Missing Sisters

by Gregory Maguire

  The first was from Sister Vincent de Paul.

  Dear Alice,

  I hear from my spies that you are in the middle of a pickle of some sort. Be a good girl and pray for guidance. Always remember Jesus loves you and so does Sister Vincent de Paul, though I have lots less influence. Sometimes a storm comes and the thing to do is wait it out. A sudden calm can be as surprising as turmoil, shocking even, if you’re used to commotion. Are you still doing speech therapy? Keep it up. I’m doing a set of painful leg exercises, but there’s not much point. I would like to see you someday before I die. I am mostly better and miss my girls in Troy and my kitchen. The food here is not food at all, like the macaroni and cheese they served at lunch, well let me tell you the macaroni was all dried out and the cheese had gone home. Ah, well, I’m waiting it out, too.

  Yours in Christ,

  Sister V. d. Paul

  “If you’d like to drop Sister Vincent de Paul a note I’ll be happy to post it for you,” said Sister John Bosco.

  “Mmmm,” said Alice noncommittally, awash in relief and terror.

  The second piece of mail, in the same magic batch, was a postcard. It read:

  Dear Alice Colossus:

  All the stories in the newspapers and that one photo they keep running: I can’t get it out of my mind. Are you the same girl I sang on the bus with, that day last winter? Seems like a miracle. My name is Larry Deeprose. I’m a student at SUNY, phone 555-6713. Give me a call.

  Your friend,

  Larry

  “This one can’t be for you,” said Sister John Bosco, evidently forgetting Alice’s misbehavior last February. “I’ll toss it.”

  “No, I like the picture,” said Alice cleverly, flipping it over to show (thank you, Jesus, that there was a picture) a photograph of a statue of Moses in some park. “I like Moses.”

  “Very well,” said Sister John Bosco, and went on to supervise someone else’s life for a while.

  Alice was in the chapel again. In her lap were the letter from Sister Vincent de Paul and the postcard from Larry Deeprose. She didn’t know if she was there to pray, or just to be alone. It was late afternoon, and she could hear the girls in the yard outside playing volleyball. The sounds of girls shrieking at volleyball did not seem out of place in a chapel, to Alice’s surprise.

  It was as if her life had woken up again. Well, she didn’t have parents, she didn’t have Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and those cunning baby girls, and adorable Garth, and feisty Miami as a companion and cohort. She didn’t even have the Harrigans. What did she have? She had the nuns, same as ever, not so bad, better than a lot. And now she had Sister Vincent de Paul again. But she was dying! There wasn’t much hope! She wanted to see Alice again!

  O clement o loving o sweet, began Alice. Mary smiled privately, as usual; Jesus showed His heart, as if to say but hearts still can be broken, you know. I am always here. The light filtered in through the waxy colored windows. A bus belched out on Fifth Avenue, and the diesel fumes made it into the chapel. I want to be a nun, thought Alice. Keep your ears open, Jesus advised again; there’s plenty of time for all that.

  And about the boy with the guitar—Larry Deeprose. Deeprose! If there was a more romantic name for a student to have, Alice didn’t know it.

  She began to add things up.

  A few days later Sister John Bosco handed Alice a stamped envelope on which she’d written Sister Vincent de Paul’s address, a place in Glens Falls fitted out for old or recuperating sisters. “You have written your best old friend a note?” asked Sister John Bosco. Alice nodded. “And I’ll mail it on my way to the store,” said Alice. “Sister Paul the Hermit Crab wants me to go to help her carry stuff back.”

  “Sister Paul the Hermit Crab?” Sister John Bosco raised her eyebrows almost up to her wimple.

  “You must’ve heard me wrong,” said Alice, blushing. “You know how bad I talk.” She fled with the envelope. Inside it she slipped a piece of paper with lots of tiny writing on it. First she copied over Sister Vincent de Paul’s address on a separate scrap of paper, so she’d know it; then she crossed out the address on the envelope and wrote Miami’s address beside it. That afternoon she slipped the envelope in the mailbox.

  THE SNOW PEOPLE

  Sister John Bosco threw open the window of her office. Fall had swept in overnight, and a tide of cool, forgiving air spread through the city streets. Moisture in the atmosphere, rising damp from sidewalks and tiny front yards. The tang of an alley skunk. She inhaled with gusto and noted with pleasure that Father Laverty was late. Two minutes of grace, two minutes to do nothing but receive the fall like a guest into her office. It was Saturday, the girls were off picking apples, all but Ruth Peters, who’d begun misbehaving lately, and Alice Colossus, who was having her once-a-month outing with the Shaw family of Albany. Sister John Bosco broke a crust off her morning roll and sprinkled the brown bits on the windowsill, admiring the birds. She gazed at a poor woman in a tattered housecoat plowing slowly through the first fall of leaves and wondered briefly about the ragged woman’s childhood.

  When Father Laverty came bustling in a moment later, Sister John Bosco was at her desk with a file in her hand. “You’re late, Father,” she said tartly.

  “Traffic, I overslept, moral inferiority—pick your excuse,” he said. “Are you going to eat the rest of that roll, or is it going begging?”

  They settled down to work. Finances out of the way first, then a few legal questions about the diocesan opinion on various kinds of group health insurance. Sister John Bosco ticked off the items they’d handled on a small, white pad. They came to Alice.

  “You will know that the annoying newspaper attention has given rise to all sorts of difficulties,” said Sister John Bosco. “I’ve had no fewer than five women contact me claiming they gave birth to twin daughters at Brady Memorial in nineteen fifty-six, and threatening legal action to reclaim Alice.”

  “So what’s the problem?” said Father Laverty. “Maybe one of them is telling the truth. Or maybe one of them would make a good mother for Alice anyway.”

  “Five of them aren’t telling the truth,” said Sister John Bosco, “or we’d have a miracle on our hands. Besides, the records at Brady Memorial show that no twins were born to unwed mothers in nineteen fifty-six. So clearly all five women are lying, or deluded. This isn’t a sound basis on which to begin considering their fitness to adopt one of our girls, as you well know.”

  What was it about him, Father Laverty wondered, that caused Sister John Bosco to speak like a state legislator? Perhaps he should come to these meetings in his day-off garb and leave the collar at home.

  “No twins at Brady that year?” he queried. “So what sort of miracle are we really talking about here? Where’d Alice and Miami come from then?”

  “The records show that they were found abandoned in the hospital lobby on June twentieth. They were a week or ten days old. There is no evidence anywhere that names either parent, and none has ever come forward to Brady Memorial to claim responsibility. Nor, might I add, has any of these five women made the slightest suggestion she had the twins elsewhere and delivered, or arranged for the delivery of, the babies to the maternity hospital.”

  “So the nuts have come out of the woodwork,” he observed.

  “Where the press is concerned, they usually do,” she said.

  “What is the long-range hope for Alice Colossus?” said Father Laverty after a while. “I rather like her, you know.”

  “Well, of course you do. She’s quite a thrilling child in her own way. Her early disadvantages aside, she’s pushing forward out of herself with commendable spirit. It appears she may be bright enough after all, though that’s been hard to determine so far.”

  “The hearing? The speech?”

  “The hearing seems to come and go. Dr. Bradford suspects it isn’t as bad as Alice makes out, that perhaps it’s a trick of the mind. The hearing gets worse in times of stress. But the speech is improving all the time. It’s a small proble
m, really, compounded in part by the hearing and in part by an overgrown integument at the back of the tongue. We are advised that minor surgery when she’s fully grown may help correct the pronunciation of the broad vowels, the fricatives, the labials…the works.”

  “And is she ready to leave us? If the right set of parents came along?”

  “Well, who can say?” Sister John Bosco allowed herself to look uncertain. “We make the best decisions we can. But what hangs in the balance!” She went on to explain. “I have just heard from the Harrigans, that couple who wanted Alice last winter, only Alice wouldn’t go. They took Naomi Matthews instead. They’re having a terrible time with her and want to send her back here.”

  “What sort of terrible time?”

  “Naomi is thirteen. What sort do you think?”

  “What do you propose? Do you want to send Alice there now?”

  “We’re not a hotel, nor are we a lending library of children,” said Sister John Bosco. “We don’t circulate our wards at the whim of cardholders in good standing. Should Naomi herself make a request of us to come back, I would not turn her away, naturally. But the Harrigans need to spend some time learning to be good parents. Six months is not enough.”

  “You’d make a good mother,” said Father Laverty daringly.

  “I am a good mother,” she retorted. “Now next on the agenda is Ruth Peters.”

  Alice, Miami, and Garth were sitting on the porch rail. Alice and Miami were waiting for their worst misbehavior ever to start. Three times while spending Saturday together they’d already gone through the litany of comparisons and sized each other up and marveled at their similarities and differences. Miami couldn’t sing to save her life. They were both great at basketball. They both had allergies to tomatoes. They both had gone to the memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What if they’d seen each other there! But they hadn’t; there was such a crowd. They couldn’t figure out which one of them was smarter, which made them both feel relieved.

  Miami said to Garth, “We’re not doing anything exciting today, so you’re not invited.”

  “She’s my sister too,” said Garth. “You can’t disinvite me.”

  “We can go in the ladies’ room, and you can’t follow us there,” said Miami.

  “What ladies’ room?”

  “We’ll find one someplace.”

  Alice sat holding the wallet she’d made for Sister Vincent de Paul during the summer. Usually she was nice to Garth. Today she was too preoccupied to pay attention to him. Miami hoped Alice knew what she was doing. Whatever trouble they got into today, Miami knew she’d be forgiven. The Shaws bent over backward to forgive. It was dumb, really, but there was no point in letting their wishy-washy goodness go to waste. With nuns, however, could forgiveness ever be relied upon? No matter what Alice said, Miami’s experience in school seemed to suggest otherwise.

  “Garth,” said Miami, “if you’re really good to us and leave us alone today, I’ll let you go up in the tower room.”

  He scowled. “When?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  “Hah!” he said. He knew an outright lie when he heard one. Miami amended her offer to give it more credibility. “Well, whenever you want if I’m not there or if I am and I don’t care.”

  “Like right now?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Miami. Garth scratched his behind. “Only don’t fall out the window. It’s awfully high.”

  “I’m very good at balancing,” said Garth, and darted away to take full advantage of the permission.

  “Come on, let’s go,” said Miami, looking at her watch. “They’ll be back from Westgate Shopping Center in a little while. I’ve left the note to say we went to Patty’s.”

  “Should we leave Garth alone?” said Alice.

  “We shouldn’t,” said Miami, “but we’re going to. Don’t worry. I’ll ask Mrs. Jenkins to keep an eye on him. The old bat, she’s always snooping and prying anyway, she’ll love it.”

  Mrs. Jenkins seemed so amazed at the sight of the similar girls that she agreed without so much as a snort. “Get that Garth to play on the porch,” she said. “I’ll watch him while I’m putting in my tulip bed.”

  Father Laverty had stayed for a bowl of minestrone and then tootled off to the alcohol rehabilitation ward at Saint Peter’s to say an early vigil mass for the patients. The girls came back from apple picking, boisterous, cheeks as red as the bushels of fruit they hauled in from the station wagons. Ruth Peters stopped crying and began to behave. Sister John Bosco was called in by Sister John Vianney from the basketball hoop in the backyard, where she was playing a little one-on-one with the older girls. She adjusted her veil and went to the phone in the lobby.

  It was Mr. Shaw on the phone. Miami and Alice were missing, but not to worry.

  “You left them alone in the house?” cried Sister John Bosco, incredulous.

  “We thought we had to show them we trusted them,” said Mr. Shaw.

  Sister John Bosco released a force of air from between her lips that, had it been interpreted into English, would have required her to confess to profanity. “Where might they be?”

  “Well, we called Miami’s friend Patty, where they said they were going. But Patty’s mother said Patty was away for the weekend, and she hadn’t seen them at all. And we called some other friends, and the library, and no one has seen them. They’re probably just walking around the neighborhood. I’m sure of it, in fact. But I wanted to let you know.”

  “You let Miami walk around the neighborhood alone?”

  “This isn’t Fifth Avenue in Troy, Sister,” said Mr. Shaw, a little sharply, “and Miami has lived here for seven years. I wouldn’t be inclined to worry except they left Garth here alone instead of taking him with them, which is what they were instructed to do. I only bothered to call in case you had any ideas.”

  Sister John Bosco’s mind began to race. What if one of the women who’d come to claim Alice had been making inquiries, had figured out from the phone book where the Shaws lived? What if she’d been stalking around waiting to cause trouble? It was farfetched; it was even faintly hysterical. But she’d rather be accused of hysteria than allow harm to come within an inch of the twins. “You’d better call the Albany police,” she said evenly, “and maybe the state police as well. This could be trouble.”

  Mr. Shaw said to his wife, “I’m not going to call the cops. It’s Saturday afternoon. Alice has been here three times already, and the girls have giggled and horsed around like ordinary kids. That they disobey right now is just part of the game. They have to test us, to see whether two of them are stronger than we are. Sister John Bosco is being excitable.”

  “But Alice is her responsibility, ultimately,” said Mrs. Shaw. “And we should be seen to be cooperative, for Miami’s sake, in the long run. For all our sakes. I suppose it won’t hurt to call.”

  So Mr. Shaw phoned, apology for bothering the police reeking from him like cigar smoke. Garth sat on the blanket with the little girls. He was afraid he’d misbehaved, that it was his fault. He didn’t want Miami to get in trouble.

  He watched his mother. She fussed with making hamburger patties for freezing, rounding each one perfectly, with the daunting confidence grown-ups had at everything they did. She smacked the finished burgers flat on squares of waxed paper she’d cut with pinking shears. She looked completely calm. When Mr. Shaw came back from the phone, she said in an even voice, “Did you tell them what Miami was wearing?”

  “How do I know what Miami was wearing?” he snapped.

  “She went with you over to Troy when you picked up Alice,” she snapped back. “It could be important. Call them back. Levi’s and a pink corduroy jacket. And Alice in a plaid skirt and a big, blue, oversize sweater, a nun’s cardigan.”

  “They’re identical twins, for heaven’s sake,” said Mr. Shaw. “You could hardly get a better identifying feature than that.”

  “Call them back,” she said, banging an aluminum mixing bowl on
the edge of the counter.

  Well, Garth thought, it was time for him to leave. He went up the stairs in bewildered grief, resting both feet on each tread before continuing. He didn’t know why they had to fight about it. They never fought. If he hadn’t agreed to stay home this would never, never, never have happened. Somehow it was all his fault. He couldn’t tell exactly how, but he felt as if he were wearing iron clothes, as if his feelings were crushed by them.

  Maybe he could see them from the tower window.

  He brightened up a bit and the iron feeling left his clothes. He made it up the ladder to the dusty chamber, sunny under the inverted cone of the ceiling. He looked out this way and that. He could see Saint Peter’s from here! And all the way down into Mrs. Jenkins’s yard. Maybe if he sat on the edge of the window he could lean just a small way over and see farther up and down South Allen Street. They’d be awfully glad downstairs if he found Miami and Alice.

  The window was unlocked. It swung inside on hinges that squeaked.

  He didn’t much like being too high, he decided.

  But it was awfully important to find Miami and Alice, wasn’t it?

  Sister Francis de Sales sat with Sister John Bosco in the office. The other nuns had taken the girls off on their Saturday afternoon walk to the Troy Public Library. The place was quiet again. Sister Francis de Sales had given up trying to be comforting, as Sister John Bosco seemed to find comfort irritating just now. They simply sat, waiting for news.

  “You don’t know what a trial it is,” said Sister John Bosco, as if Sister Francis de Sales had just claimed such knowledge with insulting possessiveness. “These children are loaned to us for a time, loaned by God. They’re like our own talents, like the talents in the parable, Sister. We are required to preserve them and allow them to grow and develop. Yet there are wolves disguised as saints out there, not even knowing themselves what they are, waiting to snatch up our precious talents and diminish them. Do you know what I’m saying, Sister? Do you understand what I mean?”