by Monica West
“See you inside.” He had shrunk since I saw him earlier on the bed—a child in a man’s suit.
I took a deep breath and helped Hannah onto the grass outside the van. We moved slowly, passing deacons who looked through us like we were invisible, deacons whose backs I had hidden behind last night. Inside the tent’s flaps, the overhead bulbs felt like spotlights as Hannah and I followed Ma down the middle aisle. Faces—though not nearly as many as the night before—turned toward us, staring in the way that people stared at Hannah when they first met her. But there was usually a trace of concern or pity directed at Hannah, whereas these stares were hostile.
“Charlatan,” someone hissed from the back of the tent.
“I heard he broke his jaw.” Another whisper came to join the chorus.
I could always shake off what faithless naysayers said about Papa, but this time tears welled behind my eyes. If Ma was surprised by the accusations being lobbed at us, she didn’t let on. Her posture was ramrod straight as she bypassed the fourth row where we usually sat and staked out a place in the center of the first row. I slunk into the seat next to Ma, with Hannah on my left. Ma’s jaw jutted—it was easy for her to show pride when she didn’t know what I knew.
The wait for the sermon to start felt interminable. I kept wanting to turn around, to see if the tent was filling up at all, but I stayed still, not even wiping away a bead of sweat that made its way from my hairline down my face before landing in the collar of my dress.
After an hour that seemed endless, the old keyboardist ascended to the stage and the opening chord of “All to Jesus I Surrender” filled the air around us. A wave of nausea churned in my stomach as Papa made the processional inside. He slipped on a wan smile and stepped behind the pulpit, raising his arms to signal that it was time for the call to worship. The deacons were supposed to join him onstage, but they stayed with the congregation, leaving only Caleb in the semicircle of chairs behind Papa.
“ ‘Give thanks to the Lord for He is good; His love endures forever.’ ” These words, usually met with applause, were greeted with cacophonous silence. The microphone screeched, but Papa continued speaking even as his words were inaudible over the crackling feedback.
“What happened last night?” A voice from the back of the tent yelled above the din.
“You put him in the hospital.”
Ma stiffened beside me as she wrapped the long strap of her purse around her hand. I shifted my eyes to the right to avoid a conspicuous turn of my head and counted the fast blinks of her confused, glassy eyes, watched the slightest tremble in her top lip. My eyes skipped from her to Caleb, who was seated behind Papa on the stage, gripping both sides of the folding chair as Papa raised his arms to stop the congregation’s incessant shouting. But the voices kept coming one after another: “A preacher wouldn’t do that to someone!” a woman’s voice shouted. “You are no preacher,” some man said. With each declaration, Caleb drifted farther away from the stage until his eyes were pointed somewhere over my head at what I imagined was an object outside of the tent’s open flaps.
My neck snapped around for the first time all service. The seats were mostly empty, and the faces that stared back at Papa were full of anger. Papa looked down at his papers as though the answer was written there. He adjusted the wireless microphone behind his ear, but his lips didn’t move.
“Saints of God, I want to talk to you about the mysteries of faith.” He was yelling now, but their booing drowned out his amplified voice. Ma rooted in the side pocket of her purse until the key ring was in her hand; with each new jeer that rose behind us, she gripped the keys tighter in her fist until only a spike of silver stuck out. She scooted to the front of her chair, planted her block heels squarely on the grass, and stood, pulling me up with her. We had never left a revival early.
The jeers got louder behind us as my hand hooked under Hannah’s armpit to bring her to her tottering feet. Soon, we were speed-walking out of the back of the tent. We burst through the line of deacons, and Ma ran at full speed to the car and started it. I was just finishing buckling Hannah in when Papa and Caleb appeared, illuminated by the individual circular ground lights that shone outside the tent.
“What was that, Samuel?” Ma asked, after getting out and sliding into the passenger seat so Papa could drive.
“Let’s just get out of here.”
“No. What were those lies they were saying? You didn’t hurt that man. You just tried to heal him. Did something else happen after the revival service?”
“We can talk about this later.” He tossed his arm around the passenger seat and looked backward into the rear window. The van zipped away from the tent in reverse.
“We’re going to talk about it now.” Her words rose at the end with a sharpness that was reserved for times when she was angry with me or Caleb; I’d never heard her use that tone with Papa. Papa ignored her until Ma grabbed the gear shift and jolted the van into park. My head crashed into the back of the driver’s seat; I threw out a stiff right arm to keep Hannah in place.
“You need to go back there and tell them that it’s all a misunderstanding. We’re not going to run away from here like criminals! Tell them!” Ma’s words knifed through the minivan’s air as she leaned close to Papa’s face, her crooked finger pointing in the direction of where she wanted him to go. Papa released his hold on the steering wheel as his shoulders slumped.
They had indicted him back in the tent, so he wouldn’t have to admit to anything that hadn’t already been said. Besides, we confessed our sins to one another regularly—Ma had told us about her anger at God after Isaiah’s death, and Papa had confessed to being prideful. This would just be another confession in a line of confessions. And if he said he was wrong, if he admitted it and repented, we could pray for him and find a way to move forward.
“Tell us, Papa,” I finally said with feeble words. I should have said, Tell them.
“They don’t know anything! They’re lying. All of them. There’s nothing to tell.”
I had leaned forward behind him, straining against the taut seat belt as I awaited his explanation, but I flopped back into the seat after hearing his flat, false words. Ma placed her left hand on the steering wheel, preventing him from driving off, but his two hands on the wheel wrestled it away from her. He jammed his foot on the gas and turned the wheel so hard that Ma’s body slammed into the door.
“I saw—” I began.
Ma and Papa snapped around and looked back at me as though I had interrupted their private conversation.
“You saw nothing, Miriam.” His eyes narrowed in the red-tinted darkness from the stoplight overhead. As he held my gaze, daring me to defy him, a flash of heat passed through my feet and made the tips of my toes tingle. Then a bubble of rage rose to my stomach and popped. He knew that I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
I snuck a glance at the revival tent receding over my left shoulder—I knew it was bad luck, that looking back turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, but I couldn’t help myself. A ribbon of exhaust streamed from the back of the car, tethering us to the people inside before the tent released us into the dark.
* * *
We hurtled onto the unlit two-lane highway that unspooled in front of us as far as the headlights illuminated and no farther. Even the stars’ bright pinpricks of light were now hidden behind a veil of clouds. Twenty minutes after leaving the revival tent, we arrived at the Griffith house.
“We need to be out of here in ten minutes, tops.” Papa looked at his gold watch that gleamed in the darkness. He didn’t say where we were headed—we weren’t due to the next revival location until Saturday—four days away. When Ma and Papa went inside the house to pack, Caleb stood by the minivan’s open door with creases between his raised, impatient eyebrows.
“What’s going on?” he whispered.
“Papa hit that guy, Caleb. He hit him when he didn’t heal him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He hit the bl
ind guy and lied about it.”
“How would you know? Did you actually see him hit anyone?” Anger—or was it disbelief?—fluttered behind his eyes. Leave it to Caleb to question what I had seen and not what Papa had done. If he had ever questioned Papa, he had never shown it. It must have felt too good to be in Papa’s sunshine; he had never experienced what it felt like to be in its adjacent shadow.
“Did you actually see the hit?” Caleb’s eyes got wider as he repeated the question, his face hopeful. I wished I had the same faith that he did in Papa.
“Yes. I saw it.”
His cheeks slackened as he shifted his gaze to the crack in the driveway. I could practically see his mind racing as he swallowed hard and then massaged his cheeks. He forced air through a pinhole in his pursed lips—the only sound between us for several seconds.
“It was dark. You didn’t see what you thought you did. You couldn’t have.” His voice lacked the conviction it had a few seconds before.
“Five minutes to go.” Papa’s voice echoed from the bowels of the house.
“You heard him.” Caleb turned on his heel and went inside.
* * *
We were refugees in the night: there was no map in Ma’s lap as we drove through dark streets. Through the van’s windows, Bethel was a blur of empty plots of land and vacant shopping centers; only when my knuckles burned did I realize that I’d been holding on to the armrest the whole time. The clock in the car changed from 8:59 to 9:00. Revival would be letting out any minute now, and we were locked in a car moving aimlessly through a city we didn’t know. We crossed the border into a neighboring town as Papa put more miles between us and Bethel. Hunger clawed at the edges of my stomach, and I buried my arms deeper into my abdomen to dull its sharp ache. Hannah started to howl and buck against her restraints, but Papa didn’t look back in the rearview mirror to signal me to quiet her.
At 10:44, we turned right down an unfamiliar road in a town far away from Bethel, in the direction of an oscillating sign that read TY’S DINER. The inside of the restaurant was bright, with leather booths and a few patrons seated on round stools by the counter. As we sat in the silent, still car, our eyes bounced over T-shirts and jeans before we exhaled sighs of collective relief that none of the people in here had been at the revival that night.
“We’re good here,” Papa said.
We ordered our food in monotones and fragments: Eggs sunny-side up, add bacon; short stack of pancakes; French toast; black coffee. At the other end of the semicircular booth, Papa was jittery in his skin, as though a current was running in his veins. He drummed his fingers next to the coffee mug that the waitress kept refilling, causing black liquid to slosh over the mug’s ceramic lip and land in a shallow puddle on the table.
After our food arrived, Papa took one bite of eggs before pushing his plate forward; he reached into his briefcase and spread out the map as though this had all been part of the plan. Papa’s shaky hands traced routes from here to places unknown as Caleb nodded without looking over at me. Next to me, Ma speared a triangle of pancake for Hannah and cupped her chin to guide it inside. I nudged her knee while she wiped syrup from Hannah’s lips.
“Do you believe what he said?” I mouthed.
Ma looked at me quizzically, and I made sure that Papa and Caleb were still talking before I repeated the words, slower this time, elongating my mouth around the vowels. She peered over my shoulder at them before shrugging.
“I saw what happened,” I mouthed again. “I saw him hurt the man.”
“What are you two talking about down there?”
I froze as the tendons in her neck became tight cords. The slick palms of my hands slid against the table’s surface.
“Just girl talk. Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” Ma said.
The tasteless hunk of French toast had jagged edges as it went down my throat, but I focused on swallowing instead of looking at Papa. When Papa didn’t believe you, his lips puckered with scorn; I couldn’t be on the receiving end of that expression, not after what I had already seen. After what felt like forever, he went back to talking about highway numbers with Caleb. I moved my right foot over inch by inch until it was touching Ma’s shoe. She left her foot there and returned to feeding Hannah.
Every few minutes, I caught Ma shooting glances at Papa. Did he at all resemble the man she had married sixteen years ago? The way the story went, she was seventeen when a cocky, twenty-year-old boxer turned preacher came to her town as the Faith Healer of Midland. She gave her life to Jesus on the spot and married Papa six weeks later. We had lived under the canopy of that belief my whole life, eating and drinking faith in God first and Papa second, never questioning Papa’s healing abilities, the same way we never questioned the existence of the sun, even when it was hidden behind clouds. Our belief left no directives about what to do if our faith in Papa faltered.
FIVE
The next afternoon, we spread thin bath towels by the concrete edge of the pool at Sleepy Elms Motel. A neon orange sign blinked V CANCY in the lobby window. I laid Hannah on the first towel, and the jarring rip from the loosening Velcro teeth of her leg braces echoed over the shallow water. I stripped her to her cotton undershirt and panties before lowering her into the pool on top of a floatie. She held the yellow foam noodle for dear life and kicked her thin legs with surprising force. Every so often, she dipped her open mouth below the surface and came back up with full cheeks.
A few kids throwing an inflatable ball by the NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY sign looked over. They spied Hannah first; then their eyes roved to Ma and me. Our long skirts and loose shirts starkly contrasted their oily torsos that were barely covered by bright strips of Lycra. The moment they made eye contact, I turned away from their brazenness the way Papa had always told us to when we were in the proximity of immodesty. Papa made it clear that God looked more favorably on modest girls like me. He had also told us that nothing happened to the man outside the tent, but I tried to push that thought aside.
A girl who seemed to be the ringleader of the group raised her hands in the air; the tank top portion of her bathing suit rose a few inches, exposing the hollow concavity of her navel. She knew all of the words to an ungodly song I’d never heard, and, as she sang, her arms swayed the way ours did to church hymns. I kicked eddies into the lukewarm water and raised my hands like hers—my shirt slid up a bit, and I raised the hem even more until an inch of my stomach was showing.
“Miriam, what are you doing?” Ma grabbed my shirt and yanked it down before looking over her shoulder. “Don’t let your father see you doing that.”
But I had seen the cab pick Papa up hours earlier—in the waning moments of gray when night yielded to dawn. Caleb and Hannah were still asleep as I hooked the blackout curtains with my forefinger and saw him open the cab’s back door with his stuffed briefcase reliably by his side.
“He’s not here, Ma, you know that. Besides, it’s hot outside.”
“It’s immodest.” The final word slid out between clenched teeth. “You can enjoy the sun without being naked.”
She leaned all the way back—sunbathing, as it were—even though a thick layer of gray cotton shielded her skin from the sun. Stretched on her back with her arms raised overhead, the small swell of her belly protruded beneath the dress’s fabric. The faint pink heart tattoo on her right wrist peeked out—one of very few remnants of her life before Papa. While her eyes were closed, I rubbed my thumb on the inky section of skin—the heart’s black outline and light-pink interior were indistinguishable from the smoothness of the rest of her wrist. She looked down at my fingers in the center of the tattoo and didn’t flick them away.
“Did it hurt?”
“I thought it did when I got it, but then I had children. That was a whole new kind of pain.” She ran her hand over her stomach.
“Did your parents know?”
She laughed. “They never knew what the three of us did. And if they did know, they wouldn’t have cared. I grew up in
a different kind of house, Miriam. My sisters and I practically raised ourselves. If we didn’t cook, we didn’t eat. We went to bed when we were tired and to school when we wanted to. The only good thing my dad ever did was pay for the occasional dance lesson when there was enough money to go around, but he never came to any of my performances.” There were traces of sadness in her voice, but the dark lenses that covered half her face were turned toward a skywriter swooping in the distance, creating indecipherable letters that faded a few seconds later.
“The last time I went to a pool like this, my sisters and I were in high school. During the summer when my mom worked, we stayed at home alone and went to the pool. Claudia’s boyfriend was a lifeguard there. We’d pack snacks and stay all day, just to avoid being at home.”
“What do you miss the most about them?”
Ma was so rarely open with me like this—especially not when Papa was around—so I wanted to take advantage of her candor.
“So many things.” She rubbed the indentations that her sunglasses had etched into the bridge of her nose. “Like the way Claudia’s eyes crinkled at the corners whenever she told a lie. Or how Yolanda used to feed me her famous chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven on my birthday, whenever we could afford the ingredients, that is.” Her voice caught on the last word. She always spoke about them in the past tense, even though they still lived in Ma’s hometown, which was only two hours north of where we lived now. Papa told us that we couldn’t have a relationship with them because they weren’t saved—effectively, they were dead to us. I’d never questioned Papa’s reasons for not letting us around the only aunts we had, even though I knew it was our job to convert nonbelievers.
In public, Ma supported his rules, but on a few occasions, usually when Papa was at the church for a trustee meeting, she slipped into the pantry and shut the door behind her. The muffled sounds of a one-sided conversation echoed through the kitchen—calls that abruptly ended when Papa’s car rumbled in the driveway. One day a few weeks before this revival season began, I ran upstairs and got on the other receiver. I didn’t remember everything they said, but at one point, Aunt Claudia asked Ma when she would wake up and take her life back. Ma hung up on her instead of answering.