Keeping Faith: A Novel (12 page)

At the profound silence, Ian grins.

“Well, let me help you out. The last thing you believed in with absolute, unshakable conviction was … Santa Claus.” He raises his brows.

“No matter how impossible it seemed, no matter how much evidence to the contrary, when you were a child you wanted to believe, and so you did. And as rude as the comparison sounds, it’s not all that different from believing in the existence of God. They both grant a boon based on whether you’ve been naughty or nice. They both go about their work without being seen. They rely heavily on the assistance of mythical creatures–elves in one case,

angels in the other.”

Ian lets his eyes touch on one of the cult members, one local reporter, one mother clutching an infant. “So how come y’all don’t believe in Santa nowadays? Well, because you grew up,

and you realized how impossible the whole thing was.

Santa Claus went from being a fact to being a real good story, one to pass on to your children. The same way your parents told you about God when you were a kid.” He hesitates for a moment, letting the silence thicken. “Can’t you see that God’s a myth, too?”

Millie Epstein slams her car door violently. Mariah’s beautiful old farmhouse is flocked by lunatics, from what she can see.

At least twenty people are milling around on the long driveway, some even bold enough to trample the grass edging the front porch. These include a handful wearing bizarre red nightgowns, a few curious locals, and two vans with television call letters spangled across their sides, complete with reporters. Millie shoves them all out of her way until she reaches the porch, where she finds the chief of police. “Thomas,” she says. “What kind of circus is this?”

The police chief shrugs. “Just got here myself, Mrs. Epstein. From what I can tell,

based on the reporters over there, there’s one group saying that your granddaughter is Jesus or something. Then there’s another guy who’s saying that not only is Faith not Jesus, but that Jesus doesn’t exist.”

“Can’t we get them off Mariah’s lawn?”

“I was just about to do that myself,” he admits.

“Course, I can only keep ‘em as far back as the road. It’s a public venue.”

Millie surveys the group. “Can we talk to Faith?” a reporter shouts. “Bring her out!”

“Yeah!”

“Bring out the mother, too!”

The voices crescendo, and, horrified, all Millie can do is listen. Then she crosses her arms over her chest and stares out at the crowd. “This is private property; you don’t belong here.

And you’re talking about a child. A child. Would you really take the word of a seven-year-old?”

From the front of the crowd comes the sound of someone clapping, slowly, deliberately. “My congratulations, ma’am,” Ian Fletcher drawls. “A rational statement, right in the middle of a maelstrom. Imagine that.”

He comes into Millie’s line of vision,

continuing to walk forward until she can see that it is Ian Fletcher, the one from the TV show, and that as handsome as he is and as mellifluous his voice,

she knows that she’s made a horrible error in judgment ever to have found him attractive.

Millie’s tossed the crowd a crumb of doubt,

just so that they’ll have something to feed on other than her granddaughter. But this man … this man scatters doubt in order to have them all eating out of the palm of his hand.

“I suggest you leave,” Millie says tightly. “My granddaughter is of no interest to you.”

Ian Fletcher flashes a smile. “Is that a fact? So you don’t believe your own granddaughter? I guess you know that a child who says she’s talking to God is just that … a child who says she’s talking to God. No bells, no whistles, not even any miracles. Just a group of fawning cult members who are already three shades shy of reputability. But that’s certainly not enough to create a frenzy over, is it now?”

His words are honeyed; they run over Millie and root her to the porch. “Ma’am, you’re a woman after my own heart.”

Millie narrows her eyes and opens her mouth and then, clutching her chest, falls to the ground at Ian’s feet.

Mariah throws open the front door and kneels over her mother. “Ma!” she cries,

shaking Millie’s slack shoulders. “Call an ambulance!”

There are a few scattered camera flashes.

Ignoring them, Mariah bends over Millie,

leaning her ear close to her mother’s mouth. But she feels no breath, no telltale stir of her hair. It’s her heart, it’s her heart, she knows it. She squeezes her mother’s hand, certain that if she lets go just the tiniest bit, she will lose her.

Moments later the ambulance roars up the driveway, spraying gravel, getting as close as it can given the m`elange of vans and news trucks and the Winnebago. The paramedics race up the porch stairs. One gently pulls Mariah out of the way and the other begins to do CPR.

“Oh, God,” Mariah whispers, her voice tiny. “Oh, God. God. Oh, my God.”

Oh, guard. Guard. Oh, my guard.

From the hiding spot where she has been huddled since sneaking out of the house, Faith’s head swings up. And her summons sounds so much like her mother’s that for the first time she realizes what she’s been saying all along.

Ian watches Mariah White tearfully argue with the paramedics, who refuse to let Faith ride along in the ambulance. The chief of police intercedes, promising to bring her daughter down to the hospital as soon as backup arrives to get everyone off her property. With his hands in his pockets, he watches the ambulance roar out of the driveway.

“Nice work.”

Ian startles at the voice and finds his executive producer holding out a set of car keys. “Here you go. You’ll get network coverage tonight for sure.”

For badgering an old woman into cardiac arrest. “Well, now,” Ian says. “Can’t ask for much more’n that.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

Ian clutches the keys. “Right,” he says,

falling quickly into James’s expectations and looking around for the producer’s BMW. He doesn’t even bother calling for a cameraman,

knowing they’ll never be allowed to set foot in the hospital. “Don’t go drag-racing my Winnebago,” he shouts, then speeds off.

In the ER waiting room he watches the fuzzy-reception TV, tuned to kiddie cartoons. There is no sign of Mariah White. Faith arrives ten minutes later in the company of a young policeman. They sit a few rows away, and every now and then she turns in her seat to stare at Ian.

It’s downright disconcerting. Ian hasn’t got much of a conscience, so his work rarely puts him in a contemplative state of mind. After all, the people he usually upsets the most are the goddamned Southern Baptists, of which he was once one and who, in Ian’s mind, are so busy swallowing their daily doses of Jesus that they need to come up choking on their self-righteousness from time to time.

Once a woman fainted clear away in the middle of his Central Park speeches, but that isn’t at all the same thing. Faith White’s grandma–Ian doesn’t even know her name–

well, what happened happened partly because of something he’d said, something he’d done.

It’s a story, he tells himself.

She’s no one you know, and it’s your story.

The policeman’s beeper goes off. He checks it, then turns to Faith and asks her to stay put. On his way to a bank of phones, the cop stops at the triage nurse’s desk and speaks quietly, no doubt asking the woman to watch the kid for a minute.

When Faith turns to stare at him again, Ian closes his eyes. Then he hears her small,

thin voice. “Mister?”

She is suddenly sitting beside him. “Hello,”

he says, after a moment.

“Is my grandma dead?”

“I don’t know,” Ian admits. She doesn’t respond, and–curious–he glances down at her. Faith huddles against the armrest of the chair, brooding. He doesn’t see someone touched by God. He sees a scared little girl.

“So,” he says, uncomfortably trying to ease her mind. “I bet you like the Spice Girls. I met the Spice Girls,” he confides.

Faith blinks at him. “Are you the reason that my grandma fell down?”

Ian feels his stomach clench. “I think I am, Faith. And I’m very sorry.”

She turns away. “I don’t like you.”

“You’re in good company.” He waits for her to move, or for the policeman to claim her, but before this can happen, Mariah White walks out of the ER, red-eyed and searching. Her eyes find Faith, and the girl jumps out of her seat and into her mother’s embrace. Mariah stares coldly at Ian. “The policeman … he was …” Ian stumbles over the words, gesturing down the hall.

“You get away from my daughter,” she says stiffly. With her arm around Faith, she disappears back through the swinging doors of the ER.

Ian watches them go and then approaches the triage nurse. “I assume Mrs. White’s mother didn’t make it.”

The nurse doesn’t glance up from her paperwork. “You assume right.”

The thing about tragedy is that it hits suddenly,

with all the power and fury of a hurricane.

Mariah holds Faith’s hand tightly as they stand beside her own mother’s body. The ER cubicle is empty of medical personnel now, and a kind nurse has removed the tubes and needles in Millie’s body for the family’s private good-bye. It is Mariah’s decision to let Faith in. She doesn’t want to do it, but she knows it is the only way Faith will believe her when she says that her grandmother is gone.

“Do you know,” Mariah says, her voice thick, “what it means if Grandma’s dead?”

Before Faith can answer, Mariah begins to cry.

She sits down on a chair beside Millie’s body, her face in her hands. At first she does not pay attention to the screeching sound on the other side of the gurney. By the time she looks up,

Faith has managed to drag the other folding chair over. She stands on the seat, her cheek pressed to Millie’s chest, her arms awkwardly wrapped around her grandmother’s body.

For a moment Mariah feels the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and she touches her palm to it. But her gaze never wavers from Faith –not when Faith lifts herself up on her elbows,

not when Faith places her hands on either side of Millie’s face and kisses her full on the mouth, not when Millie’s arms rise stiff and slow and cling to her granddaughter for dear life.

Keeping Faith

FIVE

A simple child That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

–William Wordsworth September 30, 1999 For many hours after my mother comes back to life,

I cannot stop shaking. I sit in the ER while the same doctor who signed her death certificate now gives her a battery of exams and guardedly pronounces her healthy. I tuck my hands beneath my thighs and pretend that it is perfectly normal for a woman who’s been pronounced DOA to now walk around the halls of the hospital.

The doctor wants to keep my mother overnight for observation. “No way,” she insists. “I’m running, I’m jumping, I’m not even breaking a sweat. I should always be this healthy.”

“Ma, it’s probably not such a bad idea.

You were in cardiac arrest.”

“You were dead,” the physician stresses.

“There were guys in med school who had stories of corpses sitting up in the morgue just as the body bag was being zipped. I always wanted to have a story like that myself.” As my mother and I exchange a look, he clears his throat. “At any rate, we’ll want to do a cardiogram, a CT scan, some other tests, and check your heart medication.”

My mother snorts. “Make sure I’m not a vegetable, you mean.”

“Make sure you don’t have a relapse,” the doctor corrects. “Let me get a nurse to wheel you up to a patient floor.”

“Thank you very much, I can walk,” my mother says, hopping off the table.

The doctor starts to leave the cubicle, still shaking his head. I hurry across and touch his sleeve, motioning just outside the curtains. “Is she really all right? Is this some glitch in her nervous system, you know, and an hour from now she’ll be comatose?”

The doctor looks at me thoughtfully. “I can’t say,” he admits. “I’ve seen flat-line patients in the OR sputter and come around. I’ve seen people in comas for months wake up and start talking like nothing’s happened. I will tell you that your mother was clinically dead, Mrs. White.

The paramedics said so in their report–hell, I said so in my own report. Is this a temporary recovery? I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“I see,” I say, although I don’t.

“Her heart shows virtually no sign of trauma. Of course, we’ll want to do further studies, but right now it seems as strong as a teenager’s.” He pats my forearm. “I can’t explain it, Mrs. White, so I won’t even try.”

“Will you just stop already?” My mother shrugs off my supportive arm. “I’m fine.”

She strides out of the ER, pushing ahead of me and Faith. The triage nurse crosses herself.

The paramedic who drove the ambulance, gossiping now with the desk nurse over a danish, drops his Styrofoam cup of coffee onto the floor.

“Excuse me,” my mother says, stopping an intern. “Which way to the elevators?” The woman points, and my mother looks back at me.

“Well? Are you just going to stand there?”

She marches down the hall, right past Ian Fletcher, who is staring at us with such disbelief that, for the first time in hours, I laugh.

While the phlebotomists poke and prod my mother, Faith and I sit in the waiting room on the patient floor. She looks pale and tired;

purple smudges the size of thumbprints are just beneath her eyes. I don’t realize that I’ve spoken my question aloud until Faith’s small face lifts. “I did what you wished for,” she whispers.

I swallow hard. “You had nothing to do with Grandma getting better. You understand?”

“You asked her,” Faith murmurs. “I heard you.”

“I asked who?”

“God. You said, “Oh, God. God.

Oh, my God.”" Faith rubs her nose on the shoulder of her shirt. “And she heard you. She told me what to do to make you feel better.”

I bow my head and stare at my daughter’s sneakers. One is untied, the laces straggling on the linoleum like any other kid’s. But my child has been talking to God. My child has apparently just performed a miracle.

I fight the urge to burst into tears. This whole thing has been a prolonged nightmare, and before I know it Colin will shake me and tell me to roll over and go back to sleep. Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees. This is the stuff of TV movies, of novels. Not of everyday, ordinary life.

My thumbs absently rub a callus on the inside of Faith’s palm. “What’s this?”

Faith hides her hands in her lap. “From the monkey bars.”

“Not from …” How do I say this? “Not from touching Grandma? It didn’t … hurt you?”

Faith shakes her head. “It felt like being on the hill of the roller coaster, going down.” She stares at me, confused. “Mommy, didn’t you want Grandma to be okay?”

I fold her into my arms, wishing I could take her inside me again and protect her from what is certain, now, to come. “Oh, Faith. Of course I did. D. It just scares me a little that you might have been the one to make it happen.” I stroke her hair, her shoulders.

“It scares me a little, too,” Faith whispers.

Woman Dies, Comes Back to Life 1 October, 1999; New Canaan,

NH–YESTERDAY, at approximately 3:34 P.m., Mildred Epstein passed away. At 4:45 P.m., she sat up and asked what she was doing in the hospital.

Epstein, 56, was visiting her daughter’s home in New Canaan when, witnesses say,

she clutched her chest and fell to the ground.

EMT’S on the scene performed CPR for over 20 minutes, but never managed to revive her.

She was pronounced dead on arrival at Connecticut Valley Medical Center by Peter Weaver, M.d. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Weaver told reporters last night. “In spite of the corroborative stories of many witnesses and trained emergency medical personnel, tests prove that Mrs.

Epstein’s heart shows no indication of trauma,

much less of having stopped for over an hour.”

Sources indicate that Epstein went into cardiac arrest after verbally sparring with Ian Fletcher, the teleatheist known for denying the existence of God. He was preparing a piece on Epstein’s granddaughter, concerning the controversial claim that the child has been communicating with God.

Neither Ms. Epstein nor Mr. Fletcher could be reached for comment.

“You know, this doesn’t count,” Ian says,

stretching back in his chair. “When I said fresh seafood, I wasn’t talking about tuna casserole.”

“It was this or Donut King.” James grins.

“Crullers or Chicken of the Sea.”

Ian shudders. “Do you know how much I’d pay for a good cut of Angus beef right now?”

“You could probably pilfer a whole cow from the dairy outfit across the road. There’s so damn many I bet no one’s been keeping count.”

James pats his mouth with a napkin. “At least you’re in a restaurant.”

“That’s like saying traveling in a Winnebago is similar to going on safari.”

“No–it’s like going on a grassroots revival. Or so you told me several weeks ago.” The producer leans forward. “C’mon,

Ian, you’re just picking up steam. The NBC Nightly News aired your segment with the grandmother buying the farm, and ran it hourly on the late-night editions.” James lifts his coffee cup. “I have a good feeling about this one.

The kid’s the hook–people don’t expect her to be making it all up. Which is only going to make it more spectacular when you draw back the curtain.”

Ian smiles faintly. “Worth suffering accommodations in steerage, at the very least.”

“Look at it this way: if this story puts you back in the game, you’ll never have to look at an RV as long as you live.” James reaches for the check, laughs, and pulls out his credit card.

“I actually used to like camping, as a kid.

Didn’t you ever do that?”

Ian doesn’t respond. James’s childhood was probably a bit different from his own recollections. “Oh, that’s right. You were never a kid.”

“Nope.” Ian smiles. “I sprang fully formed from the brow of my executive producer.”

“Really, Ian. I mean, we’ve known each other–what?–seven years? And all I know about you before you started in radio is that you got a Ph.d. at that inferior school in Boston.”

“That inferior school in Boston had the superior judgment to leave you to the likes of Yale,” Ian says. Feeling the prick of unease, he pretends to yawn. “I’m beat,

James. Better head back to the old homestead.”

James cocks a brow. “You? Sleepy? Like hell.”

For a moment Ian tenses. How could James know about his insomnia? How could he know that the last time Ian remembers getting more than a few hours of rest was several years ago? Has James seen him leave the Winnebago in the night to walk the woods or the plains or the prairie of whatever particular hell he’s stuck in?

“You’re just feeling cornered,” James deduces, “and trying to change the topic.” Ian relaxes, safe in his privacy. “I’m serious, Ian. I’m asking as a friend. What were your parents like? How’d you grow up?”

Overnight, Ian thinks, but he does not say so. He pushes back from the table. “I’ve got a powerful hunger for a cruller just now,” he answers, slipping his fa@cade into place with a grin. “Care to join me?”

October 3, 1999 Fortunately, the police have forced Ian Fletcher and the members of that weird cult and the fifty or so other gawkers who’ve turned up all the way off our property. Unfortunately,

that doesn’t get them far enough away. The road–a public venue–is only a half acre away from the house, so we can see them from the windows. And that means they can see us, too.

I haven’t let Faith play outside, although she is restless and whining. They clamor for me when I step out for the briefest moment; what would they do to her? I even wait until after midnight to sneak outside with the trash, trying to set it out for collection without being barraged by reporters. I steal past the swing set and under the fringe of oak trees.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

I jump up. Behind the glowing tip of match is Ian Fletcher. He lights the cigar and clamps it between his teeth, inhaling.

“I could have you arrested,” I say. “You’re trespassing.”

“I know. But I don’t think you will.”

“You’re wrong.” I immediately head toward the house, ready to call the police.

“Don’t,” he says quietly. “I saw you moving around inside, getting ready to come on out here, and I just wanted to ask after your mother.” He gestures toward the collection of cars at the edge of the road. “Without everyone listening.”

“What about her?”

“Is she all right?”

Without taking my eyes off him, I nod.

“No thanks to you.”

Is it my imagination, or does Ian Fletcher actually blush? “Yeah, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have …” He hesitates,

then shakes his head.

“Shouldn’t have what?”

His eyes are bright and burning; they hold me.

“I just shouldn’t have. That’s all.”

“An apology from Ian Fletcher? I ought to get this on tape.” But the next moment he is gone, and the only sign he’s been there at all are the red embers of his cigar at my feet.

October 4, 1999 The next day I go to the hospital, where Dr.

Weaver plans to test my mother’s heart again. To my shock, I find her waiting in the lounge on the patient floor with Ian Fletcher. “Mariah,”

she says, as if we are all getting together for tea. “This is Mr. Fletcher.”

I grip Faith’s hand so tightly she yelps. “We’ve met. Would you excuse us for a moment?” I pull my mother aside, Faith in tow. “Do you want to tell me why he’s here?”

“Calm down, Mariah. I swear, you’re headed for a heart attack yourself. I invited Mr.

Fletcher–” she pauses, smiles at him and nods, “–s that he can get his story and then get the heck out of our lives. Let him film whatever he wants; I’ve got nothing to hide.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “What makes you think he’s not going to label you as some kind of zombie or vampire and stick around anyway?”

“Because I know.”

“Oh, great. Well, that clears it all up for me.” I tighten my hold on my daughter.

“Faith doesn’t want him here either.”

“She’s reacting to your vibes, sweetheart.”

“I don’t have vibes. There are no such thing as vibes.”

“There’s no such thing as God either, right?” My mother smiles innocently.

“All right,” I say. “This is your dog-and-pony show. If you want Ian Fletcher here, it’s your business. But he’s not speaking to me or to Faith, and I’m not setting one foot in that examination room unless you make that clear to him.”