Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  “Sweetie,” I said, “there’s a difference between being a vegetarian and what Ada’s talking about—”

  “You know there’s a lot about exposure therapy online,” Ada said. “Have you looked into that at all? Marshall and I were reading about it—”

  “Meghan’s first exposure was plenty enough,” I said firmly. “Thank you, Ada, but we have a good system now and everything is fine.”

  “But, Mom,” Meghan protested, “you’re not even—”

  “Your mom’s right,” Ada quickly interrupted. “Of course. I shouldn’t have even said anything. I’m sorry.”

  Meghan shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “It’s no big deal, Mom,” she muttered.

  The silence was full and seemed somehow specific, weighted, as if it were pushing softly at me. They clearly wanted to be alone. I felt, for the first time with Meghan, that it was time for me to back off; she didn’t need a chaperone.

  “Well. You girls get to know each other and come down when you’re ready for a snack,” I said, and they looked at each other with small, satisfied, and very adult smiles. I heard Meghan’s door close quietly, and I stopped for a moment, listening to the low laughter that filtered out of my daughter’s room.

  Marshall rounded the corner with two suitcases and seemed surprised to see me at the top of the stairs. I motioned for him to come up.

  “Hey, you. Need some help?” I asked, holding my hand out for a suitcase.

  He shook his head. “No, I got it.” He pounded up the stairs, skipping every other step, and covered their length in seconds, landing beside me without even losing a breath. “Ada in with Meghan?” he asked as he passed Meghan’s closed door. I followed him to his room, where he swung his suitcase up on the bed and dropped the other one, Ada’s I presumed, by the door.

  “Yeah, they seem to have hit it off,” I said, now leaning against my son’s doorframe, keeping that Mom distance, feeling more natural about it now that I was with Marshall. “She’s very pretty.”

  He fumbled with the clasp on his suitcase, his face in quarter profile to me, enough to see a smile tease his lips. But he didn’t answer me, just flipped the lid of his suitcase up, allowing it to fall back on the bed with a muffled thump. I moved into the room and sat lightly on the edge of the bed.

  “Your father and I are trusting that there’s not going to be any nighttime activity while you’re here, Marshall.”

  “Mom,” he began to protest.

  “No, just listen to me. I’m allowing Ada to stay with your sister because it seemed to have been worked out beforehand, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. And you’re the one who let them e-mail, so you have only yourself to blame for that. I don’t want to have to talk to Meghan about why Ada slipped out of her room in the middle of the night. Is that clear?”

  Marshall took a deep breath, as though about to explain something obvious to a rather dull child. I called upon my own patience, remembering the times I had thought my own dear parents astonishingly stupid and how they tolerated me with such good humor. But I was mistaken about the object of his forbearance.

  “We don’t—we don’t do that,” he said, nearly strangling on the words. “She’s very committed to her faith, and I support her, I—she makes a lot of sense.”

  “What is her faith, Marshall?”

  “Well, it’s sort of a mixture of fundamental Christianity, evangelical, maybe even a little separatist, but it’s cool. They share everything with the community, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Their guiding principle is really all about hard work, responsibility for each other, and to God. It might seem a bit rigid, but that’s good. Faith requires something of you, right?”

  “She said her mother works in the commissary and her father works in the orchards. Are those church businesses?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s all pretty self-sufficient.” He gave up on unpacking and picked up his suitcase, still splayed open, and dropped it on the floor next to his dresser. He shrugged when he turned back to me. “I’ll just be repacking it next week anyway. I was thinking about taking Ada out fishing tomorrow. Is Dad booked?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure. Ask him at dinner. If she’s a vegetarian, I doubt she wants to fish, Marshall.”

  “We probably won’t fish. I’d just like to take her for a ride, maybe see some dolphins, have some lunch. She’s never been out on the Gulf or in the ’Glades.”

  “What about your father?”

  “What about him?” He leaned against his dresser, sending his necklaces and charms gently swaying and clinking against each other.

  “Are you going to ask him to go along?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. I’ve taken the boat plenty of times by myself.”

  “I know, and don’t think your father won’t remember the last time you did. I’d be prepared for that little conversation again if I were you. I was just thinking you might want to spend some time with him, let him get to know Ada.”

  He smiled a wry, sideways smile, something new, something lopsided and slightly cruel. A man’s smile. And, like a man, or at least like the man his father was, he didn’t answer me. Instead he asked about dinner, and asked about my work, and when I left him, he was knocking on Meghan’s door to reclaim his girlfriend.

  MARSHALL

  It was startling enough having his mother sit on his bed and address sex so directly, but now the very embodiment of it was standing there, in his bedroom, her hip jutting at him like a challenge. Technically, Ada had been in his room before, his dorm room, when his roommate was gone, studying, wherever the hell he went, but this was his bedroom.

  His every boyhood fantasy had played out in this room. He’d splayed more Playmates across that worn blue spread in his mind. More than Playmates. The most bizarre choices had been flung in all manner of disarray across every inch of this room. Classmates, teachers, movie stars, the woman who delivered the mail. Even, occasionally, friend’s mothers.

  Actually, Ira’s mother had appeared frequently. She still did sometimes. He’d never noticed her in more than an Ira’s mother who makes us brownies from scratch after school way, until after Ira died. She’d held him so often after that, rocking with him, whispering in his ear. Taking as much consolation as she gave.

  But he was no longer fourteen, and Ada was nobody’s mother, and she was here, in his room. His skin felt tight, not just the insistent pressure against his zipper, but everywhere. His wrists felt thick, strong, the back of his neck, his calves, the muscles he was rarely conscious of full and ready to move in some new way he had never even considered.

  Ada, still hipshot against the dresser’s top edge, reached out and flicked the row of necklaces with her index finger, sending them tinkling against each other, flashing silver and gold.

  “So what’s all this?” she asked. Her voice was light, but he saw the tension in the set of her jaw, the crease between her eyebrows, the way her eyes roamed over the books on the shelf. He stood and moved in behind her, inhaling the scent of her hair, before he reached past her and stilled the necklaces in his fist. They felt fragile, like childhood, and he picked up the cross, opened the top drawer, and dropped it in with a clatter.

  The necklaces tangled there in the bottom of the drawer, messy, unimportant, and he slid the drawer closed while she kept him at a distance with that hip and a turned head.

  “Nothing,” he murmured.

  She twisted away from him and shut the door, startling him with her assumption of what was allowed and appropriate in his parents’ house, his house. He resisted the urge to open the door again, to call down the stairs that it was all right, they weren’t doing anything.

  “So it’s easy like that?” she asked, leaning her back against the door. “How many of those are there? Did you really believe in all that, all those?”

  “Hey, what did I do? You know, I’ve told you—you know I’ve been searching for the right thing, the right path.”

  She narrowed her eyes at hi
m and it didn’t matter, it did not slant her face toward ugly, no matter the emotion under it. She was simply, differently, perfectly perfect.

  “Yeah. You told me,” she said.

  He moved toward her and she allowed him to come. She uncrossed her arms and let them drop to her sides, placing her palms flat against the door, turning her head so her throat was vulnerable to him. He placed his hands on her hips, pressed her into the door, and leaned down to kiss her neck just above her collarbone. She didn’t move anything but her head, turning it slightly toward him again and then spoke softly, her breath lightly ruffling against his ear, the promise of her lips nearly unbearable.

  “How do I know you won’t just leave me like you left them?”

  “No,” he whispered, moving his lips up her neck to her ear.

  “No, I won’t leave you.”

  She swiveled her head back and forth slowly, her hair brushing against his face, and then pushed him away from her, picking up her suitcase, turning, and opening the door all in the same liquid motion. He was left in the doorway, watching her walk down the hall away from him in his own house with a suitcase in her hand, as though they had already been married for forty years and she was leaving him.

  Just before she turned into Meghan’s room she threw a final comment over her shoulder.

  “Faith in our Lord requires sacrifice, Marshall. Not jewelry.”

  Three

  I PEEKED at the vegetarian tomato alfredo sauce while keeping one ear tuned to the footsteps and doors opening and closing above me. We’d never had a noisy house, not even when the kids were younger. Even Meghan’s piano lessons and practice had been muted, muffled somehow by the three stories of the house, the humidity of the Gulf of Mexico, and her hesitancy on the keys.

  But tonight there were three of them up there and it sounded like twelve to me. I knew mothers who loved a raucous house full of children, but I’d never gotten the hang of relaxing into the din, never been the placid earth mother with multiple, wide-eyed children gathered beneath her skirts.

  We did not tiptoe around; there was no ban on noise. Our family had just always had a certain amount of reserve, a reluctance to startle. But at the sound of Meghan’s bright peal of laughter, slipping down the stairway and into the kitchen like a jazz riff, I smiled, and when Cal entered the kitchen I turned it on him.

  “Hey,” he said, jerking his head up, indicating the noise from upstairs. “Guess they’re getting along. She seems nice. Marshall got some of his old man’s genes after all. We know how to pick ’em.”

  I laughed. It had been a long time since we’d flirted. “Did you ever consider that maybe you weren’t the one doing the picking?” I asked, coy but out of practice. He grabbed me around the waist and bent me over backward, going after my neck. I played along and protested for a minute, allowing him the barest graze of a kiss before I pushed him away.

  “So, really,” I said, lifting the lid again, stirring where there was no need, looking to add something there was no absence of. “What do you think?”

  Cal sniffed at the sauce, wrinkling his nose. “I think making sauce out of tofu is really weird, and I don’t care how much V8 you put in it, I’ll still know it started out looking like a slimy brick of candle wax.”

  “Come on,” I said. “What do you think of her, of Ada?”

  He shrugged. “I’m glad the kid has a girlfriend.”

  “She has a tattoo.” That got a raised eyebrow.

  “Where?” he asked.

  I pointed to the top of the back of my jeans.

  “Really? What’s it of?”

  “Some black tribal thing. And what about the eyebrow piercing?”

  “I thought she was religious? A tribal tattoo seems a little at odds with that, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, knocking the edge of the spoon against the rim of the pot and turning to face him. “I don’t know of any religions specifically against tattoos. Judaism says something about defacing your body, scraping your skin or something. But she’s definitely not Jewish. It sounds like a commune, one of those big, happy family things. It’s certainly not something I’m against; I just don’t know what their beliefs are. What if they’re polygamists or something?”

  “You’ve been watching too much cable. And since when did that matter to you, anyway?” he asked, and we were back to our usual poking at each other.

  “I guess since I considered the fact that he’s old enough to get married,” I said. “And even if he doesn’t marry her, and even if it isn’t anytime soon, he will probably marry someone, someday.”

  “This is just occurring to you?”

  “Yes,” I said, angry at the defensiveness I felt well up within me. “I mean, no, of course I’ve thought about him getting married before, I just never gave much thought to who he’d marry.”

  “Or how many wives he might have?” he pressed.

  “Look, I just—I think it changes when they get older.” I turned back to the sauce, but I could feel him staring at my back. I let the silence hold until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Without turning around, I said, “What, Cal?”

  “I think it’s very strange that you’ve fought with me for years over this, like he’s had some perfectly acceptable hobby, and suddenly, because he brings a girl home, it’s a potential problem? Jesus, Chloe, this is the first normal thing that kid’s done since he was ten.”

  “That’s ridiculous. And don’t say Jesus in front of her,” I said, dismissing him. I heard the screen door slam before I could replace the lid on the sauce.

  DESPITE Cal’s reservations, the tofu tomato alfredo was fantastic, silky and full on the tongue. Ada seemed impressed, and Marshall turned grateful, leading the conversation with topics designed to maintain peace at the dinner table. He asked about Meghan’s schoolwork and she practically glowed when he asked her something in French and she could respond fluently.

  “What did you take?” Meghan asked Ada.

  “I didn’t take any foreign languages,” she said. “I was home-schooled. I’m pretty good at sign language though.”

  “Really? Show me my name,” Meghan demanded. Ada taught us Meghan’s name, and then did everyone’s, patiently repeating the configurations over and over until we each knew at least our own names, even if we dissolved into hopeless laughter if we tried anyone else’s.

  She signed something at Marshall, quickly, with more intricate gestures than the simple finger spellings she’d taught us, and he nodded but did not include us in the conversation, such as it was. Neither Meghan nor Cal noticed, caught up in testing their names out on each other. Marshall saw me looking at them and smiled, not the sly grin he’d given me upstairs, but his old, open, boy smile.

  “So, Dad, are you booked tomorrow or can we go out on the boat?” Marshall asked.

  Cal seemed surprised, but smiled at him, and I realized he thought he’d be going. “Where do you want to go?” he asked. “We can take you to Meghan’s favorite spot, lots of redfish there. What do you say, Meg?”

  Meghan bounced in her seat. “Yeah, we could—”

  “No, Dad, I meant maybe I could take Ada out. No fishing,” he interrupted Meghan, as though she hadn’t spoken. She fell silent. “She won’t even eat fish, you think she’s gonna put a hook in one?”

  It was the exact wrong tone to take with Cal, and I sighed at the inevitability of it all, neither of them giving an inch. I’d warned him, and we were not to be disappointed. Cal did a dramatic choke on his pasta and turned red before making a great show of swallowing and wiping his mouth with his napkin before responding. His real talents were lost on the fish of Florida; the man should have been an actor. Ada watched with her mouth slightly open, a forkful of pasta hovering in midair, as if debating whether she should flee or keep eating.

  “Why, exactly, do you think I should let you take my boat out by yourself? Didn’t the last time teach you anything? Taught me something, something I’m not ready to forget, Marshall. The ans
wer is no. You can take your girlfriend out on the water by yourself when you get your own boat.”

  Two years ago, right after graduation, Marshall had not come home for dinner. Calls to his cell phone went directly to his voice mail. We didn’t start to worry until after dark, and by midnight we were frantic. Meghan had finally come to us, interrupting me on the phone with Corbin, Marshall’s friend, who professed to have not heard from Marshall.

  “Mom,” she’d whispered, sidling against me and avoiding Cal. “I think I might know where he is.” I filtered this astonishing announcement through Corbin’s vague suppositions about Marshall’s whereabouts and hung up on him without explanation.

  “What?” I cried, leaning down into her face, my hands tight upon her small shoulders. “Where? Why have you waited so long? Where is he, Meghan?”

  She cast a doubtful glance at her father and then said, in an even smaller voice, “I think maybe he took Daddy’s boat.”

  “What?” I asked, even as Cal bolted for the back door where a row of keys hung on pegs. I heard him shout, “Dammit!” and knew his second set of keys, on their ubiquitous red-and-white buoy key ring, weren’t there.

  I left Meghan, nearly shaking with the unknown outcome of her revelation, and met up with Cal in the outbuilding where he stored all of his charter equipment and kept his records in a small office. He’d already raised Marshall on the radio, and I hung back as I listened to him yell at him, reminding myself that my son deserved every bit of it. After pinpointing Marshall’s location, Cal arranged for Sea Tow to haul him and the boat, simply out of gas, back to the marina.

  When Marshall arrived home, things only got worse, and we all suffered with it. Marshall had been allowed to take the smaller boat, McKale’s Ferry, by himself since he was fourteen, but it had always been arranged beforehand, and never had he been allowed to take it after dark. I was just glad he’d left the large boat, Trillium’s Edge, designed for overnight trips out in deep water, at the marina and was now safe at home.