Chapter 26 Aleys
Aleys
Aleys returns to the hospital in procession as if she were a holy relic.
Beguines encircle her like a protective guard.
The citizens of Brugge drop their tasks, bow their heads.
Crowds trail them, emptying whole plazas, and entrepreneurs gather the dust from her footprints.
They want her now, in the wards, all the time.
Sint-Janshospitaal stills to a hush when she enters.
People freeze mid-gesture, mouths agape.
Aleys wants to yell into the strange silence, Return to your tasks.
Resume your conversations. I’m just a girl!
Stop gawking. From the lodgers’ side of the hospital, merchants crane to see her, cross themselves when they do, remember to doff their caps.
There are so many sick people.
Her mouth is dry with doubt.
They guide her to the first bed, a man with yellow skin and lemon eyes. She feels the tingle start in her hands, and when she prays, the Ave spreads like a balm. The man blinks and pink blooms in his cheeks. She doesn’t know what’s happening.
They lead her from one bed to another. Sometimes she feels something. Sometimes she doesn’t. Fever consumes a child, a woman miscarries, and Aleys’s hands are useless. She has no understanding, no idea who will rise and who will fall back on the pallet. It seems random.
“God is mystery,” says Lukas that evening, like she doesn’t know. Her nights are more real than her days.
It is the same the next week and the one after.
Friar Lukas is hovering, too attentive, overjoyed at the recoveries and suspicious of the losses, like Aleys could conquer death if she only tried harder.
He makes excuses to touch her hands, testing for the buzz, and she has taken to drawing them back into her sleeves when he approaches.
Lukas steers her toward patients who aren’t that sick.
He’s afraid I’ll fail, she thinks. He presents florid men with dyspepsia who sit up in their beds and undress Aleys with their eyes.
Indigestion is a waste of a miracle. She wonders if she has the power to smite them.
People cram into the hospital, two to a bed.
Patients have taken to bringing their own pallets, so there is hardly any space between cots and Aleys must inch her way to the heads of the sick without kicking the suffering on the ground.
Fingers clutch at her hem, grab at her ankles.
She wants to heal them. But there are so many, and she feels like an imposter, like she’s donned holiness like a costume.
Like she’s playing at being a saint. Because she can’t trust her own hands.
The gift is quicksilver, running through her fingers, pooling in her palms one moment, evaporating the next.
Aleys cures a shepherd of dropsy, a carter of a sprained ankle.
With each healing, she grows less and less substantial, as if she’s thinning at the edges, becoming transparent as wavy glass.
For when the feeling comes, there is nothing better, a rush of golden honey followed by a glorious shiver, particles of light shaking loose from her body.
She could dissolve in the glory. She touches foreheads and drives out demons.
Cords unfurl and infants gasp. Food repels her.
She wants only this medicine in her veins.
Aleys wants more and more and more. She prays for more.
Her need only grows, shooting through her thinning vessels, the light replacing blood and marrow until she is laced with canals of light that flow toward the sea.
She is a city of light, and afterward, when she goes dark, she is exhausted and craving.
For just as quickly, the gift lifts like a flock of sparrows, and Aleys is dropped from a great height, fallen boneless to the floor.
She tries to summon the light to her hands, blows on them to kindle sparks, but she clutches only mud.
And as the glow fades from her bones, doubt fills her marrow.
It slinks through her limbs and sidles into her heart and curdles her gut.
She crouches at a bedside and feels nothing.
Her tongue swells from salted prayer. Ida clutches her hand, knowing.
Ida, who has healed and failed to heal so many.
Aleys tries, she tries so hard, but nothing comes.
The eyes of the suffering beseech her and she knows herself a fraud. Has he abandoned her? Is she unworthy?
Or maybe she’s imagined the whole thing.
“Father,” she whispers to Lukas as a patient turns to the wall, coughing, “you best give him last rites.” She is heavy with silt. Nothing is coming. Still they pull her toward the next bed. Aleys would cry with frustration, but she’s too spent.
She believes. She doubts. If only God would clarify.
Why can’t he make himself plain? If she’s chosen, as Friar Lukas insists, why can’t he send an angel to explain?
But there’s no angel, no message. Everyone around her is so sure, so desperately certain, and she’s so bewildered.
So lonely. People think she has the power of judgment, that she is choosing to save only the righteous.
She thinks, I prayed for a gift, but I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be God.
Later, in the hall, Lukas tries to comfort her. “Child, it is not ours to question his choices. Do not despair. You’ve already saved two souls this afternoon.”
Has she? A palsy stilled, a breech delivered safely. She’d been a distant spectator, not a healer. Her hands had been dead. She’d have been more useful if she’d held a washcloth.
“I had nothing to do with those.”
“What are you saying? Of course you did.”
“No, I was numb.”
“Let me feel your hands.”
She shrinks within her robe. “No,” she says. She doesn’t want his touch.
He stiffens. “What do you want from me?”
“To teach me the difference between coincidence and miracle.”
But he can’t. He sees only God.
At night, Aleys washes in the basin and falls, near dead, onto her cot. Every morning, someone collects the water from her basin. Somehow, it ends up in the street, for sale, in little vials bound with red thread.
When she wakes, the magistra is at her side, keeping vigil.
“When you first came”—Sophia traces her finger gently across Aleys’s cheekbone—“you didn’t have these shadows.” She puts the back of her hand to Aleys’s brow, testing for fever. Aleys wants Sophia to keep her hand there, and reading her mind, Sophia does. “Child, he asks much of you.”
“Lukas? Or God?”
“Both.” A fast twitch in the corner of her mouth. “Neither knows much about limits.”
The weight of Sophia’s hand is like an anchor. “Magistra, I’m tired.”
“I know.” Sophia turns her palm over, smooths Aleys’s brow. “Do you want to stop?”
Aleys just wants to lie here, to rest. Yes. No. “I don’t know.”
Sophia nods. “You’re only human. Come, sit up and eat.
” She reaches for a mug of barley and milk, puts the cup in Aleys’s hands.
Aleys wraps her fingers around the cup, tilts it back, and tastes honey in the still-warm gruel.
Sophia is looking out the window, across the courtyard. She appears lost in thought.
“Magistra?”
“Mmm?”
“What if it’s all in my head? If it’s not real?” Sophia tips her chin, studying Aleys. “I don’t want to be false.”
Sophia takes the empty cup. “Whatever gift God has or has not granted, I know you’re in earnest.” She holds the mug in her lap.
“Sometimes I feel things, in my hands. Then I don’t. I can’t tell whether I’m imagining it.”
“You don’t know if they’re miracles.”
“No.”
Sophia considers this. Her gaze returns to the window.
“Maybe that’s the wrong question,” she says, nodding toward something across the courtyard.
Aleys leans forward. Marte has stepped outside the kitchen and is crouching to feed an orange cat.
She wipes her fingers on her apron and waits while the cat finishes the fish head.
Then she reaches out rough knuckles to rub behind his ear. The cat leans into her hand.
“You see,” says Sophia. “We’re all miracles to someone.”
They try to let her rest. The magistra orders Katrijn to give Aleys her spare room, the one Katrijn intended for Cecilia.
Katrijn follows Aleys with narrowed eyes that say she’s not buying any miracles.
Aleys wants to tell her, I didn’t will this upon myself.
Not this. Katrijn only shakes her head and retreats when Aleys opens her mouth.
Below the two small bedchambers is a bare sitting room. They bring a second chair so Aleys can receive visitors. She turns them away. Except one. On a rainy afternoon, Cecilia bangs on the door to announce that Aleys’s sister has arrived.
Griete stands in the open doorway. Behind her, a sheet of rain blurs the courtyard, the leaves of the trees pointing to the ground.
Griete lowers her hood. Her hair is in a simple plait that she must have braided herself.
She looks older. Aleys rises from the table.
She can feel the invisible maze between them, full of false starts and dead ends, no sure path to each other.
“Sister,” says Griete.
“You’re here.” To slap me, kiss me, break my heart? Aleys thinks of the clapping games they used to play. Of cat’s cradle, their hands bound together so tight that they cried for Mama to cut them free.
“I had to come.”
“Why? Is someone ill?”
“No, Aleys. It’s just—” She looks at her hands. “I’ve missed you.”
Something in Aleys breaks open and suddenly they are in each other’s arms. Aleys silently thanks God. Her sister, her real sister. The heavens outside have washed the world clean. The smell of wet wool, of home, fills her nostrils. She mumbles into the cloth, “I thought you hated me.”
Griete pulls back. “I did, at first. You abandoned us.”
“You know I—” She stops herself. It doesn’t matter if she had to.
“We lost the Lakenhalle because of you. It was bad.”
“But you’ve forgiven me?”
Griete shrugs. Maybe.
“Why?”