Faithful

by Alice Hoffman

  “Nobody with any brains would blame you for what happened to Helene,” Ben Mink says.

  Shelby looks at Ben with horror, amazed he has the nerve to utter Helene’s name in her presence. She thought he was a little smarter than that. She’ll talk to him, but clearly she’s not about to discuss her feelings, not with him or anyone else. Feelings are best left concealed. They can bite you if you’re not careful. They can eat you alive. Shelby has a tremor in her left hand. Sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and finds she’s shaking. As it turns out, people say Helene’s left hand is the source of the miracles. The concept that mere touch can cure you and restore your faith disturbs Shelby. Nothing can restore her. Shelby tosses Ben a desperate look. Not you too.

  He immediately picks up on her contempt. “Not that I expect you to believe in that shit. I know I don’t.”

  Shelby once had a beautiful smile. That’s long gone. It disappeared on that night, and at this point she doesn’t even think it’s possible for her to smile. She’s frozen into the expression of someone who expects the worst. She taps her foot constantly now, as if she were running and getting nowhere.

  “I believe in tragedy,” Shelby responds coldly. “Not miracles.”

  “Yeah, right. Faith is for idiots.” Ben seems relieved. “Statistics speak the truth.”

  “You have to stop thinking. It’s going to drive us apart.” Shelby keeps her good hand over her tremoring hand. She can feel her brain waves shift when she smokes pot. Pseudo-coma. Drift of snow. What a relief. “Let’s not get too personal. I buy weed from you. Period.”

  On the way home, Shelby realizes she’s probably spoken more to Ben Mink in the past two years than she has to anyone else. She counts the people she’s come in contact with, most of them from the psych ward. Shrink. Nurse. Pathetic members of her therapy group. Parents. Clerk at the 7-Eleven. The orderly, twice her age, who told her to keep her mouth shut as he pulled down her pants. Until then her only kisses had taken place in a closet during parties at Helene’s house. The orderly took her into a closet as well, a utility closet where there were mops and buckets and folded sheets and towels. She wasn’t speaking then. She tried to tell him no, but the word sounded like a sob.

  The orderly’s name was Martin. He was holding her by one wrist as he forced his other hand into her underwear. He told her if she made any noise at all she would never get out of the hospital. The staff would think she was hallucinating if she tried to blame him for anything. The nurses would drug her and tie her to her bed. And if they did, he would still do whatever he wanted to her.

  So Shelby didn’t speak. Instead, she rose out of her body. She watched the whole thing happen. She never told anyone what he did to her on a nightly basis because she was afraid of him, but also because she was worth nothing to herself. One night when they were locked in the shower room, he told her she was never getting away from him while he fucked her up against the cold, tiled wall. He said she belonged to him, a seventeen-year-old girl still bruised from her car accident who had tried to slit her wrists and was committed to this ward. He fucked her a second time on the damp floor that smelled of Lysol. It was the same cleaner her mother used, only Sue Richmond preferred the lemon scent, and Shelby cried for the first time since the accident while he held her down. Crying did something to her. It unlocked a small part of her soul. She kept seeing her mother’s face, thinking about what Sue would say if she could see what was happening, so she told her mother on her next visit. Months had passed and Shelby looked like a waif. It was impossible not to notice all the weight she’d lost, the slit across one wrist, the bruises Martin left on her. When her mother came to visit she spoke a single sentence, the first in months, the words like glass. The orderly Martin is fucking me. She and Sue were looking into each other’s eyes and Shelby thinks that in that moment her mother saw everything inside her. Sue raced down the hall, a crow, a wild woman, a scorpion ready to sting. She grabbed the first nurse she saw and informed her that Shelby was leaving. Sue told the nurse that her daughter didn’t have to pack up, all they needed was a doctor’s release. They would wait by the locked elevator until the physician on call signed Shelby out. If a release didn’t come through, there would be a lawsuit. They were in the car half an hour later, Shelby still wearing her pajamas. That night, down in the basement, Shelby took scissors and chopped at her hair. Then she used a straight razor on her scalp. She gazed at her reflection and it was clear: she wasn’t the same person anymore.

  Her mother had been in the kitchen, fixing macaroni and cheese, which had been Shelby’s favorite meal. When she came downstairs and saw what Shelby had done, she sat on the basement stairs and wept. “How could you?” Shelby’s mother said. “How could you do this to yourself?”

  Shelby wanted to say it was easy to do if you hated yourself, but she just went to sit beside her mother on a stair, and let her mother hug her, and the truth was she felt something crack inside her while she was in her mother’s arms. All the same, she didn’t talk much after that. They went out to the yard to lie on their backs on the picnic table and look at stars, but they didn’t speak about anything, even on the nights when they held hands. In terms of conversation, both in the hospital and afterward, Ben Mink won by a long shot. They talk for hours at a time. They talk about things that matter and things that don’t.

  “I believe in tragedy, too,” he told her that night, as if she cared what anyone else thought. She was terrified that he was going to try to embrace her so she shifted away, but he was too smart for that. He formally shook her hand. Even though they were both wearing gloves, she could feel the heat of his hand.

  February is hard. Those globes of light. The ice on the street. All of those high school girls who never knew Helene crying over her. Shelby is now nineteen, but she might as well be ninety. What happened to being young, to having her whole life ahead of her? She still doesn’t like to eat, even though her mom makes nutritious meals for her every night. Sue Richmond has left her job as a librarian at the elementary school so she can focus on Shelby. She spends hours fixing meat loaf, chicken stew, macaroni, pudding. Shelby never takes more than a few bites. She stays in the basement. It’s quiet and dark. She likes it there, if like was a word that could apply to anything in Shelby’s life. The couch is lumpy, and the floor is linoleum, like a skating rink. She and Helene used to sneak down here so they could have some privacy. Helene was more daring. She brought cigarettes and beer, and once or twice she invited her boyfriend, Chris, and his entire group of friends down to Shelby’s basement to goof around. Sometimes, late at night, when Shelby has smoked more weed than she should, she thinks she spies Helene on the stairs. She’s got that big grin on her face and her hair is clipped up with barrettes and she wears the jacket she was wearing on the day they bought their matching bracelets at the Walt Whitman Mall. Helene bought a blue dress, perfect for going to the prom with Chris, but it was a dress she never wore. Chris broke up with her that same day. On the phone. He had applied to Cornell, and once he was there he wanted to be free. That’s what set Helene off. That was the beginning of the end.

  She only went out that night because Helene threw a fit and called her a baby and she finally gave in and said she would drive. It sounds like a corny, lame excuse; it feels like a lie, even to herself. All the same, it’s true. By now, Shelby is so confused, all she can remember is stepping on the brake after the car hit a patch of ice and spinning around and ­Helene laughing, like they were in a Tilt-A-Whirl car, and then the crunch of metal against metal.

  Helene wanted to throw a rock through Chris’s window. She could be vindictive sometimes. She wasn’t as pure as people thought. She was lazy and had Shelby do her homework. She gossiped. That night they had collected paving stones from the driveway before they set off, dug them up with their hands so there was frozen earth under their fingernails. Shelby has walked past Chris Wilson’s house a few times since the accident. Chris did go to
Cornell and he doesn’t come home to visit. Once Mrs. Wilson ventured onto the porch to call out as Shelby was slinking by. She must have seen Shelby from the bay window in her living room; maybe she had trouble sleeping too. She was probably kindhearted, worried about the crazy, stoned-out girl on the road, but Shelby ran away, heart pounding. Off the road and into the woods. The crunch of twigs beneath her boots reminded her of metal against metal. Anything breaking reminds her of what happened. She went back to her basement, back to bed, and couldn’t be woken for the next eighteen hours, not until her mother grew so worried she spilled a cup of cold water over Shelby.

  Don’t was all Shelby said. She didn’t even shift in her sopping, freezing bed. She didn’t leap up and shout What have you done!

  Shelby’s mother sat on the edge of the bed. She sang “Over the Rainbow,” the song that would comfort Shelby when she was a baby and couldn’t sleep. It used to sound hopeful, but now it sounded so sad that Shelby felt her broken heart break all over again.

  One day Sue Richmond is driving home from the market when she makes a right turn on Lewiston for no reason, something she’s always avoided before. Because Sue was the librarian at the local elementary school before the accident, she knows most people in town. She’s checked out books for decades of children, all grown up now, the ones who succeeded and the ones who failed. She loved her job, but then Shelby needed her. She couldn’t read books to second graders when her own daughter was locked in a basement. She keeps going on Lewiston until she reaches Helene’s house. Anyone would know which one it is because of the crowd outside, the line of people waiting patiently in the driveway, most of them out-of-towners, many of them carrying red roses, said to be Helene’s favorite flower.

  Sue has bags of groceries in the backseat, including containers of frozen yogurt, already melting, but she parks and gets out anyway. Something inside her is aching. All of a sudden she feels vulnerable in some odd way. She stands in the street crying, staring at the Boyds’ yellow ranch house, the way the paint is peeling, the bouquets of roses left on the porch. Sue isn’t the only one to be overwhelmed and brought to tears. Lots of people are doing it, just standing there crying. They’re letting it all out, their sorrow, their desperation, their hope, right there, right now, in the presence of Helene’s shrine, for that is what the house has become. There are dozens of lit candles and scores of teddy bears. Sue notices two of her neighbors, Pat Harrington and Liz Howard, and they wave to her. Sue isn’t particularly friendly, she’s always afraid people will say How’s Shelby? But now she finds herself walking over to the other women. They hug her, maybe because she’s crying, or because they pity her for having a daughter like Shelby, or maybe because they remember the scene Sue made on the night of the accident, before they knew which girl was critically injured and which one had nothing more than a hairline fracture underneath all the blood and bruises. Sue hit a cop who tried to hold her back. She rode in the ambulance praying when she didn’t even know she knew how to pray.

  Pat Harrington and Liz Howard run errands for the Boyds. They’re in a group of local women who do the food shopping and help with the laundry and hand out inspirational pamphlets for the people who come for a miracle. Pat gives a healing pamphlet to Sue now. There are two printed photographs of Helene, the way she used to be—a bright, glimmering teenager—and the way she is now, lying in her bed, eyes closed peacefully. The printer has encircled the second photograph with a wreath of roses.

  When Sue gets home, she goes downstairs, even though she tries to avoid the basement. She can hardly bear to see what’s become of Shelby. When the state police told her that her daughter was the one who was alive, Sue knelt in the snow and thanked God. Now she isn’t so sure Shelby has survived. Sue’s eyes adjust to the thin light. There’s Shelby dozing. The basement is smoky and the odor is foul. Like old fruit, perhaps apple cores, and there’s a burning smell that makes her think of sulfur and grief. Had this been a few years ago Sue would have been suspicious that Shelby was in bad company, some trampy girls from high school or a boy who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. She would have called out, Are you smoking down here? The truth is, Helene was always the troublemaker. She had that bad-girl twinkle in her eye, and she always dragged Shelby along, whether it was the time they were caught shoplifting makeup at the Walt Whitman Mall or the time they took the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan and didn’t come home till two a.m. Now she wishes Shelby did have someone with her, anyone would do. She wishes Shelby was getting into trouble, kissing someone, being alive. Sue treads through the dim room, careful not to trip over stray clothing tossed about; she perches on the arm of the couch. Shelby is hunkered down in her single bed, under a blanket, staring at the TV. The light in the room is blue and wavering. It reminds Sue of a night-light. Shelby looks much the way she had as a baby, bald, with those big dark eyes.

  “Mom?” Shelby seems confused. No one ever comes downstairs. “What’s up?”

  There’s a talent show on TV where young people are singing their hearts out. Everyone looks the same to Sue, hopeful and young. The TV itself is old, with a flickering picture and bad sound.

  “You like this show?” It doesn’t seem like something the old Shelby would have spent ten minutes on. She’d been very discriminating back then.

  “It relaxes me,” Shelby says.

  Paralyzes her is more like it. Even as she speaks, she’s staring at the screen. It’s all dots to her, blue and white, like snow.

  “I think there are miracles happening at the Boyds’,” Sue says.

  “Watch this guy.” Shelby gestures to the contestant taking the stage. “He’s crap. I don’t know how he made it through the first audition. People seem to love him even though he’s terrible. Maybe it’s his wavy hair.”

  “Did you hear what I said?” Sue asks.

  Shelby looks at her mother. “The Boyds.” She glances away. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t have any body language, like a zombie. “Let me guess. There are angels on the roof.”

  “We should go together. You should see her.”

  “Really? You think so?” There is a quiver in Shelby’s voice, the same one that was there before she stopped talking and went into the hospital. A recurrence of Shelby’s depression is what Sue Richmond fears more than anything in the world. A crack-up she supposes they call it. A breakdown. You don’t know how to mourn something like that. You don’t know what to think.

  Shelby lifts herself up on one elbow. It takes all of her energy just to do that. Her voice is thick. The quiver is like a wrong note. “You think it’s just fine that they prop Helene up in bed and have strangers come in there and kiss her hand and beg her for whatever they want? You think Helene would be happy with that? People standing around while she moans and drools? She wouldn’t even sneeze in public. She’d rather have blown her brains out holding back a sneeze than embarrass herself and have to blow her nose, and now they have lines of people going into her bedroom while she craps into a plastic bag. You think we should go to that? Is that what Helene would have wanted?”

  Shelby throws herself sideways in her bed, deeper under the blanket, her back to her mother.

  “Maybe she likes the fact that she’s helping people,” Sue says softly. “Maybe that’s the miracle. That her life is worthwhile even now.”

  “Don’t you think I know what she would have liked? I knew her better than anyone!”

  “You’re wrong, Shelby. She’s different now. You don’t know her anymore.”

  Shelby turns to glare at her mother. Deep down, she’s been afraid of that exact thing. “I know more than you do. Just like I know this guy’s going to be voted off this week,” she says of the singer on TV.

  “She wouldn’t know you either.” Sue shakes her head. There’s a certain tenderness in her voice, almost as if she were crying. “You’re nothing like you were. You’re not the same person.”

  “Good,” S
helby declares, to hurt both her mother and herself. “Because I hated myself.”

  Later that same week a second postcard arrives in the mailbox. She’s been waiting for another card ever since she left the hospital. Two years have passed, so she’d just about given up. Now here it is. It’s a photo­graph of Shelby’s house that has been laminated onto a blank card. The message on the back is Do something. Her mom brings it down to the basement. It’s addressed to Shelby, but there’s no stamp, no return address. “Who would send this?” her mother asks. Shelby shrugs. She acts like she’s not excited to have gotten mail, but she is. She feels a little chill of expectation down her spine. There is someone, somewhere, who knows she’s alive. “Somebody writes to me, Mom,” Shelby tries to explain. “They think they know me. Maybe they read about me in the paper.”

  Sue fetches the magnifying glass she uses to read ingredients on food labels and make certain there’s no red dye or MSG involved. “I think that’s you sitting there inside the house.” Sue taps on the card. “Look in the basement window. There’s definitely a little person on the couch.”

  Shelby keeps the postcards in a jewelry box her mother bought her when they went on their trip to Chincoteague Island. There’s a horse painted on the box; the inside lining is blue velvet. Maybe the most recent card is a message from the great beyond. Shelby can’t stop thinking it might have been sent by Helene. She knows this is impossible; all the same, soon afterward she finds herself headed to Lewiston Street, where the Boyds live. She stands on the corner, but she can’t bring herself to go any closer than that. She looks through the dark. She recognizes Mrs. Harrington, who is leaving. Shelby went to school with her daughter, Kelsey, a pretty redhead who excelled at everything and is currently a junior at Brown University.