Miracle Woman (15 page)

‘I agree with you, honey, but I guess she's just a journalist looking for a story or an angle.'

Two more newspapers phoned requesting interviews or a comment. While at first reluctant, Martha agreed with Mike that she would take
their numbers and decide later about phoning them back.

Bobbie Meyer from Channel WBZ4 phoned again and asked her to do a spot on her weekend morning radio show,
Faith and Hope
.

‘I promise it won't be too daunting,' encouraged the highly respected journalist. ‘Just you and I having a little talk on a Sunday morning. You will have ample time to explain about your healing, clarify any misconceptions and I guarantee there will be total confidentiality with regard to those you have treated.'

After much discussion with Mike and the kids, she decided to brave the airways and try and clear up the rumours. Bobbie Meyers welcomed her to one of the East Coast's favourite radio stations, and Martha was shaking like a leaf the minute she stepped into the studio. Her mouth dried up with nerves as Bobbie's researcher kindly offered to fetch her a glass of water.

She had absolutely no memory of the interview afterwards, only that Evie had said she was a natural. Reading between the lines she guessed she had said far too much. The switchboard had been deluged with people phoning wanting to talk to her and looking for help with various complaints and illnesses. Martha tried to talk rationally and calmly to them, suggesting if possible they visit their local MD or nurse practitioner.

‘I think we'll have to get you back for a
phonein,' smiled Bobbie, ‘as there's been such a huge response.'

Evie and Kim had both called over to congratulate her, and she was grateful for the support of friends who just accepted her for who she was and weren't being swept along in this torrent of change around her.

‘How is Mike taking it?' Kim asked.

‘So-so. Mike is sceptical.'

‘Your husband is a born sceptic, Martha, he questions everything and believes nothing,' jeered Evie. ‘I suppose it's his science training.'

‘I'm worried about the kids, though. Patrick isn't saying much, so God knows what he's thinking. Alice is too young to really understand and Mary Rose is mad as hell that I'm not able to give her my undivided attention. She's like Mike – she hates all that strangers at the door stuff.'

‘Poor you,' smiled Kim.

‘Hopefully this will all die down and then I'll get back to normal.'

‘Normal,' sighed Evie ruefully. ‘I don't think you realize the impact your healing is having. The chances of things returning to normal are very slim.'

‘Don't say that,' Martha begged. ‘Just don't say that!'

Her sister-in-law Annie arrived just before they left, a whole pile of books under her arm.

‘I think you should read some of these,' she suggested, dumping them on the coffee table.

Surveying them, Martha asked, ‘Annie, what did you do? Rob a library?'

‘Oh no. Some are my own or I borrowed them. I think they'll help explain to you something of what you are doing, Martha. Reading about auras, and the chakras, and balancing out the mind and the body, is all so interesting.'

Annie was one of the most generous-spirited people she knew. Thanking her, Martha wondered when she was ever going to get the time to read even a quarter of the books.

Two days later she took her usual drive up to the Highlands Animal Shelter. Donna pulled in just ahead of her and Martha could hear the dogs yelping madly at the sound of their voices as they opened the entrance door. Passing by the noticeboard to see what jobs she'd been put down to do, Martha couldn't find her name anywhere.

‘Got a Persian in yesterday evening that is seriously matted, take two pairs of hands to sort her out, and try to groom her,' mentioned Donna.

‘Hey, my name's not up there.' Martha was puzzled.

‘Must be! Look, there's me and you must be somewhere down . . .'

Both women looked up and down the list but there was absolutely no sign of Martha's name up
on the monthly roster of phone, walk, cleaning out, etc. duties.

‘Janet must have made a cock-up doing it,' joked Donna.

‘I'd better go sort it out,' said Martha. ‘I'll just pop into the office and I'll come back and give you a hand then, OK?'

‘Sure.'

Janet Rimaldi put down what she was doing the minute Martha entered the small cluttered office with its bags of cereal mixer and bulging file cabinets.

‘Janet, I think there's been some mistake . . .'

‘Sit down please, Martha,' gestured the fifty-year-old with her greying perm and plain face devoid of any trace of makeup.

‘My name's not on the list!'

‘I know, I'm sorry.'

‘What?'

‘I couldn't put you down on the monthly roster, Martha. In the last few weeks there has been a constant stream of calls from people wanting to talk to you, looking for the healer woman. The staff and I are wasting a huge amount of time just answering them.'

‘Listen, Janet, I don't have to do phones, I won't go on them at all, if that's what you want.'

‘Martha, I don't think you understand. These last few days, so many are phoning that our main helpline is almost constantly jammed. That means we can't receive calls about animals that
might need urgent rescuing or answer queries from anxious owners. The phone is our lifeline. You know that.'

‘I'm sorry if I've caused any of this, but maybe I could just walk the dogs and . . .'

‘Martha, you volunteering here is just not going to work any more. I'm sorry but I have no option but to take you off the volunteer roster for the moment. Honestly, I'm really sorry. When this hullabaloo dies down you are more than welcome to return, but for the moment I have to put the welfare of the animals first.'

Stunned, Martha went back outside. Donna had taken the Persian out of the wired cage and stood her on the table and was very gently trying to pull a wide-toothed comb through the mass of tangled pale grey fur.

‘Hey, come on!'

‘I've got to go home,' said Martha, lifting her jacket. ‘I'm off the roster and the volunteer schedule, so I can't stay.'

‘God, I'm sorry. But why?'

Upset, Martha explained the reason.

‘Listen, we'll keep in touch,' said Donna.

‘Promise?'

‘Yeah, promise.'

‘And you'll keep an eye on Dollar for me.'

‘For sure.'

Driving back up along the highway she realized there was absolutely no point in being bitter or angry. Now her life was moving in a different
direction, she must open her mind and heart to healing. Once she got home she would sit down and study some of those books. Annie had lent her and then everything else she could on the subject of healing, for it was high time she understood more about this gift she was supposed to have.

MID-MORNING, MARTHA
collected her mother from the Belmont Retirement Home. Frances Kelly wrapped a warm red scarf around her shoulders and neck, as already there was a slight chill in the air temperature. The trees on the entrance avenue were ablaze with fall colours, a grey squirrel zigzagging crazily in his hunt for provisions as the sprightly seventy-two-year-old locked the door of her apartment and walked out to the car.

Once a month Martha drove her mother to the small cemetery out beyond Westwood where her father was buried; the two of them would pay respects to the late Joseph Kelly and go for lunch afterwards. Martha valued that special mother–daughter relationship and knew that her mother still played an important role in her life. She couldn't understand why her mother always insisted on eating at one of the small restaurants nearby instead of letting Martha take her further afield to try out somewhere new and different.

‘I'm a creature of habit, Martha, you know that, and I like to go and say hello to my poor Joe whenever I get the chance.'

Martha smiled. Somehow or other over the past twenty years her mother had managed to almost canonize her late father, bestowing a load of saintly qualities on him that he sure had never possessed during his lifetime. Her father had been big and loud and jocose to those who had frequented ‘Kelly's Saloon', as he jokingly called the bar he and his partner had owned in south Boston. The anger and temper and frustration he'd felt at working nights and running a barely profitable bar had been saved for behind the closed doors of 151 Hillside where they'd grown up. His investments in real estate, which included the then due to be demolished bar, and a small family construction business had at one stage almost bankrupted them but prudent management had managed to keep the Kelly ship afloat. Martha still remembered the long hours her father endured, out on construction sites in all weathers during the day and working three or four nights a week fixing up the derelict bar, and then running it.

As a child she pictured him asleep in the big double featherbed with the woollen blankets pulled up around him, as she and her brothers got dressed and got ready for school. He was up and shouting at their mother, looking for his work clothes by the time they left. Cantankerous
and bossy, that's how she mostly remembered him.

‘Joe was a good man, rare enough these days, let me tell you,' said Frances.

Martha gripped the steering wheel, wondering what the definition of such qualities truly was.

‘Your Mike is a good one too.'

Martha swallowed hard. Mike was nothing like her father, nothing like him. In fact that had been part of his appeal. She'd had enough of her father's erratic mood swings and blasting gusts of love for his wife and family followed closely by contempt and harshness. It was part and parcel, she supposed, of being the daughter of an alcoholic and never knowing what to expect.

Her mother with every year seemed to forget those bad old days and replace them with the good ones. Perhaps that's what the gift of age was: only the times that made one happy or brought joy were remembered, with the others pushed to the back of consciousness and disappearing from the drain of the mind like water down a plughole.

The New England countryside basked in low Autumn sunshine, the trees along the roadway wrapped in shades of red, orange and gold, the landscape a beckoning blaze of colour as they drove through it.

‘Mom, isn't it awesome!' gasped Martha.

‘I suppose all the leafers must be heading up our
way. I saw a busload of them yesterday with their cameras.'

‘They're just trying to capture it, Mom, and it's so beautiful who can blame them.' Martha turned the heat up in the car as her mother always complained of the cold.

Frances commented with interest on the houses and stores they passed.

‘Why'd they go and paint their door that colour? . . . She's got herself a good set of plants up on that porch. Protect them from the frost, that's what that garden guy on the TV always says . . . I don't know why anyone would hang such ugly drapes, there's no sense to it, Martha.'

It never ceased to amaze Martha the interest her mother took in strangers' lives, the curiosity it stirred up in her. Passing all these places gave her mother satisfaction; sitting in an armchair all day back at the Belmont complex watching soap operas on TV was certainly not something Frances Kelly was ready for yet.

‘I see that house on the corner got a new birdhouse, that wasn't there last month.'

Martha caught a glimpse of the white and blue painted bird feeder that stood on the top of a slim pole in the corner of the front yard.

‘Yes, Mom, I guess that's new.'

The cemetery at Westwood was about a half-mile out of the town and was as quiet and tranquil a place as anyone could be laid to rest. Her grandparents were buried there too, Mary
and Joseph O'Malley, who'd emigrated from Galway in the 1930s. Her mother had brought flowers and now she bent down and placed them next to the stone where her husband's name was carved.

Martha stared at the stone, concentrating on the letters of her father's name.

‘We'll say a few prayers,' her mother encouraged.

Martha, joining in, the words automatically tripping off her tongue, thought how she had grown up with prayer, a typical Catholic childhood dominated by Sunday mass, confession and communion. Prayers when her mother served the meal, prayers at bedtime, the rosary rattled around the fire on a Saturday evening, novenas for exams, for good health, and for those less fortunate than themselves. A while later she moved away to let Frances have the opportunity to speak to her father on her own.

‘I'll wait back in the car, Mom, you take your time.'

The grey-haired waitress nodded in recognition as she showed them to a booth at the back of the restaurant. Both of them perused the menu, even though it never changed from month to month, or season to season.

‘I'll have a burger and fries,' said Frances. ‘Chicken salad and a baked potato,' Martha added.

As always, her mother talked about her father,
Martha sipping on a Diet Coke and just listening.

‘Do you remember the summers, Martha?'

‘Hot and sticky . . .'

‘No! No, not those ones, I mean the summers back home in Cork.'

She remembered those all right. The few trips back to Ireland, her parents scrimping and scraping and putting money by for almost two or three years in order to pay for the fares and the expense of returning to the country they loved. Her father would visit Mossy Ryan's the tailor and buy a new coat and jacket and trousers, the boys would be dressed in their finest, and she and her mother would be treated to a trip to Filenes to array themselves in the latest style, as the Yanks, as her cousins called them, returned to visit all the relations back in Skibbereen.

‘Do you remember it?' urged Frances. ‘The excitement and the palaver of it – sure your father was in his element over there.'