Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  He was working both of our cell phones, his flipped open on the little table between the chairs, mine in his large hand, pushing the tiny buttons as dexterously as any fifteen-year-old. One of Meghan’s spiral notebooks was open on the table, and he was making notes from whatever he was finding on my phone.

  “What are you doing?” I asked again, my voice just as shrill as before. I pulled the phone from his hand and he just as quickly grabbed it back, catching my wrist in his other hand, hurting me, though I knew he couldn’t have meant to. I had nothing to hide from him, but he had never been one of those husbands who felt a right to go through my things whenever he felt like it. We’d always been polite. All of the common courtesy levees that made our relationship work were being breached.

  “Sit down,” he commanded, pointing my phone toward the chair across from him.

  I sat.

  He leaned forward and flipped my phone closed before he looked at me intently. He just looked for a moment, and I wanted to say “What are you doing” again, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of it. Instead, I remained silent and gazed back at him, hopeful that I appeared calm and unperturbed on the outside. Inside, my heart was beating hard, and I still felt nauseous. I felt as if I were sitting across from my father, a feeling that infuriated me. I’d found that the only way to combat it was to act as much like an adult as I could muster.

  “Where is he?” Cal said.

  I looked down at my phone and at his scribbled notes, buying a little time to figure out exactly what he wanted. I assumed he meant Marshall, but I wanted us on even footing in this conversation, and I wouldn’t be rushed into making a misstep. But Cal wasn’t waiting for me to catch up.

  “Where the hell is Marshall, Chloe? You can’t protect him like this. You’re going to make it much worse than it already is.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. His expression didn’t change. He didn’t believe me.

  “Dammit, Chloe, I can’t believe you can be so stupid—”

  “Whoa, you can stop right there,” I interrupted him. “Don’t you dare ever say that I’m stupid. I don’t know where he is. I have no idea. He didn’t tell me, he hasn’t called, and he’s had his phone turned off for days. All I know is that he bailed Ada out and they took off. That’s all I know. I’m not covering for him, I’m not aiding and abetting, and I’m not about to let you make me feel guilty about something I didn’t do.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, right where he’d developed tiny indentations from the sunglasses he had to wear constantly. His face looked vulnerable without them, the way faces do when people first get laser eye surgery and forget they don’t have to squint to focus. Cal squinted whenever he was without his sunglasses, even when it was dark out, and it had emphasized the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes.

  Now he looked at me through his fingers, squinting as though I were a mile away, across sunlit water, trying to decipher who I was, what I was, and whether it was worth getting closer for a more intimate look.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I stated, slowly, carefully forming each word for him so there was no mistake.

  “You really don’t?” he asked, softly now.

  “I really don’t.”

  He sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, his hand now covering his eyes. “All right. Well, I think we need to do everything we can to find him. Call his friends... does he still have friends?”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, do what you can. I’ve been onto the cell phone website. He hasn’t made any calls in the last week. I thought—” He waved my cell phone in the air before leaning forward and dropping it onto the table. “—maybe you were calling him.”

  “I am calling him,” I said. “I’m not getting any answer, but I’ve been leaving messages for days now. I’ve told you that.”

  “I think,” he said, pushing the newspaper with his toe, “that we need to make a concentrated effort to find him before this girl manages to really screw up his entire life.”

  I loved him right then. I loved him so much for the relief that coursed through me, and I felt like crying, loose-limbed and light-headed with the release of it. Suddenly, I was not alone, we were a team again, and I wanted to curl up in his lap and wrap my arms around his neck and let him tell me how he was going to fix this.

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “First we have to manage this somehow,” he said, tilting his head toward the newspaper. “There was a message at home from a reporter. I don’t think we should talk to them at all. What do you think?”

  I shook my head. “No. No, I don’t want any part of it. What are they going to want to do? Come in here and take pictures of her? Splash the grieving parents all over the front page? No.”

  He nodded. “Okay, then I think we’d better talk to someone here about their policy on who they let in.”

  “Sandy just walked right up to the door the other day.”

  “Exactly. So, we’ll do that, we’ll keep trying to find Marshall...” He trailed off and sighed, leaning his head back and staring at the ceiling for a moment, and I finally moved. I crossed the small space between us that had seemed like such a distance before, and climbed into his lap.

  He folded his arms around me so quickly that tears welled in my eyes when I realized that he needed to be touched too. Perhaps it didn’t fix anything permanent, but it would be nice, just for a moment, to be us again.

  Our breathing synchronized, and I rested my forehead in the curve of his neck, coming together the way we’d perfected over the years. It amazed me that it hadn’t changed. Shouldn’t—after agreeing that we had come to an impasse in our marriage—our curves and angles have shifted slightly? Shouldn’t the chemicals that made the smell of him mean safety and love and happiness have altered now that I wasn’t so sure he meant any of those things anymore?

  But nothing about our bodies had changed, and I breathed him in just as deeply as I had when he embraced me on our first night together. I felt him do the same; felt his hands seek out and settle in the places he loved the most on me, my hip bone, the span between my shoulder blades. It had always felt as though he were holding me together, as if were my bones to suddenly disjoint themselves I would not collapse, accordionlike, to the floor.

  It was a lovely moment, suspended there.

  MARSHALL

  He couldn’t sleep. He regretted letting her go, or regretted staying behind, he wasn’t sure which, as soon as the door closed and the sounds of the dogs faded away. He walked down the hallway and slipped into the room Ada had been in, slid into the bed she’d lain on and tried to smell some bit of her. But she hadn’t been there long enough, and all he could smell was fresh sheets atop an old mattress.

  He returned to the sofa and stared into the dark, his eyelids jumpy with exhaustion. He was what his mother used to call “mad at sleep,” and the longer he cursed not being able to find it, the further away the possibility sailed.

  He finally eased himself off the sofa and roamed the house, stopping at each window to stare out into the night, listening, waiting for something to happen. He developed a track and made the loop more times than he could count before he finally returned to the sofa and fell upon his knees in front of it, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on the sagging, sheet covered-cushions, like a child, to pray.

  He had nothing to say. He did not know what to ask for, whom to praise, how to make the words work anymore. But he stayed there, determined that something would eventually come to him, determined that he could escape into it and quiet the anger, the pain, the uncertainty.

  He tried the rote prayers, recited the chants, even whispered a song under his breath, swaying from side to side, and none of it worked, none of it moved him, and he had never known the power of the word forsaken before but he knew it now, and that became his prayer.

  You have been forsaken, you have been forsaken.


  He heard a noise behind him and his heart skipped wildly as he turned to see what had appeared, what manifestation his disbelief had conjured up. He would not have been surprised to see the things he only imagined at three in the morning: a demon, Satan himself, Iblis, Mara, Angra Mainyu.

  It was Grandmother Tobias, but seeing her there rather than the demon of his midnight imagination did not ease his fear, or his anger. He rose quickly, feeling it in his head, and sat on the sofa as she crossed the room.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, leaning down and taking his cheeks between her thumbs and fingers, as if she were a doting aunt, but squeezing, so he had to look up at her. He was shocked at how much it hurt. “I know what you were thinking,” she hissed at him.

  He was bewildered. He hadn’t known what he was thinking, how could she? He gaped up at her, and she gave his face a little shake before releasing his cheeks. His hands flew to them, rubbed them back into shape.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” he protested.

  “You were going to try to sneak in there, in my house, under my roof. I gave you shelter and you were going to go in there—”

  “No,” he protested. “No, I wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep, I was walking around, and I was—I was praying. I was praying.”

  She became still and glanced down the hall, uncertainty stamped on her face, better than the strange rage that had been there a moment before.

  “Praying?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was, you saw me, I was kneeling.”

  “Don’t have to kneel to pray, son,” she said, sitting on the sofa beside him, lowering her voice, trying to not wake a girl who wasn’t there anymore.

  “I know, I just, I thought it would be easier.”

  “Ain’t hard to pray either,” she said, chastising softly.

  How he wanted to argue. It was. It was hard to pray, when you didn’t know what to pray to, when you didn’t know what to pray for, when you didn’t have faith that anyone, anything, was listening.

  “Marshall,” she said, “you can be his vessel.”

  “What?”

  “You can be his vessel.”

  “I—What the hell does that mean?” He wanted to shout this, but he was aware, still, that Ada was supposed to be in the room down the hall. He wanted to buy her time, time enough to get out of the state, to get as far as she could. And so he put as much of the idea of yelling as he could into his half-whisper. “What does that mean?” he demanded again, satisfied when she shrunk from him.

  But Grandmother Tobias was clearly not a woman accustomed to shrinking from much and she came back at him as quickly as she had retreated. “Don’t you push me, child, don’t you question me. You open yourself, and you let him fill you, and you will find the way, you will find the path. You refuse His love and you will be lost, you accept His love and you will be released.”

  “From what?” he asked.

  “From your doubts.”

  “I don’t think I can be,” he whispered. “How do you do it?”

  She tilted her head at him, uncomprehending, as if he’d asked her how to speak Japanese. “You just do,” she said simply.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Yes,” she corrected him. “Your girl there, she knows. She just knows, she doesn’t question, she knows. Now, I’m not altogether clear on just what she thinks about it. Seems to me she’s mighty confused on that part of it. But she knows. She’ll get there. You’ll get there too, but you have to stop fighting it.”

  He slumped back on the sofa, all the anger gone out of him, everything gone out of him, and closed his eyes. “I’m not fighting anything,” he said.

  She patted his knee, as if the conversation had somehow made sense, somehow been satisfying to them both, and was now over. “Go to sleep,” she said, and left him there.

  He watched her move slowly down the hall through half-open eyes and had a moment of fear when she stopped at Ada’s door, listening. Whatever she hoped to hear she obviously convinced herself she had, and she turned away and entered her own room, quietly shutting her door.

  He threw himself back on the sofa and stared at the windows. There were no prayers in his mind, there was nothing in his mind but Ada, and everything he had just lost, had just willingly allowed, encouraged, to drive out of his life and into some unknown future without him. He pictured her speeding to the coast and then turning north onto the freedom trail of I-75, windows down, one graceful arm cocked out the window, wings of dark hair fluttering about her face.

  Sometime in the predawn hours, Ada’s hair turned to water, her limbs turned to fish, and he slept and dreamt. When the windows became hazy with the pink of sunrise, he opened his eyes as though he’d never closed them, rose, and quietly made coffee.

  He poured two cups, looking over his shoulder, dumped one in the sink, and then sat at the table until Grandmother Tobias emerged from her room, shuffling in like an old woman, devoid of any of the stealthy visitor of the night before.

  “Good morning,” he said. “We were up early so I made coffee. Can I pour you a cup?”

  She lowered herself into a chair with held breath, dropping the last couple of inches, and he suddenly wondered exactly how old she was. At times, when she turned on that faith, that passion, she became ageless, but now, without that fire and in the dawning humidity of a merciless Florida morning, she could easily have been well into her eighties or beyond.

  “Nice to have it ready,” she said, her voice matching her aged appearance. She accepted the cup gratefully and looked at him closely as she took a sip. “Your girl gone back to bed?”

  “No,” he said, taking his seat and keeping his eyes on his coffee. “Actually, she’s got family a little farther up the east coast, so I let her have the car for a couple of days so she could visit. She waited, but we weren’t sure when you’d be up, and I wanted her to get on the road before the weekend traffic got too bad.”

  He had lied so much already. He would start making things right soon, but for now he was going to continue to do what he had to do. He’d deal with the consequences later, and he knew, knew already, that the consequences might be dire indeed. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and held it up for her to see, as if it were a calling card of credibility.

  “Talked to Dad before he got on the water to let him know I wanted to stay the week to get to know you a little better. I hope that’s okay?”

  Her face changed as quickly as the sky at sunset, from suspicion, to acceptance, to a flattered hopefulness that twisted in his gut like fish twisted in his hand to get free.

  “This will be nice,” she said, hesitantly, as though she weren’t quite used to looking forward to something, or letting on that she was. He resigned himself to the fact that, apparently, there was no bottom to how badly he could feel. There was still another depth to reach.

  The deep pool he kept looking for within himself was never full of faith. If he had a deep pool of anything, the catfish, the bottom-feeders, would be feasting on regret, guilt, maybe some well-earned self-hatred. He felt as old as Grandmother Tobias. How did anyone get to an advanced age without becoming stooped and angry with guilt?

  There were only two answers he could come up with: There were either very few people who did bad things, made horrible decisions, or there were millions who had no conscience, or who at least had incredibly selective memories.

  Perhaps memory loss was not a curse of old age, but a gift. He was ready to be eighty, eighty-five, ninety. He wanted to already have his life behind him. Wouldn’t it be easier?

  Life was messy and long, with countless opportunities to make the wrong decision, to hurt other people. Exhausting.

  Grandmother Tobias made breakfast, and he ate it, but tasted little. He didn’t bother feeling badly about eating the sausage.

  Over the next week they fished, paddled Fisheating Creek and Lake Okeechobee, ate, and looked through more pictures. His grandmother brought out shoeboxes filled with more ph
otos, and seemed to know and, more surprisingly, respect that he did not want to talk about Ada or his family. At least the family he’d grown up with.

  The rest of his family, her family, he heard all about. She produced a wealth of ephemera: sermons scribbled on tissue-thin paper, birth, marriage, and death certificates, Christmas cards, and report cards. It was all too overwhelming to complete a picture in his mind of exactly what genetic material had distilled down to form who he was, but it was certainly more than he’d ever had to work with before.

  Perhaps his grandmother thought it would help him. But all it did was confuse him more, make him retreat further from understanding any sort of clear truth. As she became chattier, he became more quiet, and he drew out the days with fishing as much as he could, eventually taking the truck back out in the afternoons to fish the creek himself, getting back as late as he could to toss more fish to the wild dogs than they could possibly eat.

  Eventually, two days after he was supposed to appear in court, after Grandmother Tobias asked him over breakfast if he was certain that Ada was coming back and he had to tell her that no, she wasn’t, he finally turned on his cell phone.

  He didn’t listen to any of the messages, and there were many. Instead, he made a call to the hospital. They wouldn’t tell him anything. He looked at the phone, its technology as foreign to him now as his own face in his grandmother’s tiny bathroom mirror. He finally dialed.

  “Dad? It’s Marshall.”

  Sixteen

  THANK God for lawyers. Lawyers on my side anyway. Tessa met with Cal and me and swung into action with remarkable efficiency. It felt, a little, as if all of us—Cal and me, Tessa and Mingus, even the detectives and, to a lesser extent, the two FBI agents who spoke with us—were working together.

  None of us agreed on why we needed to find Marshall, but we all agreed, with varying degrees of desperation, that finding him was the goal. The FBI agents filled us in on the information they had on Ada, but overall they seemed rather bored with the whole thing. It seemed to simply be a lead for them, not a break in their case. They were both young, and I had the feeling that their idea of what being an FBI agent would be like and what it was turning into were wildly different.