Keeping Faith: A Novel by Jodi Picoult

Mariah get a fast appointment.
Mariah does not want to admit, even to herself,
that she is at the root of Faith’s hallucinations. After all, the doctors at Greenhaven said they couldn’t be sure that the baby inside her would not be damaged by Prozac.
And they couldn’t say how.
Mariah forces her gaze to Dr. Keller’s.
“I’m worried about this imaginary friend.”
“Don’t be. It’s perfectly normal.
Healthy, even.”
Mariah raises her brows. “It’s healthy and normal to talk to someone who isn’t there?”
“Absolutely. Faith’s created someone to give her emotional support twenty-four hours a day.” Dr. Keller pulls out a sheet of drawing paper from Faith’s file. “She calls this friend her guard, which only reinforces the behavior–she has someone to protect her now, so this never happens again.”
Mariah takes the paper and smiles at the simple drawing of a little blond girl. It’s Faith–she can tell by the purple dress with the yellow flowers, which Faith would wear every single day if given the opportunity. She’s drawn her hair in braids that look like sunny snakes, and she’s holding the hand of another person. “That’s her friend,” Dr. Keller says.
Mariah stares at the figure. “Looks like Casper the Friendly Ghost.”
“She may very well be. If Faith’s conjuring up a mental vision of this person, it’s probably something she’s seen somewhere else.”
“Casper with hair,” Mariah amends, her finger tracing the floating white body and the brown helmet around the face. “Some guard.”
“What’s important is that it’s working for Faith.”
Mariah takes a deep breath and jumps off the cliff. “How do you know it is?” she asks quietly. “How do you know this friend isn’t someone she’s hearing in her head?”
Dr. Keller pauses for a moment. Mariah wonders how much she knows about her own hospitalization, how much Dr. Johansen has revealed. “In the first place, I wouldn’t classify it as a hallucination. That would suggest that your daughter is having psychotic episodes,
and you haven’t indicated any changes in behavior that would lead me to believe that.”
“What sorts of changes?” Mariah says,
although she knows very well what they are.
“Dramatic ones. Trouble sleeping. Staring spells. Aggression. Changes in eating habits. If she’s walking around at three in the morning and saying that her friend told her to go climb onto the roof of the house.”
Mariah thinks about Faith crawling across the top of the swing set in the middle of the night.
“No,” Mariah lies, “there’s nothing like that.”
Dr. Keller shrugs. “Then don’t worry about it.”
“How about when she wants her friend to get into bed with her? Or eat at the table?”
“Go along with it. Don’t make it a big deal, and eventually Faith will feel secure enough to just let it go.”
Let her guard down, Mariah thinks, and almost smiles.
“I’ll talk to her about this friend again, Mrs.
White. But really, I’ve seen a hundred of these cases. Ninety-nine of those children turned out absolutely fine.”
Mariah nods, but she is wondering what happened to the other one.
Colin smiles at the VP of Operations for the chain of nursing homes. “This’ll just take a minute,” he says, and he casually leaves the office to rummage in the trunk of his car. Hard to sell the merits of a damn exit sign when it shoots sparks the minute he plugs it in.
Luckily, Colin has a spare in the trunk;
he can blame the other on faulty wiring at the plant in Taiwan.
The sample is buried in a box. Gritting his teeth, Colin shoves his hand along the side,
feeling for a telltale wire, then grasping and extracting what turns out to be a small barrette.
How it got into his sample box, he can’t imagine. He remembers the last time he saw Faith wearing it, winking silver against the waterfall of her light hair. She keeps her barrettes and ponytail scrunchies in an old cigar box that Colin’s own grandfather once gave