Allie
Not very many miracles are required. Not for the Vatican, not for a group of highly strung teenage girls cooped up together for months and in fear of their lives. You don’t need so many miracles. Two is plenty. Three’s an abundance.
There is a girl, Luanne. She’s very pale, with red hair and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks. She’s only fourteen. She arrived three months before and she’s a particular friend of Gordy’s. They share a bed in the dorm room. For warmth. ‘It gets awful cold at nights,’ says Gordy, and Luanne smiles, and the other girls laugh and nudge each other in the ribs.
She’s not well, hasn’t been since before her power came in. And no doctor can help her. There is a thing that happens to her when she gets excited, or scared, or laughs too much; her eyes roll back in her head and she falls to the ground wherever she is and starts to shake like she’ll crack her own back. ‘You have to just hold her,’ Gordy says. ‘Just put your arms around her shoulders and hold her until she wakes. She’ll wake by herself, you just have to wait.’ She often sleeps for an hour or more. Gordy has sat with her, arm around Luanne’s shoulders, in the refectory at midnight or in the gardens at 6 a.m., waiting for her.
Allie has a feeling about Luanne. A tingling sense of something.
She says: Is it this one?
The voice says: I’m thinking so.
One night, there’s a lightning storm. It starts way out at sea. The girls watch it with the nuns, standing on the deck at the back of the convent. The clouds are blue-purple, the light is hazy, the lightning strikes one, two, three times on the face of the ocean.
It gives you an itchy feeling in your skein to watch a lightning storm. All the girls are feeling it. Savannah can’t help herself. After a few minutes, she lets go an arc into the wood of the deck.
‘Stop that,’ says Sister Veronica. ‘Stop that at once.’
‘Veronica,’ says Sister Maria Ignacia, ‘she didn’t do any harm.’
Savannah giggles, lets off another little jolt. It’s not that she couldn’t stop it if she really tried. It’s just that there’s something exciting about the storm, something that makes you want to join in.
‘No meals for you tomorrow, Savannah,’ says Sister Veronica. ‘If you cannot control yourself in the slightest, our charity does not extend to you.’
Sister Veronica has already had one girl thrown out who would not stop fighting on the convent grounds. The other nuns have ceded this to her; she can pick and choose those in whom she detects the Devil working.
But ‘no meals tomorrow’ is a harsh sentence. Saturday is meatloaf night.
Luanne tugs on Sister Veronica’s sleeve. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘She didn’t mean it.’
‘Don’t touch me, girl.’
Sister Veronica pulls her arm away, gives Luanne a little shove back.
But the storm has already done something to Luanne. Her head jerks back and to the side in the way they all know. Her mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. She falls backwards, smack on to the deck. Gordy runs forward, and Sister Veronica blocks the way with her cane.
‘Leave her,’ says Sister Veronica.
‘But, Sister …’
‘We have done quite enough pandering to this girl. She should not have welcomed the thing into her body and, as she has done, she will have to deal with the consequences.’
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.’