mother told me when I was a young girl. 'Mântuitorul va veni la noi', she would say to me. The savior will come to us.”
“I’m not a savior,” I gingerly say to her.
“But you are. You just do not know it yet. You are a hero amongst your people.”
She has so much optimism in her voice.
“What language was that you just spoke?”
“Romanian. My mother was from Romania, my father, Hungarian. We lived together in Belgium until I was seventeen.”
That explains the vague mix of European accents.
“My mother became lost in the caligo.”
I am blind sighted by her admission. The smile falls from my face and my jaw drops open.
“My father knew nothing of our mers pe jos de vis. She died just a few months after the night she became lost. He chose not to maintain her life support and to allow her to peacefully go. Physician after physician told him there was no explanation for her vegetative state. I tried to explain but he would not hear of it. He thought I had gone mad and tried to have me committed. I could no longer be with him knowing what he had done, knowing you were out there somewhere and if he had just given you the time, she could have come back to us.”
“Helene, I am so sorry.”
Her story has cut me like a knife. Her faith in me is both powerful, yet petrifying. She is silent now, obviously reliving the pain she felt then. I unexpectedly get the urge to share more of my own story with her. “I lost my mother too. When I was born. I never knew her. She was taken away from me.”
Her hands stop braiding for a brief moment and she makes eye contact with me in the mirror. “I am very sorry you had to live without her.”
“It turned out alright. My dad found someone else when I was just a baby and I grew up knowing her as my mother. She never treated me any different than she did my younger brother, who is her biological child. I actually didn’t even know until just a few days ago.”
She pauses and makes eye contact with me in the mirror. “You really know nothing of your significance then, do you?”
“Until yesterday, I thought I was just a regular high school senior who had some weird ability to create elaborate fantasies in her dreams.”
She completes one of the braids and moves to the center of my head to do another. “After your orientation, you will be photographed. It will be a photograph that lasts for centuries. Your appearance may seem insignificant to you, but to me, it is my contribution to your legacy.”
“Thank you for telling me. You’re the first person who has given us any real information since we got here. Everyone else has been acting like we are prisoners.”
“You must understand they are merely protecting you. You have a great destiny to fulfill. There is great power in that.”
Her words resonate deep within me and I fight to push them back out. The more I think of my so-called destiny, the more anxious I feel.
We don’t say much else to each other while she completes the second and third braids in my hair and then entwines them. When she is finished, she spins me around, my back to the large mirror and holds a handheld mirror out for me to view the back of my hair. It is absolutely breathtaking.
“Wow. It’s beautiful. Thank you very much.”
“You are not quite finished yet.”
Helene takes the mirror back and straightens my chair slightly so I am facing toward her. She taps her foot on a pedal and my chair slowly rises up to put me at her eye level. She reaches for a large makeup case. She begins by dabbing a thick foundation all over my face then blends it out with a flat-topped brush, stippling it over my freckles, effectively hiding them. She moves on to a bronzer, brushing it just under my cheekbones, then applies a bright pink blush to the apples of my cheeks.
In less than two minutes I am wearing more makeup than I ever have in my life. She instructs me to close my eyes and begins applying several different eye shadows, then a speedy sweep of liquid eyeliner above my lash line. After I reopen my eyes, she gives me a quick, light coat of black mascara and a sheer peach gloss on my lips. She pulls the