Keeping Faith Read online

  "Oh, for God's sake!" my mother exclaims, scowling. "You are having a setback."

  "Why? Why is it so hard to accept that Faith might be talking to God?"

  "Ask Moses' mother."

  Just then, something strikes me. "You don't believe her! Your own granddaughter!"

  My mother peers down the hall to make sure Faith is still occupied. "Could you lower your voice?" she hisses. "I didn't say that I don't believe Faith. I'm just reserving judgment."

  "You believed in me. Even when I tried to kill myself, when Colin and a judge and the entire staff at Greenhaven said I had to be committed, you stuck up for me."

  "That was one thing. That was an isolated incident, and I was going against Colin's word." She throws up her hands. "People are still being killed in the name of religion, Mariah."

  "So if she was seeing Abraham Lincoln, or Cleopatra, that would make a difference? God's not a four-letter word, Ma."

  "Still," my mother says. "It might as well be."

  September 23, 1999

  In the mail that afternoon I get the electric bill, the phone bill, and divorced.

  The envelope looks official, stamped with the address of the Grafton County Courthouse and thick with a sheaf of papers. I slit it open with my thumb and get a paper cut. Just like that, in six weeks, my marriage is over. I think of traditions I've heard from other parts of the world--Native Americans leaving a man's shoes outside a tepee; Arabs saying "I divorce you" three times--and suddenly they don't seem as silly. I try to imagine Colin and his attorney, standing in front of the judge at a meeting I did not even know about. I wonder if I am supposed to keep this paper in my safe-deposit box, nestled beside my marriage license and my passport, but it is hard to imagine so many years fitting into such a tiny space.

  Suddenly my heart feels too big for my chest. For years I've done what Colin wanted me to do. I acted like women I'd once watched from a distance: wearing boiled-wool jackets and Lilly Pulitzer prints, inviting his colleagues' children to tea parties, draping garland over the mantel at Christmas. I turned into a shell he could be proud of. I was his wife, and if I'm not that any longer, I don't really know what to be.

  I try to envision Colin in his college football uniform. I try to see him grasping my hand at our wedding. I try, but I can't succeed--the pictures are too fuzzy or too distant to do the memory justice. Maybe this is how it works with failures of the heart. Maybe you edit your history, so that the stories you tell yourself become legend, so that accidents never happened. But then again, all I will have to do is look at Faith and know that I am only fooling myself.

  I toss the mail onto the kitchen table like a gauntlet. The worst thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task of starting over.

  "God help me," I say, burying my face in my hands, and I let myself cry.

  "Mommy," Faith yells, racing into the kitchen, "there's a book about me!" She dances around me as I chop carrots for supper. "Can we get it? Can we?"

  I look down, because I have not seen her this animated in a while. The Risperdal initially made her groggy and slow. It is only in the past day or so that her body seems to have overcome these side effects. "I don't know. Where did you hear about it?"

  "From my guard," she answers, and I feel that familiar twist of my insides. Faith pulls the stool beneath the dry-erase memo board and with great concentration scrawls I. I. Swerbeh. "That's the guy who wrote it. Please?"

  I look at the carrots, splayed like pickup sticks on the butcher block. At the chicken, naked and blushing with paprika, waiting on top of the oven. The library in town is only a ten-minute ride. "Okay. Go get your library card."

  Faith is so excited that I feel a pang of guilt, since I am planning to use this as proof that her mind is playing tricks. When there is no I. I. Swerbeh, maybe she'll believe there is no guard.

  Sure enough, there is no record of this author on either the library's computerized card catalog or the dusty old shelved one. "I don't know, Faith. This doesn't look promising."

  "At school, the librarian says that because our town's little, we sometimes have to borrow books from other libraries at other schools. And we can if we fill out a piece of paper. So maybe we just have to ask the librarian here."

  Humor her, I think. Holding Faith's hand, I approach the children's librarian. "We're looking for a book by an I.I. Swerbeh."

  "A children's book?"

  Faith nods. "It's about me."

  The librarian smiles. "Well, I guess you've checked the catalogs. It's not an author I'm familiar with..." She stops, tapping her chin. "How old are you?"

  "I'm going to be eight in ten and a half months."

  The librarian squats down to Faith's level. "How did you find out about this book?"

  Faith's eyes dart toward me. "Someone showed me the name. Wrote it down."

  "Ah." The librarian takes a piece of paper from her desk. "I used to teach first grade. It's developmentally normal at that age for children to reverse letters." She writes the author's name backward. "There you go. Makes a little more sense."

  Faith squints at the word, sounds it out. "What's a HEBREWS?"

  "I think the book you're looking for is right over here," the librarian says, plucking a Bible off the reference shelf. She opens up to the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 11, and winks.

  "It is!" Faith crows, spotting the letters of her name. "It is about me!"

  I stare at the page. Forty verses, all about what has already been accomplished by faith.

  Faith begins to read, limping over the words. "'Now faith is the sub...sub..."

  "Substance."

  "'The substance of things hoped for,'" she repeats. "'The evidence of things not seen.'" As she continues, I close my eyes and try to come up with a valid explanation. Faith might have seen this before, might have noticed her name sandwiched between other unfamiliar words. But we don't even own a Bible.

  I have always envied people who believe strongly in religion, people who could face a tragedy by praying and know that it would be all right. As unscientific as it seems, well, it would be nice to lay the responsibilities and pain on someone else's larger shoulders.

  If you had asked me a month ago whether or not I believed in God, I would have said yes. If you had asked me whether I'd like my child to grow up with that same belief, I would have said yes. I just wasn't willing to teach it to her.

  I hadn't taught it to her.

  "Tell your God," I whisper. "Tell her that I believe."

  As far as I know, before this all happened Faith had asked me only once about God. She was five, and had just learned the Pledge of Allegiance in school. "'Under God,'" she recited to me, and then in the next breath, "What's God?" I floundered for a moment, trying to find a way to explain without dragging religious differences, or for that matter, Jesus into it.

  "Well," I said, thinking of words that she'd know, "God is kind of like the biggest angel of all. He's way up in the sky, living in a place called heaven. And His job is to watch over us, and make sure we're all doing okay."

  Faith mulled this over for a moment. "He's like a big babysitter."

  I relaxed. "Exactly."

  "But you said He," Faith pointed out. "All of my babysitters are girls."

  As hard as it is to hear Dr. Keller saying Faith is having psychotic hallucinations of God, it is harder to consider the alternative. Things like this do not happen to little girls, I tell myself during a sleepless night, until I realize I have no right to make that judgment. Maybe this is a seven-year-old stage, like looking for monsters under the bed or falling for Hanson. The next morning I leave Faith with my mother and drive to Dartmouth College's Baker Library. There I ask a librarian some questions about children's perceptions of God and then walk through the dark maze of bookshelves until I find the book she's recommended. I'm expecting Dr. Spock, some treatise on childrearing, but instead she's directed me to Butler's Lives of the Saints.

  Just for the heck of it, I crack the old