Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
The doctors didn’t want to admit their diagnosis could have been so wrong.
They couldn’t believe a child as apparently ill as Gertrude could so suddenly return to good health.
Yet Gertie stood now before them, out of her hospital gown and back in her pajamas, her vital signs normal, her usual ebullient self.
Her parents and I and Lynette worked hard to quell whatever suspicion might evolve in the wake of the girl’s recovery.
We pretended bafflement even as we celebrated what had occurred.
We pressed for explanations after the doctors insisted they had none.
We worried aloud that septic shock, once cured like this, might return.
The physicians explained that septic shock simply could not be cured as quickly as Gertie seemed to have been cured, but once cured it didn’t just come back like a temporarily interrupted sneezing fit.
We mispronounced the names of illnesses and generally portrayed ourselves as medical ignoramuses, which is what they wanted to believe we were.
When their amazement at Gertie’s recovery occupied them less than frustration with our silly questions, Loretta distracted them further from consideration of our role in this event by saying she believed in miracles and that this was for sure a miracle.
She asked the doctors if they believed in miracles.
They said no, but the nurses said yes, which annoyed the doctors.
By the time that Franklin paid the bill, the physicians were eager to put the whole episode behind them.
They were grateful no one spoke of legal action due to a misdiagnosis.
Although baffled by events, Gertie was excited to be taken home by her friend Lynette.
She’d never been in a DeSoto before. And to satisfy the urge to snack while driving, Lynette kept a bag of Frito corn chips in the car, a recently marketed treat that Chef Lattuada had not yet added to the pantry at the Bram.
I rode in the Cadillac with Loretta and Franklin so that we could decide how to manage the revelation of my gift. We quickly agreed there would be no revelation.
“If the children know what I can do, we won’t be able to go on as we were. We won’t ever be the same with one another, equal and growing up together. I don’t want to lose that. I treasure that.”
Franklin’s astonishment affected his driving.
Several times, when he realized he was half on the shoulder of the highway, he pulled onto the pavement with a warning to himself—“Whoa, whoa, whoa” or “Watch it, watch out.” He glanced at the rearview mirror, in which my face was framed.
“You’ve known since that day with Rafael and the poisoned meat? ”
“I suspected. I was pretty sure. I couldn’t be certain.”
“It was too much, wasn’t it?” Loretta intuited. “Too much to handle. It would’ve been if it were me.”
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t . . . I can’t walk on water. I’m only what I am—just a human oddity. No one should think I’m something more. If I thought I were, I would be condemning my own soul.”
Loretta’s chief worry was that of a mother who knew well the ways of children. “If our rascals think of you as a miracle worker, they might be careless. If some reckless stunt might be fun, why not risk a broken arm when it can be mended with a touch?”
I agreed. “Just because maybe I can sometimes help heal the sick, that doesn’t mean I can restore vision to a damaged eye or reattach a severed foot.
I’m sure I can’t. I’m sure the dead stay dead.
Even if I could call someone back from that far shore, would it be them who returned? Or something else. I wouldn’t dare.”
We were silent for a mile or more.
Then Loretta said, “The estate staff can’t be told. Lynette will have to be warned about that.”
“We can trust her,” I said. “I’m sure we can.
She’ll realize how my life would be destroyed if tens of thousands of people sought me out to change the destiny that disease shaped for them.
How could I say no to them? But what would the unintended consequences be if I laid my hands on thousands?
What if I spared a murderer, so then he went on murdering? ”
This silence was heavier than the previous one, much as the air thickens in advance of a thunderstorm.
“We owe you everything,” Franklin said, his voice breaking.
“I owe you everything,” I protested. “You owe me nothing. What happened wasn’t my doing. Not really. The healing was accomplished through me by a power I don’t understand.”
No one was more grateful for—and humbled by—what happened than I was. I loved them and their children more than I could put into words. A world without Gertie would not be a world to which I could resign myself.
Loretta thought she and I should sit together later in the day to talk of cabbages and kings. I agreed, for no other day in my life had raised more serious issues needing discussion even before the sun reached its zenith. She would come to my suite at four o’clock.
I’d not had breakfast. Yet if lunch had been imminent rather than two hours away, I would not have sat down to a plate of Chef Lattuada’s most delicious creations.
I was overcome by weariness unlike any I had previously experienced.
My mind remained sharp. Yet the fatigue was not exclusively of muscle, tendon, and bone.
I felt as if I had been hollowed out or that some vital substance had in part been drained from me, so I would need to let that reservoir refill before I could be myself again.
In the living room of my suite, I settled in an armchair.
On the lamp table beside me, a copy of Look Homeward, Angel waited.
For the moment, however, the story I was living had more interest for me than I could find in any book.
I remembered how Gertie’s illness passed out of her and through me, causing my vision to fail before I fainted.
I was not quite the medical ignoramus that I’d pretended to be when I’d been trying to scam the hospital personnel.
I knew the collapse I experienced was a vasovagal attack.
When blood pressure drops too low, the brain can’t get enough oxygen to maintain all the functions it regulates, so it resorts to a brownout to keep systems operating at half power until blood pressure rises.
With Rafael, I thought I had opened a door and let his illness escape him.
But I now realized, with Gertie, I took the sickness from her and into myself.
It didn’t pass through me in an instant; for a short time, maybe a minute, I suffered from septic shock, my blood poisoned with staphylococcal toxins as potent as those that nearly killed Gertie.
By some trick I wasn’t consciously aware of, I expelled the bacteria and toxins, recovering from the shortest case of septic shock in history.
With this realization came a revelation I knew to be true: Each time that I spared someone from death, my life was shortened by weeks or months, or years.
This was by the design of some authority I couldn’t name, according to a law I could never challenge in any court, for a purpose as mysterious as the reason why I was born as I am.
I cherished life and the people who made mine meaningful, but I wasn’t afraid of death.
I’d long known that every gift worth having comes with a price.
The cost is not a burden; the cost, not in money but in sacrifice, tells us what we ought to value most. Gertie was alive. Alive.
At that moment, I had what a Zen master would call a satori, a sudden enlightenment.
Others might say the understanding was a grace bestowed.
The gift had always been mine since the day I was born; however, it remained unopened because the person I had been for seventeen years had not yet been a girl whose heart had fully formed.
In spite of all the wonderful books that had shaped me, I had never developed the degree of empathy that would compel me to recognize and use my healing power.
I had been unloved and unloving while in the company of Captain.
Love was the key that unlocked my gift. My love for this family—my family—and their love for me had brought my misshapen heart to its full and intended form, first for the benefit of Rafael when he’d been poisoned and now for Gertie.
In a sense, they had healed me with their love, making it possible for me to heal them.
Although exhausted, I was also exhilarated.
That one such as I, a miscreation twisted into existence by indifferent Nature—so long a monster, a laughable grotesquerie, an object of pity—should find myself in possession of a noble purpose and the power to fulfill it seemed to confirm that even fallen sparrows did not live in vain.
A memory came to me of Chef Lattuada opening his door to the Clyde Tombaugh Club, holding a copy of A Tale of Two Cities.
I must have been half-asleep, because it was not an accurate recollection, but was part memory, part dream.
Instead of asking about the purpose of our visit, he said, “You know very well why you came here. John fifteen, verse thirteen. Now would you like a piece of pie?”
I slept in my chair.
In a sleeper’s fantasy glazed with a faux frost of moonlight, I was on my balcony.
I climbed onto the balustrade. Purple martins slept in the trees.
White rabbits dreamed in their burrows. Defying gravity, I stepped off the balustrade and walked through the night above the gardens, heading east, away from most of the clustered suburbs.
No vehicles traveled the roads below me.
The land above which I drifted became ever more remote, with here and there a farm and crops in growing season.
I knew I was no longer in California. Ultimately I descended toward a family farm that had seen more prosperous times.
A sway-backed barn, a leaning silo, a stable and two-story house so weathered and paintless that they were silvered by moonlight.
I ghosted across a meadow toward the house but halted when a pale horse and pale rider raced toward me through the tall grass.
I wasn’t seen because I was there only in spirit.
The horse, wide-eyed and screaming in terror, was ridden by a long-limbed figure that seemed now like a lanky boy, now like a mantis.
The rider bit the screaming horse on the neck.