by Monica West
“Hannah Faith Horton, rise up and walk.” I always thought that Papa repeated things to hear his voice echo through the tent—to remind himself of his power. Maybe he repeated things when he started to doubt himself.
Hannah crawled along on the turf with limp legs behind her. She lifted her weight on her forearms and collapsed on her face. With one cheek pressed to the turf, she turned her neck and looked up at me with weary confusion. Her arched eyebrows pleaded with me to make it all stop. It had been too long.
She wasn’t going to walk. She was never going to walk. I lowered my hands slowly, and the room came back into focus—first colors, then shapes, then details—angry eyes, the glint of glasses, open mouths. Sounds trickled up from the ground—whispers that erupted into yells, words that weren’t discernable over the loud jeers.
Papa towered over us onstage—then he crouched to my level. His hands were close to my face, and it looked like he was wringing water out of them. I searched his expression for a kernel of tenderness or love or mercy, but there was none. The full force of his open palm struck my right cheek, his wedding band landing square on my cheekbone.
I fell to my knees on the thin layer of turf that covered the stage. I crawled away, blind, feeling my way toward the steps. My hands felt the lip of the stairs, and I slid down the three steps that brought me back to the level of the congregation. I opened my eyes when I got back in the aisle and stumbled down the narrow path that I had come down, stopping briefly by the fourth row, next to the two empty chairs where Hannah and I had been sitting. Ma wouldn’t turn to look at me, even as the eyes of the rest of the congregation seared my flesh. Her jaw was clenched as she looked up at Papa and Hannah. When I peered into the shocked faces of the crowd, I expected them to be pointing at Papa, yelling in his direction for the violence he’d just inflicted against me. But their fingers were pointing at me—their round mouths were yelling at me. My feet took me all the way outside as the tent released me into the darkness.
Overhead, the thin crescent moon was barely visible in a sky that hid it like a secret. I ran out of the parking lot, away from the noise of the tent. Away from everything. Darkness obscured the road. My feet struck the uneven gravel, sinking in divots and moving up inclines. The throaty croak of frogs and the hiss of crickets drowned out the ragged, panting breaths that couldn’t get into my lungs quickly enough, escaping just as fast as they came.
It was too dark to tell if these were roads we’d driven down earlier. All the landmarks that I had memorized—the swooping power lines that threaded between leaning wooden poles, the fork in the road—had vanished in a disorienting night sky so black and thick that I had no idea where I was going. I just knew I had to keep moving.
A crack of branches. I spun around, but there was nothing to see behind me. I twirled all the way in a circle, dizzy as I looked up at what I imagined was a dense overhang of trees knit together. Maybe a bird had landed on a branch. Or some kids had even wandered out here to play a prank. But there was no flutter of wings, no birdsong, no laughter. My heart quickened.
Another crack—louder than the first one, louder even than my thumping heart.
“Hello?” I called out, my voice barely audible among the chirps and susurrus. Nothing. I took one step back and then another, my heel striking the ground before I was ready, buckling my knees until I had fallen backward. Before I could stand back up, I heard a rustle in the leaves.
“Who is it?” My voice was wavering and thready. I dug my palms into the gravel and scampered backward as my eyes adjusted. My right hand struck a tree root, and I gripped its shriveled heft to push myself to my feet. In the distance I heard a quickening of footsteps. It sounded like someone was speaking to me, calling my name, but only my relentless heartbeat and my arrhythmic breathing echoed in my ears. Fear surged through my body as I flew into thicker, denser patches of inky dark woods. My body seemed to separate from itself. Part of me hovered above the woods while the rest of me ducked the few tree branches that I could see while getting swatted in the face by others. I jerked to the left, into a copse farther away from the road. I kept running, and soon I heard nothing at all—no footsteps quickening to catch up with me. When I slumped against a tree to catch my breath, the distant sound of footsteps came back—running this time—even though I couldn’t tell where they were.
I knew I had to keep moving. Gathering up the little remaining energy I had, I stood up and took off again. But, as soon as I did, my toe struck something hard, and I soared through blackness, my arms swirling out of time with my legs until I landed on a steep incline. The ground slid away as I tumbled down a hill, gaining speed as my head struck tree roots, and my face sliced through dense webs of branches. A hard fragment came loose and floated in my closed mouth; blood filled the spaces between my teeth.
I finally 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 can wait in the waiting room with the rest of your family, and we’ll let you know as soon as she’s out of surgery.”
As I looked at her fingers wrapped around mine, I knew that she had loved me the best way she knew how—the only way she knew how.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” I managed. As I spoke those three words, it felt like something was stabbing me from the inside.
She came into my field of vision and pressed her finger against my parched lips. “Don’t speak, Miriam. You know how much I love you. I’ve never told you that I don’t know what I would do without you. But I don’t.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and tears leaked out of puffy eyes. I wanted to reach up and hug her, but even the smallest movement was excruciating.
She didn’t say goodbye, but her hand slowly lost its grip on mine. I couldn’t turn around, could barely move my neck, as we pushed our way through the double doors. She couldn’t hear me whisper I love you as the doors closed.
* * *
I opened my eyes to a soft, hazy light—what I imagined heaven might look like. But I wasn’t dead, even though part of me wanted to be. My chest rose and fell beneath a smooth sheet as tubes that I couldn’t feel snaked into my veins. I could only keep my eyes open for seconds at a time: could see brief glimpses of my family as they passed in front of my eyes. Ma paced with sleeping Isaac cradled in her arms; Caleb and Hannah ate metallic bags of chips as crumbs fell onto Hannah’s dress; Hannah leaned on Caleb’s shoulder as he pointed to pictures in a book. Memories, piecemeal shards, came back—the warmth from Hannah’s head on my shoulder the night before, her look of fear as she stared up at me from the floor of the pulpit as I begged her to walk.
* * *
The next evening, Ma, Caleb, and Hannah wheeled me outside to the minivan, and we drove back to the compound. I hadn’t seen Papa since he left the hospital the day before and imagined him, miles away, repairing the damage in the revival tent—damage that I’d caused. Back inside the Dixons’ house, our boxes and bags had already been packed. Sometime while I was in the hospital, Papa must have also gotten the news that his service this revival season had come to an end. We no longer need you, I imagined Reverend Dixon saying.
“We’re home, Samuel,” Ma announced when we stepped inside.
Suddenly Papa was downstairs and standing inches from my face. His lips wobbled from rage or fear or relief—I wasn’t sure which. He took a step closer, and I closed my eyes in preparation for the rebuke. But there was no contact, no heat on my cheekbone, no lingering feeling of fingertips on my face. When I opened my eyes again, he was still standing in front of me, his hands at his sides.
“Look at you.” Now I could see that his expression was one of fury. He scanned my broken body—my slumped posture on crutches—before landing back on my face. “Are you proud of yourself? Are you proud of what you’ve done to this family? You’ve ruined us.” It was easier to focus on his Adam’s apple bobbing out of time with his words than on the words themselves.
“Enough, Samuel,” Ma said, pulling him back from my face. “Can’t you see she’s been through enough?”
“She needs to say something for herself, Joanne. God has already punished her sin, but I want to hear her say she’s sorry. God got His due, now I need mine.”
The rubber bottoms of my crutches straddled perpendicular grout lines in the tile. Nothing in the room moved. He was not going to relent. What I wanted to say was, You’ve ruined us I was trying to save us. To save you. But my windpipe felt like it had been snapped along with the other broken bones, and no words escaped.
He was still inches from my face, ignoring Ma’s pleas to leave me alone. I looked down at his hands. Knew the harm that they’d done two nights ago. Knew what else they’d been capable of.
“I don’t know what you want from me, Papa. I can’t apologize for something God gave me.”
“God didn’t give you the ability to heal,” he seethed.
“What if He did? Have you ever thought about that?”
“No, I’ve never thought that because it’s ridiculous.” His laughter jangled among the boxes and bags.
“Is it? I’ve read the same Bible you have, Papa. Show me where it says that women can’t heal.”
“I’m not going to argue Scripture with you, Miriam. If you could heal, why didn’t you heal Hannah?” He was getting impatient—I could see it in the way the vein in his neck bulged. But I couldn’t explain what happened with Hannah beyond what Papa said—that some people weren’t meant to be healed. That she was whole as she was. I had tried so hard to make him see that I could heal that I’d tried to heal someone who didn’t need it.
“You didn’t heal her either. Twice. Maybe because she doesn’t need healing. But you didn’t heal Ma—I did. And you didn’t heal the man from Bethel; you beat him when he questioned you.”
Ma and Caleb gasped—a reminder that they were still in the room. Papa straightened his hand, and I flinched—a reflex. But instead of hitting me, he took a few steps back and focused his anger on a nearby packing box, which he turned over in a rage. He did the same with two other boxes, spilling and kicking their contents like a spoiled toddler. We all watched, silently, none of us stooping to clean up after him.
The grandfather clock dinged eleven in the living room. As if something deep within him was spurred by the clock’s reminder of the time, Papa stopped. He sat down on the floor—his shoulders slumped and heaving—and slowly, methodically, began to repack the overturned boxes. I felt frozen in place, but watching this diminished version of Papa was painful. It must have been excruciating for Caleb and Ma, too, because we all turned around and continued loading the car in silence. This time, there would be no map with directions to the next revival site, no prayer for a record number of souls saved or healed. We slipped away before the Dixons arrived home—the gold gate clanging shut and permanently separating us from a world we would never inhabit again.
The minivan skittered across the double yellow line that divided us from the semis speeding in the opposite direction, their horns blaring staccato rhythms before droning off as they passed. Papa, gripping the wheel as though it would fly away if he let go, swerved the minivan back onto
our side of the yellow paint. The road was hypnotic as it rose in front of us, lulling me to sleep in the seat behind where Caleb and Hannah were huddled, her head under the fold of his arm instead of mine, the cast on my right leg propped up on pillows on the empty seat beside me where she should have been.
When I woke up, a bright, bold sunrise shone through the windows of our car that was no longer moving. Papa had stopped by the side of the road, and a slight breeze entered through the open doors. I looked out and saw Papa step onto a narrow path, lifting a few branches before moving onto an expanse of sand that led to a surface so glassy blue that sunlight bounced off it and refracted in multiple directions. The Atlantic Ocean. He had never taken us to the ocean before—I’d only seen it from the road, my forehead fused to the warm window as a seat belt pinned me in place.
I stepped out on crutches as Papa inched toward the ocean, his heavy dress shoes sinking into the sand. Caleb carried Hannah into the blinding early-morning sunshine while Ma, a few steps behind Caleb, held Isaac. Dwarfed by the ocean, Papa dropped to his knees in the sand; his head and hands fell forward as though he were being tugged by a different gravitational pull. Ma reflexively rushed to his side and stopped a few feet away as his forehead reached the sand and his arms stretched out in front of him. His voice rose from the sand, quiet at first, but shouting before long. His prayers were angry, his chest heaving.
“Why—why—why?” Each word sputtered out like he couldn’t muster enough steam for the whole sentence. He took a breath and composed himself. “Why me? You are the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; You keep Your promises. I have been Your faithful servant, and You have turned Your back on me. What have I done but serve You? What have I done but try to be like You and do Your will?”
