Keeping Faith

by Janice Macdonald

  “It is a big decision, I’ll grant you that. I don’t see it as a sacrifice though. Not if I had you and Faith.”

  Hannah sat down on the bed beside him again. Something was stopping her from abandoning all resistance and saying, Yes let’s do it. Let’s be a family again. It was as though Liam were on the other side of a river and she couldn’t quite bring herself to swim across the water that separated them. He was smiling, his hand extended. She wanted to be with him, but she couldn’t quite do it.

  “At least I can look into it.” Liam glanced at the ad again. “I’ll ring them tomorrow.” He took her hand. “We’re still on for the Queen Mary, right?”

  “Yep.” The zoo, the Queen Mary, pretend camping in an unfurnished apartment. If they could just go on doing fun things, deferring reality, instead of dealing with dull stuff like jobs and security, life would be a whole lot easier.

  “IS LIAM YOUR BOYFRIEND, Mommy?” Faith asked the next morning as Hannah was pouring cereal into a bowl.

  “Well, not exactly,” Hannah hedged. “How come you’re asking that?”

  “Auntie Rose said he was your boyfriend.”

  Hannah poured milk into a bowl of Cheerios, and set it in front of Faith. “Don’t forget to feed your hamster before you leave.” Evasion by distraction, she thought. Not exactly the preferred La Petite Ecole method, but Faith was her daughter, not her student.

  “I thought Allan was your boyfriend.” Faith dug into the Cheerios. “Can people have two boyfriends?”

  “Two boyfriends?” Rose shuffled into the kitchen. “Sure, honey, if you can manage it, more power to you.”

  Hannah frowned at Rose. She’d gone to bed after Liam left, then stayed awake half the night wondering whether it had been a mistake to tell him about the job. What if he took it and wasn’t happy? What if he ended up hating her for forcing him into something he’d never really wanted? What if Faith wasn’t happy having him around? She felt surly and distracted; her head ached with indecision.

  “I like Allan, Mommy,” Faith said. “Want to know why?”

  “Huh?” She looked at her daughter who had left the table and was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the puppy in her lap lapping milk from Faith’s cereal bowl. “Faith.” Hannah grabbed the bowl, and set it in the sink. “The puppy has his own bowl to eat from.”

  “I like Allan because he has a little boy for me to play with,” Faith said.

  “And a big house on Riva Alto Canal,” Rose said.

  “Rose.” Hannah glared at her aunt. “Shut the hell up.”

  “Oooh, Mommy said a bad word,” Faith said.

  “Mommy’s not in a good mood this morning,” Rose observed.

  No, she wasn’t, Hannah thought as she went upstairs to get ready for school. And her mood wasn’t improved when she stopped to get a notebook she’d left in the study and found a downloaded page entitled: Getting Custody of Your Grandchildren.

  Her face burning, Hannah read through the material.

  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1997, 3.9 million children lived in homes maintained by their grandparents, up 76 percent from 2.2 million in 1970. In a majority of the cases, grandparents were the primary caregivers. Despite this fact, it is not always easy for grandparents to get custody of their grandchildren. Courts are reluctant to award custody to anyone other than the parents.

  The law varies from state to state, but in general, grandparents cannot petition the court for custody if the family is intact—i.e. both parents are at home with the children. Grandparents may, however, intervene in a custody dispute. In some states, grandparents may also ask for custody if the child has been living with them for an extended period of time (e.g., six months, one year).

  Margaret had underlined the last two lines.

  Hannah barged into her mother’s room. Empty, the bed made up. She ran downstairs to the kitchen. Rose was pouring chocolate syrup onto a slice of toast. Faith was grinning, her mouth rimmed with chocolate.

  “Hey, Mommy,” she said as Hannah stormed in. “Look what me and Auntie Rose invented.” She held out the bread. “Want to try some?”

  “No, I don’t, thank you.” Ignoring Faith’s wail of dismay, she grabbed the toast and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. “You know better than to eat chocolate on toast for breakfast,” she told her daughter. “Even if the adults around here don’t.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rose said in mock terror. “I’d better get out of here.”

  “Rose.” Hands on her hips, Hannah addressed her aunt. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She left early. Something about an appointment downtown.”

  THE QUEEN MARY WAS NOT turning out to be one of his better ideas, Liam thought as he watched Hannah run down the promenade deck after a sulky Faith, who had told her mother that she wanted to ride a real boat that went somewhere, not a stupid boat that just stayed in one place. She wanted to ride in a boat like Allan’s boat. She liked Allan. She was bored. She wanted someone to play with. She wanted to call Douglas.

  Liam looked out at the blue water. White boats glided back and forth. Sailboats, power boats churning up a wake, darting red water taxis, a streamlined white vessel that went over to Catalina. He’d suggested earlier, in light of Faith’s unhappiness with the Queen Mary, that they take the boat over to Avalon, stay the night and return the next day. Faith had brightened at this, but Hannah frowned and reminded him that she had a job to go to.

  She’d been tense from the moment he’d arrived at the house on Termino. He didn’t know what was wrong. She hadn’t offered an explanation, and he hadn’t asked.

  He turned from the water, and watched Hannah walk toward him, holding Faith’s hand. Hannah was saying something to Faith that he couldn’t catch, looking down at her as she spoke. Faith nodded a couple of times, her expression still petulant.

  “What do you have to say to Liam?” Hannah asked as they reached the window where he stood.

  Liam felt a surge of anger. Hannah could force Faith to apologize to Allan, or to any of her other boyfriends; he didn’t want his daughter apologizing to him because she’d behaved like a six-year-old. He ruffled Faith’s hair. “That’s all right, listen, I’ve got an idea—”

  “No, it’s not all right, Liam.” Hannah looked at her daughter. “Faith?”

  Faith kicked at the wooden deck with the toe of her red sandal. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry, who?” Hannah asked.

  “Sorry, Liam.”

  Liam flinched. Sorry, Liam. His daughter had called him Liam. He looked around, almost blindly, wanting to strike out at something. She’d called him by his name before, but this time it felt like a wound reopened. Hannah realized her mistake and touched his arm. He pulled away. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  In silence they made their way to the elevator and off the boat. With no direction in mind, he started down a footpath that cut through a grassy verge along the edge of the water. He felt the wind in his face, saw the sunlight off the water. Something had gone wrong and he didn’t know what to say to fix it. More to the point, he didn’t know what had caused it to go wrong in the first place.

  “Can we go in there?” Faith pointed across the water to a circular blue building painted with sea creatures. “I want to go in there and see the porpoise.”

  “That’s not the aquarium,” Hannah said. She glanced at Liam. “I don’t know why Long Beach painted the convention center to look like an aquarium. The aquarium’s down there.” She nodded in the direction of a structure further across the bay. “People are always getting it confused.”

  “I want to go to the aquarium,” Faith said.

  “Not today,” Hannah said.

  “When?” Faith tugged at Hannah’s hand. “When can we go to the aquarium?”

  Anxious to turn the day around, Liam opened his mouth to suggest they go right now, then thought better of it. They all kept walking, past large rocks and boulders set along the water’s edge. He stopped to look at a couple of boys with
fishing poles sitting on the rocks. On some lower rocks, a couple of girls, maybe a little older than Faith, were jumping from one boulder to the next. Hannah and Faith had stopped, too, and stood beside him. He watched Faith watching the girls and edging a little closer. One of the girls jumped to a rock at the water level. The other one clambered down, arms waving to steady herself. Their laughter carried in the breeze.

  “I need to go to the restroom.” Hannah glanced over her shoulder in the direction of a low stucco building, then she caught Faith’s hand. “Let’s go.”

  “I don’t need to go.” Faith was still watching the girls.

  “I’ll watch her,” Liam said.

  Hannah took off across the grass. The girls on the rocks were both down at the water’s edge, bending to look at a small tide pool in the hollowed surface of a rock. Faith looked at Liam.

  “I want to go down there.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll go with you.” He took her hand and they climbed down three boulders. One of the girls waved to Faith.

  “I know that girl,” Faith said. “Her name’s Yolanda. Can I go down where she is?”

  Both girls were smiling up at Faith, calling for her to see the shells they’d found. Faith was clearly impatient to be with them. Liam checked his shoulder to see if Hannah had started back, but couldn’t spot her. When he turned back in the direction of the rocks and water, Faith was on the boulder immediately below the one where he stood and had started to maneuver her way down, arms outstretched, to the next one.

  “Hold on, Faith,” he called as he scrambled down after her. “I’ll give you a hand.”

  “Faith,” one of the girls called out. “You have to see this shell, it is so cool.”

  “Faith,” Hannah shouted from the top of the bluff. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “She’s fine, Hannah,” Liam called over his shoulder. “I’m watching her.”

  Down at the water’s edge, the rocks were green and shiny with seaweed. The girls held out dripping hands to show Faith what they’d found. Liam lowered himself onto one of the rocks. Faith was smiling now, a different child from the sullen one on the deck of the Queen Mary. He felt his mood lift as he watched her, wind blowing her hair about her face, billowing the back of her denim shirt. The trio had moved a few yards along the lower tier of rocks when he heard Hannah’s voice behind him. He turned to see her climbing down the rocks to where he sat. Faith had also looked up to see her mother.

  “Mommy. I have to show you this really neat thing.” Her hands cupped, Faith made her way across the seaweed-covered rocks, her brow furrowed in concentration. “It is so cool, you’ll be amazed.”

  Liam grinned and saw that Hannah was smiling, too. He put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her to him. Infused with a sudden burst of happiness, he couldn’t keep the smile off his face. He kissed the side of her mouth.

  “Faith asked me this morning if you were my boyfriend,” she said.

  He felt himself tense slightly. “And what did you tell her?”

  Whatever answer she might have given was frozen by the splash of noise and confusion at the water’s edge. In an instant Liam was down there, lifting his shaking, shivering daughter from the bay.

  AT TEN THAT SAME NIGHT, Hannah sat in her bedroom talking on the phone to Liam. “Look, quit blaming yourself, okay? It wasn’t your fault. We were both there with her, watching her. It was just an accident.”

  “I keep telling myself I should never have let her go down there in the first place.”

  “Kids play there all the time, Liam. Deb and I used to spend hours on those same rocks and I was younger than Faith. I even fell into the water a couple of times. It’s no big deal. I mean you could see that for yourself. She’d almost forgotten about it by the time we got her home. She’s fine. In bed and sound asleep.”

  “Right…well. You know her best.”

  She switched the receiver to her other ear. Liam wasn’t convinced. She could hear it in his voice. Faith’s tumble into the water had been the low point in an afternoon that never really got off the ground.

  Mostly it was her fault. All day, she’d been unable to shake the stunned disbelief that her mother had, at the very least, considered the possibility of getting custody of Faith. She’d tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Margaret later in the afternoon when Hannah got home from school. Margaret was out. She hadn’t returned by the time Liam stopped by to pick up Hannah and Faith.

  In a masterpiece of bad timing, Margaret had been home when they’d carried Faith, wet and shivering, into the house. Without a word of explanation, Hannah had taken Faith upstairs. After Liam left and Faith was in bed, she’d felt too exhausted to confront Margaret. Liam’s call came just as she’d drifted off to sleep.

  “I called about the job,” he said, after the silence between them had become uncomfortable. “They asked me to send a résumé.” He laughed. “I’ve never written a bloody résumé in my life.”

  “I can help you with that,” she said, sounding in her own ears exactly as her Aunt Helen had years ago when Hannah protested that she really didn’t have the background to apply for a position at La Petite Ecole.

  “Help me with what?” Liam asked. “I’ve played in bands. Other people’s and now my own. How do you turn that into a résumé?”

  “Well, the position is for a music teacher,” Hannah pointed out without much enthusiasm. Maybe they were trying to do the impossible. Square pegs in round holes, that sort of thing. She felt tired and discouraged. “Listen, we can talk about it tomorrow.” She yawned. “Right now I’m so bushed, I can’t even think.”

  “Yeah…” Liam said. “Right.”

  She waited a moment. “You’re not happy, are you?”

  He sighed. “I’m so bloody confused about everything, Hannah. I don’t know if I’m pushing you into something you don’t really want. I don’t know if I’m pushing myself into something I don’t really want. I don’t know if what we’re doing is right for Faith. I just don’t know.”

  “Liam…” A deep wave of tenderness for him made her throat close. If all of this was hard for her, how much harder must it be for him? Regardless of what happened, she would always have Faith in her life. Liam didn’t have that certainty. “I love you,” she said, surprising herself.

  “That helps,” he said after a moment. “A lot.”

  “Well, I do.” Despite her own doubts and fears, it suddenly seemed vital that she reassure him. “I love that you care enough about Faith that you’re willing to make this huge sacrifice to be with her. I love the way you are with her and I love you, Liam…” She stopped, self-consciousness halting the stream of words.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’m feeling better by the second.”

  “I feel as though I’m seeing a side to you I never knew when we were married. It’s as though I didn’t know you then. I mean, I still don’t really…”

  “And when you find out that I have this thing for women in black corsets, leather boots and whips…”

  “Humor is a distancing mechanism,” she said. “I learned the term from my Aunt Rose. She got a B© in Intro to Psychology. Humor stops you from dealing with things you don’t want to deal with.”

  “Read any good books lately?”

  “Avoidance is another term Aunt Rose told me about.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yep. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed about you, Liam. It still kills you to talk about feelings, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’ve never been good at that. Never had much of a chance to be good at it, come to that. But don’t let that stop you from saying things like you just did. In fact, do me a big favor, would you, and say it again.”

  Hannah rolled over on her stomach, phone melded to her ear, smile spreading across her face. “I love you,” she said.

  “Ditto,” he said. “We’ll work it all out, won’t we?”

  “Yeah.” Still smiling. Believing, at least for now.


  “And tomorrow? What’s on the agenda?”

  “Want to pick Faith up from school?”

  “What time?”

  “Come by about two. We’ll walk down there.”

  “How about if I make it earlier? Half-past twelve or so?”

  “I’ll still be in school. Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. An hour or so up in your bedroom has a lot of appeal.”

  “Did I ever tell you you were bad news?”

  “You might have mentioned it a few hundred times.”

  “Well you are,” she said. “But I love you anyway.”

  She was still smiling as she walked downstairs, suddenly ravenous, to get something to eat. Halfway down, she caught the aroma of baking from the kitchen, heard her mother’s voice and then Faith’s saying something she couldn’t quite catch. What was Faith doing up at this hour? Faith spoke again and then Hannah heard Rose’s voice.

  “…your mommy and Liam were kissing when you fell into the water?”

  “They were sitting on the rocks and Liam had his arm around Mommy and I saw him kiss her,” Faith said. “And then my foot slipped and I fell into the water.”

  Anger like a red haze in her brain, Hannah stood transfixed. Her mother was talking now, asking Faith whether she had ever seen Mommy and Liam kiss before. And then Faith was saying that Allan was her mommy’s boyfriend, that she liked Allan because she could play with Douglas. Her heart beating so hard she thought it might actually burst in her chest, Hannah sat down on the stairs.

  “So what about your mommy’s new apartment?” Margaret asked. “Did you like going there with Mommy and Liam?”

  “It doesn’t have any furniture,” Faith said. “So we had to sit on the floor and have candles. And then I spilled ginger ale on my shirt and Liam took his shirt off and then Mommy took mine off—”

  “Mommy or Liam?” Margaret asked.

  Something seemed to detonate in Hannah’s head. She burst into the kitchen, plucked Faith and the blanket covering her up from the chair she’d been sitting on and left the room in a blur of movement; aware—as if in a dream—of Margaret’s startled expression, of Rose darting aside to avoid being plowed down, of Faith’s warm, wriggling body under the blanket as she was carried up the stairs, protesting that the chocolate chip cookies weren’t ready and Grandma had promised she could have two.