Keeping Faith: A Novel by Jodi Picoult Page B

a questioning brow.
Eve’s fingers tighten on her husband’s. “I know,” she says shyly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“It’s better than wonderful,” Herb enthuses. “It’s not that we don’t love you,
Rabbi, but Evie and I aren’t going to be needing your services anymore.”
Rabbi Weissman smiles. “That’s the kind of rejection I like. What brought this about?”
“It was no one thing,” Eve admits. “I just started feeling differently.”
“Me, too,” Herb says.
If the rabbi recalls correctly, he had to separate the couple like two prizefighters at the last meeting, to keep them from physically assaulting each other. The Rothmans talk for a few more minutes, then wish the rabbi well and leave the office. Rabbi Weissman stares after them, shaking his head. God has truly intervened. Even He would have laid down odds that the Rothman marriage was too far gone to fix.
It certainly wasn’t anything that he said–he would have clearly remembered a breakthrough in this case. He would have marked it down on a Post-it,
left a note to himself on his calendar. But there’s no record from last week in the datebook,
nothing at all.
There’s just the time of their meeting, and recorded beneath it, at 11:00 A.m., the name of little Faith White.
In the middle of the night Faith wakes up and curls her hands into fists. They hurt enough to make her whimper, just like the time Betsy Corcoran had dared her to hold on to the flagpole on the coldest day of last winter and her skin had nearly frozen right to the metal. She rolls over and stuffs her hands beneath her pillow, where the sheets are still cool.
But that doesn’t help either. She fidgets a little bit more, wondering if she ought to get up and pee now that she’s awake or just sit here and wait for her hands to stop hurting. She doesn’t want to go in to her mother yet. Once she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and her foot had felt like the size of a watermelon and all tingly, but her mother had said it was just pins and needles and to go back to bed. Even though there were no pins and needles on the floor, and when Faith had checked, there were none sticking out of the sole of her foot either.
She rolls over again and sees her guard sitting on the edge of the bed. “My hands hurt,”
she whimpers, and lifts them for inspection.
Her guard leans forward to look. “It will only hurt for a little while.”
That makes Faith feel better. It’s like when she’s hot and sick sometimes and her mother gives her the little pills that she knows will make her headache disappear. Faith watches her guard lift her left hand first, and then her right, and put a kiss right in the middle of each palm. Her lips are so warm that Faith jumps at first and pulls her hands back. When she looks down, she can see it: her guard’s kiss printed on her skin in a red circle. Thinking it is lipstick, Faith tries to rub at it with her thumb, but it does not come off.
Her guard carefully folds Faith’s fingers shut, making a fist. Faith giggles; she likes the idea of holding fast to a kiss.
“See how I love you?” her guard says, and Faith smiles all the way back to sleep.
September 30, 1999 It would be nice if Ian could say that his sixth sense for rooting out deception is what leads him directly to Faith White, but it is not true.
Like any other master planner, he knows that the best way to stay informed is to keep a finger in every pot.
So after Dr. Keller flatly refuses a meeting with him, he sets into motion Plan B.
It takes a half hour to find a supply closet in the local hospital and to locate a pair of clean scrubs. Ten minutes to brief Yvonne with the pertinent information and watch her walk through the sliding glass hospital doors,
dressed to blend in.
She comes back fifteen minutes later, her face glowing. “I walked straight up to the scheduling nurse for MRI’S and told her that Dr. Keller hadn’t received the reports back on a seven-year-old patient. So she