Keeping Faith: A Novel Read Online Free

me sitting at the kitchen table, instead of holed up in bed. When I was committed, she was living in Scottsdale, Arizona–where she’d moved after my father died. She flew in after my suicide attempt and went home when she felt assured that the danger was over. Of course, she hadn’t counted on Colin’s having me institutionalized. When she discovered what he had done, she sold the condo, returned here, and spent four months overturning the legal writ so that I could be released of my own volition. She never believed Colin was right to have me sent to Greenhaven, and she’s never forgiven him. As for me, well, I don’t know. Sometimes, like my mother, I think that he shouldn’t have been deciding how I felt, no matter how unresponsive I was at the time. And sometimes I remember that Greenhaven was the one place I felt comfortable, because there nobody was expected to be perfect.
“Colin,” my mother says succinctly, “is a schmuck. Thank God Faith takes after you.”
She pats my shoulder. “Do you remember the time you came home in fifth grade, with a B-minus on your math test? And you cried like you thought we were going to put you on the rack–but we couldn’t have cared less? You did your best; that’s what was important. You tried. Which is more than I can say for you today.” She looks through the open doorway, to the living-room floor, where Faith is coloring with crayons. “Don’t you know by now that raising a child is always a work in progress?”
Faith picks up the orange crayon and scribbles violently over the construction paper.
I remember how last year, when she was learning letters, she’d scrawl a long stream of consonants and ask me what she’d spelled.
“Frzwwlkg,” I’d say, and to my surprise I made her laugh.
“So go already.” My mother pushes me toward the living room.
The first thing I do is trip over the box of crayons. “I’m sorry.” I gather fistfuls in my hands, set them back in the holiday Oreo tin we use to store them. When I’m finished, I rock back on my heels, to find Faith staring coldly at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, but I am not speaking of the crayons.
When Faith doesn’t respond, I look down at the paper she’s been drawing on. A bat and a witch, dancing beside a fire. “Wow–this is really neat.” Inspiration strikes; I pick up the drawing and hold it close. “Can I keep it? Hang it downstairs in my workshop?”
Faith tips her head, reaches for the picture,
and rips it down the middle. Then she runs up the stairs and slams her bedroom door.
My mother comes in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “That went well,” I say dryly.
She shrugs. “You can’t change the world overnight.”
Reaching for one half of Faith’s artwork, I run my fingers over the waxy resistance of the witch. “I think she was drawing me.”
My mother tosses the dish towel at me; it lands unexpectedly cool against my neck. “You think too much,” she says.
That night while I am brushing my teeth I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I am not unattractive, or so I learned at Greenhaven. Orderlies and nurses and psychiatrists look through you when you are disheveled and complaining; on the other hand, a pretty face gets noticed, and spoken to, and answered. At Greenhaven I cut my hair short,
into honey-colored waves; I wore makeup to play up the green of my eyes. I spent more time on my appearance during those few months than I ever had in my life.
Sighing, I lean toward the mirror and wipe a spot of toothpaste from the corner of my mouth.
When Colin and I moved into this farmhouse, we replaced this bathroom mirror. The old one had been cracked at the corner–bad luck,
I said. The new mirror, we didn’t know where to hang. At five-foot-four, eye level for me was not eye level for Colin. A foot taller and lanky, he laughed when I’d first held up the mirror. “Rye,” he said, “I can barely see my chest.”
So instead we put the mirror where Colin could see it. I