by Jodi Picoult
August 30, 1999
Colin White sits in his business suit on a bench at the playground, watching mothers and nannies chase toddlers beneath the jungle gym. His egg-salad sandwich remains in its plastic wrapper, untouched. Without even taking a bite, he balls it up and stuffs it back into the brown paper bag from the deli.
That little girl, the one on the monkey bars, looks something like Faith. Same curl to her hair, even if it's a shade too dark. She keeps making it to the third rung, then slipping free and falling to the ground. Colin remembers Faith doing the same thing: practicing and practicing until she could make it across. He wants to move closer, but he knows better. In this day and age it will only make him look like a pedophile, not a man who simply misses his child.
He runs his hands through his hair. What the hell was he thinking? The answer was, he hadn't been thinking at all when he'd brought Jessica back to his house that afternoon. A ballet class is not a sure thing; he should have known that Faith and Mariah might come home unexpectedly. In the three weeks that have passed, he can still remember every nuance of the looks on Faith's and Mariah's faces when Jessica walked out of the bathroom. He can still remember how Faith stared right through him when he finally caught up to her in her bedroom, as if she was old enough to know that the excuses he was making were transparent.
He had hurt Mariah, too, but then again, living with a woman who refused to accept that there was any problem with their marriage would take its toll on a saint. Every time he tried to force Mariah to face facts, he left shaking, afraid that he'd come home and find her trying to kill herself. Initially he'd gone out with Jessica just to have someone to confide in.
And now he loves her.
Colin closes his eyes. It's one hell of a mess.
The little girl on the monkey bars finishes swinging over the last rung and lands a few feet away from Colin, kicking up a cloud of dust. "Oh," she says, grinning up at him. "Sorry."
"No problem."
"Can you tie my shoe?"
He smiles. One thing he has learned about young children: To them, adults are interchangeable. Anyone of similar fatherlike age might be asked to take care of these things. He bends down over the laces of her sneaker, realizing at close range that this girl is younger than Faith, heavier, unmistakably different.
The girl climbs the short ladder on one end of the monkey bars.
"You watch me," she calls out, artlessly proud. "This time I'm going to get it right."
Colin finds himself holding his breath as the child swings out with her left arm, then her right, reaching for the metal rungs and curling her knuckles over them, even though it is an unlikely stretch, even though it is sure to leave her aching. He continues to watch, until he sees her safely across to the other side.
For seven, she knows a lot of things. She knows that monarch caterpillars live in the folds of milkweed leaves, that tights are never as tight as leggings, that "We'll see" always means "No." She has learned enough of the world to realize that it is a place of grownups, and that the only way to leave her mark is to speak at the ends of their sentences and act so much like them that they sit up and take notice. She knows that the minute she falls asleep, her teddy bear's sewed-shut eyes snap open. She knows that truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.
She also knows, although everyone is careful to keep it from her, that they are all still talking. Faith has been home from the hospital for three days now, although she isn't comfortable wearing a shirt yet. Every time she does, she feels the cuts open up and bleed, and she worries that in the winter she will either freeze to death or else leak bone dry.
During the day Grandma comes over and plays spit and go fish, and she doesn't care at all that Faith is wearing only her shorts. Her mother sits on the couch and stares at Faith's back when she thinks no one is looking, as if Faith couldn't feel the weight of her eyes anyway. When Grandma leaves after dinner, sometimes there are conversations with big, fat, white spaces, so that it seems like whole hours pass between the sentences Faith and her mother speak.
Tonight Faith is picking at the peas on her dinner plate when the doorbell rings. Grandma raises her eyebrows, and her mother shrugs. They are like that, can speak without saying a thing, because they know each other so well. With Faith and her mom, though, it's a different type of quiet, one brought on by not knowing each other at all. Faith watches her mother go to the front door, and as soon as she's out of sight, Faith takes a forkful of peas and hides them under her thigh.
"Oh!" Her mother's voice is full of air and light. "You're just in time for dinner."
"I can't stay," Faith hears her father answer. She stiffens, feels the peas pop beneath her leg. She has seen her father once since That Day. He came to the hospital with a big stuffed teddy bear that was the ugliest one she'd ever seen, and the whole time he held her hand and talked to her she was picturing that lady that came out of the bathroom as if she lived there. She does not know why the woman was taking a shower in the middle of the afternoon, or why that made her mother cry. She knows only that the whole event had a color about it, like the scribbles of a crayon gone crazy off the page--the same blue-black she sometimes imagined when she was lying in bed and could hear, through the walls, her parents fighting.
Her father walks into the kitchen and kisses her on the forehead. "Hey, cookie!" He pretends not to look at her back the same way her mother does. "How's my pumpkin pie?" Faith stares at him, and she wonders why he calls her only by the names of food.
"For God's sake, Mariah!" Her grandma gets to her feet. "How could you let him in?"
"For Faith--I had to."
Grandma snorts. "For Faith. Right." She comes closer to Faith's father, and for a moment Faith wonders if Grandma is going to sock him one right then and there. But she only pokes him in the side with her finger. "Good-bye, Colin. You're not needed."
"Lay off, Millie, will you?"
Her mother reappears with a plate. "Here," she sings. "No trouble at all."
"Mariah, I can't stay. I told you that."
"It's only dinner--"
"I have other plans."
"You could cancel them. It would be nice for Fai--"
"Jessica's waiting in the car," her father says tightly. "All right?"
Faith scurries away from her father's voice, taking shelter beneath her grandmother's arm. Her mother wilts into a chair, the plate clattering so that peas spill across the table like polka dots. Her father's jaw is working funny, no words coming out. Finally he says, "I just wanted to see my daughter. I'm sorry." Then he touches Faith's shoulder and walks out.
"God, Ma! Did you have to say that?"
"Yes! Since you wouldn't!"
"I don't need your help." Faith's mother presses her hands to her head. "Just leave."
Faith begins to panic. She did not want her father there either, but that was only because she knew that it would all come down to a scene like this. Once in school her teacher had filled a bowl with water and sprinkled pepper on top. Then she dripped dishwashing soap down the side, and the pepper went flying away. For some reason, when Faith thinks of her mother and father, that always comes to mind, too.
"Faith," her grandmother says, "maybe you should sleep at my house tonight."
Her mother shakes her head. "No way. She's staying here."
"Wonderful!"
Faith tries to figure out what is so wonderful about it. She wants to go to her grandmother's. Her mother will just mope around and stick a video in the VCR for her. At her grandma's, she gets to sleep in the guest room, with the beastly black sewing machine in the corner and the box of buttons and the small bowl of sugar cubes on the nightstand.
But then her grandmother is saying good-bye and her mother is muttering about reverse psychology and it is just the two of them, with all the dishes on the table. For a long time Faith watches her mother. She sits with her head in her hands, so still that Faith thinks she's fallen
asleep. Unsure of what to say or do, Faith pokes her. "Want to play a game?"
When her mother looks up, Faith thinks that she has never in 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 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 over to the dollhouse.
It's not a fancy dollhouse, not like the ones her mom makes, but that's not such a bad thing. Whenever Faith gets too close to one of her mother's dollhouses, she gets yelled at, and if she manages to take out a tiny chair or finger a miniature braided rug, she always thinks she's going to break it if she even bre
athes the wrong way. This plastic dollhouse of Dr. Keller's is clearly for kids, clearly for someone to play with. Not just for show.
Ken and another Barbie, this one with hair, are crammed into the tiny bathroom of the dollhouse. Ken is facedown in the toilet. Faith picks him up and walks him to the bedroom. She mashes him against the Barbie with hair, holding her tight. Then she takes the bald Barbie and props her against the bedroom wall to watch.
Dr. Keller scoots her chair closer to the dollhouse. "There are lots of people in that room."
Faith looks up. "It's a father and a mother and another mother."
"Two mothers?"
"Yeah. This one"--she touches the doll in Ken's arms--"does all the kissing."
"How about the other one?"
Faith gently strokes the bald head of the second Barbie. "That one does all the crying."
"You're what?"
Jessica's face falls, and immediately Colin knows he has made another mistake. "I thought you'd be happy," she says, and then bursts into tears.
For the life of him, Colin doesn't know what to do. He is certain that Jessica is expecting him to do or say something appropriate, but all he can think of is the moment years ago, when the doctors at Greenhaven told him that Mariah had tested positive for pregnancy. After a moment he puts his arms around Jessica. "I'm sorry. I am happy."
Jessica lifts her face. "You are?" Her voice shakes.
Colin nods. "Cross my heart."
She turns in his embrace and twines herself around him like a jungle vine. "I knew you'd say that. I knew you'd see this as a second chance."
For what? he thinks, and then realizes she is speaking of a family. He smiles at her, past the sudden constriction of his throat. Jessica's eyes are shining as she takes his hand and places it on the flat plane of her belly. "I wonder who it'll look like," she says softly.
Colin tries to picture the face of the child they might have created. He closes his eyes, but all he can see is Faith.