Matters of Faith by Kristy Kiernan Page A

going.”
    He nodded, took one last look at Meghan, and turned toward the door, but hesitated with his hand on the long, silver handle before turning around and approaching me. He bent to kiss the top of my head, but his lips did not land, they merely stirred the air slightly and a shiver ran across the back of my scalp, tingling to a fine point when the door clicked shut behind him. I should have felt bereft, but I did not.
    There was already a divided time line, already the old, painful joke of Before and After, and in this After I was just as pleased to have time alone with my daughter as I had been Before. I got up and stretched, then started to bustle around, talking to Meghan as if we were both about to start our day at home.
    â€œSo, I was thinking about pulling your bunk beds apart,” I said, adjusting the blinds, allowing more light in, but not too much, not so much that I could see every detail. I didn’t want to see the grime, from who knows what, in the seams of the putty-colored, plastic baseboard, the dust in the ceiling vent. I didn’t want to see how Meghan’s skin wrinkled under the transparent tape holding tubes in their correct alignment. I opened them just enough to offer the illusion of allowing sunlight in.
    â€œIf we moved your desk under the window, we could put both beds against that wall with your nightstand in between them. Or maybe it’s time to just get a new bed? Maybe a double? Or a queen? I think there’s room to get a queen in there. We could repaint too,” I said, stuffing empty water bottles, an unread newspaper, notes written and crossed out on the pad supplied by the hospital into the trash.
    There was, of course, no answer. I stopped the busywork and turned around to look at my daughter from the foot of her bed, as if seeing her in it for the first time. This was coma. Life moving around you, conversations had for weeks, months, years, without your input, all the business of everyone else progressing in this one space, while you remained utterly still, the pre-Copernican, unwitting center of a one-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot universe.
    Suddenly I wanted Cal back here, with me, more than I wanted anything else, and I sank into the chair he’d been in for almost forty-eight hours and sobbed in great, ugly gasps. I wasn’t used to crying. I did not do it much after my parents disappeared. I had thought I’d been all cried out. Even when Meghan was in the hospital after that first episode I didn’t cry, except briefly in relief when it turned out she was okay.
    And when it became clear that there was a course of action we could take to keep her safe, I never shed another tear over it all. I wasn’t tough, I was simply too busy. But there was no course of action to take here. Nothing. I wrapped my arms around myself and stared at the side of Meghan’s face until my eyes finally closed and I slept. In that way at least, Meghan and I were together.
    When Cal spoke to me I struggled against waking.
    â€œChloe, come on, honey,” he insisted.
    I wanted just another moment, just one more moment of oblivion, one more minute in which I could believe that I was about to wake up in our bedroom, and could start over, could fix whatever had come loose: in our marriage, in Marshall’s life, in my baby’s immune system. Somehow I had not paid enough attention. I thought I had, but I was clearly so very wrong. And I would change that.
    But I was not to have that, neither the chance, nor the dream of the chance, because Cal whispered in my ear: “Come on, Chloe. It’s Marshall. Marshall’s been arrested.”

MARSHALL
    He used to watch COPS on television, excited by the chases, the way the police tried to trip up a person on their own lies, how at times they seemed incredibly caring and passionate about their job and at others just seemed like arrogant jerks.
    He and Ira used to talk about becoming cops themselves, how