Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  “Where’s Ada?” I asked, suddenly remembering her bloody legs. He shook his head. “What happened, honey? Did Meghan get stung?” He shook his head again, and Cal and I exchanged glances.

  “What happened, Marshall?” Cal asked.

  Marshall looked at his father and started to shake his head again, but Cal stood and, covering the space between them in a split second, ripped the sunglasses from Marshall’s face. I flinched and nearly cautioned Cal again, but this time I was more afraid of Cal than of not being courteous, and my hand landed on Marshall’s arm instead, keeping him from shrinking away as his father loomed over him. “What the hell happened, Marshall?” Cal said.

  “I—I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. It was okay, I mean, we, Ada, I mean—”

  “Slow down,” I said. “It’s okay. Just take it easy. Now, everything was fine, until when?”

  “The cookie.”

  “What cookie?” I asked.

  “We got—Ada got cookies at the produce stand.”

  “What kind of cookies, Marshall?” Cal asked, his face beginning to turn red, his voice lowering. My stomach bottomed out, but I fought the growing certainty, recalling the cookies with the little hash marks in them, the exquisite smell of the peanut butter coming right through the plastic wrap, the extraordinary kindness of Sandy, whom I would never again be able to look at the same way. Meghan wouldn’t eat a cookie with peanuts, and Marshall wouldn’t let one near her. There was no question. There had been some horrible mistake, a bit of peanut had worked its way into a chocolate chip cookie, peanut oil on the wrapper, something.

  “Chocolate chip,” Marshall said, his voice dropping to a whisper. We waited. “And a peanut butter.”

  Cal exploded. He dragged Marshall up from his seat and thrust him back so his shoulders were pressed against the wall while he fought to keep his feet in front of his chair. I was on my feet just as quickly, pulling on Cal’s arms, as terrified of what he might do as I was of what Marshall was saying.

  “What did you do?” Cal yelled. “What the hell did you do?”

  Marshall broke, his face crumpled, and he sagged against the wall as Cal struggled to hold him upright. “I didn’t think—”

  “You didn’t think? You didn’t think what? You didn’t think your little sister would die? What the hell? I don’t even know what you’re saying here. You let your girlfriend buy a peanut butter cookie and then sat there while she fed it to her? While she tried to kill your sister?”

  “No, no, I—she said it was organic, and that it was such a small bit—” He broke off again, obviously too horrified to continue. Cal abruptly let go, and Marshall dropped into the chair and folded in upon himself, sobs shaking his body. “I tried the EpiPen, I did, and it worked at first, but then she stopped breathing again, and I couldn’t find another one.”

  This time he looked at us accusingly, hurt and bewildered. “I looked,” he cried. “I looked, and there wasn’t one there, and then Ada said, she said we could...”

  I leaned over him, my hands rubbing his back. “That you could what, honey? What?” I asked. I had to hear this. What horrible experiment were they performing with Meghan’s life? Marshall whispered something and both Cal and I leaned closer to hear. “What?”

  He lifted his face to us, agony etched across it, and said, “She said we could pray.”

  There was more, but I didn’t hear much of it after that.

  LATE that night, while Cal slept fitfully in a chair beside Meghan’s hospital bed, and I spoke softly to her, holding her hand, a police officer arrived and waited outside the door while a nurse whispered in my ear. I’d already told the story over and over again, to doctors, nurses, to everyone who asked how she’d gotten something with peanuts in it, and it did not strike me as strange to be telling the story one more time in the hallway while a uniformed officer took notes.

  How they, the children, Ada and Marshall, had broken a tiny piece of the peanut butter cookie off and mashed it into the top of a chocolate chip cookie and given it to Meghan. How Ada had explained to Marshall that it would be okay, that it was organic, that the exposure to such a tiny bit would help her build her immunity. And how Meghan had seemed fine, until she started pushing on her lips with her fingertips, until she started to panic and gasp for breath.

  And how they’d prayed. How they’d watched Meghan struggle for air and clutched each other and raised their voices in prayer. Until Marshall finally broke, broke and scrambled for the EpiPen and jammed it into her thigh, and their joy when she came back, and they prayed over her again, and how she’d tentatively joined them.

  He said Meghan was okay, that she was talking, that she held their hands . . . until she started gasping again. And that was when she started to vomit, and when Ada clutched him and told him to stay steady, that God was working through Meghan, was testing his faith, his commitment to him, to her. And he’d tried, he’d tried, but his faith wasn’t strong enough, and when Meghan lost consciousness, he’d struggled out of Ada’s grasp, finally throwing her to the side, and started the boat and gunned it, sending Ada flying across the cockpit to split her knees open on the floor, one knee bad enough to need stitches.

  “Where are Marshall and Ada now, ma’am?” the officer asked softly. I shook my head.

  “I told him to take her back to our house and to call her parents to come get her,” I said. “I assume they’re there.”

  He nodded his head and closed his notebook before looking at me solemnly. “I hope your daughter comes out of it, ma’am. Here’s my card. Please call me if you think of anything else.”

  I nodded, tucked the card in my pocket, and went back into the hospital room where Meghan lay.

  She’d never regained consciousness. She was alive, but the doctor told us she hadn’t been for a few moments, that she’d been starved for oxygen, and that they didn’t know when, or if, she would wake again.

  MARSHALL

  They’d gone home near dinnertime. His father, unable to even look at him, had left the waiting room to go in search of the nurse, and his mother, crying quietly, told him to go home, to find Ada and go home, and to have her parents arrange to get her. The directive was clear.

  Get her out of their house.

  He didn’t want to see her at all. He wanted his mother to take care of it. He only wanted to curl up in a ball and allow his mind to blank, to find the spiritual clarity he’d been so high on just that morning. Faith was supposed to sustain people in times of crisis, but it had fled his soul at the first sign of trouble. And this was such trouble, such horrible, nightmarish trouble.

  He’d found Ada sitting in a chair in the corner of the emergency room waiting area, crutches leaning on the table beside her, her legs bandaged. When she saw him, he could do little more than shake his head at her before saying gruffly, his voice foreign to himself: “Let’s go.”

  He’d allowed her to make her way alone across the parking lot on her crutches and started the car, watching her hobble toward him in the rearview mirror, wishing he had the guts to put it in reverse and extinguish her from his view.

  She worked her crutches into the backseat and got in the car, groaning as she bent her legs, and finally slammed the door shut with a sigh. She was clutching a sheaf of papers in her left hand and as they brushed the hairs of his arm he recoiled as if singed.

  She didn’t speak until they had pulled out of the parking lot. “Is she—is everything okay?”

  He rolled to a stop at a red light and looked at her, really looked at her. Her tiny face was pinched in pain, her mouth drawn into a tight line—a mouth he’d placed his own lips on. The lines of her delicate shoulders he’d run his hands across, small, perfect breasts he’d caressed, the first he’d held, kissed, her slender hips tucked back into the seat cupping her perfect bottom that fit right in his hands as if sculpted just for them.

  He hated her.

  And he hated himself for wanting her so desperately at the same time, for feeling
his cock stir while his sister lay dying. If he had the guts to cut it off right then, he would have.

  She glanced at him and then down at her lap. When the light turned green and he moved forward, she reached over and placed her hand on his leg. He shifted gears and then gingerly, not trusting himself to touch any more of her skin than he had to, picked her hand up and dropped it back on her lap.

  “Do you want to pray with me?” she asked.

  He could not seem to bring his mouth to move, could not push words up out of his throat. He’d always had a vague notion of words coming from his brain, falling down into the back of his throat and rolling out through his lips, effortless, gravity allowing them to drop into the world. But he had been wrong. Words were grave and serious work for the body, formed in the chest, too heavy to move unless forced out on explosive bursts of air from the lungs.

  Simply breathing seemed like such an effort. The air leaked in and out; it was impossible to think of it being able to sustain something so heavy as a single word, much less several of them strung in a row. He had no idea how he’d ever had entire conversations.

  Ada snuffled beside him, huddled against the passenger door, her left knee wrapped in an outlandishly bulky bandage, her right bandaged less dramatically. He had a nearly overwhelming urge to reach over and squeeze her knee, to make her scream in fright and pain, to just keep the pressure on, let her scream all the way home.

  “Are you going to talk to me?” she asked in a tiny voice, and he hated her for that, for being able to sustain voice, even the weak, pathetic one that it was. He didn’t look at her, just clicked the directional to turn on the road toward home, not bothering with the route he’d taken her just the day before, along the water, empty road spooling out ahead of them like their future, the smell of the Gulf and the bay mingling like lovers.

  She began to chant. It didn’t matter what. They were words he once recognized, but no longer did or wanted to. He didn’t bother turning on the radio to drown her out. He could do that on his own. She finally shut up when he turned into the drive leading to the house. He wouldn’t have even noticed except it felt a little easier to breathe, as if her words had eaten up oxygen, making the air in the car thin.

  Once out of the car he left her to struggle with the crutches and immediately went upstairs and into Meghan’s room, grabbing Ada’s suitcase and throwing anything that looked like it might be hers into it. He could hear her fight with the screen door, and by the time he got back downstairs with her suitcase she had collapsed into a kitchen chair, her forehead on her arms.

  “You need to call your parents,” he said, the words more of an effort than climbing the stairs had been.

  She lifted her face to him, horror stamped upon it, more expression than he’d seen from her since he’d grabbed the EpiPen. “What? I can’t call my parents.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to. You can’t be here when they get back.”

  “Then take me back to school,” she pleaded.

  “I’m not going back to school!” he yelled. He’d found his voice. “You have to leave.”

  “If you won’t take me then how am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t care. Just go.”

  “You can’t just . . . cast me out, Marshall. You agreed with this, you’re the one who didn’t have enough faith, you’re the one who couldn’t tough it out.” Her voice began to rise, ringing off the old metal kitchen cabinets. “You were weak. She’s screwed up because of you, not me. My faith is strong, it’s unshakable, I am the way and the truth and the life—”

  “You are nothing!” he shouted at her. “You are full of crap, and if she dies it’s going to be your fault. What will your God think of that? What will he think of a little girl dying because she trusted you, because I trusted you? How will it feel when you’re in hell?”

  Ada drew herself up straight, closed her eyes, and began to pray out loud, rapidly and loudly. He dropped her suitcase and went for her, but she stood her ground and did not flinch when he slammed his hands down on the table in front of her.

  “You’re a fake!”

  Her prayer only got louder, as did his accusations, and soon the kitchen reverberated with their voices, one word indistinguishable from the other, until he finally did what he’d wanted to do in the car, and fell on his knees and grasped her leg over the bandage and squeezed.

  He got the response he’d been looking for. She screamed, a sound full of the pain he felt. Her body stiffened in the straight-backed chair and it tipped over, spilling her onto the floor, where she lay on her side, gasping.

  “I noticed your faith didn’t stop you from getting stitches in your leg,” he said, crouching down beside her. “What happened? Why didn’t God stop the blood? Maybe, Ada, maybe it was your faith that wasn’t strong enough.” He stood and dug the keys to his car out of his pocket, throwing them on the kitchen table. “Leave the keys with my roommate. I don’t care where you go after that.”

  He left her on the floor and went upstairs, shutting and locking his door. He drew the blinds, and took the charms and necklaces from his drawer, pulling them off the cross and clutching them against his chest as he crawled into bed and wept his way into sleep.

  When he woke, Ada, despite his locked door, was lying on her side at the far edge of the bed, turned away from him. “How did you—” he began, but when she turned over and he saw the tears shining on her face, the knot inside his chest seemed to burst. He was filled with relief, and if he were to admit it to himself, helplessness. He pulled her into him and they clung to each other, he, mindful of her knees, she, mindful of his arousal, careful of each other’s individual, exposed pain.

  For the first time, they stayed together all night, and after they made love—and there was no mistake that that was exactly what it was, and that, too, was a first, though they’d not known the difference before—they did not pray or ask for forgiveness, from each other or from God.

  He took care of her. He carried her to the tub and gently changed her bandages, and gave her the painkillers she’d refused earlier, and then carried her back to bed. He could not heal his sister and had been cast from her presence, but he could take care of Ada, and they finally slept, entwined with each other, breathing each other’s air and forming their own faith.

  They did not move until morning, when the police arrived to arrest them.

  Seven

  NO change and no change and no change. Almost forty-eight hours and there was no change in Meghan, and no change in what the doctors told us and no change in how Cal and I hovered in her room except for an occasional change of position. Neither of us ate, and neither of us talked about Marshall or Ada.

  A nurse brought us a plate of breakfast but it sat on the rolling tray between us, merely a symbol of the fact that it wasn’t being rolled over to Meghan’s bed for her to eat. Cal took his eyes off of Meghan long enough to glance at me.

  “You should go home,” he said. I barked out a laugh.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. Go home? Why would I go home until I could bring Meghan with me?

  He cleared his throat. “One of us should. One of us should make sure everything is . . . all right there. And you should shower, and change. Bring us back some food.”

  “Then you go,” I said.

  He sighed. “I will. But if I’m the one who goes home, I don’t know what I’ll do when I get there.”

  His voice was low and resigned, and I suddenly realized what he was trying to say. He didn’t know what he would do to Marshall, maybe Ada. I had no idea where either of them were.

  I thought it over, calculated the time it would take me to go home, get back. It was too much time. I stood and grabbed my purse.

  “I’ll call first,” I said. Cal didn’t answer, and I left the room, hesitating at the line of the doorway, superstitious of allowing the door to close behind me. But it was unthinkable to prop the door open, to allow anyone walking by on their way to visit their own damaged l
oved one to see my child, to see Cal, broken and ancient in the reclining chair. I let the door close softly and shuddered when it clicked.

  I raced down the hall, looking for an area where I could use my cell phone. The waiting room had four people in it, their faces drawn with fear or slack with exhaustion. It was four people too many, and I continued on my way, finally boarding the elevator to take me downstairs to the lobby.

  When I got off the elevator, the sunlight coming in through the automatic doors of the lobby seemed an affront, and I glanced around to find another outlet. My eyes finally settled on the sign with the hospital map on it. There was a chapel, a gift shop, and a cafeteria in the opposite direction of that obscene sunshine, and I headed that way, turning my cell phone on as I searched.

  The gift shop was tiny and glass-fronted, and the cafeteria was nearly full, but the chapel not only had heavy solid doors and no signs saying “No Cell Phones,” but was also blessedly empty and quiet. I sat in a pew barely large enough for three people and dialed home. The phone rang long enough for the answering machine to pick up.

  “Marshall, it’s Mom. We’re still here. There’s no change. I need you to call me back. I need to know . . . what’s going on. I’ll try your cell phone.”

  I hung up and called his cell. There was no answer, and I left the same message there, then simply sat, phone on my lap, and stared up at the fake stained-glass window hanging on the front wall. I felt no qualms about prayer. I did it when I wanted to, directed it at no specific deity, and expected no response.

  I wondered what deeply religious people thought about this little chapel. Did they find it without reverence? If their symbols weren’t there—the crosses or the robes or glass-encased Torah or Qu’ran—did it steal a piece of their faith, distract them from their purposeful prayer? In this hospital, that tried to keep sick people of any faith alive, did the faithful feel forgotten in this empty chapel?

  It felt peaceful enough to me, and I closed my eyes and prayed. For my daughter, for my son, for my husband and myself. That Meghan would come out of this as whole as she had been. That Cal could one day look at Marshall without hating him. That our marriage, already in some state of flux I hadn’t yet been ready to examine too closely, could remain flash-frozen until it was all over. That when we did get home, Ada would be gone and we would never have to hear her name or see her Winona Ryder face, or the dangerous glint of her eyebrow ring ever again.