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

hallway was a closed door, which Mrs. Cade opened without knocking.

The howl in the room swirled around us. Mrs. Cade rushed to a lump on the ground. She leaned her ear close to the mummified frame that barely moved. For a moment, they were one still form. I kept my back close to the door as I waited for my heart’s audible thumping to slow.

“Get me towels and water. Now.” I rushed out of the bedroom—the foreign hallways churned as I stumbled through them, eventually getting to the kitchen and turning on a teakettle. While the water boiled, I flung open cabinet doors until a stack of towels at eye level greeted me in the linen closet. A scream through the closed door stilled the entire house.

“Miriam!” Mrs. Cade yelled when the screaming subsided. Her voice shook.

When I got back, the light was on. The room smelled damp—like copper and sweat—and the lump that I had seen before showed itself to be a woman who Mrs. Cade must have helped onto the bed. A sticky puddle stained the sheets, but I hadn’t heard Mrs. Cade telling her to push. I clutched the towels to my chest and walked closer to them—in Mrs. Cade’s cupped hands was something small and blue.

“Is she breathing?” the woman screamed.

Mrs. Cade placed a bulb in the baby’s mouth and squeezed before pulling it out. Thick, gummy strings came out with the bulb, but the baby remained silent. Mrs. Cade swiped at her bag and pulled out an oxygen mask that she placed over the baby’s mouth. The baby’s stomach rose and collapsed violently each time Mrs. Cade pumped the mask, but her eyes stayed closed.

I dropped to my knees in a warm pool of fluid next to the bed. With two trembling fingers, I reached out to touch the baby’s clammy forehead and closed my eyes, shutting out the mother’s primal screams and shaking away the images of Isaiah’s face. My secret would be out once I did it, but I couldn’t watch this baby die. I would just have to suffer whatever Mrs. Cade had to say to me—what sins she said I had committed—when it was all over. There would be no going back.

“Lord, touch and heal this child of Yours. Bring air into her lungs and breathe life into her body. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are healed.”

As I traced a sign of the cross on the baby’s head, the room fell away in pieces. It was just me and the baby as pain radiated from my hand and curled behind my eyes. As the air was being sucked from my lungs, the baby’s forehead scalded my hand, and I pulled it away, falling to the floor with my body throbbing and tiny gasps of air coming out of my mouth. I felt every splinter of the hardwood floor beneath me, the rough loops of the rug’s fiber, then nothing.

Bright blue walls and the sound of a siren in the distance. I closed my eyes and kept my cheek in a pool of sweat on the floor, even as the screaming ambulance split my head open. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I pushed myself to a seated position.

“How are you feeling?” Mrs. Cade’s voice was a yell, and the mug of tea that she held in front of my face swam in my watery eyes. I wanted to respond, wanted to ask her about the mother and her baby, but my throat was sandpaper. Mrs. Cade balled the linens on the empty bed and tossed them into the corner of the room.

“What happened?” The words burned.

“The ambulance just took them away. The baby started breathing on her own right before you passed out. They say she will be fine.”

Mrs. Cade’s eyes were wide with recognition as she squatted in front of me and placed the mug to my parched lips. The liquid scorched my throat, but I stared into the mug with each sip, unable to glance at Mrs. Cade, who had taken a seat next to me. When I finally looked over, her gnarled hand was a tree root on my thigh.

“How long?”

“Didn’t you hear me in the car? The past several months, since Bethel.” Each word took more wind out, and I paused for a few breaths.

“I’m not talking about your father anymore. I’m talking about you. This wasn’t your first healing. How long have you been doing it?”

Mrs. Cade slid from my side and crouched in front of me, her hands, still warm from the mug of tea, pressed against the sides of my face the way they always did on Sunday mornings. I tried to look away, knowing that whatever I said now couldn’t be unsaid. And even though Mrs. Cade was on my side, had always been, Papa had ways of finding anything out.

“Not long enough.” The flecks of tea in the bottom of the mug rearranged themselves into shapes—a tree, a cloud, a star—that I stared at to keep the tears at bay.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why couldn’t I do it last time?”

“Last time when?”

“With Isaiah.”

At the mention of his name, my hand shot to my mouth. We were forbidden from saying it at home, as though not saying it meant that we would forget about him. Mrs. Cade reached out a hand.

“Let me take you home. But we’re going to talk on the way back.”

In the car, I told her about Micah, Dawn, Nadia, and Suzette. She kept her eyes on the road the entire time as the words flowed out of me. Words that she promised not to repeat to anyone. The blinker flickered in the darkness as we drifted off the highway and decelerated; my words vanished the closer we got to the house, and the car filled with silence.

“Do you mind if we take a detour?” Mrs. Cade asked.

Before I could answer, she made a left in the darkness when we should have made