Keeping Faith: A Novel
her life seen anything so sad.
Except maybe the tortoise at the San Diego Zoo two summers ago, which had lifted its great head and stared right at Faith, willing her to help him go back to where he once had been.
Her mother’s voice is thin and creaky. “I can’t.” She walks out of the room, leaving Faith behind to wonder, once again, what magic words might keep her mother close by.
Mariah has always believed there ought to be a network for the lovelorn, patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous, devoted to helping those who are crippled by broken hearts.
Surely there are enough of us, she thinks, people who would benefit from a buddy system for the moments when you catch your sweetheart with his arm around another woman, or when he calls but does not want to speak to you, or when you see in his eyes that he has already started to forget you. She imagines having the name of a Good Samaritan who will talk on the phone like a seventh-grade girlfriend, draw you a dartboard with his face on it, take the ache away.
But instead she stares at the small business card with her psychiatrist’s beeper number. She is not supposed to call unless it is an emergency, which in her case would probably mean the profound desire to cut open her wrists or hang herself from the closet rack. She wants to talk to someone, but she does not know whom. Her mother is her closest friend, but she’s just sent Millie away. Other women she knows have husbands who work with Colin; they are couples who are probably going out to dinner with him and Jessica. She feels something bitter rise in the back of her throat. It does not seem right that this woman should get her husband, her friends, and her old life.
There is much Mariah has to do. She ought to check on Faith, give her her antibiotics, change the dressing on her stitches before she goes to bed. She ought to call her mother and apologize. At the very least she ought to clean up the dinner table.
Instead she finds herself staring at the bed.
All night she imagines that she is falling into dips and runnels of the mattress, as if Colin and Jessica have literally left their marks. She tugs the comforter off and makes herself a nest on the floor. She piles the sheets on top and lies down, picturing Colin’s face the way she once did in her narrow bed in a college dormitory. She stays perfectly still, oblivious to the tears that come without warning, a geyser, a hot spring with the power to heal.
Her mother is crying, Faith knows, hard enough that she can’t catch her breath. It’s a quiet sound,
but all the same as hard to block out with a pillow as her parents’ fights used to be. It makes her feel like crying, too. Faith thinks about calling her grandmother but remembers that her grandmother takes the phone off the hook at 7:00 P.m. to foil telemarketers. So she curls up on top of her bed, shirtless, holding the old bear that smells like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.
She stays that way for a long time, and then dreams about a person wearing a long white nightgown who is sitting across from her. Immediately–she’s been warned of strangers–she shrinks away.
“Faith,” the person says. “You don’t have to be afraid.”
Long dark hair, sad dark eyes. “Do I know you?”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.” Faith wants so badly to touch the nightgown of this stranger. She’s never seen anything like it. It seems so soft you might fall into it and never find your way out. “Are you a friend of my mom’s?”
“I’m your guard.”
She thinks about that for a moment, puzzling out whether or not a person you’ve never seen before can slip unannounced into your life.
“Who are you talking to?” Suddenly Faith’s mother stands in the doorway, her eyes red and swollen and her hands holding a tube of Bacitracin.
Startled, Faith glances around the room, but the stranger–and the dream–is gone. “Nobody,” she says, then turns around so that her mother can tend to her stitches.
Two nights

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