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

bed, the mattress coils gave under the weight of my hands, and I pulled myself up on shaky legs. As soon as I got to my feet, pain flashed behind my eyes, and I cowered on the carpet. I tried to push myself up again but fell to the ground. The open bottle of holy oil was lying on the floor by the bedside table, spilling its contents onto the beige carpet. My eyes scraped against my eyelids as I tried to open them, and spots speckled the room where shapes had previously appeared.

“Ma,” I said gently, touching the bed where her shoulder should have been.

She slowly turned her head toward me, and her eyes took me in.

“Hi, Ma,” I whispered. I’d hoped that something more profound would come out after all this time: how much I’d missed her, how the house hadn’t been the same without her. But my head throbbed, and it was getting harder to stay on my feet. I leaned against the side of her bed to keep from falling. The room came back into focus: the family picture on the bureau, the hope chest by the foot of the bed.

Ma slid to the edge of the mattress and put her feet on the carpet, inching ever closer to me. She tried to stand up, but her legs, wobbly from disuse, buckled under her weight. As she slumped back on the bed, the sodden sheets that had been covering her fell away, revealing bony legs and a shoulder blade that jutted out beneath a thin scrap of skin. Eventually, I crossed the inches it took to sit beside her.

In her lap, she turned her hands from their palms to the backs and then over again; she blinked with each slight motion, as though snatches of memory were replaying themselves on the insides of her eyelids. Every few seconds, her head shook like she was reliving Papa’s fist coming at her, knocking her to the ground—next to Isaac’s birth, it was probably the last thing she remembered before she’d gotten sick.

“Ma?” I touched her shoulder.

She jumped as though only now realizing that I was sitting next to her. Her disoriented eyes landed on my face, squinting like someone who was adjusting to the light after being in a dark room.

“Miriam?” Her voice was gravelly and worn. “What did you do?”

Papa’s partial smile and hooded eyes stared back at me from the other side of a dusty family picture on the dresser. I couldn’t say it under his gaze, hadn’t said it to anyone except Mrs. Cade. Ma looked down at the carpet by her feet, at the plastic bottle and the slick of holy oil.

“Miriam.” She spoke again—an answer to her own question. She reached down and grabbed the holy oil—her balance pitching her too far forward before she caught herself and straightened. She pinched the flattened bottle and brought it close to her face like it was something foreign, even though we had filled them together for years. I stiffened next to her in anticipation of her anger at my sin and closed my eyes to shield myself against her yells. Her breath quickened as her shoulders rose and fell next to my stillness.

“I know I wasn’t supposed to, but he wasn’t going to do anything to help you. He was just going to let you stay sick.” I spat out the words without pausing to take a breath.

Ma was about to answer when I heard a car pull up in the driveway. A minute later, the front door flew open—Papa’s meeting must have ended early. I heard him calling my name on the first floor as Isaac started to cry. Loud footsteps bounded up the stairs two at a time—in an instant, Papa appeared in the doorway.

I winced and pushed myself to a standing position from the tangle of Ma’s limbs and sheets. I held his gaze, even as his eyes bounced around the cluttered room before finally landing on Ma and me. Me, standing a little too tall, my posture overcompensating for the fact that Ma was still seated. She had turned her face to meet Papa’s, her neck at an unnatural angle, her eyes a hunted animal’s.

“What’s going on here?”

He rushed over to her before I could answer—his loud voice ringing in my ears—but he stopped short of sitting next to her. His looming presence blocked the light as he crouched by her face and touched her head with a gesture that wasn’t tender at all. As his hand lay against her forehead, he stared in her eyes, but it didn’t look like he was trying to see if she was better—it seemed like he was gauging the limits of her memory. He’d had over a month to rehearse an apology—it should have been out of his mouth when he got to the door and saw that she was sitting up in bed for the first time since Isaac’s birth. But I could count Papa’s apologies on one hand, and by the time he stood up again and dropped his palm from her forehead, I knew that this wouldn’t be one of them.

“What’s going on?” he asked again.

Ma tried to stammer an excuse as she scooted away from him and toward the headboard. He looked from her to me. The holy oil bottle had disappeared from her hand somehow.

“What’s going on, Miriam?”

Papa’s words tightened the fist at the pit of my stomach. I healed her. I pushed the words to the roof of my mouth and pressed them in place with my tongue. I was ready to force out the truth, but I caught Ma’s eyes on the way back to Papa’s. She shook her head slightly, almost imperceptibly.

“Nothing. She just woke up this morning when I brought breakfast. Said she felt better.” My words came through clenched teeth. I couldn’t even look on the bed to see whether Ma was nodding her approval.

“It must have been something that you did, Samuel. I