepticism. “Who else? Helen? I bet you only have two contacts on there.”

I don’t say anything because he’s right.

José chuckles again. “It’s okay, Marlenita. It doesn’t matter how many contacts you have, only that they are people who matter to you. Someday you’ll have dozens of friends. You’ll see.”

“You think so?”

“I do.” The phone pings again.

“Shouldn’t I see what he wants?”

“Not while you’re driving, cariño. You know that. After, you can ping him all you want.” He taps the steering wheel. “Now let’s do this one more time.”

I sit up in my seat, eyes straining through the windshield in search of those chalk lines. Slow and steady, my hands placed carefully at ten o’clock and two o’clock just like José showed me, I begin the process of parking. It takes me nearly five minutes but I manage to do it. Then I breathe a sigh of relief, put the car in park, turn to José, and say, “Can I text Finn to tell him I’m on my way?”

José digs in my bag and comes up with the phone. “Now that the car is no longer in gear, sí.”

I take it and read Finn’s messages.

When are you coming over?

OMG, it’s a nice day. Hurry.

What if I tempt you with culinary delights? Will that make you get here faster?

Um, if you have a phone you need to remember to USE it! Sometimes certain people in your life want to be in touch!

If you come over now, I promise I’ll let you eat all the dessert.

I’m laughing as I tap out I’m plus the emoji of a car plus the emoji of a house. I smile, proud of myself for this message in code that I know will make Finn laugh, too, when he receives it.

“Is he professing his undying love for you?” José asks.

“Maybe,” I say with a grin.

José grins back. “Well, he should if he isn’t.” He waves his hand absently toward the windshield. “Marlenita, vamos a la casa de Finn. I’ll be right here, evaluating your every move.”

“¡Sí, señor!” I pull forward across the parking lot, trying not to be nervous. Finn’s house isn’t far. I’ve never been to it, but I know where it is. There is a neighborhood of cottages right along the ocean, just past the seawall. Finn has been living so close all this time.

I turn left out of the lot and after I am safely on the road, I speak. “Thank you, José,” I say. “For teaching me. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, simply. “Just doing my job.”

His words hit me like a slap. I force myself to concentrate on driving. “Your job? What do you mean?”

“It’s my job to do what you ask, Marlena. You asked me to teach you to drive, so I’m teaching you to drive.”

Luckily, it seems there are no other cars on the road. “But I thought you were doing this as a favor. Because I asked you to and you wanted to.”

“And I do want to, and I’m happy to, but this is not a favor,” José says, in his usual cheerful tone. “This is my job. Doing what you say. I’m on the clock right now. Did you think I wasn’t?”

I swallow, the gulp of it audible in the quiet car, my eyes still fixed on the road. “This isn’t in your job description. And I’m not in charge of you.”

“But you are, Marlena. You’re the boss,” he insists.

“I am not,” I protest with a shaky laugh. “My mother is.”

“You and your mother are both my bosses. The money you make pays for my job. I have to do what you ask.”

“But . . . but I thought . . . I . . . wait a minute.” I put on my turn signal and glide to a stop along the seawall, where in theory I should be practicing my parallel parking but the only other car is about a quarter of a mile away.

“Nicely done,” José is saying. Then, “Mirame.”

I don’t want to look at José right now. But I turn the ignition off and make myself do it.

“You thought that we were friends.” José shakes his head. “Cariño, I am not your friend. I am your employee. I always have been.”

I am speechless. My lips feel glued shut.

“But just because I work for you doesn’t mean I don’t care about you, niñita. I do. I always have. I don’t know exactly what is going on, but I can see you changing and it’s for the good. And because of that”—he gestures between us, the half-eaten Twix in his hand—“here we are, and I am teaching you to drive.”

I try to nod, but instead I just drop my head and stare into my lap, at my knobby knees, the pedals on the floor, the mat, which is spotless as always. José must vacuum it every night. That just makes me sigh. José is right. I hate that he is, but he is.

“Hey,” he says. “Did you hear the part about how I care about you, or did you tune out when I said that?”

I lift my eyes. “I heard it.”

“Marlena, I know you are experiencing a lot all at once. But relationships take time. Changing a relationship after it’s been one way for many years takes time. We’ll figure it out together, eh?”

I manage to nod.

“Don’t lose hope. All is not lost.”

“I’m not,” I say, but another great big sigh escapes me. “Fatima keeps telling me that things don’t have to be all one way or all the other. But mixing everything up is so complicated. And unclear. I’m used to all the lines being very clear. And I’m also used to being painfully aware about what happens if I cross those lines, and what I lose if I do.”

“I know,” he says. “And Fatima is a smart woman.”

“She is,” I agree.

“But letting things be complicated doesn’t have to mean loss. Do you also know that?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe? Maybe I’m getting there?”

He takes a long gulp of his limonada and swallows. “Marlena,” he says, “sometimes when you start crossing lines, this is what you get.” He gestures between us again, still with the Twix, which is melting between his fingers. “You get driving lessons. And I get my favorite chocolate, some soda, and a nice afternoon with my little Marlenita, who isn’t so little anymore. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agree.

“Patience.”

“I hate patience.”

José laughs. “Don’t we all.”

Then he taps the wheel. “Now, ten o’clock, two o’clock, cariño. Or that Finn is going to think you changed your mind about him.”

THIRTY

“You got sun today,” Finn says when he opens the door of his house.

“Show me around,” I say in response. “I want the grand tour. Oh, and you promised me culinary delights!” I push past him and start looking around. Poke my head into every room, every closet. Everything is simple and everything is mismatched. Couch, two comfy chairs, lots of shelves piled with books. Books stacked one on top of the other, some horizontal, with more books wedged on those, all the way to the next shelf. The wood actually sags in the middle from the weight of them. When I poke my head in the bedroom, it is small and things are neat. The bed is made, and instead of a closet there is a metal rack where Finn has hung his clothes. On the bedside stand are more books.

“You don’t need a tour, apparently.” Finn is laughing as he comes up behind me. He puts his arms around my waist, but I keep walking, Finn in tow, backing up from his bedroom and heading into the little kitchen, where there is a small metal-topped table and two old wooden chairs. Several paper bags sit on the counter, one of them greasy.

I turn to him. “Are those our culinary delights?”

He lets go of my waist. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

I open one of the bags and breathe deeply. “Oooh, what is it? It smells delicious.”

“I went to Annie’s. The shack at the end of the seawall?”

I know it, but I’ve never been. My mother would never eat there.

Finn grabs the bag with the grease stains. “We have clam cakes.” He places it under my nose and I see fat blobs of fried dough. He returns the bag to the counter and points to the others. “We have chowder to go with the clam cakes. Also, lobster rolls, cole slaw, and corn on the cob. Maybe I overdid it?”

“It’s perfect! I’m starving. Let’s eat all of it. I’ve never had any of it.”

“Well, that’s a crime against humanity. And your Portuguese heritage, if I might add.” Finn pulls things out and sets them onto paper plates. Then we sit and dig in.

I take a bite of clam cake and swallow it down. “Wow.”

“I know, right?” Finn pops one of the smaller ones into his mouth whole. “You’re supposed to dip them in the chowder,” he says, in between chewing, “but there isn’t a right way to do this. It tastes good no matter how you approach it.”

I take Finn’s advice and dip the rest of my clam cake into the broth. “Also a good idea,” I concur, after I try it. We keep eating. Corn. Lobster rolls. The seemingly endless supply of clam cakes to go with the chowder. I pause in the activity of stuffing my face to ask Finn a question. “Are you ever going to tell me about your family?”

Finn picks up another clam cake like he hasn’t heard me. I wait while he eats it. Finally, he says, “I’m a little afraid to.”

“Why?”

“You might not like what you hear.”

“I want to know everything. Whether it’s good or bad.”

He turns his attention to his lobster roll, then picks a kernel of corn from the cob and eats it. “Okay. Well, it’s just my mother, and she and I are estranged.” He picks at another kernel. “She lives in the-middle-of-nowhere Oregon, and we haven’t spoken in years. I . . . I did something, and she can’t forgive me.”

“Oh, Finn! I’m so sorry.”

“Marlena.” Finn sounds strangled. “Please don’t ask me what I did. I don’t want to . . . I’m not ready . . .”

“Okay, okay.” I say this, because what else can I say? But it doesn’t change that I want to know whatever it is. “Why would you be so afraid to tell me that?”

He looks up from his plate. “Because I’ve worried what you will think of me, abandoning my mother.”

“It sounds more like the other way around, like she abandoned you.”

“That’s not how she sees it.”

“We really are more alike than not,” I say. “It isn’t as though my mother and I are the portrait of a happy family either.”

This elicits a bit of a smile. “I told you.”

“How old were you when you left home?”

“Sixteen.”

“Wow, that’s young.”

He nods.

I slurp a little of my chowder. “How were you able to afford living on your own?”

“I got a special scholarship, because of my aptitude for science. School and housing paid for.”

“Ah,” I say. “A genius scholarship.”

Finn rolls his eyes. “I’m not going to comment on that.”

I down another spoonful. “Does what you just told me have anything to do with why you and Angie are so close? I’ve often thought that she, I don’t know, treats you like you might be her son.”

Finn looks away. “For the most part, yeah.”

This question has him setting his lobster roll back on his plate like he can’t stomach it. “Finn, what?”

He wipes his hands on one of the napkins. There are already six, crumpled and used, strewn across the table, and the pile only keeps growing. “Angie is . . . not particularly happy with me at the moment.”

Something about the way he says this makes me feel implicated.

“Why?”

Finn stares at his plate. “I talked to her about us,” he says. “Well, she talked to me about us. She figured it out. All things considered, I guess it wasn’t that difficult.”

I think back to Angie watching us leave through her office window. “No. I thought she might suspect. Where does that leave you?”

“I’m not sure. Angie said I was too close to you to keep working on the study—”

“But that’s not fair!”

“It’s totally fair, actually,” he says. “I am too close. Though it is also possible that when Angie told me this, I shot back something along the lines of look who’s talking, since Angie hasn’t exactly stayed distant from you, either.”

I put down my spoon. “Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s also the truth, though. And Angie knows it.”

“Is that why she’s mad at you?”

Finn leans back in the old wooden chair and it creaks. “No. It’s more than that.”

“So tell me more.”

But he dives back into his food again, taking a huge bite of his lobster roll.

“Finn—”

“Can we change the subject? I think that’s enough complicated conversation from me for the day.”

I close my mouth. “Okay.” I’m uneasy letting this go. “You can tell me anything, Finn. Anything,” I repeat.

Finn stares at the messy tabletop. “I’ll tell you. I promise. Just . . . later.” He brightens a little. Reaches up and flicks my bathing suit ties, which are sticking out of my T-shirt at the back of my neck. “When you’re done eating, let’s go for a swim. We need to cross that off your list of normal, though it looks like you might have crossed it off on your own.”

I laugh. “That’s highly possible.”

“How do you feel about crossing it off once more? Just to make sure you got it?”

“I think that’s a great idea. We’re on borrowed time with this beautiful day anyway. It’s just warm enough to still go in the water. We should take advantage while we can.”

“I agree.” Finn gets up from the table and tosses his nearly empty paper plates in the trash can.

When I’m done, I clear mine, too, and after the two of us clean everything else from the table, Finn disappears into his room. When he comes out he’s wearing black swim trunks and a blue T-shirt. He reaches into a closet in the hallway and comes out with two beach towels. One of them has turtles on it and the other has little smiling snakes. “Don’t judge,” he says, when he sees me eyeing them. “There was a point, right around when I was nine, when I was sure I’d be a veterinarian, so that was the theme of my childhood. Animals, all sorts of animals, especially of the reptile variety.” He laughs, but the pain behind his eyes makes me wonder if the memory makes him miss his mother.

“Interesting new Finn tidbit” is all I say, letting the topic rest there. I take the towel with the turtles on it and drape it around my neck. We head out his front door and down the street toward the beach. “What other interesting new Finn tidbits are available for release today?”

We are so close to the water that we walk there barefoot, picking our way carefully over the hot road.

Finn sidesteps a big rock. “Let’s see. That you should be glad that I no longer keep a pet tarantula?”

“Ew, a tarantula? Really?”

“Yup, really.”

A rickety brown fence, tall thin slats of wood held together by chicken wire, marks the entrance to the beach. We climb up and over the dune. “You’re right, I think I am grateful for that.”

When we reach the high tide line we drop our towels. Finn pulls off his shirt and sets it on top of his towel. I try not to look at his skin, his bare chest. Try to act like it isn’t a big deal that I am essentially disrobing in front of the boy I can’t stop thinking about. “Any other Finn tidbits you want to share?” I croak as I pull off my top and slide my skirt down my thighs and off.

Finn’s eyes flicker over me from head to toe. Then he grins. “Wait, sorry, were you saying something I was supposed to answer? I got distracted by the sight of Marlena the Saint in a string bikini. You don’t look so saintly right now.”

I cover my eyes with my hands. “Shut up. You’re going to make me blush.”

He moves my hands away and plants a kiss on my lips. “I think I already did.”

“You were going to tell me about yourself,” I remind him. “Maybe something more recent?”

His eyes linger another moment on my neck, my stomach, then along my legs. “Right. Recent.” We walk toward the water. “How about the fact that I finally have a girlfriend?”

“I’m your girlfriend?” I yelp when my toes touch the water. It’s colder than it was this morning.

Finn bends down to kiss me again. “Yes.” We wade farther in. The water is up to my chest and Finn’s waist. Both of us duck under.

I know it will warm up the longer we stay in. I am up to my neck, then over my head, treading water. The ocean is nearly flat. Finn swims to where I am bobbing up and down. My hand brushes across his skin under the water. He pulls me close.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You’re smiling.”

I smile harder. Finn wraps his arms around me and I wrap my legs around his waist. I try not to think too much about what I’m doing. I lean in and kiss him. Then I unwrap my legs from his body and dart away, closer to the shallows.

“Hey, where are you going?”

I dive under, my hands reaching for the ocean floor. I plant them there and kick my feet up until they feel air, before I right myself again. “I’ve always wanted to try and do a handstand.”

Finn laughs. “Another thing on your list?”

“No. But I’m adding it now.”

We stay in the water until my teeth are chattering. Finn still has to drag me back to shore, because I could stay in the water all evening. He wraps me up in the towel with the turtles. We grab our clothes and walk back to his house, our bathing suits soaked and dripping. When we get there Finn points to the bathroom so I can change, but of course, it didn’t occur to me to bring a spare set of clothes. I dry off as best I can, leaving on my bathing suit bottom and pulling my skirt over it, but taking off my bathing suit top so it doesn’t leave two damp marks on my shirt. I decide this would be worse than going without a bra. I drape my bikini top on the towel rack and head into the hall. Finn’s door is open and I see him standing there, shirt off, searching for another one. I knock, then push and walk up to him, running my hand across all that bare skin.

“Well, come on in, Marlena.” He laughs, but there is also a catch in his voice.

I’m too busy studying the heart on Finn’s arm to answer, brushing my fingers across it. When I look up into his eyes, his mouth is suddenly on mine and we are kissing. These kisses are hungry and wild and dizzying, our bodies pressed up against each other. Before I’m aware of what I am doing, I’m pushing Finn backward toward the bed and climbing onto him, my legs around his waist like when we were in the water. I’m wearing more clothes this time, but somehow it feels like I’m wearing less. My skirt rides up to the tops of my thighs. Our breaths come quickly as we kiss. I press harder and harder against him, as if I want to move through him. Even though we are as close as we possibly can get I want to be closer. I grab the hem of my shirt, ready to pull it off.

“Marlena? What are you doing?” Finn’s hand shoots out, stopping me. There is a dazed expression on his face.

“Getting undressed?”

His hand is firm, preventing me from moving my top any higher. “Wait a minute.”

“Why?” I demand. “Why wait another second?”

“Well, let’s see.” Finn lifts me up and sets me to the side on the bed. Then he lies down facing me. “Oh, let me count the ways.”

“I want to do this,” I tell him.

“Do what exactly?”

I tap my hand on the bed between us. “This?”

Finn gives me a look. “If you can’t say it out loud, then we’re not doing it.”

“Sex, sex, sex,” I burst out, staring straight into Finn’s face.

And he laughs. “You certainly said it, there.”

I stare down at my hands.

Finn leans down and kisses each one of my fingers. “Marlena, please don’t think that I don’t want to be with you.”

I look up again. “See. You can’t say it either.”

Finn is smiling. “Do I want to have sex with you? Yesssssss.” He draws out the word with such agony that it brings a smile back to my face. “Of course I do. But we can take things slow. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”

I groan and flop onto my back. “Everyone keeps telling me that!”

Finn laughs. “Maybe because it’s true?”

“All or nothing. All or nothing! Why can’t it be all? What’s so wrong with all? Why is everyone always warning me against it? Are extremes really that bad?” I let my eyes slide back to Finn, down his face and over his chest, so much beautiful skin. “All looks pretty good to me right now.”

This makes Finn laugh again.

“I’m serious. I’m eighteen. I’m ready. Haven’t most girls my age already done this?”

“Plenty, sure, but not everyone. And none of them have the history you do, since there’s that part about being a healer your entire life.”

I glare. “A few minutes ago, you were loving the saint girl in a bikini.”

It’s Finn’s turn to groan and flop back onto the bed. “Oh no. I haven’t forgotten a single bit of that image.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“There isn’t one, not technically,” Finn says. “But there are lots of things we can do other than kissing, Marlena. And there are many kinds of sex.” Gently, Finn reaches out to grasp the hem of my top and raises it a little. His hand sears a trail across my skin, a trail that would be a dark-pink riot of peonies if I could paint it. I close my eyes, the light touch of his fingertips along my ribs ticklish.

“What’s so funny?” he asks. When I open my eyes he is grinning.

I bite my lip. “I don’t know. I guess maybe I’m a little nervous.”

“Good. I am, too.”

“But you know what you’re doing. You’re the one who’s talking about all the things we can do and all the different kinds of sex. You’ve done all of this before.”

“Not with someone like you.”

I sigh. “I know, I know, sheltered miracle-healer-saint.”

Finn’s face loses the grin, his eyes growing serious. “Not with someone I love.” He kisses my stomach, just above the waistband of my skirt. His breath falls across me in soft bursts, petals falling from a tree.

My breathing has stopped. “I’m someone you love?”

Finn lifts his head to look me in the eyes. “Yes, you are,” he says. Then, “I love you, Marlena. I knew it from the first moment I saw you.”

I hold his stare, like a beautiful but fleeting treasure. “I love you, too, Finn.”

Then, in the fading light of the day, Finn gets up on his knees and leans over me. I sit up so he can slip my top the rest of the way up and over my head. “Look how beautiful you are,” he says, eyes on my body.

The body, my body, as a source of miracles, has also been a source of shame. I remember when I turned thirteen and my breasts began to poke through my long white sheaths, two points I could no longer hide, how my mother looked at me, horrified, how she mourned the changes of my body. She immediately went to the store and came back with these tight, stretchy half shirts. They were bras that pressed my breasts so hard against me they nearly disappeared, which was the point. Any curves on my silhouette have always been regarded as embarrassing, shameful, something to make disappear. Evidence of the profane on this sacred body of mine. This sense of needing to hide myself has even carried over into moments when I’m changing clothes, or getting out of the shower. A girl like me is not only never to be touched, but never to be naked, at least not for long. A big part of that girl knows she should feel shame right now, being so exposed in front of a boy. But the thing is, I don’t.

“You have a dreamy look on your face,” Finn says.

“I’m happy,” I tell him.

Finn lies down next to me on his side, propping his head with his hand. “Good. Because I am too. And I’m so many other things I won’t say out loud.”

A thought occurs to me. “Hey, how does, um, this affect your photographic memory? Do you remember, ah, pretty much everything?”

He grins. “Oh yes, I do, Marlena. This is one of the moments when my photographic memory is truly useful. In the best of ways.” He presses a kiss against my mouth, his tongue searching, parting my lips until it slides against my own. When I pull him closer, pull him on top of me, he shakes his head and pulls back. “Mm-mm. We have all the time in the world, remember?” His stare slides down my neck and over my chest and stomach. Starting at my collarbone, his fingertips move across my skin, down the curve of my left breast, then over the right one. There is a tightening in my belly, between my thighs, a tingling along the skin of my chest. When I close my eyes and a sigh escapes, Finn whispers in my ear. “I think it’s time someone else is in charge of healing all the lost and lonely parts of you, Marlena. I want it to be me.”

As his fingertips continue their journey over my body, I open my eyes long enough to say, “I want it to be you, too.”

The warm feeling between my thighs keeps building while Finn’s hands explore every inch of my torso. He leans over me for another kiss, and when I open my eyes there is a lustful but tender expression on Finn’s face, Finn, whose entire being is forever a contradiction. Young but intelligent beyond his years. Serious but fun. Skeptical but full of faith. Fierce but tender. Full of restraint yet willing to abandon himself completely. To me, at least.

“What are you smiling about?” I manage to ask.

“I feel like an explorer,” he says, “discovering all of Marlena’s hidden secrets.”

“I didn’t know I had any hidden,” I tell him.

“Let’s see what else I can find out.” His hand makes its way down my stomach, sliding softly over the skin of my belly until it slips past the band of my skirt and dips underneath the edge of my bathing suit. He stops a moment, and looks at me.

I nod, unable to speak, and the tips of his fingers reach the place between my legs, gliding slowly over this part of my body that I’ve never touched, not like this, that I’m never supposed to allow anyone else to touch. Certainly not like this. It isn’t long before a feeling so intense, so unlike anything I’ve ever known yet somehow similar to that sheer, blinding ecstasy that accompanies a vision, grows up my back and down my thighs and over my stomach to my breasts and my neck until it is all that I am, one great streak of fire and burning that cannot contain my breath.

If pleasure was a vision, it would start out deep and dark and blue, the color of the ocean, cold and sharp. It would become an arrow of stars, streaming through the body on a crash course with the heart. If pleasure was a song composed by a mystic, it would begin with a chorus of soft voices that rise to a startling tangle of bells. If it had a taste, it would be of the sharp salty sea and the bright tang of ripe berries. I had no idea that love, human love, could permeate every one of the bodily senses, that it could take shape in so many different forms. I cannot believe I’ve lived a life that would have me deprived of this until my death in the name of God, of a so-called gift, with a mother who colluded to do just this. If loving Finn has profaned me, then I wish with all my heart that every ounce of sacredness in me is washed away forever.

But somewhere inside me, too, I know for the first time in my life that I am finally discovering what is truly sacred in this world. No God can ever take that from me. This is Finn’s gift to me, a boy so real I can feel his hands on my body and his breath on my lips, which is so unlike the gift that has hidden in my healing hands for so long and kept me from so much of what is truly good and beautiful.

“Marlena,” Finn whispers in my ear, as my lungs slow their effort to gulp the air. “Are you okay?”

“Hm-hmm,” I murmur back, eyes fluttering open.

I look up at Finn, his face hovering over mine, his beauty a wonder, a vision. I trace the curve of his cheek.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

I hook one of my legs over his and pull him closer. “That all my life I’ve been taught to feel ashamed of this, but now that we are here, I don’t feel ashamed at all.”

“Oh Marlena, shame is the last thing you should feel.” He buries a kiss in my hair. “You are beautiful and I love you and there is no shame in this. Not a bit.”

THIRTY-ONE

There are days when you wake up and the whole world feels good. Like everything you see is beautiful and in its place. The way the sun filters through a break in the clouds, a single ray of light raining down to the ocean below. The strawberries piled in a basket on the kitchen table, plump and red. A stack of books waiting for you to read them. Even the sound of the coffee percolating on the stove gives you a sense of peace and harmony. Sometimes there are entire weeks like this. And when they happen, they seem like a miracle.

Before, I didn’t know that being in the world could feel so good. But now, as the days slide into weeks, I live like I have never lived. Like I’ve always wanted to. I let myself change, I let my life change, I let my relationships change. Most of all, I let myself love and be loved by Finn. We walk the beach, even when it rains. We go through the things on my list, one by one, and things that weren’t on my list, too. Finn takes me to his university campus, where there aren’t any lockers but there are people everywhere, sitting on the grassy quad, carrying their books, heading to classes, and I imagine myself here one day. I think about what I might study. I go to the mall and eat in the food court. Helen and I have sleepovers, and we talk into the woozy hours of morning. I stay out all night, more than once. I learn to ride a bicycle. I get better and better at driving. Then one day, Finn and I go on a road trip.

Before we leave, Helen takes me shopping in the city. We go from store to store on a pretty street with clothes that seem ridiculously expensive, but today I don’t care.

“I need to find the perfect outfit,” I tell her. “For . . .”

Helen and I have just emerged from a dress boutique with price tags the same as her monthly rent. She gives me an exaggerated surprise-face. “For whaaaaat, Marlena?”

“You know what,” I tell her.

Finn has devoted himself to proving exactly how much there is to do other than kissing, and I am enjoying this proving. Before, I’d thought that pleasure just happened. I didn’t know that girls were different from boys, that their boyfriends or girlfriends would have to spend time learning their bodies. Finn has made himself into an excellent student of the body that is mine, and I’ve done my best to do this in return for him. But while there may be many kinds of sex, there is still one kind Finn and I have refrained from having. And I’m glad that we’ve waited.

But I don’t want to wait anymore.

Helen yanks my arm and pulls me into a fancy lingerie store. “Well, if that’s what we’re preparing for, what you wear underneath the outfit is just as important!”

“Helen!” I plant my feet firmly just inside the door. We are surrounded by lace, by things it would never occur to me to put on my body. “It’s not like he hasn’t seen me!”

She pulls harder, dragging me to a rack of pale-pink, flimsy—what are they called, teddies? “It’s not like that matters!”

“There is no way I’m wearing something like that.”

Helen bats her eyelashes with exaggerated innocence. “And why not?”

“I can see through it!”

“Exactly!”

“No, Helen. No way!”

“Oh, Marlena,” Helen sighs. “If you are going to end up naked anyway, then what does it matter if Finn can see through what you’re wearing before you take it off?”

“I don’t know?” I cover my mouth and start to laugh. “I guess maybe it doesn’t?”

Helen drags me to another rack. “Finally, you are talking sense!”

I look at all the complicated black lace, and try to figure out how a person is supposed wear whatever is dangling from the hangers. “That looks so uncomfortable.”

Helen is admiring something satin and shiny. “You aren’t supposed to wear it all day.”

“Do you put on this stuff for Sonia?” Ever since the party Helen and Sonia have been dating.

“Sonia loves me in lingerie.”

“Does Sonia wear it for you?”

She shakes her head. “No. I’m the lingerie girl in the relationship.”

“Well, what does Sonia like then?”

Helen tears her eyes from the rack to look at me. “The better question is: what does Finn like?”

“Me?”

“Of course, you. You’re not exactly helping me help you, here.”

I think of the colors I see when I’m with Finn. “What about pink? Just not that pale washed-out color you showed me before.”

“Finally.” She leads me over to another rack.

At some point, while I’m trying things on, I text Finn, in my still very slow and labored tapping of the screen.

Me: You will never guess what I am doing.

Finn: Tell me.

Me: I’d rather show you when we go away.

Finn: Gulp. Stop killing me, Marlena.

I smile at this and put the phone away.

In the end, I get something simple, but pretty, and I am grateful when we return to dress shopping. After hours of looking, I find the perfect one. It is a bright, silvery green, with a halter that ties around my neck and a skirt that reaches to my knees.

“What do you think?” I ask Helen, when I emerge from the dressing room.

She looks up from her phone and smiles. “I think that’s the one.”

“Me too.”

“Well, then, buy it, so we can go to dinner. My feet are killing me!”

Later, when we are seated in a booth, waiting for our pizza, Helen asks me about my decision to be with Finn, and I ask her what it’s like to have sex with Sonia, and what made her decide she was ready.

Helen takes a sip of her Coke. “It was easy. I knew I wanted to, and she wanted to, so we did.”

“No regrets?”

“No way.”

Our pizza arrives, and we each pull a piece from the steaming pie.

Helen waits for hers to cool so she can take a bite. “Promise me I’ll get the full report, Marlena.”

I pick up a fork and knife to avoid getting burned and cut a piece, blowing on it a little. “I promise,” I tell her, and our attention turns to eating.

My road trip with Finn turns out to also involve a boat trip. We drive to a ferry, then drive the car onto the ferry so it can take us to an island disconnected from the mainland. There are no bridges or causeways. It makes it seem like Finn and I are heading across the ocean to be in a completely new world that is all ours.

The inn where we are staying is across the street from the beach, near a little downtown with shops and restaurants. It is so much like the town where I live, but so unlike it. This town, for instance, has never sold souvenirs with my image, and I can walk down its Main Street without fear of being recognized. And I can do it with Finn and not worry about being judged.

We head into the foyer of the big old house. “What do you think?” Finn asks.

There are little couches and nooks to sit and read, and a pretty porch visible through the windows. “I love it.”

When we get to our room, I feel shy. I’ve spent so much time with Finn, just Finn, but there’s something different about going away with a boy. It feels grown-up, in a way I’ve never been. In my bag, I’ve packed my perfect dress, and the underwear I plan to wear underneath it. When Finn runs out to the car for something he forgot, I put everything away in the closet and drawers. I don’t want him to see what I’ve brought just yet.

Finn and I go for lunch at a takeout place on the docks. We buy sandwiches and eat them sitting in the sun, our legs dangling over the water. Afterward, we drive all over the island, looking at the old houses, trying to decide which one is our favorite. Which one we would buy. If we got married someday, I think. All afternoon there is a flutter in my stomach about our dinner ahead, and about what will happen after dinner.

In the end, when it does happen, I’m not wearing the special dress or the lingerie Helen made me buy. It isn’t even at night after we’ve eaten, and gone back to our room, as I’d imagined.

When we return from our drive, the two of us go upstairs so I can put away the souvenir I bought in one of the shops. A little framed postcard of the exact spot where Finn and I ate lunch. I set the bag on the floor and begin digging through my suitcase for a hair tie. Finn is sitting on a chair next to one of the windows, flipping through the novel he bought at a bookstore where a cat was sleeping on one of the table displays, which made us laugh. I find the tie for my hair and put it up in a knot. Then I go to Finn and sit on his lap. He closes the book and sets it on the table. Finn turns me so I am facing him, my legs on either side of his waist. He leans in for a lingering kiss.

“This isn’t fair,” I say, when I can’t seem to pull away. “You know all my secrets.”

“And I’ve loved finding out every one of them.” His fingertips run up my back underneath my shirt and my cardigan.

“I was just going to sit here for a minute.”

“Well, I think you should stay longer.”

I kiss Finn’s neck, once, then again. “I know all your secrets, too.” I expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t. When I look up at him, his eyes are far away. “Where did you go?”

Instead of answering, he starts unbuttoning my shirt.

“I thought we were going to the beach for a walk before dinner,” I say, as Finn is sliding my shirt and sweater open, over my shoulders and down my arms. He undoes the clasp on my plain cotton bra and suddenly I don’t want to leave the room for anything.

“You really think we should go for a walk? Right now?” he asks as I lift his shirt up. He raises his arms so I can slip it off and toss it to the floor.

“No.”

I press myself against him. I love the feeling of my bare skin against his bare skin. We’ve been so careful not to be completely naked together—Finn’s rule. One of us has been, but not both of us. Not at the same time. Finn seems to have decided it’s my turn today.

He lifts me off him and I let him undress the rest of me, my jeans, then my underwear. “This really isn’t fair,” I tell him.

“I was naked last time,” he says, kissing my shoulder.

“Is this another one of your rules? We have to switch back and forth?”

“Maybe.”

He kisses my mouth and there is no more talking. Our kisses are like waves, swelling slowly, then rising more forcefully until we are a tumble of hands and limbs and mouths. His fingers on my skin, my back, my hips, my thighs, are a beautiful torment, his lips on my shoulders, my neck, my breasts, make it impossible to breathe. Like always, I want to be closer, closer to Finn, like I can never be close enough, pressing myself against him like I really could find a way to press through him.

When we slow down again, Finn laughs, soft and low. “We were going for a walk?”

“What walk?”

He leads me to the bed and pulls me down on top of it. He trails a finger from my knee to my thigh and over the curve of my hip and the swell of my breast. Finn replaces his finger with his lips and it is dizzying. I shift onto my back and close my eyes. “I can’t believe I might have lived my whole life without this,” I whisper.

“I can’t believe it either, Marlena,” he whispers back.

I reach for the buttons on Finn’s jeans.

“It’s too tempting if both of us are naked,” he says. “You know that.”

“But what if I need it to be both of us?”

He pulls back. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” I say, undoing his top button as I say it. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” I undo another one, and Finn’s breathing speeds up. “Are you going to tell me no?”

“No,” he says. “I mean yes. Yes, I want to.”

“I think it’s time.”

“Me too,” he says.

The two of us look at each other for a long time, taking this in. I stare at this boy I love, who loves me back, in every way, at his beautiful eyes that are all for me, that are full of me, the bright-red and pink hues of love that color my vision. They are all that I see. Finn is all that I can see. It is the most beautiful vision of my life.

“I love you so much.” These words are the glorious petals of a peony flower in bloom.

“I love you just as much,” Finn says, as he lets me undress him.

When we are both naked, I study the tattoo on his arm, something I have done a dozen times at this point, but this time seems different. I brush my fingers across the lines of it, and the shadows. “I could never forget this part of you, Finn. You are my heart. And I am yours.”

THIRTY-TWO

I stare up at the wall of my room on this first day that feels like fall. There is a new painting hanging there. The entire canvas is a bright, beautiful red, touched with a glaring, swirling pink. Slopes of white curl through it. It is abstract, but if you stare at it long enough you might make out that the swirls of red and pink come together to make peonies. A trail of them. My vision, a portrait of what it is like to love and be loved by Finn. I am brimming with love, carrying it all around like a pail of overflowing water at the beach. Like with my healing visions, I wanted to make it tangible.

I reach up and touch the rough edges of the canvas, glide my fingers over the paint, now dry and brightened by the light of the sun coming through the windows. Evidence that what I have with Finn is real.

Maybe someday I will give this to him.

I turn away from the painting and head downstairs for some coffee. The heat of the mug warms my hands. It’s strange how the chill of fall came so fast; from one day to the next the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees.

Through the kitchen window I see a car I recognize parked in the white pebble driveway. Angie is walking up to the door.

What is she doing here? Did she come to see the artwork of my visions?

I race to greet her before she can ring the bell, but I’m too late. The door swings wide, my mother blocking the view. My mother is wearing heels, dressed up, even though she’s been in the house and it’s morning.

“So you are the woman who’s taken my daughter away” is the first thing she says. “Poisoned her mind.”

“Mother,” I hiss from behind her. I wish I could say I’m surprised she would speak this way to Angie when they haven’t even been introduced, and while Angie is still standing outside on the front steps. But I’m not.

“I have taken no one’s daughter,” Angie says, sounding offended.

I push past my mother and stare at Angie, wanting to tell her, Run, run while you can! But after barely a nod to me, Angie’s eyes are stuck on my mother.

“I am the one who made the decision to speak to Angie,” I say, cutting into their staring match. “I am the person who decided to take this break from healing. Angie had nothing to do with it.”

My mother is shaking her head, the purple bruises of sleeplessness under her eyes darker than ever. They make me wonder if my mother has slept at all. She points to me and looks at Angie again. “This girl here”—my mother’s gaze swipes from my head to my toes, from my bright-green top to my jeans and my loud, obnoxious flip-flops—“is no longer mine.”

For the first time, I see anger on Angie’s face, a tightness in her jaw, a clench in her teeth. “Mrs. Oliveira, that is a choice you’ve made about your daughter that has nothing to do with me, to the detriment of yourself, I might add.” Angie reaches an arm out to me. I see the quiver of protection in it. But the devastation on my mother’s face stops me short from leaning into the crook of Angie’s elbow.

“It is not just me who is suffering,” my mother goes on, as if Angie hasn’t spoken. “You’ve taken everything from my daughter, her gift, her purpose, her sacred touch, even her virginity—”

“Mother!”

My mother is far from done, ignoring my protest. “From the moment you entered Marlena’s life you started her down a path from which there is no turning back. The entire town has seen her prancing around with that boy and knows she is ruined.” My mother’s eyes flicker upward, one might think toward the beautiful fall sky, but she is looking toward God. “God knows she is ruined and that is the worst of it. Lives will be lost because of you.”

Angie is trembling. “Mrs. Oliveira.” She keeps her voice slow and steady. “I did not come to speak with you, though it is obvious you have things you’d like to say to me. I’m happy to come back another time for that conversation. I’m here because I have important issues to discuss with your daughter.” Angie glances at me finally. The way she looks at me, her normally bright laughing eyes so grave, a frown on her lips, nearly makes my knees want to buckle. What could be wrong?

My mother huffs. “What could you need to tell Marlena that you can’t say in front of me? That you’ve officially proved her a fraud?” Her eyes finally shift to me. “Oh, Marlena, do you think me stupid? This town is full of gossips and I’ve heard about the inquiries your scientist has been making about your gift.” Her gaze slides back to Angie. “What then? Tell us both why you’re here.”

The tremble in Angie’s body subsides. “Marlena, do you have somewhere we can talk in private?”

My mother is unmoving in the doorway, but I beckon Angie past her. “Follow me.”

As Angie and I go upstairs, my heartbeat seems to have slowed, like it is resisting my moving forward. I usher her inside my room. It is still mostly bare, apart from my bed, my reading chair, and a stack of books on the table beside it. The only thing that brightens it is the new painting on the wall.

Angie goes straight up to inspect it. I sit down on the edge of the bed and put my hand to my chest to feel the pulse of my heart and make sure it’s still there.

“You told me you painted your visions,” Angie says finally. She is still studying the canvas.

“I do.”

“But there’s only one painting here. Where are the others?”

I can’t tell if Angie is genuinely curious or if she is stalling. Maybe the scientist in her wants to see my art as evidence, additional resources, for her study. But the person in her is using them to distract from the real reason she is here. “All the paintings from my visions are stored away.”

She turns to me. Her blue eyes are worried. “You said all. And this one? It’s not about a vision?”

“It’s about Finn,” I say. “It’s about how I feel when I’m with him.” I pause for a breath. “I know you know about us. He told me.”

Angie comes over to the bed and sits down. “What did he tell you, exactly?”

“That you didn’t approve of us.”

Angie’s eyes drop into her lap. “I see.”

“I know he works for you and that a relationship with me might be inappropriate—”

“Marlena, no. That’s not the issue. Well, it is an issue, but not the one that has me disagreeing with Finn.”

“Then what is it?”

She sighs heavily. “Tell me something first. And be honest.”

“Okay,” I say slowly.

Angie is watching me with a strange look on her face. “Do you love him?”

I glance at the painting and smile the tiniest bit. I can’t help it. When I think of Finn my happiness overflows.

“Oh, Marlena,” she exclaims. “You do love him.”

I nod. My smile fades because Angie takes my hand and her eyes are sad. No, they are panicked. She doesn’t even hesitate when she touches me. I swallow. “What?” The word gets caught in my throat. “You think it’s a bad thing that I’m in love with Finn?”

Angie’s fingers squeeze harder. She doesn’t shake her head yes or no. She just keeps saying, “Marlena.” Then, “I told Finn that he has to tell you. That if he didn’t that I would tell you.”

I search her eyes while she is searching mine. “What?”

“You really don’t know? Not anything?”

What don’t I know? I race through everything I do know, every thought and feeling related to Finn. About his photographic memory and his estrangement from his mother and his desire to be a veterinarian when he was small. Then my brain sharpens to a single point. On it is a half-formed vision from before my healing break, its colors pale and faded, Finn walking away from me at some later date, walking toward a place I will never reach. “Say it now, Angie. I can’t take this.”

Angie breathes deeply. Then she starts. “Finn is sick.”

I shake my head. I feel my hair brushing along my bare shoulders. “No, that can’t be.” The words seem like they are from someone else. An image, bright and clear, appears to me. The tattoo on Finn’s arm. The way it’s always seemed like there was something else to it, something he wasn’t telling me. That he wasn’t quite ready to share. “It’s his heart,” I state.

“Yes.” Angie leans forward. “I would never lie to you about this.” There is a shuffle of feet outside my bedroom door but I tune them out, straining toward whatever Angie says next. “I’m so sorry, Marlena. Finn is dying.”

THIRTY-THREE

Angie and I haven’t said a word since we got in her car. We passed my mother in the hall on the way out of my room. I know she heard every word of what Angie told me. It was her feet I heard outside the door.

The seawall appears with the ocean beyond it, usually a comfort, but I stare at it as though I’m suddenly blind. I know it is there but I can’t take it in. I am ever the anchorite, but the heart in my chest is an anchor dragging my soul to the ground, one forged of crystal and glass that will shatter when it hits bottom. I don’t even know if it’s still beating. My senses have stopped working, everything numb. Perhaps I’m the one who is dying.

“Angie.” A great hard lump has lodged in my throat. I can barely swallow around it.

She is shaking her head. She turns down the road that leads to Finn’s neighborhood. “The rest is for Finn to tell you.” When she pulls up in front of his house and turns off the car, she says, “I’ll wait here. I’m not going anywhere. Take as long as you need. All day if you want.”

I get out of the car and walk up to the house, but it’s like I am underwater, that anchor pinning me to the ocean floor. My legs carry me forward up the porch stairs and my hand is reaching for the door to knock. When Finn answers and sees that it is me, his eyes light up. “Marlena,” he says with a smile. Then his eyes land on Angie, standing there by her car, and every bit of happiness fades, just like those colors in my vision paled as though draining away Finn’s life. I should have known. “What did you—” he calls out, but Angie gets in the driver’s side without a word. Slams the door.

“Finn,” I whisper. “How could you keep this from me?”

He stares down at me. I stare up at him. For a moment, a beautiful fleeting instant, I forget why I’m here. This is love, this is love is racing through my brain.

Finn’s hand twitches. His fingers cross the distance to mine, wrapping around them. My heart pounds all of a sudden, like someone has pulled up that anchor and is readying to cross the sea. Finn bends forward. At first I think he’s going to kiss me but instead he presses his forehead to mine. I close my eyes, soaking up the proximity of his face, his strong body, the smell of his skin, a dizzying feeling traveling over my limbs to the tips of my fingers and toes. I wonder if we are both angels with wings that will carry us away. I wish for this, despite all my wishing against just this for so long.

“Marlena.” He grasps my other hand, presses my palm into his chest, firmly against his heart. The pulse and pound of it reaches into me. “What did Angie say?”

“Just tell me it isn’t true.” I stare up at him and wait.

He says nothing.

“No, Finn, no.” My eyes cloud, everything turning the color of rust. I crumple forward, still pressing my palm into the center of his body. I yank my hand away and point to the heart tattoo peeking out from under Finn’s sleeve. A tinge of anger spreads through my voice, like a drop of stormy color. “I want the real story, because the one you told me is a lie.”

Finn’s eyes seek the porch floor. “Not entirely.” He raises his head, slumps against the wall of the porch. “I was born with a heart defect,” he says, and stops, as though this is the whole story.

I shake my head. Remember Finn’s body, his every inch of perfect skin, unmarred by scars. “But you’ve never had any surgeries.”

“The doctors didn’t discover it until I was older. There was nothing they could do, short of a heart transplant, which I will likely never live to see. The waiting list is too long.” He sighs. “It’s why I moved so far from home. Why my mother and I aren’t speaking. I was tired of hospitals and doctors, because believe me, every avenue has been explored. There is no fixing me. She wanted to keep trying to fix me and I needed her to stop.”

My breaths come in short, quick bursts, like I am running. “Every avenue but, say, a miracle saint girl.”

Finn fixes his stare on me. “Marlena.”

Tears pool in my eyes. “Is that why . . . ?”

“No, no.” He reaches out, maybe to put his arms around me, but I step backward. “Me and you,” he says. “My caring about you, my loving you, has nothing to do with you being a healer.”

A shiver rolls across my body, the shudder dislodging the tears in my eyes. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because it’s true.”

“You’ve tried everything else, so why not a healer? Is that why you work for Angie? Mr. I-don’t-believe-it-unless-I-can-knock-on-it Finn was hoping that one of Angie’s freak subjects might turn out not to be a fraud? Me, particularly?”

“I told you to stop saying that about yourself.”

I wish there was something I could hit hard enough to break a bone. “Like that matters. Like anything matters right now.” Finn tries to catch my hand but I don’t let him. “Look at me,” I demand. “You didn’t once think that maybe, just maybe, I could be the answer? That I could be the one to fix”—my eyes slide to the edge of his tattoo—“your heart? Not even on the day you came to my audience?”

“Of course it crossed my mind. Of course it did, and it still does. I’m not going to lie and say that I haven’t thought about it. I have. I’ve wondered.”

“Finn, you told me to stop healing. It was your idea that I take this . . . this vacation. You gave me the idea to quit!” My voice is rising and rising. “Why would you tell me to do something that goes against everything you need? How could you do that? How could you do that to yourself? What were you thinking?”

“It wasn’t about me,” he says quietly. “It’s what you needed.”

“No! What I needed—what I need—is for you to live a long and happy life! What I need is to keep on loving you and for you to keep on loving me! How could you do this to me, Finn? How could you allow me to love you in exchange for my not saving you?”

Finn’s lips part but nothing comes out. A single tear rolls down his cheek.

“Is it true what Angie said, that you’re dying? Dying?” There is a hysterical edge to that word the second time I say it.

He is still. But then he nods.

“When? How long?”

“I don’t know. Months at least.”

My knees start to buckle. “Months?”

He nods again.

“Give me your hand,” I demand. It comes out a bark. Finn doesn’t, so I say it again. “Give. Me. Your. Hand.”

He holds it out.

I do something I thought I might never do again. I get down on my knees. I inhale a long, hoarse breath, and I close my eyes tight. I reach up and take Finn’s hand. Press my forehead to the back of it. Feel his skin against me, inhale the dizzying scent of him.

And I wait.

I wait for that familiar tug in my body that signals the start of a vision. My heart and mind and soul together search for that familiar charm, wait for the reassurance of its presence, imagine it popping up to me from the floorboards where it’s lain hidden, hoping for me to call it back. I wait for the colors to start, to flood my being, followed by the scenes and that great surge of energy that passes through me into the person I touch. I wait for the healing process to begin, any part of it. I pray for it. As I hold Finn’s hand, press my cheek into his palm like my entire life depends on it, because his entire life depends on it. I silently call out to God, and as I beg and I plead, I realize something I have never before been able to say for sure.

I do believe in God.

But the God I know is a punishing God, a God using Finn to castigate me for forsaking my gift. My mother was right. She’s been right all along. This is what I get for wanting a life, for trying to have a life and love for even a few weeks. God is a being who is punishing both of us because of my hubris.

I sob into Finn’s hand.

There is nothing in me. No sign of my gift. The well of healing inside me is dry.

Finn’s arms are around me, pulling me up.

A jumble of words spills from my lips. “Maybe if I change my clothes, maybe the tank top, the jeans . . . maybe if I take my hair down . . . maybe . . . maybe . . .” I am face-to-face with Finn. Tears are streaming from his eyes. I jump back from him like his arms are made of red-hot iron. “Don’t touch me. You can’t . . . not like this . . . not anymore . . . I felt nothing, Finn, don’t you understand?” The full realization of the situation dawns like a monster rising, hulking and terrible between us. “There is nothing left in me. So we can’t . . . we have to stop.”

His face drains of color, and then I am gone, turning around and heading back the way I came toward Angie, running down the steps and across the yard as fast as I can. “Take me home,” I choke out when I get inside the car.

When I enter the house my mother is the first person I see. She is waiting, maybe since I left. “I overheard your conversation with that scientist,” she informs me. “I heard every bit of it.”

Before she can say anything else, I tell her the decision I made in the silence of Angie’s car. But I stop short of telling her the bargain I made with the punishing God.

I stare over my mother’s head at the self-portrait hanging on the wall, and I think of the shipwrecked girl I am once again. “Make the announcement. My audiences will resume next Saturday. I will heal again on the anniversary of the Day of Many Miracles.” My words are like a last, desperate prayer to Saint Jude, to Julian, to Hildegard, to all the women mystics who lived before me. I see the satisfaction on my mother’s face. “You have won. Mama,” I force myself to add. My eyes flicker toward heaven. Maybe my return to healing, to my life as it was before, exactly as it was before, will be enough to appease the angry God above me. Above all of us.