The Night Visitors(16)

Although it’s warmer in here, my skin has broken out into gooseflesh and I have to remind myself that I’m a grown woman (a grown-ass woman, as Doreen is fond of saying) with a home, not a scared girl with no place else to go. I stamp my feet to shake the snow from my boots—or maybe to announce my entrance. Either way, the noise fails to wake up the nun napping in the glass-fronted booth by the door. She’s probably deaf. Many of the old ones are. And they’re all old; not many young recruits these days. I wonder how long Sister Martine will be able to keep St. Alban’s going. I imagine the diocese is keeping its eye on this riverfront property.

As I walk past the drowsing nun I feel like Psyche sneaking past drugged Cerberus. It’s the boy, I think as I walk the long hall to Sister Martine’s office, who’s put me in mind of mythology—all those stories my father read to me and I read to Caleb. It would have been fun to look at the stars with Oren and talk about the heroes and their adventures, but we won’t do that now. Once I explain the situation, Sister Martine will want them to leave immediately. She will know a safe place to send them; by tomorrow they’ll be across the border in Canada. I stop in the middle of the hallway, swamped by an overwhelming sense of loss. Don’t be selfish, I hear my mother say, you know the right thing to do.

Do I? I wonder as I force my feet the rest of the way down the hall. I knock on the door before I can change my mind.

“Come!” a gruff voice calls from inside. For a moment I picture my father behind the door and I can’t move, but then I hear a querulous voice add, “Or don’t! It’s all the same to me.”

I adjust my lapel so my pink I STAND WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD button is visible and open the door. Sister Martine looks up from the stack of folders on her desk, blue eyes peering over reading glasses that have slipped to the end of her long aquiline nose. She looks like a bird of prey scanning the horizon for lunch. But when she sees it’s me, her face fans into a multitude of fine lines, like an origami flower unfolding.

“Mattea,” she croons, making of my full name a song. “It’s been too long.”

She begins to stand up but I hurry closer to stop her. The walker she’s been using since she broke her hip last year sits in the corner as if it’s been sent there for being bad. Sister Martine braces herself against the desk with one hand, knuckles down, and reaches for me with the other. She squeezes my shoulder with surprising strength and then stands straight to look me in the eye. It startles me to realize we’re the same height; I always picture her towering above me.

“You look tired,” she says. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“You should talk,” I counter, taking in the bruised-looking skin under her eyes and the thermos of coffee and towering stack of folders on the desk. One night, when I was staying here, I tried to slip out. I had to go past Sister Martine’s office, which I didn’t think was a problem since it was three A.M. As I crept past I saw a light and looked in. She was at her desk, stockinged feet up, wimple discarded, hard at work. That was decades ago, but I’m pretty sure she keeps the same hours now. “Tell me you haven’t been up all night,” I add.

“Only time I can get some work done without interruption.” She pats the stack of files. “I have to keep up with all my children.”

Brown folders and blue folders; I’m familiar with the system. Each brown folder represents an unwed mother who came to St. Alban’s to wait out her pregnancy. Each blue folder represents a baby born here. Sometimes a woman has two folders: a brown and a blue one. These are the women who were born here and then show up years later to have their own baby. That’s often the only way I find out what happened to the children who left from here, Sister Martine told me once.

She pats my cheek as if I were one of her children (which, in a way, I am) and looks into my face. I feel split open by her gaze. To avert it I tap the pin on my lapel. “Look what you get when you donate to Planned Parenthood these days.”

She screws up her face into a scowl, then flips up the collar of her habit to reveal an identical pink pin. “No kidding.”

I burst out laughing, the first time I’ve really laughed since I don’t know when. Sister Martine could always make me laugh. When she caught me trying to run away that night she told me to go ahead. What? she’d asked in a perfect Jewish inflection. I should worry you’re going to get knocked up?

“Did you contribute in your own name?” I ask.

“Of course not. I contributed in the name of our new vice president and gave his address. But I helped myself to a pin when I drove one of my girls over to the center in Poughkeepsie.”

“You drove a girl to Planned Parenthood?” I can’t disguise the surprise in my voice. I know Sister Martine has unusual views for a nun, but taking a girl for an abortion would probably get her excommunicated. “For . . . ?”

“An STD test and to be fitted for a diaphragm. But please don’t tell Doreen. The last time she tweeted about me and I got in trouble with the archbishop.”

“I bet,” I say, grinning back at her. I notice that her hand on my shoulder is trembling and help her back into her chair, pulling another chair close. I asked her once years ago how she could remain with the church when she disagreed with its position on birth control and abortion. She told me that her beliefs were between her and God and that they were both content that she was in the place she could do the most good. And what more could I pray for, she’d asked, other than world peace, an end to hunger, and a new water boiler for the convent, than to find the place where I can do the most good?