Keeping Faith Read online

  Dr. De Vries rubs at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "That Faith is hearing something, and talking to someone. There's too much knowledge there, that's age-and situationally inappropriate, to chalk it up to a figment of her imagination. But it's not a physical illness, and it doesn't appear to be a mental one either." He glances at Dr. Keller. "With your permission, I'll ask Dr. Keller to present this case next week at a psychiatric symposium, to see if our colleagues might have some answers."

  Through the observation glass I watch Faith launch a Sky Dancer into the air. When it hits the fluorescent lights, she laughs and tries to do it again. "I don't know...I don't want her to be some kind of spectacle."

  "She won't be present, Mrs. White. And the case will be presented anonymously."

  "If you do this, will you figure out what the problem is?"

  Dr. De Vries and Dr. Keller exchange a look. "We hope so, Mrs. White," he says. "But it may not be something we can fix."

  FOUR

  There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

  --Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  September 27, 1999

  When Allen McManus is assigned to cover symposiums, he looks upon it as an extra six hours of sleep. From time to time enough highbrow doctors congregate at the Boston Harbor Hotel to warrant sending out a stringer from The Boston Globe. No matter that most of the time Allen McManus writes obituaries--he's the one who gets sent. Obviously his editor-in-chief realizes the connection: Most of these god-awful conferences are enough to bore a person to death.

  Allen slouches in the rear of the auditorium. He's already written down the name of the symposium, which he figures is enough for the two lines of type it deserves. He's ready to cover his face with his hat and take a nap. But then an attractive woman walks up to the podium. That sparks Allen's curiosity. After all, in spite of his profession, he's not dead yet. Most of the speakers at these symposiums are crusty old turds who remind him alternately of his father and the priest from his childhood in Southie who used to rap his knuckles when he didn't quite measure up as altar boy. He sits up, interested in his surroundings for the first time that day.

  The woman is slender and fine-boned, her no-nonsense hair sluiced behind her ears as she settles her notes on the podium. "Good morning, I'm Dr. Mary Keller." Allen watches her eyes flicker over her notes, hesitate. "Ladies and gentlemen," she says, "given the unorthodox subject I'm about to present, I'm not going to read my prepared paper. Instead I'd like to tell you about two case studies. The first is a current patient, seven years old, whose mother brought her in for treatment. The subject has developed an imaginary friend, one that she refers to as her God. The second case study occurred over thirty years ago." Dr. Keller tells of a child at parochial school, forced to kneel for long stretches as penitance. She talks of a day when this five-year-old felt something stir beside her, something warm and solid, only to turn and see nothing at all.

  "The question I place before you today is this," Dr. Keller says. "If there is no physical component to a delusion, if there is no diagnostic framework in which to fit the behaviors as a generally accepted mental illness, what are we left with as a diagnosis?"

  Allen can feel the doctors in the row before him subtly shifting. Holy cow, he thinks, guessing where she's headed. This woman is committing professional suicide.

  "If physical and mental illness is ruled out, is it within the realm of a psychiatrist to authenticate the behavior? To say that, possibly, the delusion is really a vision?" She slowly runs her eyes over the entire disbelieving audience. "The reason I am asking you this is that I know for a fact that at least one, if not both of these subjects, is telling the truth. I know this because the child kneeling in the chapel, and feeling...something indescribable...was me. And because thirty years later, in my own office with another child as a subject, I have felt it again."

  Allen McManus tears his eyes away from Dr. Keller, slips out the back of the auditorium, and places a call to his editor.

  At the departure gate Colin watches Jessica check their tickets for the hundredth time. She looks like any other business traveler, with her tailored suit and laptop case--she looks like Colin himself. To see her, no one would know that at the end of this ten-day sales conference in Las Vegas, she plans to get married in a drive-through church and gamble her way through a weeklong honeymoon.

  "Are you excited?" she purrs, leaning into him. "Because I am."

  "I, uh, need to hit the bathroom." Colin gives her a smile and walks off, ostensibly toward the men's room. He does not know how he feels about getting married in Las Vegas. Performed by a hack justice of the peace, with an Elvis impersonator serenading them and bargain bouquets available for five dollars a pop, it will be considerably different from his wedding to Mariah.

  It had been Jessica's idea. They were headed to Vegas anyway for the conference. "Besides"--she had laughed, rubbing her abdomen--"imagine the stories we can tell him."

  He wonders now if his marriage to Mariah might have lasted, had he married her at the Light of the Moon chapel in Vegas instead of at St. Thomas's in Virginia, with more pomp and circumstance than a royal wedding. If he'd been willing to do--what was it called? the hora!--or break a glass beneath his foot, if he hadn't just assumed that his way was the right way, maybe their differences wouldn't have been so pronounced. As it is, Colin blames himself for what happened to his ex-wife. He asked her to bend to his wishes so much that she actually broke.

  Instead of entering the men's room, Colin sits down in a narrow phone cubicle and calls his former home. "Mariah," he says when she answers.

  There is a moment's pause. "Colin." Even though he tries not to, he can hear the thread of delight wrapped around her voice. It makes him uncomfortable; it always has. Who in his right mind wants to be someone else's savior?

  Colin presses his forehead against the metal wall of the booth and tries to find the words for what he must say. "How's Faith's back?" he asks instead.

  "Much better. She's wearing shirts now."

  "Good."

  In the silence that follows, Colin suddenly remembers how uncomfortable Mariah once was with spaces in conversation. She'd rush into sentences, chatter about nothing, rather than sit through the delay. Yet here she is, close-mouthed, as if she is trying to hold in a secret just as much as he is.

  "You're okay?" she finally asks.

  "Yeah. Headed to Las Vegas for a conference."

  "Oh," she says softly, flatly, and he knows what she means with that one word: How is it your life has gone on? "I guess you're calling for Faith, then."

  "Is that...would it be okay?"

  "You're her father, Colin. Of course it's okay."

  There is a shuffle of static, and before Colin can say anything else to Mariah, Faith is on the line. "Hi, Daddy."

  "Hey, cupcake." He wraps the metal snake of the phone line around his arm. "I wanted to tell you I'm going away for a few weeks."

  "You always go away."

  It strikes Colin that she is right. With the amount of travel he does for his job, his memories of Faith--and presumably hers of him--almost always involve good-byes or reunions. "But I always miss you."

  "I miss you, too." Faith sniffs and hands the phone back to Mariah.

  "Sorry," she says. "She's a little unpredictable these days."

  "Well. It's understandable."

  "Sure."

  "She's just a kid."

  "I know. I'm sure she appreciates that you called."

  Colin marvels at how strange they both sound: Mariah's words had once rifled over him like a waves on the beach, continuous patter about dry-cleaning tickets and school conferences and sales at the grocery store that he never really listened to, never noticed, until they stopped and he saw with surprise that he was buried up to his neck in the sand of this marriage. He wonders how you can go in the blink of an eye from speaking words that are as thoughtlessly dropped as pocket change to this, where even the most benign