Make Room for Your Miracle by Mahesh Chavda, Bonnie Chavda Page B

silent thunder. A moment later the shock of the question seemed to fling me headlong back down that long dark valley, that place where anguish preys on unanswered prayers. All my past humiliation, the begging, hoping, questioning, denial and even rage came tumbling out of my heart.
    My breath stuttered. “N-n . . .” I wondered why the word would not come out. I groped for the rest of it. “None of my own,” I finally heard myself say.
    They say a deep wound must heal from the inside out, else it will fester and the whole body will die of its infection. But I thought that to pursue such a healing would take more time and tinctures than one could possibly employ. How dare he open my deep wound now so carelessly? He surely knew little of the misery his words caused, or he would not have spoken them.
    “It shall be about this time next year,” Elisha continued, “at the time of the spring lambing.” I remember he paused. The sound of his voice seemed hardly to touch the surface of time and space around us.
    “You shall embrace a son,” he said at last.
    A fire of emotion seared my face, leaving my cheeks burning.
    What language was this? If those words had been spoken by any other man than this, our trusted guest, the compass of Israel in those days of darkness, perhaps I could have shielded myself from their piercing tips. Did he say it once or time after time?
    Embrace a son . . . embrace a son . . . the words echoed. A son. The hope of my inheritance, the song of my heart once whispered in gentle expectation when I was young. A son. The sound reverberated off the canyon walls of my empty womb.
    Liar! I wanted to shriek back. Deceiver! Yet it was the calm voice of one long dead with which I answered him.
    “No, my lord!” I whispered. “Do not deceive me, sir.” As I lowered my eyes I was weeping for my children who were not. I was Hannah. I was Rachel. I was every human who had failed at being.
    I backed away and rushed from his room. The room we had built for him on our wall.
    But Elisha did not see my shame. The prophet’s limpid eyes seemed to be looking through me, and I would later learn that he gazed upon a babe, a boy, with eyes the color of dates like his mother’s. A perfect son, fat and robust, with a head of curling dark hair, skin the color of honey. The tiny babe was suspended, swaddled there within my woman’s form. Elisha could see him clearly.
    I, however, fled down the stairs and into my bedchamber, passing a housemaid who met me with a startled look. I—who was usually calm and at peace— charged past her as if being chased by Philistines with their spears. Once alone I buried my face in a soft linen pillow until my breath returned to normal.
    Then, tired and spent, I rose and washed my face. Seeking at least cosmetic composure, I pulled the tangled strands of my wild hair back into my hair bands and redressed my eyes with softened lines of kohl to hide their crimson rims. I pinched my cheeks and brushed down the front of my tunic, straightening my belt and readjusting the folds of my skirt as I went out. Ignoring the back of my housemaid busying herself with her hand broom at the end of the hall, I descended the stair and entered the main floor, once again the collected mistress of my household. I crossed to the kitchen and resumed oversight of the preparation of my guests’ evening meal as if nothing had happened.
    At first I did not mention to Joktan or to anyone what the prophet had said. I laid the words aside. But in a few months’ time they seemed no longer to taunt me. I gave them permission to come and settle down in my heart. “You shall embrace a son!” And one night as I drifted off to sleep beside my husband, I knew it would be.
    One morning, not too long afterward, I awoke and rushed from my bed, my head reeling and my stomach heaving. I passed the first month, and that unpleasantness was more pleasant than any preoccupation I had kept. I waited another month and when it