Keeping Faith Read online

  August 30, 1999

  Colin White sits in his business suit on a bench at the playground, watching mothers and nannies chase toddlers beneath the jungle gym. His egg-salad sandwich remains in its plastic wrapper, untouched. Without even taking a bite, he balls it up and stuffs it back into the brown paper bag from the deli.

  That little girl, the one on the monkey bars, looks something like Faith. Same curl to her hair, even if it's a shade too dark. She keeps making it to the third rung, then slipping free and falling to the ground. Colin remembers Faith doing the same thing: practicing and practicing until she could make it across. He wants to move closer, but he knows better. In this day and age it will only make him look like a pedophile, not a man who simply misses his child.

  He runs his hands through his hair. What the hell was he thinking? The answer was, he hadn't been thinking at all when he'd brought Jessica back to his house that afternoon. A ballet class is not a sure thing; he should have known that Faith and Mariah might come home unexpectedly. In the three weeks that have passed, he can still remember every nuance of the looks on Faith's and Mariah's faces when Jessica walked out of the bathroom. He can still remember how Faith stared right through him when he finally caught up to her in her bedroom, as if she was old enough to know that the excuses he was making were transparent.

  He had hurt Mariah, too, but then again, living with a woman who refused to accept that there was any problem with their marriage would take its toll on a saint. Every time he tried to force Mariah to face facts, he left shaking, afraid that he'd come home and find her trying to kill herself. Initially he'd gone out with Jessica just to have someone to confide in.

  And now he loves her.

  Colin closes his eyes. It's one hell of a mess.

  The little girl on the monkey bars finishes swinging over the last rung and lands a few feet away from Colin, kicking up a cloud of dust. "Oh," she says, grinning up at him. "Sorry."

  "No problem."

  "Can you tie my shoe?"

  He smiles. One thing he has learned about young children: To them, adults are interchangeable. Anyone of similar fatherlike age might be asked to take care of these things. He bends down over the laces of her sneaker, realizing at close range that this girl is younger than Faith, heavier, unmistakably different.

  The girl climbs the short ladder on one end of the monkey bars.

  "You watch me," she calls out, artlessly proud. "This time I'm going to get it right."

  Colin finds himself holding his breath as the child swings out with her left arm, then her right, reaching for the metal rungs and curling her knuckles over them, even though it is an unlikely stretch, even though it is sure to leave her aching. He continues to watch, until he sees her safely across to the other side.

  For seven, she knows a lot of things. She knows that monarch caterpillars live in the folds of milkweed leaves, that tights are never as tight as leggings, that "We'll see" always means "No." She has learned enough of the world to realize that it is a place of grownups, and that the only way to leave her mark is to speak at the ends of their sentences and act so much like them that they sit up and take notice. She knows that the minute she falls asleep, her teddy bear's sewed-shut eyes snap open. She knows that truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.

  She also knows, although everyone is careful to keep it from her, that they are all still talking. Faith has been home from the hospital for three days now, although she isn't comfortable wearing a shirt yet. Every time she does, she feels the cuts open up and bleed, and she worries that in the winter she will either freeze to death or else leak bone dry.

  During the day Grandma comes over and plays spit and go fish, and she doesn't care at all that Faith is wearing only her shorts. Her mother sits on the couch and stares at Faith's back when she thinks no one is looking, as if Faith couldn't feel the weight of her eyes anyway. When Grandma leaves after dinner, sometimes there are conversations with big, fat, white spaces, so that it seems like whole hours pass between the sentences Faith and her mother speak.

  Tonight Faith is picking at the peas on her dinner plate when the doorbell rings. Grandma raises her eyebrows, and her mother shrugs. They are like that, can speak without saying a thing, because they know each other so well. With Faith and her mom, though, it's a different type of quiet, one brought on by not knowing each other at all. Faith watches her mother go to the front door, and as soon as she's out of sight, Faith takes a forkful of peas and hides them under her thigh.

  "Oh!" Her mother's voice is full of air and light. "You're just in time for dinner."

  "I can't stay," Faith hears her father answer. She stiffens, feels the peas pop beneath her leg. She has seen her father once since That Day. He came to the hospital with a big stuffed teddy bear that was the ugliest one she'd ever seen, and the whole time he held her hand and talked to her she was picturing that lady that came out of the bathroom as if she lived there. She does not know why the woman was taking a shower in the middle of the afternoon, or why that made her mother cry. She knows only that the whole event had a color about it, like the scribbles of a crayon gone crazy off the page--the same blue-black she sometimes imagined when she was lying in bed and could hear, through the walls, her parents fighting.

  Her father walks into the kitchen and kisses her on the forehead. "Hey, cookie!" He pretends not to look at her back the same way her mother does. "How's my pumpkin pie?" Faith stares at him, and she wonders why he calls her only by the names of food.

  "For God's sake, Mariah!" Her grandma gets to her feet. "How could you let him in?"

  "For Faith--I had to."

  Grandma snorts. "For Faith. Right." She comes closer to Faith's father, and for a moment Faith wonders if Grandma is going to sock him one right then and there. But she only pokes him in the side with her finger. "Good-bye, Colin. You're not needed."

  "Lay off, Millie, will you?"

  Her mother reappears with a plate. "Here," she sings. "No trouble at all."

  "Mariah, I can't stay. I told you that."

  "It's only dinner--"

  "I have other plans."

  "You could cancel them. It would be nice for Fai--"

  "Jessica's waiting in the car," her father says tightly. "All right?"

  Faith scurries away from her father's voice, taking shelter beneath her grandmother's arm. Her mother wilts into a chair, the plate clattering so that peas spill across the table like polka dots. Her father's jaw is working funny, no words coming out. Finally he says, "I just wanted to see my daughter. I'm sorry." Then he touches Faith's shoulder and walks out.

  "God, Ma! Did you have to say that?"

  "Yes! Since you wouldn't!"

  "I don't need your help." Faith's mother presses her hands to her head. "Just leave."

  Faith begins to panic. She did not want her father there either, but that was only because she knew that it would all come down to a scene like this. Once in school her teacher had filled a bowl with water and sprinkled pepper on top. Then she dripped dishwashing soap down the side, and the pepper went flying away. For some reason, when Faith thinks of her mother and father, that always comes to mind, too.

  "Faith," her grandmother says, "maybe you should sleep at my house tonight."

  Her mother shakes her head. "No way. She's staying here."

  "Wonderful!"

  Faith tries to figure out what is so wonderful about it. She wants to go to her grandmother's. Her mother will just mope around and stick a video in the VCR for her. At her grandma's, she gets to sleep in the guest room, with the beastly black sewing machine in the corner and the box of buttons and the small bowl of sugar cubes on the nightstand.

  But then her grandmother is saying good-bye and her mother is muttering about reverse psychology and it is just the two of them, with all the dishes on the table. For a long time Faith watches her mother. She sits with her head in her hands, so still that Faith thinks she's fallen