Keeping Faith: A Novel (17 page)

KEEPING FAITH

Keeping Faith

SEVEN

All hell broke loose.

–John Milton,

Paradise Lost October 15, 1999 Two days later Faith is still in the hospital. As far as I’m concerned, she’s fine, with the exception of the open wounds on her hands.

But even these, she says, no longer hurt. Dr.

Blumberg, the hand surgeon, has escorted in a parade of experts to confer on Faith’s diagnosis. He won’t give us a straight answer about that, and he won’t discharge Faith until he does.

I’ve tried to reach Colin, but his voice mail said only that he’d gone out of town, without specifying where. I’ve tried calling every few hours, but nothing has changed.

My mother thinks I should worry about Faith, not Colin. She has spent every day here with us and wants to know why I’m in such a rush to get home. In the hospital, at least, none of the reporters or religious zealots can get to Faith.

I have been home myself, of course, to shower and change. The number of people has not really changed–

the cult’s still there, and the Winnebago–although I have seen neither hide nor hair of Ian Fletcher.

This doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that he’s had a live broadcast since Faith was admitted to the hospital, yet he did not mention her injuries.

“Ma,” Faith whines, “that’s the third time I’ve called you!”

I smile at her. “Sorry, honey. I didn’t hear.”

“No, you were too busy brooding,” my mother mutters.

I ignore her. “What did you need,

Faith?”

“One of those Popsicle thingies. The red kind.”

“Sure.” Rather than bother a nurse, I’ll get it from the refrigerator at the end of the hall.

I open the door and find Ian Fletcher on the other side, arguing with the policeman who’s been thoughtfully stationed to keep Faith from being accosted by any media that might slip past hospital security unannounced.

“I’m telling you,” Fletcher demands. “You ask her, and she’ll let me in.”

“Ask her what?”

He smiles at me and indicates a bouquet of roses. “I was hoping to see the patient.”

“My daughter isn’t available right now.”

Right on cue, Faith’s voice pipes up through the open doorway. “Hey, Mom, who’s here?” She scurries to the end of the bed, spies Ian Fletcher, and blushes. “I guess I’m supposed to thank you for carrying me home the other night.”

Fletcher pushes his way into the room and holds out the roses to Faith. “No need. White knights like me are always looking around for damsels in distress.”

Faith giggles, and my mother takes the roses.

“Aren’t these just to die for?” she exclaims.

“Faith, what should we put them in?”

With an apologetic shrug to the policeman,

I step back inside the hospital room and close the door. “I never did meet a lady who wasn’t partial to flowers,” Ian says.

“They make my mom sneeze,” Faith answers.

“I’ll have to keep that in mind, then.” Fletcher turns to me. “So, how is she doing?”

“Much better.”

His eyes remain locked on mine. “Yes,”

he says. “She looks wonderful.”

We are interrupted by my mother, who bustles between us with the water pitcher full of roses. As she settles them on the nightstand, Ian sinks down onto the edge of the bed. “Anyone tell you when you can go home?”

“Not yet,” I answer.

“I want to go now,” Faith says. “It smells bad in here.”

“It smells like a hospital,” Ian agrees. “Like someone’s always cleaning toilets.”

“Were you ever in the hospital?”

A shadow falls across Ian’s face. “Not for myself.” He glances up at me. “Could I speak to you for a second?”

Again he gestures to the hall. With a silent nod to my mother, I follow him out. This is where the other shoe is going to drop, I tell myself. This is where he will tell me that in spite of his exemplary behavior and yellow roses, I can expect a camera crew ready to record Faith’s exodus from the hospital. “You wanted to talk?”

He stands just a foot away, our shoulders leaning against opposite sides of the doorjamb.

Ian clears his throat. “Actually–“

“Mrs. White.” The sound of Dr.

Blumberg’s voice startles me. “I’m glad you’re here. I’d like to speak to you about Faith. Would you join me in the lounge at the end of the hall?”

Although this is what I’ve been waiting for, I begin to tremble. Somehow I know it is bad news;

doctors always want to talk about bad news when they invite you to sit down. If Faith were well,

he would have come right into the room. He is going to tell me that Faith has cancer, that she has three weeks to live, that it is somehow my fault. If I’d been a more competent mother, I would have noticed something before now–a lump behind her ear, a slow-healing cut on her knee.

“Mariah,” Ian asks quietly. “May I?”

He glances down the hallway, where the doctor has already begun to walk, and then back to me. He is asking a thousand questions, catching me at my weakest, and, at the same time, offering his arm so that my legs feel a little less shaky. He should not be privy to this–and yet he was with Faith when it happened; he has seen all there is to see. My need for support edges out my better judgment.

“All right,” I whisper, dazed, and together we begin to walk.

Beside me, Ian is fussing with something, but I do not look. If it’s a tape recorder or a notepad, I don’t want to see. It is an effort to keep my eyes trained straight ahead,

but when Dr. Blumberg asks Ian to borrow his pen, it sparks my interest. He pulls a plastic-wrapped package from his pocket. “You see this danish?”

It’s a tart layered with cherry filling and cheese. Dr. Blumberg takes Ian’s pen and spears the danish, right through the Saran Wrap and all the fillings and out the other plastic-coated side. “This is a pretty good example of a penetrating trauma. A puncture wound.” He hands Ian back his pen, now dripping and sticky, and points to the hole in the center of the danish. “See how the tart is ragged? How the layer of cheese runs into the layer of cherry? And the cherry, it’s oozing. A penetrating trauma to the hand tears and distorts tissue. There’s skin torn in the periphery or pushed into the wound.

Blood clots and mangled tissue from adjacent injured areas fill the wound. More often than not we find hematomas or shattered bones.” Dr.

Blumberg lifts his eyes to me. “Your daughter’s wounds looked nothing like this.”

“Maybe they weren’t … penetrating traumas,” I suggest.

“Oh, they were. Went clean through. The operative word there being “clean.” X rays–

I’ve got them in my office–showed these perfectly round little wounds, with perfectly round little gaps in the tissue and the bones … but no actual trauma.”

Now I am completely lost. “That’s a good thing?”

“It’s an inexplicable thing, Mrs. White.

I’ve spent the past two days, as you know, in consultation with colleagues regarding Faith’s diagnosis. We all agree: There is no way an object can enter the palm and exit the other side of the hand without causing substantive damage, or at the very least tearing some tissue.”

“But she was bleeding. She passed out because of it.”

“I’m aware of that,” Dr. Blumberg says.

“Yet her hands were bleeding slowly. As opposed to a laceration, she hadn’t lost enough blood to account for her loss of consciousness. Your daughter’s wounds act like punctures … but don’t look like them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Have you ever read of people who suffer head trauma and can suddenly speak fluent Japanese or French?” the doctor asks. “They crack their heads on a telephone pole, and for some reason they can understand a language they’ve never understood before. It’s not something you see every day, but it happens. Medically, it’s very difficult to explain.” He takes a deep breath. “After careful consideration, several physicians and myself raised the question of whether Faith actually injured her hands with anything–or if she just started to bleed.”

Fletcher whistles softly beside me. “You’re authenticating stigmata.”

“I am not conclusively offering that diagnosis at this juncture,” the doctor heatedly insists; at the same time I say,

“Stigmata?”

Dr. Blumberg hesitates, clearly embarrassed. “As you know, stigmata are supposedly replications of the crucifixion wounds of Christ, Mrs. White, medically inexplicable instances where people bleed from the hands,

feet, and side without any actual trauma to the body. Sometimes they accompany religious ecstasy. Sometimes these wounds vanish and reappear, sometimes they’re chronic. They’re almost always reported to be painful. There are apparently several historical instances where physicians have indeed gone on record with that as a diagnosis.”

“You’re telling me my daughter– No.”

Faith is not in religious ecstasy, whatever that is. And why would she have crucifixion wounds when she doesn’t know what crucifixion is? I hunch my shoulders. “Those historical instances … were from when?”

“Hundreds of years ago,” Dr. Blumberg admits.

“This is 1999,” I say. “Those things don’t happen anymore. Those phenomena get x-rayed and carbon-tested and scientifically proven to be fakes.” I turn to Ian Fletcher. “Right?”

But for once he doesn’t say a word.

“I want to see her hands,” I announce.

Agreeing, Dr. Blumberg gets to his feet and walks back toward Faith’s hospital room. “Honey,” I say brightly as I follow him through the swinging door, “the doctor wants to examine you.”

“Then can I go home?”

“We’ll see.” I stand at Dr.

Blumberg’s side as he unwinds the thick bandages. They’ve been changed daily, but after Faith’s scene in the ER, medical personnel are very careful to keep her from getting a glimpse of the wounds. Gently tugging at the gauze with tweezers, the doctor switches on a gooseneck lamp beside the bed and maneuvers his body so that Faith’s view will be blocked. He peels back the last of the bandages on Faith’s right hand.

It is just a couple of millimeters wide, the hole, but it is there. The skin surrounding the edges is purple and bruised; there are arrows of dried blood radiating outward.

Faith flexes her fingers and, inside, I can see the flash of a needle-thin bone. Yet the wound does not begin to bleed again.

Dr. Blumberg probes the edges of the wound.

Every now and then Faith winces, and at one point he inadvertently moves out of the way enough to let her get a look at her own hand. She lifts it to her face, peering at the pinhole of light coming through from the other side, while we all hold our breath.

Then she starts to scream.

Dr. Blumberg rings for a nurse, and Ian Fletcher struggles along with my mother to hold Faith down. “Faith,” I soothe. “It’s all right. The doctor’s going to make it all right.”

“Mommy, there’s a rip in my hand!” she shrieks. A nurse comes running into the hospital room with a Styrofoam tray that holds a syringe. Dr. Blumberg firmly grasps Faith’s arm and plunges the needle into her thin biceps. After a moment of fighting, she goes limp.

“I’m sorry about that,” Dr. Blumberg murmurs. “I think we ought to continue to keep her here. My suggestion for treatment is to get a psych consult.”

“You think she’s crazy?” I say, my voice rising hysterically. “You saw her hand.

She’s not making this up.”

“I didn’t say she was crazy. It’s just that the mind is a powerful organ. It can make a person ill just as easily as a virus. And frankly, I don’t know the protocol in this sort of situation. I don’t know if the mind can cause the body to bleed.”

Tears fill my eyes. “She’s seven.

Why would she want to do that?”

I sit down beside Faith on the hospital bed, smoothing her hair while her face relaxes in sleep. Her mouth parts, a bubble rising between her lips. Behind me I hear the doctor speaking softly to my mother. I hear the door open and close twice.

Little girls, they dream of being princesses.

Of owning ponies. Of wearing jewels and ball gowns. Not of bleeding for no reason at all, just to be like Jesus.

Ian Fletcher’s voice falls quietly at my temple. “I interviewed a nun once,” he says. “Seventy-six years old,

a Carmelite. She’d been cloistered since she was eleven. According to the Reverend Mother, Sister Mary Amelia had been blessed with stigmata.” Slowly I turn so that I can look him in the eye.