Loss of Faith by Erica Peterson

The only color in this room is dark. Dark isn’t even a color. But the drapes have been closed for seven days, and my eyes no longer seem able to distinguish between the Crayola-inspired colors of the ugly reproduction of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the wall. They also can’t focus on the pages of the book in front of me—not that I’ve really been trying to read it. The book has been there for a week. It’s black, which seems appropriate.

My right hand reaches up to scratch my face and I realize that the gesture is ineffectual; my fingernails are bitten down so far that my fingertips are red and raw. Shit, I think. That’s going to hurt tomorrow. It doesn’t hurt today. In my more lucid moments, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m being pumped so full of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers that I’ll eventually end up with the emotional capacity of a rock. Rocks are happy, I suppose. They certainly aren’t sad.

The white plastic telephone next to me has been sadly silent for the past day or so. That’s fine with me—the last time I was subjected to the tinny ring, it was predictably my mother.

“Are you still in Overlook?” she asked. What a dumb question. I could tell that she was smoking by the breathiness of her voice, and I felt like that should piss me off. She had promised me she’d quit.

“Yes.”

“Amanda, you’ve got to get up and do something with your life. You’re twenty-six for God’s sake and here you are with no boyfriend, no job, no prospects…” her voice trailed off. “I don’t know why you’re there; you can lie in bed at home. I just want you to come back. You know you’re welcome here.”

I pictured the white suburban split-level. The bird bath in the front yard and the neighbors with their yappy dogs and year-round barbequing. How cliché.

“I know,” I finally answered.

“Well, only you can decide to get better,” she went on.

“That’s bullshit, mother.” To her, I’m still an angst-ridden adolescent campaigning for a later curfew. She can’t fit razor blades and blue-green pills and chronic all-consuming depression into her schema. Now she’s going to tell me she’s praying for me.

“I’m praying for you, and I have the rest of the congregation praying too,” she promised. “I activated the emergency prayer chain. It’ll start doing some good soon. You’re a child of God, after all.”

I hung up the phone.

That was two days ago, but today I’m still past the point where I thought praying made sense, and still coherent enough to know that the idea of an ‘emergency prayer chain’ is ludicrous.

When I was little I believed God was like Santa Claus. They were both associated with Christmas, after all, and I could never quite keep it straight who exactly went down the chimney and who was the father of the baby Jesus. Although by the time I reached elementary school the cumulative effects of two years of Sunday School had shed some light on the matter, I still had problems with the “two old fat guys,” as I saw them.

A few years later, when my mother called me into her room and told me that she had been making up Santa all along, I decided that God was probably made up, too. I realized there was no way anyone with a belly like a bowl full of jelly could fit down our tin chimney pipe, and yelled at myself for being so stupid. She must have been lying to me about other things, I decided. Candy wouldn’t really rot your teeth and carrots wouldn’t improve your vision. There probably wasn’t even a bogyman, and then there definitely wasn’t a God.

My mom was the kind of woman who had a shrine to the Virgin in her bedroom, complete with photographs and holy candles, and my revelation about God scared her. I caught her up at night with her beads, praying for my soul a few times.

“Dear God, please let Amanda find You and Your Son and the right path. And while you’re at it, please help Megan to see the true way too.”

At least one of her prayers was finally answered: after another intensive Sunday School session where all of the miracles of both the Old and New Testaments were thrown at me, I was firmly re-entrenched in the Catholic faith.

From my bed, I have a great view of the dead flowers on my nightstand and the card that’s nestled into them, almost hidden. It’s short and to the point. “Amanda,” it reads. “Sorry. Alex.” The flowers were dead when I got them a week ago, and they’re still dead. I wonder if they were dead when Alex sent them—if their lack of color and brittle texture is supposed to send some subliminal message about whether or not he’s actually sorry. If it is, I decide, I don’t really care. It’s not like Alex has anything to really be sorry about anyway.

Everything was my fault, and that’s even clearer in the dim light of the room, as I stare at the textured ceiling. My eyes try not to catch those of the Virgin, immortalized in another tacky wall hanging. When I met Alex, it was right after that awful night in the dive bar with blinking neon Budweiser advertisements and lukewarm foamy beer. My friends never showed and I sat by myself at the counter, nursing my vodka tonic. I’ve managed to block most of it from my mind, but the man in the suit’s pimply and slightly blurry face comes back to me when I really don’t want to remember.

“Let me buy you a drink,” he propositioned.

I demurred; my first drink was already going to my head. He pressed, we joked about the wide variety of domestic beer on the menu—there was Bud and Bud Light—and finally I accepted a glass. Bud Light with a surprise touch of Rohypnol. That’s all I remember.

It was Alex’s bad luck that we met each other two weeks later in the self-help section of Barnes & Noble, and he got to pick up the pieces. He did an okay job, too. Came to therapy and church with me (neither of which I found helpful), waited a remarkable three months to have sex, and tried to mold me back into the person I once was. Like I was Play-Doh or some similar crap. Unfortunately, he didn’t know who that person was any more than I did and I can’t help feel like he missed a piece or two somewhere between the bar and home.

I was too much for him to deal with, and for that, I’m sorry.

When I was nine years old, I liked going to church. When I woke up on Sunday mornings, well-rested and feeling small in the double bed that used to be my parents’ before I was born, the sunlight streamed through the blinds and I remember smiling. I stretched my arms out, taking up as much of the bed as possible, and lay there happy. Then I got up and put on a skirt and went downstairs to make myself a bowl of Golden Grahams. Sometimes I would slice a banana in it, but that was only when we had bananas.

My mother was usually still asleep in her bed upstairs, and Megan was never awake. She’d just started college, and according to Mom she needed her beauty sleep. I thought I knew what she meant; Megan could have used a little bit more beauty. Since she started studying hospitality at Redlands Community College she hadn’t been sleeping much and had gained a bunch of weight. Whenever I thought that, I reminded myself what a very un-Christian thought that was. My mother’s words reverberated through my head: your sister is beautiful because she’s one of God’s children, just like you are. Megan never went to church though, because she could never wake up in time for the 11a.m. service.

I never had a problem waking up on Sundays. I liked the honey-colored wooden pews with the embroidered cushions and the flowers gathered at the alter. They were fresh every Sunday, and when I had money I liked to donate it to the Flower Fund. Then, I sat on the pews and try to figure out which flower my money bought. I stared at my flower and sometimes I touched it after the service. I don’t think the priest would have minded if he knew, because I didn’t hurt my flower, after all, but I waited till everyone was out having coffee and doughnuts and the sanctuary was dark.

There’s a television bolted to the wall, and it doesn’t seem all that practical. If I wanted to watch it—which I don’t—I would have to crane my neck to focus on the screen. What if I had a broken back, I ask. This is discrimination. I wouldn’t be able to watch TV, which we all know is a cornerstone of American society. Most of the time the television is off, because whatever appears when I turn it on bothers me. Music videos with their unrealistic gyrations, the evening news with more information about hurt and killing and pain, or the televangelists that remind me too much of home and my mother. Sometimes I leave it on channel 3; the buzzing flurries of static and confusion make a nice backdrop and reassuring white noise.

I run my fingers over the stitches lacing up my left wrist and try once again to banish the thoughts of a different strange bed, a different morning of self-pity and anger and disgust. I didn’t call the police until it was too late—I was in a daze for at least forty-eight hours, due to both the roofies and the shock—and they told me there wasn’t any physical evidence left if I wanted to press charges. That was the day I realized that God wasn’t looking out for me anymore, and I was on my own. Thanks for nothing, I remember thinking.

The doctor thankfully interrupts my memory tangent. This is what they’re here for: to distract me from myself. I feel like it’s a new one every time, which is why I never bother to notice his last name.

“Hello, Amanda,” he says. I notice his surreptitious glance at my chart, making sure he’s got my name and condition committed to temporary memory.

“Hi,” I say. I know he’s making a note of that too. Patient manages to sufficiently communicate, or something like that.

“How are you feeling today?”

I don’t even bother dignifying that question with a response. They’re controlling what they put into me—I should be asking him how I’m feeling.

Patient becomes uncommunicative and hostile, he writes. I am not hostile, I silently protest.

“Well, Amanda, I think we’re going to up your dosage a bit,” the Doctor says. “When we reach the perfect combination, you shouldn’t even know you’re taking medicine.”

He leaves, and I return to my white noise and my intravenous drip.

Luckily for everyone, but especially my mother, one day I woke up and realized that I believed in God. More than on a superficial level, though; I was ready to believe in God every day of the year, not just when it was Christmas or when I wanted something bad enough to bother praying for it.

When my best friend Tasha Slocowsky told me she hated me—while in the middle of a game of keep-away on the playground—I told her that was fine because God loves me. I might have also added that she was going to hell. A few weeks later, the same thing happened with Melinda Yee and Sara Lehman. Before I knew it, I had succeeded in alienating most of my friends, but that didn’t bother me too much. I had Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, after all.

The thing that did bother me was the priest. He was sort of scary, for one thing; always wearing black and hanging out in that creepy wooden box where you sat and he stared at you from behind a screen. Going there was called going to confession, my mom said. I had lots of sins to confess—serious stuff too. My litany routinely included at least one incident of talking back to my mother (thou shalt honor your mother and father) an account or two of working on Sunday (thou shalt honor the Sabbath and keep it holy) and usually a couple of impure thoughts.

The thing that was the most confusing, though, was how I had to call the priest “Father.” Because I didn’t have one. At least according to Mom, Megan and I were God’s gift to her and our dad was out of the picture and we were lucky to have one good parent and shouldn’t be selfish and wish for two. But then there was the priest—Father—was he really my dad? That wasn’t a thought I entertained too often because he was about eighty and scary, but it was there nonetheless.

Around that time, I stopped going to church. As much as I still loved it—the building, the ritual, the flowers—I realized that my definition of God didn’t encompass any of those things. And I was tired of Father Caspian and the graphic images of Jesus dying every Sunday morning.

It’s 5:30 on the dot, which means that within the next thirty seconds the rubber-shoed generic nurse will push through the door marked “No Visitors” and come into my room to bring me chicken parts, creamy mashed potatoes and lime Jell-O. And there’s a plastic spoon and fork and a napkin, everything pre-packaged and neatly arranged in its own spot. I’m a vegetarian, I tell her every day, which means that all I can eat are the mashed potatoes. Which are probably from a box and don’t even have lumps. I like the lumps.

The 5:30 dinner that I can’t eat is somehow comforting; it’s predictable and a break from staring at either the static, drawn blinds or dead flowers. The nurse always comes in the same way—backwards—picks the book off of my lap, and sets the tray down. She murmurs encouragement, asks if there’s anything else I need, and leaves. I sit there, sometimes eating the potatoes, sometimes not, and stare at the Last Judgment. Am I being judged? Maybe I should tell my eyes to focus and read my book. Something tells me my eyes aren’t the real problem.

Sometimes the deluge of medication seems to wane a bit and I break through, wondering what would happen if I told the nurse yes. If I stopped her before she turned around to leave and told her that I need some live flowers. That I need to be able to take a shower by myself and have access to a real butter knife and scissors rather than having my chicken pre-cut for me. That I need to be able to be taken off the liquid numbness they’re pumping into my veins long enough to have a really good cry—the kind with multiple tissues, red swollen eyes and a dripping nose.

But the thought is fleeting, and I’m barely able to summon enough strength to shake my head in answer to her question. She probably wouldn’t know how to respond, anyway. And I doubt she loves me enough to find me fresh flowers in frozen February Chicago.

Once I started thinking more and more about God, my childish brain found Him in my life everywhere I turned. I stepped back from the curb a second before a burgundy Range Rover nearly sideswiped me? It was God’s doing. I got an A on my Language Arts paper about the symbolism in Bridge to Terabithia? All God. I saw God in my mother’s eyes when she reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear when I drank from a water fountain. I saw God in my teachers and my classmates and the homeless man who sat on the corner bench whistling “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” over and over between his teeth.

Though I got older and more cynical, occasionally flipping off obnoxious drivers or drinking too much or making stupid self-destructive decisions, God sort of stabilized me. Everything happens for a reason, I told myself. My future was a mystery, but I knew that God knew what was going to happen. And for some reason, it always turned out okay in the end.

It’s past midnight, and no one has come to move my bed down and tell me to go to sleep. So I still sit at my forty-five degree angle and watch the static. My heart monitor beeps, and for a minute I think about pulling it out so it might make a damn nurse get worried and come to check on me. Then she will, as always, take the black book off of my lap—it’s in the exact same position as it was when she put it back there after dinner—flip the light switch and subject me to another cheery “good night, dearie!”

I got a letter from my mother today, and that’s still sitting next to me with the seal intact. Against my better judgment, I reach out my left hand and grab it. Slide my finger under the flap, pull. Out comes a crisply-folded sheet of her pale pink stationary. Blue felt pen, so I can tell where the ink is smudged and running. My eyes scan the words.

“Dear Amanda…tried my best to raise you…you got lost…need to get out of bed and live your life…praying…I still love you…please don’t be mad at me… remember you’re a child of God…Love, Mom.”

Letters are unfair, I think. I don’t get to respond—at least, not right away. No instant gratification. Had my mother been listening, however, or had been able to let herself hear about the events of the past few months, she would know that I’m not mad at her. Or at Alex, who my mother blamed for the suicide attempt and subsequent depression; typical for her to blame it on a man. She does not, of course, know about the rape. As for me, I am mad at myself and mad at God, and when I try to remember the faith I had when I was fourteen or fifteen, or even twenty-five, all I feel is numb. This time, it might not be okay.

I cross my legs under the thin cotton hospital blanket, and my shifting weight causes the Bible to fall off of my lap and onto the cold linoleum floor.