by Monica West
“What’s going to happen to you guys?” I asked. When I spooled time back to the day in the annex, I wondered if we’d be where we were if I hadn’t spoken those forbidden words over her.
Micah shrugged. “I think my dad is looking to work for another church, but that’s been hard. And I have to find another homeschool. My mom’s been calling people.”
Deacon Johnson’s voice calling Micah’s name came from the belly of the house. Micah tilted her head toward the low sound. “Coming,” she yelled back.
“So what does this mean?” I asked.
Micah shrugged, her eyes brimming with tears.
“We’ll see each other again, right?”
Micah gave a halfhearted nod.
“Promise me we’ll see each other again.” I stuck out my pinky to link with hers—she lifted her hand but placed it on the door and pushed it closed.
“I gotta go, Miriam.”
As the bronze doorknocker swung closer to my face, I wondered if Ma had felt something similar when she had to leave her sisters. If she’d had a similar conversation with them while Papa was waiting in the driveway with the engine running. If she had the same sensation I was having now, where I felt the parts of myself that had always been solid leaking through my shoes.
TEN
The congregation dwindled as November marched on—first the Smiths left, and then the Markhams and then the Loomises. It must have felt like betrayal for Papa—he had welcomed the twin Loomis boys into the kingdom last year, dunking their identical bodies deep below the surface of the lake. He took comfort where he could, in the fact that most of the regulars who’d been members since the church was founded—save the Johnsons—were still in attendance. In the midst of it all, Deacon Farrow stood by Papa’s side Sunday after Sunday, while Mrs. Cade and Mrs. Nesbitt vocally supported him.
In the first couple of weeks after the Johnsons left, offerings reached a new low. At the end of the third Sunday service in November, the baskets made their way down the rows and returned to the front still almost empty. Afterward, as we were loading up the car to leave, the head of the usher board brought a Post-it with the written tally out to Papa. Papa took it and didn’t seem to register what it said, but when we got home, doors slammed all around the house, knocking pictures from the wall. We tiptoed around the house for the rest of the day, grabbing fallen pictures and returning them to jutting wall nails.
For each Sunday that more pews were empty, living in the house was like standing on a tightrope—small things, like too much syrup on the pancakes, sent Papa’s whole plate flying off the table. By the end of the month, when the multipurpose room showcased amateur hand turkeys with what we were thankful for, church attendance was a third of what it had been when the congregation had welcomed us back from revival season.
* * *
I tried to see Dawn’s absence from the past month’s healing services as a good sign, that maybe she was no longer in need of healing, but as each week passed without information, my uncertainty grew. And then Papa officially canceled Friday healing services—it was more out of formality than anything else. They had been all but dead since the Friday with Micah, and none of Papa’s attempts to resuscitate them had worked.
Somehow, through the tangled grapevine of church news—a congregant to an usher to a deacon, or something like that—Papa found out that Deacon Johnson had started serving on the deacon board of his rival church across town. It was a week before Thanksgiving when the phone call came. Ma made dinner while Papa was sequestered in the study—every few minutes, his angry voice surged downstairs.
“Bring your father up his dinner,” she said to me, fear barely hidden on her face. She held a heavy plate—from the replacement set she had bought—in front of my face, a fillet of grilled fish set on its center. Curlicues of steam tickled my nose as I walked up the stairs and heard Papa’s loud whispering from around the corner.
“Have I done nothing for him for all these years? How dare he? He acts like he doesn’t owe me a bit of loyalty.”
Whoever he was speaking to didn’t have much of a chance to say anything as the rise at the end of one question bled into the first syllable of the next.
“He owes me everything. This place wouldn’t exist without me, and he knows that.” He pounded his fist on the desk at the final word. I bobbled the plate, sending a few asparagus spears into the air before they landed on the carpet. I crouched and picked them up, blowing them off before replacing them on the plate’s edge, not touching the other food—just the way he liked it.
The study door flew open, almost sucking me inside the room on a gust of air. Next to my hands, Papa’s socked size-thirteen feet stretched the thin navy-blue fabric, revealing the mountain range of corns on his scrunched toes.
“Miriam. How long were you out here?”
“I— I just got—”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.” I swallowed the last syllable and dug my hands into the carpet to stand, but my legs threatened to let me fall. A tight grip like a blood pressure cuff constricted my upper arm and yanked me to my feet.
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing, Papa. I promise.”
“What does the Bible say about lying?”
“I’m not lying.”
“Then you need to repent.”
Repentance meant that I was supposed to pray or recite Scripture, loud enough for him to hear. I dropped to my knees near where his dinner plate was sitting; the butter had slid from the top of the mashed potatoes and was congealing under the asparagus. Papa took a step closer—I hadn’t started praying yet.
“Repent.” His breath was hot and stale on my face as he bent over me. Downstairs, Ma and Caleb had stopped talking.
His favorite Scripture for disobedience was Ephesians 6:1–3, which was about honoring your mother and father and your days being long on earth. He took another step closer and then another until he was so close to me that I couldn’t see all of him. I will never hurt you; I will never hurt you. I clung to his words from a lifetime ago, needing to believe them.
I closed my eyes and brought my hands to my face, pressing the pads of my fingers together in front of my nose. Saying the Bible verse out loud would appease him, and I would have to repeat it until my voice was gone or he was satisfied; it was never certain which one would come first. But my tongue felt thick in my dry mouth.
“I’m waiting, Miriam.”
I kept my lips pressed firmly together, even as I heard his knuckles crack behind me. A loud whap on the back of my head thrust me into the hallway wall. My hands flew in front of my face and made contact with the wall first. The plaster and drywall gave a little as my head reverberated from the force of his slap.
“I’m waiting, Miriam.”
His words echoed between my ears as though my head had been hollowed out. He struck me again—right on the space where my ponytail holder gathered my cottony curls at the back of my head. The pain came sharp and fast and radiated to other parts of my head. I squeezed my eyes shut behind prayer hands.
Above me, his breathing became more erratic. We stayed there like two statues as the silence dragged on. I imagined him closing his eyes and taking a long breath to compose himself the same way he did before starting a long sermon, his shoulders rising and falling beneath his T-shirt. The pain began to ebb as I waited for the next hit.
The hallway throbbed with our breathing—mine burning as it filled my lungs, refusing to steady even as I focused on long inhales and exhales. Finally, I twisted my neck and looked up at him. His eyes were red, and the vein in his forehead was pulsating. But then I saw the anger in his eyes transform into something softer—regret, perhaps. As he turned around and walked into his bedroom, I slowly stood up. All of the pain that had gone away earlier swam to my head. The dizzy floral wallpaper supported my unsteady palms as I waited to hear Ma or Caleb come up to see if I was okay. But no one moved downstairs. Alone, I stumbled to my bedroom and locked the door.
If Ma wanted to come and check on me later, she would have to knock.
I reached for the Bible on the nightstand, fingering my name embossed in gold on the worn leather cover. That night’s reading was from Deuteronomy, but I couldn’t make myself open it. I put the Bible back on my nightstand and reached for my prayer journal instead. The early questions of my youth mocked me with their simplicity. Does Jesus prefer Baptists because he was baptized by John the Baptist? Is there a different heaven for Baptists? With the journal perched on my legs, I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask—what were the words to explain the feeling that pulled at the core of my stomach and sent a bitter wave of vomit to my throat? My pen hovered above the page, unable to make contact. I pressed it closer to the sheaf of paper and a blob of ink pooled onto the faint blue lines. Suddenly, a hatch opened as my pen skimmed over one page, then another and another. When I finally finished, I was breathless, gasping over the page as though I had just finished a race.
The kids in our neighborhood who had grown up with myths of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy must have already experienced this emptiness after feeling a hand linger too long under the pillow or upon witnessing their parents placing carefully wrapped presents under the tree. We had been shielded from that—Ma kept our teeth in a little wooden box and we each picked a name to buy a Christmas present for. Papa had told us never to believe in transient things for happiness because our hope was in eternal life. But Papa had carefully cultivated our belief in him. He never said it outright—Believe in me as you believe in God—that would have been obvious blasphemy and idolatry. But he was the all-consuming presence that had filled my entire life, taking up all the space in the house and in revival tents. In its absence was a black hole that seemed bigger than the presence that had inhabited it. Like the gap left behind after losing a tooth—the ragged, sore space in your mouth always felt larger than the tiny bit of enamel that fell out.
* * *
The annual Thanksgiving service was always held on the Sunday before the holiday, and this year’s was to be no different. We separated at the front doors: Caleb and Papa walked to the sanctuary while Ma, Hannah, and I went to the multipurpose room to prepare the Thanksgiving meal. Most years, we cooked with Micah and her mom; together, wearing turkey hats and oven mitts, we served members of the church and the neighborhood. This time, when we stepped inside the multipurpose room, I felt the absence of Mrs. Johnson’s ebullient hello and hug that usually squeezed the air out of me. Instead, we were greeted by silence and a crooked banner that read HAPPY THANKSGIVING stuck to the wall behind a crystal bowl full of punch.
Ma and I got to work on the string beans. Her arms jostled mine in the small space as snatches of the sermon came over the loudspeaker.
“We’re popping all these beans, but I don’t know how many people will come this year. I guess it’s always better to have too much than too little.” She laughed.
I shrugged. There was nothing funny about the small congregations and the way they precipitated Papa’s anger. And she had felt it too, which made her laugh even harder to understand.
“What’s with the silent treatment lately, Miriam?”
If she had still been the person I remembered, she would have noticed that I hadn’t been able to laugh with her since the day she sacrificed me to Papa’s rage and left me alone while he hit me in the hallway. We hadn’t had our late-night reading sessions either; the few times she’d knocked, I’d pretended to be asleep. I glanced away from Ma’s desperate face and looked behind me, where Hannah was punching soft balls of dough. Hannah glanced toward us, her mouth opening for a soundless laugh. I joined her as she slapped the dough onto a cutting board, placing my hands on top of hers and adding gentle pressure as we moved the rolling pin over the airy mound, creating a jagged shape. Her hand curled around the glass as we cut perfect circles into the dough, and I dropped each disc onto the greased cookie sheet. When I closed the oven door, Hannah stood next to the rectangular window and watched the heated coils glow red as the dough rose.
Caleb’s hesitant voice through the loudspeaker announced that Papa would give the benediction; I imagined him in the pulpit next to Papa, his clip-on tie askew. I’d asked him to say something to Papa one night when they were in the study together, to tell him how bad his anger was getting at home, that I wasn’t sure how much more we could handle. What do you want me to say? he’d responded to my pleas. Tell him the truth, I’d said. But for all I knew, he hadn’t said anything.
“ ‘The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace. Amen.’ ”
I poured green beans from the pot into the colander and watched through the wall of steam as people started to trickle through the double doors. Normally, the line would be in the hallway before Papa said the closing prayer, but people came in one or two at a time. Per Ma’s request, I had already made Papa’s plate with a turkey leg, a heap of green beans, and two biscuits.
Papa entered the multipurpose room, and I grabbed his plate so he didn’t have to wait in line. Some motion near the side window rustled the bushes—the profile of a man and a girl who was a head shorter. Dawn and her father. With Papa’s plate in my hands, I elbowed my way past Ma.
“Be careful, Miriam,” Ma squeezed out of clenched teeth as I pressed past her awkward third-trimester body, jolting it into the open cabinet door. I let myself out of the kitchen and wove through the short line of people who were picking up plates and grabbing cups. On the way outside, I bumped into Papa and handed him his plate.
“Where are you going?” Papa called as I jogged out of the multipurpose room, his voice echoing in the hallway.
The wind outside had picked up since we had arrived that morning, and my heart was beating faster than my shoes slapping the concrete. The driver’s-side door was open as Dawn’s father lowered himself inside.
“Dawn,” I yelled.
We had been standing close to this exact spot on the night when she’d asked me to heal her. Breathless, I approached Dawn’s closed passenger door and banged on the window. She opened it and stepped outside; I followed her around the side of the car to the rusted trunk. Her face had more color in it, her cheeks chubbier, her breathing at normal intervals as she spoke to me.
“Hi, Miriam,” she said. “I tried to find you earlier but didn’t see you during the service.”
“I was cooking in the back.”
She looked at the front of my flour-covered apron and nodded. I hadn’t thought about what I would say to her when I saw her; I grasped the apron’s fabric and ran it between my fingers as I tried to formulate the right question. “How are you feeling?”
“That’s why I wanted to find you.” She leaned closer to me, and her voice dropped. “I felt weird right after the—you know—so it seemed like all the other times.” Another gust of wind ripped through the parking lot—she paused and looked around. A few other parishioners mingled outside, making small talk that wafted over to where we stood.
“I went back to my cardiologist for a checkup. Do you know what they told me?”
I shook my head. Dawn’s father rolled down the window and poked his head out. “Hurry up, honey. We’re running late,” he said.
“Coming.”
“What did they say?”
“My heart function is normal. I can’t remember the last time I had a normal checkup. The doctors couldn’t believe it, especially since I haven’t had the latest surgery yet.”
“Honey!” her father called.
“Gotta go. Thanks, Miriam. See you around.”
She wrapped me in a hurried embrace and jogged back to the car door as though she’d been jogging all her life. That had to be proof of something. I held on to that picture as she looked around once again with a wan smile before sinking into the car’s upholstery.
I played her words over and over again. Maybe, like with Micah, a normal checkup could just mean that an abnormal
one was on the horizon. But maybe it had worked. Euphoria should have felt like all my neurons and synapses firing at the same time—something that should have made my body feel lighter—but I sank onto the ground. My hands grasped small piles of gravel next to the tiny rainbows that appeared in the shiny black oil puddle. I closed my lips around a prayer that I couldn’t utter aloud, the prayer that ran counter to everything I’d ever learned or been taught: Thank You, Lord, for healing Dawn through me. Give me the strength to seek You and do Your will.
* * *
In bed in the middle of the night, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my hands had touched something and made it whole again. But then my thoughts were interrupted by music that wasn’t gospel riding the heat currents through the vent beneath my bed. At first I thought I was dreaming, but the music continued even after I got up and crept downstairs, passing the front window where I saw an empty driveway. Papa had been leaving early a lot more these days, staying gone for hours at a time and offering no explanation about where he’d been when he returned. I imagined long, closed-door meetings with the deacon board as he tried to replace Deacon Johnson, meetings that were too volatile for him to let us overhear.
When I got closer to the kitchen, the music slid into my veins—the hi-hat’s tinny tapping was persistent as guitars and drums faded, leaving nothing but a woman’s mournful voice singing about a man who left her, her high notes breaking away from the music and modulating until they landed on a sound more animal than human. A pair of feet padded a syncopated rhythm in the kitchen’s dimness—quick steps that were out of pace with the slow words and music. When I craned my neck around the corner, all of the weight of Ma’s growing body was raised on the balls of her feet. Her eyes were closed, and her right arm was bent several inches in front of her as though she were holding someone who wasn’t there. She looked younger than I’d ever seen her, unencumbered by the heaviness of pregnancy and revival season that had stooped her shoulders. I watched her reflection as she passed the black mirrored pools of the kitchen windows; my eyes slid to her undulating hips that drove her from the cabinets to the stove, buffeting her against the refrigerator and back toward the sink, her face tilted upward. Her limbs threaded together in front of her, swimming their way to the light. Carnal, Papa probably would have muttered if he had been here, but this wasn’t the evil of the flesh that he said was sin. For a moment, I saw the dancer that she’d been before she met Papa.