Keeping Faith: A Novel (34 page)

all the times she has looked at her daughter’s face and cleaved a lie in half with a single look. This is the codicil of motherhood: Like it or not, you acquire a sixth sense when it comes to your children–viscerally feeling their joy, their frustration, and the sharp blow to the heart when someone causes them pain.

“Fast.” Mariah sighs. “And with my eyes wide open.”

As Millie opens her arms, Mariah moves into them, drawing close the comfort of childhood with a great rush of relief. She tells her mother of Ian, who was not following her when she thought he was, who was not the person he made himself out to be.

She describes the way they would sit on the porch after Faith went to sleep, and how they would sometimes talk and sometimes just let the night settle over their shoulders. She does not tell Millie of Ian’s brother, of what Faith might or might not have briefly done for him. She does not tell Millie how it felt to have Ian’s body pressed against hers, heat from head to toe, how even during hours of sleep, he held on to her hand as if he could not bear to let her go.

To her credit, Millie does not act surprised or ask if they are speaking of the same Ian Fletcher. Instead she holds Mariah close and lets the explanations fall where they may. “If this happened between you,” she says carefully, “where do things stand?”

Mariah glances through the gauzy curtains at the smattering of lights that attracted her mother. “With him out there and me in here,” she answers, smiling sadly. “Just like before.”

Sometimes in the middle of the night Faith thinks she can hear something crawling under her bed, a serpent or a sea monster out of water or maybe the tiny, hooked feet of rats. She wants to toss off her covers and run into her mother’s room, but that would mean touching the floor, and there’s a very good chance that whatever is making the noise will wrap itself around her ankle and eat her with its rows of sharp teeth before she ever makes it into the hall.

Tonight Faith wakes up, certain it’s coming for her, and screams.

Her mother comes rushing into the room. “What’s the matter?”

“They’re biting me!” she cries. “The things that live under the bed!” But even as she speaks, the world comes back to her, strange black shapes turning into lamps and dressers and other ordinary things. She glances down at her hands, still fisting the covers, Band-Aids covering the small holes beneath the knuckles. They don’t hurt at all now. They’re not bleeding either. They tingle a little,

as if a dog were pushing his wet nose into them.

“You okay?”

Faith nods.

“Then I think I’ll go back to sleep.”

But Faith doesn’t want her mother to leave.

She wants her to be sitting here, on the edge of the bed, thinking of nothing but Faith. “Ow!” she cries impulsively, clutching her left hand.

Her mother turns quickly. “What? What happened?”

“My hand hurts,” Faith lies. “A big,

sharp, needle pain.”

“Here?” her mother asks, pressing.

It doesn’t hurt at all. It feels sort of nice, actually. “Yes,” Faith whimpers. “Ow!”

Her mother crawls into the bed, gathering Faith into her arms. “Try to rest,” she says, her own eyes closing.

In the dark, Faith falls asleep smiling.

October 28, 1999 Clearly, her mother has been eating like a pig.

That’s the only explanation Mariah can come up with to make sense of the absolute dearth of food in the house. Having been gone for a week, she’d have expected the fruit and the milk to go bad, but there’s no more bread, and even the peanut-butter jar is empty. “God, Ma,” she says, watching Faith pick at a dry bowl of Rice Krispies. “Did you host a party?”

Affronted, Millie sniffs. “That’s the kind of gratitude I get for keeping house?”

“I would have expected you to replenish the pantry, that’s all. For your own comfort.”

Millie rolls her eyes. “Oh, and of course the vultures out there would have just waved politely as I went on my merry way.”

“If they harassed you, you could have harassed them right back.” Grabbing her purse, Mariah strides to the door. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

But eluding the reporters is not as simple as Mariah expects. Inching out of the driveway, she nearly hits a man who pushes his daughter’s wheelchair in front of her car. Police notwithstanding, hundreds of hands pat her windows,

her bumpers, her trunk. “God,” she breathes,

astounded by the sheer numbers of people, gratefully picking up speed a quarter mile past her own driveway.

She believed that, without Faith in tow, there was less of a chance that she’d be pursued, but three cars tail her as she makes her way into the grocery store in a neighboring town. Keeping careful track of them in the rearview mirror,

she deliberately takes side streets instead of main roads, hoping to lose them before she reaches her destination. Two of the cars are gone by the time she leaves the outskirts of New Canaan. The third follows her into the parking lot but turns in a different direction, leading Mariah to realize sheepishly that this might have been a neighbor or ordinary citizen, rather than a reporter on her trail.

In the grocery store she keeps her head ducked, reaching for melons and lettuce and English muffins and not making eye contact with other shoppers. She rounds the aisles with grim determination, set on making it through the checkout line without being noticed. But she has just reached into a frozen-food locker when a hand closes around her wrist and pulls her behind a tall display of ice-cream cones.

“Ian.”

He is dressed down in jeans and a tattered flannel shirt, a baseball cap pulled low over his face. He has not shaved. Mariah touches his cheek. “This is your disguise?”

His hand slides from her wrist to her shoulder.

“I wanted to know what happened in court.”

A small light goes out inside Mariah.

“Oh.”

“And I wanted to see you.” Ian’s fingers curl around the soft skin of her inner arm. “I needed to.”

She looks up at him. “We go back to the judge in five weeks.” She can just make out his eyes beneath the bill of his cap, pure Arctic blue and focused with the most singular intensity,

pinning her like a butterfly.

Another shopper rounds the corner,

toddler twins hanging on either side of her cart like docking buoys. She glances dismissively at them, then continues down the aisle. “We can’t be here like this,” Ian says. “One of us is bound to get recognized.” But he makes no move to leave, and instead strokes his fingers under her chin,

making her arch like a cat.

Just as suddenly, he steps away. “I’ll do anything I can to make sure Faith stays with you.”

“The only way the judge is going to let me keep her is if he thinks her life’s perfectly normal,” she says evenly. “So the best thing you could do, Ian, is leave.” She grants herself permission for one more glance at him,

one more touch of his hand. “The best thing for Faith,

and the worst thing for me.” Then she reaches for the handle of her shopping cart and continues down the aisle,

her heart tripping, yet her face as serene as if she’d never seen him at all.

The telephone rings when Mariah is nearly asleep. Groggy and dazed, she reaches for it assuming that Ian is on the other end, and too late realizes that even before dreams descend, he has already claimed a part in them.

“I am so glad to hear that you’re still answering the phone.”

“Father MacReady,” Mariah says, sitting up in the bed. “Isn’t it a little late?”

He laughs. “For what, exactly?”

“Calling.”

There is a beat of silence. “I’ve been led to believe that it’s never too late for a calling.

Sometimes they just catch you behind the knees and knock you down like a linebacker.”

She swings her legs over the edge of the bed,

pleats the edge of the top sheet. “You’re twisting my words again.”

“For what it’s worth, I prayed for you,” Father MacReady admits quietly. “I prayed that you’d be able to take Faith and get away.”

“Your hotline is apparently a little rusty.”

“It may be, you know. Which is why I wanted to talk to you. Your mother had the pleasure of turning away a colleague of mine today who’d like to take a look at Faith.”

“My daughter isn’t the Catholic Church’s lab specimen, Father,” Mariah says bitterly. “Tell your colleague to go back home.”

“That’s not up to me. It’s his job. When Faith starts saying things that don’t match up with two thousand years of teachings, they have to come evaluate it.”

It makes Mariah think of that old adage–

if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you do not want religion, do you have the right to send it away?

“I know you’re not going to want to hear this,” Father MacReady says, “but I’d consider it a personal favor if you’d allow Faith to speak with Father Rampini.”

There are people at the edge of her property now who have gathered in the name of Christianity. She did not ask them to come; she would certainly like them to leave.

The judge would consider it a mark in her favor if she managed to get them to leave.

The simplest way to do that is for them to hear,

straight from the mouth of their Church, that Faith is not who they would like her to be.

But then again, it means exploiting Faith, and Mariah is not sure she wants to do that even if it leads to a greater good. “Faith and I don’t owe you any favors. We’re not Catholic.”

“Technically,” Father MacReady says,

“neither was Jesus.”

Mariah sinks back into her pillow, feels it brush against the sides of her face. She thinks about those trees falling in the woods, silent and unobserved, until one day someone comes along and notices with a start that the entire forest is gone.

October 29, 1999 Father Rampini knows many ways to make a statue weep, none of which have anything to do with Jesus. You can rub the marble face with calcium chloride, which makes water condense from the air in false tears. You can press small balls of lard into the eyes, which melt when they warm to room temperature. You can even use sleight of hand,

dabbing at the statue with a sponge to make moisture when your audience is distracted. He’s seen fake magician’s blood hidden up a sleeve, stigmata spontaneously bursting with a flick of the wrist. He’s watched rosaries go from silver to gold, scientifically explicable metallurgic reactions.

His gut feeling? Little Faith White is full of crap.

He believed, at first, that it would be easy to discredit the child. A couple of discreet inquiries, a tearful admission, and he’d be back at the seminary before supper. But the more he learns about Faith White, the more difficult it is becoming to dismiss her out of hand.

Yesterday he interviewed many of the reporters on the front lawn, trying to uncover a secret book deal the mother might have made or word of a TV exclusive. Historically, true prophets didn’t profit–either by money,

esteem, or comfort. Had he found even the subtlest hint of self-aggrandizement, he’d have been on the Mass Pike that afternoon.

All right, so she wasn’t trying to become rich and famous by acting like a visionary. But neither was there proof apart from Faith White’s alleged vision–

like the spring at Lourdes that cures ailments, or the picture of the Virgin not made by human hands,

given to Blessed Juan Diego and still hanging four hundred years later in the shrine in Mexico City. He said as much to Father MacReady, who–

maddeningly enough–barely looked up from the sermon he’d been writing in his office. “You’re forgetting,” MacReady said. “She’s a healer.”

That morning Father MacReady accompanied him to the medical center. While the parish priest visited members of his congregation who were recuperating on the patient floors, Father Rampini spent hours reading the reports about Millie Epstein, with no firm conclusions.

Medically, the woman had died. Certainly she was alive and kicking now. And yet rumor had it that Faith touched the woman to bring her back–a laying-on of hands smelled a little fishy.

The only way to prove that Faith White was an out-and-out liar would be to interview her directly. And that is what he’s slated for today.

Father Rampini has decided on a three-pronged attack: First, he will narrow down the truth regarding this female vision–Mary maybe, but certainly not God. Second, he will prove that the vision is inauthentic. Finally, he’ll examine the alleged stigmata and list the reasons they aren’t the genuine article.

Father MacReady asks him to remain silent during his introduction to Mariah White, and out of professional courtesy Father Rampini agrees.