Keeping Faith: A Novel (2 page)

“We could put on a video for her,” I whisper, leaning close to Colin. “That is,

assuming you’re looking for someone to wash your back.”

But instead of answering, Colin awkwardly untangles Faith’s arms from his waist.

“Honey, maybe you should–“

“Should what?”

We all turn toward the voice coming from the bathroom. The door swings open to reveal a damp, dripping woman, half wrapped in a towel, a woman who assumed that Colin’s words were meant for her. “Oh, my God,” she says,

reddening, retreating and slamming the door.

I am aware of Faith running from the bedroom,

of Colin going after her, of the water in the shower being turned off. My knees give out, and suddenly I am sitting on the bed, on the wedding-ring quilt Colin bought me in Lancaster,

Pennsylvania, after the Mennonite woman who crafted it told him that the symbol of a perfect marriage was an endless circle.

I bury my face in my hands and think,

Oh, God. It is happening again.

BOOK I THE OLD TESTAMENT

Keeping Faith

ONE

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.

–John Milton,

Paradise Lost There are certain things I do not talk about.

Like when I was thirteen, and I had to take my dog and have her put to sleep. Or the time in high school that I got all dressed up for the prom and sat by the window, waiting for a boy who never came.

Or the way I felt when I first met Colin.

Well, I talk a little about that, but I don’t admit that from the beginning I knew we were not meant to be together. Colin was a college football star; I’d been hired by his coach to tutor him to pass French. He kissed me–shy, plain,

scholarly–on a dare from his teammates, and even muddled by embarrassment, it left me feeling gilded.

It is perfectly clear to me why I fell in love with Colin. But I have never understood what made him fall for me.

He told me that when he was with me, he became someone different–a person he liked better than the easygoing jock, the good ol’ fraternity boy.

He told me that I made him feel admired for what he was instead of what he’d done. I argued that I wasn’t a match for him, not tall or stunning or sophisticated enough. And when he disagreed, I made myself believe him.

I don’t talk about what happened five years later, when I was proved right.

I don’t talk about the way he could not look me in the eye while he was arranging to have me locked away.

Opening my eyes is a Herculean effort.

Swollen and grainy, they seem resolved to stay sealed shut, preferring not to risk the sight of something else that might turn the world on end. But there is a hand on my arm, and for all I know it might be Colin, so I manage to slit them enough that the light, sharp as a splinter, comes into view.

“Mariah,” my mother soothes, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. “You feeling better?”

“No.” I am not feeling anything. Whatever Dr. Johansen prescribed over the phone makes it seem as if there’s a foam cushion three inches thick around me, a barrier that moves with me and flexes and manages to keep the worst away.

“Well, it’s time to get moving,” my mother says, matter-of-fact. She leans forward and tries to haul me from the bed.

“I don’t want to take a shower.” I try to curl into a ball.

“Neither do I.” My mother grunts. The last time she’d come into the room, it was to drag me into the bathroom and under a cold spray of water.

“You’re going to sit up, damn it, if it sends me to an early grave.”

That makes me think of her coffin table, and of the ballet lesson Faith and I never did manage to get to three days ago. I pull away from her grasp and cover my face, fresh tears running like wax. “What is the matter with me?”

“Absolutely nothing, in spite of what that cretin wants you to believe.” My mother puts her hands on my burning cheeks. “This is not your fault, Mariah. This isn’t something you could have stopped before it happened. Colin isn’t worth the ground he walks on.” She spits on the carpet, to prove it. “Now sit up so that I can bring Faith in here.”

That gets my attention. “She can’t see me like this.”

“So, change.”

“It’s not that easy–“

“Yes, it is,” my mother insists. “It’s not just you this time, Mariah. You want to fall apart?

Fine, then–do it after you’ve seen Faith. You know I’m right, or you wouldn’t have called me to come over here and take care of her three days ago.” Staring at me, she softens her voice. “She’s got an idiot for a father, and she’s got you. You make what you want of that.”

For a second I let hope sneak through the cracks in my armor. “Did she ask for me?”

My mother hesitates. “No … but that’s neither here nor there.”

As she goes to get Faith, I adjust the pillows behind my back and wipe my face with a corner of the comforter. My daughter enters the room,

propelled by my mother’s hand. She stops two feet from the bed. “Hi,” I say, bright as any actress.

For a moment I just delight in seeing her–the crooked part of her hair, the space where her front tooth used to be, the chipped pink Tinkerbell polish on her fingernails. She folds her arms and sets her colt’s legs and mulishly presses her beautiful bow of a mouth into a flat line.

“Want to sit down?” I pat the mattress beside me.

She doesn’t answer; she barely even breathes. With a sharp pain I realize that I know exactly what she’s doing, because I’ve done it myself: You convince yourself that if you keep perfectly still, if you don’t make any sudden moves, neither will anyone else. “Faith …” I reach out my hand, but she turns and walks out of the room.

Part of me wants to follow her, but a larger part of me can’t muster the courage. “She’s still not talking. Why?”

“You’re her mother. You find out.”

But I can’t. If I have learned anything, it is my own limits. I turn onto my side and close my eyes, hoping that my mother will get the hint that I just want her to go away.

“You’ll see,” she says quietly, laying her hand on top of my head. “Faith is going to get you through this.”

I make her think I am asleep. I do not let on when I hear her sigh. Or when I watch, through narrowed eyes, as she removes from my nightstand an X-acto knife, a nail file,

and a pair of embroidery scissors.

Years ago when I found Colin in bed with another woman, I waited three nights and then tried to kill myself. Colin found me and got me to the hospital. The ER doctors told him they had been able to save me, but that isn’t true.

Somehow that night, I got lost. I became another person, one I do not like to hear about, one I would certainly not recognize. I could not eat, I could not speak, I could not command enough energy to throw the covers off my body and get out of bed.

My mind was frozen on a single thought: If Colin didn’t want me anymore, why should I?

When Colin told me that he was having me committed to Greenhaven, he cried. He apologized. Still, he never held my hand, never asked me what I wanted, never stared into my eyes. He said I needed to be hospitalized so that I would not be left alone.

Contrary to what he thought, I wasn’t alone.

I was several weeks pregnant with Faith. I knew about her, knew she existed before the tests came back and the doctors altered the course of treatment to meet the needs of a pregnant,

suicidal woman. I never told anyone there about the pregnancy, just let them figure it out themselves–and it took me years to admit that was because I was hoping to miscarry. I had convinced myself that it was Faith, a small ball of cells inside me, who made Colin turn to another woman.

Yet when my own mother says that Faith is going to keep me from getting so deeply depressed that I can’t claw my way out, she may not be far off the mark. After all, Faith has done it before.

Somehow, during those months at Greenhaven, being pregnant became an asset instead of a liability. People who would not listen to what I had to say when I was first committed stopped to remark on my swelling belly, my glowing cheeks. Colin found out about the baby and came back to me.

I named her Faith, a real goyishe name according to my mother, because I so badly needed something to believe in.

I am sitting with my hand on the bridge of the phone. Any minute now, I tell myself,

Colin is going to call and tell me it was a run of dementia. He will beg not to be held responsible for this small bit of insanity. If I do not understand something like that, who will?

But the phone does not ring, and sometime after two in the morning I hear a noise outside. It is Colin, I think. He’s come.

I run to the bathroom and try to untangle my hair, my arms stiff and aching from disuse. I swallow a capful of mouthwash. Then I rush into the hall with my heart pounding.

It’s dark. There’s no one moving about; nothing.

I creep down the staircase and peer out the sidelight that frames the front door.

Carefully I ease the door open–it creaks–

and step onto the old farmer’s porch.

The noise that I thought was my husband coming home to me is a pair of raccoons, thieving around the trash can. “Go!” I hiss at them, waving my hands. Colin used to snare them in a Hav-A-Heart trap, a rectangular cage with a levered door that didn’t cause harm to the animal. He’d hear one screaming after being shut in and would carry it off to the woods behind the house.

Then he’d walk back, the cage empty and neat, with no sign of the raccoon’s having been there. “Abracadabra,” he’d say. “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

I retreat inside, but instead of heading upstairs I see the moon reflecting off the polished dining-room table. In the center of the oval is a miniature replica of this farmhouse. I made it; it is what I do for a living. I build dream houses–not out of concrete and drywall and I-beams, but with spindles no bigger than a toothpick, squares of satin that fit in the palm of my hand, mortar based with Elmer’s glue. Although some people ask for an exact replica of their house, I have also created antebellum mansions, Arabian mosques,

marble palaces.

I built my first dollhouse seven years ago at Greenhaven, out of popsicle craft sticks and construction paper, when other patients were making God’s-eyes and origami.

Even in that first attempt there was a spot for every bit of furniture, a room to suit each personality. Since then I have built nearly fifty others. I became famous after Hillary Rodham Clinton asked me to make the White House for Chelsea’s sixteenth birthday–

complete with an Oval Room, china in the display cabinets, and a hand-sewn United States flag in the Executive Office. Customers have asked, but I do not make dolls to go with the houses.

A piano, however tiny, is still a piano. But a doll with a beautifully painted face and finely turned limbs is always, at its heart, made of wood.

I pull out a chair and sit down, gently touching my fingers to the sloping roof of the miniature farmhouse, the pillars that hold up its porch, the small silk begonias in its terra-cotta planters. Inside it is a cherry table like the one this dollhouse sits upon. And on that miniature cherry dining-room table is an even smaller replica of this dollhouse.

With the flick of a fingertip I shut the front door of the dollhouse. I brush my thumb along the stamp-sized windows, sliding them down. I secure the shutters with their infinitesimal latches; I shelter the begonias beneath the Lilliputian porch swing. I close up the house tightly, as if it might need to stand through a storm.

Colin phones four days after leaving. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”

Presumably, by this he means that Faith and I weren’t supposed to interrupt. Presumably,

we had forced his hand. But of course I do not say so.

“It’s not going to work with us, Mariah. You know that.”

I hang up the phone while he is still talking, and pull the covers over my head.

Five days after Colin has left, Faith is still not speaking. She moves around the house like a silent cat, playing with toys and picking out videos and all the time watching me suspiciously.

My mother is the one who manages to plumb through the muteness to figure out that Faith wants oatmeal for breakfast, or that she can’t reach the Playmobil village on the top shelf, or that she needs a drink of water before going to bed. I wonder if they have a secret language. I don’t understand her; she refuses to communicate,

and all in all it reminds me of Colin.

“You have to do something,” my mother repeats. “She’s your daughter.”

Biologically, yes. But Faith and I have little in common. In fact, she might as well have skipped a generation and come straight from her grandmother,

so close are those two. They have the same grounding in whimsy, the same rubber resilience, which is why it is so strange to see Faith moping around.

“What am I supposed to do?”

My mother shakes her head. “Play a game with her. Go for a walk. At the very least, you could tell her you love her.”

I turn to my mother, wishing it were that simple.

I’ve loved Faith since she was born, but not the way you’d think. She was a relief. After first wanting to miscarry and then months on Prozac,

I’d been certain she’d appear with three eyes or a harelip. But the easy, normal birth gave way to the reality of a baby I could not make happy, as if my punishment for thinking the worst of her were to be disconnected before we ever had a chance to bond. Faith was colicky; she kept me up all night and nursed with such a vengeance my belly cramped at each feeding.

Sleep-deprived and unsettled, I would lay her on the bed at times, stare at her wise, round face and think, What on earth do I do with you?