he mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

John Milton,

Paradise Lost September 20, 1999 At Greenhaven there was a woman who believed that the Virgin Mary lived in the shell of her ear.

“All the better,” she told us, “to whisper prophecies.” From time to time she invited the nurses and the doctors and the other patients to look. When it was my turn, I got so close that for the slightest moment I noticed a pulsing in some inner pink membrane. “Did you see her?”

she demanded, and I nodded, not certain which of us this made seem more insane.

Faith has been out of school as much as she’s in, and I haven’t worked on one of my dollhouses in two weeks. We spend more time at the hospital than in our home. We know now, thanks to an MRI and a CT scan and a battery of blood work, that Faith does not have a brain tumor or a thyroid problem. Dr.

Keller has asked her colleagues about Faith’s behavior, too. “On the one hand,”

she said to me, “almost all adult psychotic hallucinations have to do with religion, the government,

or the devil. On the other hand, Faith is functioning in a totally normal way, with no other psychotic behavior.” She wanted to put Faith on Risperdal, an antipsychotic drug. If the imaginary friend went away, that would be that. And if she didn’t, well, I would cross that bridge if and when we came to it.

Faith can’t be talking to God; I know this. But in the next breath I wonder, Why not? Things have happened before without precedent. And a good mother would stick up for her child, no matter how bizarre the story. But then again, if I start saying that Faith is seeing God, that she isn’t crazy–well, everyone will think that I am.

Again.

To give Faith the Risperdal I have to mash the pill in a mortar and pestle and mix it with chocolate pudding to mask the taste. Dr.

Keller says that antipsychotics work fast; that unlike with Prozac and Zoloft, we don’t have to wait eight weeks to see if it’s taken hold. In the meantime, we just have to wait and see.

Faith is sleeping now, curled on her side beneath her Little Mermaid comforter. She looks like any other child. She must know I’m here, because she stretches and rolls over and opens her eyes.

They are glazed and distant with the Risperdal. She has always favored Colin in features, but with a start I realize that right now she looks like me.

For a moment I think back to the months I spent at Greenhaven–watching the door close behind me and lock, feeling the prick of the sedative in my arm, and wondering why Colin and an ER psychiatrist and even a judge were speaking for me,

when I had so much I wanted to say.

I honestly don’t know what would be worse to find out in this case: that Faith is mentally ill or that she isn’t.

“Sleep,” Faith parrots.

“So-Like-Every-Every-P.”

“Excellent.” Second grade has brought spelling words our way. “Keep.”

“Knowledge-Every-Every-P.”

I place the list on top of the kitchen table.

“You got them all right. Maybe you ought to be the teacher.”

“I could be,” she says confidently. “My guard says everyone has things to teach people.”

Just like that, I freeze. It has been two days since Faith’s mentioned her imaginary playmate, and I was beginning to believe the antipsychotic medicine deserved the credit.

“Oh?” I wonder if I can reach Dr.

Keller by pager. If she’ll discontinue the drug just on the strength of my own observations.

“Your friend is still hanging around?”

Faith’s eyes narrow, and I realize that she hasn’t been talking about her guard for a very important reason: She knows that it’s gotten her into trouble. “How come you want to know?”

I think about the answer Dr. Keller would offer: Because I want to help you. And then I think about the answer my mother would give: Because if she’s important to you, I want to get to know her. But to my surprise, the words that come from my mouth are entirely my own. “Because I love you.”

It seems to shock Faith as much as it’s shocked me. “Oh … okay.”

I reach for her hands. “Faith, there’s something I want to tell you.” Her eyes grow round,

expectant. “A long time ago, before you were born, I was very upset about something. Instead of telling people how I felt, I started acting different. Crazy. I did something that scared a lot of people, and because of it I was sent somewhere I really didn’t want to be.”

“You mean, like … jail?”

“Kind of. It doesn’t matter now. But I wanted you to know that it’s okay to be sad. I understand. You don’t need to act different to get me to see that you’re upset.”

Faith’s chin trembles. “I’m not upset.

I’m not acting different.”

“Well, you didn’t always have this guard of yours.”

The tears that have been building in her eyes spill over. “You think I made her up,

don’t you? Just like Dr. Keller and the kids at school and Mrs. Grenaldi. You think I’m just doing this to get noticed.” Suddenly she draws in a sharp breath. “And now I’m going to have to go to that jail place for it?”

“No,” I insist, hugging her close.

“You’re not going anywhere. And I’m not saying you made her up, Faith, I’m not. It’s just that I was so sad once that my mind made me believe something that wasn’t true–that’s all I’m saying.”

Faith’s face digs into my shoulder as she shakes her head. “She’s real. She is.”

I close my eyes, rub my thumb against the bridge of my nose to ward off the headache.

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. I stand up and gather an empty platter, left over from the afternoon’s treat of cookies. I am halfway to the kitchen when Faith tugs on the bottom of my shirt. “She wants to tell you something.”

“Oh?”

“She knows about Priscilla. And she forgives you.”

The plate I am holding drops to the floor.

When I was eight years old, I wanted a pet so badly that I began to collect small creatures–frogs and box turtles and, once,

a red squirrel–and secretly bring them into the house. It was the turtle crawling over the kitchen counter that finally turned the tide. Rather than risk salmonella poisoning, my mother came home one day with a kitten, mine for the promise that I’d leave other creatures outdoors.

I named the kitten Priscilla, because she had been a princess in my favorite library book that week. I slept with her on my pillow, her tail curled over my brow like a beaver hat. I fed her the milk from my cereal bowls. I dressed her in doll clothes and bonnets and cotton socks.

One day I decided I wanted to give her a bath. My mother explained to me that cats hate to get wet and that they’d lick themselves clean rather than go anywhere near water to wash. But then again, she’d said Priscilla wouldn’t like being swaddled and walked in a toy baby carriage, and she’d been wrong about that. So on a sunny afternoon when I was playing in the backyard, I filled up a bucket with water and called for the cat. I waited until my mother was out of sight and then dunked Priscilla into the water.

She fought me. She scratched and twisted and still I managed to hold her in the water, convinced I knew best. I scrubbed her fur using a bar of Ivory that I’d stolen from my parents’

bathroom. I was very careful to wash all the trouble spots my mother always reminded me about. I was so careful, in fact, that I forgot to let her up to breathe.

I told my mother that Priscilla must have fallen into the bucket, and because I was crying so hard, she believed me. But for years I could feel the bones shifting beneath the slack fur.

Sometimes, there is a tiny weight in my palm that I curl my hand around as I sleep.

I never got another cat. And I never told a soul.

“Mariah,” my mother stares at me blankly.

“Why are you telling me now?”

I glance toward my mother’s guest bedroom, where Faith has gone to play with a tin of buttons.

“Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“About Priscilla? That I drowned her?”

My mother rolls her eyes. “Well, of course not. Not until five minutes ago.”

“Did Daddy?” My mind is doing calculations–Faith was only two when my father died; how much could she remember from back then?

My mother lays a hand on my arm. “Mariah,

are you feeling okay?”

“No, Ma, I’m not. I’m trying to figure out how my daughter knows a secret about me that I never in my life shared with anybody. I’m trying to figure out if I’m having a setback or if Faith’s going crazy, or if–” I break off, ashamed at what I am about to admit.

“What?”

I look at my mother and then down the hallway,

where the sound of Faith’s voice lingers. It is not something I can just say, the way other mothers brag about their child’s ability to solve math problems or do the backstroke. It offers up an agenda. It draws a line, and forces the person I am speaking with to toe up. “Or if Faith’s telling the truth,” I whisper.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” my mother exclaims, scowling. “You are having a setback.”

“Why? Why is it so hard to accept that Faith might be talking to God?”

“Ask Moses’ mother.”

Just then, something strikes me. “You don’t believe her! Your own granddaughter!”

My mother peers down the hall to make sure Faith is still occupied. “Could you lower your voice?” she hisses. “I didn’t say that I don’t believe Faith. I’m just reserving judgment.”

“You believed in me. Even when I tried to kill myself, when Colin and a judge and the entire staff at Greenhaven said I had to be committed,

you stuck up for me.”

“That was one thing. That was an isolated incident,

and I was going against Colin’s word.” She throws up her hands. “People are still being killed in the name of religion, Mariah.”

“So if she was seeing Abraham Lincoln,

or Cleopatra, that would make a difference?

God’s not a four-letter word, Ma.”

“Still,” my mother says. “It might as well be.”

September 23, 1999 In the mail that afternoon I get the electric bill, the phone bill, and divorced.

The envelope looks official, stamped with the address of the Grafton County Courthouse and thick with a sheaf of papers. I slit it open with my thumb and get a paper cut. Just like that, in six weeks, my marriage is over. I think of traditions I’ve heard from other parts of the world–

Native Americans leaving a man’s shoes outside a tepee; Arabs saying “I divorce you” three times–and suddenly they don’t seem as silly. I try to imagine Colin and his attorney, standing in front of the judge at a meeting I did not even know about. I wonder if I am supposed to keep this paper in my safe-deposit box, nestled beside my marriage license and my passport, but it is hard to imagine so many years fitting into such a tiny space.

Suddenly my heart feels too big for my chest. For years I’ve done what Colin wanted me to do. I acted like women I’d once watched from a distance: wearing boiled-wool jackets and Lilly Pulitzer prints, inviting his colleagues’ children to tea parties, draping garland over the mantel at Christmas. I turned into a shell he could be proud of. I was his wife, and if I’m not that any longer, I don’t really know what to be.

I try to envision Colin in his college football uniform. I try to see him grasping my hand at our wedding. I try, but I can’t succeed–the pictures are too fuzzy or too distant to do the memory justice. Maybe this is how it works with failures of the heart. Maybe you edit your history, so that the stories you tell yourself become legend, so that accidents never happened.

But then again, all I will have to do is look at Faith and know that I am only fooling myself.

I toss the mail onto the kitchen table like a gauntlet. The worst thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task of starting over.

“God help me,” I say, burying my face in my hands, and I let myself cry.

“Mommy,” Faith yells, racing into the kitchen, “there’s a book about me!” She dances around me as I chop carrots for supper. “Can we get it? Can we?”

I look down, because I have not seen her this animated in a while. The Risperdal initially made her groggy and slow. It is only in the past day or so that her body seems to have overcome these side effects. “I don’t know. Where did you hear about it?”

“From my guard,” she answers, and I feel that familiar twist of my insides. Faith pulls the stool beneath the dry-erase memo board and with great concentration scrawls I. I. Swerbeh.

“That’s the guy who wrote it. Please?”

I look at the carrots, splayed like pickup sticks on the butcher block. At the chicken,

naked and blushing with paprika, waiting on top of the oven. The library in town is only a ten-minute ride. “Okay. Go get your library card.”

Faith is so excited that I feel a pang of guilt, since I am planning to use this as proof that her mind is playing tricks. When there is no I. I. Swerbeh, maybe she’ll believe there is no guard.

Sure enough, there is no record of this author on either the library’s computerized card catalog or the dusty old shelved one. “I don’t know,

Faith. This doesn’t look promising.”

“At school, the librarian says that because our town’s little, we sometimes have to borrow books from other libraries at other schools. And we can if we fill out a piece of paper. So maybe we just have to ask the librarian here.”

Humor her, I think. Holding Faith’s hand, I approach the children’s librarian.

“We’re looking for a book by an I. I.

Swerbeh.”

“A children’s book?”

Faith nods. “It’s about me.”

The librarian smiles. “Well, I guess you’ve checked the catalogs. It’s not an author I’m familiar with …” She stops, tapping her chin. “How old are you?”

“I’m going to be eight in ten and a half months.”

The librarian squats down to Faith’s level. “How did you find out about this book?”

Faith’s eyes dart toward me. “Someone showed me the name. Wrote it down.”

“Ah.” The librarian takes a piece of paper from her desk. “I used to teach first grade.

It’s developmentally normal at that age for children to reverse letters.” She writes the author’s name backward. “There you go. Makes a little more sense.”

Faith squints at the word, sounds it out.

“What’s a HEBREWS?”

“I think the book you’re looking for is right over here,” the librarian says, plucking a Bible off the reference shelf. She opens up to the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 11, and winks.

“It is!” Faith crows, spotting the letters of her name. “It is about me!”

I stare at the page. Forty verses, all about what has already been accomplished by faith.

Faith begins to read, limping over the words.

“”Now faith is the sub … sub …”"

“Substance.”

“”The substance of things hoped for,”“ she repeats. “”The evidence of things not seen.””

As she continues, I close my eyes and try to come up with a valid explanation. Faith might have seen this before, might have noticed her name sandwiched between other unfamiliar words. But we don’t even own a Bible.

I have always envied people who believe strongly in religion, people who could face a tragedy by praying and know that it would be all right. As unscientific as it seems, well, it would be nice to lay the responsibilities and pain on someone else’s larger shoulders.

If you had asked me a month ago whether or not I believed in God, I would have said yes.

If you had asked me whether I’d like my child to grow up with that same belief, I would have said yes. I just wasn’t willing to teach it to her.

I hadn’t taught it to her.

“Tell your God,” I whisper. “Tell her that I believe.”

As far as I know, before this all happened Faith had asked me only once about God. She was five, and had just learned the Pledge of Allegiance in school. “”Under God,”" she recited to me, and then in the next breath, “What’s God?” I floundered for a moment, trying to find a way to explain without dragging religious differences, or for that matter,

Jesus into it.

“Well,” I said, thinking of words that she’d know, “God is kind of like the biggest angel of all. He’s way up in the sky, living in a place called heaven. And His job is to watch over us, and make sure we’re all doing okay.”

Faith mulled this over for a moment. “He’s like a big baby-sitter.”

I relaxed. “Exactly.”

“But you said He,” Faith pointed out. “All of my baby-sitters are girls.”

As hard as it is to hear Dr. Keller saying Faith is having psychotic hallucinations of God, it is harder to consider the alternative.

Things like this do not happen to little girls, I tell myself during a sleepless night, until I realize I have no right to make that judgment.

Maybe this is a seven-year-old stage, like looking for monsters under the bed or falling for Hanson. The next morning I leave Faith with my mother and drive to Dartmouth College’s Baker Library. There I ask a librarian some questions about children’s perceptions of God and then walk through the dark maze of bookshelves until I find the book she’s recommended. I’m expecting Dr. Spock, some treatise on child-rearing, but instead she’s directed me to Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

Just for the heck of it, I crack the old book open, figuring I can have a good laugh before I go about finding Dr. Spock. But before I know it I’ve spent the entire day reading about young Bernadette Soubirous from Lourdes, France,

who in 1858 spoke to the Virgin Mary several times. About little Juliana Falconieri,

fourteenth century, who saw Christ and let him give her flower garlands. About other child visionaries at Fatima. About all these children, some as young as Faith, some as nonreligious, who were nonetheless singled out.

I begin to scribble notes on the pad I keep in my pocketbook. Of all the visionaries from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and even nineteenth centuries, the ones who saw a lady described a blue-mantled Virgin Mary. The ones who saw a vision in a white gown, with sandals and long dark hair–the ones who called it God–all were referring to a man.

All but Faith.

“So?” I whisper, when I get back to my mother’s. “How was she?”

“Fine,” my mother booms. “She’s not asleep.”

“What I meant is whether she’s been … you know. Seeing things.”

“Oh, right. God.”

I push past her and walk into the kitchen, where I pull a banana from its brothers and begin to peel the skin. “Yes. T.”

My mother shrugs. “It’s a stage. You’ll see.”

I take a bite of the fruit, which lodges in my throat. “What if it’s not, Ma?” I ask, swallowing hard. “What if this doesn’t go away?”

My mother smiles gently. “Dr. Keller will find some other medicine that works.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean … what if it’s real?”

My mother stops wiping down the counter.

“Mariah, what are you saying?”

“It’s happened before. There were other kids who saw … things. And Catholic priests and the pope or someone authenticated it.”

“Faith isn’t Catholic.”

“Well, I know that. I know we’ve never been religious. But I’m wondering if that’s something you’re given a choice about.” I take a deep breath. “I’m just not sure if you and me and a psychiatrist are the people who ought to be judging this.”

“Who should be?” my mother asks, then rolls her eyes. “Oh, Mariah. You aren’t going to take her to a priest.”

“Why not? They’re the ones who have experience with apparitions.”

“They’ll want proof. A statue crying tears, or some paraplegic getting up and walking.”

“That’s not true. Sometimes they just go on the strength of the child’s word.”

My mother smirks. “And when did you become such an expert on goyim?”

“This isn’t about religion.”

“No? Then what is it about?”

“My daughter,” I say thickly, as tears come to my eyes. “There’s something different about her,

Ma. Something that people are going to start whispering about and pointing at. It’s not like she has a birthmark I can hide under a turtleneck and pretend it’s not there.”

“What good is it going to do to talk to a priest?”

I don’t know. I have no idea what I’ve been hoping for–some sort of exorcism? Some vindication? Suddenly I can clearly remember standing on the corner of the street at a red light years ago, certain that everyone could see the scars hidden beneath my sleeves. That everyone knew I was subtly, irrevocably different from them. I don’t want this for my daughter. “I just want Faith to be normal again,” I say.

My mother looks at me squarely. “All right. You do what you have to. But maybe you shouldn’t start at a church.” Rummaging through her ancient,

crammed Rolodex, she extracts a business card. It’s yellowed and dog-eared–either much used or too long forgotten. “This is the name of the rabbi in town. Whether or not you want to admit it, your daughter’s Jewish.”

Rabbi Marvin Weissman. “I didn’t know you went to temple.”

“I don’t.” She shrugs. “It just sort of got passed along to me.”

I pocket the card. “Fine, I’ll call him first. Not that he’s going to believe me. In all the books I read today, I didn’t find a single Jewish person who had a religious vision.”

My mother rubs her thumbnail on the edge of the counter. “And what does that tell you?”

Although I’ve passed the temple in New Canaan many times, I have never gone inside. It is dark, musty. Long, thin collages of stained glass flank the walls at measured intervals,

and a Hebrew-school bulletin board is gaily decorated with the names of students. Faith shudders closer to me. “I don’t like it here. It’s creepy.”

Privately, I agree, but I squeeze her hand. “It’s not creepy. Look at the pretty windows.”

Faith considers the panels and looks at me again. “It’s still creepy.”

Down a hallway, there are approaching footsteps. A man and a woman stride into the entryway, still arguing. “Is there anything nice you can say?” the woman shouts. “Or do you just go out of your way to make me look like an idiot?”

“Do I look like I’m trying to get you upset?” the man thunders. “Do I?” Oblivious to Faith and me, they yank their jackets from hangers in the coatroom. Faith cannot take her eyes off the couple. “Don’t,” I whisper.

“It’s not polite to stare.”

But still she watches them, her eyes wide and sad and oddly trancelike. I wonder if she is remembering Colin and me, if the fights we tried to muffle behind a closed bedroom door still managed to carry. The couple walks out the door,

their anger palpably linking them, as if they are holding tight to the hands of their only child.

Suddenly Rabbi Weissman appears, wearing an ombr`e plaid shirt and jeans. He is no older than I am. “Mrs. White. Faith.

I’m sorry about being late. I had a previous appointment.” The angry couple. were they here for some kind of counseling? Was that what other people did when their marriages were falling apart?

When I continue to say nothing, he smiles quizzically. “Is there something wrong?”

“No.” I shake my head, well and truly caught. “It’s just that I always expect rabbis to have long, gray beards.”

He pats his smooth-shaven cheeks. “Ah,

you’ve been watching Fiddler on the Roof too much. What you see is what you get.” He slips a hard candy into Faith’s hand and winks.

“Why don’t we all come into the sanctuary?”

Sanctuary. Yes, please.

The main room of the temple has high beams and a fluted ceiling, pews neatly set like teeth and a bema covered with a rectangle of blue velvet. The rabbi pulls a small pack of crayons from the pocket of his shirt and gives them to Faith, along with a few sheets of paper.

“I’m going to show your mom something. Would that be okay?”

Faith nods, already pulling out the colors. The rabbi leads me to the back of the room, where we have a clear view of Faith, and also privacy. “So your daughter is talking to God.”

Put so bluntly, it makes me blush. “I think so, yes.”

“And the reason you wanted to see me?”

Shouldn’t that be evident? “Well, I used to be Jewish. I mean, I was raised that way.”

“You’ve converted, then.”

“No. I just sort of lapsed out of it, and then married an Episcopalian.”

“You’re still Jewish,” the rabbi says. “You can be an agnostic Jew, a nonpracticing Jew,

but you’re still a Jew. It’s like being part of a family. You have to screw up pretty badly to get kicked out.”

“My mother says that Faith’s Jewish, too.

Technically. That’s why I’m here.”

“And Faith’s talking to God.” It’s just the slightest movement, but I incline my head.

“Mrs. White,” the rabbi says. “Big deal.”

“Big deal?”

“Lots of Jews talk to God. Judaism assumes a direct relationship with Him. The issue isn’t whether Faith is talking to God … but rather if God is talking to her.”

I mention the quote from Genesis that Faith sang like a nursery rhyme, the chapter in the Bible. I tell him of my drowned kitten, the story that no one else ever knew. When I’m finished, Rabbi Weissman asks, “Has God given your daughter any messages? Any suggestions for rooting out the evil in the world?”

“No, she hasn’t.”

The rabbi pauses. “She?”

“That’s what Faith tells me.”

“I’d like to speak to her,” Rabbi Weissman says.

A half hour after I leave the rabbi sitting with Faith in the sanctuary, he joins me in the entryway of the temple. “Maimonides,” he says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation, “tried to explain the “face” of God. It’s not a real face, because that would make God no better, really, than a man. It’s a presence, a sense that God is aware. Just as God makes us in His own image, we make Him in our image, too–so it makes sense in our own heads. According to the Midrash, there were several incidents when God was revealed in form. At one,

the Red Sea crossing, God appeared as a young warrior and hero. At Sinai God appeared as an elderly judge. Why did God look like a judge at Sinai and not at the Red Sea? Because at the Red Sea the people needed a hero. An old man would not have fit.” He turns to me. “Of course, this is something you’re familiar with.”

“No. I’ve never heard it before.”

“Really?” Rabbi Weissman scrutinizes me. “I asked Faith if she could draw a picture of the God she sees.” He hands me a sheet of paper, crayoned on one side. I prepare to be unimpressed–after all, I’ve seen Faith draw this imaginary friend before. But this picture is different. A woman dressed in white sits on a chair, cradling ten babies in her arms, babies that are black, white, red,

and yellow. And although the artwork is crude, this mother’s face looks something like my own.

“Are you saying she thinks God looks like me?” I ask finally.

Rabbi Weissman shrugs. “I’m not saying anything. But other people might.”

Dressed as he is in a slick Italian suit, with his neatly combed hair and his crisp manners, Dr. Grady De Vries, expert on childhood schizophrenia, does not look like the kind of man who would spend the better part of three hours down on the floor beside Faith,

playing with the bald Barbie. And yet I’ve been sitting at the observation window watching him do just that. After some time he and Dr. Keller come through the adjoining door to the psychiatrist’s office.

“Mrs. White,” Dr. Keller says, “Dr.

De Vries would like to speak to you.”

He sits down in a chair across from me. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Good.”

“We’re taking Faith off the Risperdal.

Your daughter is not psychotic. I’ve studied psychosis in children for over twenty years. I’ve published books and papers on it and have been an expert witness at trials and–well, you get the idea. Faith is, in all manners but one, a mentally healthy and reasonably content seven-year-old girl.”

“What’s the bad news?”

Dr. De Vries rubs at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “That Faith is hearing something,

and talking to someone. There’s too much knowledge there, that’s age- and situationally inappropriate,

to chalk it up to a figment of her imagination. But it’s not a physical illness, and it doesn’t appear to be a mental one either.” He glances at Dr. Keller. “With your permission, I’ll ask Dr. Keller to present this case next week at a psychiatric symposium, to see if our colleagues might have some answers.”

Through the observation glass I watch Faith launch a Sky Dancer into the air. When it hits the fluorescent lights, she laughs and tries to do it again. “I don’t know … I don’t want her to be some kind of spectacle.”

“She won’t be present, Mrs. White.

And the case will be presented anonymously.”

“If you do this, will you figure out what the problem is?”

Dr. De Vries and Dr. Keller exchange a look. “We hope so, Mrs.

White,” he says. “But it may not be something we can fix.”