by Monica West
She entered the living room and gasped when she saw Ma’s swollen face; a moment later, she reset her expression into a look of practiced calm and hurried to Ma’s side.
“You’re okay, Joanne,” she said over and over. I stayed far behind her, looking over her shoulder as she placed her stethoscope to Ma’s stomach.
“The baby’s okay, too,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Caleb took Hannah upstairs while I turned on the teakettle in the break between contractions. Its whistle mingled with the noises that Ma was now making in the living room. I checked the kitchen clock: 3:04. The house paused to catch its breath as Ma caught hers; in the brief silence, I gathered an armful of towels.
My body sprang into action, the movements deep in muscle memory. I’d done this with Isaiah, wiping Ma’s brow at regular intervals and feeding her ice chips, counting the minutes between the contractions and, finally, when the time came, telling her to push with my hand propped on her sweaty knee. But Mrs. Cade must have seen something that wasn’t right, because just when I was about to tell Ma to push one final time, she sent me away.
I’d watched from the hallway when Ma was having Hannah, too young and scared to enter the room. Ma’s cries were different back then, more like a cat’s breathy mews than wails. At first I thought those noises were normal, until a look of concern crept across Mrs. Cade’s brow and she stepped in the kitchen to make a call. Before we knew it, the house flooded with intermittent flashes of red light. While Papa stood there, the paramedics placed a plastic dome over Ma’s mouth that silenced her cries. They belted her to a gurney and whisked her off, the stretcher’s back wheels skittering like a wayward shopping cart’s. Papa went away in the ambulance with her. When I finally got to see Hannah, a wall of glass and a tangle of tubes separated us.
In the kitchen, I soaked and wrung out the towels that Mrs. Cade had directed me to get. For a moment, it was quiet. My internal timer counted the seconds between contractions. One, two, three. Ma screamed out at almost ninety-four. Go time, as Mrs. Cade called it. Normally, she would tell me to go upstairs and bring Papa down, but she must have gotten a good enough look at Ma’s face and decided not to extend the invitation.
“So we’re going to do this, huh?” Adrenaline pulsed through me when I realized that it would be the three of us for the first time. Ma switched from her laboring position on all fours to the birthing position, which meant that her raised, bent knees were on either side of Mrs. Cade’s head.
“Hey, Miriam.” Her thready whisper was barely audible with the noise of Mrs. Cade removing things from her bag.
“Hey, Ma.” I crouched by her head, wiping her brow with a cool cloth. Her dry lips cracked into a smile before I rubbed a piece of ice over them.
“When the next contraction comes, you need to start pushing,” Mrs. Cade directed from between Ma’s knees.
Ma lifted her head from the pillow in acknowledgment of what Mrs. Cade had said. Like a wave, the next contraction rolled in. Ma curled around herself. I grabbed one of her knees and guided it back, focusing on the way the bruise seeped across her left eye as she winced, listening to Mrs. Cade’s steady movements rather than the irregular patter of my racing heart.
“Push,” I coaxed. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I paused a beat between each number, just like Mrs. Cade had taught me. Ma’s screams threatened to shatter the windows. I grabbed her hand tight, hoping to take away some of the pain. She squeezed so hard I thought my fingers might come off, but I kept counting.
“Good, Joanne. A few more like that and we’ll have a baby.”
“Good job, Ma,” I whispered. I took the few moments of quiet to wipe some of the accumulated beads of sweat from her forehead, avoiding the tender space near her eye, and moved my hand down to the thick white glue that had gathered in the corners of her mouth. Everything around her—the pillow, the couch—was soaked with her sweat.
“I see a head, Joanne! One more good push.”
Ma looked like she didn’t have an additional push to give, but she nodded, or shook her head: the movement so slight that it was hard to classify. The baby crowned, and Mrs. Cade invited me to peek between Ma’s legs to witness the miracle of life. In the dark cove between Ma’s thighs, a damp thatch of hair surrounded the wide opening that was giving way for a baby to come into the world; then I looked back up into Ma’s tired eyes and squeezed her hand tighter.
“Don’t push,” Mrs. Cade counseled. She bent down and I heard a tiny snip of scissors, then a sharp drawn breath from Ma as her eyes pleaded with the ceiling for release.
“Okay, Joanne. Push now.”
“One more push.” I tried to be encouraging, but it was obvious that Ma didn’t have much left. Her eyes fluttered under pale lids as I counted to ten slowly, trying to place a bit more distance between when all of our lives would change once again. Before I got to ten, a rush of thick liquid and blood poured onto the towel followed by a long pause, but no cry.
“Mrs. Cade?” Ma and I both said in unison. This couldn’t be another Isaiah. Please God, let this baby live.
Before Mrs. Cade could respond, a cry filled the room, more like the bleating of a lamb than a baby’s screech, but it was the sweetest sound.
“It’s a boy!” Mrs. Cade announced the words that Ma had been waiting to hear. Papa’s footsteps upstairs stopped as Ma’s head collapsed against the sodden, canary-yellow pillowcase. Mrs. Cade placed the baby on Ma’s chest; Ma stared at his tiny, wide nose that was a replica of Papa’s and touched the cleft in his chin that was identical to hers. I waited for singing and cooing as she met her newest son, but each time she opened her mouth, nothing really came out.
“Do you want to cut the cord?” The glint of Mrs. Cade’s silver scissors pulled my gaze away from the mournful look in Ma’s hooded eyes. This should have been a joyful time—God had seen fit to bring a new baby to this house after so much suffering. But looking at Ma, who was holding the baby to her chest with mechanical arms, made it feel like less of a blessing.
A coiled spring like a slick, stretched phone cord connected Ma to the baby. Mrs. Cade directed me to cut between the two places where she had clamped the cord. She handed me her scissors, and I pressed down hard before the sharp blades finally cut through the thickness.
“What do you think his name should be?” Ma finally asked. Even though her voice sounded stronger than it had a few minutes ago, it was tinged with sadness.
“I get to name him?”
“Well, you helped me, didn’t you?”
Papa was normally the one to name babies, not me. But Mrs. Cade and Ma were both looking at me expectantly. The baby pursed his perfect set of pink lips as I grazed the silky layer of black fuzz that covered his pale brown scalp.
“So what is it?”
“Isaac.” The only son of Abraham and Sarah. Their miracle and the reward for their belief.
“Isaac,” Ma repeated. “Isaac it is.”
It felt strange to name him without Papa—but Ma’s mind was made up; even Mrs. Cade nodded from between Ma’s legs as she delivered the placenta. She lifted an armful of dirty towels and marched toward the laundry room. Ma eased her legs back to the couch—just like that, all the evidence of the birth was swept away into trash bags and the washing machine. Then there were erratic footsteps on the stairs—Papa’s presence took some of the air out of the room as he entered.
“Do you need me to cut the cord?” he asked. But then he must have seen the baby, already swaddled and wrapped on Ma’s chest. He stopped suddenly, his torso jutting forward with inertia before he pulled himself back. Caleb came down with Hannah; they rushed past Papa and went to Ma’s side.
“I see you have it covered.” Papa seethed from the periphery where he stood, his foot not crossing the dividing line between tile and carpet, his eyes raging at Ma beneath half-open lids. Mrs. Cade stood by Ma’s side like a guard.
“This is your new son. Isaac.” Mrs.
Cade’s voice—daring with its defiance—emphasized the last word, the pact that the three of us had agreed on without consulting him. No one talked to Papa like that in here.
“Isaac, huh?” Papa rolled the name around in his mouth. He pursed his lips and lowered his eyes—the same face that he used when he consulted his sermon notes—at that moment, however, crinkles of defeat settled beneath his eyebrows. Then he looked back up at me and Mrs. Cade flanking Ma. Mrs. Cade’s gaze was steely on him, even as my legs wobbled. I took a step closer to Mrs. Cade, hoping that proximity would give me some of her boldness.
“Isaac it is,” he relented.
As Papa took a few steps forward to get a better look at Isaac, Isaac started to wail. Ma, ashen, nestled him under her shirt, letting a swollen breast flop out of her nightgown rather than covering herself the way she normally did when Papa and Caleb were nearby. My cheeks burned at them seeing her like that, and I concealed her with the corner of a blanket as she negotiated a large brown nipple into his mouth.
“Thank you, Gladys.” Papa walked over to Mrs. Cade and stood by her side. He bent down and started to put away some of the supplies that she had taken out of her bag. She wrested her bag away from him, shoving a blood pressure cuff and amber vials of medication inside before sliding the zipper closed.
“Can you help me bring some things to my car, Miriam?” Without waiting for my reply, she handed me the bag, and I followed her to the driveway, where she popped her trunk.
“How long?” Mrs. Cade asked when we shared the trunk’s shadow. I rearranged some of the cardboard boxes to make her birth bag fit.
“I think it was three hours this time. The shortest.”
“Not the labor, Miriam. The bruises.” Her voice shot down an octave. She reached up and placed a hand on the trunk lid but didn’t move to close it.
I recoiled—even though I’d been waiting for someone to give voice to what had been happening with Papa, her words landed in the center of my chest like a punch. We weren’t supposed to talk about family matters outside the house. That was especially true now that Papa’s reputation was on the line.
“It’s me, Miriam.” Her hand moved from the top of the trunk to where mine was resting by my side; she interlaced her fingers with mine and squeezed. With her other hand, she cupped my chin and guided my face level with hers, snatching my eyes from where they were searching the cracks in the ground. I finally looked up at her, and she tilted her head to the side as her eyes brimmed. My lips trembled.
“I can’t, Mrs. Cade.”
“I know what I saw. You can either confirm what I already know or lie to me. And I know you’re not the kind of person who lies.”
Mrs. Cade knew me as the person who recited memory verses in her kitchen over plates of homemade cookies; the person who always stood by her dad and believed him to be infallible. Mrs. Cade had no idea the kind of person I had become. The kind of person who healed but lied about it, who had seen and heard unspeakable things. I wasn’t ready to tell Mrs. Cade what was going on at home—saying it out loud would make it real.
Mrs. Cade’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out of the duffel bag and touched the screen. “I have to run. A high-risk mother is in labor. I’ll be back to check on your mother and Isaac. And to finish this conversation.”
As she got in the car and put it into reverse, I looked back through the screen door. I could make out the shape of Caleb rocking Isaac in his arms. Since Bethel, it had always been me to come to Ma’s defense, even when she and Caleb hadn’t come to mine. Caleb had ignored my warnings about Papa until the night before, when pretending everything was okay was no longer possible. So maybe it was only fair that he would have to be the one to stay and protect her rather than me.
“Wait!” I yelled when Mrs. Cade had backed halfway down the driveway. Her car jerked to a stop, and I ran to open the passenger door before sliding inside. Mrs. Cade turned off the radio, presumably to give me space to say what I couldn’t before. The car’s doors and windows pressed in tighter as we veered under a canopy of trees. It would be easier to tell her everything when I got farther away from the houses I recognized, when the car outran the looming shadow of Papa’s congregation.
“For about five months. He hit a man on the revival circuit, back in Bethel. He hadn’t been able to heal him, and…” My voice drifted off. It should have been harder than this to betray Papa, but, after I took a deep breath, the truth spilled over the dashboard. “He’s been hurting us—me and Ma—since we’ve been back. Ma’s gotten the worst of it.”
Mrs. Cade nodded as she swerved right down a narrow dead end. Then she reached over the gulf of empty travel mugs between our seats and rested her hand on my knee.
“It’s worse than I thought.”
“You knew?” I looked over at her, but she was squinting at the road, nodding.
“He hasn’t been healing for a while. I know that he used to heal—at least I think that he did. He started forgetting who had the power—him or God. And that’s where he started to go wrong. And I’ve seen some other troublesome things around the church, even before what happened with Micah and Deacon Johnson. He’s had the deacons covering up for him, pretty much eating out of his hand, until they couldn’t hide what was going on any longer. When he got rid of Deacon Johnson, that was the last straw for most people, and that was his last real defender except for Deacon Farrow. People are losing faith in him for the first time in his life. A prideful man like your father can’t hear that truth about himself. And he can’t take that sitting down.”
Mrs. Cade must have been talking about another preacher in another church in another town who had gotten too much power and forgotten who gave it to him. As I tried to process the first phrase, there was another one beneath it—deacons covering up for him—and beneath that another one—losing faith in him. Each phrase echoed in my skull. I wanted to ask Mrs. Cade so many questions, but before I could, she pulled into a driveway.
“This is it.” She popped the trunk and jumped out before I could ask her anything.
By the time I stepped out of the car, Mrs. Cade was already up the driveway, the duffel bag thumping against her right leg. A few steps behind Mrs. Cade, my heels sank into the rotted-out wooden boards on the porch before following her inside. Thoughts of Papa disappeared in the claustrophobic, labyrinthine hallways whose walls were cluttered with pictures of unfamiliar faces. At the end of the hallway was a closed door, which Mrs. Cade opened without knocking.
The howl in the room swirled around us. Mrs. Cade rushed to a lump on the ground. She leaned her ear close to the mummified frame that barely moved. For a moment, they were one still form. I kept my back close to the door as I waited for my heart’s audible thumping to slow.
“Get me towels and water. Now.” I rushed out of the bedroom—the foreign hallways churned as I stumbled through them, eventually getting to the kitchen and turning on a teakettle. While the water boiled, I flung open cabinet doors until a stack of towels at eye level greeted me in the linen closet. A scream through the closed door stilled the entire house.
“Miriam!” Mrs. Cade yelled when the screaming subsided. Her voice shook.
When I got back, the light was on. The room smelled damp—like copper and sweat—and the lump that I had seen before showed itself to be a woman who Mrs. Cade must have helped onto the bed. A sticky puddle stained the sheets, but I hadn’t heard Mrs. Cade telling her to push. I clutched the towels to my chest and walked closer to them—in Mrs. Cade’s cupped hands was something small and blue.
“Is she breathing?” the woman screamed.
Mrs. Cade placed a bulb in the baby’s mouth and squeezed before pulling it out. Thick, gummy strings came out with the bulb, but the baby remained silent. Mrs. Cade swiped at her bag and pulled out an oxygen mask that she placed over the baby’s mouth. The baby’s stomach rose and collapsed violently each time Mrs. Cade pumped the mask, but her eyes stayed closed.
I dropped to my knees in a warm pool of
fluid next to the bed. With two trembling fingers, I reached out to touch the baby’s clammy forehead and closed my eyes, shutting out the mother’s primal screams and shaking away the images of Isaiah’s face. My secret would be out once I did it, but I couldn’t watch this baby die. I would just have to suffer whatever Mrs. Cade had to say to me—what sins she said I had committed—when it was all over. There would be no going back.
“Lord, touch and heal this child of Yours. Bring air into her lungs and breathe life into her body. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are healed.”
As I traced a sign of the cross on the baby’s head, the room fell away in pieces. It was just me and the baby as pain radiated from my hand and curled behind my eyes. As the air was being sucked from my lungs, the baby’s forehead scalded my hand, and I pulled it away, falling to the floor with my body throbbing and tiny gasps of air coming out of my mouth. I felt every splinter of the hardwood floor beneath me, the rough loops of the rug’s fiber, then nothing.
* * *
Bright blue walls and the sound of a siren in the distance. I closed my eyes and kept my cheek in a pool of sweat on the floor, even as the screaming ambulance split my head open. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I pushed myself to a seated position.
“How are you feeling?” Mrs. Cade’s voice was a yell, and the mug of tea that she held in front of my face swam in my watery eyes. I wanted to respond, wanted to ask her about the mother and her baby, but my throat was sandpaper. Mrs. Cade balled the linens on the empty bed and tossed them into the corner of the room.
“What happened?” The words burned.
“The ambulance just took them away. The baby started breathing on her own right before you passed out. They say she will be fine.”
Mrs. Cade’s eyes were wide with recognition as she squatted in front of me and placed the mug to my parched lips. The liquid scorched my throat, but I stared into the mug with each sip, unable to glance at Mrs. Cade, who had taken a seat next to me. When I finally looked over, her gnarled hand was a tree root on my thigh.
