Her last love, they say, was the greatest: a man named Joseph, a bachelor all his life, who found her on the street, bruised and broken and half-crazy from deliria. There’s some debate about what kind of man Joseph was—whether he was righteous or not, whether he ever succumbed to the disease—but in any case, he took good care of her. He nursed her to health and tried to bring her peace.
By this time, however, it was too late. She was tormented by her past, haunted by the loves lost and damaged and ruined, by the evils she had inflicted on others and that others had inflicted on her. She could hardly eat; she wept all day; she clung to Joseph and begged him never to leave her, but couldn’t find comfort in his goodness.
And then one morning, she woke and Joseph was gone—without a word or an explanation. This final abandonment broke her at last and she fell to the ground, begging God to put her out of her misery.
He heard her prayers, and in his infinite compassion he instead removed from her the curse of deliria, with which all humans had been burdened as punishment for the original sin of Eve and Adam. In a sense, Mary Magdalene was the very first cured.
“And so after years of tribulation and pain, she walked in righteousness and peace until the end of her days” (Book of Lamentations, Mary 13:1).
I always thought it was strange that my mother named me Magdalena. She didn’t even believe in the cure. That was her whole problem. And the Book of Lamentations is all about the dangers of deliria. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and in the end I guess I’ve figured out that despite everything, my mother knew that she was wrong: that the cure, and the procedure, were for the best. I think even then she knew what she was going to do—she knew what would happen. I guess my name was her final gift to me, in a way. It was a message.
I think she was trying to say, Forgive me. I think she was trying to say, Someday, even this pain will be taken away.
You see? No matter what everyone says, and despite everything, I know she wasn’t all bad.
The next two weeks are the busiest of my life. Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color—the greens were still pale and tentative, the mornings had a biting coolness—but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as bright as spots of blood. Every day after school there’s an assembly, or ceremony, or graduation party to go to. Hana gets invited to all of them; I get invited to most, which surprises me.
Harlowe Davis—who lives with Hana in the West End, and whose father does something for the government—invites me to come over for a “casual good-bye thing.” I didn’t even think she knew my name—whenever she’s talking to Hana her eyes have always skated past me, like I’m not worth focusing on. I go anyway. I’ve always been curious about her house, and it turns out to be as spectacular as I imagined. Her family has a car, too, and electric appliances everywhere that obviously get used every day, washers and dryers and huge chandeliers filled with dozens and dozens of lightbulbs. Harlowe has invited most of the graduating class—there are sixty-seven of us in total and probably fifty at the party—which makes me feel less special, but it’s still fun. We sit in the backyard while the housekeeper runs in and out of the house with plates and plates of food—coleslaw and potato salad and other barbecue stuff—and her father turns out spare ribs and hamburgers on the enormous smoking grill. I eat until I feel like I’m about to burst and have to roll backward onto the blanket I’m sharing with Hana. We stay there until almost curfew, when the stars are peeking through a curtain of dark blue and the mosquitoes rise up all at once and we all go shrieking and laughing back into the house, slapping them away. Afterward I think it’s one of the nicest days I’ve had in a long time.