Keeping Faith: A Novel (31 page)

at that!–to start proclaiming God as a mother.

It is said that she’s a healer. Well, that he might even accept, with the proper sorts of proof.

And that she has stigmata–again, he’d like to see it with his own eyes. But to say that God is visiting her in a clearly female form …

certainly it is heresy.

Father Rampini checks his reflection in the rearview mirror before opening the door of his car.

He tucks the leather portfolio beneath his arm and steps out, smoothing the placket of his black shirt and adjusting the white collar.

The door to the rectory sweeps open, and Father MacReady stands on the threshold. For the briefest of moments they size each other up:

parish priest to seminary priest, confessor to researcher, Irish to Italian. Father MacReady steps forward, filling the doorway,

making it impossible for the visiting priest to enter.

Just as quickly, he steps back. “Father.” He nods. “I hope your trip was all right?”

“A little bit of rain near Brattleboro,”

Paul says, the mutual antagonism vanishing into professional politesse like smoke.

“Come in,” Father MacReady says, glancing around. “Can I get your bag for you?”

“That’s all right. I don’t imagine I’ll be staying.”

This is news to Father MacReady. Although he isn’t thrilled to share his home with some pompous,

published yahoo from St. Joseph’s, he knows that it will reflect poorly on himself if he fails to offer enough hospitality. “It’s no trouble.”

“No, of course not. I just believe I’ll be able to wrap this case up in a matter of hours.”

At that, Joseph MacReady laughs. “Do you? Maybe you’d better come inside.”

On the plane home from Kansas City Ian sits apart from Faith and me, since we don’t want to attract attention by being seen together. An hour into the flight, while Faith is busy listening to the movie, I hesitantly creep into the darkened first-class cabin and take the seat beside him. He reaches over the seat divider and squeezes my hand. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How’s everything back there?”

“Fine. We had cereal for breakfast. You?”

“Waffles.”

“Oh,” I answer politely, thinking that this is not the conversation two people who made love so magically the night before ought to be having.

“Have you thought about the hearing?”

I’ve told Ian everything my mother told me: Joan Standish has received word that Colin’s suing me for custody of Faith. “What can I do? He’ll say that Faith shouldn’t have to live with a hundred people shoving to take her picture and ask her questions every time she leaves the house. Who’s going to disagree with that?”

“You know I’ll do what I can to help,” Ian says, but I do not know that, not at all. Now that we are headed home, the differences between us have sprung up, a minefield that makes it impossible to recall the seamless landscape of the night before. When we step off this plane,

by necessity, Ian and I will be on very different sides of a controversial issue.

We both sit silently, brooding. Then Ian reaches for my hand, turning it over in his own before he starts to speak. “I have to tell you something,

Mariah. I wanted Faith to fail. I thought you were putting her up to this … prophet show for the attention. I deliberately set out to win your sympathy, so that you’d take her to Michael.”

“You already said this to me the other–“

“Hear me out, all right? I did and said whatever I could to get you there–including when I told you I was starting to believe in Faith. That was a lie, just one more thing to make sure you’d go to Lockwood. I was hot-miked that night. I taped you saying that Faith would give her healing powers a try. And when we got to Lockwood,

I taped that whole damned fiasco. I was going to show the way you two ran your sting.”

Stricken, I have to force my lips to move.

“There’s your proof, then.”

“No. After Michael pitched his fit and I realized Faith hadn’t been able to work a miracle, I was furious. I had my story, and it didn’t make a heap of difference so long as Michael was still rocking back and forth. I lied to you, Mariah, but I lied to myself, too. I didn’t want Faith to be a fraud, not when it came to my brother.” He looks at me. “I tossed the tape into the pond in Lockwood’s garden.”

I glance into my lap, one question tumbling through my mind. I have to know, I have to. “Last night … were you lying to me, then, too?”

Ian lifts my chin. “No. If you believe nothing else I’ve told you, believe that one thing.”

I let out the breath I’ve been holding and pull away from him. “I would just ask you one favor–if you could hold off on your show until after the preliminary hearing …”

“I’m not going to get on the air and say Faith couldn’t work a miracle.”

His voice is so soft that I realize what I’ve overlooked: Any reference to Faith is going to circle right back to Ian’s own brother.

“You don’t want anyone to know about Michael.”

“That’s not why. It’s because Faith did work one.”

I sit back, stunned. “She did not. I was there. I watched you leave the room.”

“When I went back this morning, Michael and I had a real conversation. He made fun of me.

And he reached right up and hugged me.”

“Oh, Ian.”

“It didn’t last for long, and at first I thought I’d just dreamed it. But I didn’t. I really had that minute with him, Mariah. One minute in twenty-five years.” He smiles sadly.

“One hell of a minute.” His expression clears as he turns to me. “Autism … it isn’t like that. It doesn’t switch on and off like a faucet. Even on Michael’s good days, he’s always been … apart. But this morning he was the brother I’d always wanted to have–and that’s beyond the power of science. I can’t tell you that I believe in God. But, Mariah … I do believe Faith can heal.”

The wheels of my mind turn. I imagine Ian stepping onto the front lawn and convoking the press. I imagine them hanging on his every word.

I imagine the furor that will ensue when Ian, the most influential doubting Thomas of them all,

announces that he’s found the real thing.

They will never let go of Faith.

“Lie,” I say quickly. “Tell everyone Faith couldn’t do it.”

“I don’t lie. That’s the whole point of the show.”

By now I am on the verge of tears. “You have to lie. You have to.”

Ian takes my hand and brings it to his mouth,

kisses each finger. “Hush, now. We’ll figure it all out.”

“We?” I shake my head. “Ian, there is no “we.” There’s you and your show, and there’s me and custody. If one of us wins, the other one loses.”

He tucks my head onto his shoulder, his voice soothing. “Ssh. Let’s pretend it’s six months from now. And I already know the name of the high school you went to, and your favorite Disney dwarf, and how you take your coffee.”

I smile hesitantly. “And we sit around on Saturday nights watching videos.”

“And I wear my boxers to breakfast. And you let me see you without makeup.”

“You already have.”

“You see?” Ian brushes his lips across my forehead, erasing the worry. “We’re halfway there.”

No. Haverhill, New Hampshire A. Warren Rothbottam likes his show tunes. He likes them so much, in fact, that he’s personally paid to have his judge’s chambers at the Grafton County Superior Court rewired with a state-of-the-art stereo system and cleverly hidden Bose speakers, which make it seem as if Carol Channing is robustly singing from behind the neat row of New Hampshire Procedural Law books. The music, however, is too big for the room, and often spills into the hall or through the walls. Most people do not mind. If anything, it gives a certain character to the courthouse that the squat, unremarkable building in the middle of nowhere does not manage by itself.

Today, before settling down behind his desk, Judge Rothbottam selected Evita. He closes his eyes and slices his hands through the air, humming loudly enough to be heard in the hall.

“Your Honor.”

The timid voice cuts through his orchestration, and Rothbottam scowls. Punching a button on his intercom, the music dulls. “What,

McCarthy? This better be good.”

The clerk of the court is shaking. Everyone knows that when Judge Rothbottam puts on an original-cast recording, he isn’t to be disturbed. Something about the sanctity of the music.

But then again, an emergency motion is an emergency motion. And Malcolm Metz is too famous a lawyer to be put off by a county clerk.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor, really. It’s just that Mr. Metz called for the third time in response to his emergency motion.”

“You know what you can tell him to do with his emergency motion?”

McCarthy swallows. “I can guess, Your Honor. Would that be a denial, then?”

Scowling, Rothbottam reaches beneath his desk,

and the glorious voice of Patti LuPone cuts off in the middle of a high C. The judge has never met Malcolm Metz, but one would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to move in the circles of the New Hampshire legal system and not know about him. A highly paid rainmaker in a prestigious Manchester law firm, Metz has managed to reel in case after case receiving plenty of TV coverage: the custody battle for Baby J that resulted in a nasty courtroom war between a surrogate mother and an adoptive family, the sexual harassment suit won by a secretary against her senator boss, the current fiasco involving the split between a Mafia don and his bimbo wife. Rothbottam does not care for grandstanding; he leaves that to the legitimate theater.

If his courtroom has to be violated by some asshole like Metz, the counselor will damn well play by the judge’s rules.

“Just a second,” Rothbottam says to the clerk. He thumbs through the motion to modify custody that Metz has filed that morning and the accompanying brief requesting an ex parte hearing. According to Metz, the child is in grave danger and needs to be removed from the mother’s influence immediately; the ex parte motion is necessary before the defendant even gets wind of the motion to modify custody.

Just the kind of dramatic bullshit he’d expect from Malcolm Metz.

Rothbottam scans the brief. White very.

White. He just heard the divorce a month ago, and there hadn’t been any custody issues then. What the hell is going on?

He does not realize that he’s spoken aloud until he hears McCarthy on the intercom.

“Well, Your Honor, she’s that girl. The one who’s been on the news.”

“Who is?”

“The one the father wants custody of Faith White.”

The seven-year-old who is raising the dead and speaking to God and showing stigmata. Rothbottam groans. No wonder Metz is deigning to come to New Canaan, New Hampshire. “You know,

I don’t know Metz at all. I don’t even want to know him, although I guess I’m not going to be so lucky. But I do know Joan Standish, who represented the mother in the divorce.

Call Metz and tell him to be here at three o’clock. Let him know that Joan and her client will be joining him. I’ll listen to his argument about the child being in danger, and we’ll set a date for the custody hearing.”

“All right, Your Honor.” The clerk beeps off the intercom after agreeing to find the judge the latest newspaper stories about Faith White.

Rothbottam sits at his desk for a moment, then walks to the bookshelves and extracts a new original-cast recording from the many stacks.

The music from Jesus Christ Superstar fills his chambers, and Rothbottam smiles.

There is nothing wrong, nothing at all, with getting in the mood for what is yet to come.

Manchester, New Hampshire Malcolm Metz moves so gracefully in the leather swivel chair that he looks like a twentieth-century version of a centaur as he gestures to his three minions and finishes telling the joke. “So Saint Peter opens the gates of heaven and lets in a pope and a lawyer.

“Come in,” he tells them. “I’ll show you to your new quarters.”" Metz glances around. A skilled litigator, after all, is at best a superb actor.

“Saint Peter stops off at a tremendous golden penthouse, built on top of a cloud.

He leads them inside and shows them the gold faucets in the bathrooms and the silk bedding and the expensive rugs in the halls. Then he turns to the lawyer and says, “This is your new home.” He leaves with the pope, and takes him to a tiny cell with a little twin bed and a washstand.

“And this,” he says, “is where you are going to live from now on.”"

Metz adopts a lilting Italian accent.