Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

was another girl after that—Suzette—who made her request as I snuck to the bathroom, away from Papa’s presence but still within earshot of the loudspeaker booming his words about obedience and submission. Papa would have wanted me to turn them away, would have struck me in the face if he knew what I was doing. So I kept my secret from him, from all of them, as I moved away from the danger of the main sanctuary for the later healings. I healed Nadia of her psoriasis by the sink in a locked bathroom while erratic knocks interrupted us from outside. Suzette’s migraines were harder—we were crowded in the closet of the claustrophobic annex where Micah had passed out. At the end of each healing, when I saw double and they reeled in front of me, I told them to say that Papa had done it if anyone asked.

Later the night of Suzette’s healing, I lay awake in bed, the words that had declared her migraines a thing of the past wet on my lips. A hollow in my stomach felt like hunger, but it couldn’t have been, since I’d just devoured Ma’s fried chicken—the ravenousness a new side effect of healing that Ma, as she scooped me another helping of corn, chalked up to growing pains.

Outside the open window, a baby’s plaintive cry caught the night wind and entered my room—its boldness a reminder that Isaiah had never had the chance to cry. I conjured him back. No one knew I had touched him as he passed from Papa to the paramedics, had felt the curve of his swollen belly that never ate, had traced the edges of his mute, open mouth. My hand had fallen to my side at that moment, not expecting the rubbery coldness of his scentless skin, but I could have kept it there and whispered a prayer over him then, tracing a dry sign of the cross over his eyes that probably would have been deep brown and pensive—like Caleb’s—if only they had opened.

ELEVEN

Ma pulled the Advent calendar—the same one we’d had since I was a baby—out of a tattered box marked “Christmas.” The calendar’s twenty-four tiny cardboard doors didn’t shut anymore, prematurely exposing that day’s Scripture and gift of mangers, Jesus figurines, and nativity scenes. Caleb, Hannah, and I stood in a semicircle around her as she placed it on the mantel; this once-breezy gesture, now laborious for Ma, officially marked the beginning of Christmas season. Only this year, it was almost two weeks late.

Ma made up for the missing nightly Advent celebrations by pouring four mugs of hot chocolate that we sat around the table to drink. Hannah wore a foamy mustache when she pulled her lips out of the mug, and we laughed until there was a thud upstairs. Our laughter came to an abrupt end as Ma padded up the steps. A minute later, the silence was shattered by a shriek.

Caleb placed his palms on the table and jumped up. Then another scream came, more chilling than the first. He looked over at me, his pupils contracting into periods.

“What’s he doing up there?” His voice broke and spilled over as he asked the obvious question. Another scream shot to the first floor. Before I could answer him, he jerked away from the table, knocking the chair to the ground. He must have taken the stairs two at a time because seconds after he left, muffled footfalls pounded above me. I fingered the whorls in the table’s fake wood grain as the bedroom door flung open, glad he was going up to help Ma, but wondering where all of this concern had been when Papa had hurt me in the hallway a few weeks ago.

After some minutes passed, Caleb’s heavy footsteps were on the stairs with Ma’s trailing behind a few seconds later. Needing something to do, I jumped from the table and dumped half-full mugs of tepid hot chocolate into the sink, steeling myself to face her when she rounded the corner. Then she was behind me, as close as she had been when we were dancing. She reached around—startling me with her touch—and pulled the mugs from my sopping hands before laying them at the bottom of the sink. I dropped my head and watched the water wash the brown away until Ma shut off the tap.

I blinked back tears as I turned around; she angled the left side of her face away from me, even though the visible right side was caked with layers of foundation. Caleb was in front of her now too, pinning her in place with a wide stance. With the gentlest grip, he turned her chin so he could see the side that she was trying to hide.

“It looks worse than it is.” Tears clogged her throat as she spoke. She pulled her face away from him and winced. I didn’t know why she was explaining something to him that he had just seen. Before he could respond, she pushed her way between us and walked toward the cupboard, jangling pots and pans for a dinner that was hours away. We followed her as she pulled out a cutting board and started chopping an onion—the repetitive motion of the blade against the hard plastic surface blunted the edge of Caleb’s repeated questions. “What’s going on? How long has he been doing this?”

She looked over at me. Tell him, I told her with my eyes, nodding to punctuate the point. I put my arm around her waist; she was as close to confessing as she had ever been.

“Things have been hard on your father,” she began. Hannah had been playing at the table; she stopped moving when Ma spoke. “He doesn’t mean it. He just can’t control himself.”

Caleb’s mouth got wider as he tried to make sense of how the man who he had placed next to God was capable of such brutality. I thought back to the day behind