by Monica West
I leaned against the doorjamb, my shoulder touching the wall. I couldn’t shift my eyes from her, from the smile that tickled the sides of her mouth as her lips formed words to lyrics that I’d never heard her say: “I’ll be your lover. Better than any other. I’ll make you moan and scream with ecstasy.” Her lips should have stumbled over these words, but there was only unfettered joy behind her closed, fluttering eyelids as her languid limbs moved like they were floating underwater. I wondered how many nights she went downstairs while we slept, a thin floor the only thing separating us.
The song ended and her eyes opened and focused on me as the opening chords to a new song filled the room. Her mouth widened in shock, and she wrapped her hands around her nightgown as though she were naked.
“Did I wake you up?” She transformed in front of me, jamming the screen of her phone until the room was quiet. Her scared eyes darted as her neck craned around me.
“He’s not here.”
Her shoulders relaxed, and she collapsed in the kitchen chair—all the vibrancy in her face and body slowly left the room. I took the chair across from her.
“I’ve never seen you dance like that, Ma.”
She shrugged.
“Can you teach me?”
A sparkle in the corner of her normally dimmed eyes provided a glimmer of the Ma I’d just seen. She pressed both hands against the table and turned toward the door once more. When she got to her feet, she stretched out her hand toward me. I grabbed it, and she pulled me to a standing position—soon we were in the middle of the kitchen floor. Her phone began another song with a quicker beat like the rat tat tat tat of sudden rain against a windowsill. She crooked her arm around the small of my back and pressed me against the hard, protruding mound of her stomach, flattening her breasts against mine as she collapsed the gap between us with one swift jerk of her arm. Our bodies moved as one, her hips rocking a couple seconds before mine caught up. My clumsy body was off-kilter as it rammed into hers, bouncing us off each other and sending me away from her in a twirl—when I stopped spinning and found her again, she was extending her arm across the kitchen toward me.
She spun me again, all while singing along to the lyrics. We danced until that song ended and then through another few songs until I lost count.
By the time the sun burned the sky orange, we fell to the floor breathless, spread-eagle beside one another. My laugh intertwined with hers until they were inextricable from each other, and her chest heaved and fell in rapid succession. I’d heard her laugh before—at Caleb’s dumb jokes over dinner or Papa’s impressions of church members. But this laugh was different—it was bright and bold. The first real laugh since what had happened with Papa the night after Micah’s healing service. I looked over next to me at where she lay with eyes closed and hair splayed against the floor like a sunburst.
“You’re pretty good,” she said to the ceiling when her breathing returned to normal.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
“It’s all the contemporary classes I took in high school. Before things got bad.” She rolled over on her side and perched her chin in her palm. Her laughing eyes became mournful as they searched mine. She reached out and placed a palm on the side of my face, her fingertips grazing my cheekbone that was prominent like hers. Our twin faces in different bodies, she liked to say.
“I kept saying that I couldn’t marry a man like my father. And your dad was different in the early years. But I feel like I don’t know him anymore. And I’ve been meaning to say that I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
The front door clicked. We sprang from where we were sprawled on the floor—Ma opened cupboards, clanging pots and pans together in an elaborate charade of making breakfast as I pressed the pause button on her phone and shoved it in the pocket of my robe. Papa’s loud footsteps came down the hallway, and Ma’s trembling hands made the heavy cast-iron skillet handle rattle against the burner. As he stopped at the edge of the kitchen, I folded and refolded a dish towel into sections, watching the thread loops line up like a row of tiny nooses.
I sidestepped to the edge of the kitchen until my spine flattened against the refrigerator door. Ma greeted him with a tentative embrace, her face seemingly trying to gauge how long he had been waiting on the porch, what he had heard. His arms were relaxed by his sides even as Ma hugged him hello.
“You’re back early. Do you want some breakfast?”
“I’m starving.”
With Papa’s focus on Ma, I slowly crept upstairs. Back in my room, I sank into my bed—feeling some comfort that I wasn’t the only one with twin selves. Ma didn’t heal, but she kept a whole other side shielded from Papa. I would have to follow her example and separate my selves as well. When alone, I would drape my power around my shoulders like a cape, but before leaving the sanctum of my room, I would have to revert to the Miriam I had learned how to be—the Miriam who held her tongue and stayed quiet the way Papa expected.
* * *
The following week after services, I felt a delicate hand on my shoulder. It was a girl from the congregation whose round face I recognized even though I didn’t know her name. “Nadia,” she whispered before asking me to heal her. There was another girl after that—Suzette—who made her request as I snuck to the bathroom, away from Papa’s presence but still within earshot of the loudspeaker booming his words about obedience and submission. Papa would have wanted me to turn them away, would have struck me in the face if he knew what I was doing. So I kept my secret from him, from all of them, as I moved away from the danger of the main sanctuary for the later healings. I healed Nadia of her psoriasis by the sink in a locked bathroom while erratic knocks interrupted us from outside. Suzette’s migraines were harder—we were crowded in the closet of the claustrophobic annex where Micah had passed out. At the end of each healing, when I saw double and they reeled in front of me, I told them to say that Papa had done it if anyone asked.
Later the night of Suzette’s healing, I lay awake in bed, the words that had declared her migraines a thing of the past wet on my lips. A hollow in my stomach felt like hunger, but it couldn’t have been, since I’d just devoured Ma’s fried chicken—the ravenousness a new side effect of healing that Ma, as she scooped me another helping of corn, chalked up to growing pains.
Outside the open window, a baby’s plaintive cry caught the night wind and entered my room—its boldness a reminder that Isaiah had never had the chance to cry. I conjured him back. No one knew I had touched him as he passed from Papa to the paramedics, had felt the curve of his swollen belly that never ate, had traced the edges of his mute, open mouth. My hand had fallen to my side at that moment, not expecting the rubbery coldness of his scentless skin, but I could have kept it there and whispered a prayer over him then, tracing a dry sign of the cross over his eyes that probably would have been deep brown and pensive—like Caleb’s—if only they had opened.
ELEVEN
Ma pulled the Advent calendar—the same one we’d had since I was a baby—out of a tattered box marked “Christmas.” The calendar’s twenty-four tiny cardboard doors didn’t shut anymore, prematurely exposing that day’s Scripture and gift of mangers, Jesus figurines, and nativity scenes. Caleb, Hannah, and I stood in a semicircle around her as she placed it on the mantel; this once-breezy gesture, now laborious for Ma, officially marked the beginning of Christmas season. Only this year, it was almost two weeks late.
Ma made up for the missing nightly Advent celebrations by pouring four mugs of hot chocolate that we sat around the table to drink. Hannah wore a foamy mustache when she pulled her lips out of the mug, and we laughed until there was a thud upstairs. Our laughter came to an abrupt end as Ma padded up the steps. A minute later, the silence was shattered by a shriek.
Caleb placed his palms on the table and jumped up. Then another scream came, more chilling than the first. He looked over at me, his pupils contracting into periods.
“What’s he doing up there?” H
is voice broke and spilled over as he asked the obvious question. Another scream shot to the first floor. Before I could answer him, he jerked away from the table, knocking the chair to the ground. He must have taken the stairs two at a time because seconds after he left, muffled footfalls pounded above me. I fingered the whorls in the table’s fake wood grain as the bedroom door flung open, glad he was going up to help Ma, but wondering where all of this concern had been when Papa had hurt me in the hallway a few weeks ago.
After some minutes passed, Caleb’s heavy footsteps were on the stairs with Ma’s trailing behind a few seconds later. Needing something to do, I jumped from the table and dumped half-full mugs of tepid hot chocolate into the sink, steeling myself to face her when she rounded the corner. Then she was behind me, as close as she had been when we were dancing. She reached around—startling me with her touch—and pulled the mugs from my sopping hands before laying them at the bottom of the sink. I dropped my head and watched the water wash the brown away until Ma shut off the tap.
I blinked back tears as I turned around; she angled the left side of her face away from me, even though the visible right side was caked with layers of foundation. Caleb was in front of her now too, pinning her in place with a wide stance. With the gentlest grip, he turned her chin so he could see the side that she was trying to hide.
“It looks worse than it is.” Tears clogged her throat as she spoke. She pulled her face away from him and winced. I didn’t know why she was explaining something to him that he had just seen. Before he could respond, she pushed her way between us and walked toward the cupboard, jangling pots and pans for a dinner that was hours away. We followed her as she pulled out a cutting board and started chopping an onion—the repetitive motion of the blade against the hard plastic surface blunted the edge of Caleb’s repeated questions. “What’s going on? How long has he been doing this?”
She looked over at me. Tell him, I told her with my eyes, nodding to punctuate the point. I put my arm around her waist; she was as close to confessing as she had ever been.
“Things have been hard on your father,” she began. Hannah had been playing at the table; she stopped moving when Ma spoke. “He doesn’t mean it. He just can’t control himself.”
Caleb’s mouth got wider as he tried to make sense of how the man who he had placed next to God was capable of such brutality. I thought back to the day behind the tent in Bethel when I had to see him with different eyes. How hard it had been to reconcile what I had seen with what I had always known.
“How can you say that? There’s no excuse.”
“It won’t always be like this.”
Caleb’s hand snaked inside of mine as he hugged Ma from the other side. She stopped chopping onions as her neck bent.
* * *
Later that night, Ma whistled a tuneless song from far back in memory as she made four plates of burned meat loaf for dinner and brought them to the table. The leftovers stayed in pots on the cooktop. We ate dinner without him at the head of the table, and I stuffed myself with the charred meat even though I wasn’t hungry. Afterward, Hannah, Caleb, and I curled under Ma’s outstretched arms on the couch as night fell. Her hardened belly protruded into my ribs, and I leaned close enough to it to feel the occasional kick. We pretended to be excited about the impromptu slumber party, shivering in unison whenever there was a loud noise upstairs.
I woke up in the middle of the night with Hannah’s arm below my back. I sat up on the couch and tried to readjust myself under Ma’s armpit, but the space where Ma had been sleeping was empty. Caleb and Hannah’s necks were at odd angles as their snores competed with each other for airtime. Pushing myself off the couch with a stiff arm, I walked through the empty hallway. There was no sign of her.
Upstairs was the faint noise of a zipper—a sound that always reminded me of revival season—followed by a rustle. I stayed by the landing as Ma crept downstairs in the dark with a suitcase by her side. When she was halfway down the staircase, I came into full view. Ma froze in midstep like a caught child; she shifted the suitcase by her side, as though she could somehow hide it. Even in the darkness, her face was wet, her eyes glassy.
“What are you doing?” I asked, as soon as I could find my voice.
She set her suitcase down on the step before her body crumpled next to it, her shoulders raising into a shrug. A car approached the house and slowed down before killing the lights. Ma lurched to her feet with the suitcase swaying by her side and slid past me on the staircase, tossing the front door open like she was expecting company.
“Who is that?”
She turned her head from me to the glinting car on the other side of the screen door, then back to me. Her hand gripped the door’s handle.
“I have to do this. I’m sorry.” Pain creased her voice, folding it into hundreds of tiny pieces like the origami birds I used to make with Micah, the ones that crashed into the carpet whenever Micah and I tried to make them fly. The door opened, and Ma straddled the threshold—one foot outside with the suitcase while the other foot was planted inside a square of ceramic tile.
She peeked over the back of the couch at Caleb’s drooped head—for a moment, we both listened to his snore, which sounded like a car whose engine wouldn’t start. I glanced over Ma’s shoulder into the driveway where a woman I’d never seen before sat behind the wheel. Her face looked just like Ma’s.
She took another step outside, toward where her sister—one of the aunts we’d never been allowed to meet—waited for her. I wanted to move toward them, but my feet had grown roots. Time unspooled itself—first moving quickly and then shifting to slow motion—as she opened the back door and threw her bag inside. As she moved to the passenger door and opened it, her hand glided over the door’s steel curve, then down the straight edge. She looked back at the house—at me inside the front door—weighing the life that she had with us with whatever was on the other side with her sister.
She lifted her hand and wiggled her fingers slowly—a wave that I was unable to return. But instead of stooping into the car and disappearing into the passenger seat, she stayed upright, her dress floating away from her body on the breeze, her gaze still fixed on the house.
Prickles traveled up my stationary legs as I stared at her, willing her to move one inch closer to the house. A low voice from the car chided her as Ma took a longing glance at the woman in the driver’s seat and then back at the house. With a jerking motion, Ma closed the door. Behind the sloped windshield, her sister pressed her head against the steering wheel as Ma opened the back door and retrieved her bag. Ma’s sister shook her head and then started the car. As silently as she came, she pulled onto the street and left Ma and her suitcase in the middle of the driveway. I released the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and propped the door open for her as she came back inside. She paused on the threshold as though considering her decision, her left hand on the doorjamb, her right arm crooked against the small of her back as she fell forward into the screen.
“Are you okay?” I didn’t know which version of the question she would answer.
“I don’t know what’s going on anymore.” She hadn’t closed the door yet and looked back out to the street, where the car was retreating. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t go with her, but I can’t stay here like this either.”
The foundation that she had so carefully applied before dinner had melted away from her face while we slept, revealing blue puffiness and a left eye that was almost swollen shut in a wink. She had borne the brunt of all he had to offer, her soft body a convenient receptacle for his rage.
The car was still on the street, its hazards lighting the night in flickering yellow. Ma hadn’t yet brought her bag inside, hadn’t yet stepped over the threshold. I couldn’t move to bring her in or shut her out, so I kept the door open as an invitation.
“What will happen to us if you leave?” It was the most selfish question, but it was the only thing I could think about, especially as Caleb and Hanna
h slept only feet away.
“You don’t think I’ve thought about that? You three are the first things on my mind each morning and my last thoughts at night. How to love and protect you. How to keep you safe. And I’ve failed at all of it. I’m so sorry for that…”
Her voice trailed off as she spoke, each word bringing her farther inside the house. By the time she stopped talking, both feet were on the tile. When the screen door closed on her, the car turned the corner with its hazards still on. Ma sagged in the doorway with her hands pressed against her stomach, breathing harsh exhales through pursed lips. It seemed like a contraction, but her due date was a month away. I helped her onto the couch and carried her suitcase upstairs, stowing it in the back of my closet behind a cardboard box of old Bibles and Sunday school drawings.
* * *
Later that afternoon, the house suddenly swelled with wailing. The low hum from Ma’s early stage of labor lifted through the vents and curled its way beneath doors. It was too soon, and when I rushed to the couch to check on Ma, she was grabbing her stomach and rocking, as though that action would slow things down.
“You’re okay, Ma,” I said as I scampered into the kitchen to call Mrs. Cade. I tried to keep my voice neutral, but Mrs. Cade must have heard something in it that scared her because ten minutes later, her car tires screeched into the driveway. I opened the door to her familiar, welcome face, and stepped aside while she rushed to Ma.
