The Healing Circle

Coco Picard

Description

A mother abandons her family in California to pursue a miracle cure in Munich. Once she gets there however, she wonders if she might have already died. Bedridden with a terminal diagnosis, memories, nurses, immoral doctors, foreign television broadcasts, and phone calls from children intrude upon her consciousness. An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky is her primary companion.

Sujets

• VIH
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Argentina
• Healing
• World War II
• California
• Helena Blavatsky
• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• HIV
• Argentine

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 16 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781636280523
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Healing Circle
Copyright 2022 by Coco Picard
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design by Mark E. Cull
Cover art Story of Fertility (Alegría de la Fertilidad) by Aliosky Garcia
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Picard, Coco, 1980- author.
Title: The healing circle / Coco Picard.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022026228 (print) | LCCN 2022026229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280516 (paperback) | ISBN 9781636280523 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3616.I215 H43 2022 (print) | LCC PS3616.I215 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6-dc23/eng/20220606
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026228
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026229
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you always for everything to do with writing and the else of it: Devin King, and the young ones, Alma and Oscar.
And to my most generous first readers for your encouragement when the book was especially wobbly: Becca Grady, Moshe Zvi Marvit, Lily Robert-Foley, and Monica Westin.
Thank you for the discussions through the push and pull of writing: Melanie Pierce and D.W. White of CTMTPAC. Thanks also to Meg Wolitzer, for your time, mentorship, and the benefit of your astonishing clarity with which I caught the pulse. Thank you Susie Merrell for encouraging me past the safety of reduction and the hooray for the vibrant community of Stony Brook BookEnds fellows with whom I had the pleasure of writing.
Thank you friends and family, immediate and beyond, past and present, in all shapes, forms, and configurations for influence, guidance, collaboration, and friendship: Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, Giovanni Aloi, Marvin Astorga, Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh and Peter Picard, Mimi Bardagjy and Michael King, Victoria and Leo Castillo, David Colville, Patrick Durgin, Lex and Tim Dunley, Terry Duvall, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson, Soni Grant, Irwin Hoffman, Paul King and Adena Rivera-Dundas, Young Joon Kwak, Stephen Lapthisophon, Neil Lehrman, Karsten Lund, Dan Monfried, Joni Murphy, Ellen Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg, Courtney Rush and Shea Lawrence, Lara Schoorl, Sarah Stickney, and Sonia Yoon.
Thank you Kate Gale and Marc E. Cull, Tobi Harper, Monica Fernandez, Natasha McClellan, Rebeccah Sanhueza, Tansica Sunkamaneevongse, and everyone at Red Hen Press for your care and vision ushering my book into print. Thank you Alioky Garcia for sharing your work on the cover. And Martha Cooley for the garland.
My parents of course, Geoffrey and Lynne Picard. And again, to my brother, because always and the tree bar.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105
CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 108
CHAPTER 109
CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 111
CHAPTER 112
CHAPTER 113
CHAPTER 114
CHAPTER 115
CHAPTER 116
CHAPTER 117
CHAPTER 118
CHAPTER 119
CHAPTER 120
CHAPTER 121
CHAPTER 122
CHAPTER 123
CHAPTER 124
CHAPTER 125
CHAPTER 126
CHAPTER 127
CHAPTER 128
CHAPTER 129
CHAPTER 130
CHAPTER 131
CHAPTER 132
CHAPTER 133
CHAPTER 134
CHAPTER 135
CHAPTER 136
CHAPTER 137
CHAPTER 1
It is just past twilight. A young woman enters the frame of a bleak, late winter wood looking directionless and distracted. She stops to look up at the sky. It isn’t raining but the ground is wet with rotting leaves, and pine needles, and dripping snow. Judging by the cuff of her jeans, she has been walking for some time. It is likely her socks are wet. She trips on a root. Winding between black tree trunks, hands dug deep in a bright green coat, she approaches a tall man in an undershirt and plastic perforated clogs. He seems out of place, underdressed and ill-prepared, carrying a catheter like a purse.
The strangers nod at one another before carrying on in opposite directions.
The woman bisects a hospital helipad; its concrete is a buckling mess of negligence. Behind her, the man throws his catheter in the air without apparent effort. The bag of urine transforms into a parrot, flies off above the trees and disappears behind the edge of the window.
Gods appear in such strange places, Mother thinks before turning away from the window and drifting off to sleep.
CHAPTER 2
In this story, Mother lies on her back in a hospital bed at a twenty-degree angle. She ran away from her family in California in search of a miracle cure. Using the inheritance left by her ex-husband and help from the Healing Circle, Mother signed up for an experimental treatment at a suburban hospital on the outskirts of Munich. It still feels exciting. This is the cure of all cures. An ultimate healing serum that’ll fix anything, any disease. Because it isn’t legal yet, the drug isn’t sanctioned by the hospital and so Mother is located in a peculiar out-patient wing, otherwise known as the Wellness Center.
Only she can’t get comfortable and keeps changing the angle of her bed. The injections aren’t working as quickly as she’d hoped. She still can’t feel her feet, floats in and out of consciousness—somewhere between this surreal present and other phases of life. That moment, only last week, when medical doctors denied her the stem-cell transplant; she’d been abandoned by traditional medicine and came to this room, now flooded with the stark light of high noon.
She is determined to survive. But sometimes the prospect of recovery looks too intense. Maybe I would prefer to die, she thinks, finally and immediately please, because this feels terrible—the nausea, fevers, dependence, frustration. I can’t imagine what it would take to walk again. Maybe better to give up? she asks, only to stumble directly into another question: What if Mother has already died?
She doesn’t know where this question comes from but it arrives with a panic. She’s never doubted her existence before and the novelty makes her suspicion seem credible—like a stranger showing up uninvited to a dinner party, sodden from a thunderstorm. You can’t turn that person away, not in such inclement weather. But as the dinner party ensues, you start to realize this person didn’t show up by accident but happens instead to be intimately connected to each and every person at the party in different, secret ways. Are you sure you are alive? the stranger asks.
The Wellness Center is antiseptic and white with creamy curtains and cabinets, everything comprised of right angles, and frequented by nurses whom she hardly knows. It’s hard to look out the window today; everything there is blinding with snow. Funny, imagining that this is where her father was born—another part of the building, but still. It could be the afterlife. Mother closes her eyes.
CHAPTER 3
For the first official Healing Circle gathering, Lena, Andrea, and Mother meet at a Prancercise class in the park. Mother arrives late. She’s always running late. Morning fog hangs around, thick and dewy. Their instructor has her hands on her hips in a Wonder Woman pose, explaining the routine and its ability to unlock one’s “Latent Joy Potential.” She wears leg warmers, Star Trek leisurewear, and jewelry suited for a black-tie gala. Seriously, Mother thinks, this woman is my hero. After a brief tutorial on the various moves, the instructor guides her modest group past dedicated Tai Chi practitioners using a precise sequence of dressage-inspired dance moves: half-passes, flying changes, leg yields, etc.
On their way home, Lena admits they could do better. “I liked her style but didn’t get any healing sensation.”
CHAPTER 4
In the few months that she has occupied this room at the Wellness Center, Mother has only seen one helicopter land on the helipad outside her window. It has remained since, a little off to the side, accumulating snow. The aloe plant on her window ledge exhibits more activity. And