The Patron Saint of Butterflies(10)

“Hey,” he says, trying to act all casual. “Where have you been?”

I shrug and bend my knees so the robe covers my feet again. “Around.”

“Yeah,” Peter says slowly. “Well.” He clears his throat. “You know … I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry that I—”

“I’m sick of prayers!” Iris shouts suddenly, interrupting Peter midsentence. She is wriggling away from Christine. “I want to go back to school!” The room erupts with laughter as Iris bursts into tears. She has wild, curly blond hair and a stubby nose. “And no one’s listening to me! My legs hurt! They’ve been hurting all day!” Poor Iris. She says whatever’s on her mind, no matter what the consequence. It won’t get her into too much trouble here with Christine, but she’s always getting it from her parents, who, after Peter’s parents, are two of the most devoted Believers at Mount Blessing. They have no qualms about telling Emmanuel every single thing she does wrong. Like me, Iris is no stranger to the Regulation Room.

“Go upstairs and lie down, Iris,” Christine says. Her voice sounds tired. “I’ll be up in a minute to rub your legs.” I turn back to Peter and chuck him softly under the chin with my fist.

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “But thanks for saying it.” Peter’s face changes from one of relief to one of alarm as Christine walks up to the two of us.

“Honey,” she says, her dark eyebrows knitting themselves into a line above her blue eyes. “I was just going to have someone go look for you.” She touches my arm as Peter drifts back over to the window. “Are you all right?”

I nod and stare down at the floor. Christine moves her hand up to my shoulder. When I look up, her eyes are rimmed with tears. “You’re sure you’re okay?” she whispers.

I shove my hands into my pockets and shrug. “Yeah, of course. I’m fine.”

I guess Christine has been the closest thing to a mother I’ve ever known. Once, when I had the chicken pox, she stayed up with me for two days straight, taping a pair of mittens around my wrists so I wouldn’t scratch myself. Another time, when my fear of the dark started to get really bad, she brought a tiny yellow night-light in the shape of a heart and plugged it into the wall next to my crib. It was no larger than a belt buckle, and to this day I don’t know how or where she got it, but I still have it. When I was younger, I guess, the fact that she was nice to me sort of canceled out the fact that she also ratted me out to Emmanuel every now and then. But I’m older now. And I know better.

Christine is a huge Emmanuel fan. Huge. Her devotion to him stems back twenty years, when he healed her of some weird compulsive disorder and then convinced her that she couldn’t live without him. I’ve heard her story about joining Mount Blessing at least a thousand times. She used to tell it to all of us when we lived in the nursery, sort of a last-resort bedtime ritual that she would launch into whenever she got bored or sentimental.

Christine was more or less an old maid before Emmanuel came along. At least that’s how she tells it. At the age of thirty-six, she still lived with her mother in a little town in Iowa, worked at the local library, and had never been out on a date. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also had some kind of ailment that made her face and body do all sorts of weird things. Her mouth would squish itself up into horrible grimaces, or she would start to make clicking noises with her tongue. Other times, she would yank at her hair or stamp her feet. She had no control over these things; she said it was as if her body and her brain lived on two separate planes and operated independently of each other. There was no known cure for the disorder, and her life ahead looked bleak and hopeless. Until Emmanuel and his first followers moved into the house next door. Christine had heard little things about him from the women she worked with at the library; apparently he was already making a name for himself at the college, where he taught divinity classes, inviting students of his to “healing services” he held at the house. And after a few neighborly nods and a wave here and there from the front porch, Emmanuel invited Christine to come to one of the services, too.

“There was so much love in that room,” Christine always said, closing her eyes during this part of the story. “All just radiating from Emmanuel. There were seven or eight other people in there, seated in a semicircle at his feet, but I hardly even noticed them. I couldn’t take my eyes off Emmanuel. The light from the lamp next to him made his skin look as if it was glowing. He held out both of his hands as I came into the room and gave me the most beautiful smile. I started to get nervous. ‘Come closer,’ he said gently. I took a few steps, and as I got close enough Emmanuel reached out, put his hands on my head, and started to pray in Latin. As he prayed, his hands began to tighten, until the pressure on my skull was so intense I thought he might push me through the floor. There was no pain, but I remember the heat from his hands, how it traveled all the way down my body. Then suddenly he tilted my head back so I was looking directly into his eyes. They were the strangest color I had ever seen—a sort of milky gray with little specks of gold and green. ‘Be still,’ he said, gazing at me with those eyes. ‘Be still.’”

I don’t know if I believe anymore that Emmanuel has magical healing powers the way I used to think he did when I heard this part of the story. But after that night—and to this day—Christine got her body back again. The foot stamping, the clicking noises, the hair pulling, all of it, just disappeared after Emmanuel prayed over her that night. Lately I’ve been thinking that maybe she wanted so badly to be healed that her body did it for her. Or maybe her belief in Emmanuel was stronger than the wacky way her brain was wired, and once she had something to replace that part of it, it withered and died. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Whatever the case, it was enough for Christine to pack her bags when Emmanuel moved East, kiss her mother good-bye, and follow him. Twenty-five years later, she has never looked back.