“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.
“Ioweyoueverything,” I protested. “You owe me nothing. What happened wasn’t my doing. Not really. The healing was accomplishedthroughme 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 Ihad 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 ofLook Homeward, Angelwaited. 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,myblood 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 asatori, 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 ofA 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 driftedbecame 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.
Thirty-Three
Two days after Gertie’s recovery from septic shock, Loretta sat with me in the parlor of my suite and spoke of her long-ago losses and how she met Franklin. Whether I was just a friend of the family or her daughter by adoption, her story was part of mine, as mine was part of hers. It was added to the shelves of my inner library.
She had known much terror and more horror than she would ever reveal to Isadora, Gertrude, and Harry. She and I were bonded now by the secret of Gertie’s recovery, which encouraged her to share more with me. However, she had another reason for being forthcoming.
I will include here only the bare essence of what she told me, bleaching the terror and horror into pale facts.
Before Loretta was born, her father and mother—Charles and Eunice Bramley—immigrated to America from England. He was a skilled tailor. She was a talented baker. Opportunities in their homeland were so limited that they needed to build their future half a world away, in San Francisco. Loretta was born on March 14, 1897, three years before her folks purchased a home in the heights.
On April 18, 1906, the quake struck at 5:13 a.m., shortly after she dressed for school. It was 8.3 on the Richter scale. The house was badlydamaged, but she escaped without injury. Her parents had already left for work. When she stepped outside, the smoky streets were crowded with wailing, bleeding people. Hitched to wagons, injured dray horses were dying—or dead and stiff-legged—in their traces. Clusters of corpses had spewed forth into the street with the shattered substance of the hotels and apartment buildings.
Loretta needed more than an hour to make her way down through the broken city as isolate flames began to join in great tides of fire. She arrived at the bakery where her mother had become the manager—and saw the woman’s battered corpse being loaded onto the bed of a horse-drawn wagon filled with the dead.
Now, taking advantage of a lap blanket draped over the arm of her chair, Loretta pulled it around her to ward off the chill of memory. She said, “Hundreds, if not thousands, were dead. The city needed to spare itself from the worst diseases that would be spawned from legions of cadavers, so some were buried in communal graves. Often there was no way to identify the bodies and no one to make a record of them. I never knew where they interred my mom. The tailor shop where my dad worked was ashes. Perhaps nothing of him remained but bones. I never found out.”
I began to understand how she had become the woman she was. Hardship had not broken her; it tempered her as a sword is tempered by heating and quenching. She was lovely and gentle, but she was also steel.
She said, “I headed back home, though the house was damaged. I didn’t know where else to go. The city had grown dangerous. Looters. Drunks. Men who, in the face of Armageddon, no longer had moral reservations regarding rape. As the afternoon faded into evening, the noise grew noisier—shouting, laughter, drunken singing. Screams in the distance were those of women, children. Structures continued to fall—roaring, rattling, echoing across the hills.”
Being a child with no living relative of which she was aware, with no inheritance pending, Loretta became a ward of the state. South of San Francisco Bay, the community of San Jose suffered some damage, but a state-operated orphanage there agreed to accommodate her and other children in her circumstances. The court commended her to Mercy Village until her eighteenth birthday.
