Keeping Faith: A Novel by Jodi Picoult Page A

him.
Forgetting the nursing home VP, forgetting the exit sign that now dangles from the box like a broken droid, Colin runs the pad of his thumb over the edge of the barrette.
He has been to the obstetrician with Jessica. He has heard the new baby’s heartbeat. But it is very hard to pretend that he is thrilled about this unborn child, when he has made such a mess of things with the one he’s already got.
He has tried to call her, and once he even watched her at the school playground from a distance,
but he backs away before making contact. The fact of the matter is, he does not know what to say. Every time he thinks he has the apology right, he remembers how Faith stared at him when he came to visit her in the hospital after the circus accident–silent and judgmental, as if even in her limited range of experience she knew he did not measure up. Being a father, Colin knows,
is no ATANDThat commercial, no simple feat of tossing a ball across a green yard or braiding a length of hair. It is knowing all the words to Goodnight Moon. It is waking a split second in the middle of the night before you hear her fall out of bed. It is watching her twirl in a tutu and having one’s mind leap over the years to wonder how it will be to dance at her wedding.
It is maintaining the illusion of having the upper hand, although you’ve been powerless since the first moment she smiled at you from the rook’s nest of your cradled arm.
He thinks about Faith so much these days that he cannot imagine how she ever slipped from his mind long enough to let him make the monumental mistake of sleeping with Jessica in his own home.
Colin sighs deeply. He loves Jessica, and she’s right–it is time to reinvent himself. So he makes a silent promise: to be a better father this time around, to make sure that Faith reaps the benefits of the new leaf he is going to turn over. He tells himself that as soon as he straightens out his life, he’ll come back for Faith. He’ll make it up to her.
“Mr. White,” the nursing-home executive says impatiently from the doorway. “Can we get on with this?”
Colin turns around, shoves the barrette into his pocket. He picks up the new sample and smoothly launches into a diatribe on its energy and monetary savings, wondering all the while how someone who makes a living by helping people safely escape cannot for the life of him see the way out.
September 6, 1999 Millie Epstein picks up her Diet Coke and settles next to her daughter on the living-room couch. “Well, consider it a blessing. She could have dreamed up a British soldier with a big furry hat as a guard, and then complained that he wouldn’t fit in the backseat of the car.”
Mariah rolls her own can of soda across the plane of her forehead. “She’s supposed to start school next week. What if the other kids tease her?”
“Is that what you’re worried about? Really,
Mariah. She’s seven. By next week she won’t even remember this.”
Mariah skims her lip along the sharp edge of the soda can. “I did,” she says quietly.
Her mother comes up swinging. “There was nothing wrong with you. Colin made you believe you were meshugge when you were only a little bit under the weather.”
“It was a clinical depression, Ma.”
“Which is not the same as thinking an alien is beaming radio messages into your brain.”
Mariah turns in her seat. “I never said I was schizophrenic.”
“Honey.” Millie touches her daughter’s shoulder. “You had an imaginary friend when you were about five, too. A boy named Wolf, who you said slept at the foot of your bed and told you vegetables were to be avoided at all costs.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Mariah’s head is beginning to pound. Picking up the remote, she turns on her mother’s TV.
There is nothing on but soap operas, which she can’t abide, an infomercial, and a Martha Stewart program. She flips through the lesser-used channels of the satellite dish and settles on a syndicated