by Monica West
She blinked slowly. Once and then twice. Her eyes took in the room, the towels on the rack, and me standing next to her. Removing my hand from her mouth, I stepped away from her and pressed my back against the wall, sliding to the floor. My raised knees were the only thing separating us as she inhabited her skin again. She looked at the open pouch of testing paraphernalia on her legs like she’d forgotten what had just happened.
“I was healed for a bit, wasn’t I?” Her thin voice brimmed with desperation.
Part of it had been real, hadn’t it? There could be no denying that I had felt something that day in the annex and so had she. And for the past five weeks, she had been healed. But now, the thing that she feared so much, that I didn’t realize I was afraid of until now, had happened. Had Micah even been healed at all? Would it have been a healing if Jesus put mud on the blind man’s eyes only for his blindness to return? Or if the leper’s newly smooth skin erupted back into scabs and scarred flesh? Did Papa also harbor these fears—that behind every healing was the possibility of a tumor metastasizing, abnormal cells splitting during a pregnancy, a relapse?
My impotent hands hugged my knees as I waited for a feeling of relief to settle in. I had never meant to heal Micah, was never supposed to have the ability to heal her, so this should have been good news. It meant that everything could go back to normal. But even as I’d told myself that it hadn’t worked, that women like me weren’t allowed to heal, I’d wanted to be wrong.
“Wasn’t I healed?” she asked again. My eyes traced her pigeon toes before moving up over her bent knees and to her chin that was resting against her folded arms.
“I think so.”
“It felt so good to not have to prick my finger.” Her voice floated away as she spoke. “I guess I always knew it would come back. I was afraid of it.”
“I’m so sorry you’re sick again, Micah. I really wanted you to be healed.”
“Me too.” The words had barely left her mouth before heavy, racking sobs filled the room. I stood up and bent over to put my arms around her. She curled her body into mine as I stroked the oiled spaces of scalp between her orderly cornrows.
“Can I be alone for a bit?” she said when my knees cramped from crouching beside her. Every joint ached as I stood up and walked toward the door.
“I’ll see you back downstairs.”
“Miriam,” she eked out at the crest of another sob. “Don’t say anything to your dad.”
EIGHT
The night before the first healing service, Ma, Hannah, and I sat at the table with orderly rows of small white bottles between us. Forty was the magic number of bottles to fill—the same number of days and nights that Moses was on the mountain with God. Ma looked at me from the other side of a thin, gold ribbon of oil that flowed from the industrial-size bottle of Crisco into the smaller bottles.
There was no special ceremony as we filled each bottle, stopping when they were about three-quarters of the way full. I wondered if the people who lined up for healing knew that the cross Papa traced on their heads was really Crisco. Papa said that the power came from the prayer, not the oil.
Wordlessly, Ma and I finished and placed the bottles into the cardboard box that Papa would take to church with him tomorrow. Before Bethel, Ma and I used to play a game where we guessed who would be healed by this oil. A woman with cancer, I sometimes offered. An older man with arthritis, she would say. But I was too busy thinking about Bethel to bring up the game.
“That’s forty,” Ma said as she folded the box’s cardboard flaps closed. She drummed her fingers on the lid like there was more to say. At the table, Hannah lifted the bottle of vegetable oil in front of her face. She shook her head, perhaps in disbelief that the table and chairs could look so distorted behind the viscous yellow substance, or perhaps she thought that there was magic in the liquid somehow.
Later that night, I heard three soft raps on my door. Before I could answer, Ma slipped into the crack that let the light in. She approached my bed with her arms behind her back—a sly smile spreading across her face as she presented the newest library book on outstretched palms. She hadn’t come for our secret reading sessions since Bethel, and the fact that she was back meant that things had returned to a semblance of normalcy. I put my prayer journal on my nightstand and straightened in bed, holding her elbow as she climbed over me. She’d been slowing down more now than during her pregnancy with Isaiah, but I tossed the thought aside.
“Look what I have,” she whispered, her eyes darting to where Hannah was sleeping a few feet away. “It’s the one that you requested a couple months ago. It just came in.” I held the cellophane wrapper and fingered the embossed letters on the cover. Song of Solomon. It crinkled open and I pressed my nose against the new pages. Even though we were surrounded by books at home—Bibles in multiple translations and biblical commentaries—those books weren’t mine. And though I loved the stories of Miriam, Moses, Deborah, and Esther, the books that I got with Ma from the library were different. It felt good to try on lives that weren’t mine, lives that didn’t involve traveling every summer. I fell in love on those pages and felt the ache of heartbreak that I’d never experienced.
“When did you get it?” A pang of jealousy rose in my throat, and my words came out more accusatory than I intended. The library was a place we went together when Papa was at the church for trustee meetings. Under the guise of getting more Christian books to replenish the homeschool baskets in our basement, we always chose one secular book that we hid in the middle of the larger stack to read late at night. The title of this one made things easier, though—if Papa saw it, he would never suspect that it wasn’t about the Bible.
“Let’s read a couple of pages,” she said. “We have some time.” She glanced at her watch as I slid closer to the nightstand to give her more room.
In the puddle of light from the desk lamp, I read aloud, letting my tongue taste words that Papa could never know I was reading. I felt the slip of Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings on my bare arms, imagining his leap to his death and the way his stomach must have plunged to his feet on the way down. Ma leaned her head into my shoulder and nodded with pride when I read words like bereft and transfixed—and in an instant, I was five again, only this time her finger wasn’t dragging beneath letters on the page, bouncing each b or releasing a tiny spit stream with each p. And since she wouldn’t read these books aloud herself, she got some joy at hearing me tell her about a life that she had once lived. A life I never had.
My face grew warm as I read about Macon undressing his wife, Ruth, and my words halted.
“Did you fall in love before him?” I asked the wall. I crossed my legs to quell the tingle in my crotch that rose when I thought about Jason Campbell, but the feeling dissipated soon thereafter when I remembered Papa’s withering gaze.
Ma paused for a minute, seeming to weigh whether to answer me. “My first love was when I was twelve. He was my next-door neighbor. Curtis.” His name was closer to a giggle than a word when it came out of her mouth.
“Anyone else?”
“There were other crushes before your father,” she laughed. “Kevin and Christopher. But they weren’t real. I knew it the second I met your father because they all vanished—their names and faces. And for an instant, nothing else had any meaning in my life.”
“What was it like? Falling in love.”
She stretched out her legs in my twin bed, her toned dancer’s calves twining around each other like cords in a rope, her pointed toes emphasizing her high arches. It was clear what he saw in her—a beautiful dancer who clung to his every word as though it were gospel. And she saw someone who could save her from her life. She told me that her heart burst when Papa pulled her, soaking, from the murky lake water, but lately I’d wondered if she had been desperate for anything to take her away from the house where she grew up. The boy who came to town wearing a suit that was two sizes too big happened to be in the right place at the right time and distorted her sudden love
for God into a love for him. For a moment, all the power that she let him wield in the house made sense—she had never known Papa without God and never known God without Papa.
“Keep going. It’s getting really good,” she said, nodding to the book.
I turned back to the open book and continued reading even though my brain wasn’t keeping up with the words. Ma put her hand on my knee; I must have paused too long.
“I know this hasn’t all been easy, Miriam. And I’m sorry.” Ma was inches away from me—her scent of laundry detergent and floral soap faint in my nose—but I couldn’t look at her as she spoke.
“Sorry for what, Ma?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing. Everything.” She tossed her hands in the air; as they fell back to the comforter, her voice dropped. “He’s different. I can’t think of another way to describe it. The man that I married never would have hit the man in Bethel.”
I willed my chin to look in her direction. She was looking straight ahead, at the closed door, at Hannah in the bed across from us. “And I brought all of you along on this ride. It hasn’t been easy for any of us, but particularly you. If I had known then what I know now—” She cut herself off before the inevitable end of the sentence.
“What would you have done differently?”
There was no reply, but I felt her shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “I was really young. I was in love.”
“Are you still?” I snatched the words from the bottom of my throat. I expected her to chastise me for asking such a thing, but in the long pause that passed between us, the Ma who was always so certain about God and Papa didn’t seem certain at all.
“It’s not as simple as that, honey. It’s not a yes or no. You’ll see.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them.
We heard a door open downstairs, and Ma quickly kissed me on the forehead before wishing me good night. I slid the book under my mattress after she left.
The air felt heavier when she was gone, like someone had left a window open during a passing storm. Now that I’d seen Papa for who he really was, it was hard for me to understand how I’d once been one of his staunchest defenders. Perhaps Ma just had more faith in him—or faith in general—than I did. Or perhaps it was that she’d known him for a whole lifetime before I’d even been born, so for her to suddenly see him through different eyes might have felt impossible.
* * *
The next evening, a few dozen cars were in the parking lot for the inaugural healing service. We stepped inside the sanctuary to see a hundred or so people already there; they wore jeans, T-shirts, waitress uniforms, and dingy sweatshirts that they would never dare to wear on Sundays. Whatever illness had made them come out tonight had stripped away all desires for vanity.
Caleb, Hannah, Ma, and I walked to the front of the church and slid in the pew next to Micah right before service was supposed to begin. I didn’t know what to expect as Papa walked to the pulpit. Several deacons were scattered on the carpet below in the same assigned positions they had on Sunday mornings. Papa bowed his head, and his lips moved in some form of prayer that we couldn’t hear; a few people around me looked up in concern. As Papa continued mouthing inaudible words, the doors at the back of the church opened and slammed shut, jolting me in my seat as the sound echoed off the empty pews in the back few rows. I couldn’t turn around until he ended the opening prayer, even as the pews creaked under the weight of the new people who had entered.
“In Jesus’s name, I pray. Amen.”
On the amen I spun around to see several more stragglers coming into the sanctuary. A few older women moved slowly down the aisle in thick-soled shoes. Among them were Mrs. Deveare and Mrs. Lewis: names that had been on and off the sick and shut-in list for years. Names that we claimed to pray for even when they were displaced by newer names—the accident victims, the young mothers who’d had complicated deliveries—the ones who had been in the bloom of health a few weeks earlier, whose deterioration had been so sudden that it made the rest of us draw in breaths at the mention of their names.
Behind them, Dawn Herron stepped inside, her arm gripping her father’s crooked elbow for support. The Herrons weren’t really members. Even though Papa had made house calls to convince them to change their minds, they resisted his overtures, only coming on occasional Sundays right before healing and leaving before the offering. Dawn was the only nonmember on the church prayer list for her many surgeries to repair a congenital heart defect, and an air of mystery surrounded Dawn and her dad. From the few facts I could piece together, I knew that her mom had died from a heart condition a few years ago, that her dad worked two jobs and still couldn’t quite keep up with Dawn’s mounting medical bills, and that Dawn was a senior at East Mansfield High.
Soon, Papa raised his wobbly arms and the hundred people here flooded into the aisles as he took his time walking down to the ground. I waited for Dawn and her father to creep into my peripheral vision, but I didn’t see them. When Papa emptied holy oil into his hand and placed it on Mr. Tucker’s forehead, I peeked around. I wondered why they weren’t coming up to the front like they always did. Next to me, Micah’s leg twitched like she wanted to go up too but knew that she couldn’t. I placed my hand on her knee, and she covered it with her hand, tucking the medical alert bracelet back in when it slipped from beneath her sleeve.
If Papa noticed Dawn’s absence in the line, he didn’t let on. He seemed more confident in his movements while he made his way through the sixty or so people who were left in the aisle. Soon, all the people he had healed were lying on the ground, some of them just starting to get to their feet when he returned to the pulpit to announce the offering.
“Give as the Lord has given unto you.” It was Papa’s standard offering line, but asking people to give after they had just been healed seemed like they were paying God—or Papa—for something that God would do for free. When the buckets had all been collected, and the benediction was delivered, Papa dispatched me, Micah, and our mothers to the multipurpose room with a sleight of hand. He’d told us that we’d be responsible for preparing dinner after the first healing service, and on Papa’s command, we rose in an orderly line and followed Ma outside.
“Miriam, can you grab the cups from the car?” Ma dangled her key ring from her curled index finger. I swiped it and walked out of the double doors leading to the parking lot. The car alarm to the minivan chirped as I popped the trunk and rifled through cardboard boxes in search of plastic tumblers.
“Can I talk to you?” a breathy voice asked as I stood under the trunk’s open canopy. I turned around slowly, catching a glimpse of Dawn’s face, which was cloaked by darkness.
“To me?” I was the only one out there, but she’d never spoken to me before.
“Yeah.”
“Sure.” She was half a head taller than me as she folded her long, willowy limbs in front of her chest. A few tightly coiled strands came loose from the bun at the top of her head and flopped in her face. She raised her eyes to look at the hair but left it there as though it took too much energy to push it away.
“Can you do me a favor?” Her words were labored and slow as she took deep breaths every other word or so.
“Sure.” I leaned closer.
“I need you to fix me.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward me, instinctively looking around to make sure no one was nearby to overhear. Goose bumps sprouted on my exposed flesh even though the October air was warm.
“What did you say?”
“I heard about Micah. I need you to fix me too.” Her voice was partially eaten by a passing wind.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I just heard it around.”
In those early days, Micah was swarmed by people who were waiting to hear about how she had been healed. She soaked in the attention from people who’d never talked to her before—it had been agony to walk by and hear sections of her embellished story that took a new shape each Sunday as the crowds got larger. Ma
ybe one of Dawn’s friends who went to the church had been nearby one of those days, and maybe that was the day that Micah had accidentally said my name instead of Papa’s.
“I never healed Micah.” What I couldn’t say was what I wanted to say. Micah isn’t healed anymore.
Dawn looked up to the sky, where a band of dark clouds trailed across the moon like a bride dragging her veil. She didn’t speak for a while, as if the answer were somewhere up there.
“Please.” Her voice was faint.
“I can’t do what I did with Micah,” I whispered. “I don’t even know what happened.”
“You can try.” In the moonlight, the whites of her eyes glowed. “What harm could it do?”
“I don’t think I can. I gotta go. They’re waiting for me.” I grabbed the sleeve of cups and slammed the trunk, turning to walk toward the rectangles of light that the multipurpose room windows spilled on the pavement. Dawn grabbed for my wrist, but I wrenched out of her grip and ran toward the building—one parking space became three, then five, as my breath raced out of my lungs. I didn’t turn around to see if she was walking in after me.
“Look,” she said.
My hand was on the door and her voice was barely audible—one turn of the knob would mean safety in the multipurpose room. But the same curiosity that made me sneak behind the tent in Bethel swept over me like a storm surge. Caleb always said that it would get the best of me. Go inside, I told myself.
I shifted my head to the left, where she was now standing under the low-hanging branches of a weeping willow. She took slow steps toward me and removed her jacket before unbuttoning her shirt; she pulled the fabric apart with her hands until the top of her sternum was exposed.
