People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia, 1917
ePub
A4PART SEVEN
A
ll hell broke loose.–John Milton,
Paradise Lost October 15, 1999 Two days later Faith is still in the hospital. As far as I’m concerned, she’s fine, with the exception of the open wounds on her hands.
But even these, she says, no longer hurt. Dr.
Blumberg, the hand surgeon, has escorted in a parade of experts to confer on Faith’s diagnosis. He won’t give us a straight answer about that, and he won’t discharge Faith until he does.
I’ve tried to reach Colin, but his voice mail said only that he’d gone out of town, without specifying where. I’ve tried calling every few hours, but nothing has changed.
My mother thinks I should worry about Faith, not Colin. She has spent every day here with us and wants to know why I’m in such a rush to get home. In the hospital, at least, none of the reporters or religious zealots can get to Faith.
I have been home myself, of course, to shower and change. The number of people has not really changed–
the cult’s still there, and the Winnebago–although I have seen neither hide nor hair of Ian Fletcher.
This doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that he’s had a live broadcast since Faith was admitted to the hospital, yet he did not mention her injuries.
“Ma,” Faith whines, “that’s the third time I’ve called you!”
I smile at her. “Sorry, honey. I didn’t hear.”
“No, you were too busy brooding,” my mother mutters.
I ignore her. “What did you need,
Faith?”
“One of those Popsicle thingies. The red kind.”
“Sure.” Rather than bother a nurse, I’ll get it from the refrigerator at the end of the hall.
I open the door and find Ian Fletcher on the other side, arguing with the policeman who’s been thoughtfully stationed to keep Faith from being accosted by any media that might slip past hospital security unannounced.
“I’m telling you,” Fletcher demands. “You ask her, and she’ll let me in.”
“Ask her what?”
He smiles at me and indicates a bouquet of roses. “I was hoping to see the patient.”
“My daughter isn’t available right now.”
Right on cue, Faith’s voice pipes up through the open doorway. “Hey, Mom, who’s here?” She scurries to the end of the bed, spies Ian Fletcher, and blushes. “I guess I’m supposed to thank you for carrying me home the other night.”
Fletcher pushes his way into the room and holds out the roses to Faith. “No need. White knights like me are always looking around for damsels in distress.”
Faith giggles, and my mother takes the roses.
“Aren’t these just to die for?” she exclaims.
“Faith, what should we put them in?”
With an apologetic shrug to the policeman,
I step back inside the hospital room and close the door. “I never did meet a lady who wasn’t partial to flowers,” Ian says.
“They make my mom sneeze,” Faith answers.
“I’ll have to keep that in mind, then.” Fletcher turns to me. “So, how is she doing?”
“Much better.”
His eyes remain locked on mine. “Yes,”
he says. “She looks wonderful.”
We are interrupted by my mother, who bustles between us with the water pitcher full of roses. As she settles them on the nightstand, Ian sinks down onto the edge of the bed. “Anyone tell you when you can go home?”
“Not yet,” I answer.
“I want to go now,” Faith says. “It smells bad in here.”
“It smells like a hospital,” Ian agrees. “Like someone’s always cleaning toilets.”
“Were you ever in the hospital?”
A shadow falls across Ian’s face. “Not for myself.” He glances up at me. “Could I speak to you for a second?”
Again he gestures to the hall. With a silent nod to my mother, I follow him out. This is where the other shoe is going to drop, I tell myself. This is where he will tell me that in spite of his exemplary behavior and yellow roses, I can expect a camera crew ready to record Faith’s exodus from the hospital. “You wanted to talk?”
He stands just a foot away, our shoulders leaning against opposite sides of the doorjamb.
Ian clears his throat. “Actually–“
“Mrs. White.” The sound of Dr.
Blumberg’s voice startles me. “I’m glad you’re here. I’d like to speak to you about Faith. Would you join me in the lounge at the end of the hall?”
Although this is what I’ve been waiting for, I begin to tremble. Somehow I know it is bad news;
doctors always want to talk about bad news when they invite you to sit down. If Faith were well,
he would have come right into the room. He is going to tell me that Faith has cancer, that she has three weeks to live, that it is somehow my fault. If I’d been a more competent mother, I would have noticed something before now–a lump behind her ear, a slow-healing cut on her knee.
“Mariah,” Ian asks quietly. “May I?”
He glances down the hallway, where the doctor has already begun to walk, and then back to me. He is asking a thousand questions, catching me at my weakest, and, at the same time, offering his arm so that my legs feel a little less shaky. He should not be privy to this–and yet he was with Faith when it happened; he has seen all there is to see. My need for support edges out my better judgment.
“All right,” I whisper, dazed, and together we begin to walk.
Beside me, Ian is fussing with something, but I do not look. If it’s a tape recorder or a notepad, I don’t want to see. It is an effort to keep my eyes trained straight ahead,
but when Dr. Blumberg asks Ian to borrow his pen, it sparks my interest. He pulls a plastic-wrapped package from his pocket. “You see this danish?”
It’s a tart layered with cherry filling and cheese. Dr. Blumberg takes Ian’s pen and spears the danish, right through the Saran Wrap and all the fillings and out the other plastic-coated side. “This is a pretty good example of a penetrating trauma. A puncture wound.” He hands Ian back his pen, now dripping and sticky, and points to the hole in the center of the danish. “See how the tart is ragged? How the layer of cheese runs into the layer of cherry? And the cherry, it’s oozing. A penetrating trauma to the hand tears and distorts tissue. There’s skin torn in the periphery or pushed into the wound.
Blood clots and mangled tissue from adjacent injured areas fill the wound. More often than not we find hematomas or shattered bones.” Dr.
Blumberg lifts his eyes to me. “Your daughter’s wounds looked nothing like this.”
“Maybe they weren’t … penetrating traumas,” I suggest.
“Oh, they were. Went clean through. The operative word there being “clean.” X rays–
I’ve got them in my office–showed these perfectly round little wounds, with perfectly round little gaps in the tissue and the bones … but no actual trauma.”
Now I am completely lost. “That’s a good thing?”
“It’s an inexplicable thing, Mrs. White.
I’ve spent the past two days, as you know, in consultation with colleagues regarding Faith’s diagnosis. We all agree: There is no way an object can enter the palm and exit the other side of the hand without causing substantive damage, or at the very least tearing some tissue.”
“But she was bleeding. She passed out because of it.”
“I’m aware of that,” Dr. Blumberg says.
“Yet her hands were bleeding slowly. As opposed to a laceration, she hadn’t lost enough blood to account for her loss of consciousness. Your daughter’s wounds act like punctures … but don’t look like them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever read of people who suffer head trauma and can suddenly speak fluent Japanese or French?” the doctor asks. “They crack their heads on a telephone pole, and for some reason they can understand a language they’ve never understood before. It’s not something you see every day, but it happens. Medically, it’s very difficult to explain.” He takes a deep breath. “After careful consideration, several physicians and myself raised the question of whether Faith actually injured her hands with anything–or if she just started to bleed.”
Fletcher whistles softly beside me. “You’re authenticating stigmata.”
“I am not conclusively offering that diagnosis at this juncture,” the doctor heatedly insists; at the same time I say,
“Stigmata?”
Dr. Blumberg hesitates, clearly embarrassed. “As you know, stigmata are supposedly replications of the crucifixion wounds of Christ, Mrs. White, medically inexplicable instances where people bleed from the hands,
feet, and side without any actual trauma to the body. Sometimes they accompany religious ecstasy. Sometimes these wounds vanish and reappear, sometimes they’re chronic. They’re almost always reported to be painful. There are apparently several historical instances where physicians have indeed gone on record with that as a diagnosis.”
“You’re telling me my daughter– No.”
Faith is not in religious ecstasy, whatever that is. And why would she have crucifixion wounds when she doesn’t know what crucifixion is? I hunch my shoulders. “Those historical instances … were from when?”
“Hundreds of years ago,” Dr. Blumberg admits.
“This is 1999,” I say. “Those things don’t happen anymore. Those phenomena get x-rayed and carbon-tested and scientifically proven to be fakes.” I turn to Ian Fletcher. “Right?”
But for once he doesn’t say a word.
“I want to see her hands,” I announce.
Agreeing, Dr. Blumberg gets to his feet and walks back toward Faith’s hospital room. “Honey,” I say brightly as I follow him through the swinging door, “the doctor wants to examine you.”
“Then can I go home?”
“We’ll see.” I stand at Dr.
Blumberg’s side as he unwinds the thick bandages. They’ve been changed daily, but after Faith’s scene in the ER, medical personnel are very careful to keep her from getting a glimpse of the wounds. Gently tugging at the gauze with tweezers, the doctor switches on a gooseneck lamp beside the bed and maneuvers his body so that Faith’s view will be blocked. He peels back the last of the bandages on Faith’s right hand.
It is just a couple of millimeters wide, the hole, but it is there. The skin surrounding the edges is purple and bruised; there are arrows of dried blood radiating outward.
Faith flexes her fingers and, inside, I can see the flash of a needle-thin bone. Yet the wound does not begin to bleed again.
Dr. Blumberg probes the edges of the wound.
Every now and then Faith winces, and at one point he inadvertently moves out of the way enough to let her get a look at her own hand. She lifts it to her face, peering at the pinhole of light coming through from the other side, while we all hold our breath.
Then she starts to scream.
Dr. Blumberg rings for a nurse, and Ian Fletcher struggles along with my mother to hold Faith down. “Faith,” I soothe. “It’s all right. The doctor’s going to make it all right.”
“Mommy, there’s a rip in my hand!” she shrieks. A nurse comes running into the hospital room with a Styrofoam tray that holds a syringe. Dr. Blumberg firmly grasps Faith’s arm and plunges the needle into her thin biceps. After a moment of fighting, she goes limp.
“I’m sorry about that,” Dr. Blumberg murmurs. “I think we ought to continue to keep her here. My suggestion for treatment is to get a psych consult.”
“You think she’s crazy?” I say, my voice rising hysterically. “You saw her hand.
She’s not making this up.”
“I didn’t say she was crazy. It’s just that the mind is a powerful organ. It can make a person ill just as easily as a virus. And frankly, I don’t know the protocol in this sort of situation. I don’t know if the mind can cause the body to bleed.”
Tears fill my eyes. “She’s seven.
Why would she want to do that?”
I sit down beside Faith on the hospital bed, smoothing her hair while her face relaxes in sleep. Her mouth parts, a bubble rising between her lips. Behind me I hear the doctor speaking softly to my mother. I hear the door open and close twice.
Little girls, they dream of being princesses.
Of owning ponies. Of wearing jewels and ball gowns. Not of bleeding for no reason at all, just to be like Jesus.
Ian Fletcher’s voice falls quietly at my temple. “I interviewed a nun once,” he says. “Seventy-six years old,
a Carmelite. She’d been cloistered since she was eleven. According to the Reverend Mother, Sister Mary Amelia had been blessed with stigmata.” Slowly I turn so that I can look him in the eye.
“Everyone thought it was a miracle. Until I found a sewing hook used for ripping out stitches slipped into the hem of Sister Mary Amelia’s habit. Turned out there was a very fine line between religious ecstasy and religious insanity.”
You think she did this to herself. I don’t have to speak the words; he knows what I am thinking.
“Her hands–the sister’s–looked nothing like Faith’s.”
“What are you saying?”
He shrugs. “That this is different. That’s all.”
All in all, Allen McManus figures it’s a cheap trade. A pepperoni pizza and a six-pack for young Henry, who works part-time in production at the Globe, and in return the kid will get on the computer and hack his way into the privileged information of the White family.
“How come it’s taking so long?” Allen asks,
gingerly moving a piece of sweaty athletic clothing so that he can sit at the edge of the bed in Henry’s room.
“My modem’s only twenty-eight-point-
eight,” Henry says. “Cool your jets.”
But Allen can’t. The more he’s learned, the more he’s felt anxious. Lately Allen has been remembering quotes from Revelation, hideous stories told by Sister Thalomena in fifth grade about sinners who went to hell. It has been years since he personally went to confession or took communion, and religion for Allen will always be scarred by the bestiality of the nuns who taught his parochial-school classes. But Catholicism runs deep, and this girl has made him rethink his choices. What if, all these years, he’s been wrong? How many Hail Marys and Our Fathers comprise a penance for turning one’s back on God?
Suddenly the computer screen begins running with a stream of information. “Credit-card purchases. This is the missus’s card.”
Allen leans forward. Lots of groceries, kids’-clothing stores, a couple of L. L. Bean catalog buys. Nothing dicey. “Jeez, they even paid the bill off every month.”
“She did. Let’s check out her husband.”
Henry’s fingers fly over the keyboard, pulling up a business American Express card.
Slowly, he whistles. “Looks like Mr.
White did a bit of socializing on his business trips. Check this out–Lily’s Palace of Dancing.”
Allen grunts. “So he was screwing around on his wife. Big deal.” Infidelity doesn’t naturally lead to setting up one’s daughter as a fake Messiah. You do something like that to make yourself look better, to draw attention. Or else you’re just plain nuts.
“Hey, bingo!” Henry shouts. “The legal search turned up a name. It’s from the records department of the state of New Hampshire. The courts have to file away all the injunctions and crap–just about anything that’s brought before a judge.
Looks here like Mr. White tried to have the missus locked up. No, correction: Looks like he succeeded.”
“Let me see.” Allen sits down and scrolls through the page. “Holy cow! He had her committed to a mental hospital.” He glances at the original order that landed the woman at Greenhaven, at the repeated hearings Millie Epstein instigated to try to get her daughter released.
Henry lounges on the bed, picking pepperoni out of his teeth. “Lots of fucking crazy people in the world, man.”
But Allen does not hear him. A mental hospital. Now it makes sense.
Seven-year-olds don’t just start talking to God; someone puts them up to it. And someone who’s crossed the edge once, he figures, is more than likely to do it again.
Getting up from the chair, Allen reaches into a paper sack for a Rolling Rock and tosses one to Henry. “Cool,” Henry says. “What are we celebrating?”
Allen smiles slowly. “Atheism.”
Somehow word has gotten through the hospital grapevine about Faith. Nurses come on the pretense of checking Faith, only to wind up sitting by her side and speaking to her and,
in one case, giving Faith a medal of Saint Jude to hold in her mittened hands for a moment.
Faith does not seem to know what to do. When she is awake, she politely answers questions about school and her favorite Disney movies; when she is asleep, these strangers touch her hair and her cheek as if even that small contact will preserve them.
My mother has been in a state all day. “This doesn’t mean anything,” she tells anyone who will listen. “Stigmata, shmigmata. Jews have been waiting fifty-seven hundred years for a Messiah; we’re not going to start believing in Jesus now.” At one point, when Faith is asleep, she pulls me aside. “Doesn’t this bother you? This thing with Faith?”
“Well, of course,” I whisper heatedly.
“You think I want her to go through this?”
“I mean the Catholic thing. Catholic, for God’s sake! All these people parading in and out of here like Faith’s some saint.”
“Bleeding from her hands doesn’t make her Catholic.”
My mother nods emphatically. “I should hope not.”
The one good thing that happens is this: My mother is in the cafeteria, in search of Jell-O for Faith, when Father MacReady walks through the door that afternoon.
“Charlotte,” he says to the nurse who’s brushing Faith’s hair–and pocketing strands when she thinks I’m not looking. “How are you? And the children?”
“We’re fine, Father,” the nurse says. “I guess you’ve heard what’s going on?”
“One of the hospital volunteers works in the church’s business office.” The priest waits until the nurse leaves, then sits down in the chair she’s vacated. “Hi. I’m Father MacReady.”
“Why are you wearing that white thing around your neck?” Faith asks.
“It’s a special shirt that says he works in a church,” I explain.
“I thought he was someone’s father,” Faith says,
her brow wrinkling.
The priest grins. “Actually, that’s the most confusing thing of all.” He gently lifts Faith’s bandaged hand. “I hear you speak to God. I like to do that myself.”
“Did she make your hands hurt, too?”
I stare at Faith. Until now, I had not known that this God of hers had told her what would be happening. I hadn’t thought to ask.
“No, Faith,” the priest answers. “God didn’t make my hands hurt.”
Is that regret I hear in his voice?
At that moment my mother walks in bearing a tray of lemon Jell-O. “No red today,
Faithele, but– Oh.” Her gaze rakes over the priest. “Already it’s starting,” she says sourly.
“You must be Mrs. Epstein,” Father MacReady greets her. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
My mother purses her mouth. “I wish I could say the same.”
“Mother!”
“Well, it’s true. I’m living life one day at a time now, you know, and I’m not going to cozy up to a man who’s trying to convert my granddaughter.”
“Believe me, I have no intention of converting your granddaughter–“
“Of course not! You think it’s half done already, what with the bleeding from the hands. Stigmata,
my Aunt Fanny!”
I roll my eyes and take the priest’s elbow. “Ma, maybe you could watch Faith and help her with the Jell-O.”
“Good,” my mother announces. “In the meantime,
you get rid of him.”
As soon as Father MacReady and I are in the hallway, I apologize. “I’m so sorry.
My mother isn’t exactly taking this well.”
“And you?”
“I’m still getting used to the idea of Faith talking to God. Taking it a step further–
well, I can’t even get my head around that.”
Father MacReady smiles. “Stigmata–if that’s what they are–are a gift.”
“Some gift. To leave you in constant pain, and make you a freak show.” There is a reason, I know, that the word “stigmata” is rooted in “stigma.”
“Millions of people would say your daughter is blessed.”
“She doesn’t believe she’s blessed.”
To my embarrassment, my voice wavers. “Do you know she put on dark gloves when it first happened? She was too ashamed to show me that she was bleeding.”
Father MacReady seems interested by this. “From what little I know of stigmatics, they don’t show their wounds to the world. They hide them.”
After a moment of silence, I stop walking.
We have wandered to the end of the pediatric ward, to the infant nursery where I stood with Ian Fletcher. “I have a confession to make.”
“I seem to bring that out in people.”
“I sneaked into confession once.”
“A confession about confession?” Father MacReady laughs.
“I was only ten. I wanted to see what it was like. But I thought some buzzer would go off, you know,
some sensor to show I wasn’t Catholic.”
“Nah, the Protestants are the ones with the fancy technology.” Leaning against the wall, he grins. “Actually, I’ve always admired the Jews for their lack of confession. You can pass that along to your mother, as a matter of fact.”
“I just might.”
“See, a Catholic sinner confesses, says a few prayers, and gets the shame wiped away.
It seems to me Jews carry guilt like camels, forever. Which do you think is the more effective deterrent?” Sobering, Father MacReady turns. “I don’t know if God is speaking to Faith, Mrs. White. I’d like to believe it, though. I don’t care what other clergymen say; I’ve never believed that spirit comes from religion. It comes from deep inside each of us; it draws people to us. And your daughter has a lot of it.
“Okay, so it’s not Judgment Day. There’s no Lake of Fire yawning in front of the green at the town hall. No Book of Life with a list of names in it. So she’s a Jewish child with wounds that might be stigmata; so she happens to see a female God. I have to tell you that,
although my superiors would probably disagree, I don’t find it all that shocking. Maybe this is God’s idea of a winning ticket–a way to get many different personalities to worship Him at once. To worship Him at all.”
“But she never agreed to it,” I say. “She’s not anybody’s savior, or anybody’s martyour. She’s just a scared little girl.”
Father MacReady stares at me for a long moment. “She’s also God’s child, Mariah.”
I cross my arms to hide the trembling. “You know, that’s where you’re wrong.”
Father MacReady locks the door that leads from the rectory to his private quarters. He walks slowly into the kitchen, sitting down at the scarred table and watching the sun play through the dust motes on a thin spotlighted ray. On second thought, he stands up and gets a bottle of Sam Adams out of the refrigerator. He’s not one to overdrink, but he feels that his dinnertime beer might be better served right now, in the middle of the afternoon.
The hell of it is that Father MacReady really,
truly likes Mariah White.
But he also really, truly loves his church.
“I’m not doing this to them,” he murmurs to himself. “I’m doing it for everyone else.” Then he finishes the entire beer.
In the decades he has been a priest,
he’s counseled on visions twice. The first time was in Vietnam, a soldier who said that the Virgin Mary had come to him in the jungle. The second time was much more disturbing–a sixteen-year-old inner-city girl who claimed that the Holy Ghost had impregnated her. That time Father MacReady had called in the authorities,
who all waited with bated breath until the girl delivered a perfectly ordinary baby with a DNA match to the recently hired choir director.
He’s never run across stigmata.
With a sigh he removes a battered book from a shelf beneath the telephone and looks up the number of the Chancery in Manchester.
From The Boston Globe, October 17, 1999 Mother of Visionary “Mentally Unbalanced”
New Canaan, NH–IF you see it, they will come.
Or so might be the slogan of the seven-year-old New Canaan girl who is allegedly envisioning God. The pious and the curious have flocked to the small New Hampshire town for a glimpse of the child who can work miracles.
But the basis for such heavenly sightings might be far more earthbound than these onlookers might imagine. Sources have revealed that the mother of the girl was hospitalized for mental illness several years ago. A psychiatrist formerly employed by the private psychiatric institution Greenhaven, who wishes to remain unnamed,
confirmed that Mariah White was a patient at the Burlington, Vermont, facility for four months during 1991. When asked the nature of her illness, the psychiatrist declined to comment.
According to Dr. Josiah Hebert, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Harvard University, some of the most common adult psychotic delusions involve religion. “If Ms. White’s illness involved hallucinations about God, it does not necessarily follow that her daughter would experience the same sorts of things,” Hebert said. “However, in the normal parent-child relationship, parental approval is key, and the behaviors that bring it about are infinitely varied. What we have may not be a case about a visionary, but about a little girl desperately trying to gain her mother’s attention.”
When asked about the alleged miracles effected by the girl, Dr. Hebert was dismissive, calling such phenomena beyond the range of both logic and science.
As for the hoopla surrounding the girl’s visions,
Hebert urges caution. “I don’t think you can seriously credit the claims of a child without examining the formative influences on that child. Which in this case may be more abnormal than paranormal.”
When I least expect it, Rabbi Daniel Solomon sneaks through my defenses.
We have only recently arrived home, Dr.
Blumberg’s having discharged Faith that afternoon.
I’ve just finished tucking Faith into bed and washing up the dishes from dinner when there is a knock at the front door. I am so astonished by the fact that Rabbi Solomon has managed to slip past everyone outside that I step back to let him in before I realize what I’m doing.
He is wild-eyed and disheveled, his long ponytail straggling and his dashiki twisted around his waist. He nervously fingers a string of amber beads at his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I realize this must be a bad time–“
“No, no,” I murmur, gesturing to his clothes. “It’s the least I can do for someone who manages to run the gauntlet.”
He looks at his muddy shirt and jeans as if surprised to find them in this condition. “They don’t call us the Chosen People for nothing,” he quips, and glances up the stairs.
Immediately my face tightens. “She’s asleep.”
“Actually, I came here to see you. Do you get The Boston Globe?”
“The newspaper?” I ask stupidly. I wonder if he’s had the nerve to speak on record about Faith. Almost angrily I grab the copy that he’s holding out to me. There on page four is a headline staring me in the face: MOTHER OF VISIONARY “MENTALLY UNBALANCED”
The thing about having something hidden in your past is that you spend every minute of the future building a wall that makes the monster harder to see. You convince yourself that the wall is sturdy and thick, and one day, when you wake up and the horrible thing does not immediately jump into your mind, you give yourself the freedom to pretend that it is well and truly gone. Which only makes it that much more painful when something like this happens, and you learn that the concrete wall is really as transparent as glass, and twice as fragile.
I sink onto the stairs. “Why did you bring this to me?”
“I knew eventually you’d see it. At the time, I thought bringing it here in person would be a mitzvah. I figured it was easier to get bad news from a friend.”
A friend? “I was hospitalized,” I hear myself admit. “My husband had me committed after I tried to kill myself. But I wasn’t psychotic like this … Hebert idiot says. And I never had hallucinations about God. I certainly didn’t pass them along to Faith.”
“I never thought you did, Mrs. White.”
“What makes you so sure?” I ask,
bitter.
Rabbi Solomon shrugs. “There’s a theory that there are thirty-six people in every generation who are truly righteous people. They’re called the lamed vavniks–lamed for “thirty,” and vav for “six.” Usually they’re quiet people, gentle,
sometimes even unlearned–not unlike your little girl. They don’t push forward. Most people don’t know about them. But they exist, Mrs.
White. They keep the world going.”
“You know this for a fact. And you know that Faith is one.”
“I know that the world’s been around for a very long time.
And yes, I’d like to believe that Faith is one.”
Above us, the hall clock chimes. “Wouldn’t you?”
Monsignor Theodore O’Shaughnessy does not get a chance to return Father MacReady’s phone call until the following night. He’s been busy untangling the administrative nightmares in his little diocese–overseeing the fiscal woes of parochial schools and Catholic hospitals, researching competitive insurance premiums, and, in one particularly overwhelming chunk of time, dealing with a nasty trial involving a Manchester priest and a group of preteen boys at a retreat in the summer of 1987. He sits down in his favorite brown cracked-leather wing chair, picks up the piece of paper with Father MacReady’s message, and dials the phone.
“Joseph!” he says jovially when the priest answers on the other end of the line. “It’s Monsignor O’Shaughnessy. Been a while,
hasn’t it?” In fact, it has been a very long while. The monsignor can conjure a face in his mind, but he’s not sure if it belongs to Father MacReady of New Canaan or Father MacDougal of New London. “You wanted to speak about a youth mission?”
“No,” Father MacReady says. “A youth’s vision.”
“Ah. I’m afraid that Betty’s a bit old for the secretarial job. She’s lost most of her hearing, matter of fact, but I can’t bear to let her go. So–it’s a vision? As in apparition?” A youth mission–say, building houses for Habitat for Humanity–is one thing.
It might even defray some of the bad press the diocese is getting through the sexual-abuse trial. This … well, this is only going to make them look even worse. “What kind of vision?”
“There’s a local child here, a seven-year-old girl, who is apparently seeing God.”
MacReady hesitates and then adds,
“Technically, she’s of the Jewish faith.”
“Then it’s not our problem,” the monsignor says, greatly relieved.
“She may also have stigmata.”
Monsignor O’Shaughnessy thinks that, all in all, this has been a very tough week. “You know what I’m going to do for you? I’m going to call Bishop Andrews. This is really out of my range of expertise.”
“But–“
“No buts,” the monsignor says magnanimously. “My pleasure.”
He hangs up before Father MacReady can tell him that God, to Faith White, is female.
Exhaling heavily, Joseph sets the phone back in its cradle and thinks that maybe this omission is not such a bad thing at all.
October 17, 1999 The thing Colin White likes about Las Vegas is this: It never shuts down. As a sales rep, he’s spent time in Washington,
Seattle, St. Paul, San Diego–all of those cities roll up their sidewalks by midnight. Las Vegas throbs like an artery,
sucks you in, seduces.
The thing Colin White does not like about Las Vegas is this: He can’t get a good night’s sleep. He doesn’t know if it is because the city burns just outside the hotel window, neon casino signs bright enough to create an artificial day. Or because he cannot get used to his new wife’s shifting in his bed all night long. Or maybe he is thinking of Faith, of how he’s left her hanging, of what sort of father that makes him.
He leaves Jessica buried in the spiral curl of sleep and walks into the adjoining living-room of the suite, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. There is a half-eaten apple from the complimentary fruit basket balanced on the arm of the couch. With a sigh Colin sinks onto the cushions and picks up the core, gnawing as he points the remote control at the television set.
There is a commercial promoting vacations in New Hampshire. Colin stares at the wash of fall colors and the profile of the Man in the Mountain, the steep ski runs. With a pang of homesickness he sets down the apple and leans forward, elbows balanced on his knees.
If it were not certain to upset Jessica, he would cut the honeymoon short.
There is so much he needs to do to settle his previous life before forging ahead with this new one.
He would like to apologize to Mariah for the simple fact that they were not meant to live together. He would like to feel the weight of Faith settled in his arms,
the sweet scent of her hair when he leans close to pull up the covers as he puts her to sleep. He would like to be able to say the word “family” without his gut twisting like a sailor’s knot.
On television there’s an aerial view of the Mount Washington Hotel.
Snatching the telephone from its receiver, Colin pushes in nearly all the digits of his former number before realizing that in New Hampshire it is four-thirty in the morning. He sets the phone down. Surely Faith is asleep right now.
The familiar theme music of Hollywood Tonight! fills the small room. Figures they’d air that crap in the middle of the night. He stretches out on the couch and closes his eyes,
opening them just a slit when he hears the voice of Petra Saganoff. He might be tired, but he isn’t dead.
Her smoky voice rolls over him like a blanket, as a bright-blue banner fills the screen: THE LITTLEST SAINT? “As you can see,”
Saganoff says, “we’re on location, following a story that began last week with Rafael Civernos, the pediatric-Aids baby who was miraculously cured after playing with a little girl in the yard right behind me.” Squinting, Colin tries to figure out what’s so familiar about Petra Saganoff–something he can’t quite put his finger on.
“Hollywood Tonight! has now discovered that the seven-year-old miracle worker has been hospitalized herself, for a mysterious, inexplicable ailment.” The footage changes to stock photos of stained-glass windows. “For centuries,
Christian saints have manifested religious ecstasy by receiving stigmata–medically impossible wounds on the hands, side, and feet that mirror those of Jesus on the cross.” Saganoff’s voice-over begins to lull Colin to sleep. “For one New Hampshire child, this is only the latest in a growing list of proof that God has somehow touched her.”
Petra Saganoff is back again,
standing in front of a stone wall that is lined with people in blankets and sleeping bags, carrying flowers and rosaries and cameras. “As you can see, Jim, the public acceptance of the girl’s claims is growing by the hour. By now there are over two hundred people here who’ve heard about the visions and miracles of this little girl and want, somehow, to come in contact with her.”
The screen pulls back to reveal the Hollywood Tonight! anchor. “Any word on the girl’s medical condition to date?”
“We know she came home from the hospital,
Jim. It remains to be seen if this pint-sized healer will now be able to heal herself. This is Petra Saganoff, on location for Hollywood Tonight!”
Colin sits up, suddenly realizing why this all looks so familiar: Petra Saganoff is standing on the eastern edge of his own driveway.
October 18, 1999 “You know what?” Ian interrupts, leaving David with his mouth gaping. “I don’t give a flying fuck. All I know is that it’s your job to tell me what’s going on between the pages of The Boston Globe, and this one crucial tidbit was something you managed to overlook.” His voice has risen with each word, to the point where he’s backed young David to the narrow door of the Winnebago. Grabbing yesterday’s paper from the media assistant’s shaking hand, he barely has to scowl in the boy’s direction before David flees from the RV.
Ian sinks onto the uncomfortable couch and scans the small piece again, searching for something he’s missed. It is an article that should be sending him over the moon with joy–an indirect dig at Faith’s credibility that doesn’t put Ian himself in the position of muckraker. Allen McManus did a better job than he’d anticipated, not only accessing the records of the court injunction that locked Mariah away but also getting confirmation from a psychiatrist that she was indeed a patient. If this were any other case,
Ian would be on his cell phone inviting McManus to come speak at an impromptu press conference. He would be subtly suggesting other routes the reporter might use to slander the White family in general.
Instead all Ian can do is wonder why the hell he ever anonymously phoned McManus’s office in the first place.
Ian closes his eyes and knocks his head against the wall of the Winnebago, trying to remember when he’d set that particular ball rolling. Ah,
that’s right–Millie Epstein’s return from the dead. Well, Ian almost excuses himself for that;
it’s hard to beat. And if he’s going to be honest,
he’s done this sort of thing a hundred times before.
In his mind, the more doubts you sow, the more followers you reap. The problem here isn’t that he set the reporter on the trail, it’s that he set him on the trail of Mariah White.
The hell of it is, he likes her. He knows he shouldn’t; he knows that it interferes with his judgment–but there it is, all the same. A physical attraction he could dismiss, but it goes beyond that. There are times he’s found himself wishing she weren’t involved in this case, so that in the end she would not be the one hurt. And that foreign feeling scares him to death.
A knock at the door interrupts his thoughts.
Ian yanks it open, expecting to find a penitent David begging for his job, but instead there’s someone he’s never in his life seen before. The man is middle-aged, with a slight belly and thinning blond hair. He wears a baseball jacket with stains near the line of the zipper.
“Hey! I see you’re already a fan of mine,”
says the stranger.
Ian glances at his fist, still clutching the Globe article.
“Allen McManus,” the man says, holding out his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you. I came here to continue the series, and saw the Winnebago, and … what can I say? I guess we’re all after the same story. Great minds think alike.”
Ian ignores the man’s hand. “And you’re not one of them.”
“But you–“
He grasps McManus’s fingers tightly in what would look like a handshake to a passerby,
while actually causing great pain. “I work alone,” Ian says through his teeth. “And if you ever suggest that I’m in any way affiliated with the bullshit you’re printing, I will find so many skeletons in your closet that your boss won’t let you write the alphabet, much less the obits.” Then, with great satisfaction,
he slams the door in the reporter’s face.
At age seven Constantine Christopher Andrews sewed bits of barbed wire into the linings of his clothes, figuring that the only way out of the neighborhood he’d been born in and would probably die in was to do enough penance for God to notice him. His mother, who never bothered to learn English after coming over on the boat from Sicily,
always assumed he’d become a priest–the premonition having something to do with a strawberry birthmark in the shape of the cross that clearly marked his belly upon birth. Constantine grew up hearing of his imminent ordination so often that he,
too, grew to accept it as fact.
He loved Catholicism. It was a weekly dose of color and gilt and grandeur in a piss-poor immigrant ghetto. His dedication was duly rewarded, and he moved up the ranks of the Catholic hierarchy to the point where, for the past fifteen years, he’s served as a bishop. He wanted to retire five years ago, but the Pope wouldn’t let him. It’s been so long since he’s mingled with grassroots Catholics–so long, in fact, since his religion has meant anything more than oiling the wheels in major fund-raising campaigns–that when Monsignor O’Shaughnessy calls with the story of an alleged stigmatic, he is momentarily thrown for a loop.
“What are we talking here?” he asks,
exasperated because taking this call means he’s going to be late to the Heritage Breakfast at the Italian Center, with some of the richest Catholic businessmen in Manchester. “Hands, feet,
sides?”
“As far as I know,” the monsignor says,
“hands only. Apparently the child is Jewish.”
“Well, that’s that. Let the rabbis take care of her.”
“They could. Except there’s already been press attention. According to Father MacReady, about three hundred practicing Catholics have visited the site.” He clears his throat. “There’s also the small matter of an alleged resurrection.”
“Press attention, you say?” Bishop Andrews considers. One of the phenomena he’s noticed as a member of the Catholic hierarchy is that donations to the Church get more frequent when the faith is promoted as a result of good PR.
If he reaches his fund-raising goal by December, perhaps he’ll be able to take a little time golfing in Scottsdale.
He wishes, not for the first time, that he were the bishop of a big city like Boston, rather than a small, poor diocese in southern New Hampshire. “I sent three candidates down to St. John’s this year. They ought to be able to spare us a seminary priest to look into the matter.”
“Very good, Your Excellency. I’ll let Father MacReady know.”
The bishop hangs up the phone and then places a call to the Rector of St. John’s Seminary in Boston, talking about the Celtics game for a minute before getting down to business with the same calculated charm he usually saves for glad-handing. It takes less than ten minutes for the rector to cough up a name, which Andrews writes on a slip of paper and routes to his assistant. By the time he leaves his office,
he’s thinking about whether he’ll have the waffles or the French toast, having completely erased the young girl with stigmata from his mind.
The way Faith knows it is not going to be a very good day is that her mother has made banana pancakes for breakfast. She likes pancakes, on the whole, but when the bananas hit the griddle they smell like feet, and the whole time she’s trying to swallow, she finds herself thinking of sweaty socks instead, which at breakfast is enough to make you throw up. She must have told her mother a gazillion times that she doesn’t like banana pancakes, but, like most things she says, it doesn’t stick, causing Faith to wonder if she’s really making noise when she speaks or if the volume is turned up only inside her head.
“Ma,” she says, sliding into place at the table, “I want something else.”
Without speaking, her mother sidles over and removes the banana pancakes. Faith’s jaw drops. Whenever her mother goes to the trouble of whipping out more than a cereal box for breakfast, it means that she’s put enough time and effort into the meal for Faith to eat whatever is on her plate, thank you very much. Faith watches her mother dump the pancakes into the garbage disposal and absentmindedly flip the switch.
“What am I supposed to eat?”
Her mother blinks at her. “Oh,” she says,
coming back to earth. “I don’t know. Oatmeal?”
Without waiting for Faith’s approval, she rips open a packet and dumps it into a bowl, then adds water from the Insta-Hot tap. Faith hears the bowl ring as her mother sets it down, and she sniffs.
Banana.
“I bet Daddy wouldn’t make me eat stuff that’s totally gross like this,” she mutters.
Her mother whips around. “What did you say?”
Faith lifts her chin. “I bet if I lived with Daddy, he wouldn’t make me eat this.”
Her mother’s eyes are droopy and red, and her voice is so soft that it hurts Faith just to listen to it. Immediately she feels as if she’s been kicked in the stomach. She watches her mother swallow hard, as though the banana oatmeal were stuck in her throat. “Do you want to live with Daddy?”
Faith bites her lip. She loves her father,
that much is true, but there is something different about her mother–something easier and more involved–and after all these years of living on the fringe of her mother’s life, Faith is not willing to give up a precious second.
“What I want,” Faith says carefully,
“is to stay here.”
It is worth it, the way her mother rushes the space between them to gather Faith in her arms. What is even better is that her mother sticks her elbow in the banana oatmeal. “Damn,” she says, and then blushes. “I guess I’d better get you something else.”
“I guess.”
She watches her mother rinse out her sleeve and wet a sponge. “I’m not very good at this,” she says as she begins to wipe down the table.
Globs of oatmeal spill over the edge, landing on Faith’s lap and the floor. She looks up at the way her mother’s hair curtains half of her face, at the little dimple in her cheek. As a toddler, Faith would touch that spot on her mother’s cheek and then wait for it to cave in when she grinned. She loved that, the way she could fall right into her mother’s smile.
“You’re doing great,” Faith says, and shyly rises off her seat to kiss the bow of her mother’s neck.
Father MacReady sneaks a glance at the priest in the passenger seat of his old Chevy and thinks that having a graduate degree in pastoral psychology isn’t what makes you an expert. Father Rourke, fresh from St. John’s Seminary, is still wet behind the ears. He’s so young that he probably wasn’t even born when Father MacReady was overseas in ‘nam. And being stuck in Boston, in seminary, only makes him an ivy-tower type. He wouldn’t know how to counsel a parishioner if one fell into his lap.
But of course Father MacReady doesn’t say anything of the sort. “Pastoral psychology,”
he says amiably, turning onto Mariah White’s road. “What made you get into that?”
Father Rourke crosses his leg, a Polarfleece sock and Birkenstock sandal peeking out from beneath his black trousers. “Oh, a gift for people, I guess. I would have been a psychiatrist, I suppose, if I hadn’t felt another calling.”
And the profound need to tell everyone about it.
“Well, I don’t know how much the rector told you about Faith White.”
“Not a lot,” Rourke says. “Just that I’m here to check out her mental state.”
“For the record, that’s been done. By lay psychiatrists.”
Rourke turns in his seat. “You do realize that the chance of this child’s being a true visionary is basically nonexistent?”
Father MacReady smiles. “Don’t you ever see a glass as half full?”
“If it’s a mind we’re talking about, half isn’t nearly as good as whole.”
Father MacReady parks in the field across from the Whites’ driveway, in between a camper and a group of elderly women on folding stadium chairs.
The seminary priest glances around, his jaw dropping. “Wow! She’s already got quite a following.”
They chat for a while with the policeman at the end of the driveway, another parishioner, thank the Lord, who easily lets Father MacReady pass when he says they’ve made an appointment to see Mrs. White.
“Have we?” Rourke asks as they walk up the driveway. “Made an appointment?”
“Not exactly.” Father MacReady approaches the front door and knocks, to find a small, elfin face peeking out at them from the sidelight. There is the sound of tumblers falling as a key is turned in a lock, and then the door swings open. “They’re better,” Faith says, holding up her hands for the priests’
perusal. “Look, I only need Band-Aids.”
Father MacReady whistles. “And they’re Flintstone Band-Aids. Very cool.”
Faith glances at the second priest and shoves her hands behind her back. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.” She suddenly remembers.
“Maybe we could talk to your mother, then.”
“She’s upstairs taking a shower.”
Rourke steps forward. “Father MacReady here was telling me how much he liked talking to you when you were in the hospital, and I was really looking forward to doing that, too.”
Father MacReady realizes Faith is wavering. Maybe there’s something to pastoral psychology after all. “Faith, your mother knows me. Surely she wouldn’t mind.”
“Maybe you’d better wait here till she comes down.”
Rourke turns to Father MacReady. “Well,
I don’t know what I’m going to do now with all those games I brought.”
Faith rubs her sleeve on the doorknob,
bringing it to a high polish. “Games?” she says.
Upstairs, I have just towel-dried my hair when I hear the sound of male voices.
“Faith!” I dress quickly, my stomach knotting as I race downstairs.
I find her sitting on the floor with Father MacReady and another unfamiliar priest, using a green crayon to circle answers on what is clearly a psychological-assessment test.
Gritting my teeth, I make a mental note to call the chief of police and have him send out a Protestant patrolman. “Faith, you weren’t supposed to answer the door.”
“It’s my fault,” Father MacReady smoothly answers. “I told her you wouldn’t mind.” He hesitates, then nods in the direction of the second priest. “This is Father Rourke, from St. John’s Seminary in Boston. He came all the way up here to meet Faith.”
My cheeks burn with disappointment. “How could you! You were supposed to be on our side.” Father MacReady opens his mouth to apologize, but I won’t let him. “No. Don’t think you can say something that makes this all right, because you can’t.”
“Mariah, I didn’t have a choice. There’s a certain procedure we follow in the Catholic Church, and–“
“We’re not Catholic!”
Father Rourke gets to his feet quietly.
“No, you’re not. But your daughter has attracted the attention of a number of Catholic people. And the Church wants to make sure that they’re not being led astray.”
I have visions of crucifixions, of martyrs being burned at the stake. “Mariah, we’re not taking pictures,” says Father MacReady.
“We’re not going to broadcast the brand of Faith’s breakfast cereal on the evening news.
We just want to speak to her for a little while.”
Faith stands up and slips her hand into mine.
“It’s okay, Mom. Really.”
I look from my daughter’s face to the priests’. “Thirty minutes,” I say firmly. Then I fold my arms over my chest,
sit beside her, and prepare to bear witness.
Father Rourke might just as well pick up his diagnostic tests and his inkblots and head back home on the next Amtrak. He does not need the computer analysis to tell him that Faith White is not a child who has lost touch with reality,
that hers is not the behavior of a psychotic.
He glances at Father MacReady, picking through a decorative bowl of MandMore’s on the coffee table and extracting the yellow ones to pop into his mouth. The mother’s barely moved a muscle in over twenty minutes. Rourke is at a loss. The girl is not mentally ill, but she doesn’t seem to be particularly problematic from a religious standpoint either. It’s not as if she yaps about what God’s told her, like the woman he was sent to Plymouth to examine. In fact, mostly Faith White doesn’t say anything at all.
Trying to figure out his next course of action,
he pulls his rosary from his pocket and absentmindedly fingers it. “Oh,” Faith breathes. “That’s pretty.”
He stares at the polished beads. “Would you like to see it?”
Faith nods, slipping the rosary over her head like a necklace. “Is this how it goes?”
“No. It’s for praying to God.” At Faith’s blank look, Rourke adds, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name.
…” He is interrupted by Faith’s laugh.
“You’ve got that wrong.”
“Got what wrong?”
Faith rolls her eyes. “God’s a mother.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A lady. God’s a lady.”
Rourke’s face reddens. A female God?
Absolutely not. His head swings toward Mrs.
White, who raises her eyebrows and shrugs.
Father MacReady, on the other hand, is the very picture of innocence. “Oh,” MacReady says. “Did I forget to mention that?”
Just after 10:00 P.m., the doorbell rings.
Hoping not to wake Faith, I scramble down the stairs and yank open the door to find myself staring at Colin.
He looks terrible. His hair is flattened on one side, as if he’s been asleep on it;
his raincoat is wrinkled; his eyes are bloodshot with lack of sleep. His mouth is a thin slash, pinched tight with disapproval.
He glances over his shoulder at the vans and cars parked in the cornfield across the road,
illuminated by a full moon. Faith stumbles sleepily down the stairs and skids to a stop beside me, her arms wrapped around my waist.
When Colin sees her, he crouches and reaches out a hand. Faith hesitates, then dashes behind me. “What in the name of God,” he says tightly, “have you done to my daughter?”
“Actually,” Mariah answers, “it’s funny you should put it that way.”
Colin uses every bit of his self-control to keep from pushing her aside so that he can get his hands on his daughter. Until he got here, he did not really know what he would find. Certainly those trashy telemagazines bent the truth, in the same way the National Enquirer supposedly stuck Elizabeth Taylor’s head on Heather Locklear’s body. Colin thought maybe he’d find that Faith had burned her palm on the stove. Maybe she’d fallen off her bike and needed stitches. There were a multitude of ways to explain a bad camera shot of a little girl’s bleeding hands.
But Colin had reserved a coach ticket on the first flight out of Las Vegas, fought with Jessica over coming, traveled all day by plane and rental car, only to arrive at the driveway of his former home and find it blockaded by the police, lined with shrines and tents and hordes of curious people.
“I’m coming in,” he says tightly, and Faith lets go of her mother and skitters upstairs.
“I don’t think so. This is my house, now.”
Colin needs a minute to pull himself together.
Mariah, telling him no? He shoves forward,
only to have her stop him with a bracing hand.
“I mean it, Colin. I’ll call the police if I have to.”
“Go ahead!” he yells with frustration.
“They’re just at the goddamned end of the goddamned driveway!”
He is tired, crabby, and overwhelmed. When he set their divorce in motion, he had not thought twice about giving custody of Faith to Mariah.
He’d never assumed that she would balk when he was ready to introduce Faith to the new mix of his life. She was fair, and when she wasn’t, she was a pushover.
Was. “Look,” he says calmly. “Can you just tell me what this is about Faith’s hands?”
Mariah looks down at her bare feet.
“It’s not that easy.”
“Make it easy.”
She hesitates, then pushes the door wider so that he can walk inside.
After tucking Faith in again, I explain it all to Colin–the imaginary friend, the medicines for psychosis, the steady parade of priests and rabbis, the resurrection of my mother. For a moment he just stares at me; then he begins to laugh. “You had me going there for a while.”
“I’m not kidding, Colin.”
“Right. You really think that Faith has some hotline to God.” He laughs again. “She’s always had a hell of an imagination, Rye, you know that. Remember the time she got the whole nursery-school class to believe that when they went outside for recess, they’d be in Disney World?”
I’m having trouble concentrating.
There’s an anger brewing just below the surface in me, resentment that Colin feels he can walk back in here and issue commands, when he clearly relinquished that right months ago. But there are other emotions, too. Just being in the same room with Colin still feels like a homecoming, as if my body knows the right of it and is reaching for him before I can convince my mind to do the same. A tornado starts in the pit of my belly–one that whirls with the assumption that he’s come back for good and sucks my good sense right down through its center.
I watch the play of Colin’s mouth, listen to him call me by my nickname, and wonder if I am going to live through being this close to him knowing that he no longer wants me.
“Whatever happened, it’s out of control. Do you think it’s normal that she can’t go to school? That there are a bunch of people sleeping under the rhododendrons who think our daughter–” He snaps his fingers beneath my nose. “Hey … are you even listening to me?”
I stare at his long fingers. In spite of the fact that there was a divorce decree, Colin is still wearing a wedding band.
Then I realize it isn’t the one I gave him.
“Oh,” Colin says, coloring. “T.” He covers the ring with the palm of his other hand. “I,
um, got married. To Jessica.”
When I shake my head, my vision of Colin reconfigures. He is no god, no tender memory, but simply someone I will never understand.
“You married Jessica,” I repeat slowly.
“Yes.”
“You married Jessica.”
“Rye, we never would have made it work. I am sorry truly, truly sorry for that.”
My anger returns full force. “We never could have made it work? How could you know that, Colin,
when I was the only one willing to try?”
“Yes, you were. But, Rye–I wasn’t.”
He reaches for my hand, but I pull it away and tuck it between my knees. “You were willing to try again, Colin. Just not with me.”
“No, not with you.” He looks away,
embarrassed. “That’s not important right now.”
“It’s not? God, what could be more important?”
“Faith. It’s not about you this time. You always twist it so it’s your problem, your issue.”
“It was about me!” I cry. “How can you say Greenhaven wasn’t about me?”
“Because we’re not talking about Greenhaven!
Jesus Christ, we’re talking about our daughter!” He rakes his hand through his hair.
“It’s been eight years, for God’s sake. I did what I thought I had to do. Aren’t you ever going to forgive me for that?”
“Apparently not,” I whisper.
“I know,” Colin says after a moment. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
He holds out his arms, and I move into them.
With detachment I marvel at how you can know someone’s body so well, even after a separation, like a land you visited as a child and return to years later, with an eye toward the unfamiliar but a feeling of confidence in your footing. “I never meant to hurt you,” he murmurs into my hair.
I plan to say the same to him, but it comes out all wrong. “I never meant to love you.”
Surprised, Colin draws back, a rueful smile on his face. “That’s the hell of it,
huh?” He touches my cheek. “You know I’m right, Rye. Faith doesn’t deserve this.”
It strikes me then why he has come: not to make his peace with me, but to take my daughter away.
Suddenly I remember how, years ago, I would sometimes wake him in the middle of the night and ask him a ridiculous question: “What do you like best about Cracker Jacks–the peanuts or the popcorn?” “If you were going to be a day of the week, which one would it be?” And others, as if I expected to be a contestant on the Newlywed Game. Colin would pull a pillow over his head, ask why I needed to know. I see now that I was storing away the answers, like a squirrel.
To give myself a modicum of credit: I did not know that Colin was sleeping with another woman, but I did know that he likes the yolks broken in his eggs. That the smell of wallpaper paste makes him dizzy. That given the choice to learn a new language, he would choose Japanese.
Now Jessica will learn these things. Jessica will have my husband, my daughter.
Faith didn’t deserve this, Colin had said.
And I think, Neither did I.
The thought makes my heart catch–
what if I couldn’t keep Faith?
Suddenly I feel strong enough to move a mountain. To single-handedly sweep away all the people who have stolen my privacy. To carry Faith to where nobody has the chance to touch her in passing or snag pilled wool from her sweaters or sort through her discarded trash.
I am strong enough to admit that maybe I’m doing all right as a mother, all things considered. And I am certainly strong enough to admit that, for the first time in my life, I wish Colin would just go away.
“You know,” I say, “if Faith told me,
without a doubt, that the sky was orange, I’d entertain the notion. If she says so, there’s a reason for it, and I’m going to listen.”
Colin stills. “You believe she’s talking to God, and raising the dead, and all of this garbage? That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. And neither was I.” I stand up.
“You made a decision to give me custody of Faith. You have a visit coming up at Thanksgiving. But until then I don’t want to hear from you, Colin.”
I walk to the front door and hold it open,
although it takes a moment for Colin to get over the shock of being dismissed. He moves briskly to the door. “You won’t hear from me,” he says softly. “You’ll hear from my lawyer.”
In spite of my newfound bravado, I tremble for hours after Colin leaves. I turn on all the lights downstairs and walk from room to room, trying to find a comfortable place. Finally I sit down at the dining-room table, gingerly playing with the shutters on the model farmhouse I made years ago. It isn’t accurate now. The wallpaper in the master bath has changed, and Faith has a bed instead of a crib, and–of course–it is now a residence for two instead of three.
I’m furious at Colin for what he’s done,
what he’s threatened. My rage propels me up the stairs, down the hall, to the doorway of Faith’s room, where I hover like a ghost. Did he mean it? Would he fight to have Faith taken away?
He would win; this I know. I don’t stand a chance. And if it is not Colin who comes for Faith, it will be someone else: another official from the Catholic Church … the tabloid-Tv reporter whose national coverage brought Colin running … or the thousands of others who also saw the broadcast and want a piece of her.
I tiptoe into the room and stretch out beside Faith on the narrow bed, staring down at the slope of her cheek and the spiral of her ear. How is it that you never realize how precious something is until you are about to lose it?
Faith shifts, turns, and blinks at me.
“I smell oranges,” she says sleepily.
“It’s my shampoo.” I smooth the covers over her. “Go back to sleep.”
“Is Daddy still here?”
“No.”
“Is he coming back tomorrow?”
I stare at Faith and make up my mind. It is not what I want to do, but I don’t really have a choice. “He can’t,” I say. “Because you and I are going away.”
