Keeping Faith Page 7

  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.”

&nbs
p; “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.”