Healer Chapter 12

The months that passed were the happiest of my life. Nathan and I had to learn how to keep our relationship secret especially when we bumped into each other in public places. It was difficult to keep my mouth shut when we found ourselves in line together at the supermarket and the girl behind the check-out counter flirted with him. I couldn’t hide the eye-roll I gave when she doubled his discounts. She saw it, called me a “fat cow who couldn’t get a real man if I paid him”, and charged me twice on my ground beef without even pretending to do otherwise. I let it go, especially since we were sharing food costs and it actually ended up costing us less. Nathan had heard the insult, but we’d decided that we didn’t want to draw attention to us, so he also kept his mouth shut. He was waiting at my car when I came outside and gave me a hug.

“You’ll notice that she paid me when she doubled my discounts, and yet, who is it who has me?” which made me feel a lot better. “And you are NOT a fat cow.”

“Moo.” I couldn’t help myself. He put his bags into my car and I took them back to my house. He’d complained about the lack of junk-food in my kitchen, so I told him he could buy his own and keep it on the empty top shelf in my pantry. He was practically living with me, though he kept his apartment for appearances sake and because he still had a few more months on his lease. When his buddies wanted to watch sports at his place, that’s where they went, a perk that I really liked, actually. Otherwise, the only time he went to the apartment was to pick up his mail. Whether anyone noticed that his truck and patrol car were rarely in the parking lot of his apartment building, we’ll never know. I only went there once, to drop him off so that he could move his patrol car to my house. My house is on the outskirts of town, practically in the woods and way off the beaten track with plenty of bushes to obscure it from the road, so random passers-by can’t see who is parked there. My clients probably noticed that the truck was parked there, but did not comment. I suspect that they knew whose truck that was and kept it quiet for the same reasons that they don’t publicize their own visits to my home. The nurses and Natalie continued to hound me for details, but I just smiled and dodged the questions. It was our business and no one else’s. Nathan was now regretting that public kiss at the hospital—everyone, including Fred and Dalia, expected a repeat whenever we were seen together in a somewhat private area (like the EMS lounge), though thankfully this wasn’t the case when the spot was more public.

Jill passed away peacefully at home, after doing a month long tour of Europe, surrounded by her friends and family. Robert was in remission. His mom asked me to help him through the rest of his treatments and I was happy to take him on as a client. When I take on a client who cannot afford to pay me I only ask that they “pay it forward” in some way. I see their whole family at the hospital, volunteering to help other families get through the ordeals that they knew so well. Stacy brings Charlotte to visit me as often as she can. Charlotte had no ill effects from her trip to the hospital and is growing beautifully.

Nathan and I continued to try and figure out a way to get over his intimacy problem. I tried to get a meeting with various members of the Brownies, but they refused to even take my calls. I tried to make my trips to the hospital more apparent, to let people see that what I do is good. I even tried to go to church one Sunday, but I was just glared at and I noticed that not only did the service start late, but it seemed totally geared towards passages denouncing witchcraft and heathenism. I suspected that the late start was because the Reverend wanted to re-write his entire sermon.

For his part, Nathan read my bible, looking for anything that I might have missed. He did find one strange thing. Many of my ancestors noted weird results, where, in their attempts to heal one thing the results were not the one-to-one that we expect. One time, a simple cough was transferred as a runny nose. Another time, a headache became a sore back. It was like the symptom got lost in transit. We talked about it and decided to see if I could force this to happen.

Over the months we’d learned that Nathan got about an hour of relief from his problem after I woke him up. We could then touch each other intimately and he wouldn’t get so turned on physically and thus could enjoy it. I joked with him that I hoped his normal recovery time wasn’t so long. But our first attempts at trying out my possible new ability were slow:

“I’m not going to hurt you or let you hurt yourself.”

“Well, how can I try and alter symptoms when I have nothing to swap? It’s frustrating that I have to wait an hour to try again.” We’d decided that the easiest way to see if we were making progress would be to turn his desire into a cramp in my foot. So far I’d only been able to make my foot feel numb and that had taken three days of trying. I couldn’t continue to give him my innocence because that was what was taking an hour to wear off. If only I had some pain or symptom to give to him instead.

“I know,” he said, hugging me. “But we’re not going to turn sadistic and trade punches or cuts.”

That was the dilemma we found ourselves in for most of the month of October. It wasn’t until I woke up feeling sick that we made progress.

“You want to give me what?!” Nathan was looking green and glanced unhappily at his bowl of cereal.

“My cramps. I also have some fatigue or bloating if you want to go that way.” I tried to sound casual, though this was probably the first time I had a frank discussion of my period since my mom first explained it to me.

“I must really love you because I’m still sitting here thinking about this.” He sighed and pushed away his bowl. He crossed his arms across his chest. “Okay, my first question is whether there will be any damage to me since I don’t have your equipment—I really don’t need to further harm my reproductive system.”

“You have the same muscles, which is where the cramps are.” I gestured at my lower abdomen.

“What does it feel like?”

“Uhh…I don’t really know how to explain it. Maybe similar to a guy getting hit in the crotch? Though I wouldn’t know that feeling. It’s painful, though not as painful as labor, but exercise helps a lot, as does heat…and chocolate.”

“And how long will it last?”

“Umm…well, you know about my lack of control over my own strength,” I’d been trying to get the innocence to a minimum dose, but that hadn’t worked. “So it might last an hour, too. We won’t know until we try.”

“You know, this is the ultimate in emasculation.” He groaned. “Okay, I’m game, but this goes the way of the hospital mess story—never to be referred to again, got it?”

“Scout’s honor,” I told him, holding up the two fingers. I grabbed some Hershey’s minitures out of the pantry and a bottle of Advil and followed him into the den. We settled on the couch and started making-out. No matter how our relationship is stressed, we loved the fact that we could sit on a couch on a Sunday morning and make-out without feeling unproductive.

It didn’t take long for him to get aroused, but I paused before I transferred my pain, thinking through the three exchanges I had to make: take his desire, give him my cramps, and somehow wrestle his desire into a cramp in my foot—all at the same time. I started the transfer slowly, sending the cramps while grabbing onto his desire. It was easier this time. I’d never really thought about what the “innocence” was when I gave it to him. It wasn’t anything I could describe in particular, just a general feeling. I knew then that emotions were not my forte—pain, however, is. Pain is tangible, pain is real, pain has a shape, a form, and can be held…or at least in my imagination, which is half of the act of doing magic. Previous attempts had been like juggling eels—I’d used all my consciousness trying to figure out exactly what innocence is and sending it to him that when the desire entered my body, I’d already missed my chance to grab it and shape it to my own will. This time, I’d already sent the pain, in a controlled dose, to him when I grabbed the desire, and the desire never had a chance to escape into my body. It was no trouble to stuff it down into the muscles of my foot.

“Oh! OUCH!” My foot was contorted in a strange angle, clearly cramped up.

“Are you okay?” Nathan was looking green again and he rubbed his abdomen roughly, working through his own cramp.

“I’m fine. You?” I rubbed my foot, trying to get the muscles to relax.

“Well, it’s definitely not the same feeling as getting hit in the balls. It’s more like a tooth ache, I guess, though on a larger scale.”

“Yeah, a dull ache would explain it pretty well.” I flexed my foot. It still hurt, but it was moving again.

Nathan reached for some chocolate. “Please forgive me and all male-kind for not being more sympathetic to the misery women go through every month. This goes on for five days plus the other symptoms?” He curled up on his side, still rubbing his guts.

“Huh? Oh, I’m not sure how other women’s are, but mine just super sucks the first day because I get everything at once. By the second day, I’m usually done with the symptoms except for the bleeding. I do tend to get extra emotional the day before, though.” My foot was starting to feel more like normal again. “Move your hands.” I rubbed my hands together to warm them up and pressed them to Nathans abdomen, his eyes rolled up in his head for a second.

“That feels good.” He rested his hands on top of mine and closed his eyes.

“Well, remember this trick next month for me and I’ll be insanely happy.”

“Done.”

I had to re-warm my hands three times before the cramps subsided from his body. It’d only taken about twenty minutes, a third of the time it’d taken us before.

“Ugh,” Nathan groaned, finally able to stretch out on the couch. “I’ve never been so happy to be a man before.” He looked at me and absently rubbed his stomach. “So I guess it worked?”

“Yup. I figured out the problem was that I didn’t have something tangible to hold on to when I gave you so called ‘innocence’.”

“Ah. Does that mean that I’m stuck getting cramps or do you think that you can figure out how to hold on to innocence? Because I’m a bit partial to never having a period again…and I can’t believe that statement just came out of my mouth.”

“Honey, when you’ve spent forty-eight to ninty-six hours feeling fat, sore, exhausted, irritated, weepy, and very, very messy, you can tell me that again.” I smiled at him and rubbed my own abdomen; my cramps were returning.

“I hope to God that I never piss you off so bad that you make me experience all of that.”

“Trust me when I say that you couldn’t.” I smiled at him. “So, do we try that again or do we call it a day?”

“Ah hell, let’s do it again. You need the practice and I need to atone for being a man.”

We were recuperating after our fourth or fifth trial when there was a frantic knock on the door.

“I’ll get it,” I told him, limping to the front door. Stacy was there and she looked frightened. Charlotte, now almost two years old, was in her arms. She looked fine except that her arm was bent at a slightly odd angle and she was crying, though not loudly. “What happened?” I asked her, showing her into the light drawing room.

“I don’t know,” she told me, her voice shaking. “We were at the park and she was running after some birds. She bent down to touch something and then a bird flew up into the sky from where she was. She started crying and I ran over to her, thinking that the bird had just scared her, but then I saw her arm and it…I think it’s broken.” She broke down then, tears streaming down her face.

I silently took Charlotte from Stacy’s arms, settling her onto my lap. While I was inspecting her arm to determine that it was indeed broken I felt my own discomfort leave my body. “Woah!” I yelled. I held Charlotte away from myself, though that wasn’t stopping the child. I quickly grabbed my various cramps and set the child back on her mother’s lap. Stacy looked at me strangely, but her tears had stopped. She looked very confused.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Umm…awkward,” I told her. I stood up and began to pace around the room. “Okay, first off, her arm is broken, so you’re going to need to take her to the hospital. Secondly, we have a situation.”

“What kind of situation?” She looked alarmed.

“The kind that keeps you from having friends in this town,” I said quietly. “Biologically speaking, she’s my daughter, not yours.”

“What?!? How is that possible? I conceived her, I carried her…” she held Charlotte closer to her and the child whimpered. I reached over and pulled some of the pain from the broken arm into myself.

“It’s possible because when you came to me for fertility treatment I exchanged five of my healthy eggs for five of your non-healthy eggs. I told you this when I did the treatment.” I suddenly felt tired. It’s very difficult to raise a child with this gift and it would be even worse with her living with a Brownie father.

“Why is her arm broken?”

“It’s broken because that’s the one thing I haven’t publicized. When someone in my family gives aid to another, we take on the physical illness that we claim to help. When I help someone’s headache, I get the headache. When I saved Charlotte and the rest of the babies, I took their symptoms into myself. Charlotte has the gift and she healed that bird’s broken arm, taking it upon herself.”

“But why? How does she know that she can help others?”

“It’s instinctual,” I told her. “We have no control over it: we just want to help others. My family has an obscenely high mortality rate for girls under age five who are born with the gift. Children that young don’t understand that they can get hurt and die while helping others and they will unknowingly help at the expense of their own health.”

“What can I do?”

“You have to keep her away from sickness. She can’t touch people who are ill because she will take their illness upon herself. And we need to teach her to control her instincts starting right now." Charlotte whined a little when her arm didn't do what she wanted it to. "But first and foremost, she needs to have her arm set by a doctor. I'm going to call Natalie and explain to her the situation. She'll keep everyone non-essential away from her. Do you want me to come with you?"

"No. I need to call Ralph and he's going to be pissed that I waited this long to tell him. I still don't know what explanation I'm going to give him. How often do toddlers break their arms at the park?" Tears leaked from her eyes as she stood with her daughter in her arms.

"Often enough. Kids are always falling down. Go. I'll call Natalie." They left while I went to my address book.

Nathan came into the room as Natalie answered. I turned towards him.

"Nat? It's Scarlet. Stacy is bringing Charlotte in with a broken arm. I need you to pay special attention that she stays away from other people."

"What? Why?" She sounded scared and I knew instintively that she was fearing the worst.

"It's not that. Charlotte is like me, but she's way too young to keep her powers to herself and if she's not careful she's going to hurt herself." I saw Nathan's eyes go wide, but he didn't reach for me.

"Okay." Natalie said slowly. "You're going to need to explain that one to me the next time you come to the hospital, but I'll do what I can to keep Charlotte safe. I just want to know. Did you know about this before?"

"Definitely not. I just did what I could to help her conceive. I did not know that this was even possible."

There was a noise in the background. "Ugh. I'm getting paged. I'll talk to you soon. Bye."

I hung up the phone and looked at Nathan.

"She's like you? What does that even mean?" he asked.

"Well, she took the broken arm from a bird in the park an hour ago. So I think that means that she's my heir, for lack of a better term."

"I thought that it passed from mother to daughter."

"It does. So I guess that technically Charlotte is my daughter."

"How?"

"I traded Stacy five of my eggs for 5 of her unhealthy ones."

Nathan let out a breath. "Wow." He sat in one of the wingback chairs and reached for me. I sat on his lap. "So you're a mom."

"No. I'm an egg donor. I hope to God that Ralph never doubts the paternity of Charlotte because I have a feeling that she'll come back with my DNA. If I've ever wondered where there's any scientific evidence of what I've done, I guess this is it. Crap." I wasn't ready to deal with a child who has my abilities; and certainly not a child whose father would possibly rather see her dead than possess them. He would have her exorsized immediately. I leaned my head against Nathan's drawing on his strength, though not literally.

"It'll be okay," he told me. And I almost agreed with him.