Keeping Faith: A Novel (23 page)

“That is a pure shame, ma’am.” Ian shakes his head. “Because He told me to listen to His voice right here at Camp Perry.” He comes forward, extending a hand. “Forgive me for not introducing myself sooner. I’m Harry Walters, a preacher from Lou’ville. This here’s my lovely wife, Maybelle, and my daughter Frances.”

“Frances is a fine name,” the woman says.

“My maiden aunt’s name.”

“We thought so ourselves.”

The woman cocks her head. “You say you’re a preacher?”

“That I am. And a musical one at that. I’m the director of the Greater Kentucky Hymn Sing, and this year the Lord’s called me to fashion a few new tunes in His name.”

“I been to those hymn sings myself. Always did believe in offering up a joyful noise.”

“Amen, ma’am,” Fletcher says.

The woman throws up her hands. “Well, who am I to stand in the way of the Lord? I can’t promise you regular housekeeping, but I imagine I can poke around and find some sheets yet.” She walks back into the manager’s house, presumably to find a key.

Ian Fletcher turns toward Mariah and Faith and gives a nearly imperceptible bow.

Mariah bursts out with a startled laugh. The nerve of the man! He approaches the car and opens her door. “Maybelle, honey,” he says, smiling hugely, “looks like I got us a temporary home.”

“Maybelle? You couldn’t have picked Melissa, or Marion, or–“

“I like Maybelle. It seems …

bovine.”

Mariah glares at him, then turns to the backseat. “Come on, Faith–“

“Frances,” Ian interrupts.

“Whatever.” She helps Faith tug her knapsack from the car as the old lady comes out of the manager’s house.

“You got bungalow seven. I go to bed at nine o’clock, and I don’t care if it is Jesus you’re singing to–you make sure it’s quiet then.” She turns and leaves them to their cabin.

Crossing the threshold, Ian becomes another person entirely. “Christ. Did someone die here last summer?”

Mariah, standing in the doorway, cannot fault his observation. To call the cabin rustic would be a stretch of flattery. A ratty braided rug with numerous stains graces the floor. Off the central room are two doors, one leading to a bathroom the size of a closet and one leading to the only bedroom. There’s a coffee table, a frayed plaid couch, and a battered kitchen table,

on which rests an assortment of mismatched, dusty Tupperware.

“This is gross.” Faith scowls. “I don’t want to stay here.”

Mariah immediately forces herself to smile. “It’s an adventure. Like camping out, except we have a bed.” She peers into the bedroom. “Well, one of us has a bed.”

Ian snorts. “You and Faith can sleep in it. I’ll risk the communicable diseases growing on the couch.” He sits down heavily on it and bows his head, his shoulders shaking in silence. For a stunned moment Mariah thinks he might be crying,

but then a guffaw spills out of him as he tips back his head. “God, if my producer could see me now,” he says, wiping his eyes. “The Winnebago is a goddamned palace compared to this.”

It is at the mention of his producer that Mariah realizes what’s been niggling at the back of her mind. She’s terrified of being recognized, although she and Faith are still far from familiar faces.

However, Ian Fletcher is a household name, a celebrity. And yet he can walk up to the Avis counter without causing a rush of fans; he can pretend to be Preacher Harry Walters and no one recognizes him. “How come?” she asks quietly. “How come she didn’t know you?”

Ian grins. “This is the Bible Belt,

sweetheart. We got hymn sings and little old ladies who want to please Jesus, but not a huge population of atheists. I’ve got a built-in disguise here, because I’m not real high on the must-see-Tv list of most of these religious folk.”

Mariah raises a brow. “You couldn’t have known by looking at her that that old lady’s never seen your show.”

“I’d stake my bets.”

Annoyed by his certainty, she crosses her arms. “Because she’s elderly? Because she couldn’t see through your snow job?”

“No, Miz White.” Fletcher leans forward and flicks on the battered TV set to reveal a screen of static. “Because she doesn’t have cable.”

By the time Ian gets to Lockwood he’s an hour and seventeen minutes late. He’s left Mariah and Faith at the cabin with the excuse that he’s going to find food at the market. Now he flies into the recreation room, where he usually finds Michael. Peering through the door, he sees Michael still sitting in his usual corner, tossing down cards.

Tempered with the wash of relief that Michael’s waited for him is the bitter realization that there’s nowhere for him to go.

“Hey.” Ian pushes inside and draws up a chair. Sweat runs down his temple, but he doesn’t remove his coat just yet. He knows the routine; first Michael has to acknowledge him.

A red card falls. Then a black one.

Ian rubs his temple against his collar.

“Three-thirty,” Michael says quietly.

“I know, buddy. I’m an hour and …

twenty minutes late.”

“It’s four fifty-one. Twenty seconds.

Twenty-two seconds. Twenty-four–“

“I know what time it is, Michael.”

Irritated, Ian shrugs off his coat.

“Three-thirty. Three-thirty on Tuesday. That’s the time that Ian comes.”

Michael begins to rock gently in his seat.

“Ssh, Michael. I’m sorry now. I won’t let it happen again.” Recognizing the warning signs, he moves slowly, holding his hands up as he comes closer.

“Three-thirty!” Michael yells.

“Three-thirty on Tuesday. Not on Monday.

Not Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday! Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday!”

As quickly as the outburst has come, it’s over.

He pulls his chair away from Ian, into the corner of the room, his shoulders hunched over his deck of cards.

“You were late.”

Ian turns to find one of the psychiatrists who come daily to Lockwood standing a few feet away. His smile twists. “So I’ve been told.”

“Michael has a gift for that, doesn’t he?” The doctor laughs. “Your flight was late?”

“No. I got hung up on my way here.”

“Well, in his world there’s no room for mistakes. Don’t take it personally.”

Ian calls the man as he turns to go.

“What do you think would happen if I came back tomorrow? Or a couple of days after?”

“You mean other than Tuesday at three-thirty?” The psychiatrist considers Michael, in the corner. “I think it would set him off again.”

Ian nods and looks away. He’d thought so,

too. It means that he has seven days,

exactly, to get Faith White back here.

He sighs and pulls up a chair directly behind Michael. Ian can see the crown of his head,

peppered with gray now, and it depresses him.

What kind of life has it been here, for so long?

A better one than it almost was. The voice in his head is an absolution.

Lockwood is a supervised-care facility, just one step away from a residential group home,

and considerably better than an institution. One day, maybe, Michael will be ready to live on his own. Until then, this is the best care money can buy.

Wearily, Ian glances at his watch, and sits in silence for the rest of the hour, because even if Michael is not speaking to him directly, he’s fully aware of how long Ian stays.

He watches Michael rock, a metronome,

and wonders how a man like himself, who has no use for the Bible, has become his brother’s keeper.

By the time Ian returns to the cabin, the sun has set. Still rattled by Michael’s outburst,

he absently walks up the gravel path, lets himself inside, and stops dead. The small open room of the cabin is lit by candles, the scarred kitchen table covered with a checked table runner.

Clean silverware and chipped dishes are laid out at place settings. Mariah has moved some of the furniture around to hide watermarks on the wooden floor and suspicious streaks on the walls. It’s still not the sort of room to which he’s accustomed, but it looks … almost cozy.

Mariah and Faith freeze on the couch like two deer caught in headlights. After a moment Mariah gets to her feet and wipes her palms on her thighs. “I figured if we were going to be here awhile …” she says, letting her voice trail off.

Ian’s gaze falls to Faith and to the battered game of Yahtzee sprawled across the coffee table in front of her. The girl draws her knees up, hiding her face, and rattles the dice in her cupped palm. He fights the urge to sit beside her, to kick off his shoes and set his stockinged feet beside the Yahtzee tumblers.

“… in the car?”

It is a moment before Ian realizes Mariah is speaking to him. What stuff in the car?

Groaning, he remembers his excuse for leaving–

the groceries. “I, uh, haven’t gotten around to it yet,” he says, backing toward the door.

“I’ll head out now.” He all but flees outside, before Mariah can ask him where he’s been all this time, before he breaks down and simply tells her.

It begins to rain as he drives away from the cabin. In the rearview mirror he sees Mariah standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the yellow light from the candles. Where did she find those candles? Or the board game? Or any of the other stuff, for that matter? Ian’s hands tremble on the steering wheel as he tries to remember the way to the nearest Piggly Wiggly. The frayed rugs, the battered games, the woman waiting on him–they circle in his mind. He forces himself to make a mental list of what he’ll buy: milk and juice and eggs, cereal and soda pop and macaroni, item after item crowding out the unsettling thought that the life he has been leading,

for all its luxury, is nowhere near as fine.

Her mother keeps skipping the good parts. It’s bad enough that Faith has no books for a bedtime story–in spite of what her mother said,

Reader’s Digest doesn’t count–but now her mom can’t even get through a memorized version of Little Red Riding Hood without telling it wrong.

“The basket of food,” Faith prompts. “For Grandma. Remember?”

“Right.” Her mother keeps looking at the door.

Faith guesses it’s because she’s hungry. Ian Fletcher was supposed to bring dinner, but he’d spaced out, and so all Faith had was a handful of Tic-Tacs from her mother’s purse. If she closes her eyes and tunes out her mother’s voice, she can hear her stomach gurgling, like the falls down by the New Canaan Dam.

“So Red Riding Hood gets to the door and knocks and the wolf–“

“You didn’t even talk about the wolf yet,”

Faith complains. “He has to eat Grandma.”

“For God’s sake, Faith, if you know it so well, why don’t you just tell it to yourself!”

When she was getting into her nightgown, Faith had said something like she hoped God could find her all the way out here in Kansas, and her mother had jumped at her and said she absolutely,

positively couldn’t talk about God in front of Ian Fletcher. Now her mother doesn’t even want to tuck her in. Faith rolls onto her side. If she cries right now, she doesn’t want anyone to see it. “Fine,” she mutters.

She feels her mother’s hand on her arm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“Whatever.”

“No, it was wrong of me. I’m hungry and I’m tired, but that’s not your fault.” Her mother scrubs the heels of her hands into her eyes and sighs. “I’m not up for a bedtime story right now,

Faith, okay?”

“Okay,” she murmurs.

Her mother smiles and kisses her hair.

“Thanks.”

As she gets up, Faith reaches for her sleeve. “I don’t like it here.” Her voice catches in her throat, which embarrasses her, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. And before she even has a chance to try to stop them, the tears come. “It smells funny and they don’t have the Disney Channel and there’s nothing to eat.”

“I know, honey. But Mr. Fletcher’s going to fix that.”

“How come he’s even here? How come we have to stay with him?”

Her mother suddenly looks so upset that Faith wishes she’d never even asked the stupid question.

“We’ll go one day at a time,” her mother says.

“If living with Mr. Fletcher doesn’t work out,

we’ll just take a plane somewhere else. Las Vegas, maybe.”

That soothes Faith. She feels her mother curl up behind her. It makes Faith think of a hammock in their yard, a web of rope that she thought would unravel the first time she leaned back on it, but that managed to support her all the same.