Keeping Faith: A Novel (6 page)

“Two mothers?”

“Yeah. This one”–she touches the doll in Ken’s arms–“does all the kissing.”

“How about the other one?”

Faith gently strokes the bald head of the second Barbie. “That one does all the crying.”

“You’re what?”

Jessica’s face falls, and immediately Colin knows he has made another mistake. “I thought you’d be happy,” she says, and then bursts into tears.

For the life of him, Colin doesn’t know what to do. He is certain that Jessica is expecting him to do or say something appropriate, but all he can think of is the moment years ago, when the doctors at Greenhaven told him that Mariah had tested positive for pregnancy. After a moment he puts his arms around Jessica. “I’m sorry. I am happy.”

Jessica lifts her face. “You are?” Her voice shakes.

Colin nods. “Cross my heart.”

She turns in his embrace and twines herself around him like a jungle vine. “I knew you’d say that. I knew you’d see this as a second chance.”

For what? he thinks, and then realizes she is speaking of a family. He smiles at her,

past the sudden constriction of his throat.

Jessica’s eyes are shining as she takes his hand and places it on the flat plane of her belly. “I wonder who it’ll look like,” she says softly.

Colin tries to picture the face of the child they might have created. He closes his eyes, but all he can see is Faith.

Mariah straightens with a groan, having finished tying Faith’s sneakers into double knots. It is Thursday, the day for vacuuming and returning library books and buying fresh corn at the farmstand and, these days, for Faith’s appointment with Dr. Keller. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Mommy,” Faith says, “you have to do hers,

too.”

Sighing, Mariah squats again and pretends to tie the shoes of Faith’s imaginary friend.

“Mommy … she’s got buckles.”

After a moment Mariah stands. “Are we ready now?” She cuts in front of her daughter,

grabs her purse, and opens the front door.

Once Faith is outside, Mariah remains for a moment, so that her guard has a chance to walk out the door, too.

A smile wreathes Faith’s face, and she slides her hand into Mariah’s on the way to the car. “She says thank you.”

Mariah never would have chosen Dr. Keller as her own psychiatrist. For one thing, she is so organized that Mariah always finds herself checking to see if she’s left something back in the car–her keys, her pocketbook, her confidence. And Dr. Keller is beautiful, too–young, with hair the rich color of a fox’s back and legs that she always remembers to cross. Mariah learned years ago that she did not want to talk to someone like that. Dr. Johansen was just her speed–short,

tired-looking, human enough that Mariah did not mind revealing her failures. But Dr. Johansen had been the one to suggest that Faith see someone to help her understand the divorce. Mariah wanted Faith to see Dr. Johansen, but he didn’t treat children. He recommended Dr. Keller, and even called the office to help Mariah get a fast appointment.

Mariah does not want to admit, even to herself,

that she is at the root of Faith’s hallucinations. After all, the doctors at Greenhaven said they couldn’t be sure that the baby inside her would not be damaged by Prozac.

And they couldn’t say how.

Mariah forces her gaze to Dr. Keller’s.

“I’m worried about this imaginary friend.”

“Don’t be. It’s perfectly normal.

Healthy, even.”

Mariah raises her brows. “It’s healthy and normal to talk to someone who isn’t there?”

“Absolutely. Faith’s created someone to give her emotional support twenty-four hours a day.” Dr. Keller pulls out a sheet of drawing paper from Faith’s file. “She calls this friend her guard, which only reinforces the behavior–she has someone to protect her now, so this never happens again.”

Mariah takes the paper and smiles at the simple drawing of a little blond girl. It’s Faith–she can tell by the purple dress with the yellow flowers, which Faith would wear every single day if given the opportunity. She’s drawn her hair in braids that look like sunny snakes, and she’s holding the hand of another person. “That’s her friend,” Dr. Keller says.

Mariah stares at the figure. “Looks like Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

“She may very well be. If Faith’s conjuring up a mental vision of this person, it’s probably something she’s seen somewhere else.”

“Casper with hair,” Mariah amends, her finger tracing the floating white body and the brown helmet around the face. “Some guard.”

“What’s important is that it’s working for Faith.”

Mariah takes a deep breath and jumps off the cliff. “How do you know it is?” she asks quietly. “How do you know this friend isn’t someone she’s hearing in her head?”

Dr. Keller pauses for a moment. Mariah wonders how much she knows about her own hospitalization, how much Dr. Johansen has revealed. “In the first place, I wouldn’t classify it as a hallucination. That would suggest that your daughter is having psychotic episodes,

and you haven’t indicated any changes in behavior that would lead me to believe that.”

“What sorts of changes?” Mariah says,

although she knows very well what they are.

“Dramatic ones. Trouble sleeping. Staring spells. Aggression. Changes in eating habits. If she’s walking around at three in the morning and saying that her friend told her to go climb onto the roof of the house.”

Mariah thinks about Faith crawling across the top of the swing set in the middle of the night.

“No,” Mariah lies, “there’s nothing like that.”

Dr. Keller shrugs. “Then don’t worry about it.”

“How about when she wants her friend to get into bed with her? Or eat at the table?”

“Go along with it. Don’t make it a big deal, and eventually Faith will feel secure enough to just let it go.”

Let her guard down, Mariah thinks, and almost smiles.

“I’ll talk to her about this friend again, Mrs.

White. But really, I’ve seen a hundred of these cases. Ninety-nine of those children turned out absolutely fine.”

Mariah nods, but she is wondering what happened to the other one.

Colin smiles at the VP of Operations for the chain of nursing homes. “This’ll just take a minute,” he says, and he casually leaves the office to rummage in the trunk of his car. Hard to sell the merits of a damn exit sign when it shoots sparks the minute he plugs it in.

Luckily, Colin has a spare in the trunk;

he can blame the other on faulty wiring at the plant in Taiwan.

The sample is buried in a box. Gritting his teeth, Colin shoves his hand along the side,

feeling for a telltale wire, then grasping and extracting what turns out to be a small barrette.

How it got into his sample box, he can’t imagine. He remembers the last time he saw Faith wearing it, winking silver against the waterfall of her light hair. She keeps her barrettes and ponytail scrunchies in an old cigar box that Colin’s own grandfather once gave him.

Forgetting the nursing home VP, forgetting the exit sign that now dangles from the box like a broken droid, Colin runs the pad of his thumb over the edge of the barrette.

He has been to the obstetrician with Jessica. He has heard the new baby’s heartbeat. But it is very hard to pretend that he is thrilled about this unborn child, when he has made such a mess of things with the one he’s already got.

He has tried to call her, and once he even watched her at the school playground from a distance,

but he backs away before making contact. The fact of the matter is, he does not know what to say. Every time he thinks he has the apology right, he remembers how Faith stared at him when he came to visit her in the hospital after the circus accident–silent and judgmental, as if even in her limited range of experience she knew he did not measure up. Being a father, Colin knows,

is no ATANDThat commercial, no simple feat of tossing a ball across a green yard or braiding a length of hair. It is knowing all the words to Goodnight Moon. It is waking a split second in the middle of the night before you hear her fall out of bed. It is watching her twirl in a tutu and having one’s mind leap over the years to wonder how it will be to dance at her wedding.

It is maintaining the illusion of having the upper hand, although you’ve been powerless since the first moment she smiled at you from the rook’s nest of your cradled arm.

He thinks about Faith so much these days that he cannot imagine how she ever slipped from his mind long enough to let him make the monumental mistake of sleeping with Jessica in his own home.

Colin sighs deeply. He loves Jessica, and she’s right–it is time to reinvent himself. So he makes a silent promise: to be a better father this time around, to make sure that Faith reaps the benefits of the new leaf he is going to turn over. He tells himself that as soon as he straightens out his life, he’ll come back for Faith. He’ll make it up to her.

“Mr. White,” the nursing-home executive says impatiently from the doorway. “Can we get on with this?”

Colin turns around, shoves the barrette into his pocket. He picks up the new sample and smoothly launches into a diatribe on its energy and monetary savings, wondering all the while how someone who makes a living by helping people safely escape cannot for the life of him see the way out.

September 6, 1999 Millie Epstein picks up her Diet Coke and settles next to her daughter on the living-room couch. “Well, consider it a blessing. She could have dreamed up a British soldier with a big furry hat as a guard, and then complained that he wouldn’t fit in the backseat of the car.”

Mariah rolls her own can of soda across the plane of her forehead. “She’s supposed to start school next week. What if the other kids tease her?”

“Is that what you’re worried about? Really,

Mariah. She’s seven. By next week she won’t even remember this.”

Mariah skims her lip along the sharp edge of the soda can. “I did,” she says quietly.

Her mother comes up swinging. “There was nothing wrong with you. Colin made you believe you were meshugge when you were only a little bit under the weather.”

“It was a clinical depression, Ma.”

“Which is not the same as thinking an alien is beaming radio messages into your brain.”

Mariah turns in her seat. “I never said I was schizophrenic.”

“Honey.” Millie touches her daughter’s shoulder. “You had an imaginary friend when you were about five, too. A boy named Wolf, who you said slept at the foot of your bed and told you vegetables were to be avoided at all costs.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Mariah’s head is beginning to pound. Picking up the remote, she turns on her mother’s TV.

There is nothing on but soap operas, which she can’t abide, an infomercial, and a Martha Stewart program. She flips through the lesser-used channels of the satellite dish and settles on a syndicated sitcom.

“No, go back.” Millie grabs the remote. “I like listening to his accent.”

Mariah frowns at an installment of Ian Fletcher’s anti-evangelical show, watching him strut around like a jaded cock of the walk.

Accent, hah. He probably picked it up from a voice coach. She has never understood the mass philosophical appeal of this man, but then again she has never been interested enough in religion to want to entertain its alternative. “I think the reason people watch him is because they believe that if he keeps mouthing off, God’s going to hurl a lightning bolt down during a live broadcast and let the world watch him fry.”

“That’s very Old Testament of you.” Millie pushes the mute button. “Maybe you remember more of Hebrew school than I thought.”

Mariah blinks. “I went to Hebrew school?”

“For a day. Your father and I thought we’d try to do the conventional thing by you. Some of your friends went to Sunday school, so …” She laughs. “You came home and said you’d rather take ballet.”

It does not surprise Mariah. When she was a child her religious affiliation was purely social, the kind of Jew whose family attended temple only on High Holy Days, and then just to see what everyone else was wearing. Mariah can remember seeing Santa in the mall and wishing she could crawl into his lap. She can remember how on Christmas Day, when the rest of the world was celebrating, her family would go to the Chinese restaurant for dinner and then out to a movie, where they were the only people in the theater.

It surprised no one when Mariah married an Episcopalian.

Mariah cannot recall ballet class, but she realizes that although she can still configure her feet in the basic five positions, she would be hard-pressed to recite all Ten Commandments.