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

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