Keeping Faith

by Janice Macdonald

  In blind fury, Hannah set Faith down on the bed. She looked at her daughter and tried to bring her voice under control. “Listen, sweetie…” Her voice and body were shaking. “We’re going on a kind of adventure, okay?” She went to Faith’s dresser drawer, pulled out socks and underwear, dumped them on the rocker, opened another draw and gathered pants and shirts.

  “But I want a cookie.” Faith’s voice turned tearful. “I don’t like you, Mommy. You’re being mean.”

  “Hannah,” Margaret said from the doorway. “I think you need to calm down a little, okay? You’re frightening your daughter.”

  Faith started crying, little whimpering sounds.

  Her back to Margaret, Hannah clutched a pile of Faith’s clothes. Her teeth were chattering, her body trembled. Behind her, Margaret was telling Faith not to cry. Mommy was just upset about something, Margaret was saying. Mommy would be fine. They’d all be fine. Still shaking, Hannah went to the closet and started to pull down Faith’s overnight bag. A little red suitcase Helen had bought last Christmas. She tugged it out from under a couple of boxes, a jerky movement that sent it tumbling to the floor. One of the clasps had rusted and the case burst open, spilling assorted drawings and school-work Faith had brought home. In the few moments it took to stack them into an empty shoe box, reason trickled back in. Maybe this wasn’t the way to handle the situation. Faith, already upset, would be confused. Frightened. She had no idea why her mother and grandmother were fighting. Hannah took a deep breath, and tried to compose her face as she looked at her daughter.

  “Hey, you know what?” She studied her watch, noting in her peripheral vision that Margaret was no longer in the doorway. “It is late. Really late. After midnight, in fact.” Faith regarded her wide-eyed, not entirely convinced things were back to normal. “How about a bedtime story?” Hannah asked her daughter.

  “What about our adventure?”

  “Let’s put the adventure off until tomorrow,” she said. “What d’you say? It’s kind of late for an adventure tonight.”

  “Can I have a cookie?” Faith asked.

  Hannah pretended to consider. “It’s very late, but if you brush your teeth really well afterward, I guess you can have one.”

  She tucked her daughter into bed, kissed her forehead and went down to the kitchen to get a cookie. From the living room, she could hear the TV, but no voices. She got the cookie, poured milk into a glass and carried it upstairs. Faith was already asleep. Carefully she closed Faith’s door, set the milk and cookies on the hall table and walked across the hallway to Margaret’s bedroom.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MARGARET, IN HER PURPLE ROBE, was sitting up in bed, a New Yorker spread across her knees, her bifocals down low on her nose. One side of her face lit by the bedside lamp, she listened without a word as Hannah demanded an explanation for the downloaded information. Demanded an explanation and an apology for grilling Faith.

  “You have seriously overstepped your boundaries, Mom. You have absolutely no right—”

  “No, as far you’re concerned, I have no rights, do I? It’s all about Liam’s rights. To hell with the fact that I’m her grandmother. To hell with the fact that Faith has been a part of my life from the moment she first came into the world. I watched her come into the world. And now suddenly, it’s all Liam this and Liam that.” The New Yorker slid to the floor and she leaned over to pick it up. “I’m sick to death of it. If this was a responsible guy with a normal job and the means to provide my granddaughter with a decent home, it would be one thing. Maybe I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I could accept it. But no, it’s some damn foreign musician who has decided he wants to be a daddy and suddenly you’ve abandoned any shred of common sense. Well, I’m sorry, but if you’re expecting an apology from me, you’re not going to get it. And I’ll tell you one thing. Faith would never have fallen into the water if I’d been watching her.”

  After that, Margaret burst into tears. By then it was after one and since there seemed to be no way to resolve things, Hannah left and went into her room. She dropped fully dressed across the bed, but she didn’t fall asleep. She thought about the things she’d said to Liam, the things Margaret had said to her. Thought about how to make everything all right again. Around four in the morning, she went down to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine from Margaret’s jug. But still she couldn’t derail her brain. It kept running down the same track, colliding inevitably with Liam’s rights as a father and her mother’s rights as a grandmother who’d helped raise her granddaughter. Liam’s happiness if he gave up his music, her own happiness and, overshadowing everything else, Faith’s happiness.

  When the room began to fill with hazy morning light, she gave up on sleep altogether, pulled on her robe and began to make coffee. Some time later, Margaret came down, dressed in a burgundy blazer and gray slacks. When Hannah told her mother that she and Liam would be picking up Faith from school, Margaret gave a brittle smile, picked up her purse and walked out.

  For the first time in the four years she’d worked at La Petite Ecole, Hannah called in sick that morning. After taking Faith to school, she spent the morning packing clothes from her room and Faith’s into cardboard boxes. Debra dropped by about ten. She’d just returned from a visit to the obstetrician.

  “When you had Faith, did you feel like a grown-up right away, or did you still feel like a kid?” she asked Hannah.

  Hannah, on her knees trying to decide what to throw in a sack for Goodwill and what to pack, sat back on her heels to look at her sister. Her head felt like cotton from not sleeping, and she suspected Debra was more interested in spilling out her own feelings than listening to hers, so she took the easy way out. “Is that how you feel? Like a kid still?”

  “Kind of. I mean, here I am back home again with Mom fussing over me, nagging me about eating right, and I’m thinking, God, I’m going to have this kid who is actually going to need me.”

  Hannah looked at her sister. Debra’s face was flushed. She wore a baggy black T-shirt and gray leggings that ended just below her knees. Flopped on Hannah’s bed, a black baseball cap pulled low on her head, she looked less like a mother-to-be than someone who had just wandered out of a college class.

  “I mean, don’t you ever kind of resent Faith?” Debra asked. “Like, if you didn’t have her you’d be free to do all these other things, travel, bum around…I don’t know, it just seems like this huge responsibility.”

  “It is a huge responsibility.”

  “But did you think about that before you had Faith? Or did you just kind of…get pregnant?”

  “I don’t know, Deb.” Hannah shook her head. She wasn’t up to philosophical discussion on motherhood. “I guess I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought.”

  “Yeah…” Debra turned onto her side, face propped on her elbow. “Mom said the only thing you really cared about was Liam—”

  “Mom said that, huh?” Hannah felt a return of last night’s red rage. “Well, Mom can damn well go to hell.”

  “Hannah.” Deb regarded her with a faint smile. “What are you getting so mad about? I mean, sure you love Faith now and you’re a good mother and everything, but you were kind of like the way I feel right now. It’s like you weren’t really a grown-up. You were just a kid who was obsessed with this guy and then you had a kid yourself. You were lucky Mom and everyone could help you out.”

  Hannah managed to finish packing the box she was filling with Faith’s underwear and nightclothes. She excused herself to Deb, went into the bathroom and stood under the shower for thirty minutes. Afterward, as she dried her hair, she stared at her face through a clear spot in the fogged-up mirror. Her mouth looked strained, her eyes puffy. If only she could have flat-out denied Deb’s assertion…

  SHE WAS DOWN at the mailbox, picking up the day’s assortment of catalogs and grocery store fliers when Liam pulled up thirty minutes early. The mail in hand, she watched him reach for something on the seat, then open the passenger door of the
Mercedes. He walked to where she stood, a smile on his face and a bunch of pink roses in his hand. Despite everything, her heart sped up with no regard to the turmoil churning in her brain.

  “Any million-dollar checks for me there?” Liam asked, with a nod at the mail she was holding. “Checks, fan mail?”

  “Hi.” She smiled. “No mail for you.” His white T-shirt read: What’s The Craic! Find Out In The Irish Post.

  “All things considered—” she flicked his chest “—not the best thing to wear to your daughter’s school.”

  He frowned, peered down at his shirt. “What?”

  “Craic?”

  He grinned. “It doesn’t mean crack, it means fun. It’s Gaelic. The Post publishes a calendar of what clubs are playing where.” He shrugged. “I see your point though. Kids could read it wrong.”

  “Yep.”

  “God.” He sighed. “I’ve a lot to learn, haven’t I?”

  “Hey…” She glanced at the roses in his hand, up at his face, the smile gone now. “You’re doing fine, don’t worry about it.”

  He handed her the roses. “Do you know what pink means?”

  She shook her head. “Do you?”

  He grinned. “No idea.”

  “You’re early. We still have about ten minutes before we pick her up.”

  “Alert the media,” he said. “The first time in my life I’ve ever been early.”

  “I’ll take these into the house.” Roses in hand, she started up the path, aware of Liam following her. She walked through the back door into the kitchen, felt him watching her as she bent to get a vase from one of the lower shelves. She carried the container over to the sink, ran water into it and began to arrange the roses. Liam came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. Dug his chin into her shoulder.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  She stayed very still, suddenly on the verge of tears. “Oh…stuff.”

  “Stuff.” His chin was still on her shoulder, his hands locked over her stomach. “Bloody awful that stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What variety of stuff?”

  “Everything.” She exhaled. “My mom’s talking about wanting custody of Faith.”

  He said nothing for a moment. Then he took her hand, led her over to the table and they both sat down. Hannah looked at him in his Craic T-shirt, at the planes of his face, his mouth, and something just seemed to dissolve inside her. He leaned forward in his chair, put his arms around her again, stroked her hair as she cried against his chest. When the sobs subsided, she got up and mopped at her face with a paper towel. Then she sat down again.

  “I don’t think it will really come to that, but it’s obviously crossed her mind.” She sat facing Liam, her knees touching his. “Everything’s such a mess. I feel as though my mother’s become my enemy.”

  He got up, and walked over to the window. The roses, visible from the kitchen, bloomed in bouquets of red, yellow and pink. He turned around to face Hannah. “I wrote up the résumé last night. I brought it for you to have a look at. Maybe it would reassure Margaret if she thought…” He shrugged. “That I wasn’t about to move the two of you to Ireland.”

  She sighed. “I’m not sure if your getting a job is really the answer, Liam. If you’d made the decision independently of me and Faith, it would be different, but—”

  “I wouldn’t be thinking about it if it weren’t for you and Faith,” he said.

  “That’s my point. What if you regret it a year from now?”

  “There are no guarantees, Hannah. Life’s a calculated risk.”

  “But how well have you calculated this one?”

  “Okay then, here’s the deal.” He came to kneel by her chair. “It’s never going to work if we’re both pessimistic at the same time. Last night was my turn to sing the blues. You were the one who said we’d pull through, remember?”

  She smiled slightly.

  “Well, now it’s your turn to wail and gnash your teeth. Go on. Do it while you can. Then it’ll be my turn.”

  Her smile broadened. “You’re nuts. You know that?”

  “I love you. You know that?”

  She nodded. Liam leaned forward to kiss her. He got up a few moments later, sat on a chair, pulled her up on his lap and kissed her again.

  “Optimism alone isn’t enough, though,” he said. “We need a plan. Tonight, after Faith goes to bed, let’s have a talk with Margaret. Maybe we can get her to see our side.”

  Hannah nodded. “I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

  “Come on.” He caught her hands. “Cheer up. One of these days when we’ve got six kids and grandchildren running around all over the place, we’ll look back on this and laugh.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. First, though, we need to do something about my shirt.”

  “Take it off.”

  He did. The shirt in one hand, he grinned at her. “Now what?”

  She laughed. Liam was wiry rather than muscular and his bare chest showed little evidence that he’d spent time basking under the California sun. But damn, he turned her on. Standing there in her mother’s kitchen, blue-eyed and sexy in his black jeans that sat low enough on his belly that… “I’ll get you another shirt,” she said. “After you kiss me again.”

  AND THEN THEY WERE OUT on the street, Liam in a yellow polo shirt Deb’s ex-boyfriend had left at the house. Walking hand in hand down Termino to Faith’s school with the sun warm on her back and the scent of orange blossoms in the air. As they crossed Ocean Boulevard, Hannah looked out at the strip of shimmering, postcard-blue Pacific visible behind Albertson’s market and felt a surge of pure happiness that, like blinding sunshine, overpowered everything but the moment. Impulsively she brought Liam’s hand to her mouth and kissed it.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He stopped walking. “Say that again.”

  “I love you.”

  Liam smiled and looked so much like Faith that Hannah almost told him once more. They started walking again, swinging hands, Liam humming something she didn’t recognize.

  “You know something?” she said to him. “I wish we could just take Faith and somehow…encapsulate ourselves in our own little world. It’s all the outside influences that screw things up.”

  “There’s a spaceship parked outside Miranda’s,” he said.

  “I’ll get packed.”

  “I know what you mean, though,” he said after a moment. “When I’m with you and Faith, I have no doubt we could make things work. And then…” He sighed. “Actually, there’s some concern about the future of the band. What with Brid out of things for a while. Pearse thinks I’ve lost interest…”

  “Lost interest?” Hannah looked at him. “Is he kidding?”

  “Well, I’ve been distracted. Brid’s having treatment, so there’s some excuse for her missing practice sessions, but I’ve skipped a couple of sessions myself. The other night, for instance. I’d planned to go out for a quick meal, when I ran into you and Faith.”

  Hannah said nothing, but a cloud drifted across the horizon. For one evening, Liam had chosen Faith over his music. How many times could he make that kind of choice and not begin to resent the sacrifice?

  “Ah, to hell with it all anyway.” He squeezed her hand. “To hell with everything but the three of us. If we hadn’t agreed to give it a week, I’d say let’s pick up Faith and drive to Las Vegas and get married.”

  Hannah felt her breath catch. She recalled Margaret’s words. …you’ve abandoned any shred of common sense.

  “ANY MINUTE NOW,” Hannah said, “those doors will burst open and a bunch of little monsters will come tearing out. If you don’t stand back they’ll run you down.”

  Liam sat on the edge of a low brick wall, his eye on the green painted double door. His assurances to Hannah aside, tension gnawed at his gut, held his neck and shoulders in a viselike grip. Hannah’s mother didn’t just dislike him, she was actually rea
dy to wage war against him. And the thing was, he couldn’t blame her.

  He thought of his mother, blowzy and peroxided when he’d last seen her. He’d been about ten and they’d gone to Dublin on the train. A job? A man? He couldn’t remember why she’d taken him there.

  For hours, they’d walked about the city looking for a flat she could afford. No one would take a chance on her. She hadn’t enough to pay the rent, they’d tell her over and over. It was nearly dark when they’d left the last place and he knew—and she knew he knew—they’d spend that night sleeping in the train station. He could see now that it must have been the last straw for her. She’d stood on the street screaming at him to go away.

  “I can’t take care of you,” she’d sobbed.

  And here he was, years later, sitting in the sunshine waiting for his daughter, who went off to school every day in a neighborhood of pastel-colored houses with lawns manicured to smooth green velvet and windows that glinted in the sun. Glibly telling his daughter’s mother that there were no guarantees in life, but they would work things out. He looked at the knot of parents waiting for their kids and wondered who exactly was fooling whom? A blond woman in blue cotton pants and a white shirt waved at Hannah.

  “Tiffany’s mother,” Hannah told him. “Tiffany is Faith’s best friend. They argue about once a week and Faith decides Beth’s her best friend and she’s never going to speak to Tiffany again. The next day they’re inseparable.”

  Liam opened his mouth to speak, but just then the doors opened. He shoved aside his gloomy musings and tried to spot Faith in the tumble of kids whooping and yelling their way out of the building. “What is she wearing?” he asked Hannah.

  “Red pants and a yellow shirt. She picked them out herself.”