Keeping Faith Read online

  Jodi Picoult

  Keeping Faith

  FOR LAURA GROSS--

  Ten years ago you believed in me so strongly that you managed to convince the publishing world I was worth the risk, too. Here's to another forty or fifty years of business, and friendship. Now do you see why I couldn't dedicate this to Padre Pio?

  Contents

  Prologue

  Under normal circumstances, Faith and I should not be home...

  Book I

  The Old Testament

  One

  There are certain things I do not talk about.

  Two

  Ian Fletcher is standing in the middle of hell. He...

  Three

  At Greenhaven there was a woman who believed that the...

  Four

  When Allen McManus is assigned to cover symposiums, he looks...

  Five

  For many hours after my mother comes back to life...

  Six

  Ian's grandmother had been a dyed-in-the-wool Southern belle who wore...

  Seven

  Two days later Faith is still in the hospital. As...

  Eight

  For the record," Millie says, "I'm against this."

  Nine

  The first time Colin kissed me, I was a college...

  Book II

  The New Testament

  Ten

  Mariah stands beside Joan in the middle of the judge's...

  Eleven

  When I was Faith's age, I learned that I was...

  Twelve

  Jessica White adjusts a pale-green glass vase an inch to...

  Thirteen

  The man," Joan announces, slinging her briefcase onto our kitchen...

  Fourteen

  There had been times, when Faith was an infant and...

  Fifteen

  It takes several long seconds before Joan's words sink in...

  Sixteen

  Because it is bitterly cold, the snow does not stick...

  Seventeen

  That," I sing, "was incredible!" Inside me, it feels as...

  Eighteen

  Who the hell am I," says Ian, "to tell you...

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Other Books by Jodi Picoult

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  August 10, 1999

  Under normal circumstances, Faith and I should not be home when my mother calls and invites us to come see her brand-new coffin.

  "Mariah," my mother says, clearly surprised when I pick up the phone. "What are you doing there?"

  "The grocery store was closed." I sigh. "The sprinklers in the produce section had a flood. And the dry cleaner had a death in the family."

  I do not like surprises. I live by lists. In fact, I often imagine my life like a September loose-leaf binder--neatly slotted and tabbed, with everything still in place. All this I attribute to a degree in architecture and my fervent intent to not turn into my mother as I grow older. To this end, every day of the week has a routine. Mondays I work on the frames of the tiny dollhouses I build. Tuesdays I build the furnishings. Wednesdays are for errands, Thursdays for house-cleaning, and Fridays for tending to emergencies that crop up during the week. Today, a Wednesday, I usually pick up Colin's shirts, go to the bank, and do the food shopping. It leaves just enough time to drive home, unload the groceries, and get to Faith's one o'clock ballet class. But today, due to circumstances beyond my control, I have entirely too much time on my hands.

  "Well," my mother says, in that way of hers. "It seems you're fated to come for a visit."

  Faith suddenly bounces in front of me. "Is it Grandma? Did she get it?"

  "Get what?" It is ten o'clock, and already I have a headache.

  "Tell her yes," my mother says on the other end of the phone line.

  I glance around the house. The carpet needs to be vacuumed, but then what will I do on Thursday? A heavy August rain throbs against the windows. Faith spreads her soft, warm hand over my knee. "Okay," I tell my mother. "We'll be right over."

  My mother lives two and a half miles away, in an old stone house that everyone in New Canaan calls the Gingerbread Cape. Faith sees her nearly every day; stays with her after school on days I am working. We could walk, if not for the weather. As it is, Faith and I have just gotten into the car when I remember my purse, sitting on the kitchen counter.

  "Hang on," I tell her, getting out and cringing between raindrops, as if I might melt.

  The phone is ringing by the time I get inside. I grab the receiver. "Hello?"

  "Oh, you're home," Colin says. At the sound of my husband's voice, my heart jumps. Colin is the sales manager for a small company that manufactures LED exit signs, and he's been in Washington, D.C., for two days, training a new rep. He is calling me because it is like that with us--tied as tight as the lacing on a high-top boot, we cannot stand being apart.

  "Are you at the airport?"

  "Yeah. Stuck at Dulles." I curl the telephone cord around my arm, reading between the round vowels of his words for all the other things he is too embarrassed to say in a public venue: I love you. I miss you. You're mine. In the background a disembodied voice announces the arrival of a United flight. "Hasn't Faith got swimming today?"

  "Ballet at one o'clock." I wait a moment, then add softly, "When will you be home?"

  "As soon as I can." I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

  He hangs up without saying good-bye, which makes me smile. That's Colin, in a nutshell: already rushing to come back home to me.

  It stops raining on the way to my mother's. As we pass the long soccer field that edges the town, vehicles begin pulling onto the road's narrow shoulder. A perfect, arched rainbow graces the lush grass of the playing field. I keep driving. "You'd think they'd never seen one before," I say, accelerating.

  Faith rolls down her window and stretches out her hand. Then she waggles her fingers in front of me. "Mommy!" she yells. "I touched it!"

  Out of habit I look down. Her fingers are spread and streaked with red and blue and lime green. For a moment, my breath catches. And then I remember her sitting on the floor of the living room just an hour before, her fists full of Magic Markers.

  My mother's living room is dominated by an unappealing Naugahyde sectional couch the color of skin. I tried to talk her into leather, a nice wing chair or two, but she laughed. "Leather," she said, "is for goyim with Mayflower names." After that, I gave up. In the first place, I have a leather couch myself. In the second, I married a goy with a Mayflower name. At least she hasn't coated the Naugahyde with a protective plastic wrap, the way my grandmother Fanny did when I was little.

  But today, walking into the living room, I do not even notice the couch. "Wow, Grandma," whispers Faith, clearly awed. "Is someone in it?" She falls to her knees, knocking at the highly polished mahogany rectangle.

  If things had gone according to plan, I'd probably be choosing cantaloupes at that moment, holding them to my nose for softness and sweetness, or paying Mr. Li thirteen dollars and forty cents, and receiving in return seven Brooks Brothers shirts, so starched that they lay like the torsos of fallen men in the back of the station wagon. "Mother," I say, "why do you have a casket in your living room?"

  "It's not a casket, Mariah. See the glass on the top? It's a coffin table."

  "A coffin table."

  My mother sets her coffee mug on the clear plate of glass to prove her point. "See?"

  "You have a coffin in your living room." I am unable to get past that one sticking point.

  She sits on the couch and props her san