Simple Faith

by Susan Fanetti

  “What about the bear?”

  “We haven’t seen him yet, right? I’ll bring a rifle, but I don’t think he’s around to bother us.”

  Still she stared across the cabin, out the window. “Okay. Not far.”

  The air already seemed fresher, at the mere prospect of getting out of here for a while. He grinned. “Thank you.”

  ~oOo~

  She didn’t have good hiking shoes, but they were not on a hike. The trail bed was soft, covered in dried leaves and pine needles, and her Keds were adequate to the task. It was April and sixty degrees even up in these mountains, but Lara wore a t-shirt, a hoodie, and a zipped-up jacket, and kept her hands shoved into the pockets. Trey was comfortable with a flannel shirt over a t-shirt.

  They walked slowly, side by side, and Trey watched her head swivel back and forth as she studied the world around them. He looked too, trying to see what she saw. She looked for patterns in everything; both she and her father had said as much. What he saw was a forest—trees and undergrowth, spring fresh, and the dried remnants of the years before. He heard the calls of various birds—none he could name—and the drilling of a woodpecker at work. Above was blue sky, a few wispy clouds, and the last linger of a trail from a jet that had passed overhead as they’d come out of the house.

  After fifteen minutes of walking on a gentle downward slope, they came to a widening of the trail and an ancient, stone-sided well, its top blocked with wood planks. Two large, flat boulders sat beside it, arranged by man or nature like a bench where one might sit and contemplate a wish before he made it. Lara went to the rocks and sat. Trey set the rifle aside and sat beside her.

  As usual, she wasn’t predisposed to talking. He didn’t think she’d initiated a conversation yet; human interaction didn’t seem to occur to her naturally. But if he said something, she was a willing partner and sometimes even expansive in her speech.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asked now.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you looking for, when you look around the way you do? What do you see?”

  “Those are different things, what I’m looking for and what I see.”

  “Okay. What are they?”

  “I think I see what you see. But maybe in more detail. I see the veins in a leaf or the ridges in a tree’s bark. I see the different colors in a rock.” She brushed her hand over the grey stone she sat on, and Trey looked closer. The black and white and red and brown and grey stone she sat on. “What am I looking for? It’s hard to explain.”

  “Patterns,” he offered.

  But she shook her head. “That’s only part of it. I’m looking for order. I need to see the order of things. The reason. There’s always I reason, and I need to see it.”

  “You mean ‘everything happens for a reason’?”

  “Yes, but the way people mean that phrase is wrong. What they mean is too simplistic, and it’s magical thinking. The reason isn’t any god’s plan. I don’t believe in god. The reason is that nature loves order. There is always a reason, always a cause and effect, always a point of predictability. Even entropy—the concept that all order eventually degrades into disorder—even that is predictable, and thus has its own order. I’m looking for the math of the order.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “My therapist would tell you that I seek order because my life began in chaos, and I suppose that’s sufficient. But when I was with my mom, I believed I was loved and cared for. I believed I was sick, not that my mom was hurting me. She was my whole world. Always with me, singing me songs, holding my hand when the doctors did things that hurt me, knitting me blankets and shawls and stuffed animals. I believed I was a sick kid with a devoted mom. It wasn’t until they arrested her and sent me to Providence to live with my dad—I assume you know he was my uncle first.”

  Trey was so captivated by her story he barely noted that she expected a response, but he managed a nod.

  “It wasn’t until then, when I was living with a stranger, and being told that I was sick only because my mom made me that way, that my head started to slip. I had trouble understanding what was real. Strangers were trying to make me believe that my mom, my whole world, had made me sick, that really I could breathe without help, and I could walk. That was the hardest, learning how to walk, discovering that I wasn’t paralyzed. Because at first, I was. I was seven years old, and I’d never taken a step. My muscles hadn’t developed, and my legs were misshapen. It was very painful, the therapy to get my legs to work. For years, even as I gained health, it was my dad and the doctors in Providence I mistrusted, and I missed my mom.”

  A gust of warm breeze swirled through the clearing, stirring the dead needles and leaves on the forest floor and dropping a fresh green one on Lara’s thigh. She picked it up and examined its underside. “Then, when I was thirteen, right after I graduated high school, my dad let me read my medical files. The original files and the investigator analysis of them. When somebody finally suspected her and an investigation started, they went back through and reconsidered all the lab results from my whole life, looking for signs that she’d poisoned me. They found extensive evidence. She’d been doing it since I was a baby. That’s when I had my first real breakdown. That’s where the chaos happened, when I saw the truth in science. I was different before that, though. I’ve always been different, and it’s difficult to be sure how much is due to circumstance and how much to genetics.” A dry kind of laugh left her lips. “Who knows, maybe I was always broken and she wouldn’t have had to make me sick to get the attention she needed.”

  Trey didn’t share that humorless laugh. “Where’s your mom now?”

  “Dead. She killed herself in the mental hospital they committed her to. Hoarded her meds until she could take them all at once.”

  “And you see order and reason in all of that?”

  Her eyes met his and held fast. “No. It makes no sense. Even understanding MSBP and that she was sick herself, it defies all reason that a mother would put bleach in her only child’s formula. Or why she put cat feces in the humidifier so I got toxoplasmosis. Or, when the doctors put in a feeding tube because I couldn’t keep anything down, she put saltwater in it—that’s the one that brought her down. I’ll never know how to understand her. So I have to understand everything else. Somewhere, someday, maybe I’ll understand my mother, too.” She smiled. “That’s how my therapist explains it. For me, I just need the math.”

  Without thinking, Trey took her hand. She glanced down at once but didn’t pull away. They sat there on a stone in the woods, Lara staring at his hand around hers, and he staring at her beautiful, serious face.

  “Can you explain it to me? What math you see?”

  That earned him another smile. She took her hand from his and held up the leaf that had fallen to her lap. “What’s this?”

  He laughed. “A leaf.”

  “A mulberry leaf.” She twisted and pointed to a tree about ten feet away. “That’s a mulberry tree. And that over there, too.” Bending down, she picked up several more leaves, new green ones and old brown. “Look.” She fanned the green leaves in her fingers. “These two trees have thousands of leaves apiece, but because they are mulberry trees, all their leaves conform to a specific shape. To a large extent, their shape is predetermined. Factors like environment play in, too, but that doesn’t complicate my point.”

  “Which is what?”

  She grinned broadly, and her blue eyes sparkled. Damn. When she was really into something, all her demons calm and quiet, and she was simply happy, damn, she was so fucking beautiful. “It’s math! Math is coded into the cells of the tree. Minutely specific natural calculations go on at a cellular level to determine the size and shape and color and texture of every single mulberry leaf in the entire world. And look!” She dropped the green leaves and fanned out the brown. “They all die the same way, too. Their colors change and they fall from the trees and they lose the chlorophyll and nutrients in the same way, reacting to various
factors in the same way. Because it’s coded into their tiniest matter. Nothing is random. Everything has an order. It’s all a pattern.”

  Another breeze stirred the leaves. Trey pointed to the scatter at their feet. “Not that. How is that not random?”

  She was really into this, and her enthusiasm—a new thing in these days of knowing her, this naked excitement—was contagious. So contagious he found himself getting hard and had to shift on the stone so she wouldn’t notice. Not that there was a high likelihood she’d have noticed in any event. Leaves, she noticed. Him, not as much.

  “There is a calculation that could determine precisely when a leaf will fall from its branch, and there is a calculation that could predict the flow of air through this passage, and account for all the other leaves falling and being blown and how their interaction will change their progress and thereby determine at precisely which point in time this leaf”—she bent and collected one that had blown up against her sneaker—“will land at this spot. We have the math now. We use some of it to predict the weather to a degree of accuracy that would have been astonishing only ten years ago. That we can’t predict with even more precision is merely a matter of the limits of our instruments, including our own brains and perceptions, not of the theory. Nothing is random. We just can’t see deeply enough yet to see all the reason.”

  “But what if we weren’t here? The leaf would have blown some other way if we hadn’t taken this walk you didn’t want to take.”

  “But we are here. A calculation able to take into account all the factors might have predicted with a high degree of probability that we’d be sitting here right now. The fact that we can’t yet make the calculation doesn’t mean the calculation is impossible.”

  “And that gives you comfort, seeing that everything is controlled by math?”

  Lara nodded. “I don’t like surprises.”

  It freaked him out. Where was free will in that idea? Everything she’d said was, whether she knew it or not, barely half a step from the Catholic teaching he’d grown up with. He’d always struggled to understand how God could know everything that would happen and yet people still had free will. If the result was predetermined, could a choice truly be free? Every nun and priest he’d ever asked that question had grown frustrated long before his confusion was assuaged, and he’d been told the same thing by each and every one of them, practically verbatim: It’s faith, Trey. Simple faith. Trust in the Lord.

  Which was no answer at all. But he’d never found a better one.

  Lara’s fervid devotion was to mathematics and not to the Lord, but it didn’t matter where she put her faith in the idea that ‘everything happens for a reason.’ God was God, by any name.

  ~oOo~

  Trey came out of a dream into the dark. He was hard and had a pillow strangled in his arms. The dream broke apart before he could get hold of it, but whatever it had been, he was horny as all fuck now. Shit.

  He heard the creak of floorboards in the hallway. Lara was on the move. Every damn night. He checked his watch—just after one. That was early for her nightly wandering. Tossing the covers back, he reached for his sweatpants on the floor and slid his legs into them before he stood. His stupid cock was at full attention. Luckily, it was dark, and Lara was no doubt sound asleep. She got more exercise in her sleep than she did all day.

  Well, not yesterday. He’d gotten her out for a walk yesterday.

  Shoving uselessly at his pole standing straight out, Trey went into the hallway and in search of his charge.

  She was at the table, tearing apart the puzzle she’d almost completed, letting the pieces drop anywhere, even on the floor.

  “Hey, hey, hey.” He ran over and put his hands over hers, stopping their flurry. “You don’t want to do that.” As always, she was calm and malleable in her sleep. His hands on hers stopped their movement without fight.

  “It’s all broken,” she said, as clear as if they were having a conversation at noon. “None of it makes any sense.”

  Those words were more meaningful than her usual midnight pronouncements. Lifting her hands from the table, he turned her on the chair and crouched before her. “Are you awake?”

  She didn’t answer, but her eyes met his and seemed to see him. That wasn’t unusual; except for the nonsense, she seemed perfectly wakeful during her nightly rambles. Seemed, but was not.

  “Lara, are you awake?”

  Her eyelids slid closed, and she leaned in.

  And kissed him.

  Trey jumped back so fast he nearly lost his balance, and since he was holding her hands, he nearly pulled her off the chair.

  “Tell me you’re awake.”

  “It’s broken,” she said again, which wasn’t an answer.

  “What’s broken, babe?”

  “Inside.”

  Before he could say or do more, she pulled her hands from his and slid her arms around his neck, and then she was kissing him again.

  His dream was fresh enough that it rushed back together, diffuse but potent, when her mouth was on his, her tongue moving on his lips, looking for more. He’d been having some kind of sexy dream about Lara, and now his body was all in with this surprising development. Without his intention, his mouth had opened and he was kissing her back, taking her tongue, giving her his, taking over, standing and pulling her wispy body up with him, drawing her tightly to him. God, her lips were as soft and lush as they looked. And she was right there with him, matching his every move, holding him as tightly as he held her.

  But she was absolutely not awake.

  How did he know? Because she’d been brutally raped a week ago. Her reactions were unusual, and often surprising, but he was absolutely certain that she would not consciously be coming onto him like this.

  He turned out of the kiss and caught his breath. Lara stared up at him, expressionless. Uncomprehending. Unconscious.

  That hurt—more sharply than he was ready to deal with.

  Clearing his throat, he collected himself and took her hand. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

  She went meekly with him. When she lay down, she closed her eyes at once and turned away from him.

  Trey tucked her in and stood over her, still hard as steel, and thoroughly disgusted with himself.

  ~ 8 ~

  Lara woke feeling vaguely ill and moderately depressed. She didn’t dream when she took her sleeping meds, and she supposed the lack of it had begun to take a toll. Rarely did she stay on sleep medications for more than a few days. She sleepwalked, and didn’t dream, and after a while her mind began to feel like it didn’t fit properly in her head. Defective though it was, she liked it settled snugly in place.

  But now, here, she was afraid to stop taking the pills. She was afraid what would come for her when she dreamed again. There were things she wasn’t ready to face, a puzzle she wasn’t ready to solve. Certainly not here, so far from home.

  The room was chillier than usual, and the light softer. The old compact travel clock she’d found in the nightstand drawer told her she’d woken about two hours earlier than usual. Should she roll over and try to sleep through this disconcerted feeling?

  After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, she decided her head hurt too much for more sleep. Some tea might help, and working her puzzle, getting lost in that focus, would shrug off the sluggishness of her mood.

  She got up and pulled on the hoodie she’d worn yesterday. It still smelled subtly of the forest, and she smiled. Walking out in that unknown world, she’d been anxious and hyperaware, but the woods were lovely—Robert Frost’s poem spun up from the floor of her head and whispered its lines—and she’d enjoyed sitting with Trey at that old well and telling him about the inherent order of the world.

  He’d been interested, and he’d listened and understood. Whether he agreed was unimportant. She’d sat with him, holding leaves in her hand, and found the order she’d been searching for all week.

  Her father had asked her to trust Trey through her trust in h
im, and she’d done so, extended her faith in her father to this man she barely knew. But now, her faith in Trey was his own, for him.

  It was a strange, unsettling thing, to trust someone new. But powerful, too.

  Heading to the bedroom door, Lara smiled. She wouldn’t mind taking another walk today.

  She opened the door, and Trey stood right there, a few feet away, frozen in mid-stride between the open bathroom door and the closed door to his room. His hair was wet, and his body gleamed damply in the light coming from her room. He was naked except for a towel wrapped around his waist.

  He was a swimmer and surfer, and his body showed it. Muscular arms and heavy, rounded shoulders. A broad chest, topped with strong, clear collarbones, like a hunting bow, and a deep notch at the base of his throat. Firm pectoral muscles, each defined with a sharp sweep of contour. Hard abdominal muscles, each one visible but not so overdeveloped as to seem carved with a chainsaw. His wide chest tapered to a slim waist and hips. Virtually no hair, except a faint vertical trail from his navel down. His skin had a pale bronze cast, not quite olive. Just a hint of his Southern European heritage. He was half Italian. What was the other half?

  He stared at her, his green eyes wide, as stunned as she. One of the wet ends of his hair dropped a bead of water that trailed like a tear down his chest.

  Lara swallowed, discomfited by the strength of her physical reaction to the sight of him. She found him attractive, certainly. She’d grown to like him, yes. And to trust him, more importantly. But she was actually quivering.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, breaking the spell. “I didn’t think you’d be awake this early.”

  Before she could respond, he opened the door to his room, went in, and closed the door.

  His back was as attractive as his front. Across his shoulders, arcing in thick black letters in an Old Europe-type font, was a tattoo of the words SEMPRE FAMIGLIA.