Keeping Faith Read online

  "Do you think Colin will want joint custody of your daughter?"

  I stare at the attorney. "I don't know." I cannot imagine Colin living without Faith. But then again I cannot imagine myself living without Colin.

  Joan Standish narrows her eyes and sits down on her desk, across from me. "If you don't mind my saying so, Mrs. White," she begins, "you seem a little...removed from all this. It's a very common reaction, you know, to just deny what's been legally set into motion, and therefore to just let the whole thing steamroll over you. But I can assure you that your husband has, in fact, started the judicial wheels turning to dissolve your marriage."

  I open my mouth, then snap it shut again.

  "What?" she asks. "If I'm going to represent you, you'll have to confide in me."

  I look into my lap. "It's just that...well. We went through this, sort of, once before. What happens to all...this...if he decides to come back?"

  The attorney leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees. "Mrs. White, you truly see no difference between then and now? Did he hurt you last time?" I nod. "Did he promise you he'd change? Did he come back to you?" She smiles gently. "Did he sue for divorce last time?"

  "No," I murmur.

  "The difference between then and now," Joan Standish says, "is that this time he's done you a favor."

  Our seats for the circus are in the very first row. "Ma," I ask, "how did you get tickets this close?"

  My mother shrugs. "I slept with the ringmaster," she whispers, and then laughs at her own joke. Her surprise from yesterday involved a trip to the Concord Ticket Master, to get us all seats at the Ringling Brothers Circus, playing in Boston. She reasoned that Faith needed something that might get her excited enough to chatter again. And once she heard about the libel, she said that I should consider the trip to Boston a celebration.

  My mother hails a man selling Sno-Cones and buys one for Faith. The clowns are working the stands. I see some that I recognize--could they be the same after all these years? One with a white head and a blue smile leans over the low divider in front of us. He points to his suspenders, polka-dotted, then to Faith's spotted shirt, and claps his hands. When Faith blushes, he mutely mouths the word "Hello." Faith's eyes go wide, then she answers him, just as silently.

  The clown reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a greasepaint crayon. He cups Faith's chin in one hand, and with the other draws a wide, splitting smile over her lips. He colors musical notes on her throat and winks.

  He hops away from the divider, ready to entertain some other child, and then turns back at the last minute. Before I can manage to duck away, he reaches for my face. His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

  Although it is not something I remember, when I was little I tried to join the circus.

  My parents took me to the Boston Garden every year when Ringling Brothers came to town, and to say I loved it would be an understatement. In the weeks leading up to the show I'd wake in the middle of the night, my chest tight with flips and my eyes blind with sequins, my sheets smelling of tigers and ponies and bears. When I was actually at the circus, I'd school my eyes not to blink, aware that it would be gone as quickly as the cotton candy that melted away to nothing in the heat of my mouth.

  The year I was seven I was mesmerized by the Elephant Girl. The daughter of the ringmaster, glittering and sure, she stepped on the trunk of an enormous elephant and shimmied up it, the way I sometimes walked up the playground slide. She sat with her thighs clamped around the thick, bristly neck of the elephant and stared at me the whole time she circled the center ring. Don't you wish, she said silently, that you were like me?

  That year, like all the other years, my mother made me get up ten minutes before the intermission, so that we could beat the bathroom lines. She towed me to the ladies' room, both of us crowding into the tiny stall, and she loomed like a djinn with her arms crossed over me as I squatted to pee. When I was done, she said, "Now wait till I'm finished."

  My mother tells me that I had never crossed the street without reaching for her hand, never reached toward a hot stove; even as an infant, I'd never put small objects in my mouth. But that day, while she was in the toilet, I ducked beneath the door of the stall and disappeared.

  I do not remember this. I also do not remember how I made my way past the green-coated security guards, out the door, and into the huge lot where the circus had set up its trailers. Of course, I do not remember how the ringmaster himself announced my name in hopes of finding me, how the murmurs of a lost little girl ran like fire, how my parents spent the show searching the halls. I can't recall the chalky face of the circus hand who found me, who pronounced it a wonder that I hadn't been trampled or gored. And I can't imagine what my parents thought, to discover me nestled between the lethal tusks of a sleeping elephant, my hair matted with straw and spit, his trunk curled over my shoulders like the arm of an old love.

  I don't know why I'm telling you this, except to make you see that maybe, like eye color and bone structure, miracles are passed down through the bloodlines.

  The Elephant Girl has grown up. Of course, I cannot be sure they are one and the same, but here is a woman in a spangly costume with the same red-gold hair and wise eyes as the girl I remember. She leads a baby elephant around the center ring and tosses it a purple ball; she bows grandly to the audience and lets the elephant wave over her shoulder. Then from the side curtains comes a child, a little girl so like the one in my past that I wonder if time stands completely still beneath a big top. But then I watch the Elephant Woman help the girl ride the baby elephant around the ring, and I see that they are mother and daughter.

  A look passes between them, one that makes me glance at Faith. Her eyes are so bright I can see the Elephant Girl's sequins reflected in them. Suddenly the clown who was here before is leaning over the divider, motioning wildly to Faith, who nods and falls over the railing into his arms. She waves back at us, her face mobile as she marches off to be part of the pre-intermission extravaganza. My mother scoots into Faith's seat. "Did you see that? Oh, I knew we should have brought the camera."

  And then in a buffet of light and booming voice, the circus performers and animals parade around the trio of rings. I look around, trying to find Faith. "Over there!" my mother calls. "Yoo-hoo! Faith!" She points past the ringmaster and the caged tigers to my daughter, who is riding in front of the Elephant Lady on a tremendous tusked beast.

  I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be. The searchlights wing over the crowd, and in spite of the cheers and the fanfare I can still hear my mother surreptitiously unwrapping a Brach's butterscotch candy in the belly of her purse.

  A trained dog, spooked by something, leaps out of the arms of a clown in a hoopskirt. The dog streaks between the ringmaster's legs, over the satin train of a trapeze artist, and just in front of Faith's elephant, causing it to trumpet and rear up on its legs.

  If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget how long it took to watch Faith tumble to the sawdust, how panic swelled into my eardrums and blocked out all other sound, how the clown who'd befriended her rushed over, only to bump against the juggler and knock the spinning knives out of his hands, so that the three bright blades fell and sliced across my daughter's back.

  Faith lies unconscious on her belly in a hospital bed at Mass General, so small she barely takes up half the length of the mattress. An IV drips into her arm to ward off infection, the doctor says, although he is confident because the lacerations were not deep. Still, they were deep enough to require twenty stitches. My jaw is so tight from being clenched that a shudder runs down my spine, and my mother must know how close I am to falling apart, because she has a quiet word with a nurse, touches Faith's hair, and pulls me out of the room.

  We don't speak until we reach a small supply closet, which my mother appropriates for our use. Pushing me