Matchmaking for Beginners(5)

“Oh my goodness!” Marnie says, holding out her hands. “Look at this! I never get to see snow! It’s wonderful!”

“The first snow of the year,” I say. “Always a crowd-pleaser.”

“Noah told me you grew up here. Do you ever miss it?”

“No,” I say. “Not when I have Brooklyn.”

I tell her then about my crazy house and my crazy little community of people—a hodgepodge of kids and parents and old people, everybody coming in and out of each other’s apartments and telling their stories and giving each other advice and bossing everybody around. I tell her about Lola, my best friend next door who lost her husband twenty years ago, and about Jessica and her sweet, quirky boy, and how it is with all of them needing love so much, and yet how fearful they are whenever love comes anywhere close—and then, because Marnie needs to know this, I explain that I’ve got this whole matchmaking thing going on with them, simply because I can’t help but see who they need to belong with. I think I will tell her about Patrick, too, but then I stop because her eyes have widened and she says, “You do matchmaking?”

And bingo! Here we are, right where I needed us to land.

“Yes. I’ve got this little spidey-sense thing going when I see people who need to be together. You have it, too, don’t you?”

She stares at me. “How did you know? I’ve gone around my whole life thinking about this stuff. I’ll see two people, and I just know they have to be together, but I don’t know how I know. I just . . . know it.”

“Yes, it’s the same for me.”

I’m silent, willing her to talk.

“My best thing ever was when I found my sister a husband,” she says at last. “He was my roommate’s brother, and I met him when he came to pick up my roommate for Christmas break, and at that very moment, I knew he was going to be right for Natalie. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like my heart hurt until I could introduce them. And then, sure enough—when they met—fireworks. They fell for each other almost immediately. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.”

“Of course you did,” I say softly.

I look out at the gardens and the trees, so shadowy against the white, snowy sky, and I want to fall down in gratitude. Here I am; I’m at the end of my life, and the universe has sent her to me. At last.

“You have many gifts,” I say when I can speak again.

“You think that’s a gift? The way I see it is that I’m just this person who sits around and thinks, ‘Wow, my coworker Melinda might want to hang out with the guy who teaches soccer in the after-school program, because they kind of match each other.’ Meanwhile, my sister is inventing things that are going to save the world, and what’s taking up space in my brain most days is who in my vicinity looks like they could fall in love. Big deal.”

I feel my heart pounding so loudly I have to squeeze my fingers to ground myself. “Please,” I say. “The subversive truth about love is that it really is the big deal everyone makes it out to be, and it’s not some form of security or an insurance policy against loneliness. It’s everything, love is. It runs the whole universe!”

“Well. It’s not more important than the work of curing cancer,” she says.

“Yes. It is. It’s the life force. It’s all there is, in fact.”

She hugs herself, and I watch her as snowflakes land gently on her arms.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I see colors around people. And little lights. My family would be horrified if they knew. They’d see it as some kind of neurological condition, I think. But I see—little showers of sparks coming from nowhere.”

“I know. It’s just thought energy,” I tell her. And then I bite my lip and decide to plunge right in. “Do you ever use thoughts to make things happen? Just for fun?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, watch. Turn around and let’s look in the window there. See—um, let’s choose the woman in the red sweater.”

She laughs. “Which one? They all have red sweaters.”

“The one with the red hair. Let’s just beam some thoughts over to her. Send her some white light. Go ahead, and watch what happens.”

We’re both silent. I bathe the woman in a glow with white light, the way I do. And sure enough, after about thirty seconds, she puts down her drink and looks around the room, as though she’s heard her name being called. Marnie laughs in delight.

“See? We did that! We sent her a little hit of something good, and she got it,” I say.

“Wait a minute. That’s energy? Does it always work?”

“Not always. Sometimes you get resistance. I only do it for fun. The matchmaking stuff—that seems to come from somewhere else. It’s like I get shown which people should be together.”

She looks at me with interest. The red spots on her cheeks are glowing brighter. “So did you figure out a way to make a living by being a matchmaker, then? That’s maybe what I need to figure out.”

“Ah, honey. I make a living being me. What I’ve learned is that the same intuition that lets me know which people need to be together also leads me to exactly what I need. Ever since I made up my mind to live the way I wanted to live, I’ve been provided for.”