Revival Season

by Monica West

  * * *

  Every inch of the house ached with Ma’s absence. A presence was easy to feel, but an absence was much more acute: the empty chair at the kitchen table, silence greeting you instead of the voice that you were so used to hearing. The house also felt more dangerous with her gone: there were fewer places to hide. I stood up straighter when I heard Papa behind me in the kitchen. When he yelled Ma’s name through the house, I shivered because I was the one to answer him. His hands wouldn’t stay quiet long—especially since I overheard him telling the deacons that offerings weren’t enough to pay the church’s mortgage anymore. Caleb and Hannah would be safe, but someone had to replace Ma in the house.

  Even though Hannah couldn’t say it aloud, I knew she felt the absence the way Caleb and I did. She crawled up the steps in the direction of Ma’s room, only to be snatched up by older arms before she could reach the door. Sometimes she let herself be comforted, but more often than not, she would wail inconsolably.

  “Ma will be back soon,” I told her in a steady voice. And as I repeated it, I started to believe it myself.

  * * *

  Isaac was fussy as January marched on. He enjoyed playing with a dingy zebra that had been Hannah’s favorite toy at his age. At night, when I brought Ma plates of food that she barely ate, I told her about each milestone and rested Isaac against her chest, but she didn’t move to hold him.

  A few days later, right after Isaac smiled at me for the first time, there was a knock on my bedroom door.

  “Please get her dressed,” Papa barked.

  I knew better than to ask questions. He was gone when I walked down the hallway to Ma’s bedroom door. The wadded sheets didn’t look like anyone was there, but then the slightest movement came from the middle of the bed. I stepped over the nursing pads and clean diapers on the floor and made my way to her. I slid my body behind Ma’s, wrapping myself around her solidness and folding my arms around the loose flesh where her pregnant belly used to be. She didn’t even move—didn’t nestle into me—the only sign of life was her chest rising and falling at regular intervals. I pressed my nose into her hair, which smelled dank and had no hints of the coconut oil that she loved. I sank into the warmth of the sheets, trying to get as close to her as possible.

  “Hi, Ma,” I said, snuggling closer. With my index finger, I separated some of the matted tendrils and smoothed them into something that resembled a style. Ma’s heavy head didn’t move from the pillow. I lifted myself on an elbow and looked at her face, expecting to find her eyes closed. But when I glanced over the curve of her jaw and found the arc of her chin, tracing it up to the contour of her cheekbone, her eyes were wide open. I shook her shoulder, but she didn’t blink.

  “Ma!” I shouted into her ear. Still no response. I yanked back the covers. She was wearing an old gray nightgown that used to be white. Large oblong stains darkened the part of her nightgown that covered her breasts. The familiar sour-sweet scent of milk that used to come from her body was long gone; since she hadn’t nursed Isaac in a month, her milk had dried up weeks ago.

  I crept out of the bed and into the bathroom. The washcloth that rested over the basin was stiff with soap, but it wasn’t from touching Ma’s skin. I wrung it out in a stream of warm water and brought it back to the bed.

  “I’m going to wash you off now, okay?” I asked in the same voice I usually used with Hannah. My hands trembled—I’d only really seen Ma’s body when she gave birth. Her flaccid breasts flopped to each side of her body as I lifted her left arm carefully over her head and rested it against the pillow like a bird’s wing. I half expected her to swat the washcloth out of my hands and tell me that she could wash herself, but she just lay there in her sour-smelling nightgown.

  I peeled up Ma’s nightgown, inch by inch, slowing down when I got to her stomach. My eye caught some faded blue stains that seeped into her skin—old bruises. A knot of rage rose in the back of my throat when I palpated the evidence of the hollow thumps that Caleb and I’d heard last month. I swallowed it and moved the washcloth, my strokes gentle on the loose skin of her stomach—the rivulets of water sliding over her body and onto the fitted sheet like tears.

  The washcloth moved to white rings—like the ones that dated trees—that lined her middle. Caleb’s lines were the faintest; the slightest press of my fingertips moved inward to mine, then Hannah’s and Isaiah’s. The new ones from Isaac were stark white against her darker skin, and my finger lingered there a little while longer before rolling the nightgown up to her breasts. My eyes stayed on the sheets around her as the washcloth traveled over her swollen nipples. Pulling the filthy nightgown over her head, I cast it into the growing pile of dirty laundry in the corner of the room. I slid her underwear from beneath her body, exposing a triangular thatch of hair where her legs were pressed together. A clean pair of underwear was folded in her drawer—one of the last vestiges of her careful housekeeping—and I shimmied it up her legs. In her closet, a long gray dress that used to be snug now made her look tiny.

  I took a few steps away from the bed, and Ma looked just like she did when I arrived—still and small. I couldn’t look away from her, but a minute later, Papa walked in, breaking my stare. He scooped Ma from the bed and adjusted her weight in his arms; her limp hand dangled behind his back as though she had just dropped something.

  * * *

  It was dark when they arrived back home from wherever they had been. Papa didn’t make any pronouncements at the kitchen table; he just took her upstairs. There was no victory in his arms sagging beneath her weight, his creaky knees halting every step to take a breath.

  There were no conversations that night or the next as we went back to business as usual. Papa preached that Sunday about faith and sickness to a crowd of about a hundred people huddled into the first few rows.

  “When we are sick, brothers and sisters, we need to rely on our faith to heal us. If we remain sick, we need to ask ourselves: How strong is my faith?” I stiffened in the pew as he spoke lies into a microphone whose feedback intermittently interrupted his half-hearted climaxes. He was going off-script, departing from biblical teachings that he had subscribed to for years, teachings that were the basis for his ministry. And for what? As the words echoed through my skull, I heard the undercurrents of a veiled message about Ma. That her weak faith was keeping her sick, even though her faith had buoyed the family during the darkest times like Isaiah’s death. He’d said as much to her.

  As he asked us to rise for the final prayer, everything he’d said echoed back to me. He was saying that he wasn’t getting her any help—he was saying that what had happened to her was her fault, ignoring the fact that he’d tried to heal her and failed. That he had tried to heal other people and failed. So now, rather than admit that he couldn’t heal, he was casting the blame on anyone but himself. He was sacrificing Ma to the altar of his pride in order to hold on to his convictions.

  By the time the crowd had dispersed after the sermon, Papa had left me with no choice. He wasn’t going to heal Ma. If I could do it for Micah, Nadia, Dawn, Suzette, and Hope, I owed it to Ma to at least try.

  THIRTEEN

  Wind came through the open window of Ma’s room, snatching the door from my grip and slamming it behind me. Next to her rumpled bedsheets, lavender gossamer curtains caught the breeze and billowed inward. The stale smell was now gone, replaced by distant chimney smoke and the night-blooming jasmine plant that Mrs. Cade had brought over last week.

  “Ma.” I announced myself as I approached, my voice rushed. There wasn’t much time: Caleb and Hannah would be back from homeschool in twenty minutes, and Papa’s church meetings would be over in about an hour. I pulled the sheet away from her foot, exposing the prickly hairs on her ankle and calf. Lifting her leg from the bed released a pungent stench of urine and exposed the damp sheet beneath her. The bottle of holy oil jutted out of the pocket of my pajama pants. I sat it on the nightstand next to the remnants of the morning’s uneaten breakfast.

 
I pushed her left shoulder, and the rest of her body followed until she was flat on her back, her arms at her sides. Her eyes fluttered, but they didn’t open. I shook her again, but she didn’t stir. I needed to hurry it along, but I couldn’t deviate from the routine—from asking questions that I knew she couldn’t answer.

  “Ma, what ails you?” I paused a few beats, imagining the lilt of her voice in the silence. A loud noise sent me to the window, but Papa’s car was still gone. I rushed back to Ma’s side.

  “Do you believe that I have the power to heal you?”

  A twitch of her leg responded. She had clearly heard me, proof that she was still with us through the clouds and fog, which meant that she might be aware of what I was doing. It was a risk, but I had to take it. If anyone understood having two lives, it was Ma.

  I emptied double the amount of holy oil on my palm and traced the sign of the cross on her clammy forehead, pressing my hand there to seal the healing. “Joanne Renée Horton, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are healed.”

  The place where our skin touched felt electrified—a mixture of heat and tingling that intensified the longer I kept my hand there—but I couldn’t pull it away. It had fused there, skin against skin. As a gust of air swept into the room, the curtain surged in and its corners, unmoored, snapped in midair. I kept my hand on Ma’s head, the tingle becoming warmer by the moment, and closed my eyes.

  My hand went limp, but it stayed on Ma’s head. The pain that flashed from her body to mine drove me to my knees by the side of the bed. The room thrummed, a taut guitar string that pulsated with each breath. Screams curdled in the air and pressed against the walls. I assumed they were Ma’s, but her mouth was still closed, so they must have been mine. Her eyes had opened, though, but my lips couldn’t move to ask her if she was okay. I slid onto the carpet by her bedside as the room went black.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes after what could have only been a few minutes, my head felt like it had been slammed into a block of concrete. I pushed myself onto my hands and knees, arching my back where a dull ache had settled at the base of my spine. Gripping the side of the bed, the mattress coils gave under the weight of my hands, and I pulled myself up on shaky legs. As soon as I got to my feet, pain flashed behind my eyes, and I cowered on the carpet. I tried to push myself up again but fell to the ground. The open bottle of holy oil was lying on the floor by the bedside table, spilling its contents onto the beige carpet. My eyes scraped against my eyelids as I tried to open them, and spots speckled the room where shapes had previously appeared.

  “Ma,” I said gently, touching the bed where her shoulder should have been.

  She slowly turned her head toward me, and her eyes took me in.

  “Hi, Ma,” I whispered. I’d hoped that something more profound would come out after all this time: how much I’d missed her, how the house hadn’t been the same without her. But my head throbbed, and it was getting harder to stay on my feet. I leaned against the side of her bed to keep from falling. The room came back into focus: the family picture on the bureau, the hope chest by the foot of the bed.

  Ma slid to the edge of the mattress and put her feet on the carpet, inching ever closer to me. She tried to stand up, but her legs, wobbly from disuse, buckled under her weight. As she slumped back on the bed, the sodden sheets that had been covering her fell away, revealing bony legs and a shoulder blade that jutted out beneath a thin scrap of skin. Eventually, I crossed the inches it took to sit beside her.

  In her lap, she turned her hands from their palms to the backs and then over again; she blinked with each slight motion, as though snatches of memory were replaying themselves on the insides of her eyelids. Every few seconds, her head shook like she was reliving Papa’s fist coming at her, knocking her to the ground—next to Isaac’s birth, it was probably the last thing she remembered before she’d gotten sick.

  “Ma?” I touched her shoulder.

  She jumped as though only now realizing that I was sitting next to her. Her disoriented eyes landed on my face, squinting like someone who was adjusting to the light after being in a dark room.

  “Miriam?” Her voice was gravelly and worn. “What did you do?”

  Papa’s partial smile and hooded eyes stared back at me from the other side of a dusty family picture on the dresser. I couldn’t say it under his gaze, hadn’t said it to anyone except Mrs. Cade. Ma looked down at the carpet by her feet, at the plastic bottle and the slick of holy oil.

  “Miriam.” She spoke again—an answer to her own question. She reached down and grabbed the holy oil—her balance pitching her too far forward before she caught herself and straightened. She pinched the flattened bottle and brought it close to her face like it was something foreign, even though we had filled them together for years. I stiffened next to her in anticipation of her anger at my sin and closed my eyes to shield myself against her yells. Her breath quickened as her shoulders rose and fell next to my stillness.

  “I know I wasn’t supposed to, but he wasn’t going to do anything to help you. He was just going to let you stay sick.” I spat out the words without pausing to take a breath.

  Ma was about to answer when I heard a car pull up in the driveway. A minute later, the front door flew open—Papa’s meeting must have ended early. I heard him calling my name on the first floor as Isaac started to cry. Loud footsteps bounded up the stairs two at a time—in an instant, Papa appeared in the doorway.

  I winced and pushed myself to a standing position from the tangle of Ma’s limbs and sheets. I held his gaze, even as his eyes bounced around the cluttered room before finally landing on Ma and me. Me, standing a little too tall, my posture overcompensating for the fact that Ma was still seated. She had turned her face to meet Papa’s, her neck at an unnatural angle, her eyes a hunted animal’s.

  “What’s going on here?”

  He rushed over to her before I could answer—his loud voice ringing in my ears—but he stopped short of sitting next to her. His looming presence blocked the light as he crouched by her face and touched her head with a gesture that wasn’t tender at all. As his hand lay against her forehead, he stared in her eyes, but it didn’t look like he was trying to see if she was better—it seemed like he was gauging the limits of her memory. He’d had over a month to rehearse an apology—it should have been out of his mouth when he got to the door and saw that she was sitting up in bed for the first time since Isaac’s birth. But I could count Papa’s apologies on one hand, and by the time he stood up again and dropped his palm from her forehead, I knew that this wouldn’t be one of them.

  “What’s going on?” he asked again.

  Ma tried to stammer an excuse as she scooted away from him and toward the headboard. He looked from her to me. The holy oil bottle had disappeared from her hand somehow.

  “What’s going on, Miriam?”

  Papa’s words tightened the fist at the pit of my stomach. I healed her. I pushed the words to the roof of my mouth and pressed them in place with my tongue. I was ready to force out the truth, but I caught Ma’s eyes on the way back to Papa’s. She shook her head slightly, almost imperceptibly.

  “Nothing. She just woke up this morning when I brought breakfast. Said she felt better.” My words came through clenched teeth. I couldn’t even look on the bed to see whether Ma was nodding her approval.

  “It must have been something that you did, Samuel. I kept hearing your voice praying for me like it was coming through a tunnel.” She finally looked up at Papa, fear quivering right beneath the surface of her words. “You prayed over me, saying healing words. And I followed your voice out. Thank you.”

  I dragged my eyes off the ground to look at her, but her gaze shifted as she lied. Anger blurred the sight of the two of them. Papa looked to me and back at Ma, needing to believe what she was saying, but clearly confused by the rumpled comforter and the darkened oil spot on the carpet near his toe.

  “I healed you?” His incredulous voice rose on the fina
l word. But with each repetition—I healed you; I healed you—he grew more convinced of something he hadn’t done.

  “Praise the Lord!” Papa dropped to his knees next to her.

  The part of me that was supposed to summon anger for him had been lopped off with a dull blade—in its place, all I felt was numbness. But Ma’s betrayal was a new, fresh wound.

  “May I be exc—?” I asked the carpet.

  “Yes,” Ma said before I could finish the question. I wanted to inch away, wanted her to ache with each eternal second it took me to walk to the door. But my body jolted out of the room, and my hand made a glistening trail of oily sweat on the wallpaper as I hobbled down the hallway. When I reached my bedroom door, out of breath, Ma’s voice rode the hallway air—breaking into spaces where I’d yearned to hear it for weeks. I’d wanted to hear it whispering my name when she kissed me in the morning or the inflection in it when she asked me to reread sections of books to her. When I closed my eyes and drank it in, I could pretend that her words—thank you—were directed at me rather than at Papa. If I hadn’t done anything, she’d still be in bed where I found her. As I climbed under the covers in the middle of the day, shivering under my prayer quilt, I wished I’d left her there. As soon as the thought was out, my stomach seized. I was taking credit for something that was in God’s hands—not mine. It was the same thing Papa had done.

  On the bookshelf, a family picture from three years ago stared back at me: I still felt the heat from Caleb’s right hand touching my shoulder, remembered the scratchy feel of my tights as I crossed my legs in the chair. Ma sat next to me in a long dark blue dress that she’d sewn for the occasion. “Act naturally,” the photographer had told us before asking me to tilt my chin in the most unnatural way. The braces on Caleb’s teeth sparkled, and Papa’s golden cross hung suspended from his neck, catching the light from the flashbulb. Hannah, smaller then, hadn’t yet graduated to leg braces and crutches, but she sat in a wheelchair, baby teeth on display for the camera.