before the accident, when Mother had first heard of muscle testing and
energy work, she’d dismissed both as wishful thinking. “People want a
miracle,” she’d told me. “They’ll swallow anything if it brings them hope, if
it lets them believe they’re getting better. But there’s no such thing as magic.
Nutrition, exercise and a careful study of herbal properties, that’s all there is.
But when they’re suffering, people can’t accept that.”
Now Mother said that healing was spiritual and limitless. Muscle testing,
she explained to me, was a kind of prayer, a divine supplication. An act of
faith in which God spoke through her fingers. In some moments I believed
her, this wise woman with an answer to every question; but I could never
quite forget the words of that other woman, that other mother, who was also
wise. There’s no such thing as magic.
One day Mother announced that she had reached a new skill level. “I no
longer need to say the question aloud,” she said. “I can just think it.”
That’s when I began to notice Mother moving around the house, her hand
resting lightly on various objects as she muttered to herself, her fingers
flexing in a steady rhythm. If she was making bread and wasn’t sure how
much flour she’d added. Click click click. If she was mixing oils and couldn’t
remember whether she’d added frankincense. Click click click. She’d sit
down to read her scriptures for thirty minutes, forget what time she’d started,
then muscle-test how long it had been. Click click click.
Mother began to muscle-test compulsively, unaware she was doing it,
whenever she grew tired of a conversation, whenever the ambiguities of her
memory, or even just those of normal life, left her unsatisfied. Her features
would slacken, her face become vacant, and her fingers would click like
crickets at dusk.
Dad was rapturous. “Them doctors can’t tell what’s wrong just by touching
you,” he said, glowing. “But Mother can!”
The memory of Tyler haunted me that winter. I remembered the day he left,
how strange it was to see his car bumping down the hill loaded with boxes. I
couldn’t imagine where he was now, but sometimes I wondered if perhaps
school was less evil than Dad thought, because Tyler was the least evil
person I knew, and he loved school—loved it more, it seemed, than he loved
us.
The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time
and boredom to grow. Sometimes, when I was stripping copper from a