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

kept hearing your voice praying for me like it was coming through a tunnel.” She finally looked up at Papa, fear quivering right beneath the surface of her words. “You prayed over me, saying healing words. And I followed your voice out. Thank you.”

I dragged my eyes off the ground to look at her, but her gaze shifted as she lied. Anger blurred the sight of the two of them. Papa looked to me and back at Ma, needing to believe what she was saying, but clearly confused by the rumpled comforter and the darkened oil spot on the carpet near his toe.

“I healed you?” His incredulous voice rose on the final word. But with each repetition—I healed you; I healed you—he grew more convinced of something he hadn’t done.

“Praise the Lord!” Papa dropped to his knees next to her.

The part of me that was supposed to summon anger for him had been lopped off with a dull blade—in its place, all I felt was numbness. But Ma’s betrayal was a new, fresh wound.

“May I be exc—?” I asked the carpet.

“Yes,” Ma said before I could finish the question. I wanted to inch away, wanted her to ache with each eternal second it took me to walk to the door. But my body jolted out of the room, and my hand made a glistening trail of oily sweat on the wallpaper as I hobbled down the hallway. When I reached my bedroom door, out of breath, Ma’s voice rode the hallway air—breaking into spaces where I’d yearned to hear it for weeks. I’d wanted to hear it whispering my name when she kissed me in the morning or the inflection in it when she asked me to reread sections of books to her. When I closed my eyes and drank it in, I could pretend that her words—thank you—were directed at me rather than at Papa. If I hadn’t done anything, she’d still be in bed where I found her. As I climbed under the covers in the middle of the day, shivering under my prayer quilt, I wished I’d left her there. As soon as the thought was out, my stomach seized. I was taking credit for something that was in God’s hands—not mine. It was the same thing Papa had done.

On the bookshelf, a family picture from three years ago stared back at me: I still felt the heat from Caleb’s right hand touching my shoulder, remembered the scratchy feel of my tights as I crossed my legs in the chair. Ma sat next to me in a long dark blue dress that she’d sewn for the occasion. “Act naturally,” the photographer had told us before asking me to tilt my chin in the most unnatural way. The braces on Caleb’s teeth sparkled, and Papa’s golden cross hung suspended from his neck, catching the light from the flashbulb. Hannah, smaller then, hadn’t yet graduated to leg braces and crutches, but she sat in a wheelchair, baby teeth on display for the camera.

I walked over to the picture; as I swiped arcs into the dusty glass, memories came back. My cheeks were chubbier then, my teeth glinting silver with braces. My long skirt hid the raised scabs on my knees from a fall that I’d suffered on my bike. The scab had sloughed off long ago—in its place, a slick pink hunk of new skin had sprouted.

I lifted the picture in its lacquered frame and released it like a Frisbee—it flew across the room with more force than I intended, crashing into the opposite wall where my homeschool books were squeezed together on the top shelf. Cracked spiderwebs radiated outward from the deepest hole near Papa’s mouth, and a jagged line split his face diagonally. Several pieces of glass came loose, and I pulled on the largest shard in the center. With a small amount of force, it broke off in my hand. I pressed the pointed end into my fingertip; the skin reddened and then split with no protest. This pain was sharp and acute as a line of blood the width of a hair made its slow path down my index finger, stopping briefly at the knuckle before meandering to my palm. My teeth pressed together as I lifted the shard and moved it toward my upper thigh with a shaky hand. It plunged into my flesh—excruciating relief sent my head lolling backward as though I was drunk with too much communion wine. A wavy line above my right kneecap pooled with blood that dripped to the carpet below. The bloody husk of glass fell from my hand with a thud.

The pain subsided for a moment when I removed the glass, and I needed it to hurt more, to displace the anger that swelled inside, but the sight of all the blood made the room swirl. I sidestepped the splatters of red on the carpet as I walked to the bathroom, past the open door where Papa’s stilted voice told Ma everything she had missed. In the bright bathroom light, the cuts gaped until I swiped them with gauze and covered them with Band-Aids.

Back in my room, I stumbled to the window, yanking open the curtains, then sliding the glass up. Cold air buffeted my face as I took one breath and then another, but there still wasn’t enough air in here. There would never be enough. One small push and the plastic frame popped out. I slid out of the bedroom window and landed on the peaked roof before swinging from the gutter and letting go.

A gravitational pull had always drawn me to Micah’s house—after a fight with Caleb or upon returning from revival season, I sank into her beanbag chair while she stared at me with her chin cradled in her hand. My bike tires jerked to the right like they were on autopilot, whizzing past homes whose backyards had housed my best forts and whose treehouses bore my carved initials. Micah’s house rose at