Faith and the Dark

Another sheet of rain pounded the little car as Faith drove it past an exit on interstate 12. She hated driving in the rain--it was a trait she shared with both her mother and her grandmother. Getting lost was another, but Faith didn't like to admit that.

She was on her way to see her mother and grandmother. They'd be having coffee right about now, she thought, until the rain pounded down harder and she had to concentrate on not veering off the road. She held the steering wheel with two hands, at ten o'clock and two o'clock, and scooted so far up in the seat that her forehead almost touched the windshield. She still had miles to go, but the thought of a hot cup of coffee in her grandmother's dry, toasty kitchen kept her resolve strong. There was a mug at her grandmother's house that was always reserved for Faith, and her mother always kept her mug full when she was there.

But right now, she had to focus. The front tires on her ten-year-old car were as bald as her father's head, and every vehicle around her was passing her, flinging gallons of dirty water in her line of sight. The moments when she couldn't see the reflective paint on the road made her fear for her life, and for some reason, she always turned the radio off when she drove in conditions like this. She knew the silence didn't help her driving ability. She'd thought about it once, when she wasn't driving in a downpour, and she came to an unsatisfying conclusion: there could be no chance she'd die to a song she didn't like. It was either something that spoke about her life--shiny, optimistic and compassionate--or nothing at all.

There was always that control thing about Faith. She knew it, and she hated it, but it comforted her. She liked to be in control of things. The second that a situation began to drift away from her reigns, the anxiety began, and she couldn't function. She didn't know if it was by-definition anxiety--all she knew was that a fog descended, and she was rendered incapable of making decisions. She would simply turn around and walk away. Give up.

Which was why she had such a strong aversion to driving in downpours. With her usual reaction to everything else out of her control, Faith would simply give up and allow the inevitable, horrible accident to happen, and it would all be over. An inglorious death, by hydroplaning into one of those giant concrete walls that surround I-12. Her hands began to shake.

It's happening, she thought. It's happening, and I'll never make it out of this.

She forced herself to picture her thick ceramic mug at her Grandmother's, filled to the brim with everything warm and wonderful. And her mother, whom Faith resembled, sitting at the table with her characteristic, slightly-misshapen sugar cookies. Her mom wasn't very good at baking, but the memory wasn't about how they tasted.

Faith took a deep breath and took control of the situation. She was almost there.

The little car slowed to make the exit to Florida Boulevard. Just being on this road made Faith feel better; she'd been driving down this road since the day she passed her driver's test. And even years before that, her Grandmother would drive Faith to the little cemetery on the occasional Sunday after Mass, to visit Grandpa's grave.

She remembered one time she rode with her mother to the cemetery. Her Grandmother had been distressed about something, and had disappeared without telling anyone where she was going. Somehow, through some channel she was too young to feel, Faith's mother knew. And they found grandma there, in the cemetery, kneeling by grandpa's gravestone, weeping.

"He's still there Grandma," Faith had said, like the child she was.

"I know he is, Faith, he's the light of my life, but it gets dark sometimes kiddo, and the rain starts pouring. Sometimes I just have to come here to make sure he's still here."

At the time, Faith distinctly remembered wanting a happy meal after that exchange. She mentioned it to her mother, and they went to McDonald's. Everything felt so stable and unchanging.

She often wondered in her teenage years whether or not it was a good thing to be raised in such a grand illusion. The cons seemed far more numerous than the pros. Perhaps, if she hadn't been born to such a religious and grounded family, she could have better prepared for the horrible things that happened later--the heartbreak, the danger, the deaths. Maybe she wouldn't have been forced to fashion a way to cope, to live everyday life the same as it had been. If things hadn't been so constant or stable, she'd have come to expect them not to be.

Faith didn't know when she began to understand, but she had eventually stopped asking questions. The situations in life that she couldn't control still constantly threatened her well-being, and always would. Reality returned, as it always did when she passed the cemetery to pull into her driveway a few blocks away.

Sometimes she just had to believe that they weren't in there. When it got dark, and the rain poured, the only thing she could do was think about being in her grandmother's kitchen. And when she came home, like she always did, she put on a pot of coffee, no matter what time it was. Then, though she rarely did it, she'd think about making awful, awful cookies.