Keeping Faith Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Me, too,” Herb says.

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

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

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

  nothing at all.

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

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

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

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

  she whimpers, and lifts them for inspection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  dressed to blend in.

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

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

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

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

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

  My apologies.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  IAN FLETCHER, he reads. THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.

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

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

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

  Still, he knows what Fletcher does for a living,

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

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


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

  then walks into the office.

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

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

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

  Crazy. Filled with a righteous fury,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t know,” Mariah says tightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t have any.”

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

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

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

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

  Ian Fletcher is very good at doing his job.

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

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

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

  An angel? The very thought is traitorous,

  ludicrous. It’s the goddamned Winnebago,

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

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

  Let the battle begin, Ian thinks,

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

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

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

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

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

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

  No.”

  He watches people from the corner of his eye,

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

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

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

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

  At the profound silence, Ian grins.

  “Well, let me help you out. The last thing you believed in with absolute, unshakable conviction was … Santa Claus.” He raises his brows.

  “No matter how impossible it seemed, no matter how much evidence to the contrary, when you were a child you wanted to believe, and so you did. And as rude as the comparison sounds, it’s not all that different from believing in the existence of God. They both grant a boon based on whether you’ve been naughty or nice. They both go about their work without being seen. They rely heavily on the assistance of mythical creatures–elves in one case,

  angels in the other.”

  Ian lets his eyes touch on one of the cult members, one local reporter, one mother clutching an infant. “So how come y’all don’t believe in Santa nowadays? Well, because you grew up,

  and you realized how impossible the whole thing was.

  Sant
a Claus went from being a fact to being a real good story, one to pass on to your children. The same way your parents told you about God when you were a kid.” He hesitates for a moment, letting the silence thicken. “Can’t you see that God’s a myth, too?”

  Millie Epstein slams her car door violently. Mariah’s beautiful old farmhouse is flocked by lunatics, from what she can see.

  At least twenty people are milling around on the long driveway, some even bold enough to trample the grass edging the front porch. These include a handful wearing bizarre red nightgowns, a few curious locals, and two vans with television call letters spangled across their sides, complete with reporters. Millie shoves them all out of her way until she reaches the porch, where she finds the chief of police. “Thomas,” she says. “What kind of circus is this?”

  The police chief shrugs. “Just got here myself, Mrs. Epstein. From what I can tell,

  based on the reporters over there, there’s one group saying that your granddaughter is Jesus or something. Then there’s another guy who’s saying that not only is Faith not Jesus, but that Jesus doesn’t exist.”

  “Can’t we get them off Mariah’s lawn?”

  “I was just about to do that myself,” he admits.

  “Course, I can only keep ‘em as far back as the road. It’s a public venue.”

  Millie surveys the group. “Can we talk to Faith?” a reporter shouts. “Bring her out!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Bring out the mother, too!”

  The voices crescendo, and, horrified, all Millie can do is listen. Then she crosses her arms over her chest and stares out at the crowd. “This is private property; you don’t belong here.

  And you’re talking about a child. A child. Would you really take the word of a seven-year-old?”

  From the front of the crowd comes the sound of someone clapping, slowly, deliberately. “My congratulations, ma’am,” Ian Fletcher drawls. “A rational statement, right in the middle of a maelstrom. Imagine that.”

  He comes into Millie’s line of vision,

  continuing to walk forward until she can see that it is Ian Fletcher, the one from the TV show, and that as handsome as he is and as mellifluous his voice,