Keeping Faith: A Novel (29 page)

Setting his palms on her cheeks, Ian tips his forehead to hers. “You don’t understand.”

Mariah stares at his haunted features, but sees instead Ian sitting beside his twin, trying to play by the odd rules of engagement because it’s better to have that than nothing at all. Ian’s wrong. She knows him better than he might think.

“I’d like to understand,” she says.

Ian Fletcher had been born two and a half minutes before his brother Michael: bigger,

stronger, more active than his twin, a circumstance for which he’d been paying for the rest of his life.

Clearly, Ian had taken the lion’s share of nourishment and space in the womb, and although no doctor ever said so, he felt responsible for his brother’s ill health and slow responsiveness,

perhaps even for the autism that Michael was diagnosed with as a toddler.

Their parents had been rich, jet-setting socialites from Atlanta who married late in life and held their Learjet, their restored plantation manor, and their condo on Grand Cayman in much higher esteem than they did their twin sons. Ian and Michael had been a mistake, and clearly one they didn’t talk about, since something was obviously not quite right with one of the boys. They lived high off the hog,

traveling around the world for months at a time and leaving Ian and Michael in the hands of whatever tutor or nanny had been hired to deal with them.

Ian knew he was responsible for Michael; he understood that as soon as he was able to understand the differences between them. Privately tutored, Ian did not have friends or playmates. What he had,

what he’d always had, was his brother.

When Ian was twelve, his father’s lawyer arrived in the middle of the night with the local sheriff. His parents’ plane had crashed in the Alps, and there were no survivors.

Overnight the world changed. Ian learned that the lifestyle to which they’d been accustomed was courtesy of an immense credit-card debt, one that left the boys bankrupt before an inheritance could even be considered. Ian and Michael were placed in the reluctant custody of his mother’s sister and her Bible-thumping husband, and uprooted to Kansas.

But his aunt and uncle had no intention of trying to understand Michael’s psychological problems, and they didn’t have the resources to hire someone else to do so. The state’s public-education system would have paid to send Michael anywhere in Kansas, but no one researched the choices, and so Michael was sent to the nearest institution with an open bed, a place that reeked of feces and urine, a place where Michael was the only patient even able to talk.

Ian visited him, even when his aunt and uncle stopped coming. He went to the library and found out which residential homes had the best reputations, but no one would listen. He spent six years wondering what horrors Michael had suffered that made him regress, unwilling to dress himself in the morning and rocking more often in silence and absolutely, positively refusing to be touched.

On the day that Ian and Michael turned eighteen, Ian dressed in a secondhand suit from a thrift store and petitioned a Kansas City court for custody of his brother. He got a scholarship to Kansas State and worked around the clock to pay for his books and to save money. He learned all about group homes for autistic adults and met with doctors who told him Michael was not capable of such an independent arrangement yet. He learned about assisted-care facilities–how they took both federal and state aid, and would take some indigent cases, but very few. How you had to know someone in the right place at the right time, or you’d be told there were no beds available. How you then paid for a quality of care,

and continued to pay, lest that precious bed be given to someone else.

Ian’s drive to succeed was fueled by his brother. It dovetailed naturally with the fact that a long time ago, he’d stopped believing in God. What God would have taken away his parents, his childhood? Most important, what God would have done this to his brother? Ian was angry, and, to his surprise, people wanted to listen: first, grade-school English teachers,

then theology professors, then radio listeners,

and then TV producers and viewers. The more famous he became, the easier it was to pay Michael’s board at Lockwood. The more outspoken he became, the more quickly he clawed his way back to a lifestyle he had only barely remembered.

When Michael was twenty-two, he began to feed himself again. At twenty-six he was able to button his own shirt. At thirty-seven he still refuses to be touched.

Suddenly Mariah understands what has fashioned a man like Ian Fletcher. He spent years making himself into someone other than that lost little boy–

into someone whose cornerstone is disbelief in God–

and with good reason. How painful it must have been to find himself hoping–praying–that a miracle might come about after all.

She also realizes that Ian might have gotten his brother into Lockwood, and might have reached the financial peak he’d staked out in order to pay for his brother’s care, but her intuition tells her that Ian hasn’t gotten what he needs most of all. He’s been taking care of Michael all his life–but it has been years since anyone has taken care of Ian.

Mariah starts out slowly, running her hand over his hair, then flipping it over so that her knuckles graze his throat and his jaw. She raises her palms to his cheeks and draws them down the slope of his shoulders, watching him close his eyes like a cat in the sun. Then she wraps her arms around him tightly, fits her face into the crook of his neck, and feels him shudder.

His arms close about her with such force that she cannot breathe, cannot do anything but ride out the crest of his need. His hands map her back and her shoulders, his lips falling at her ear. “Thank you,” he whispers.

Mariah draws back and kisses him. “My pleasure.”

Ian smiles. “Let’s hope so.” He kisses her and lets his lips silver her skin.

He undresses her, reaches into his wallet for a condom, and uses his hands and his tongue to navigate her body.

Is it her imagination, or does he linger at her wrists, the places that still make her ashamed?

Mariah pictures herself shrinking, small and malleable beneath Ian’s hands, until she feels that surely she would be able to fit inside one of her dollhouses, walk on its pristine floors and look into its spotless mirrors. She opens her eyes as Ian moves over her, into her.

It has taken years to find out, she thinks, but this is what it was like to be a perfect fit.

Ian’s rhythm becomes stronger. Mariah strains toward him, her fingers clutching his shoulders, her mouth round on the salt of his skin.

She stops thinking about Ian’s past, about Faith’s future, about anything at all. And just before Mariah splinters around him, she hears Ian’s voice fanning past her temple.

“Oh,” he cries, lost in her. “Oh,

God!”

“I didn’t,” Ian says, chuckling.

“You did.”

“Why do you think that is? I mean, it happens all the time, but if it’s just you and me in bed, why would I call out God’s name?”

Mariah laughs. “Force of habit.”

“For you, maybe.” He wraps his arms around her, still amazed by the lull of peace inside him now, steady as a flat-line. “I’m thinking it has more to do with divinity.”

Mariah turns in his embrace. “Does it?”

she says, her eyes darting away. “Was it … okay?”

Ian’s brows rise. “You have to ask?”

Her shoulders rise and fall, and his body instinctively tightens. “It’s just–well, I always wondered what would have happened if I was thirty pounds lighter, or platinum blond, or sexier. I thought that might have kept Colin’s interest.”

Ian is quiet for a moment. “If you were thirty pounds lighter, you’d blow away in the wind. If you were platinum blond, I wouldn’t recognize you. And if you were any sexier, you’d probably kill me.” He kisses her on the forehead. “I’ve seen your handiwork. You told me how you make those miniature houses. You made one hell of a daughter. So what is so hard about believing that anything you make … including love … might be any less exquisite?”

Ian frames Mariah’s face in his hands,

effortlessly sliding between her legs again. “You’re not perfect. You have this freckle here.” He points to her collarbone. “You can be downright stubborn. And your hips are–“

“I had a baby!”

Ian laughs. “I know. I’m just trying to show you that if you want to get clinical about perfection,

none of us would pass muster. Me least of all.”

He strokes her hair. “Colin is an idiot. And I do mean it this time when I say:

Thank God.”

Mariah smiles and snuggles closer on the nest of blankets they’ve made on the rug.

“Do you know what the most beautiful word in the English language is?”

“Let me think on it a minute.” Ian wrinkles his brow in concentration.

“”Mellifluous.”"

Mariah shakes her head. “”Uxorious,”"

she breathes. “Excessively fond of one’s wife.”

In his whole life, Ian cannot remember ever feeling this sense of peace, right here in this hellhole of a Kansas cabin. This is his temporary reprieve, he knows. His truce.

Tomorrow he will have to tell Mariah that he has been lying all along, that he cultivated her sympathy from the moment they stepped off the plane just so that he’d be able to set Faith up for a fall. Tomorrow he’ll have to tell her that he intentionally recorded Faith’s disastrous meeting with Michael, even if he no longer has the tape.

Tomorrow he’ll have to decide how much to reveal to his producer.

Tomorrow will be soon enough to have her hate him.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she says, yawning.

A penny? They’re worth a far piece more.

“I don’t think we get a choice in who we fall for,” Ian whispers. “I think we just do.”

But Mariah’s breathing is even and regular, and Ian realizes she’s already drifted off. He savors the weight of her numbing his arm and warming his skin, and moments later–for the first time in years–

Ian falls into a deep, easy sleep.

It is just after five in the morning when Ian slips away from Mariah. He covers her with the blanket, unsure of whether or not she sleeps naked as a matter of course and not wanting Faith to come bounding in to find her sprawled that way. He dresses quickly and writes Mariah a quick note that says when he’ll be back, where he is going,

and nothing important at all.

He drives to Lockwood. Why he is returning, he cannot say. Clearly, if his brother was set off by the presence of Mariah and Faith interrupting the regular schedule, then a 6:00 A.m. visit isn’t going to go smoothly. It’s just that things had been left so rough. Michael shouting, and Ian storming off …

He doesn’t want a week to pass before he sees him again. If Michael is asleep,

Ian can just peek in, make sure he’s all right, and get on his way.

The staff gives Ian a wide berth as he walks to his brother’s room and pushes open the door. Michael is snoring softly, his face relaxed, his big body sprawled over the covers. “Hey, buddy,” Ian whispers, and then hesitates before he touches his brother’s hair.

Michael’s eyes open with a start. “Ian?”

“That’s right.” He quickly withdraws his hand and glances at the clock over the door, certain that Michael is about to start screaming, but instead his brother yawns and stretches.

“How come you’re here so early?” Michael says. Ian blinks at him, stunned. “What,

you’ve got no place better to go?”

His brother, who has not spoken about anything but cards for the past three years, is teasing him.

Ian narrows his eyes, taking in the spark of understanding, of connection, in his brother’s eyes.

“God, Ian. And they say you’re the smart one.” Michael holds out his arms, an invitation.

“Michael,” Ian breathes, folding his twin into an embrace. When Michael’s hand pats him clumsily on the back, he loses the power of speech.

Gaining control, he draws back to talk–

really talk!–to his brother, but finds Michael’s expression remote. Ian watches him take the deck of cards from the nightstand.

“Four of diamonds. Three of spades.

Seven of diamonds. Ian comes at three-thirty on Tuesday. Not Monday Wednesday Thursday–“

Dumbfounded, Ian steps back from the bed.

He walks out of Michael’s room before a full-blown tantrum begins, certain that he’s imagined the whole surreal encounter, that his brother was actually asleep the entire time. With a sigh Ian digs for his car keys and pulls something unexpected from his breast pocket–the jack of hearts, slipped there minutes before by someone close enough to truly touch him.