Keeping Faith

by Jodi Picoult

  "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 M&M'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 med
icines 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. "That." 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."

  EIGHT

  Ian Fletcher is a man destined for hell, if ever there was one--unless he manages to prove it doesn't exist before he gets there.

  --Op-ed page,

  The New York Times, August 10, 1999

  October 19, 1999

  For the record," Millie says, "I'm against this."

  "I'm not," Faith announces as Mariah zips her jacket. "I think it's cool to be a spy."

  "You're not a spy. You're a sneak." Mariah pats down the placket of the zipper. "You ready?"

  She knows Faith is; she's b
een ready since 6:00 A.M., when Mariah told her what was going to happen. Of course, she'd couched it in the vocabulary of suspense and adventure, so that Faith would feel more like a young Indiana Jones than a child being taken into hiding. And so far the escapade has lived up to Faith's anticipation--stealing into the car with little more than a knapsack apiece, driving forty-five minutes to the mall, blending into the crowds to lose the two dogged reporters who'd tailed them there. The reporters will no doubt stake out her Honda, waiting for the three of them to appear. But by the time Millie walks to the parking lot to drive the car back home, Mariah and Faith will already have changed clothes and met a taxi at an exit on the far side of the mall, headed toward the airport.

  Now all she has to do is say good-bye.

  Mariah glances at the mirror in the bathroom at Filene's and catches her mother's gaze. Millie walks forward and puts her arm around Mariah's waist. "You don't have to let them chase you away," she says softly.

  "I'm not, Ma." Mariah swallows the lump in her throat. "I'm getting a head start." She cannot stand the thought of leaving her mother behind--not only because of the recent heart trouble, but also for the simple fact that Millie is Mariah's closest friend, as well as her mother. Then again, even Millie would agree--you do what you have to do to keep Faith. With it put that plainly, Mariah cannot let herself be steamrolled--again--by people and circumstances beyond her control.

  She has not told Millie about Colin's custody threat, nor has she mentioned where she plans to go. This way, when the lawyers get in touch with her...or the reporters, or Ian Fletcher--her mother will not be forced to lie. Mariah turns and throws her arms around her mother's neck. "I will call you. When I can, when I know it's all right."

  Faith burrows between them. "Get dressed, Grandma! We're going to miss the taxi."

  Mariah touches Faith's hair. "Honey, Grandma has to stay here."

  "Here?"

  "Well, not here. But at our house, to watch over...things."

  The words do not register. "Grandma has to come with us," Faith insists.

  Mariah has not told Faith this part of the plan, for exactly this reason; it is the one thing that will make her balk. "Faithele," Millie says, crouching down, "there's nothing I'd like more than to go with you in the taxi on your trip. But I can't."