Matters of Faith (28 page)

He folded his arms around me so quickly that tears welled in my eyes when I realized that he needed to be touched too. Perhaps it didn't fix anything permanent, but it would be nice, just for a moment, to be us again.

Our breathing synchronized, and I rested my forehead in the curve of his neck, coming together the way we'd perfected over the years. It amazed me that it hadn't changed. Shouldn't—after agreeing that we had come to an impasse in our marriage—our curves and angles have shifted slightly? Shouldn't the chemicals that made the smell of him mean safety and love and happiness have altered now that I wasn't so sure he meant any of those things anymore?

But nothing about our bodies had changed, and I breathed him in just as deeply as I had when he embraced me on our first night together. I felt him do the same; felt his hands seek out and settle in the places he loved the most on me, my hip bone, the span between my shoulder blades. It had always felt as though he were holding me together, as if were my bones to suddenly disjoint themselves I would not collapse, accordionlike, to the floor.

It was a lovely moment, suspended there.

He couldn't sleep. He regretted letting her go, or regretted staying behind, he wasn't sure which, as soon as the door closed and the sounds of the dogs faded away. He walked down the hallway and slipped into the room Ada had been in, slid into the bed she'd lain on and tried to smell some bit of her. But she hadn't been there long enough, and all he could smell was fresh sheets atop an old mattress.

He returned to the sofa and stared into the dark, his eyelids jumpy with exhaustion. He was what his mother used to call “mad at sleep,” and the longer he cursed not being able to find it, the further away the possibility sailed.

He finally eased himself off the sofa and roamed the house, stopping at each window to stare out into the night, listening, waiting for something to happen. He developed a track and made the loop more times than he could count before he finally returned to the sofa and fell upon his knees in front of it, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on the sagging, sheet covered-cushions, like a child, to pray.

He had nothing to say. He did not know what to ask for, whom to praise, how to make the words work anymore. But he stayed there, determined that something would eventually come to him, determined that he could escape into it and quiet the anger, the pain, the uncertainty.

He tried the rote prayers, recited the chants, even whispered a song under his breath, swaying from side to side, and none of it worked, none of it moved him, and he had never known the power of the word
forsaken
before but he knew it now, and that became his prayer.

You have been forsaken, you have been forsaken
.

He heard a noise behind him and his heart skipped wildly as he turned to see what had appeared, what manifestation his disbelief had conjured up. He would not have been surprised to see the things he only imagined at three in the morning: a demon, Satan himself, Iblis, Mara, Angra Mainyu.

It was Grandmother Tobias, but seeing her there rather than the demon of his midnight imagination did not ease his fear, or his anger. He rose quickly, feeling it in his head, and sat on the sofa as she crossed the room.

“What are you doing?” she asked, leaning down and taking his cheeks between her thumbs and fingers, as if she were a doting aunt, but squeezing, so he had to look up at her. He was shocked at how much it hurt. “I know what you were thinking,” she hissed at him.

He was bewildered.
He
hadn't known what he was thinking, how could she? He gaped up at her, and she gave his face a little shake before releasing his cheeks. His hands flew to them, rubbed them back into shape.

“I wasn't doing anything,” he protested.

“You were going to try to sneak in there, in my house, under my roof. I gave you shelter and you were going to go in there—”

“No,” he protested. “No, I wasn't. I couldn't sleep, I was walking around, and I was—I was praying. I was praying.”

She became still and glanced down the hall, uncertainty stamped on her face, better than the strange rage that had been there a moment before.

“Praying?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I was, you saw me, I was kneeling.”

“Don't have to kneel to pray, son,” she said, sitting on the sofa beside him, lowering her voice, trying to not wake a girl who wasn't there anymore.

“I know, I just, I thought it would be easier.”

“Ain't hard to pray either,” she said, chastising softly.

How he wanted to argue. It was. It was hard to pray, when you didn't know what to pray to, when you didn't know what to pray for, when you didn't have faith that anyone, anything, was listening.

“Marshall,” she said, “you can be his vessel.”

“What?”

“You can be his vessel.”

“I—What the hell does that mean?” He wanted to shout this, but he was aware, still, that Ada was supposed to be in the room down the hall. He wanted to buy her time, time enough to get out of the state, to get as far as she could. And so he put as much of the idea of yelling as he could into his half-whisper. “What does that
mean
?” he demanded again, satisfied when she shrunk from him.

But Grandmother Tobias was clearly not a woman accustomed to shrinking from much and she came back at him as quickly as she had retreated. “Don't you push me, child, don't you question me. You open yourself, and you let him fill you, and you
will
find the way, you
will
find the path. You refuse His love and you will be lost, you accept His love and you will be released.”

“From what?” he asked.

“From your doubts.”

“I don't think I can be,” he whispered. “How do you do it?”

She tilted her head at him, uncomprehending, as if he'd asked her how to speak Japanese. “You just do,” she said simply.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Yes,” she corrected him. “Your girl there, she knows. She just knows, she doesn't question, she knows. Now, I'm not altogether clear on just what she thinks about it. Seems to me she's mighty confused on that part of it. But she knows. She'll get there. You'll get there too, but you have to stop fighting it.”

He slumped back on the sofa, all the anger gone out of him, everything gone out of him, and closed his eyes. “I'm not fighting anything,” he said.

She patted his knee, as if the conversation had somehow made sense, somehow been satisfying to them both, and was now over. “Go to sleep,” she said, and left him there.

He watched her move slowly down the hall through half-open eyes and had a moment of fear when she stopped at Ada's door, listening. Whatever she hoped to hear she obviously convinced herself she had, and she turned away and entered her own room, quietly shutting her door.

He threw himself back on the sofa and stared at the windows. There were no prayers in his mind, there was nothing in his mind but Ada, and everything he had just lost, had just willingly allowed,
encouraged
, to drive out of his life and into some unknown future without him. He pictured her speeding to the coast and then turning north onto the freedom trail of I-75, windows down, one graceful arm cocked out the window, wings of dark hair fluttering about her face.

Sometime in the predawn hours, Ada's hair turned to water, her limbs turned to fish, and he slept and dreamt. When the windows became hazy with the pink of sunrise, he opened his eyes as though he'd never closed them, rose, and quietly made coffee.

He poured two cups, looking over his shoulder, dumped one in the sink, and then sat at the table until Grandmother Tobias emerged from her room, shuffling in like an old woman, devoid of any of the stealthy visitor of the night before.

“Good morning,” he said. “We were up early so I made coffee. Can I pour you a cup?”

She lowered herself into a chair with held breath, dropping the last couple of inches, and he suddenly wondered exactly how old she was. At times, when she turned on that faith, that passion, she became ageless, but now, without that fire and in the dawning humidity of a merciless Florida morning, she could easily have been well into her eighties or beyond.

“Nice to have it ready,” she said, her voice matching her aged appearance. She accepted the cup gratefully and looked at him closely as she took a sip. “Your girl gone back to bed?”

“No,” he said, taking his seat and keeping his eyes on his coffee. “Actually, she's got family a little farther up the east coast, so I let her have the car for a couple of days so she could visit. She waited, but we weren't sure when you'd be up, and I wanted her to get on the road before the weekend traffic got too bad.”

He had lied so much already. He would start making things right soon, but for now he was going to continue to do what he had to do. He'd deal with the consequences later, and he knew, knew already, that the consequences might be dire indeed. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and held it up for her to see, as if it were a calling card of credibility.

“Talked to Dad before he got on the water to let him know I wanted to stay the week to get to know you a little better. I hope that's okay?”

Her face changed as quickly as the sky at sunset, from suspicion, to acceptance, to a flattered hopefulness that twisted in his gut like fish twisted in his hand to get free.

“This will be nice,” she said, hesitantly, as though she weren't quite used to looking forward to something, or letting on that she was. He resigned himself to the fact that, apparently, there was no bottom to how badly he could feel. There was still another depth to reach.

The deep pool he kept looking for within himself was never full of faith. If he had a deep pool of anything, the catfish, the bottom-feeders, would be feasting on regret, guilt, maybe some well-earned self-hatred. He felt as old as Grandmother Tobias. How did anyone get to an advanced age without becoming stooped and angry with guilt?

There were only two answers he could come up with: There were either very few people who did bad things, made horrible decisions, or there were millions who had no conscience, or who at least had incredibly selective memories.

Perhaps memory loss was not a curse of old age, but a gift. He was ready to be eighty, eighty-five, ninety. He wanted to already have his life behind him. Wouldn't it be easier?

Life was messy and long, with countless opportunities to make the wrong decision, to hurt other people. Exhausting.

Grandmother Tobias made breakfast, and he ate it, but tasted little. He didn't bother feeling badly about eating the sausage.

Over the next week they fished, paddled Fisheating Creek and Lake Okeechobee, ate, and looked through more pictures. His grandmother brought out shoeboxes filled with more photos, and seemed to know and, more surprisingly, respect that he did not want to talk about Ada or his family. At least the family he'd grown up with.

The rest of his family, her family, he heard all about. She produced a wealth of ephemera: sermons scribbled on tissue-thin paper, birth, marriage, and death certificates, Christmas cards, and report cards. It was all too overwhelming to complete a picture in his mind of exactly what genetic material had distilled down to form who he was, but it was certainly more than he'd ever had to work with before.

Perhaps his grandmother thought it would help him. But all it did was confuse him more, make him retreat further from understanding any sort of clear truth. As she became chattier, he became more quiet, and he drew out the days with fishing as much as he could, eventually taking the truck back out in the afternoons to fish the creek himself, getting back as late as he could to toss more fish to the wild dogs than they could possibly eat.

Eventually, two days after he was supposed to appear in court, after Grandmother Tobias asked him over breakfast if he was certain that Ada was coming back and he had to tell her that no, she wasn't, he finally turned on his cell phone.

He didn't listen to any of the messages, and there were many. Instead, he made a call to the hospital. They wouldn't tell him anything. He looked at the phone, its technology as foreign to him now as his own face in his grandmother's tiny bathroom mirror. He finally dialed.

“Dad? It's Marshall.”

THANK God for lawyers. Lawyers on my side anyway. Tessa met with Cal and me and swung into action with remarkable efficiency. It felt, a little, as if all of us—Cal and me, Tessa and Mingus, even the detectives and, to a lesser extent, the two FBI agents who spoke with us—were working together.

None of us agreed on why we needed to find Marshall, but we all agreed, with varying degrees of desperation, that finding him was the goal. The FBI agents filled us in on the information they had on Ada, but overall they seemed rather bored with the whole thing. It seemed to simply be a lead for them, not a break in their case. They were both young, and I had the feeling that their idea of what being an FBI agent would be like and what it was turning into were wildly different.

I had no sympathy for them. What in life turns out the way we thought it would? Our jobs, our marriages, our children, ourselves. When they sat across from me with bored sighs, barely taking any notes, I wanted to say, “Welcome to the world, welcome to your lives. Sucks to be on the other side of your dreams, doesn't it?”

I didn't, of course. I answered their questions, but when they left I knew we wouldn't hear anything from them. They would go back to Miami and hope to get assigned to a case that was more exciting than trying to find a couple of kids who might, just might, have some idea about where an alleged pedophile could be, but most likely did not.