by Monica West
I walked over to the picture; as I swiped arcs into the dusty glass, memories came back. My cheeks were chubbier then, my teeth glinting silver with braces. My long skirt hid the raised scabs on my knees from a fall that I’d suffered on my bike. The scab had sloughed off long ago—in its place, a slick pink hunk of new skin had sprouted.
I lifted the picture in its lacquered frame and released it like a Frisbee—it flew across the room with more force than I intended, crashing into the opposite wall where my homeschool books were squeezed together on the top shelf. Cracked spiderwebs radiated outward from the deepest hole near Papa’s mouth, and a jagged line split his face diagonally. Several pieces of glass came loose, and I pulled on the largest shard in the center. With a small amount of force, it broke off in my hand. I pressed the pointed end into my fingertip; the skin reddened and then split with no protest. This pain was sharp and acute as a line of blood the width of a hair made its slow path down my index finger, stopping briefly at the knuckle before meandering to my palm. My teeth pressed together as I lifted the shard and moved it toward my upper thigh with a shaky hand. It plunged into my flesh—excruciating relief sent my head lolling backward as though I was drunk with too much communion wine. A wavy line above my right kneecap pooled with blood that dripped to the carpet below. The bloody husk of glass fell from my hand with a thud.
The pain subsided for a moment when I removed the glass, and I needed it to hurt more, to displace the anger that swelled inside, but the sight of all the blood made the room swirl. I sidestepped the splatters of red on the carpet as I walked to the bathroom, past the open door where Papa’s stilted voice told Ma everything she had missed. In the bright bathroom light, the cuts gaped until I swiped them with gauze and covered them with Band-Aids.
Back in my room, I stumbled to the window, yanking open the curtains, then sliding the glass up. Cold air buffeted my face as I took one breath and then another, but there still wasn’t enough air in here. There would never be enough. One small push and the plastic frame popped out. I slid out of the bedroom window and landed on the peaked roof before swinging from the gutter and letting go.
A gravitational pull had always drawn me to Micah’s house—after a fight with Caleb or upon returning from revival season, I sank into her beanbag chair while she stared at me with her chin cradled in her hand. My bike tires jerked to the right like they were on autopilot, whizzing past homes whose backyards had housed my best forts and whose treehouses bore my carved initials. Micah’s house rose at the end of a cul-de-sac, and even though we hadn’t really spoken in months, I could feel her fingers on my cuts, her reassuring voice asking me if they hurt.
Bright light from inside her family room leaked onto the driveway as I parked my bike by her steps. I tossed a pebble at her window and listened to its hollow ping against the glass. Closing my eyes, I pictured her bedroom that I knew by heart—when I opened them, Micah’s face was angled down to where I was standing. Her face had slimmed, and she looked older, but she didn’t look like she saw me. I waved my arms, and her eyes finally met mine. But there was no glimmer of recognition, not even a wave. Then the room darkened as she shut her blinds and disappeared.
I swiped at my tears once and then again as I wrenched my bike out of the thicket of bushes and climbed on, unsure of where to go next. A few downward pushes of my pedals dragged me out of her orbit. I couldn’t go home to participate in their lie, so I turned down Mrs. Cade’s street, speeding under the shadow of elms before turning into her driveway.
“I healed her,” I confessed into her blouse when she answered the door.
* * *
The next morning, there was a knock on my bedroom door; it opened before I had a chance to tell whoever it was to come in.
“Morning, Miriam.” Ma closed the door behind her, trapping us in the room together for the first time since the day before. I winced from the cuts as I sat up in bed; she seemed not to notice as she plopped next to my blanketed feet, still ostensibly unaccustomed to moving her body. Her skin was dewy from the shower, and her wet hair was set in pink foam rollers that sprouted all over her head. Her nightgown was freshly washed, and her eyes were clear and wide as she looked over where Hannah was still sleeping. All remnants of the Ma who had been haunting our house since Isaac’s birth were gone: everything except the skin that still hung from her bones like a dress that was too loose.
“We need to talk about yesterday.” On top of the comforter, she moved her hand up my leg, inching ever closer to the deepest cuts. She took several deep breaths before letting them out slowly, methodically. I could imagine her counting as she exhaled the way she always did to calm herself down—one, two. Her expression was inscrutable.
“What have you done?” she finally asked, breaking the silence that had grown thick around us. She’d asked the question of me and Caleb so many times that it almost seemed rhetorical. She would stand in the kitchen with her hands on her hips when the evidence of our mischief—a broken window or a singed tablecloth—was irrefutable. This time, however, her tone demanded an answer.
What does she want me to say? She’d seen the empty bottle of holy oil yesterday. She knew that I’d done what Papa couldn’t.
I shrugged, knowing that wasn’t really an answer. She removed her hand from my leg as her anger rose.
“Miriam. You know what a sin it is. If your father knew…”
“He did know! He saw you in bed all that time and didn’t do anything. What was I supposed to do? Leave you like that forever?”
“Lower your voice.” The words slid between her teeth. Her scared eyes bounced to the closed door and then to Hannah, who hadn’t moved.
“Why are you so worried about him hearing us? Yes, I know what I did was a sin. But it also seems like a sin to know someone is sick and do nothing when you can heal them.”
“Women can’t—”
“Clearly they can, Ma. And maybe Papa’s been telling us that all along to make himself feel better about—”
She held a flattened hand out to me. “Don’t finish that sentence.”
“Just because I don’t say it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You know as well as I do that he hasn’t been healing people.”
The faces of the other people that I had healed jumbled in front of my eyes, with Ma’s face now joining the group. I didn’t want to tell her about the rest of them, to have her pollute everything I’d done by calling it sin. I swallowed their names.
“And now he thinks he healed you. Why did you make me lie to him?”
“He’s been having a hard time.” Her angry gaze softened as she looked at her lap. “He needs some good news.” She pinched the daisies on her flannel nightgown as though she were trying to pluck them from soft earth.
“You’ve been having a hard time too, Ma.” I remembered the way she had tried not to wake us when she came downstairs with her suitcase, the resigned look that settled on her face as she stepped back into the house, the way that she couldn’t even look at the street as her sister drove away. “I want to show you something.”
She looked up at me with eyes that were softer than they had been when she came inside. I slid out from beneath the comforter, careful not to jostle her, and took stiff steps to the closet door. My cuts oozed and reopened with each movement, and I focused on my breathing to ignore the pain. The closet doors bowed toward me, and I hefted her suitcase from where I’d stowed it in December. It felt heavier now than it did then. Ma watched me as I brought it to the bed and set it at our feet like a time capsule. The zipper snagged on something as though reluctant to expose what was inside. When it finally lay open in front of us, piles of folded clothes seemed like they were castoffs from a different life. Jeans I didn’t even know Ma owned with tank tops that she’d never be allowed to wear—all of them with tags attached. Nothing was strewn inside or packed in a hurry—the bag had been packed for a while.
Ma crouched in front of the suitcase and sorted through the clothes with jerky move
ments, as though with every bend of her joints she was reminding her limbs how to move. She sifted through the orderly piles—holding each garment to her nose and breathing it in. In the middle of the clothing was a photo of me and Caleb kneeling on either side of Hannah’s wheelchair with our arms tossed around one another’s shoulders. She had opted for that photo of the three of us instead of the many others that had Papa in them.
“Were you really going to do it?”
She sorted through clothes and objects, running her fingers around the circular edges of buttons; I thought she didn’t hear me and was about to ask my question again when she looked up at me and nodded.
“I am so sorry.”
“What about us? About me? You were going to leave me here?”
“I know that makes me the worst mother in the world, but I couldn’t take it anymore. It was selfish, I know that, and I should have taken you with me. You and Hannah. But all I could think was that I had to get out.”
“And I made you stay.”
Instead of an answer, she turned her attention to refolding the clothes and placing them back in the suitcase.
“Can I leave it in here?” she asked.
“Sure. You know where it is in case—”
She pressed her index finger against my lips, silencing the rest of my answer. “If there is a next time, I’ll take you with me. I promise. I’ll never leave you behind…”
As her voice trailed, I thought about what it would feel like to get in the back seat of her sister’s car and leave this house behind. Ma was motionless beside me, a pile of unfolded clothes on her lap. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
Papa called to us from downstairs that breakfast was ready. His voice jolted us, and Ma lost her balance as she tried to stand up too quickly. Clothes spilled off her lap as she reached down to steady herself, and I grabbed her hand that was planted on the carpet.
“What are you going to tell him? About the healing.” I’d never thought I could say it so freely to her, but now I had something on her too.
“I can’t tell him anything.”
“You can’t tell him that I healed you?”
“Honey.” She cupped my face, and I let it go heavy in her hand. She was still the same Ma, albeit a little weaker, with sunken cheeks and dark bags underneath sadder eyes. “You know I can’t.”
“You can do whatever you want.”
“I know you think that I can, Miriam, but I can’t. That’s not what you want to hear, that your mom is a disappointment, but it’s the truth.” She exhaled a deep sigh that made her cough.
“You’re not a disappointment, Ma. I promise.” But she was right. I hoped she couldn’t see the way her heavy words were collapsing my shoulders. But that thought was followed by the memory of the bruises I saw when I washed her: the price she had already paid for standing up to him.
“I knew you’d understand,” she said, kissing my cheek. “Now let’s get to breakfast.”
She was so quick to shift—to become the woman Papa needed her to be rather than the mother I so desperately craved. For once I wanted her to choose my needs over his.
“I’ll get Hannah up and meet you downstairs,” I said. As she walked to the door, I hefted the suitcase back onto the shelf. When the closet was finally closed, hiding any evidence that she’d ever tried to leave, I woke up Hannah and carried her downstairs.
“Look who’s awake!” Papa gestured in my direction with a spatula when Hannah and I rounded the corner into the kitchen. He was wearing Ma’s apron, the one that she always let me wear when I helped with dinner.
I dug my nails into the underside of the table until they bent as Papa delivered the breakfast of scrambled eggs, wavy strips of crisp bacon, and miniature stacks of pancakes on two outstretched arms. Papa served himself last and took a seat at the head of the table.
“Let us pray,” he announced.
With red arcs forming in my nail beds, I reached for Hannah’s smooth fist.
“Lord, I want to thank You for delivering Your child Joanne from demons and darkness. Let her continue to grow in strength in the coming days and weeks. Thank You for Your faithfulness to this family. Thank You for the healing powers that You continue to renew within me. Let me remain an instrument of Your holy will. Amen.”
He had been pretending for so long that he had convinced himself he had actually done it. Or maybe he thought her healing had restored something he had lost long ago. He had to know that it wasn’t him. It hadn’t been him for a long time. Saying the thing I’d wanted to tell him since Bethel meant that I would betray Ma, and I couldn’t sacrifice her like that. I couldn’t bear to know that the hollow thumps on her body later would be my fault. But wasn’t the fact that she was sitting with us, letting him think that he healed her, betraying me?
“Amen,” I grumbled.
My stomach was an aching maw, yet I couldn’t bring myself to eat. As I watched him from across the table, his posture already taller, I didn’t know if I could keep the lie anymore, even though I had just promised Ma that I would. I didn’t want to break her trust, but wasn’t she the one who always said that secrets were only heavy until you released them? Maybe she could forgive me when it was all said and done. When she could see how different life could be when he knew the truth. I tried to make eye contact with her, to give her a hint of what I didn’t want to do—to her and to me—but what I had to do to save us.
“Papa? What makes you so sure?”
“Sure about what?”
“That you were the one to heal her.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He started cutting his pancakes; he had one triangle raised to his open mouth as a sticky line of syrup hung over the plate. My heart quickened at his dismissal, and at how much I wanted to tell him about what I’d said to Ma upstairs. If I could find the right combination of words, the consequences wouldn’t be on her. The sin had been mine, so the punishment would be mine too. Maybe I could make Papa see that.
Next to Papa, Ma pretended to be focused on the food. Papa had done a good job conditioning her all these years. She was compliant. Subservient. But as much as it pained me to think about, Ma had almost worked up the courage to leave him. I could be brave, too. And I couldn’t see how things at home could get much worse. So I closed my eyes and focused on breathing before letting the words spill out of me.
“You didn’t heal her. Like the guy in Bethel.”
A chair pushed back across from me—Papa’s chair. “What did you just say to me?” Somehow he’d moved from the other side of the table, and now he was standing over me. Spittle shot onto my plate as the words flew out of his mouth. “What did you just say? Who do you think you are?”
The same vein that bulged in his neck in Bethel was jumping beneath his skin, and as he repeated his questions—“What did you say? Who do you think you are?”—Caleb appeared by his side. Caleb’s hands pulled at Papa’s fists that were raised above me, and Papa strained against Caleb’s strength. The edges of the room turned black, but everything in front of me—the brown table and the eggshell walls and the gleaming silver of the refrigerator—came into sharper focus. Hannah’s shouting was the high note above everything else, and her rocking back and forth next to me in the chaos made the room materialize again: the hard floor under my feet, the table beneath my hands, my knees knocking against the table even though I didn’t remember getting up.
“How dare you? Of course I healed her.”
“Calm down, Samuel.” Ma was standing next to him with her hands on his shoulders, gently guiding him back to his chair.
“What are you doing?” Caleb mouthed at me.
I shook my head—my body was acting before my mind caught up. The man we were all terrified of looked so small in the chair.
“So if I didn’t heal her, who did?” he scoffed.
Ma looked at me, her eyes pleading for me not to open my mouth. This will be better, I wanted to tell her. I promise.
“I did.�
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A loud cough sent flecks of chewed pancake across the table. “Don’t be silly,” Papa said after he resumed breathing normally. He exaggerated every movement of taking a bite: opening his mouth wider than normal, inching the fork closer to the gap between his teeth, clamping down hard on the fork’s tines.
“She’s not the only one. I’ve healed other people too.”
I hadn’t planned to tell him about the others; saying it out loud poisoned the sacred bond of those private healings, defiled the trust they had placed in me. Papa’s expression morphed from feigned nonchalance to disbelief and then anger before landing on scorn. With pinched fingers, he removed his glasses from the bridge of his nose and laid them in front of his plate.
“You’ve done what?”
“Before Ma, I healed a few other people. Mostly people in the church, but some others too.” My heart rose to my throat as soon as I said it, but I straightened as the words tumbled out louder and faster, gaining strength like a storm.
Papa’s head was between his hands, his fingers pressing against his temples. No one else moved.
“Go to your room,” Papa’s voice seethed.
I left my breakfast untouched and stormed out of the kitchen and up the stairs before flopping onto my bed. Why did Papa insist that this spiritual gift that was no longer his could never be mine? The thoughts faded as I heard his feet on the steps—before I could brace myself, he was in my bedroom.
He stood in the doorway and unbuckled his belt—then he wrapped it into a fat coil around the middle of his hand, the silver buckle lost somewhere in his palm. Errant pieces of thread poked from the seams as he gripped the loose end of the belt until the taut leather strap snapped the air between his hands.
“You are no healer, Miriam.” Another snap of the belt in the middle of his words made me shudder. He wanted me to agree with him, but I couldn’t. With his socked left heel, he kicked the door closed behind him. The belt swung backward on an arc as Papa said it again. “You are no healer, Miriam.”