Keeping Faith Read online

  "You're telling me my daughter--No." Faith is not in religious ecstasy, whatever that is. And why would she have crucifixion wounds when she doesn't know what crucifixion is? I hunch my shoulders. "Those historical instances...were from when?"

  "Hundreds of years ago," Dr. Blumberg admits.

  "This is 1999," I say. "Those things don't happen anymore. Those phenomena get x-rayed and carbon-tested and scientifically proven to be fakes." I turn to Ian Fletcher. "Right?"

  But for once he doesn't say a word.

  "I want to see her hands," I announce. Agreeing, Dr. Blumberg gets to his feet and walks back toward Faith's hospital room. "Honey," I say brightly as I follow him through the swinging door, "the doctor wants to examine you."

  "Then can I go home?"

  "We'll see." I stand at Dr. Blumberg's side as he unwinds the thick bandages. They've been changed daily, but after Faith's scene in the ER, medical personnel are very careful to keep her from getting a glimpse of the wounds. Gently tugging at the gauze with tweezers, the doctor switches on a gooseneck lamp beside the bed and maneuvers his body so that Faith's view will be blocked. He peels back the last of the bandages on Faith's right hand.

  It is just a couple of millimeters wide, the hole, but it is there. The skin surrounding the edges is purple and bruised; there are arrows of dried blood radiating outward. Faith flexes her fingers and, inside, I can see the flash of a needle-thin bone. Yet the wound does not begin to bleed again.

  Dr. Blumberg probes the edges of the wound. Every now and then Faith winces, and at one point he inadvertently moves out of the way enough to let her get a look at her own hand. She lifts it to her face, peering at the pinhole of light coming through from the other side, while we all hold our breath.

  Then she starts to scream.

  Dr. Blumberg rings for a nurse, and Ian Fletcher struggles along with my mother to hold Faith down. "Faith," I soothe. "It's all right. The doctor's going to make it all right."

  "Mommy, there's a rip in my hand!" she shrieks. A nurse comes running into the hospital room with a Styrofoam tray that holds a syringe. Dr. Blumberg firmly grasps Faith's arm and plunges the needle into her thin biceps. After a moment of fighting, she goes limp.

  "I'm sorry about that," Dr. Blumberg murmurs. "I think we ought to continue to keep her here. My suggestion for treatment is to get a psych consult."

  "You think she's crazy?" I say, my voice rising hysterically. "You saw her hand. She's not making this up."

  "I didn't say she was crazy. It's just that the mind is a powerful organ. It can make a person ill just as easily as a virus. And frankly, I don't know the protocol in this sort of situation. I don't know if the mind can cause the body to bleed."

  Tears fill my eyes. "She's seven. Why would she want to do that?"

  I sit down beside Faith on the hospital bed, smoothing her hair while her face relaxes in sleep. Her mouth parts, a bubble rising between her lips. Behind me I hear the doctor speaking softly to my mother. I hear the door open and close twice.

  Little girls, they dream of being princesses. Of owning ponies. Of wearing jewels and ball gowns. Not of bleeding for no reason at all, just to be like Jesus.

  Ian Fletcher's voice falls quietly at my temple. "I interviewed a nun once," he says. "Seventy-six years old, a Carmelite. She'd been cloistered since she was eleven. According to the Reverend Mother, Sister Mary Amelia had been blessed with stigmata." Slowly I turn so that I can look him in the eye. "Everyone thought it was a miracle. Until I found a sewing hook used for ripping out stitches slipped into the hem of Sister Mary Amelia's habit. Turned out there was a very fine line between religious ecstasy and religious insanity."

  You think she did this to herself. I don't have to speak the words; he knows what I am thinking. "Her hands--the sister's--looked nothing like Faith's."

  "What are you saying?"

  He shrugs. "That this is different. That's all."

  All in all, Allen McManus figures it's a cheap trade. A pepperoni pizza and a six-pack for young Henry, who works part-time in production at the Globe, and in return the kid will get on the computer and hack his way into the privileged information of the White family.

  "How come it's taking so long?" Allen asks, gingerly moving a piece of sweaty athletic clothing so that he can sit at the edge of the bed in Henry's room.

  "My modem's only twenty-eight-point-eight," Henry says. "Cool your jets."

  But Allen can't. The more he's learned, the more he's felt anxious. Lately Allen has been remembering quotes from Revelation, hideous stories told by Sister Thalomena in fifth grade about sinners who went to hell. It has been years since he personally went to confession or took communion, and religion for Allen will always be scarred by the bestiality of the nuns who taught his parochial-school classes. But Catholicism runs deep, and this girl has made him rethink his choices. What if, all these years, he's been wrong? How many Hail Marys and Our Fathers comprise a penance for turning one's back on God?

  Suddenly the computer screen begins running with a stream of information. "Credit-card purchases. This is the missus's card."

  Allen leans forward. Lots of groceries, kids'-clothing stores, a couple of L. L. Bean catalog buys. Nothing dicey. "Jeez, they even paid the bill off every month."

  "She did. Let's check out her husband." Henry's fingers fly over the keyboard, pulling up a business American Express card. Slowly, he whistles. "Looks like Mr. White did a bit of socializing on his business trips. Check this out--Lily's Palace of Dancing."

  Allen grunts. "So he was screwing around on his wife. Big deal." Infidelity doesn't naturally lead to setting up one's daughter as a fake Messiah. You do something like that to make yourself look better, to draw attention. Or else you're just plain nuts.

  "Hey, bingo!" Henry shouts. "The legal search turned up a name. It's from the records department of the state of New Hampshire. The courts have to file away all the injunctions and crap--just about anything that's brought before a judge. Looks here like Mr. White tried to have the missus locked up. No, correction: Looks like he succeeded."

  "Let me see." Allen sits down and scrolls through the page. "Holy cow! He had her committed to a mental hospital." He glances at the original order that landed the woman at Greenhaven, at the repeated hearings Millie Epstein instigated to try to get her daughter released.

  Henry lounges on the bed, picking pepperoni out of his teeth. "Lots of fucking crazy people in the world, man."

  But Allen does not hear him. A mental hospital. Now it makes sense. Seven-year-olds don't just start talking to God; someone puts them up to it. And someone who's crossed the edge once, he figures, is more than likely to do it again.

  Getting up from the chair, Allen reaches into a paper sack for a Rolling Rock and tosses one to Henry. "Cool," Henry says. "What are we celebrating?"

  Allen smiles slowly. "Atheism."

  Somehow word has gotten through the hospital grapevine about Faith. Nurses come on the pretense of checking Faith, only to wind up sitting by her side and speaking to her and, in one case, giving Faith a medal of Saint Jude to hold in her mittened hands for a moment.

  Faith does not seem to know what to do. When she is awake, she politely answers questions about school and her favorite Disney movies; when she is asleep, these strangers touch her hair and her cheek as if even that small contact will preserve them.

  My mother has been in a state all day. "This doesn't mean anything," she tells anyone who will listen. "Stigmata, shmigmata. Jews have been waiting fifty-seven hundred years for a Messiah; we're not going to start believing in Jesus now." At one point, when Faith is asleep, she pulls me aside. "Doesn't this bother you? This thing with Faith?"

  "Well, of course," I whisper heatedly. "You think I want her to go through this?"

  "I mean the Catholic thing. Catholic, for God's sake! All these people parading in and out of here like Faith's some saint."

  "Bleeding from her hands doesn't make her Catholic."