Keeping Faith: A Novel (61 page)

along with a cult, and about ten network-affiliate TV reporters. After Faith healed an AIDS baby, more press arrived, and more people who wanted to touch Faith, or pray with her.”

“How did you feel about this?”

“Awful,” I say immediately. “Faith’s seven. She couldn’t go out to play without being harassed. She was being teased at school, so I pulled her out and began doing lessons at home.”

“Mariah, did you in any way encourage Faith to have hallucinations about God?”

“Me? Colin and I were a mixed-faith marriage. I don’t even own a Bible. I couldn’t have planted this idea in her mind; I don’t know half the things she’s come out with.”

“Did you ever harm your daughter in a way that would cause her to bleed from her hands and her side?”

“No. I never would.”

“What do you think would happen to Faith if she went to live with Colin?”

“Well,” I say slowly, “he loves her.

He hasn’t always had her interests at heart, but he loves her. It isn’t Colin I’m worried about … it’s Faith. She’d have to deal with a new sibling, and a mother that isn’t really hers, and right now I don’t think it’s fair to ask her to change her world again.” Glancing at Colin, I frown. “Faith’s performing miracles. Taking her away from me won’t change that. And it won’t change the fact that wherever she goes, people are going to follow her, or want a piece of her.”

I can feel my daughter’s eyes on me, like the sun that touches the crown of your head when you step outside. “I can’t tell you why Faith’s like this,” I say softly. “But she is. And I can’t tell you why I deserve to have her. But I do.”

Metz likes to call it his “snake in the jungle” approach. With a witness like Mariah White, he has two choices: He can go in there and batter away, preying on her confusion, or he can appear nice and question gently and then, when she least expects it, strike her fatally. The most important thing is to make Mariah doubt herself.

By her own admission, it’s her Achilles’

Heel. “You must be tired of talking about this depression from seven years ago.”

Mariah gives him a small, polite smile. “I guess.”

“Was that the first time in your life that you were so ill?”

“Yes.”

His voice is rich with pity. “You’ve had recurrent depression many times since then,

haven’t you?”

“No.”

“But you have been on medication,” Metz chides,

as if she’s given the wrong answer.

She looks puzzled for a moment, and inside,

he smiles. “Well, yes. But that’s what’s kept me from getting depressed again.”

“What medication are you on?”

“Prozac.”

“Was that specifically prescribed to alleviate the wild mood swings?”

“I don’t have wild mood swings. I suffer from depression.”

“Do you remember the night you tried to kill yourself, Mrs. White?”

“Not really. I was told at Greenhaven that I’d probably block it out of my mind.”

“Are you depressed right now?”

“No.”

“If you weren’t taking medication, you’d probably be very depressed.”

“I don’t know,” Mariah hedges.

“You know, I’ve read about these cases where people on Prozac have flipped out. Gone crazy,

tried to kill themselves. Don’t you worry it might happen to you?”

“No,” Mariah says, looking toward Joan a little nervously.

“Do you have any recollection of going crazy while on Prozac?”

“No.”

“How about harming someone while on Prozac?”

“No.”

“How about just having some violent reactions?”

“No.”

Metz raises his brows. “No? You consider yourself an emotionally stable person, then?”

Mariah nods firmly. “Yes.”

Metz walks toward the plaintiff’s table and picks up a small videocasette. “I’d like to introduce the following tape into evidence.”

Joan is out of her seat in an instant,

approaching the bench. “You can’t let him do this,

Your Honor. He’s springing this evidence on me. I have a right to discovery.”

“Your Honor,” Metz counters, “Ms.

Standish was the one who opened up the line of questioning during her direct examination, with regard to how stable Mrs. White is under the influence of Prozac.”

Judge Rothbottam takes the tape from Metz’s hand. “I’ll look at it in chambers and make my decision. Let’s take a short recess.”

The attorneys head back to their seats. On the witness stand, unsure of what is happening,

Mariah remains frozen, until Joan realizes her predicament and quietly approaches to help her step down.

“What’s on the tape, Mariah?” Joan asks as soon as we are sitting at the defense table.

“I don’t know. Honestly.” Although it is cold in the courtroom by anyone’s standards, sweat trickles between my breasts and down my back.

The judge enters from a side door, settles into his chair, and asks me to return to the witness stand. From the corner of my eye I see a bailiff wheeling in a TV/VCR combination. “Shit,” Joan mutters.

“I’m going to allow the tape to be entered into evidence,” Rothbottam says. Metz goes through the legal process, then says, “Mrs.

White, I’m going to play the following tape for you.”

As he hits the play button, I bite my lip. The small screen fills with an image of me lunging toward the camera so that my features spread and blur. I’m shouting so loud that the words don’t register, and after a moment my hand comes up, clearly aiming to strike whoever has been filming.

Then the camera swings wildly, panning in an arc of color to touch briefly upon Faith, cowered in a corner; on my mother in a hospital johnny; on Ian and his producer.

The tape from the stress test, the footage Ian said he would not use.

He’s lied to me again. I turn toward the gallery, my eyes scanning until I find him –sitting just as still and white-faced as I must be.

The only way this tape could have come into Metz’s hands is, somehow, via Ian. And yet to look at him, one would believe that he is as surprised to see it surface in court as I am.

Before I can consider this, Metz begins to speak.

“Mrs. White, do you remember this incident?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us about the day the video was taken?”

“My mother was having a stress test done after her resuscitation. Mr. Fletcher was being allowed to film it.”

“What happened?”

“He promised not to turn the camera on my daughter. When he did turn it on her, I just … reacted.”

“You just … reacted. Hmm. Is that something you do often?”

“I was trying to protect Faith and–“

“A simple yes or no will do, Mrs.

White.”

“No.” I swallow hard. “If anything, I usually think things through to death before I act on them.”

Metz crosses the courtroom. “Would you say this tape shows you being “an emotionally stable person”?”

I hesitate, choosing my words carefully. “It is not one of my finer moments,

Mr. Metz. But on the whole I am emotionally stable.”

“On the whole? What about during those other odd incidents of fury? Is that when you physically harm your daughter?”

“I do not harm Faith. I’ve never harmed Faith.”

“Mrs. White, you yourself said you’re an emotionally stable woman, and yet this videotape clearly disproves your claim. So you’ve lied to us under oath, haven’t you?”

“No–“

“Come on, now, Mrs. White …”

“Objection!” Joan calls out.

“Sustained. You’ve made your point,

Counselor.”

Metz smiles at me. “You say you’d never harm your daughter physically?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You’d never harm her psychologically either,

right?”

“Right.”

“And you’re an intelligent woman. You’ve followed the testimony in this courtroom.”

“Yes, I have.”

“So if you had Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, and I accused you of harming your daughter, what would you probably say?”

I stare at him, bile burning the back of my throat. “That I didn’t do it.”

“And you’d be lying–just like you lied about being emotionally stable. Just like you’ve lied about protecting Faith.”

“I don’t lie, Mr. Metz,” I say,

fighting for control. “I don’t. And I have protected Faith. That’s what you saw me doing on the video–primitively, maybe, but protecting her all the same. It’s why I took her out of school when other children began to tease her. It’s why I took her away, in secret,

before this hearing started.”

“Ah, yes. Going into hiding. Let’s talk about that. You disappeared the night after your husband informed you that he’d be filing for a change of custody, correct?”

“Yes, but–“

“Then you had the misfortune of discovering that your great escape wasn’t that great, after all. Ian Fletcher had managed to follow you.

We’ve already proven Mr. Fletcher to have been less than honest up on the witness stand, and now we’ve seen evidence of your own falsehoods.

Maybe you’d like to tell us–truthfully, for a change–what happened in Kansas City?”

What happened in Kansas City?

This, Ian knows, is the moment that Mariah will be able to exact revenge. First the McManus incident, then the video–regardless of the fact that he personally had nothing to do with the latter, it’s not going to soften Mariah’s heart toward him just now.

Plus, the simplest way for her to regain her credibility is to offer up as proof the evidence that Faith is truly a healer. The evidence that’s all tangled up in the story of Ian’s own brother.

An eye for an eye. At that, Ian almost laughs. It is downright ironic for him to be brought down by biblical justice. But just as he exploited Mariah’s privacy, she now has the opportunity to uncover his own.

Ian braces his hands on the wooden seat and prepares himself for Judgment Day.

What happened in Kansas City?

Malcolm Metz is standing right in front of me. To his right, I know that Joan is desperately trying to catch my attention so I will not say anything stupid. But the only person I can see is Ian, buried in the middle of the courtroom gallery.

I think of Dr. Fitzgerald and his testimony. Of Joan walking into her office to find Ian waiting for her, ready to play paralegal. Of the look on Ian’s face when Allen McManus walked up to the witness stand,

when that horrible videocassette began to play.

He isn’t perfect. But then again, neither am I.

I look at Ian, wondering if he can tell what I am thinking. Then I turn to Malcolm Metz. “Absolutely nothing,” I say.

The bitch is lying. It’s written on her face. Metz would bet his life savings that,

somehow, Fletcher’s arrival in Kansas City led to direct proof that all the mumbo jumbo surrounding Faith is just that, and that, consequently,

the miraculous hallucinations and physical trauma are actually being caused by Mariah. Fletcher’s been close-mouthed because he doesn’t want to give away his big story;

Mariah’s keeping quiet because it only ruins her credibility. But short of accusing her of fabricating testimony again, there’s very little he can do.

He takes a moment to compose himself. “You love your daughter, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’d do anything for your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Would you give up your life for her?”

He can practically see her imagining Faith in that pitiful hospital bed. “I would.”

“Would you give up custody of her?”

Mariah falters. “I don’t understand.”

“What I mean is this, Mrs. White: If it was proven to you by a series of experts that Colin was the better parent for Faith, would you want her to go?”

Mariah frowns, then looks at Colin. After a moment she faces the attorney again. “Yes.”

“Nothing further.”

Furious, Joan asks to redirect.

“Mariah,” she says, “first I want to address that clip of videotape. Can you tell us what happened prior to the outburst on that tape?”