The Healer. Greg Hollingshead
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to do next. Not just the next thing, but what needs to be done. It’s like there’s been a disaster to the land. The question is, What’s growing here now?”
“Lower the gun.”
She did not lower the gun.
He took a breath. Exhaled. At that moment he too must have recognized the extraordinariness of her talking to him, for he seemed to resolve to go along. He rocked back on his heels. “So what is? Growing here now?”
“I’m telling you I don’t know. I have to find out for myself.”
“Nothing new about that. ‘Caro’ine do it by se’f.’ That’s your problem.”
“Then I’ll find that out too. Why aren’t I allowed to know what I can know? Why can’t a person know a thing unless everybody else is right there to say, ‘Okay, fine, we’re all ready, you can go ahead and know that now.’ What if other people haven’t had the same kinds of things happen to them? Good or bad, I’m not talking about only bad—”
“People keep each other on track. That’s how they move ahead. This is the problem since you quit school.”
“I quit school because I wasn’t learning anything in school.”
“You’re learning now? What? How special you are? The powers available to the true believer?”
“What do I believe?” she cried. “Tell me what I believe! Tell me right now!”
He ignored this. “And you quit healing because you couldn’t—what? Deserve it? Or heal?”
“It’s the energy heals,” she said. “The energy’s got nothing to do with deserving or not deserving.”
“Of course it does. Whatever you happen to think about it. You just don’t want to see your own part in this. In anything. Nothing new about that either. Look, Caroline. Anybody can be a saint if they never leave their own room. At least when you were laying hands on people you were getting out of the house. You’re too old for this. You’re too smart. It’s time to come back to reality. It’s time to remember who you are.”
She lowered the gun. “Who I am is fog,” she said. “Who I am is poison gas.”
He looked at her, and then he performed one of his unexpected acts. Brought his hands up to press the heels against his eyes. For a full minute he stood like that, still facing her, heels pressing, and then he took them away and his eyes were red and hollow and wet. He blinked. “Just don’t leave me, Precious Angel,” he said in a soft voice, almost a lisp. “I’m begging you. Don’t do it.”
She watched him as he said this. And then she said, “This isn’t begging, it’s warning.”
She turned and walked back to the truck.
When Ross Troyer spoke in the kitchen his voice caused the heat duct that fed his daughter’s room overhead to resonate. Caroline would know her parents were arguing by the quality of the sound from the duct. Her father did not have to raise his voice, all he had to do was speak long enough each time for the duct to resonate. She would know he was not talking on the phone because the phone was directly below her bed, in the front sitting room, next to her mother’s hand. She would know her parents were arguing because it was only when they argued that her father addressed more than one or two words to her mother at one time. If Caroline were to crouch by the register, as she used to do when she was a child, she could hear what he was saying, and if she were to lie flat on the floor and press her ear to the register, as she used to do until the burden of knowing came to outweigh the secret strength of it, she could hear as well what her mother was saying, all the way from the front sitting room, which was separated from the kitchen by the dining area, less a room than a space between the kitchen and the front room. There her mother, the dog at her feet, would be watching TV or reading a magazine or doing a crossword puzzle, a tumbler of vermouth on the coffee table in front of her, while in the kitchen her father, who did not drink, would be cleaning his rifle or going through real estate listings, and Caroline would know that he was listening to her mother as he had always listened to her, now listening and now not listening, in a way that to judge from his intermittent responses had done nothing over three decades to diminish the irritating effect of her words. Sooner or later the duct would start to resonate.
It was resonating tonight, but Caroline did not get off her bed, where she had been writing (the small black notebook now slack in her hand, the ballpoint pen capped and fallen to the bedspread alongside her knee), but listened only to the pure sign of her parents’ arguing as she had listened to it not as a child crouched at the register who understood the words or most of them but earlier, as an infant on her back, her limbs waving in air to its inflections, her muscles drinking its rhythms, that she might be informed by, and so survive, and in surviving one day react against and in reacting echo and so recreate the world of her parents’ emotions. Now, twenty years later, loath, she was sitting upright on her bed, where she could hear echoing inside her the legacy of that infant thirst: the tone and rhythm and tenor of the old wrangle, of the voices that moved without ceasing. And all of it—not only her parents’ passion but the turmoil it caused at the depths of her own muscles, her own being—was no less physical and familiar than the traffic noise and the rest of the low constant din from the street or than the full moon visible through the window like a halogen floodlamp behind speeding clouds. And she continued to listen to the rasp of the curtains in the night breezes and to the sound of her own breathing deeper and slower. And the other, the interior and past, was contained within the ground of these immediate sights and sounds, soothed by them, slowed and quieted though not silenced, held by them in an embrace of perception that calmed and so enabled the discovery of grace even in that.
In the front room Ardis Troyer had been drinking Bright’s President vermouth with ice while snapping through the pages of Chatelaine. She had been doing this for some time, every once in a while leaning forward to take a sip of her drink, but then she closed the magazine on her lap and sat like that, with her hands folded upon it. Reached for her drink. Drained it. Set down the tumbler with alcoholic care, though she was not drunk. Cleared her throat. Keeper, the black Lab, who lay with his chin on his foreleg, opened his eyes to look at her but was not roused to lift his head. She began to speak, at first almost wistfully but with increasing force and in a tone of amazed grievance concerning matters financial as they pertained to old plans of household acquisition and renovation too long in abeyance. Expectations cancelled, prolongations of waiting endured, not without bitterness.
These were old beads, slick with handling, and it would be remarkable if her husband listened at all.
When she spoke next, the connection at first obscure, the subject was her fellow waitress Gail Poot’s sister-in-law Bertie, who recently with the help of her husband Wilf had set herself up in the electrolysis business.
“Hair removal,” Ross Troyer said from the kitchen.
“That’s right. Unsightly body hair. Also spider veins. Spider veins is same equipment, different course.”
She reached for her glass. “Gail says people still think it hurts. Bertie told her it takes a little practice to get the depth right, that’s all. You get the depth right and they don’t feel a thing. A mild discomfort. Bertie’s better at it than most of them. She can already do thirty an hour.”
“Not customers she can’t.”
“Customers? Hairs.”
“Christ.”
“Bertie says the people act just like patients. They respect you and they’re grateful. They never dreamed this would be possible in their lifetime. What more could you ask? I think it would be a wonderful opportunity. In hard times people look to their appearance.”
He was studying a real estate listing.
“When it’s all they’ve got,” Ardis said.
“Who’s Bertie?”
“Gail Poot’s sister-in-law.”
“Gail