Keeping Faith: A Novel (37 page)

“I’ll stay as long as you like,” he says, and then watches the small square of light in her bedroom go black.

Mariah has no sooner put the phone on the cradle than she realizes her mother is standing in the slightly open doorway. She does not know how much Millie has heard, how long Millie was standing there.

“Who was calling so late?” her mother asks.

“No one. Wrong number.” With the weight of Millie’s gaze thrown over her like another quilt, Mariah turns onto her side, toward the window, toward Ian.

For reasons Father MacReady does not understand,

Father Rampini has not hightailed it back to Boston after sending along his recommendation that afternoon to Bishop Andrews. He has spent several hours in the guest room at the rectory, not packing but instead tying up the telephone line with faxes he sends from his laptop computer. So it is a surprise when Father MacReady comes downstairs for a glass of milk before bedtime and finds the visiting priest sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine.

“Chianti?” Father Rampini says, a corner of his mouth lifting. “Why, Joseph,” he jokes in an Irish brogue, “where are you hidin’ the good malt whiskey?”

Father MacReady grins. “I find it useful to break across cultural barriers every now and then.”

“Want some?” Rampini hands the other priest a glass filled to the rim with wine, then lifts his own and downs it in one swift motion.

Well, it’s not milk, but it’ll put him to sleep all the same. Father MacReady tips his own glass and finishes every drop.

Rampini laughs. “Wanna have a spitting contest now?”

“No thanks. I already feel sick. But I was taught it’s not good manners to let someone drink you under your own table.”

The other priest smiles. “I’ll be a good guest. I promise to pass out neatly in my chair.”

MacReady drums his fingers on the tabletop.

“How long do you think you’ll .be a guest?”

“If you need–“

“No, no,” he says placatingly. “Stay as long as you want.”

Rampini snorts. “You’re trying to think of a nice way to ask why I’m still here.”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Mmm.” The visiting priest scrubs his hands over his face. “I’ve been asking myself that,

too. Do you know what I was doing all afternoon?”

“Ringing up a tremendous telephone bill?”

“Yes, but the diocese will pay for it.

Actually, I was reading the work of a psychiatrist who talks about a young child’s image of God.

There’s a theory that the earliest roots for God are tied to an infant looking up at his mother and knowing that it’s okay to close his eyes and imagine her, because when he opens his eyes she’ll still be there.”

Father MacReady nods slowly, unsure of where this is going.

“Then a kid gets to be six, seven. He hears about God on TV, sees pictures of angels. He doesn’t know what God is,

really, but he knows from context that God is big and powerful and sees everything. There are two people the kid knows who fit that bill–his mom and dad. So he uses them as raw material. If he was cuddled a lot, he may come up with a representation of an affectionate God. If he was raised strictly, God might be more stringent.”

Father Rampini tips the Chianti bottle over his glass again. “Conversely, the kid might attribute to God the things she wishes she had in a parent–unconditional love, protection,

whatever.”

He rubs a small circle of condensation into the tabletop. “So now we look at Faith White,

whose mother–by her own admission–hasn’t always been the most devoted of parents. What happens to a child who’s always wanted her mother’s attention? And then winds up, miracle of miracles, with only a mother in her life? What is she most likely to imagine God to be?”

“A loving mother,” Father MacReady murmurs,

and then picks up the Chianti and drinks straight from the bottle. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I thought you already wrote your recommendation to the bishop.”

“I did.” Rampini winces. “There’s just … something.” He leans back in his chair, his gaze roaming the worn walls of the rectory kitchen. “If I could just make sense of why she’s seeing a woman. Why. That would tip the scales, you know? I mean, that crap I just told you–it’s psychology. Not theology. I can read it, but I can’t believe it in my heart.”

“Maybe it’s not what she’s seeing,” Father MacReady says slowly. “Maybe it’s the way she’s interpreting it.”

“How is that any different from what I just said?”

“It is. Did you ever see that drawing, the one that if you look at it one way, turns into a bottle, and if you see it a different way,

looks like two people kissing?”

Father Rampini takes the wine away. “I think it’s time for you to stop.”

“I’m perfectly sober. You know …

whatchamacallits … optical illusions!

Well, it could just be Faith’s frame of reference that’s wrong, not her vision.” At Father Rampini’s blank look, MacReady continues. “Say you’re a little girl who knows nothing about religion. Any religion. And you live in the nineties, in a fairly conservative town, where most people look the same. Then one day someone appears out of thin air. The person is about so tall, and has long brown hair, and is wearing a dress and sandals like your mother. What do you assume you’re seeing?”

“A woman,” Father Rampini murmurs. “But it’s Christ–maybe young, without the beard–in traditional clothing.”

“There’s no reason to assume that a little girl from New Canaan would know what men wore in Galilee two thousand years ago.” Father MacReady is smiling so hard, he thinks his face might split. He feels himself being yanked to his feet as Father Rampini grabs him in a bear hug.

“Do you know what this means? Do you?”

“That you’re going to make another long distance call on my phone,” Father MacReady says,

laughing. “Go ahead. Call Bishop Andrews on my dime.”

He follows Rampini to the guest room, where the other priest scrabbles around his cluttered desk for the Manchester phone number. “Of course,”

Rampini mutters, “the Bishop’s Conference will say that Christ would make Himself known as the Lord fairly quickly, dress notwithstanding … but at least it’ll go to conference. Ah, here we are. Hand me the phone?”

Father MacReady is not listening. He holds the portable phone in one hand and Father Rampini’s Saint-A-Day desk calendar in the other.

He’s ripped off the page, so that the display is for tomorrow. Wordlessly, he hands it to the visiting priest.

Saint Elizabeth of Schonau. Died 1146. Saint Elizabeth beheld a vision of a young woman sitting in the sun and asked an angel to tell her what it meant. The angel said, “The young woman is the sacred human nature of our Lord Jesus.”

Father Rampini dials the phone. “I know,”

he says after a moment into the receiver. “Wake him up.”

Keeping Faith

ELEVEN

To whom then will ye liken God?

or what likeness will ye compare unto him?

–Isaiah 4018 When I was Faith’s age, I learned that I was going to hell.

Ursula Padrewski sat behind me that year in school. She was tall for seven, with long braids that her mother coiled on top of her head like a sleeping rattlesnake. Her father was an assistant rector at the Episcopal church.

One day on the playground she took each girl’s Barbie and plunged it headfirst into a puddle of rainwater. She came up to me with her hands on her hips and said Malibu Barbie had to get baptized.

“What’s baptized?” I asked.

She gasped, as if this were a word I should have known. “You know. Where you get dunked underwater for God.”

“God didn’t dunk me underwater,” I told her.

“They do it in church when you’re a baby,” she said, but not before she took a step back.

“If you don’t get baptized,” Ursula confided, “you get thrown into a pit of fire and go to hell.”

I was old enough to understand that my family didn’t go to church, which meant I probably had not been baptized, after all. That left in my mind the image of the ground opening up and flames reaching as high as my throat.

I started screaming so loud that even after the playground monitor had wrestled me to the nurse’s office, no one could calm me enough to figure out what was wrong. My mother, summoned with a phone call, arrived ten minutes later.

She skidded to a stop on the worn linoleum,

laying her hands on my body to check for broken bones. “Mariah, what’s the matter?”

She motioned the nurse away. “Mommy,” I asked, breath hitching, “did I get baptized?”

“Jews don’t get baptized.”

I burst into tears again. “I’m going to hell!”

My mother wrapped her arms around me, and muttered something about prayer in public schools and Reverend Louis Padrewski. Then she tried to tell me about the Jews being the Chosen People, that I had absolutely nothing to worry about, and that there was no pit of fire.

But I knew that my family was nothing like Joshua Simkis’s, who were also Jewish but worked very hard at it. Joshua, in third grade,

couldn’t have milk whenever the cafeteria served hamburgers. And he wore a little crocheted yarmulke to school, tucked into his hair with a bobby pin. My family, well, we didn’t go to church–but we didn’t go to temple either. I hadn’t been baptized, but I didn’t think we were going to be Chosen.

Eventually I was ready to go home. But as we walked to the car, I was careful to leap over the cracks of the sidewalk, thinking that at any moment they would split to reveal Ursula’s pit of fire. And that night, when my parents had long been asleep, I filled the bathtub with water and dunked Malibu Barbie. Then I stuck my head in and repeated a bedtime prayer I’d heard Laura Ingalls say on the TV show Little House on the Prairie. Just in case.

October 30, 1999 In the morning, Joan calls me. “Just wanted to make sure you’re still alive,” she says, and although she is joking, neither of us laughs.

“I thought I might stop by this afternoon, talk about a defense strategy.”

The very concept makes me think of what Ian said the night before, about fighting back.

Self-defense, by definition, involves putting oneself on the line. “Joan, did you happen to see Hollywood Tonight!?”

“I’d rather do a bikini wax than sit through that show.”

Not for the first time, I wonder who is responsible for their huge number of viewers.

“Colin was on. With Malcolm Metz. They spoke outside the courthouse yesterday, and Colin talked about how Faith’s in danger and then started to cry.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about the media distorting your case. Thank God, the only person who will be hearing it is the judge, and–“

“I think I ought to let Hollywood Tonight!

come into my house and film Faith.”

“You what?” It takes Joan a minute to get over her surprise, and I can fairly hear her stiffen. “As your legal counsel, I highly recommend against that particular course of action.”

“I know it has nothing to do with the hearing, Joan.

But the judge needs to see Faith as a normal little girl, playing with dolls and Legos and what have you. And for that matter, so do the other people who think she’s some saint. I don’t want to look like I’m hiding anything.”

“You should never mix the media with the courtroom,

Mariah.”

“I shouldn’t sit here and let Colin walk away with my daughter either. I don’t want him planting ideas in people’s heads about me and Faith,

when we’re perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves.” Hesitating, I add, “I’ve been at this point before, with Colin. And I’m not going to let him do it to me again.”

I can hear her tapping something–a finger? a pencil?–against the edge of the phone. “No interviews, with either you or Faith,” she says at last, starting to hammer out a list of conditions.

“Fifteen minutes of film footage, tops,

and only in rooms that have been contractually agreed upon beforehand. And you don’t sign a goddamned thing until I see it.”

“All right.”

“You know this means I’m going to have to watch that damn show.”

“I’m sorry.”

Joan sighs wearily. “Yeah,” she says.

“So am I.”

Lacey Rodriguez believes in starting at the beginning. And as far as she can see, the furor surrounding Faith White blossomed after the incident with her grandmother’s resurrection. She takes a small notebook from her tote bag and smiles at Dr. Peter Weaver, the cardiologist in charge of Millie Epstein’s case.

For an attractive man, he’s a pill.

He flattens his hands on the surface of his desk and glares at Lacey. “I understand that you’re only doing your job, Ms. Rodriguez.

Which is why you must see that I can’t divulge any information about my patient.”

She turns up the wattage on her smile.

“And I wouldn’t ask you to. In fact, the attorney with whom I’m working is more interested in your knowledge of Faith and Mariah White.”

Dr. Weaver blinks. “I don’t know them at all. Except, of course, for the rumors that we’ve all heard about the child. But medically, I can’t substantiate any claims of healing. For me the issue was not how Mrs. Epstein was resuscitated, but simply that she was.”

“I see,” Lacey says, pretending to record every single word on a page of her notebook, when in fact the man’s said nothing at all of value.

“The only times I’ve even come in contact with Mrs. White were at her mother’s bedside and subsequent checkups.”

“Did she seem … fragile to you at the time? Emotional?”

“As much as anyone would have been, given the circumstances. I’d have to say that, overall, my impression of her was one of concern and protectiveness for her mother.” He shakes his head, his thoughts spooling backward. “And her daughter.”

“Could you give me an example?”

“Well,” Dr. Weaver says, “there was a moment during Mrs. Epstein’s stress test, when the cameraman must have gotten the little girl in his range and–“

“Pardon me–you filmed the stress test?”

“No, not me. Ian Fletcher. That television guy. Mrs. Epstein and the hospital had signed waivers to allow it. I’m sure it’s already been aired. But the point was, Mrs.

White clearly didn’t want her daughter filmed, and did everything in her power to stop it.

Went after the cameraman, even, screaming and pushing at him. The very picture of a fierce maternal instinct rearing its head.” He smiles apologetically. “So, you see, I don’t really have much to say that is going to help your case.”

Lacey smiles back at him. Don’t be so sure, she thinks.

November 2, 1999 Kenzie van der Hoven comes from a long line of legal-minded men.

Her great-grandfather had started van der Hoven and Weiss, one of the first law firms in Boston.

Her father, her mother, and her five older brothers were all currently partners there. When she was born,

the last of the lot, her parents were so sure she was another boy that they simply gave her the name they’d already picked out.

She grew up as Kenneth, confusing the hell out of schoolteachers and doing everything she could to shorten her name to a diminutive, although her parents never bowed to her wishes. Following in the deep treads of everyone else in her family, she went to Harvard Law and passed the bar and litigated exactly five trials before deciding that she was tired of being what other people wanted her to be. She legally changed her name to Kenzie, and she turned in her shingle to become a guardian ad litem, a court-appointed child’s advocate during custody cases.

She’s worked for Judge Rothbottam before, and considers him a fair man–if a little partial to Broadway musicals that have starred Shirley Jones. So when he called her yesterday with the White case, she accepted on the spot.

“I should warn you,” the judge said. “This one’s going to be a doozy.”

Now, as Kenzie walks wide-eyed around the White property, she understands what he meant.

At the time she had not connected the name with the religious revival occurring in New Canaan –most of the papers she read referred to Faith simply as “the child,” in some semblance of protecting a minor’s privacy. But this–well,

this is indescribable. There are small knots of people camped out under pup tents, heating lunch over Sternos. Dotting the crowd are the ill in their wheelchairs, some spiraled with MS, some trailing intravenous lines, some with their eyes wide and vacant. Black-habited nuns patter across the fallen leaves like a flock of penguins, praying or offering service to the sick.

And then there are the reporters, a breed apart with squat vans and cameramen, their chic suits as unlikely as blossoms against the frozen November ground.

Where on earth is she supposed to start?

She begins shoving through the crush of bodies,

determined to get to the front door so that she can see Mariah White. After five minutes of tripping over sleeping bags and extension cords,

she finally quits. Somewhere around here there must be a policeman; she saw the marked car at the edge of the property. It would not be the first time she’s had her guardian-ad-litem status enforced by an officer of the law, but crowd control has never before been the reason.

Turning to a woman beside her, Kenzie laughs breathlessly. “This is something, isn’t it? You must have been here a pretty long time to get such a plum spot. Are you waiting for Faith?”

The woman’s thin lips stretch back. “No Eng-lish,” she says. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

Great, Kenzie thinks, hundreds of people and I pick the one who doesn’t understand me. She closes her eyes for a moment, remembering the judge’s schedule. The custody hearing will be in five weeks. In that time, she has to interview everyone who’s had contact with Faith since August and possibly earlier, she has to get to the bottom of the grandmother’s resurrection, and she has to win Faith over and convince her that she is an ally.

Basically, she needs a miracle.

As I am sticking Faith’s shoes in the closet, I realize someone is taking photographs through the sidelight of the front door. “Excuse me,” I say,

yanking it open. “Do you mind?”

The man lifts his Leica and takes a picture of me. “Thanks,” he says, and scurries away.

“God,” I mutter to myself, standing in the open doorway. My mother’s car inches along the driveway, finally parking halfway down when people begin milling too close for her to continue safely. She’s gone home to pack a valise and return, deciding to move in for a while. It’s easier than trying to shake off the reporters who trail her on the short drive to her home. The man with the Leica is right in her face, too, when she leaves the car. Groupies chant Faith’s name. For some reason, today they are all much closer to my house than they ought to be.

My mother stumbles up the porch steps with her suitcase and turns around. “Go,” she says,

waving her hands at the masses. “Shoo!” She stalks past me, shuts and bolts the door.

“What is with these people? Haven’t they got something better to do?”

I peek out the sidelight. “How come they’re all the way up to the porch?”

“Accident in town. I passed it coming in. A lumber truck jackknifed on the highway exit ramp, so there’s no policeman at the end of the driveway.”

“Great,” I murmur. “I guess I ought to be thankful they’re not rushing the door.”

My mother snorts. “It’s early yet.”