Keeping Faith: A Novel Read Free Page A

the tests came back and the doctors altered the course of treatment to meet the needs of a pregnant,
suicidal woman. I never told anyone there about the pregnancy, just let them figure it out themselves–and it took me years to admit that was because I was hoping to miscarry. I had convinced myself that it was Faith, a small ball of cells inside me, who made Colin turn to another woman.
Yet when my own mother says that Faith is going to keep me from getting so deeply depressed that I can’t claw my way out, she may not be far off the mark. After all, Faith has done it before.
Somehow, during those months at Greenhaven, being pregnant became an asset instead of a liability. People who would not listen to what I had to say when I was first committed stopped to remark on my swelling belly, my glowing cheeks. Colin found out about the baby and came back to me.
I named her Faith, a real goyishe name according to my mother, because I so badly needed something to believe in.
I am sitting with my hand on the bridge of the phone. Any minute now, I tell myself,
Colin is going to call and tell me it was a run of dementia. He will beg not to be held responsible for this small bit of insanity. If I do not understand something like that, who will?
But the phone does not ring, and sometime after two in the morning I hear a noise outside. It is Colin, I think. He’s come.
I run to the bathroom and try to untangle my hair, my arms stiff and aching from disuse. I swallow a capful of mouthwash. Then I rush into the hall with my heart pounding.
It’s dark. There’s no one moving about; nothing.
I creep down the staircase and peer out the sidelight that frames the front door.
Carefully I ease the door open–it creaks–
and step onto the old farmer’s porch.
The noise that I thought was my husband coming home to me is a pair of raccoons, thieving around the trash can. “Go!” I hiss at them, waving my hands. Colin used to snare them in a Hav-A-Heart trap, a rectangular cage with a levered door that didn’t cause harm to the animal. He’d hear one screaming after being shut in and would carry it off to the woods behind the house.
Then he’d walk back, the cage empty and neat, with no sign of the raccoon’s having been there. “Abracadabra,” he’d say. “Now you see it, now you don’t.”
I retreat inside, but instead of heading upstairs I see the moon reflecting off the polished dining-room table. In the center of the oval is a miniature replica of this farmhouse. I made it; it is what I do for a living. I build dream houses–not out of concrete and drywall and I-beams, but with spindles no bigger than a toothpick, squares of satin that fit in the palm of my hand, mortar based with Elmer’s glue. Although some people ask for an exact replica of their house, I have also created antebellum mansions, Arabian mosques,
marble palaces.
I built my first dollhouse seven years ago at Greenhaven, out of popsicle craft sticks and construction paper, when other patients were making God’s-eyes and origami.
Even in that first attempt there was a spot for every bit of furniture, a room to suit each personality. Since then I have built nearly fifty others. I became famous after Hillary Rodham Clinton asked me to make the White House for Chelsea’s sixteenth birthday–
complete with an Oval Room, china in the display cabinets, and a hand-sewn United States flag in the Executive Office. Customers have asked, but I do not make dolls to go with the houses.
A piano, however tiny, is still a piano. But a doll with a beautifully painted face and finely turned limbs is always, at its heart, made of wood.
I pull out a chair and sit down, gently touching my fingers to the sloping roof of the miniature farmhouse, the pillars that hold up its porch, the small silk begonias in its terra-cotta planters. Inside it is a cherry table like the one this dollhouse sits upon. And on that miniature cherry dining-room table is an even smaller replica of this