Keeping Faith: A Novel by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

later Mariah wakes up with a start. She walks barefoot down the hall, aware before she even gets there that Faith is missing.
“Faith?” she whispers. “Faith!” She rips the comforter from the empty bed and checks in the closet. She peeks her head inside the bathroom and then clatters down the stairs to check in the playroom and the kitchen. By now her head is throbbing and her palms are damp. “Faith,” she yells, “where are you?”
Mariah thinks of the stories she’s read in the news, of children who’ve been abducted from their own houses in the dead of the night. She imagines a hundred different terrors that exist just beyond the edge of the driveway. Then she sees a flash of silver through the window.
Outside in the yard Faith is gingerly crawling across the pressure-treated beam that forms the top of the swing set, ten feet above the ground.
She’s done it before, catlike, and terrified Mariah, who was certain she’d fall. “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing out here in the middle of the night?” Mariah says softly, so as not to startle her.
Faith glances down, not at all surprised to be discovered. “My guard told me to come.”
Of all the things Mariah expected to hear, that is not one of them. “Your what?”
“My guard.”
“What guard?”
“My friend.” Faith grins, giddy with the truth of it. “She’s my friend.”
Mariah tries to remember the faces of Faith’s little playmates. But none have come to visit since Colin left, their families adhering to the New England tradition of keeping one’s nose out of a neighbor’s bad business,
lest it be contagious. “Does she live around here?”
“I don’t know,” Faith says. “Ask her.”
Mariah suddenly feels her chest pinch.
Since Greenhaven she has pictured her mind as a series of glass dominoes, capable of being felled by a puff of breath in the right direction.
She wonders if dissociation from reality is genetically based, like hair color or a tendency to gain weight. “Is … is your friend here now?”
Faith snorts. “What do you think?”
A trick question. “Yes?”
Faith laughs and sits up, straddling the beam and swinging her feet. “Come down before you get hurt,” Mariah scolds.
“I won’t get hurt. My guard told me.”
“Bully for her,” Mariah mutters, climbing onto one of the swings so that she can grab for her daughter. As she comes closer, she can hear Faith singsonging under her breath to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”: “”But the fruit o-of the tree … which is in the mid-dle of the garden …”"
“Inside,” Mariah says with authority.
“Now.”
It is not until her daughter is tucked into bed that Mariah realizes, for the first time since the circus accident, Faith’s back has healed enough for her to be wearing a nightgown.
Except for the fact that Dr. Keller’s Barbie is bald, Faith likes playing with the toys. There are Koosh mitts and a dollhouse and crayons shaped like ducks and pigs and stars. The Barbie, though, gives her the creeps. It has little pimply holes where its hair ought to be, and it looks all wrong. It reminds Faith of the time she dropped a Baby Go Potty doll and its chest cracked off to reveal a pump and batteries, instead of the storybook heart she’d imagined there.
Mostly, though, Faith likes coming to see Dr. Keller. She thought that maybe she’d have to get shots or even that test where they stick the really long Q-tip down your throat, but Dr.
Keller only watches her play and sometimes asks her questions. Then she goes off into the room where Faith’s mother is waiting, and Faith gets to play even longer all by herself.
Today Dr. Keller is sitting on a chair,
writing in her notebook. Faith picks up a puppet, one with a queen’s crown, and then lets it slide off her hand. She digs her hands into the tub full of crayons and lets the colors fall through her fingers. Then she walks across the room and stares down at the bald Barbie. She grabs it and carries it