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that you need to put that behind you. When you go home, I would like you to wrap those binders as nicely as you want to, and I see a big red bow. And then I want you to put them in a box and put them away.”
    Carol knew that Martie was right. “A big part of me still anguishes because in spite of everything, I came up short. I had to let that go.”
    Everything the medium said comforted and amazed Carol. But Martie wasn’t entirely accurate. “Your husband passed away months ago,” she said.
    â€œWell, it’s been a few months,” Carol replied. Their conversation was taking place in early July and Noel had died on April 8.
    But Martie shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s not what I’m getting. I’m getting that he died six to eight months ago.”
    When Carol told me her story, she stopped at that point and said, “Hold that in abeyance. Keep it in mind until I tell you what happened the next day.”

4
    P icnic tables scattered around the grass near the Good Vibrations Cafe were filled with visitors eating sandwiches. It was her first visit to Lily Dale, and Marian Boswell had come from a service at the Healing Temple. Every day during the summer season Lily Dale hosts two services for hands-on healing. Healers don’t promise that the blind will see or the lame will walk, but they say it could happen. They’re channeling divine healing energy, they say, and it will at least make you feel better.
    Energy is an all-purpose word in Lily Dale. “I don’t like her energy,” someone would say with a shrug if she disliked a neighbor. It was so handy and neat a piece of jargon that I soon picked it up myself.
    â€œBad energy,” I’d say regretfully when someone rubbed me wrong. Listeners would nod thoughtfully, taking a moment to consider all that meant.
    The healers channel energy in order to readjust energy. The mediums raise their own energy to meet spirit energy. They also read energy. More than once when I protested that something a medium told me about myself wasn’t true, she would reply, “I’m getting this from you energetically,” as though that settled the matter and would shut me up for sure.
    The spirits themselves are often energy. Mediums might tell a tourist, “I’m getting a male energy,” and be answered with a too-eager guess: “Is it my father?”
    â€œNo, it’s a younger energy. Perhaps from your father’s side.”
    Healers channel energy while standing at the front of church. Little benches sit before them. When the benches are empty, the healers stare straight ahead with their hands folded. Anyone who wants healing sits on the bench, facing away from the healer, who then starts moving his or her hands over the supplicant. The healers start at the head and shoulders and move down the body, without touching the central body because mediums say that’s illegal in New York unless you have a license. Some use a kind of sweeping motion. One healer told me she could feel the tangles of blocked energy as she smoothed them.
    After the healers finish, they often hug the people who’ve been sitting before them, and sometimes they whisper something. Healers flick their hands when they finish, as though they’re flinging water drops off their fingers. That’s to release the pain and illness they have absorbed. Bad energy. Some say they can feel it in their own bodies, especially their hands. Finally, the healers go to a basin at the side of the church, rinse their hands, dry them, and return to their benches.
    All the while, sweet music is playing. Being there is restful if you don’t pay attention to how some people act. Certain healers have bigger reputations than others. So some people wait for those benches to be clear. Generally people take turns, but I once saw a woman in a pink suit practically knock an old lady over to get to the healer she