here lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

–Alfred, Lord Tennyson September 27, 1999 When Allen McManus is assigned to cover symposiums, he looks upon it as an extra six hours of sleep. From time to time enough highbrow doctors congregate at the Boston Harbor Hotel to warrant sending out a stringer from The Boston Globe. No matter that most of the time Allen McManus writes obituaries–he’s the one who gets sent. Obviously his editor-in-chief realizes the connection: Most of these godawful conferences are enough to bore a person to death.

Allen slouches in the rear of the auditorium.

He’s already written down the name of the symposium, which he figures is enough for the two lines of type it deserves. He’s ready to cover his face with his hat and take a nap. But then an attractive woman walks up to the podium. That sparks Allen’s curiosity. After all, in spite of his profession, he’s not dead yet. Most of the speakers at these symposiums are crusty old turds who remind him alternately of his father and the priest from his childhood in Southie who used to rap his knuckles when he didn’t quite measure up as altar boy. He sits up, interested in his surroundings for the first time that day.

The woman is slender and fine-boned, her no-nonsense hair sluiced behind her ears as she settles her notes on the podium. “Good morning, I’m Dr. Mary Keller.” Allen watches her eyes flicker over her notes,

hesitate. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, “given the unorthodox subject I’m about to present, I’m not going to read my prepared paper. Instead I’d like to tell you about two case studies. The first is a current patient, seven years old, whose mother brought her in for treatment. The subject has developed an imaginary friend, one that she refers to as her God. The second case study occurred over thirty years ago.” Dr.

Keller tells of a child at parochial school,

forced to kneel for long stretches as penitence. She talks of a day when this five-year-old felt something stir beside her, something warm and solid, only to turn and see nothing at all.

“The question I place before you today is this,” Dr.

Keller says. “If there is no physical component to a delusion, if there is no diagnostic framework in which to fit the behaviors as a generally accepted mental illness, what are we left with as a diagnosis?”

Allen can feel the doctors in the row before him subtly shifting. Holy cow, he thinks,

guessing where she’s headed. This woman is committing professional suicide.

“If physical and mental illness is ruled out, is it within the realm of a psychiatrist to authenticate the behavior? To say that,

possibly, the delusion is really a vision?”

She slowly runs her eyes over the entire disbelieving audience. “The reason I am asking you this is that I know for a fact that at least one, if not both of these subjects, is telling the truth.

I know this because the child kneeling in the chapel, and feeling … something indescribable … was me.

And because thirty years later, in my own office with another child as a subject, I have felt it again.”

Allen McManus tears his eyes away from Dr. Keller, slips out the back of the auditorium, and places a call to his editor.

At the departure gate Colin watches Jessica check their tickets for the hundredth time. She looks like any other business traveler, with her tailored suit and laptop case–she looks like Colin himself. To see her,

no one would know that at the end of this ten-day sales conference in Las Vegas, she plans to get married in a drive-through church and gamble her way through a weeklong honeymoon.

“Are you excited?” she purrs, leaning into him.

“Because I am.”

“I, uh, need to hit the bathroom.” Colin gives her a smile and walks off, ostensibly toward the men’s room. He does not know how he feels about getting married in Las Vegas.

Performed by a hack justice of the peace, with an Elvis impersonator serenading them and bargain bouquets available for five dollars a pop, it will be considerably different from his wedding to Mariah.

It had been Jessica’s idea. They were headed to Vegas anyway for the conference. “Besides”–

she had laughed, rubbing her abdomen–“imagine the stories we can tell him.”

He wonders now if his marriage to Mariah might have lasted, had he married her at the Light of the Moon chapel in Vegas instead of at St.

Thomas’s in Virginia, with more pomp and circumstance than a royal wedding. If he’d been willing to do–what was it called? the hora!–

or break a glass beneath his foot, if he hadn’t just assumed that his way was the right way, maybe their differences wouldn’t have been so pronounced. As it is, Colin blames himself for what happened to his ex-wife. He asked her to bend to his wishes so much that she actually broke.

Instead of entering the men’s room, Colin sits down in a narrow phone cubicle and calls his former home. “Mariah,” he says when she answers.

There is a moment’s pause. “Colin.” Even though he tries not to, he can hear the thread of delight wrapped around her voice. It makes him uncomfortable; it always has. Who in his right mind wants to be someone else’s savior?

Colin presses his forehead against the metal wall of the booth and tries to find the words for what he must say. “How’s Faith’s back?” he asks instead.

“Much better. She’s wearing shirts now.”

“Good.”

In the silence that follows, Colin suddenly remembers how uncomfortable Mariah once was with spaces in conversation. She’d rush into sentences,

chatter about nothing, rather than sit through the delay.

Yet here she is, closemouthed, as if she is trying to hold in a secret just as much as he is.

“You’re okay?” she finally asks.

“Yeah. Headed to Las Vegas for a conference.”

“Oh,” she says softly, flatly, and he knows what she means with that one word: How is it your life has gone on? “I guess you’re calling for Faith, then.”

“Is that … would it be okay?”

“You’re her father, Colin. Of course it’s okay.”

There is a shuffle of static, and before Colin can say anything else to Mariah, Faith is on the line. “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey, cupcake.” He wraps the metal snake of the phone line around his arm. “I wanted to tell you I’m going away for a few weeks.”

“You always go away.”

It strikes Colin that she is right. With the amount of travel he does for his job, his memories of Faith–and presumably hers of him–almost always involve good-byes or reunions. “But I always miss you.”

“I miss you, too.” Faith sniffs and hands the phone back to Mariah.

“Sorry,” she says. “She’s a little unpredictable these days.”

“Well. It’s understandable.”

“Sure.”

“She’s just a kid.”

“I know. I’m sure she appreciates that you called.”

Colin marvels at how strange they both sound: Mariah’s words had once rifled over him like waves on the beach, continuous patter about dry-cleaning tickets and school conferences and sales at the grocery store that he never really listened to, never noticed, until they stopped and he saw with surprise that he was buried up to his neck in the sand of this marriage. He wonders how you can go in the blink of an eye from speaking words that are as thoughtlessly dropped as pocket change to this,

where even the most benign conversation wrings you dry.

“So … was that all?” Mariah hesitates just the slightest moment before asking, “Or did you want to talk to me?”

There are so many things to discuss: the wedding, how Mariah’s faring, how odd it seems to be miles apart and still feel as if there is a high, deep wall he is peering around. “That was all,” Colin says.

September 29, 1999 Ian pays three people just to read the newspapers from around major cities in the United States and Europe. Every morning at eight o’clock these assistants are expected to report to his office with two dubious mystical events. On a morning two weeks into his Grassroots AntiRevival Campaign, they sit in the tight quarters of the Winnebago. “All right,

now.” Ian turns to David, his youngest employee. “What did you dig up?”

“Two-headed chicken and a seventy-five-year-old who gave birth.”

“Get out,” scoffs Yvonne. “The record’s that Florida woman.”

The story doesn’t particularly move Ian either. “What have you got that’s better?”

“Crop circles in Iowa.”

“I don’t want to get mixed up with that.

Believing in God and believing in aliens are two completely different ruses. Wanda?”

“There’s a bizarre source of a light at the bottom of a Montana well.”

“Sounds like radioactive waste. Anything else?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, yes. In Boston there was some excitement at a psychiatric symposium.”

Ian grins. “There’s an oxymoron.”

“Yeah, I know. It seems some doctor tossed out the idea that if a delusion can’t be disproved, it just might be real.”

“That’s my kind of shrink. What delusion,

exactly?”

“The psychiatrist has a patient–a girl –who she thinks might be seeing God.”

Ian’s body begins to hum. “Is that so?

Who’s the kid?”

“I don’t know. Psychiatrists don’t release names at these symposiums.

They’re just “the subject.”" Wanda fishes in her jeans pocket. “I did get the psychiatrist’s name, though,” she says, handing Ian a piece of paper.

“Miz Mary Margaret Keller,” Ian reads. “She couldn’t disprove a delusion, huh?

She’s probably had the kid studied by fifty people just like her. What she needs is someone like me.”

When there is a knock on the door, Rabbi Weissman looks up from his books. Groaning,

he realizes it’s ten o’clock. Time for another counseling session with the Rothmans.

For the briefest of moments he considers pretending that he’s not there. There is nothing he dislikes more than sitting while the Rothmans sling insults at each other with such vitriolic force that he fears being caught in the crossfire. He understands the role of the rabbi when it comes to helping members of his congregation, but this? Marital therapy? The rabbi shakes his head. More like target practice.

With a sigh, Rabbi Weissman fixes a smile on his face and opens the office door,

momentarily stunned by the sight of Eve and Herb Rothman kissing in the hall.

They break away with a flurry of embarrassed apologies. Rabbi Weissman watches with disbelief as the couple pulls the two armchairs closer together before sitting down. Surely this isn’t the same man who last week called his wife a scheming cow bent on milking him of his hard-earned money. Surely this isn’t the same woman who last week said that the next time her husband came home smelling like a harem she would slice off his baytsim in the middle of the night.

“Well,” he says, raising a questioning brow.

Eve’s fingers tighten on her husband’s. “I know,” she says shyly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“It’s better than wonderful,” Herb enthuses. “It’s not that we don’t love you,

Rabbi, but Evie and I aren’t going to be needing your services anymore.”

Rabbi Weissman smiles. “That’s the kind of rejection I like. What brought this about?”

“It was no one thing,” Eve admits. “I just started feeling differently.”

“Me, too,” Herb says.

If the rabbi recalls correctly, he had to separate the couple like two prizefighters at the last meeting, to keep them from physically assaulting each other. The Rothmans talk for a few more minutes, then wish the rabbi well and leave the office. Rabbi Weissman stares after them, shaking his head. God has truly intervened. Even He would have laid down odds that the Rothman marriage was too far gone to fix.

It certainly wasn’t anything that he said–he would have clearly remembered a breakthrough in this case. He would have marked it down on a Post-it,

left a note to himself on his calendar. But there’s no record from last week in the datebook,

nothing at all.

There’s just the time of their meeting, and recorded beneath it, at 11:00 A.m., the name of little Faith White.

In the middle of the night Faith wakes up and curls her hands into fists. They hurt enough to make her whimper, just like the time Betsy Corcoran had dared her to hold on to the flagpole on the coldest day of last winter and her skin had nearly frozen right to the metal. She rolls over and stuffs her hands beneath her pillow, where the sheets are still cool.

But that doesn’t help either. She fidgets a little bit more, wondering if she ought to get up and pee now that she’s awake or just sit here and wait for her hands to stop hurting. She doesn’t want to go in to her mother yet. Once she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and her foot had felt like the size of a watermelon and all tingly, but her mother had said it was just pins and needles and to go back to bed. Even though there were no pins and needles on the floor, and when Faith had checked, there were none sticking out of the sole of her foot either.

She rolls over again and sees her guard sitting on the edge of the bed. “My hands hurt,”

she whimpers, and lifts them for inspection.

Her guard leans forward to look. “It will only hurt for a little while.”

That makes Faith feel better. It’s like when she’s hot and sick sometimes and her mother gives her the little pills that she knows will make her headache disappear. Faith watches her guard lift her left hand first, and then her right, and put a kiss right in the middle of each palm. Her lips are so warm that Faith jumps at first and pulls her hands back. When she looks down, she can see it: her guard’s kiss printed on her skin in a red circle. Thinking it is lipstick, Faith tries to rub at it with her thumb, but it does not come off.

Her guard carefully folds Faith’s fingers shut, making a fist. Faith giggles; she likes the idea of holding fast to a kiss.

“See how I love you?” her guard says, and Faith smiles all the way back to sleep.

September 30, 1999 It would be nice if Ian could say that his sixth sense for rooting out deception is what leads him directly to Faith White, but it is not true.

Like any other master planner, he knows that the best way to stay informed is to keep a finger in every pot.

So after Dr. Keller flatly refuses a meeting with him, he sets into motion Plan B.

It takes a half hour to find a supply closet in the local hospital and to locate a pair of clean scrubs. Ten minutes to brief Yvonne with the pertinent information and watch her walk through the sliding glass hospital doors,

dressed to blend in.

She comes back fifteen minutes later, her face glowing. “I walked straight up to the scheduling nurse for MRI’S and told her that Dr. Keller hadn’t received the reports back on a seven-year-old patient. So she goes,

“Oh, Faith White?”‘ and she looks it up in her computer and says they were sent out a week ago. Faith White,” she repeats. “Just like that.”

But Ian has moved on. He’s already running his finger down the long line of Whites in the phone book. Pulling his cell phone from his pocket,

he calls the first name on the list. “Hello.

I’m looking for Faith White’s mother? Oh.

My apologies.”

He does it twice more, with no success, and then reaches an answering machine: “You have reached Colin, Mariah, and Faith. Please leave a message.”

Ian circles the address and looks up at his employees. “Bingo.”

New Canaan is not an easy town to get around. With the exception of Main Street, which turns into the sturdier and more serviceable Route 4 on both ends, there is not much that stands out. The school, the police station, the hairdresser, the professional building, and the Donut King are the sentries that let you know you’re passing through New Canaan. But unless you know your way through the narrow lanes that run between cornfields or up winding paths that cut over Bear Mountain, you do not realize that you’re missing the farmhouses and old Capes where the residents of New Canaan actually live.

The members of the Order of the Great Passion mill in and around the Donut King. Tired and irritable from their cross-country trek from Sedona, they seem more driven to find the nearest restroom than a new Messiah–the original goal that brought them to New Canaan. Brother Heywood, their leader, walks across Main Street, looking over the stretch of land that belongs to a registered Holstein farm. New Canaan,

he thinks. The land of milk and honey. But truth be told, he has no idea if he’s led his flock to the right place. The Messiah might just as well be in New England, New York,

New Brunswick. From his pocket he withdraws a set of runes and casts them into the dirt at his feet. He is rubbing one of the carved stones against his thumb when he is nearly suffocated by a blast of grit and dirt.

The Winnebago that comes flying too fast around the corner sends Brother Heywood stumbling back. He gets to his feet and shades his eyes, trying to get the license-plate number–

not that he plans to report it, having subscribed to a noninterventionist philosophy some years ago, but old habits die hard. However, his eye is drawn from the blue license plate to the brightly painted fireball emblazoned on the recreational vehicle’s rear door.

Brother Heywood stuffs his runes back into his caftan and from a second pocket quickly extracts a pair of folding binoculars.

IAN FLETCHER, he reads. THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.

Well, you’d have to be living under a rock to not know the name Ian Fletcher. His face is on a billboard right on the outskirts of Sedona, and his show is syndicated to kingdom come. In a way Heywood’s fancied himself like the teleatheist–

willing to buck the system and face public ridicule all in the name of religion.

Except that Brother Heywood’s expectations for the final outcome are considerably different from Ian Fletcher’s.

Still, he knows what Fletcher does for a living,

and he’s heard about the antievangelical cross-country tour. There’s only one reason he can think of that would make Ian Fletcher come to New Canaan, New Hampshire–and it means that the Order hasn’t been on a joyride after all. Making sure no one is watching,

Brother Heywood lifts the binoculars and mentally maps out the path to a distant white farmhouse, the place where the Winnebago finally comes to a stop.

On Thursday Mariah spends the morning watching the video Agnes of God, and so gets a late start food shopping. When she pulls up to the elementary school, ready to pick Faith up for the day, the trunk is full of groceries. The bell rings, and Mariah takes up her usual position, beside a large maple tree at the edge of the first-grade classroom pod, but Faith does not appear. She waits until the last of the children have dribbled out of the school,

then walks into the office.

Faith is huddled on the overstuffed purple couch beside the secretary’s desk, crying, her leggings torn at the knees and her hair straggling out of its braid and sticking against her damp cheeks. She’s stretched out her sleeves and hidden her fists inside them. She wipes her nose on the fabric. “Mommy, can I not go to school anymore?”

Mariah feels her heart contract. “You love school,” she says, dropping to her knees, as much to comfort Faith as to block the curious gaze of the school secretary. “What happened?”

“They make fun of me. They say I’m crazy.”

Crazy. Filled with a righteous fury,

Mariah slips an arm around her daughter. “Why would they say that?”

Faith hunches her shoulders. “Because they heard me talk to … her.”

Mariah closes her eyes and makes a silent appeal–to whom?–to solve this, and fast.

She pulls Faith upright and holds her mittened hand, tugging her out of the main office. “You know what? Maybe you can stay home from school, just for tomorrow. We can do things, you and me, all day.”

Faith turns her face up to her mother’s. “For real?”

Mariah nods. “I used to take special holidays sometimes with Grandma.” Her jaw tightens as she remembers what her mother had called it: a mental-health day.

They drive through the winding roads of New Canaan, Faith slowly beginning, in bits and pieces, to relay the school day to Mariah. At the turn to their driveway, Mariah rolls down the window and picks up the mail, marking the number of parked cars lining the road. Hikers, or birdwatchers, taking to the field across the road.

They get that up here quite often. She continues to drive, and then she sees the crowd that surrounds the house.

There are vans and cars, and for God’s sake, a big painted Winnebago.

“Wow,” Faith breathes. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Mariah says tightly.

She turns off the ignition and steps from the car into a throng of nearly twenty people. Immediately cameras begin flashing, and questions are hurled at her like javelins. “Is your daughter in the car?”

“Is God with her?” “Do you see God, too?”

When Faith’s door cracks open, the questions stop. Mariah watches her daughter get out of the car and stand nervously on the slate path that leads up to the house. Lining it are a dozen men and women in caftans, who bow their heads as Faith looks at them. Standing behind, and slightly apart, is a man smoking a thin cigar. The face seems familiar to Mariah. With a start she realizes that she’s seen him on TV–IAN Fletcher himself is leaning against her crab-apple tree.

Suddenly Mariah knows exactly what is going on. Somehow, some way, people are beginning to hear about Faith. Feeling sick, she wraps an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and steers her up the porch. She pulls Faith into the house with her and locks the door.

“How come they’re here?” Faith peeks out the sidelight and is yanked away by her mother before she can be seen.

Mariah rubs her temples. “Go to your room. Do your homework.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then find some!” Mariah snaps. She walks into the kitchen and picks up the phone, tears already thickening her throat. She needs to call the police, but she dials a different number first. When her mother answers on the second ring, Mariah lets the first sob out.

“Please come,” she says, and she hangs up.

She sits at the kitchen counter, her palms spread on the cool Formica. She counts to ten.

She thinks of the milk and the peaches and the broccoli sitting in the trunk of her car, already beginning to rot.

Ian Fletcher is very good at doing his job.

He is ruthless, he is driven, he is single-minded. So he fixes his eyes on the little girl, this next subject of his, and watches her get out of the car.

But his attention wanders to the woman beside Faith White. The look of fear on her face, her unconscious grace, the instinctive slip of her arm over her daughter–all draw Ian’s eye.

She is small and fine-boned, with hair the color of old gold. It is pulled back from her face, which is pale and free of makeup and quite possibly the most naturally lovely thing Ian has seen since climbing the falls in South America. She’s not classically beautiful, not perfect, but somehow that only makes her more interesting. Ian shakes his head to clear it. He carouses with models and movie stars–he should not be swayed by a woman with the face of an angel.

An angel? The very thought is traitorous,

ludicrous. It’s the goddamned Winnebago,

he decides. Spending the night on a foam cot, instead of a deluxe hotel mattress, is aggravating his insomnia to the point where he can’t think straight, to the point where anyone with a pair of X chromosomes becomes attractive.

Ian focuses on Faith White, walking beneath her mother’s arm. But then he makes the mistake of glancing up–and meets the gaze of Mariah White. Cool, green, angry.

Let the battle begin, Ian thinks,

unwilling and unable to look away until she firmly shuts the door.

“Name one thing–other than the existence of God –that we take on blind faith,” Ian challenges, his voice rising like a call to arms over the small group of people gathered to listen.

News of Ian’s presence has by now attracted a number of onlookers, in addition to several members of the press. “There’s nothing!

Not a single thing. Not even the sun rising every day.

I know it’s going to be there, but that’s something I can prove scientifically.”

He leans against the railing of a wooden platform hastily erected beside the Winnebago for media moments like these. “Can I prove God is there?

No.”

He watches people from the corner of his eye,

whispering to each other, maybe even second-guessing what made them come to see this miraculous Faith White in the first place.

“You know what faith is, what religion is?”

He looks pointedly at the scarlet-suited members of the Order of the Great Passion, gathered close with scowls on their faces. “It’s a cult. Who gives us religion? Our parents brainwash us when we’re four or five and most receptive to fantastical ideas. We’re told we have to believe in God, so we do.”

Ian raises a hand in the direction of the White farmhouse. “And now the word of a little girl who–I might add–is just at the right age to believe in fairies and goblins and the Easter Bunny as well–is enough to convince you?” He levels the crowd with a calculated gaze. “I ask all y’all again: What else do we believe in with blind faith?”

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.