Matters of Faith (2 page)

I was proud of Marshall. He was curious, about this world and the possibility of the next. Curiosity was an admirable trait, one my own parents cultivated in me. Meghan, our daughter, was as curious as Marshall and I were about the world. And she was due home any second.

“Did you pick up the EpiPens?” I asked.

“On the counter.”

And we were done. Marshall, check. Fishing trip, check. Meghan's EpiPens, check. I turned to go back inside, the screen door catching my heel again. I'd asked Cal a hundred times to slow it down. If I didn't have to endure the pained sighs and protests that he had been
just about to do it
—the implication that I was an ever-impatient, never-satisfied wife—I would look up how to do it myself. It was just a screen door. How hard could it be? Maybe he would do it before Marshall came home.

But right now the screen door didn't bother me. Marshall was coming home, and he was bringing a girlfriend. It would be good to have someone new in the house.

For all of us.

 
 
SWITCHING out Meghan's EpiPens that night, I told her about Marshall and Ada. She grinned as she handed me the old injector from her backpack and fit her new one in.

“I know,” she said, with a coy look up through her lashes, something that had been happening a lot lately. Meghan had begun to flirt like a silent screen siren. With everyone. Me, her father, the UPS man. I was hoping it was a phase that would pass, though I'd hoped that with her fixation on Winona Ryder too.

“How do you know?” I asked.

She shrugged. “She e-mailed me.”

I sat back on my heels in surprise. “She e-mailed you? You mean Ada?”

“Uh-huh. She's a vegetarian.”

“Wait a minute. When did she e-mail you?” Meghan was twelve. I vetted all of her e-mail from anyone other than Marshall.

“A little while ago. She used Marshall's account.”

“Oh. Well, what else did she say?” I asked, a little disgruntled at Marshall for allowing Meghan the first, albeit electronic, glimpse of his girlfriend.

Meghan shook her head and pulled brightly colored folders out of her backpack, arranging them carefully on her desk, preparing to start her homework. With Marshall I'd had to stay on top of homework or I'd find him studying some religious text or another; with Meghan I rarely even needed to remind her.

“Nothing. She sounds really nice. She said she'd stay in my room if you said she could. Can she?”

“I have the pull-out sofa in my office for guests, Meghan,” I said, looking at her bunk beds doubtfully, finding it hard to imagine a college girl wanting to play sleepover with a twelve-year-old. Besides, what if Cal were right and she ventured out to visit Marshall? “I think we'll wait and talk to Marshall about this, okay?”

Meghan chewed her bottom lip and stared up at her
Edward Scissorhands
poster, but said nothing. I sighed. She was such a good child. And she followed directions. Always. Following directions might save her life one day. That had been drilled into them, her. And they'd had to drill it into everyone around them. They'd spent years educating themselves and Meghan's schools.

They now had a peanut-free zone for lunch in Meghan's middle school. Thanks to new laws, Meghan was able to carry an EpiPen, that ever-present, life-saving cylinder, with her everywhere in school, with a backup in the nurse's office.

Unfortunately, with education came a certain amount of isolation in our small town, and so far Meghan was the only child to come through the local school system with a life-threatening food allergy. The lunch area was in a small room separate from the regular lunchroom, and she ate alone. It all set her apart, and not in a way that made her the most popular girl in school.

It was no wonder she was looking forward to Ada's visit. I looked up at the
Edward Scissorhands
poster above Meghan's desk, with Winona partially obscured by the blades at the ends of Depp's delicate wrists, and wondered if she saw herself in Ryder's character, held safely behind sharp objects. I nudged her shoulder.

“You think she'd like the peony sheets or the Little Mermaid?”

“Mom!” she gasped. “Not the Little Mermaid—” She broke off when she saw the grin on my face. She threw her thin arms around me, and I'd have gladly attached blades to my own hands at that moment to keep her safe.

I e-mailed Marshall repeatedly over the next three weeks. Asking questions about Ada under the guise of making sure we were prepared for her visit. I asked about the food she liked (
she's a vegetarian mom, very whole foods, i've stopped eating red meat and feel so much better, you should really think about restricting meghan's exposure to additives and stuff
. . .), and her sleeping habits, (
i don't know mom
), and skirted around the issue of her religion with vague questions about her family (
they're really close . . . some interesting ideas . . . their church sent her to school on a full scholarship
).

I researched vegetarianism and whole foods and stocked up on tofu and grains, and in the week leading up to their arrival I stopped work altogether, closing the door to my studio with three paintings in various stages of restoration, and worked on cleaning the house.

Meghan's allergies had turned me into a late-in-life clean freak, and our home was spotless most of the time. After the first horrifying anaphylactic episode when she was two—a friend's daughter babysat and made Meghan homemade Play-Doh out of peanut butter—we'd gotten her tested for other allergies, and the results changed our lives. A whole host of airborne irritants threatened Meghan's airways: dust mites, an endless variety of flower pollens, dander, mold. And food allergies, peanuts and shellfish, threatened her systemically. Thank God she was fine with fish, or our entire livelihood would have been threatened.

Now our home was tiled throughout with only a few scattered throw rugs, no more drapes, no more overstuffed sofas. Marshall's two cats had been pressed upon neighbors, and I learned how to steam clean everything.

But this was different. This wasn't cleaning for my daughter's health; this was cleaning to impress. We didn't have many house-guests, and I was a bit surprised to find that there was a difference. Meghan and I got haircuts, and she talked me into buying her two new tops, several pairs of shorts, and flip-flops with rhinestones on them, all of them a clear maturity level above what she had been wearing.

Two days before their arrival, I put fresh sheets on Marshall's bed, smoothing his pillows, running my hands down the spread, tugging at wrinkles that weren't there. I missed him. His fresh-man year at college he'd come home as often as he could, called every other day, made me feel needed and missed. But this year I was lucky to get an e-mail once a week, and questions about his friends and classes that he used to answer readily had been met with silence.

All natural, of course. All the way it was supposed to be. And, in fact, Marshall's pulling away had probably come later than might have been considered normal. But then Marshall had never been a typical kid.

I dusted his dresser, picked up the large wood cross he'd hung all his necklaces on, and wiped under that as the pendants swung and clinked against each other—crosses, crucifixes, ankhs, and spirals and stars—mixing happily, without rancor, the way their representative religions seemed unable to manage in the real world. I fingered the gold Star of David that Ira's parents had given him after their son's funeral.

Poor Ira. At least his end had come rather quickly. There's not much time for suffering when you are, literally, hit by a train. It was Ira's parents who suffered, and Marshall, of course. Cal would say that was where all of Marshall's issues started, but Marshall and I had been having theological discussions for years before that.

True, it had escalated, more rapidly than I'd been aware of at the time. But he'd also been on the cusp of puberty, a natural time to start exploring the larger questions in life.

Marshall's first cross, small and silver, on a thin leather cord, hung between Ira's star and a red, knotted kabbalah string. I clicked it with my fingernail and looked around Marshall's room one last time, wondering what Ada would think of the lack of decoration—no posters, no sports equipment in the corners. Aside from the necklaces on the dresser and the religion books on the shelf above his bed, it was practically monklike.

I gave the room one last glance as I backed out the door. The sun winked off a crystal pendant, throwing prisms across the otherwise bare walls, dagger-shaped rainbows as beautiful as any painting.

 
 
CAL had watched our preparations throughout the week with a bemused smile, but the day before they were due he came home with a fresh haircut and offered to make whole grain bread, something he hadn't done in years. The three of us worked in the kitchen together, music floating in from the living room, the windows open and the smell of the Gulf of Mexico and the bay filling the house, as soft as hope.

A rush of affection for Cal, something I hadn't felt in a long time, hit me when I saw him bent over the counter, kneading dough. He and Meghan were talking about fishing, and I studied him, seeing the young man I'd met when I was younger than Marshall was now.

He'd come out of the backwoods of middle Florida, land weary and religion exhausted, running from his mother, the reputation of his brother, the memory of his father. We'd met when my boyfriend, a fellow art major, took me on an airboat tour of the Everglades. Cal had been our boat captain, silent while our guide yelled over the engine, staring at me while everyone else stared at ospreys on their massive nests and alligators slipping into the grassy water.

I'd felt his eyes on me the whole time, and when I finally got off the boat, my knees weak, ears ringing, shaking wind-flattened bugs out of my clothes and hair, I was flush with more than sunburn. He handed me a phone number along with a warm can of Coke, and I'd slipped it into my pocket with a breathless glance at my boyfriend.

I called him that night and he picked me up at my dorm. We'd only spent a handful of nights apart since. He got me through college, he got me through the disappearance of my parents—on sabbatical in the Galápagos the year after we married when their boat went down—and he got me through the births of Marshall and Meghan.

And then somewhere along the line, he—the determined man who wouldn't take his eyes off me—had slowly disappeared, into work, into his workshop to tinker with engines and fishing gear, into the Gulf and the Everglades. Or perhaps I'd simply lost sight of him. Who knows how a marriage disintegrates, by what degrees, what its half-life is?

Now, as he shaped the dough into a ball and gently slipped it into an oiled bowl, I thought I saw him again. He looked up, and I didn't look away but smiled at him, feeling a laugh bubble up in my throat when he did a double take. He grinned and winked at me while our daughter's sweet voice splashed through the kitchen in bright, happy colors. And for a moment we were back, and I couldn't wait for Marshall and his first girlfriend to walk through that door and remind us of ourselves.

He was letting Ada drive the last half. He was exhausted with the telling of Ira's story. He'd never told anyone at college about it before; he'd never wanted to take the chance that he would break down, maybe cry in front of people who had not known Ira, could not understand how close they had been.

But Ada was different. She was so very different. And she had been rapt as he'd told the story, gasping when he told her about the train, how massive it had seemed, how close, how fast. She placed her hand on his leg, rubbing his thigh sympathetically. To his surprise, he hadn't cried. Just her presence, just her listening to the most pivotal moment of his life, was enough to comfort him, and when they'd stopped to gas up the car and change places, she'd held him and kissed him right there in front of truckers and everyone.

And he'd let her drive, not just because he was tired, but because she'd asked so—there was no other word for it—she'd asked so damn
cutely
, he could not resist, and because now he could look at her rather than the road. Every time he looked at her he found something new, something more delicate, something more astonishing than the last thing he'd noticed.

Like right then, she downshifted into fourth gear, and when she flexed her foot on the gas pedal he noticed the line of muscle running down her thigh. His mouth suddenly got dry, and he wanted more than anything to lean over the console and run his tongue over that line of muscle.

He swallowed and looked out the window.
Jesus
. He swallowed again, reforming the unconscious epithet into a short prayer. She made him think in ways he'd never thought before, never knew he could think before.

They'd been weak. He'd tasted the skin over that muscle before, the night she'd teased him into inviting her home for spring break. He'd professed as much regret as she had. But it was all he could think about.

She shifted up to fifth and tossed her head, trying to get a lock of dark hair blown by the wind out of the side of her mouth. He reached for it at the same time as she did, but she got there first, hooking her index finger over it and drawing it out, and had she drawn her shirt over her head it couldn't have left him more breathless. He shifted in his seat and nearly groaned aloud.

His hands curled of their own accord, his fingers grasping the air beside his thighs the way they wanted to grab hold of her hair.

“So what else did your mom say?” she asked. “What should I call her?”

He shrugged, irritated to have the image of his mother sliding over Ada's, but relieved too. “Chloe, I guess,” he said. His mother had always told his friends to call her Chloe. He didn't figure it would be any different for Ada.