Keeping Faith: A Novel (63 page)

Her mother thinks she is asleep. She knows because she can hear the house settling like a fat lady arranging her skirts, twitching and creaking and sighing all around her. Faith sits up in bed and turns on the tiny lamp on the nightstand. She pulls up her pajama top, examining critically the thin ladder of her ribs, the rainbow bruises on her skin where tubes and needles were connected. Then she holds one palm beneath the lamp and feels for the small flap of skin where the hole was. It’s gone now, nothing but the smooth pink bowl of her hand.

“God,” she whispers aloud.

Nothing.

She glances from the windowsill to the nightlight to the dresser. “God?”

Faith tosses back the covers and gets onto her hands and knees. She checks under the bed, and then gathers all her courage and throws open the door of the dark, dark closet. She hears only the rhythm of her own breathing, and the fan from the bathroom down the hall. The round sounds of her mother and Ian, talking downstairs.

“God?” she tries again.

But with the same casual confidence she has that the sun is going to come up in a matter of hours,

Faith knows that she is alone inside these white walls.

Suddenly she is very cold, and a little scared.

She dives beneath the covers, thudding hard enough as she sprints across the floor for her mother to come investigate. She hears her footsteps on the stairs, the creaky one at the count of seven, the muffle of her shoes once she hits carpet.

She guesses how long it is before her mother is within spitting distance of the bedroom.

“They asked a lot of questions,” Faith says just loud enough for her words to carry, her eyes on the slice of light from the nearly closed door. “But then again, they’ve never seen Y.” She holds her breath. From the corner of her eye she sees the knife edge of her mother’s tired smile.

With her heart pounding and her fists clutching the comforter, Faith continues to talk to no one at all, until she hears her mother’s voice again downstairs, until she is certain that nobody is listening.

THE END

Table of Contents

Keeping Faith

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN