Revival Season - Monica West (10 ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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