Mariah straightens with a groan, having finished tying Faith's sneakers into double knots. It is Thursday, the day for vacuuming and returning library books and buying fresh corn at the farmstand and, these days, for Faith's appointment with Dr. Keller. "Okay. Let's go."
"Mommy," Faith says, "you have to do hers, too."
Sighing, Mariah squats again and pretends to tie the shoes of Faith's imaginary friend. "Mommy...she's got buckles."
After a moment Mariah stands. "Are we ready now?" She cuts in front of her daughter, grabs her purse, and opens the front door. Once Faith is outside, Mariah remains for a moment, so that her guard has a chance to walk out the door, too.
A smile wreathes Faith's face, and she slides her hand into Mariah's on the way to the car. "She says thank you."
Mariah never would have chosen Dr. Keller as her own psychiatrist. For one thing, she is so organized that Mariah always finds herself checking to see if she's left something back in the car--her keys, her pocketbook, her confidence. And Dr. Keller is beautiful, too--young, with hair the rich color of a fox's back and legs that she always remembers to cross. Mariah learned years ago that she did not want to talk to someone like that. Dr. Johansen was just her speed--short, tired-looking, human enough that Mariah did not mind revealing her failures. But Dr. Johansen had been the one to suggest that Faith see someone to help her understand the divorce. Mariah wanted Faith to see Dr. Johansen, but he didn't treat children. He recommended Dr. Keller, and even called the office to help Mariah get a fast appointment.
Mariah does not want to admit, even to herself, that she is at the root of Faith's hallucinations. After all, the doctors at Greenhaven said they couldn't be sure that the baby inside her would not be damaged by Prozac. And they couldn't say how.
Mariah forces her gaze to Dr. Keller's. "I'm worried about this imaginary friend."
"Don't be. It's perfectly normal. Healthy, even."
Mariah raises her brows. "It's healthy and normal to talk to someone who isn't there?"
"Absolutely. Faith's created someone to give her emotional support twenty-four hours a day." Dr. Keller pulls out a sheet of drawing paper from Faith's file. "She calls this friend her guard, which only reinforces the behavior--she has someone to protect her now, so this never happens again."
Mariah takes the paper and smiles at the simple drawing of a little blond girl. It's Faith--she can tell by the purple dress with the yellow flowers, which Faith would wear every single day if given the opportunity. She's drawn her hair in braids that look like sunny snakes, and she's holding the hand of another person. "That's her friend," Dr. Keller says.
Mariah stares at the figure. "Looks like Casper the Friendly Ghost."
"She may very well be. If Faith's conjuring up a mental vision of this person, it's probably something she's seen somewhere else."
"Casper with hair," Mariah amends, her finger tracing the floating white body and the brown helmet around the face. "Some guard."
"What's important is that it's working for Faith."
Mariah takes a deep breath and jumps off the cliff. "How do you know it is?" she asks quietly. "How do you know this friend isn't someone she's hearing in her head?"
Dr. Keller pauses for a moment. Mariah wonders how much she knows about her own hospitalization, how much Dr. Johansen has revealed. "In the first place, I wouldn't classify it as a hallucination. That would suggest that your daughter is having psychotic episodes, and you haven't indicated any changes in behavior that would lead me to believe that."
"What sorts of changes?" Mariah says, although she knows very well what they are.
"Dramatic ones. Trouble sleeping. Staring spells. Aggression. Changes in eating habits. If she's walking around at three in the morning and saying that her friend told her to go climb onto the roof of the house."
Mariah thinks about Faith crawling across the top of the swing set in the middle of the night. "No," Mariah lies, "there's nothing like that."
Dr. Keller shrugs. "Then don't worry about it."
"How about when she wants her friend to get into bed with her? Or eat at the table?"
"Go along with it. Don't make it a big deal, and eventually Faith will feel secure enough to just let it go."
Let her guard down, Mariah thinks, and almost smiles.
"I'll talk to her about this friend again, Mrs. White. But really, I've seen a hundred of these cases. Ninety-nine of those children turned out absolutely fine."
Mariah nods, but she is wondering what happened to the other one.
Colin smiles at the VP of Operations for the chain of nursing homes. "This'll just take a minute," he says, and he casually leaves the office to rummage in the trunk of his car. Hard to sell the merits of a damn exit sign when it shoots sparks the minute he plugs it in. Luckily, Colin has a spare in the trunk; he can blame the other on faulty wiring at the plant in Taiwan.
The sample is buried in a box. Gritting his teeth, Colin shoves his hand along the side, feeling for a telltale wire, then grasping and extracting what turns out to be a small barrette.
How it got into his sample box, he can't imagine. He remembers the last time he saw Faith wearing it, winking silver against the waterfall of her light hair. She keeps her barrettes and ponytail scrunchies in an old cigar box that Colin's own grandfather once gave him.
Forgetting the nursing home VP, forgetting the exit sign that now dangles from the box like a broken droid, Colin runs the pad of his thumb over the edge of the barrette.
He has been to the obstetrician with Jessica. He has heard the new baby's heartbeat. But it is very hard to pretend that he is thrilled about this unborn child, when he has made such a mess of things with the one he's already got.
He has tried to call her, and once he even watched her at the school playground from a distance, but he backs away before making contact. The fact of the matter is, he does not know what to say. Every time he thinks he has the apology right, he remembers how Faith stared at him when he came to visit her in the hospital after the circus accident--silent and judgmental, as if even in her limited range of experience she knew he did not measure up. Being a father, Colin knows, is no AT&T commercial, no simple feat of tossing a ball across a green yard or braiding a length of hair. It is knowing all the words to Goodnight Moon. It is waking a split second in the middle of the night before you hear her fall out of bed. It is watching her twirl in a tutu and having one's mind leap over the years to wonder how it will be to dance at her wedding.
It is maintaining the illusion of having the upper hand, although you've been powerless since the first moment she smiled at you from the rook's nest of your cradled arm.
He thinks about Faith so much these days that he cannot imagine how she ever slipped from his mind long enough to let him make the monumental mistake of sleeping with Jessica in his own home.
Colin sighs deeply. He loves Jessica, and she's right--it is time to reinvent himself. So he makes a silent promise: to be a better father this time around, to make sure that Faith reaps the benefits of the new leaf he is going to turn over. He tells himself that as soon as he straightens out his life, he'll come back for Faith. He'll make it up to her.
"Mr. White," the nursing-home executive says impatiently from the doorway. "Can we get on with this?"
Colin turns around, shoves the barrette into his pocket. He picks up the new sample and smoothly launches into a diatribe on its energy and monetary savings, wondering all the while how someone who makes a living by helping people safely escape cannot for the life of him see the way out.
September 6, 1999
Millie Epstein picks up her Diet Coke and settles next to her daughter on the living-room couch. "Well, consider it a blessing. She could have dreamed up a British soldier with a big furry hat as a guard, and then complained that he wouldn't fit in the backseat of the car."
Mariah rolls her own can of soda across the plane of her forehead. "She's supposed to start school next week. What if the other kids teas
e her?"
"Is that what you're worried about? Really, Mariah. She's seven. By next week she won't even remember this."
Mariah skims her lip along the sharp edge of the soda can. "I did," she says quietly.
Her mother comes up swinging. "There was nothing wrong with you. Colin made you believe you were meshugge when you were only a little bit under the weather."
"It was a clinical depression, Ma."
"Which is not the same as thinking an alien is beaming radio messages into your brain."
Mariah turns in her seat. "I never said I was schizophrenic."
"Honey." Millie touches her daughter's shoulder. "You had an imaginary friend when you were about five, too. A boy named Wolf, who you said slept at the foot of your bed and told you vegetables were to be avoided at all costs."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Mariah's head is beginning to pound. Picking up the remote, she turns on her mother's TV. There is nothing on but soap operas, which she can't abide, an infomercial, and a Martha Stewart program. She flips through the lesser-used channels of the satellite dish and settles on a syndicated sitcom.
"No, go back." Millie grabs the remote. "I like listening to his accent."
Mariah frowns at an installment of Ian Fletcher's antievangelical show, watching him strut around like a jaded cock of the walk. Accent, hah. He probably picked it up from a voice coach. She has never understood the mass philosophical appeal of this man, but then again she has never been interested enough in religion to want to entertain its alternative. "I think the reason people watch him is because they believe that if he keeps mouthing off, God's going to hurl a lightning bolt down during a live broadcast and let the world watch him fry."
"That's very Old Testament of you." Millie pushes the mute button. "Maybe you remember more of Hebrew school than I thought."
Mariah blinks. "I went to Hebrew school?"
"For a day. Your father and I thought we'd try to do the conventional thing by you. Some of your friends went to Sunday school, so..." She laughs. "You came home and said you'd rather take ballet."
It does not surprise Mariah. When she was a child her religious affiliation was purely social, the kind of Jew whose family attended temple only on High Holy Days, and then just to see what everyone else was wearing. Mariah can remember seeing Santa in the mall and wishing she could crawl into his lap. She can remember how on Christmas Day, when the rest of the world was celebrating, her family would go to the Chinese restaurant for dinner and then out to a movie, where they were the only people in the theater.
It surprised no one when Mariah married an Episcopalian.
Mariah cannot recall ballet class, but she realizes that although she can still configure her feet in the basic five positions, she would be hard-pressed to recite all Ten Commandments. "I didn't know--"
"Oh!" Millie exclaims. "This is his big tour! The one he's taking across America! Tuesday he was in New Paltz."
Mariah laughs. "New Paltz has a big atheist population?"
"Just the opposite. He was there because some church claimed to have a statue oozing blood. Turned out to be a limestone deposit or something."
A line of type flashes at the bottom of the screen: HOULTON, MAINE, LIVE! The camera pans, catching T-shirts emblazoned with THE LIMB OF LIFE: THE JESUS TREE. Then it narrows on a close-up of Ian Fletcher, framed in the doorway of an RV. "Gorgeous man." Millie sighs. "Look at that smile."
Mariah doesn't glance up from the TV Guide she's skimming. "Well, of course," she says. "He's probably having the time of his life."
Ian has never been so miserable in his life. He is hot and sweaty, has a killer headache, and is quickly coming to hate Maine, if not the entirety of New England. Worse still, he can't look forward to a respite when the broadcast is finished. His producer refused to book him a decent hotel, saying that a guy who wants to go on a grassroots tour ought to be willing to let his Italian loafers touch the ground. So--for appearance's sake--Ian's production crew gets to stay at the Houlton Holiday Inn, while Ian camps out in a glorified tin can.
He's not about to reveal that accommodations are vitally important to a man who cannot sleep at night, but only prowls about, exhausted. His insomnia is no one's business but his own. Still, Ian can't even begin to describe the anticipation he feels at the prospect of bringing down this whole little Christ show. Whatever hoax he picks next to unravel will damn well be situated near a Ritz-Carlton.
At a signal from James he steps out of the godforsaken Winnebago, several reporters closing around him. He pushes through them and steps onto an empty milk crate that someone has left behind. "As y'all may know," Ian says, gesturing to the small and devoted knot of people gathered in front of the McKinneys' sprawling apple tree, "there's been some question in recent days whether Houlton, Maine, is indeed the site of a religious miracle. According to William and Bootsie McKinney, the morning of August twentieth, following a severe thunderstorm, Jesus appeared to them in a split branch of this Macintosh tree."
Ian turns toward it. Actually, the way the rings of the tree have grown and the delicate lines of dried sap do sort of resemble a long-chinned, dark-eyed visage. Like conventional pictures of Jesus, if one believes in that sort of thing. Ian deliberately smacks his open palm over the image, covering it. "Is there a face here? Maybe. But if the McKinneys were not pious Catholics who attended mass regularly, would they have seen Jesus? Or might they have said it looks like Orville Redenbacher, or Great-uncle Samuel?" He waits for the suggestion to sink in before adding, "Is a religious miracle truly inexplicable and divine? Or is it a coincidental meeting of what's been programmed in one's mind with what one wants to see?"
At the quick gasp of one of the nuns, the Houlton parish priest steps forward. "Now, Mr. Fletcher," Father Reynolds says. "There are documented cases of religious miracles that have even been approved by the Holy See."
"Like that sighting of the Virgin Mary in a Mexican subway puddle a few years back?"
"I don't believe that has reached the approval stage yet."
Ian snorts. "C'mon, Father--if you were the Virgin Mary and you wanted to choose a place to appear, would you pick the oil sheen on a subway platform? Can't you accept the possibility that this may not be what it seems?"
The priest taps his finger against his chin. "I can," he says slowly. "Can you?"
At the titter that runs through the crowd, Ian realizes he's lost his momentum. Goddamn live TV. "Ladies and gen'lemen, I'd like to introduce Dr. Irwin Nagel, of Princeton University's Forrestal Campus. Doctor?"
"Wood," the professor says, "is made up of several types of xylem cells, including vessels, which conduct materials and strengthen the stem of the tree. The so-called picture inside here is only a natural process of the xylem. As the tree gets older, the innermost layers stop conducting food and get clogged with resin, gum, and tannin, which harden and darken. The face that the McKinneys have seen is actually just a conglomeration of deposits in the tree's heartwood."
Ian nods as his producer comes to stand beside him. "What do you think?"
"I don't know if they're buying it," James whispers. "I liked your subway thing, though."
Dr. Nagel suddenly lifts up a large, dangerous-looking pair of hedge trimmers. "Now, I've got the McKinneys' permission for this," he says, as he randomly selects a branch and hacks it off. The pale sapwood seems to blush, and then within moments the demarcations of the tree's rings are clearly visible. "Well, there. It kind of looks like Mickey Mouse."
Ian steps forward. "The professor means that the apparition of the face of Christ is, literally, a fluke of nature. That it happened is not extraordinary for a tree of this size and age." On impulse Ian takes a black marker from his pocket and draws a shape on the exposed insides of the tree. "Roddy," he calls to a familiar reporter, "what is this?"
The man squints. "That's the moon."
Ian points to Father Reynolds. "A bowl."
"A semicircle," says Professor Nagel.
Ian sets the cap on his marker with an audible click. "Perception is a very powerful thing. I say this isn't the face of Jesus. That's my opinion. It may or may not be true, and I can't prove it, and you have the right to doubt what I say. But by the same token, when Bill McKinney and Father Reynolds say, 'Yes, this is the face of Jesus,' well, that's just an opinion, too--and one that can't be proved. It doesn't matter if the pope agrees with them, or the President, or the majority of the whole damned world. It's certainly what they see. But it may or may not be a fact. And if you don't believe me, how can you believe them?"
"You know, half the time I don't even understand what he's saying, and I still think he's terrific," Millie announces. "Look at that priest. He's practically purple."
Mariah laughs. "Can we turn this off, Ma? Or is Jerry Springer coming on next?"
"Very funny. He's a poet, Mariah. Just you listen to him."
"He's using someone else's script," Mariah says, as Ian Fletcher lifts up a Bible and begins to read with heavy sarcasm.
"'But the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God hath said Ye shall not eat of it; neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.'" Faith comes into the room and slips onto the couch. "I know that poem."
The funny thing is, the biblical verse seems familiar to Mariah, too, although she can't understand why. It has been years since Mariah has studied a Bible, and as far as she knows, Faith's never even seen one. She and Colin had put off their daughter's religious instruction indefinitely, since neither of them could consider it without feeling like a hypocrite.
"'And the serpent said to the woman...'"
Faith mutters something beneath her breath. Assuming the worst, Mariah crosses her arms. "What was that, young lady?"
"'Ye shall not surely die.'"
As the words leave Faith's mouth, Ian Fletcher repeats them on TV, and then plucks an apple from the McKinneys' tree to take a large, provocative bite. That's when Mariah recalls where she's heard Fletcher's verses before--just days ago, when Faith was playing on the swing set in the middle of the night, humming them softly. Just days ago, when Faith--who has never been to church or temple in her young life, who has never attended Sunday or Hebrew school--was singing from the Book of Genesis as if it were any other jump-rope rhyme.