The Power(25)

Luanne is fitting on the deck, slamming the back of her head into the wooden boards. There’s blood in the bubbles of saliva at her mouth.

The voice says: Go on, you know what to do.

Allie says, ‘Sister Veronica, may I try to stop her making a fuss?’

Sister Veronica blinks down at Eve, the quiet and hardworking girl Allie has pretended to be for all these months.

She shrugs. ‘If you think you can stop this nonsense, Eve, be my guest.’

Allie kneels down next to Luanne’s body. The other girls look at her like she’s a traitor. They all know it’s not Luanne’s fault – why is Eve pretending she can do anything?

Allie can feel the electricity inside Luanne’s body: in her spine and in her neck and inside her head. She can feel the signals going up and down, stuttering, trying to right themselves, confused and out of sync. She can see it, clear as with her own eyes: there’s a blockage here and here, and this part just at the base of the skull is mistiming what it’s doing. It’d only take a tiny adjustment, an amount of power you wouldn’t even feel, the kind of quantity that no one else can fractionate down to, only a tiny thread right here to set it right.

Allie cradles Luanne’s head in her palm, puts her little finger in the notch at the base of the skull, reaches out with a fine tendril of power and flicks at it.

Luanne opens her eyes. Her body stops convulsing all at once.

She blinks.

She says, ‘What happened?’

And they all know this is never how it goes, that Luanne should have slept for an hour or more, that she might be confused for a week.

Abigail says, ‘Eve healed you. She touched you, and you were healed.’

And this was the first sign, and at this time they came to say: this one is special to the Heavens.

They bring her other girls in need of healing. Sometimes she can lay her hands on them and feel out their pain. Sometimes it is just that something is hurting that need not hurt. A headache, a twitching muscle, a giddiness. Allie, the no-account girl from Jacksonville, has practised enough that Eve, the calm and quiet young woman, can lay her hands upon a person’s body and find just the right place to send out a needle of power and set something to rights, at least for a while. The cures are real, even if they are only temporary. She cannot teach the body to do its work better, but she can correct its mistakes for a time.

So they start to believe in her. That there is something within her. The girls believe it, anyway, if not the nuns.

Savannah says, ‘Is it God, Eve? Is God speaking to you? Is it God inside you?’

She says it quietly one evening in the dormitory after lights out. The other girls are all listening, pretending to be asleep in their own beds.

Eve says, ‘What is it you think?’

Savannah says, ‘I think you have the power to heal in you. Like we read in Scripture.’

There’s a muttering around the dormitory, but no one disagrees.

The next night, as they’re getting ready for bed, Eve says to around ten of the other girls, ‘Come with me down to the seashore tomorrow at dawn.’

They say, ‘What for?’

She says, ‘I heard a voice saying, “Go to the seashore at dawn.”’

The voice says: Well played, girl, you say what you need to say.

The sky is pale blue-grey as a pebble and feathered with cloud, the sound of the ocean is quiet as a mother shushing her baby, when the girls walk down to the shore in their nightgowns.

Allie speaks in Eve’s voice, which is soft and low. She says, ‘The voice has told me that we should wade out into the water.’

Gordy laughs and says, ‘What is this, Eve? You want to go swimming?’

Luanne shushes her with her finger to Gordy’s lips. Luanne has not had a seizure that lasted more than a few seconds since Eve placed her thumb to the nape of her neck.

Abigail says, ‘What shall we do then?’

Eve says, ‘Then God will show us what She wants of us.’

And this ‘She’ is a new teaching, and very shocking. But they understand it, each of them. They have been waiting to hear this good news.

The girls wade out into the water, their nightgowns and pyjamas sticking to their legs, wincing as their feet find sharp rocks, giggling a little, but with a holy feeling that they can see on one another’s faces. Something is going to happen out here. The dawn is breaking.

They stand in a circle. They are all up to their waists, hands trailing in the cold, clear brine.

Eve says, ‘Holy Mother, show us what you want of us. Baptize us with your love and teach us how to live.’

And each of the girls around the circle suddenly feels their knees buckle under them. As if a great hand were pressing on their backs, pushing them down, ducking their heads into the ocean to rise up, water fountaining from their hair, gasping and knowing that God has touched them and that this day they are born anew. They all fall to their knees in the water. They all feel the hand pressing them down. They all know for a moment that they will die here under the water, they cannot breathe and then when they are lifted up they are reborn.

They stand in the circle, wet-headed and amazed. Only Eve remained standing, dry in the water.

They felt the presence of God around them and among them, and She was glad. And the birds flew above them, calling out in glory for a new dawn.

There were around ten girls in the ocean that morning to witness the miracle. They had not been, before that moment, leaders in the group of five dozen young women dwelling with the nuns. They were not the charismatic ones, not the most popular, or the funniest, or the prettiest, or the cleverest girls. They were, if anything drew them together, the girls who had suffered the most, their stories being particularly terrible, their knowledge of what one might fear from others and oneself particularly acute. Nonetheless, after that morning, they were changed.