ure, lots of people believe in God.

Lots of people used to believe the world was flat,

too.”

Ian Fletcher in The New York Times, June 14, 1998 August 17, 1999 Ian Fletcher is standing in the middle of hell. He paces around the new backdrop of the set, running his hand over the gas pipes that will produce flame, and the jagged peaks of rock.

He scrapes off a bit with his thumb, thinking that brimstone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“It’s too damn yellow. Looks like some New Age druid circle.”

His set decorator glances at the associate producer. “I think, Mr.

Fletcher, that the fire-and-brimstone thing was smell-related.”

“Smell?” Ian scowls. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s sulfur, sir. You know, you burn it,

and it stinks.”

Ian glares at the set decorator.

“Tell me,” he says softly, threateningly,

“what’s the point of a smell-related special effect in a visual medium like television?”

The man quails. “I don’t know, Mr.

Fletcher, but you–“

“But I what?”

“You wanted fire and brimstone, Ian.” The voice comes from the tangle of cameras and microphones just off to the left. “Don’t blame the fellow for your own mistakes.”

At the sound of the executive producer’s voice, Ian sighs and runs a hand through his thick, black hair. “You know, James, the only thing that makes me think there might be a higher power after all is the way you always manage to drop in at the absolute worst moment.”

“That’s not God, Ian, that’s Murphy’s Law.” James Wilton steps into the circle of sulfur and glances around. “Of course, if you rediscover religion, that would be one way to boost ratings.” He hands Ian a fax with the latest Nielsen numbers.

“Shoot,” Ian mutters. “I told you CBS wasn’t the way to go. We ought to reopen negotiations with HBO.”

“HBO isn’t going to come within ten feet of you if you keep ranking in the bottom third.”

James breaks off a piece of sulfur and holds it to his nose. “So this is brimstone,

eh? Guess I always kind of pictured it as a big black fireplace.”

Ian absentmindedly glances at the new set.

“Yeah, well. We’ll design a new one.”

“Oh?” James says dryly. “Should we pay for it with the huge bonus from your pending Nike endorsement? Or with the incoming grant from the Christian Coalition?”

Ian narrows his eyes. “You don’t have to be so cynical. You know that six months ago, when we did the specials, we got an incredible Nielsen share for the time slot.”

James walks from the set, leaving Ian to follow. “They were specials. Maybe that was the appeal. Maybe a weekly show loses its novelty.” He turns to Ian, his face grave. “I love what you do, Ian. But network executives have notoriously short attention spans. And I’ve got to bring them a winner.” Taking the fax from Ian’s hand, James crumples it into a ball. “I know it goes against your nature … but now would be a good time to start praying.”

Although he’d been asked by countless journalists,

Ian Fletcher refused to isolate the incidents in his life that made him stop believing in God.

In fact, not only did he admit to being born a nonbeliever, he made a living out of trying to convince the world that everyone was born a nonbeliever and that faith was something one was subtly schooled to accept–like cow’s milk, or potty training–because it was socially acceptable.

Religion, he argued, made a wonderful panacea. Ian’s offhand comparison of devout Catholics to toddlers who believed that a Band-Aid itself cures the wound was hotly debated in the op-ed pages of The New York Times, in Newsweek, and on Meet the Press. He asked why Jews were the Chosen People yet continued to be targeted for persecution.

He asked why Catholics were the only ones who ever saw the Virgin Mary in fountains and morning mists. He asked how there could be a God when innocent children got raped and maimed and killed. The more outspoken he became, the more people wanted to listen.

In 1997 his book, God Who?, spent twenty weeks at number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. He became a guest at Steven Spielberg’s home and was invited to sit in on White House round-table discussions and focus groups concerning a variety of cultural issues. That July a People magazine featuring Ian Fletcher on the cover sold out in twenty-four hours. A speech in Central Park drew more than a hundred thousand spectators. And in September 1998,

Ian Fletcher met with TV executives and became the world’s first teleatheist.

He formed a company–Pagan Productions–

borrowed cues from the Reverends Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, and then put on a show.

Huge TV screens behind him played images of mass destruction–bombs, land mines, civil wars–while Ian’s stirring, unmistakable Southern drawl challenged the concept of a supreme, loving being who would allow things to come this far. He developed a large following and cultivated a reputation as Spokesman of the Millennium Generation–those cynical Americans who had neither the time nor the inclination to trust in God for their future. He was opinionated, brash, and bullheaded, which won him the appeal of the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old sector. He was highly educated–a Ph.d.

in theology from Harvard–which made the baby boomers take note. But clearly Ian Fletcher’s greatest attribute–the one that endeared him to women of all ages and made him a natural for the small screen–was the fact that he was handsome as sin.

Two hours later Ian bursts into the office of his executive producer. “I’ve got it!”

he crows, oblivious to the way that James is motioning to him to be quiet, as he’s on the phone. “It’s perfect. It’s going to make you one very rich man.”

At that, James turns toward Ian.

“I’ll get back to you,” he says into the receiver and hangs up. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. What’s the grand plan?”

Ian’s vivid blue eyes are shining, and his hands are busy diagramming and punctuating his enthusiasm. He looks exactly like the kind of angry, spirited orator who drew James to him in the first place, as the voice of a spiritually lost country. “What do you do if you’re a Bible Belt televangelist and your ratings take a dive?”

James considers this. “You sleep with your secretary, or extort money.”

Ian rolls his eyes. “Wrong. You take your show on the road.”

“Like in a Winnebago?”

“Why not?” Ian says. “Think about it,

James. Preachers at the turn of the last century built congregations with grassroots revival meetings. They pitched a tent in the middle of nowhere and made miracles happen.”

James narrows his eyes. “I can’t quite imagine you in a tent, Ian. Your idea of “roughing it” is settling for The Four Seasons instead of The Plaza.”

Ian shrugs. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. We’re going to go slumming with the masses, my friend. We’ll hold the world’s first antirevival.”

“If viewers don’t tune in to you at home,

Ian, why should they tune into you in Fuck-all,

Kansas?”

“Don’t y’all get it? That’s the whole catch. Instead of making cripples throw down their crutches and having blind people see, I’m going to uncover hoaxes. I’m going to rip apart all these so-called miracles. You know–go to Lourdes with scientists and prove that the statue’s not crying tears, it’s condensation. Or find the medical reason why a guy who’s in a coma for nineteen years suddenly wakes up good as new.” He leans forward, grinning from ear to ear. “People believe in God because they don’t have any other explanation for things that happen. I can change that.”

Slowly, James smiles. “You know,” he admits, “this actually isn’t a bad idea.”

Ian reaches for the newspaper on the corner of James’s desk. He tosses one section to his producer and then takes his own and spreads the pages wide, like the wings of a great bird. “Call your secretary and have her run on out to the newsstand. We need the Globe, the Post, the L.a. Times,” Ian orders.

“Someone saw Jesus’ face on his pizza at dinner last night. Now we’ve just got to find him.”

August 30, 1999 Colin White sits in his business suit on a bench at the playground, watching mothers and nannies chase toddlers beneath the jungle gym.

His egg-salad sandwich remains in its plastic wrapper, untouched. Without even taking a bite,

he balls it up and stuffs it back into the brown paper bag from the deli.

That little girl, the one on the monkey bars,

looks something like Faith. Same curl to her hair, even if it’s a shade too dark. She keeps making it to the third rung, then slipping free and falling to the ground. Colin remembers Faith doing the same thing: practicing and practicing until she could make it across. He wants to move closer, but he knows better. In this day and age it will only make him look like a pedophile, not a man who simply misses his child.

He runs his hands through his hair. What the hell was he thinking? The answer was, he hadn’t been thinking at all when he’d brought Jessica back to his house that afternoon. A ballet class is not a sure thing; he should have known that Faith and Mariah might come home unexpectedly. In the three weeks that have passed, he can still remember every nuance of the looks on Faith’s and Mariah’s faces when Jessica walked out of the bathroom. He can still remember how Faith stared right through him when he finally caught up to her in her bedroom, as if she was old enough to know that the excuses he was making were transparent.

He had hurt Mariah, too, but then again,

living with a woman who refused to accept that there was any problem with their marriage would take its toll on a saint. Every time he tried to force Mariah to face facts, he left shaking, afraid that he’d come home and find her trying to kill herself.

Initially he’d gone out with Jessica just to have someone to confide in.

And now he loves her.

Colin closes his eyes. It’s one hell of a mess.

The little girl on the monkey bars finishes swinging over the last rung and lands a few feet away from Colin, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“Oh,” she says, grinning up at him.

“Sorry.”

“No problem.”

“Can you tie my shoe?”

He smiles. One thing he has learned about young children: To them, adults are interchangeable.

Anyone of similar fatherlike age might be asked to take care of these things. He bends down over the laces of her sneaker, realizing at close range that this girl is younger than Faith,

heavier, unmistakably different.

The girl climbs the short ladder on one end of the monkey bars. “You watch me,” she calls out, artlessly proud. “This time I’m going to get it right.”

Colin finds himself holding his breath as the child swings out with her left arm, then her right, reaching for the metal rungs and curling her knuckles over them, even though it is an unlikely stretch,

even though it is sure to leave her aching. He continues to watch, until he sees her safely across to the other side.

For seven, she knows a lot of things. She knows that monarch caterpillars live in the folds of milkweed leaves, that tights are never as tight as leggings, that “We’ll see” always means “No.”

She has learned enough of the world to realize that it is a place of grown-ups, and that the only way to leave her mark is to speak at the ends of their sentences and act so much like them that they sit up and take notice. She knows that the minute she falls asleep, her teddy bear’s sewed-shut eyes snap open. She knows that truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.

She also knows, although everyone is careful to keep it from her, that they are all still talking. Faith has been home from the hospital for three days now,

although she isn’t comfortable wearing a shirt yet. Every time she does, she feels the cuts open up and bleed, and she worries that in the winter she will either freeze to death or else leak bone dry.

During the day Grandma comes over and plays spit and go fish, and she doesn’t care at all that Faith is wearing only her shorts. Her mother sits on the couch and stares at Faith’s back when she thinks no one is looking, as if Faith couldn’t feel the weight of her eyes anyway.

When Grandma leaves after dinner, sometimes there are conversations with big, fat, white spaces, so that it seems like whole hours pass between the sentences Faith and her mother speak.

Tonight Faith is picking at the peas on her dinner plate when the doorbell rings. Grandma raises her eyebrows, and her mother shrugs. They are like that, can speak without saying a thing, because they know each other so well. With Faith and her mom,

though, it’s a different type of quiet, one brought on by not knowing each other at all. Faith watches her mother go to the front door, and as soon as she’s out of sight, Faith takes a forkful of peas and hides them under her thigh.

“Oh!” Her mother’s voice is full of air and light. “You’re just in time for dinner.”

“I can’t stay,” Faith hears her father answer. She stiffens, feels the peas pop beneath her leg. She has seen her father once since That Day. He came to the hospital with a big stuffed teddy bear that was the ugliest one she’d ever seen,

and the whole time he held her hand and talked to her she was picturing that lady that came out of the bathroom as if she lived there. She does not know why the woman was taking a shower in the middle of the afternoon, or why that made her mother cry. She knows only that the whole event had a color about it, like the scribbles of a crayon gone crazy off the page–the same blue-black she sometimes imagined when she was lying in bed and could hear, through the walls, her parents fighting.

Her father walks into the kitchen and kisses her on the forehead. “Hey, cookie!” He pretends not to look at her back the same way her mother does. “How’s my pumpkin pie?”

Faith stares at him, and she wonders why he calls her only by the names of food.

“For God’s sake, Mariah!” Her grandma gets to her feet. “How could you let him in?”

“For Faith–I had to.”

Grandma snorts. “For Faith. Right.” She comes closer to Faith’s father, and for a moment Faith wonders if Grandma is going to sock him one right then and there. But she only pokes him in the side with her finger. “Good-bye, Colin. You’re not needed.”

“Lay off, Millie, will you?”

Her mother reappears with a plate. “Here,” she sings. “No trouble at all.”

“Mariah, I can’t stay. I told you that.”

“It’s only dinner–“

“I have other plans.”

“You could cancel them. It would be nice for Fai–“

“Jessica’s waiting in the car,” her father says tightly. “All right?”

Faith scurries away from her father’s voice,

taking shelter beneath her grandmother’s arm. Her mother wilts into a chair, the plate clattering so that peas spill across the table like polka dots. Her father’s jaw is working funny, no words coming out.

Finally he says, “I just wanted to see my daughter. I’m sorry.” Then he touches Faith’s shoulder and walks out.

“God, Ma! Did you have to say that?”

“Yes! Since you wouldn’t!”

“I don’t need your help.” Faith’s mother presses her hands to her head. “Just leave.”

Faith begins to panic. She did not want her father there either, but that was only because she knew that it would all come down to a scene like this. Once in school her teacher had filled a bowl with water and sprinkled pepper on top. Then she dripped dishwashing soap down the side, and the pepper went flying away. For some reason, when Faith thinks of her mother and father, that always comes to mind, too.

“Faith,” her grandmother says, “maybe you should sleep at my house tonight.”

Her mother shakes her head. “No way. She’s staying here.”

“Wonderful!”

Faith tries to figure out what is so wonderful about it. She wants to go to her grandmother’s. Her mother will just mope around and stick a video in the VCR for her. At her grandma’s,

she gets to sleep in the guest room, with the beastly black sewing machine in the corner and the box of buttons and the small bowl of sugar cubes on the nightstand.

But then her grandmother is saying good-bye and her mother is muttering about reverse psychology and it is just the two of them, with all the dishes on the table. For a long time Faith watches her mother.

She sits with her head in her hands, so still that Faith thinks she’s fallen asleep.

Unsure of what to say or do, Faith pokes her. “Want to play a game?”

When her mother looks up, Faith thinks that she has never in her life seen anything so sad.

Except maybe the tortoise at the San Diego Zoo two summers ago, which had lifted its great head and stared right at Faith, willing her to help him go back to where he once had been.

Her mother’s voice is thin and creaky. “I can’t.” She walks out of the room, leaving Faith behind to wonder, once again, what magic words might keep her mother close by.

Mariah has always believed there ought to be a network for the lovelorn, patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous, devoted to helping those who are crippled by broken hearts.

Surely there are enough of us, she thinks, people who would benefit from a buddy system for the moments when you catch your sweetheart with his arm around another woman, or when he calls but does not want to speak to you, or when you see in his eyes that he has already started to forget you. She imagines having the name of a Good Samaritan who will talk on the phone like a seventh-grade girlfriend, draw you a dartboard with his face on it, take the ache away.

But instead she stares at the small business card with her psychiatrist’s beeper number. She is not supposed to call unless it is an emergency, which in her case would probably mean the profound desire to cut open her wrists or hang herself from the closet rack. She wants to talk to someone, but she does not know whom. Her mother is her closest friend, but she’s just sent Millie away. Other women she knows have husbands who work with Colin; they are couples who are probably going out to dinner with him and Jessica. She feels something bitter rise in the back of her throat. It does not seem right that this woman should get her husband, her friends, and her old life.

There is much Mariah has to do. She ought to check on Faith, give her her antibiotics, change the dressing on her stitches before she goes to bed. She ought to call her mother and apologize. At the very least she ought to clean up the dinner table.

Instead she finds herself staring at the bed.

All night she imagines that she is falling into dips and runnels of the mattress, as if Colin and Jessica have literally left their marks. She tugs the comforter off and makes herself a nest on the floor. She piles the sheets on top and lies down, picturing Colin’s face the way she once did in her narrow bed in a college dormitory. She stays perfectly still, oblivious to the tears that come without warning, a geyser, a hot spring with the power to heal.

Her mother is crying, Faith knows, hard enough that she can’t catch her breath. It’s a quiet sound,

but all the same as hard to block out with a pillow as her parents’ fights used to be. It makes her feel like crying, too. Faith thinks about calling her grandmother but remembers that her grandmother takes the phone off the hook at 7:00 P.m. to foil telemarketers. So she curls up on top of her bed, shirtless, holding the old bear that smells like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.

She stays that way for a long time, and then dreams about a person wearing a long white nightgown who is sitting across from her. Immediately–she’s been warned of strangers–she shrinks away.

“Faith,” the person says. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Long dark hair, sad dark eyes. “Do I know you?”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.” Faith wants so badly to touch the nightgown of this stranger. She’s never seen anything like it. It seems so soft you might fall into it and never find your way out. “Are you a friend of my mom’s?”

“I’m your guard.”

She thinks about that for a moment, puzzling out whether or not a person you’ve never seen before can slip unannounced into your life.

“Who are you talking to?” Suddenly Faith’s mother stands in the doorway, her eyes red and swollen and her hands holding a tube of Bacitracin.

Startled, Faith glances around the room, but the stranger–and the dream–is gone. “Nobody,” she says, then turns around so that her mother can tend to her stitches.

Two nights later Mariah wakes up with a start. She walks barefoot down the hall, aware before she even gets there that Faith is missing.

“Faith?” she whispers. “Faith!” She rips the comforter from the empty bed and checks in the closet. She peeks her head inside the bathroom and then clatters down the stairs to check in the playroom and the kitchen. By now her head is throbbing and her palms are damp. “Faith,” she yells, “where are you?”

Mariah thinks of the stories she’s read in the news, of children who’ve been abducted from their own houses in the dead of the night. She imagines a hundred different terrors that exist just beyond the edge of the driveway. Then she sees a flash of silver through the window.

Outside in the yard Faith is gingerly crawling across the pressure-treated beam that forms the top of the swing set, ten feet above the ground.

She’s done it before, catlike, and terrified Mariah, who was certain she’d fall. “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing out here in the middle of the night?” Mariah says softly, so as not to startle her.

Faith glances down, not at all surprised to be discovered. “My guard told me to come.”

Of all the things Mariah expected to hear, that is not one of them. “Your what?”

“My guard.”

“What guard?”

“My friend.” Faith grins, giddy with the truth of it. “She’s my friend.”

Mariah tries to remember the faces of Faith’s little playmates. But none have come to visit since Colin left, their families adhering to the New England tradition of keeping one’s nose out of a neighbor’s bad business,

lest it be contagious. “Does she live around here?”

“I don’t know,” Faith says. “Ask her.”

Mariah suddenly feels her chest pinch.

Since Greenhaven she has pictured her mind as a series of glass dominoes, capable of being felled by a puff of breath in the right direction.

She wonders if dissociation from reality is genetically based, like hair color or a tendency to gain weight. “Is … is your friend here now?”

Faith snorts. “What do you think?”

A trick question. “Yes?”

Faith laughs and sits up, straddling the beam and swinging her feet. “Come down before you get hurt,” Mariah scolds.

“I won’t get hurt. My guard told me.”

“Bully for her,” Mariah mutters, climbing onto one of the swings so that she can grab for her daughter. As she comes closer, she can hear Faith singsonging under her breath to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”: “”But the fruit o-of the tree … which is in the mid-dle of the garden …”"

“Inside,” Mariah says with authority.

“Now.”

It is not until her daughter is tucked into bed that Mariah realizes, for the first time since the circus accident, Faith’s back has healed enough for her to be wearing a nightgown.

Except for the fact that Dr. Keller’s Barbie is bald, Faith likes playing with the toys. There are Koosh mitts and a dollhouse and crayons shaped like ducks and pigs and stars. The Barbie, though, gives her the creeps. It has little pimply holes where its hair ought to be, and it looks all wrong. It reminds Faith of the time she dropped a Baby Go Potty doll and its chest cracked off to reveal a pump and batteries, instead of the storybook heart she’d imagined there.

Mostly, though, Faith likes coming to see Dr. Keller. She thought that maybe she’d have to get shots or even that test where they stick the really long Q-tip down your throat, but Dr.

Keller only watches her play and sometimes asks her questions. Then she goes off into the room where Faith’s mother is waiting, and Faith gets to play even longer all by herself.

Today Dr. Keller is sitting on a chair,

writing in her notebook. Faith picks up a puppet, one with a queen’s crown, and then lets it slide off her hand. She digs her hands into the tub full of crayons and lets the colors fall through her fingers. Then she walks across the room and stares down at the bald Barbie. She grabs it and carries it over to the dollhouse.

It’s not a fancy dollhouse, not like the ones her mom makes, but that’s not such a bad thing.

Whenever Faith gets too close to one of her mother’s dollhouses, she gets yelled at, and if she manages to take out a tiny chair or finger a miniature braided rug, she always thinks she’s going to break it if she even breathes the wrong way. This plastic dollhouse of Dr.

Keller’s is clearly for kids, clearly for someone to play with. Not just for show.

Ken and another Barbie, this one with hair, are crammed into the tiny bathroom of the dollhouse.

Ken is facedown in the toilet. Faith picks him up and walks him to the bedroom. She mashes him against the Barbie with hair, holding her tight.

Then she takes the bald Barbie and props her against the bedroom wall to watch.

Dr. Keller scoots her chair closer to the dollhouse. “There are lots of people in that room.”

Faith looks up. “It’s a father and a mother and another mother.”

“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.

“I didn’t know–“

“Oh!” Millie exclaims. “This is his big tour! The one he’s taking across America!

Tuesday he was in New Paltz.”

Mariah laughs. “New Paltz has a big atheist population?”

“Just the opposite. He was there because some church claimed to have a statue oozing blood. Turned out to be a limestone deposit or something.”

A line of type flashes at the bottom of the screen: HOULTON, MAINE, LIVE! The camera pans, catching T-shirts emblazoned with THE LIMB OF LIFE: THE JESUS TREE. Then it narrows on a close-up of Ian Fletcher, framed in the doorway of an RV. “Gorgeous man.” Millie sighs.

“Look at that smile.”

Mariah doesn’t glance up from the TV Guide she’s skimming. “Well, of course,”

she says. “He’s probably having the time of his life.”

Ian has never been so miserable in his life.

He is hot and sweaty, has a killer headache, and is quickly coming to hate Maine, if not the entirety of New England. Worse still, he can’t look forward to a respite when the broadcast is finished. His producer refused to book him a decent hotel, saying that a guy who wants to go on a grassroots tour ought to be willing to let his Italian loafers touch the ground. So–for appearance’s sake–Ian’s production crew gets to stay at the Houlton Holiday Inn, while Ian camps out in a glorified tin can.

He’s not about to reveal that accommodations are vitally important to a man who cannot sleep at night, but only prowls about, exhausted. His insomnia is no one’s business but his own. Still,

Ian can’t even begin to describe the anticipation he feels at the prospect of bringing down this whole little Christ show. Whatever hoax he picks next to unravel will damn well be situated near a Ritz-Carlton.

At a signal from James he steps out of the godforsaken Winnebago, several reporters closing around him. He pushes through them and steps onto an empty milk crate that someone has left behind. “As y’all may know,” Ian says,

gesturing to the small and devoted knot of people gathered in front of the McKinneys’ sprawling apple tree, “there’s been some question in recent days whether Houlton, Maine, is indeed the site of a religious miracle. According to William and Bootsie McKinney, the morning of August twentieth, following a severe thunderstorm, Jesus appeared to them in a split branch of this Macintosh tree.”

Ian turns toward it. Actually, the way the rings of the tree have grown and the delicate lines of dried sap do sort of resemble a long-chinned,

dark-eyed visage. Like conventional pictures of Jesus, if one believes in that sort of thing.

Ian deliberately smacks his open palm over the image, covering it. “Is there a face here?

Maybe. But if the McKinneys were not pious Catholics who attended mass regularly, would they have seen Jesus? Or might they have said it looks like Orville Redenbacher, or Great-uncle Samuel?” He waits for the suggestion to sink in before adding, “Is a religious miracle truly inexplicable and divine? Or is it a coincidental meeting of what’s been programmed in one’s mind with what one wants to see?”

At the quick gasp of one of the nuns, the Houlton parish priest steps forward. “Now,

Mr. Fletcher,” Father Reynolds says.

“There are documented cases of religious miracles that have even been approved by the Holy See.”

“Like that sighting of the Virgin Mary in a Mexican subway puddle a few years back?”

“I don’t believe that has reached the approval stage yet.”

Ian snorts. “C’mon, Father–if you were the Virgin Mary and you wanted to choose a place to appear, would you pick the oil sheen on a subway platform? Can’t you accept the possibility that this may not be what it seems?”

The priest taps his finger against his chin. “I can,” he says slowly. “Can you?”

At the titter that runs through the crowd, Ian realizes he’s lost his momentum. Goddamn live TV. “Ladies and gen’lemen, I’d like to introduce Dr. Irwin Nagel, of Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus.

Doctor?”

“Wood,” the professor says, “is made up of several types of xylem cells, including vessels, which conduct materials and strengthen the stem of the tree. The so-called picture inside here is only a natural process of the xylem.

As the tree gets older, the innermost layers stop conducting food and get clogged with resin,

gum, and tannin, which harden and darken. The face that the McKinneys have seen is actually just a conglomeration of deposits in the tree’s heartwood.”

Ian nods as his producer comes to stand beside him.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know if they’re buying it,”

James whispers. “I liked your subway thing,

though.”

Dr. Nagel suddenly lifts up a large,

dangerous-looking pair of hedge trimmers.

“Now, I’ve got the McKinneys’ permission for this,” he says, as he randomly selects a branch and hacks it off. The pale sapwood seems to blush, and then within moments the demarcations of the tree’s rings are clearly visible. “Well,

there. It kind of looks like Mickey Mouse.”

Ian steps forward. “The professor means that the apparition of the face of Christ is, literally,

a fluke of nature. That it happened is not extraordinary for a tree of this size and age.”

On impulse Ian takes a black marker from his pocket and draws a shape on the exposed insides of the tree. “Roddy,” he calls to a familiar reporter, “what is this?”

The man squints. “That’s the moon.”

Ian points to Father Reynolds. “A bowl.”

“A semicircle,” says Professor Nagel.

Ian sets the cap on his marker with an audible click. “Perception is a very powerful thing. I say this isn’t the face of Jesus. That’s my opinion. It may or may not be true, and I can’t prove it, and you have the right to doubt what I say. But by the same token, when Bill McKinney and Father Reynolds say, “Yes,

this is the face of Jesus,” well, that’s just an opinion, too–and one that can’t be proved. It doesn’t matter if the pope agrees with them,

or the President, or the majority of the whole damned world. It’s certainly what they see. But it may or may not be a fact. And if you don’t believe me, how can you believe them?”

“You know, half the time I don’t even understand what he’s saying, and I still think he’s terrific,” Millie announces. “Look at that priest. He’s practically purple.”

Mariah laughs. “Can we turn this off, Ma?

Or is Jerry Springer coming on next?”

“Very funny. He’s a poet, Mariah. Just you listen to him.”

“He’s using someone else’s script,”

Mariah says, as Ian Fletcher lifts up a Bible and begins to read with heavy sarcasm.

“”But the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God hath said Ye shall not eat of it;

neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”" Faith comes into the room and slips onto the couch. “I know that poem.”

The funny thing is, the biblical verse seems familiar to Mariah, too, although she can’t understand why. It has been years since Mariah has studied a Bible, and as far as she knows,

Faith’s never even seen one. She and Colin had put off their daughter’s religious instruction indefinitely, since neither of them could consider it without feeling like a hypocrite.

“”And the serpent said to the woman …”"

Faith mutters something beneath her breath.

Assuming the worst, Mariah crosses her arms.

“What was that, young lady?”

“”Ye shall not surely die.”"

As the words leave Faith’s mouth, Ian Fletcher repeats them on TV, and then plucks an apple from the McKinneys’ tree to take a large, provocative bite. That’s when Mariah recalls where she’s heard Fletcher’s verses before–just days ago, when Faith was playing on the swing set in the middle of the night, humming them softly. Just days ago, when Faith–who has never been to church or temple in her young life,

who has never attended Sunday or Hebrew school–was singing from the Book of Genesis as if it were any other jump-rope rhyme.

The men and women who work at Pagan Productions in L.a. keep a healthy distance from Ian Fletcher, frightened by his bursts of temper, his ability to turn their own words back on themselves, and their instinct for self-preservation–

in the event Mr. Fletcher is wrong about God,

they don’t want to be cast into the lake of fire along with him on Judgment Day. They are paid well to respect their employer’s privacy and to firmly deny requests for interviews. It is for this reason that no one outside Pagan Productions knows that Ian leaves every Tuesday morning, and that no one has any idea of where he goes.

Of course, people who work for Ian hypothesize like mad: He has a standing appointment with a mistress. He attends a witches’ coven.

He calls the pope, who is, unbeknownst to his followers, a silent partner in Pagan Productions. Several times, on dares, the bravest employees have tried to follow Ian when he disappears in his black Jeep. He manages to lose all of them by winding around the Los Angeles Freeway. One swears that he tracked Ian all the way to LAX, but nobody believes him. After all, where can you fly round-trip in time to be back for a tape-editing session that same night?

On the Tuesday morning of the week that Ian kicks off his grassroots antirevival at the Jesus Tree, a black stretch limousine pulls up alongside the Winnebago. Ian is discussing with James and several associate producers the reactions his recent comments have received in the press. “I’ve got to go,” Ian says, relieved to see the car approach. He’s had to juggle time and make concessions, since this week he is leaving from Maine rather than L.a.

“You’ve got to go?” James asks. “Where?”

Ian shrugs. “Places. Sorry, I thought I mentioned I’d be cutting out early today.”

“You didn’t.”

“Well, I’ll be back tonight. We can finish up then.” He grabs his briefcase and his leather jacket and slams out the door.

Exactly two and one half hours later he crosses the threshold of a small brick building. He navigates the hallways with the confidence of someone who has been there before. Some of the people he passes nod as he makes his way to the recreation center, equipped with oak tables and televisions and chintz couches. Ian heads for a table in the far corner occupied by a man. Although it is warm in the room, Michael wears a crewneck sweater with a button-down oxford shirt. His hands flutter over a pack of cards,

which he turns over one at a time. “Queen of diamonds,” he murmurs. “Six of spades.”

Ian slips into the chair beside him. “Hey there,” he says softly.

“King of hearts. Two of spades. Seven of hearts.”

“How have you been, Michael?” Ian scoots closer.

The man’s shoulders rock from side to side.

“Six of clubs!” he says firmly.

Ian sighs, nods. “Six of clubs,

buddy.” He moves back a distance. He watches the cards flip in succession: red,

black, red, black. Michael turns over an ace. “Oh, no,” he says. “Ace–“

“In the hole,” Ian finishes.

For the first time, Michael makes fleeting eye contact with Ian. “Ace in the hole,” he echoes, then goes back to counting cards.

Ian sits quietly until exactly one hour has passed since his arrival–not because Michael has acknowledged his presence but because he knows that Michael would notice an absence even a few minutes shy of the routine. “See you in a week, buddy,” Ian murmurs.

“Queen of clubs. Eight of hearts.”

“All right, then,” Ian says,

swallowing hard. He walks out of the building and begins the journey back to Maine.

Something Faith has recently discovered is that if you squinch up your eyes really tight and rub them hard with the balls of your thumbs, you see things:

little stars and greeny-blue circles that she imagines are her irises, as if there’s some kind of mirror on the insides of her eyelids that makes this vision possible. She pulls at the edges of her lids and sees a flurry of red, the color she thinks that anger must be. She has been doing it a lot, although yesterday, when school started, it didn’t work that well. Willie Mercer said that only babies would carry a Little Mermaid lunchbox, and when she whispered to her guard, trying to ignore him, Willie laughed and said she was Looney Tunes. So she closed her eyes to shut him out, and one thing led to another, and before she knew it the school nurse was calling home to say that Faith wouldn’t stop rubbing her eyes; it must be conjunctivitis.

“Do your eyes hurt, Faith?” Dr.

Keller asks now.

“No, everyone just thinks they do.”

“Yes. Your mom told me about school yesterday.”

Faith blinks, squinting into the fluorescent lamps. “I wasn’t sick.”

“No.”

“I just like doing it. I see things.” She tips up her chin. “Try it,” she challenges.

To her surprise, Dr. Keller actually takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes the way Faith has been doing. “I can see something white. It looks like the moon.”

“It’s the inside of your eye.”

“Is it?” Dr. Keller puts her glasses back on. “Do you know this for sure?”

“Well, no,” Faith admits. “But don’t you think maybe your eyes are still looking around even when the lids are down?”

“I don’t see why not. Do you see your friend when your eyes are closed like that?”

Faith doesn’t like talking about her guard. But then again, Dr. Keller took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, something Faith never imagined she would do. “Sometimes,” Faith says in the tiniest voice she can manage.

Dr. Keller looks at her carefully, which hardly anyone else ever bothers to do. Usually when Faith talks, her mother just says “Uh-huh” and “Really?” but she’s actually thinking of a gazillion other things while Faith is trying to tell her something. And Mrs.

Grenaldi, her teacher, doesn’t look anyone in the eye. She stares just over the top of the kids’

heads, as if they all have bugs crawling through the parts of their hair.

“Have you had your friend a long time?”

“Which friend?” Faith asks, although she knows she can’t fool Dr. Keller.

The psychiatrist leans forward. “Do you have other friends, Faith?”

“Sure. I play with Elsa and Sarah and with Gary, when my mother makes me, but Gary wipes his snot on my clothes when he thinks I’m not looking.”

“I mean other friends like your guard.”

“No.” Faith considers. “I don’t know anyone else like her.”

“Is she here with us now?”

Faith glances around, uncomfortable. “No.”

“Does your guard talk to you?”

“Yes.”

“Does she ever say scary things to you?”

Faith shakes her head. “She makes me feel better.”

“Does she touch you?”

“Sometimes.” Faith closes her eyes and jams her thumbs into them. “She shakes me at night to wake me up. And she hugs me a lot.”

“That sounds nice,” Dr. Keller says.

“I bet you like that.”

Embarrassed, Faith nods. “She says she loves me best.”

“Then she’s only your friend? Not anyone else’s?”

“Oh, no,” Faith says. “She has other friends. She just doesn’t see them so much right now.

It’s like how I used to go over to Brianna’s house all the time, but now she goes to a different school so I don’t get to play with her a lot.”

“Does your guard tell you about her other friends?”

Faith repeats several names. “She played with them a long time ago, not anymore.”

Dr. Keller has become very quiet.

This is strange; usually she asks Faith questions,

questions, questions until Faith is ready to cover her ears. Faith watches the doctor’s hands, which are shaking just a little bit, like the way her mother’s did when she was taking pills.

“Faith,” Dr. Keller says finally,

“does it … do you like–” She takes a deep breath and continues. “Did you ever pray to have a friend like this?”

Faith wrinkles her nose. “What’s praying?”

From the light in her eyes Mariah knows that Dr. Keller is on the verge of a breakthrough.

Or maybe it has already happened; it is difficult to tell, since Faith is playing so nicely on the other side of the observation window.

Dr. Keller sits down at her desk and gestures for Mariah to do the same. “Faith mentioned some names to me today: Herman Joseph, from Steinfeld. Elizabeth, from Schonau.

Juliana Falconieri.” Dr. Keller glances up.

Mariah shrugs. “I don’t think we know any Hermans. And is Schonau close to here?”

“No, Mrs. White,” Dr. Keller says softly. “It’s not.”

Mariah laughs nervously. “Well, maybe she’s making those names up. I mean, if she managed to create an imaginary friend …?” She lets her voice trail off, and she feels her palms begin to sweat, although she does not know why she’s nervous.

Dr. Keller rubs her temples. “Those are very complicated names for a seven-year-old to spontaneously invent. And they aren’t fabricated. They are, or were, people who existed.”

More confused, Mariah nods. “Maybe it’s something they’re learning in class. Last year Faith was an expert on the rain forest.”

“Does she attend parochial school?”

“Oh, no. We’re not Catholic.” Mariah smiles hesitantly. “Why?”

Dr. Keller sits on the edge of the desk,

across from Mariah. “Before I married and became a psychiatrist, I was Mary Margaret O’Sullivan from Evanston, Illinois. I received communion every Sunday and had a big party for my confirmation and went to parochial school until I was accepted at Yale. In my school, I did learn about Herman Joseph.

And Elizabeth, and Juliana. They’re Catholic saints, Mrs. White.”

Mariah is speechless. “Well,” she says,

because she does not know what is expected.

Dr. Keller begins pacing. “I don’t think we’ve been hearing Faith just right. Her guard … the words … they sound alike.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your daughter,” Dr. Keller says flatly. “I think she’s seeing God.”