She asked the question she’d had on her mind since she received his phone message, “What made you call?” Mary Towers was one of my brother’s oldest friends. Mom talked with her and spent time crying with her on the day after the accident. From Mom, Mary heard the name, Arnold Mikesh, the person who found Josh, and my mother asked if she knew him. Nothing else about him. Now two days later the man himself had left a message on her answering machine.
“I’ve been having some bad headaches, neck pain, trouble sleeping, some difficulty breathing.”
Blinking in the stronger illumination of the reception foyer, Arnie was looking into her face with a lost expression. It wasn’t coincidence. His experience at the accident scene had left him knotted up, and he was reaching out for help. She again felt the surprising but welcome surge of energy for work she wanted to do.
“Sounds like you made a good call then. I’d recommend ninety minutes of therapy.”
For his part, Mikesh was having a hard time taking it all in. This woman with the red painting that made no sense was a study in extremes. Her skin was pale and freckled, but her eyes had the muddy blue cast of a newborn baby’s, and her hair, pushed loosely to the top of her head, was black enough to suck the light from the air around her. She was directing him through an entry, talking about “Swedish technique,” using phrases he didn’t understand, asking him to strip to his underwear. He hoped the name his neighbor Barbara gave him was not somebody’s idea of a prank.
A few minutes later Mikesh was sitting with a sheet wrapped around his waist on a low, padded table, feeling even more vulnerable. Taking off his boots and jeans meant the avenue of a hasty escape was gone. Though alone in the room, humiliation settled over him like an iron hat as he stumped unevenly from the chair where he left his clothes and boots to the table at the center of the room. He was relieved that the woman didn’t witness that sorry spectacle. He stared at the black hairs on his bright white legs, conscious of them in a way he had not felt since high school, and hoped the long shower he took before leaving home had cleaned away the worst patches of dead winter skin and whatever other visible horrors might be clinging to him. A kettle steamed quietly on a warming plate. He had a quick image of the woman with the mud-colored eyes splashing drips of scalding water on his exposed back. She entered in a technician’s coat, pushing up her sleeves. He noticed a trace of citrus in the air, and the sound of a radiator, hammering as it warmed; he hoped the radiator noise would cover the clanking in his chest and the banging fist that pounded harder inside the back of his head.
She had him lie face down. When she touched his back to rearrange the sheet, he twitched. As she began, his eyes were facing down and closed; still, he could see, in his mind, those energetic pale fingers. But there was no scalding water, no comment on his misshapen calves, his papery skin, his blue veins. No question about his uneven legs, the product of a quirk in his genetics that manifested itself at puberty, placing a kink in his adult body. She was telling him to relax, and how to do it, then asking him about pressure, tension, pain, and the way he imagined them: sharp, dull, throbbing, angry. As she spoke, she was leaning into her hands, pushing her entire weight into him with more force than he guessed possible. Kneading skin and muscle, her hands moved in arcs and circles, starting at the edges, but always inward: closer and closer toward his heart.
Through her fingertips Mary read the terrain beneath Arnold Mikesh’s skin, a frozen pile-up of muscle, tendon, and bone without capacity to properly shift or flow—a challenge for an hour-and-a-half of work. With so much seized up within him, she marveled that this man had smiled when he first spoke with her, red faced, with hat in hand, at her door. She needed this workout as much as Mikesh: reconnecting with her hands through an art that demanded she practice as regularly as a pianist or a dancer.
The anatomy that comprised the puzzle before her had gotten rearranged. Slowly but forcefully her hands learned the tangle of disorganized pieces, and located the places for which they were made, the ropes of muscle in their slots and the beadwork of bone in his spine—massaging the knots, testing the tension in cables of muscle, coaxing each piece into relaxed alignment. Mikesh was a man who used his back. Though he was neither trim nor defined, the calluses she saw on his hands, the firmness of his arms and shoulders, told her he was used to heavy lifting. She wondered where he came from, and what propelled him in the middle of a night when no one else was on the road to the lonely spot where Josh died.
Mary Towers was close enough to Josh that my mother chose her for consolation and several hours of shelter after we arrived from Des Moines to identify Josh’s body. Mary’s thoughts as she kneaded Mikesh’s muscle and skin were pulled to one of the last two times she had seen Josh. He had been in Decorah, holding a July gathering at the fairgrounds, healing people, laying hands on them, but it had gone on too long. When he tried to leave, there was a disturbance and he was hauled into jail. When she heard about it through a friend she felt troubled. She checked with the police and found Josh had gone to the home of a local minister. When she pulled up in front of the unfamiliar house in her compact Honda she was conscious of the heat and humidity: the kind of weather that made tomatoes swell and split. She heard voices in the back yard, and could smell barbeque. Slinging her workbag over her shoulder she walked around the garage to a deck where Josh was sitting in an aluminum chair. Peña, the minister and his wife, and three or four others, none familiar to Mary, were gathered around him. She could read Josh’s face, see that his mind was elsewhere. He needed time to himself. Josh may have been a healer, but who took time to heal him? Used to Peña’s aggression, she knew to ignore him, lest he order her away directly. She walked to Josh, crouched at his side and took his hand, explaining she’d heard about the day’s troubles. She knelt at his feet, and removed his sandals. Josh tensed, but said little. Pouring a sandalwood-scented oil over her hands, she ran them over the knobs of his ankles, cupped his heels, and then massaged the balls of his soles, squeezing, working back and then forward again to his toes. Conversation broke off. A woman joked, uncomfortably, that this might be something that would do the woman good too. More silence. Peña, agitated, his eyes narrowed, said that Mary had not been invited, that she was not “with” them. Mary had heard people describe the minister’s worshippers as “holy rollers.” She had heard the man’s voice on radio advertisements for Sunday worship. Now he was speaking about her.
“Joshua, you should be aware that this woman has a reputation around town.”
Mary felt her skin prickle and the blood rise to her head. The man did not deign to speak to her directly or to use her name. But she did not defend herself, did not speak angry words. She focused on moving the oil into Josh’s toes.
“Remember what being seen with her will make upright people think about you.”
Only then did Josh answer him: “She understood what I needed. You fed me. You welcomed me. But you didn’t do this.”
Josh having defended her, Mary looked to the minister and read the disgust on his face as he considered the image Josh suggested. She could not suppress a smile. She was burning at the words said about her reputation. She let her hair fall forward, dragging it back and forth across the upper arches of Josh’s feet wickedly, as if to confirm that she was the opposite of upright, to suggest that the minister also do this for Josh. Her unspoken taunt shoved the preacher out of his constrained comfort zone. The man rose in outrage, but Josh said, “let her be.”
She left soon after. Though she might have called Josh back into himself, she destroyed his welcome in that household. She had seen Josh only once since then, later in the summer. Then nothing. Josh carefully avoided her.
Mary refocused on her work with Mikesh. She sensed the healing inch forward. Spasmed muscles relaxed. The air Mikesh drew into his lungs pushed up more slowly and firmly against her fists. She methodically worked his back, his fingers, his face, his legs, his chest, the muscle of the shoulders that had pressed into the ground to get near to Josh before he died. This man exchanged last words with Josh. The man beneath her eased and quieted in his breathing. She had helped put him back