The Hands of God

My mother likes to tell the story of the magical woman with the hands of God who saved the life of a baby on Christmas Eve. She will tell this tale to anyone, anytime, but she especially loves reliving it on Christmas Eve.

Gathered at her house, the holiday energy funnels through the eyes of my children and their cousins, still young enough that the magic of Santa is breathtakingly real, every strange noise a reason to pause and listen, wide-eyed, in case it’s reindeer on the roof. They run rampant through the house, high on sugar and hope, still too young to sit and listen for long, but my mother is adamant. The story will become part of their Christmas lore, just like it was part of my sister's and mine.

The story always opens with the weather, the bitter and blustery December of 1979, where the wind took your breath away and no one wanted to go outside. It wasn’t a holiday month of magical, snow-covered landscapes and twinkling lights. Instead, it was harsh frostiness and sickness siphoning off the air.

“There was a lady, and her name was Nat. And she owned a bookstore downtown…a magical bookstore!” My mother sits primly in her leather armchair, hands wrapped around a mug of tea. She emphasizes the word magical loudly enough to break the din of screams and giggles. The children drift over, the smaller ones dropping into their older siblings’ laps. My sister is scrolling her phone, but she catches my eye and smiles. We’ve heard the story countless times, but we still settle in.

Nat’s bookstore, my mother goes on to say, was a staple downtown. Called Healing Hands, it was a tiny, cluttered shop of everything and anything mystical you could imagine. In a time before it was considered chic, Nat sold everything from books about the seven chakras to decks of tarot cards to sage and holy wood. There were decorative items bearing moons themes and thick guides on manifesting your wildest dreams. There were shiny rocks with inspirational words on them, hope, love, peace.

“Inspirational words stamped on the front, Made in China stamped on the back,” my sister volunteered, knowing the story front to back.

“Shhh,” my mother said. “I’m telling it.” But it was true, she admitted. Nat perpetuated the idea that she was mystical—perhaps a healer, perhaps a shaman, perhaps a…witch. She widened her eyes and gazed at each of her grandchildren, drawing their tiny attention spans back.

“A witch?” asked my youngest son, now rapt with interest, not remembering the story from last year. “What did she look like?”

According to my mother, Nat was non-descript. A woman in her forties, with brown hair in a short, sensible style. She was of medium build and wore decidedly un-witchlike clothing—jeans and sweaters like the rest of the moms in town. She was married to a normal, nine-to-five type husband, and she had three kids of her own. People spoke about her behind her back: that she was a witch who practiced sorcery and black magic was one rumor. The other was that she was a fake, a fraud—just in it for the money with her made-in-China merchandise. It seemed she couldn’t win when it came to the gossip, condemned both for her magical gift or her lack thereof.

“Anyhow,” my mother continued. “That winter was awful, just awful. The wind howled. The air felt hard—it hurt to breathe outside. There was no snow, only a frozen, barren landscape and gray skies, every day. It never rose above ten degrees, and that was before you factored in the wind chill!”

“No snow?” asked my littlest niece, her forlorn voice shaky with concern. Just four, her only solid memories of Christmas involved this particular year, during which we’d had an abundance of white fluff. Right now, outside the window, light flakes were falling against the darkening sky, still illuminated by the streetlights.

My mother shook her head gravely. “No snow,” she said sadly. “It was a terrible year.”

“There was a young couple…” my father interjected, returning from the outside where he had been doing dad things--salting the driveway and dragging in Christmas gifts hidden in the garage while the grandchildren were distracted.

“I’m telling it!” my mother snapped good-naturedly. We liked to tease her and pretend that we were bored with hearing the story of the magical bookstore and the baby, but the truth was, we loved it. And no one else told it quite like my mother.

There was indeed a young couple who’d been high school sweethearts, had married and had just had their first children: two twin baby girls. Their lives, thus far, were tracking perfectly. They owned a small home, the man had a good job, and the woman (a teacher) had stopped working to stay home with her babies for a while.

The twin girls had been born in October, before the disastrous winter had materialized. According to my mother, the risky pregnancy and birth were as textbook perfect as one could hope for. This woman, on October 1^st of 1979, had pushed not one, but two healthy baby girls out like it was no big thing.

“She was a warrior,” my mother said, nodding knowingly. “She didn’t know it then, but she was.”

The young couple was discharged from the hospital and brought their baby girls home. They were over the moon. The girls were perfect, their family was perfect, their life was perfect. But by Thanksgiving, when the cursed winter was bubbling, everything began to unravel.

“The woman was feeling proud of herself, nursing and caring for two babies alone each day while her husband worked. She had recovered splendidly from pregnancy, snapping back to her pre-baby body in no time.” (Here, my sister and I rolled our eyes, both of us still hanging on to remnants of growing a birthing a total of four children between us.)

By mid-November, one of the twins had stopped growing. The woman had noticed this twin, the second baby born, had always been a little bit less voracious than the first. She nursed with less vigor, cried pitifully, and needed to be held. The older twin (we’ll call them Twin A and Twin B) was scrappy and solid: she would nurse ferociously, cry loudly, sleep deeply. Twin B was sort of pathetic.

“The woman was worried, but the doctor told her there was no cause for concern. That it was typical, even with identical twins as hers were, for one to be smaller than the other. The woman,” my mother added with a furrow in her brow, “Should have listened to her intuition.”

As November bled into December, Twin B stopped gaining weight. The doctor suggested the woman give her formula, which outraged her since she was a hippie at heart and wanted her babies to only have the breast. At the word breast, all the kids began to snicker, even the little ones who didn’t know why they were laughing. My father worked his aging body down onto the floor, and they clamored to him. My sister’s girls and my boys. My mother paused her story to look at my father with shining eyes. She loved nothing more than having her entire family in one room, all attention focused on her story.

This part was boring for the kids, so my mother sped through it. My father, my sister, and our husbands had all heard it before—how as December wore on, Twin B went downhill. Fast. So fast, she was circling the drain as Christmas approached, hospitalized and floundering.

“She couldn’t hack it,” my sister said with sarcastic sadness.

“She was a wimp,” I agreed.

My mother squinted at us. She didn’t like it when we made jokes, because this was the most tragic part of the story. She often left out the details when retelling it, and after we became mothers, my sister and I understood that part—how motherhood made you imagine every dying child as your own, shaking you to the core with fear. The woman was in a living nightmare: a dying baby, no answers, perplexed doctors. And then, at night, she would go home to take care of her other baby, who was now on formula as well, because she couldn’t be in two places at once.

“If she was home with Twin A, she felt horrifically guilty about leaving Twin B. And if she was at the hospital with Twin B, she felt terrible about not being with Twin A. Plus, she was terrified.”

“Terrified,” my father added, softly.

The baby was diagnosed with Failure to Thrive. The doctors had no explanation because all the usual reasons didn’t apply. The baby was not neglected, either emotionally or physically. She had been the same size as her sister at birth—both a solid, robust six pounds even. They concluded that perhaps the woman’s breastmilk was insufficient, but that made no sense either because Twin A had been growing in leaps and bounds all along. This theory tore apart the woman, who began to feel as if it were her fault. At home with Twin A, her husband was constantly afraid his wife would return one day with the worst news imaginable—that their daughter had died.

“What about the witch?” asked my older son, bored with this part of the story.

This was where Nat and her magical bookstore came in. As each day went by, Twin B grew weaker and weaker. The doctors began to prepare the couple for the very likely scenario that Twin B would perish. They suggested she be taken home to die with her family around her. Wracked with grief and fear, the young couple agreed. They arrived at the hospital together, with Twin A in tow, when the nurse preparing Twin B for discharge took them aside.

“She told them,” my mother said, leaning in with expectation, “That there was a woman in town who was a healer. A magician. A witch!” Now, the kids were back to listening and frankly, so were my sister and I.

“The nurse said she didn’t know what the young couple believed in, but the rumor was that the woman—Nat—had healing powers. That she had the hands of God, even.”

The nurse herself wasn’t sure if the couple would believe her, but she had watched the young woman die along with Twin B each day, so she figured it was worth a mention. The nurse knew in her bones it was unlikely the baby would survive the night. The woman seemed willing to do anything; the man less so but it was clear that whatever his wife wanted, he would support.

“They had a great love, you see,” my mother added. “Even in the worst of times.”

The nurse told them just to go to the bookstore, and that she would let Nat know they were coming.

“But it's Christmas Eve?” the woman worried, staring at the languid baby in her arms.

The nurse shook her head. “What better day for a miracle then?”

Because truly, only a miracle was going to save Twin B.

And so, the young couple got into their car with their two babies, one babbling in a car seat in the back and the other fading, wrapped in swaths of warm blankets and her mother’s arms. They drove through the desolate town on Christmas Eve. Darkness fell and the wind was wicked and biting. All the stores were all closed. Everyone was snuggled at home with their families, and the woman could not stop crying.

“She was hysterical when they blew into the store, desperate and afraid. The man, he wasn’t sure, but he figured at this point they had very little to lose. He was already processing the death of his daughter, already envisioning their life with just one, wondering how on earth his wife would go on, whether Twin A would sense the absence of her sister from earth.”

“He had little faith,” my father added.

Nat was waiting in the store. Surrounded by her merchandise and the heavy scent of sage and jasmine, she welcomed them as if she had been waiting for them her whole life. The woman was desperate, but the innate politeness she had been raised with took over, and she profusely apologized to Nat for wrecking her Christmas Eve.

Nat was kind, maternal. She shushed the woman and indicated that the man and Twin A should sit down on a green velvet couch squashed into the corner of the store. She took Twin B delicately from the woman, who began to sob and dropped onto the couch beside her husband, thoroughly depleted.

“And that’s when the magic happened,” my mother whispered.

The woman was never able to accurately determine what transpired in the minutes that followed, and as the years went on, she admitted that her memory of those moments was a blur. The man would recollect that Nat opened the baby up, peeled back the layers of blankets and laid her out on her lap. The woman remembered that the baby was still wearing white terrycloth pajamas and a pink hat from the hospital. The man could recall the tenderness with which Nat bent over Twin B, her hands delicately caressing the baby’s sallow cheeks. The woman would remember that Twin A was awake but silent: a blessing, or perhaps she knew.

“I’m sure she knew,” my sister or I would say. “Twins know.”

But neither the man nor the woman would ever be able to explain what happened next. A silence fell over the bookstore, only the hushed warble of Nat’s voice, speaking words that may have been unintelligible, or may have just been lost over the years. There was a calm that transfixed the young couple, and the woman’s tears dried, and the man felt as if his heart was going to explode. Despite the chill and the drafty windows of the bookstore, despite the trauma they had experienced over the past weeks…both the man and the woman only remembered this.

“Peace,” my mother said softly. “Peace came over them. Everything felt fragile and yet tranquil. Warmth rained down through the night, like a circle of love. Love. Love took over.”

“What do you mean?” my oldest son, ever inquisitive and analytical, asked.

My mother shrugged, smiling at him. “They said she had the hands of God. Whatever anyone wanted to call her, the woman and the man now knew this to be true. They bowed their heads and said their own prayers, not only for themselves and Twin B, but for Twin A as well. To lose her other half would have been a tragedy.” We all grew silent at this part, knowing without a doubt it was true.

When Nat raised her head, she smiled at the couple and wrapped Twin B back up and handed her to the woman, but not after placing her lips gently on the baby’s forehead, Twin B’s skin so translucent the veins in her temples throbbed visibly.

“What do we do?” the woman asked. The peace and the love had calmed her, but she was still frightened.

“Take her home,” Nat told them. “Love her. She’ll be okay.”

And she was.

Whatever had happened in that bookstore on Christmas Eve of 1979, the woman and the man did not know and in time, they found it did not matter. God, or magic, or miracles or just coincidence—it was all irrelevant. The next morning, Twin B was still alive. Later that day, she took a bit of a bottle. Eventually, the woman was able to nurse her again, and by the spring—despite all the doctors’ warnings to not get their hopes up—Twin B was thriving again. She was feistier than her sister even, and they would grow up to compete with each other for years: physically, in school, on the soccer field. It was only in their adulthood that they would become the dearest of friends again, as close as they had been in the womb.

“And that,” my mother concluded grandly, “is the story of the mysterious, magical woman with the hands of God who saved my daughter with a Christmas miracle.”

The kids all turned to my sister and I, and we clasped hands. The story, no matter how many times we’d heard it, never failed to elicit a spark in our bond, even during our teenage years when we were at each other’s throats.

“So which one of you was Twin B?” my sister’s oldest daughter asked, but my mother would not answer, as always, only smiling at my father.

“It doesn’t matter,” my mother said.

My sister and I looked at each other. We had always assumed at some point, our parents would tell us, or we would just…cosmically know. We were both strong women—outgoing, driven, stubborn. We were both athletes and as far back as we could remember, we had both been physically healthy. My parents took no photographs during that wretched winter, and even after Twin B began to revive, it was impossible to tell us apart in the oldest pictures.

We never knew which one of us was the twin who was hearty and full of gusto from day one. Which one had eaten hard, had slept hard, had grown properly in those first weeks of life.

We never knew which of us had suffered, had failed to thrive, had nearly died. Which one of us first showed her strength by coming back to life.

Looking around the room at my family, which would be tragically altered no matter who was missing, I knew what my mother said was true. It did not matter. It only mattered that that our family was whole because of a woman in a magical bookstore who had the hands of God.