The Amazing Otis Vale

Chapter 7

When the last needle was placed, Otis straightened up and took a breath.

What he did next, nobody in that corridor could see, he infused his Spiritual energy into it.

He let it move downward through his palms and into his fingertips, and from there into the needles, each one a channel, a path cut through the flesh and into the places that needed what he was sending.

The needles began to vibrate.

It started small, a fine tremor barely visible to the eye, the kind of movement you might attribute to an air current or your own vision playing tricks. Then it grew, and the woman lying on the gurney began to vibrate with it, a fine shaking that moved from the points of each needle outward through her body like a current moving through water.

Lena made a sound and grabbed the edge of the gurney.

The energy moved deeper.

Into the liver, where the disease had been advancing for months, and it met it there and the disease did not have a framework for what arrived, something older than medicine, and it began to break apart. Into the spine, along the compressed pathways, the energy moving through like heat through ice, the structures shifting toward what they were supposed to be before damage had rearranged them. Through every system that had been failing, one by one, each receiving what it had been missing.

The woman's chest moved.

It was barely a movement. A shallow rise, thin and tentative, the chest of someone taking a first breath rather than another breath.

Lena's knuckles went white on the edge of the gurney.

Another breath came. Fuller. More certain.

The color began returning to the woman's face, so slowly that they had to watch carefully to track it, the chalk-white warming toward something living.

Her fingers moved.

One hand, the left one, the fingers curling slightly against the white sheet, the automatic and unconscious movement of a body remembering that it has hands and that hands can move.

“Oh my God,” someone in the crowd said.

The corridor had gone completely silent except for that one voice.

The woman's eyes opened, then wider. Moving. Adjusting. Landing on the fluorescent light above her, then moving, then finding Lena's face.

Lena made a sound that had nothing of language in it and put both hands over her mouth.

“Mom,” she said, from behind her hands. It came out broken and whole at the same time.

The woman on the gurney looked at her daughter with eyes that were still finding their focus, still assembling the world back into something recognizable. Then she said, rough and soft at the same time, barely enough air behind it to carry it the length of the gurney, “Why are you crying.”

The corridor broke.

Not loudly. It broke the way things break when something has been held very tight and then released, in a collective exhale, in the dropping of shoulders, in hands going over mouths and people turning to the people beside them with expressions that could not settle on a single emotion because there were too many arriving at once.

“She's talking,” a nurse said, her voice stripped of all professional detachment.

“She was flatlined,” the other nurse said. 

“I watched the monitor. She was flatlined.”

“I don't—” Director Hale started, and stopped.

Otis began removing the needles, working in order, each one drawn out clean and returned to the case. His hands were steady. His face was composed. He worked quickly because Lena's mother needed the needles out now that the energy had completed its work, and because his own mother was upstairs and the thought of that had not left him for a single second since he walked through the hospital doors.

“She can sit up,” he said to Lena, who was still gripping the edge of the gurney with both hands and crying silently. 

“When she's ready.”

“She needs to rest,” a nurse said automatically.

“She needs to be—”

“She can sit up,” Otis said again, calmly. 

“The spinal compression has been cleared. The liver disease is gone. Not managed. Cleared. Her body is not the same as it was twenty minutes ago.” He looked at the nurse directly. “She can move. Let her move.”

Lena's mother was already trying to push herself up.

Lena reached for her shoulders. “Mom, no, you don't have to—”

“I want to sit up,” her mother said, and her voice was stronger now, the roughness clearing with each breath, color continuing to return to her face with a speed that made the nearest nurse take a half-step back.

She sat up.

She sat up on the edge of the gurney unaided, both feet swinging slightly over the side, and she looked down at her own hands and moved them, spreading the fingers and closing them and spreading them again, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone receiving back something they had given up on.

“I can feel my legs,” she said quietly. 

“I haven't been able to feel my legs properly in—” She stopped. She pressed both hands flat against her lower back, where the spinal damage had lived for so long, feeling the absence of what had been there. 

“The pain is gone,” she said, and her voice cracked on the last word.

She looked up.

Not at her daughter. Past her daughter, at Otis, who was standing at the side of the gurney with the closed needle case in his hand.

He met her eyes.

She looked at him for a moment with the complete and searching attention of a woman who has just been given back her life and wants to understand by whose hands.

“How,” she said.

Otis looked at her for a second. Then he set the needle case down on the edge of the gurney. 

“Are you sure she's not ghost?” someone said, near the front, looking at the woman sitting up on the gurney with her feet dangling and her daughter's arms around her. “Is that woman actually—”

“She was dead,” someone else said flatly. 

“I was standing right here. She was dead.”

“Then what just happened?”