Keeping Faith

by Picoult, Jodi

  well, because I wanted to. And that’s not all I lied about. I let you think I was on that plane because I followed you to Kansas City, but I was booked on the flight before you probably ever thought of running to the airport. I come here fairly often, matter of fact, to see someone.”

  “Someone.” Her voice is cool, and although it’s what Ian expected, it still smarts.

  She is anticipating a producer, a documentary filmmaker, some other satellite person who might expose Faith. “A relative who’s autistic. Michael lives out here in an assisted-care facility, because he can’t function by himself in the regular world. It’s real private to me, which is why no one knows about him–

  not my producer, not my staff. When I saw you and Faith on that plane, I knew you figured I was tailing you. I wasn’t, but I didn’t want you to know why I was there. So I did what you expected–I followed you.”

  He rakes his hands through his hair. “What I didn’t figure on was what might happen when I did that.” Ian glances away. “Faith–

  I’ve seen her day in and day out, now. And the more time I spend with her, the more I wonder if maybe there isn’t something to her story, if maybe I’m wrong.” He swallows hard. “I go out during the day and I see Michael and then I’ll come back home and see Faith, and– God, the two of them get all tangled up and my head starts spinning:

  What if? What if she’s telling the truth?

  What if she could cure Michael? And then, just as quick, I’m ashamed of myself–me, the great disbeliever!–for even thinking such a thing.” Ian turns to Mariah, his eyes glistening, his voice broken. “Can she do it? Can she make miracles happen?”

  He can read Mariah’s heart in her eyes;

  she sees him as a man in pain. She reaches for his hand. “Of course we’ll go see your relative, Ian,” she murmurs. “And if Faith can do something, then she will. And if she can’t,

  it’s no different from what you’ve been saying all along.”

  Without a word Ian lifts her hand to his lips, the very image of gratitude, even as the tiny microphone and tape recorder hidden in his clothing capture Mariah’s promise.

  October 26, 1999 Lockwood is an ugly place. The halls and floors are the color of pistachio ice cream. There are doors lined up like dominoes, and each one has a little box outside with a chart stuffed into it. Mr. Fletcher leads them to the end of a hall, where they enter a room that’s a lot nicer than anything else Faith’s seen. There are books on the walls and a bunch of tables with board games and even some classical music playing.

  It reminds her a little bit of the library in New Canaan, except the library doesn’t have nurses walking around in their soft white sneakers.

  Her mother hasn’t told her much of anything,

  except that Mr. Fletcher has a sick relative they are going to visit today. It’s fine with her; that cabin is so boring. Plus, some of the rooms that they passed had TV. Maybe this person has the Disney Channel, and Faith can watch while the grown-ups all talk.

  Mr. Fletcher walks to the corner of the room,

  where a man is sitting with a deck of cards. The guy doesn’t even turn around when they get close, but just says, “Ian’s here.

  Three-thirty on Tuesday. Just like always.”

  “Just like,” Mr. Fletcher answers, and his voice sounds strange to Faith, stiff and high.

  Then the man turns around, and Faith’s eyes go wide. Why, if she didn’t know any better, she would have said it was Mr. Fletcher himself.

  Mariah’s mouth drops open. His twin?

  Pieces begin to fall into place: why Ian would keep this a secret, why he visited on a regular basis, why he had such a vested interest in having Faith meet this Michael. She falls back to the periphery, where Ian has asked her to stand with Faith while he slowly approaches his brother.

  “Hey, buddy,” Ian says.

  “Ten of diamonds. Eight of clubs.” The cards fall in a pile, fanning out across the table.

  “Eight of clubs,” Ian repeats, settling into a chair.

  Ian has told her that Michael has been diagnosed as severely autistic. His survival strategy in the real world is to live by a routine. To break the routine sets him off.

  It can be as simple as someone’s rearranging the order of the eating utensils on his napkin, or Ian’s staying two minutes past the hourlong visit. And he cannot stand to be touched.

  Ian has told her that this is the way Michael will always be.

  Faith yanks at her hand. “Let go,” she whispers.

  Michael turns over an ace. “Oh, no.”

  “Ace in the hole,” the brothers say in unison.

  There is something of the scene that moves Mariah greatly: Ian sitting inches away from a man who could be his mirror image, trying to connect with words that do not signify anything. She brings up her hand to wipe at her eyes and realizes she’s no longer holding on to Faith.

  Her daughter moves toward the card table. “Can I play, too?”

  Frozen, Ian waits for Michael’s reaction. He turns from Ian to Faith and then back to Ian and begins to shout at the top of his lungs. “Ian comes alone! Three-thirty on Tuesday. Not Monday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday; alone alone alone!” With his hand, he thrashes at the cards so that they scatter across his lap and the floor.

  “Faith.” Mariah tries to draw her away as a member of the staff arrives to calm Michael down. But Faith is crawling around on the floor, picking up the fallen cards. Michael is rocking, throwing off the soothing words of the nurse who knows better than to lay a hand on him.

  Faith awkwardly sets the pack of cards on the table, staring curiously at the grown man with the mind of a child. “It might be best if you and your friends go,

  Mr. Fletcher,” the attendant says softly.

  “But–“

  “Please.”

  Ian flings himself out of the chair and walks from the room. Mariah reaches for Faith and follows him, glancing over her shoulder once to see Michael reach for the deck of cards, cuddle it close to his chest.

  Just outside the library, Ian closes his eyes and takes great, deep breaths of air. Just as whenever Michael has an episode,

  he finds himself shaking. But somehow this seems worse.

  Mariah and Faith slip outside and wait beside him quietly. He can barely even stand to look at them. “That was your miracle?”

  There is a phenomenal rage running through him,

  like a poison working its way through his system. He doesn’t know why, or where it’s come from. After all, this is what he had expected to happen.

  But not what he’d hoped.

  The thought catches him unawares, pulls the world out from beneath his feet. He feels himself spinning and has to lean against the wall. All the bullshit he’d fed to Mariah last night, all the little concessions he’d made during the week to make them think he was starting to believe in Faith … they weren’t really lies. Professionally, Ian may have wanted Faith to fail today. But personally, he had wanted her to succeed.

  Autism isn’t something you can fix with a blink or a touch of your hand; he’s known that all along.

  Faith White, for all her claims, is a fake. But being right, this time, doesn’t bring him any sense of satisfaction. This little girl,

  who’s been playing everyone for a fool, has managed to show Ian he’s only been fooling himself.

  Mariah touches his arm, and he shrugs it off.

  Like Michael, he thinks, and he wonders if his brother cannot stand to be touched because he cannot bear such open, honest pity. “Just go away,” he mutters,

  and he finds himself walking off. By the time he reaches the doors, he’s nearly running. He circles around to the back of Lockwood, to the small pond with its brace of swans. Then he rips the microphone from beneath his lapel. He takes the microcassette recorder out of his pocket, tape still turning. He throws them both as hard as he can into the water.

  It is nearly three-thirty in the morning before Ian r
eturns to the cabin. Mariah knows exactly what time it is; she’s been waiting up the whole night, worried. After running from Lockwood, Ian had driven off in the car,

  leaving her and Faith to find their own transportation back. And even after the taxi had dropped them off and the car was nowhere in sight, Mariah assumed Ian would return by dinnertime. By nine o’clock. Midnight.

  She’s been picturing the car in a ditch,

  wrapped around a tree–clearly, he is too upset to be out driving. Relieved that he’s safe, she walks from her bedroom to the living room. The fumes of alcohol reach Mariah before she even sees Ian lounging on the couch with his shirt unbuttoned, gripping a bottle of Canadian Club by the neck. “Please, just go away.”

  Mariah wets her lips. “I’m so sorry,

  Ian. I don’t know why Faith was able to help my mother but not Michael.”

  “I’ll tell you why,” he says tightly.

  “Because she is a goddamned hoax. She couldn’t heal a fucking paper cut, Mariah! Just give up the act already, will you?”

  “It’s not an act.”

  “It is. It’s all an act.” He waves the bottle, sloshing liquor on the couch cushions. “I’ve been acting since the minute I saw y’all on the plane, and God knows your daughter’s gunning for a goddamned Oscar, and you … you–“

  He leans so close to Mariah, she can taste the Canadian Club on his breath. She hesitates, then leans forward and kisses him.

  It is slow at first, a gentle rubbing of his lips against hers. She reaches around his head and brings him closer, kissing him deeply, drawing out whatever is hurting him so badly.

  Ian’s throat works for a moment before he can speak. “What was that for?”

  “I’m not acting, Ian.”

  Setting his palms on her cheeks, Ian tips his forehead to hers. “You don’t understand.”

  Mariah stares at his haunted features, but sees instead Ian sitting beside his twin, trying to play by the odd rules of engagement because it’s better to have that than nothing at all. Ian’s wrong. She knows him better than he might think.

  “I’d like to understand,” she says.

  Ian Fletcher had been born two and a half minutes before his brother Michael: bigger,

  stronger, more active than his twin, a circumstance for which he’d been paying for the rest of his life.

  Clearly, Ian had taken the lion’s share of nourishment and space in the womb, and although no doctor ever said so, he felt responsible for his brother’s ill health and slow responsiveness,

  perhaps even for the autism that Michael was diagnosed with as a toddler.

  Their parents had been rich, jet-setting socialites from Atlanta who married late in life and held their Learjet, their restored plantation manor, and their condo on Grand Cayman in much higher esteem than they did their twin sons. Ian and Michael had been a mistake, and clearly one they didn’t talk about, since something was obviously not quite right with one of the boys. They lived high off the hog,

  traveling around the world for months at a time and leaving Ian and Michael in the hands of whatever tutor or nanny had been hired to deal with them.

  Ian knew he was responsible for Michael; he understood that as soon as he was able to understand the differences between them. Privately tutored, Ian did not have friends or playmates. What he had,

  what he’d always had, was his brother.

  When Ian was twelve, his father’s lawyer arrived in the middle of the night with the local sheriff. His parents’ plane had crashed in the Alps, and there were no survivors.

  Overnight the world changed. Ian learned that the lifestyle to which they’d been accustomed was courtesy of an immense credit-card debt, one that left the boys bankrupt before an inheritance could even be considered. Ian and Michael were placed in the reluctant custody of his mother’s sister and her Bible-thumping husband, and uprooted to Kansas.

  But his aunt and uncle had no intention of trying to understand Michael’s psychological problems, and they didn’t have the resources to hire someone else to do so. The state’s public-education system would have paid to send Michael anywhere in Kansas, but no one researched the choices, and so Michael was sent to the nearest institution with an open bed, a place that reeked of feces and urine, a place where Michael was the only patient even able to talk.

  Ian visited him, even when his aunt and uncle stopped coming. He went to the library and found out which residential homes had the best reputations, but no one would listen. He spent six years wondering what horrors Michael had suffered that made him regress, unwilling to dress himself in the morning and rocking more often in silence and absolutely, positively refusing to be touched.

  On the day that Ian and Michael turned eighteen, Ian dressed in a secondhand suit from a thrift store and petitioned a Kansas City court for custody of his brother. He got a scholarship to Kansas State and worked around the clock to pay for his books and to save money. He learned all about group homes for autistic adults and met with doctors who told him Michael was not capable of such an independent arrangement yet. He learned about assisted-care facilities–how they took both federal and state aid, and would take some indigent cases, but very few. How you had to know someone in the right place at the right time, or you’d be told there were no beds available. How you then paid for a quality of care,

  and continued to pay, lest that precious bed be given to someone else.

  Ian’s drive to succeed was fueled by his brother. It dovetailed naturally with the fact that a long time ago, he’d stopped believing in God. What God would have taken away his parents, his childhood? Most important, what God would have done this to his brother? Ian was angry, and, to his surprise, people wanted to listen: first, grade-school English teachers,

  then theology professors, then radio listeners,

  and then TV producers and viewers. The more famous he became, the easier it was to pay Michael’s board at Lockwood. The more outspoken he became, the more quickly he clawed his way back to a lifestyle he had only barely remembered.

  When Michael was twenty-two, he began to feed himself again. At twenty-six he was able to button his own shirt. At thirty-seven he still refuses to be touched.

  Suddenly Mariah understands what has fashioned a man like Ian Fletcher. He spent years making himself into someone other than that lost little boy–

  into someone whose cornerstone is disbelief in God–

  and with good reason. How painful it must have been to find himself hoping–praying–that a miracle might come about after all.

  She also realizes that Ian might have gotten his brother into Lockwood, and might have reached the financial peak he’d staked out in order to pay for his brother’s care, but her intuition tells her that Ian hasn’t gotten what he needs most of all. He’s been taking care of Michael all his life–but it has been years since anyone has taken care of Ian.

  Mariah starts out slowly, running her hand over his hair, then flipping it over so that her knuckles graze his throat and his jaw. She raises her palms to his cheeks and draws them down the slope of his shoulders, watching him close his eyes like a cat in the sun. Then she wraps her arms around him tightly, fits her face into the crook of his neck, and feels him shudder.

  His arms close about her with such force that she cannot breathe, cannot do anything but ride out the crest of his need. His hands map her back and her shoulders, his lips falling at her ear. “Thank you,” he whispers.

  Mariah draws back and kisses him. “My pleasure.”

  Ian smiles. “Let’s hope so.” He kisses her and lets his lips silver her skin.

  He undresses her, reaches into his wallet for a condom, and uses his hands and his tongue to navigate her body.

  Is it her imagination, or does he linger at her wrists, the places that still make her ashamed?

  Mariah pictures herself shrinking, small and malleable beneath Ian’s hands, until she feels that surely she would be able to fit inside one of her dollhouses, walk on i
ts pristine floors and look into its spotless mirrors. She opens her eyes as Ian moves over her, into her.

  It has taken years to find out, she thinks, but this is what it was like to be a perfect fit.

  Ian’s rhythm becomes stronger. Mariah strains toward him, her fingers clutching his shoulders, her mouth round on the salt of his skin.

  She stops thinking about Ian’s past, about Faith’s future, about anything at all. And just before Mariah splinters around him, she hears Ian’s voice fanning past her temple.

  “Oh,” he cries, lost in her. “Oh,

  God!”

  “I didn’t,” Ian says, chuckling.

  “You did.”

  “Why do you think that is? I mean, it happens all the time, but if it’s just you and me in bed, why would I call out God’s name?”

  Mariah laughs. “Force of habit.”

  “For you, maybe.” He wraps his arms around her, still amazed by the lull of peace inside him now, steady as a flat-line. “I’m thinking it has more to do with divinity.”

  Mariah turns in his embrace. “Does it?”

  she says, her eyes darting away. “Was it … okay?”

  Ian’s brows rise. “You have to ask?”

  Her shoulders rise and fall, and his body instinctively tightens. “It’s just–well, I always wondered what would have happened if I was thirty pounds lighter, or platinum blond, or sexier. I thought that might have kept Colin’s interest.”

  Ian is quiet for a moment. “If you were thirty pounds lighter, you’d blow away in the wind. If you were platinum blond, I wouldn’t recognize you. And if you were any sexier, you’d probably kill me.” He kisses her on the forehead. “I’ve seen your handiwork. You told me how you make those miniature houses. You made one hell of a daughter. So what is so hard about believing that anything you make … including love … might be any less exquisite?”

  Ian frames Mariah’s face in his hands,

  effortlessly sliding between her legs again. “You’re not perfect. You have this freckle here.” He points to her collarbone. “You can be downright stubborn. And your hips are–“

  “I had a baby!”