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

stopped moving in a small space of gravel, but my head bounced like I was still tumbling down the hill. As I tried to push myself up, rocks bit into the soft flesh of my palms. My throat wanted to cry out, but it felt like hands were pressing on my chest each time I drew a breath. A sharp pain started in my knee and shot all the way up the rest of my leg. I lay on my back as the stars reeled and a new sheet of darkness fell over my eyes.

SIXTEEN

I heard someone breathing next to me as I peeled the left side of my face from a sticky pool and placed my forearms in the gravel, trying to turn my body to see who had found me. As I moved, the blinding pain that pulsed through my chest and my leg made me curl back into a ball.

“Why were you running from me? You’re okay now. Don’t move.” Caleb. Was he the person who had been chasing me? I watched his fingers pressing my forearm as a way to reassure me, but I couldn’t feel the touch. Then the muted sound of dialing on his cell phone, the sharp rise of fear in his words as he tried to describe generic landmarks around us—a hill, a lake, a dense patch of woods. He stayed on the phone, his left hand on my arm, until a distant siren interrupted him and got closer. Soon a red light pulsated, punctuated by flashes of blue.

“She’s down here.” His dress shoes ran away from me, and I tried to get him to stay, but I couldn’t speak or move. When he came back, someone was with him, inching closer to me, but I still couldn’t move my head to see a face.

I floated away from the scene until the paramedic pulled me back into my body by strapping me to a gurney that clattered into the back of the ambulance. I didn’t let Caleb’s hand go—or maybe it was him not letting mine go—even as they loaded me inside. Throughout the whole ride, Caleb held tight, his forehead pressed against the spiderweb pattern of dried blood on my hand. I wanted to play the squeezing game—one squeeze firmer than the previous one until someone relented. I squeezed once, but he didn’t squeeze back. When the ambulance bumped to a stop, his voice—no louder than a whisper—was praying. I slid into darkness again.

Beep beep beep. The sounds snaked their way into my ears that felt like they had been stuffed with cotton. My right leg was immobilized in a splint, and I tried to wiggle my toes, but my brain didn’t seem to connect to the rest of my body, and my legs stayed still above the thin sheets.

In the din of noise, the glass doors wheezed open to the nurse’s station, visible through the gap in the curtain next to my bed. A frazzled Ma, still wearing the same dress from revival the previous night, rushed over to the desk. I could hear her frantic voice but couldn’t make out her words. A few seconds later, she entered my room holding Isaac in one arm, with Hannah and Caleb a few steps behind. No Papa.

I lurched in bed at the sight of Hannah, wanting to rush to her side and take her into my arms—to kiss her face and tell her that I was sorry about the night before, that I was sorry for thinking that she wasn’t whole, that she needed fixing. But before I could say anything, Papa rushed into the room. He had assumed all types of expressions in the pulpit—anger, rage, joy—but never the unvarnished fear that I saw now.

Soon they were all next to my bed in a cluster—Ma looked frail as she stood above me, the belt of her dress hanging loosely from her waist like an afterthought. She spit out questions rapid-fire: “What were you doing? Where did you go? Where does it hurt? What happened last night?” They came out so quickly that when I tried to answer one, the next one replaced it. I gave up speaking. She touched every inch of my face and looked at me as though she were seeing my features—the moles on my cheeks that I’d inherited from her, the steep arch of my bushy eyebrows, my stubby eyelashes—for the first time. She was extra gentle on the scratches and bruises, as though her touch could magically put me back together. Then she kissed everywhere that she touched, finishing with my cheek. Hannah didn’t move—her eyes were fixed on my leg. I patted the mattress next to me and told her it was okay, but she stayed put, even as Caleb nudged her forward.

“Are you Mr. and Mrs. Horton?” The doctor who had been bobbing around the periphery of my room came back and stood next to my bed. “I’m Dr. Reynolds, the ER attending.” He held out his hand to shake, then he looked around at my siblings before taking Ma and Papa outside to talk. Through the partition, I heard Dr. Reynolds say that I had a cracked rib that would heal on its own, but that I needed surgery to repair a fractured leg. As I sighed into the pillow and blankets, pain radiated to every part of my body.

When they came back inside, Papa stayed on the outskirts of my family’s semicircle—he looked me over once, as if he were verifying that I was alive—but he didn’t say anything to me as the orderlies dressed in blue came to wheel me to the operating room. Everyone else stayed in the room except for Ma. She walked down the hallway with me—her left hand holding mine. Her hand tightened as we rounded one corner and then another. The bed stopped by a final set of double doors.

“This is the end of the line, Mrs. Horton. You