Keeping Faith: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

her arms crossed over me as I squatted to pee. When I was done, she said, “Now wait till I’m finished.”
My mother tells me that I had never crossed the street without reaching for her hand, never reached toward a hot stove; even as an infant, I’d never put small objects in my mouth. But that day, while she was in the toilet, I ducked beneath the door of the stall and disappeared.
I do not remember this. I also do not remember how I made my way past the green-coated security guards, out the door, and into the huge lot where the circus had set up its trailers.
Of course, I do not remember how the ringmaster himself announced my name in hopes of finding me,
how the murmurs of a lost little girl ran like fire, how my parents spent the show searching the halls. I can’t recall the chalky face of the circus hand who found me, who pronounced it a wonder that I hadn’t been trampled or gored.
And I can’t imagine what my parents thought,
to discover me nestled between the lethal tusks of a sleeping elephant, my hair matted with straw and spit, his trunk curled over my shoulders like the arm of an old love.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this,
except to make you see that maybe, like eye color and bone structure, miracles are passed down through the bloodlines.
The Elephant Girl has grown up. Of course, I cannot be sure they are one and the same,
but here is a woman in a spangly costume with the same red-gold hair and wise eyes as the girl I remember. She leads a baby elephant around the center ring and tosses it a purple ball; she bows grandly to the audience and lets the elephant wave over her shoulder. Then from the side curtains comes a child, a little girl so like the one in my past that I wonder if time stands completely still beneath a big top. But then I watch the Elephant Woman help the girl ride the baby elephant around the ring, and I see that they are mother and daughter.
A look passes between them, one that makes me glance at Faith. Her eyes are so bright I can see the Elephant Girl’s sequins reflected in them. Suddenly the clown who was here before is leaning over the divider, motioning wildly to Faith, who nods and falls over the railing into his arms. She waves back at us, her face mobile as she marches off to be part of the pre-intermission extravaganza. My mother scoots into Faith’s seat. “Did you see that?
Oh, I knew we should have brought the camera.”
And then in a buffet of light and booming voice, the circus performers and animals parade around the trio of rings. I look around, trying to find Faith. “Over there!” my mother calls.
“Yoo-hoo! Faith!” She points past the ringmaster and the caged tigers to my daughter, who is riding in front of the Elephant Lady on a tremendous tusked beast.
I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be. The searchlights wing over the crowd, and in spite of the cheers and the fanfare I can still hear my mother surreptitiously unwrapping a Brach’s butterscotch candy in the belly of her purse.
A trained dog, spooked by something, leaps out of the arms of a clown in a hoopskirt. The dog streaks between the ringmaster’s legs, over the satin train of a trapeze artist, and just in front of Faith’s elephant, causing it to trumpet and rear up on its legs.
If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget how long it took to watch Faith tumble to the sawdust, how panic swelled into my eardrums and blocked out all other sound, how the clown who’d befriended her rushed over, only to bump against the juggler and knock the spinning knives out of his hands, so that the three bright blades fell and sliced across my daughter’s back.
Faith lies unconscious on her belly in a hospital bed at Mass General, so small she barely takes up half the length of the mattress. An IV drips into her arm to ward off infection, the doctor says, although he is confident because the