Miracle Girls (9781938126161)

by Caschetta, M. B.

  When Glory picks Cee-Cee up in the public school parking lot, she wears giant dark glasses. Look at those cows, she says about all the other mothers who greet their kids with apples and cookies and smiles.

  Once Glory found a garbage bag on the front porch, left by a particularly bold Mrs. So-and-So. It was filled with hand-me-down clothes and a handwritten note, which Glory crumpled and threw into the wind. People have some nerve, she said.

  Somehow, though, Cee-Cee ended up wearing the tiny flannel shirt and green corduroy jumper, the cable-knit sweater with the matching skirt and the bright red tights. Glory laced her into a perfect-fitting pair of black-and-white saddle shoes.

  Walk around, Glory said. You look like a million bucks!

  Cee-Cee didn’t want to love the pretty oxfords, but couldn’t help it. The dark-black and shiny-white panels were like nothing she’d ever worn before. Just the same, she took the prized possessions off, then put them on again, lacing and unlacing. Later, she set them on a pillow at the end of the bed and got on her knees to ask for help.

  Live a little! Glory said. They’re just shoes.

  Sometimes Nonna’s church Sisters stop over with homemade jam or roses from their garden. They have questions for Cee-Cee about her visions because Nonna keeps them up to date. But Glory snatches their jars and bouquets and slams the door in their faces.

  Old black crows, Glory says.

  Watching through the window as they walk away, Cee-Cee thinks the Sisters are pretty in their short veils and dark suits, their sensible shoes. When they stop by Nonna’s for tea, they are cheerful all the time.

  Now Glory comes flying around the back of the car and stops abruptly at Cee-Cee’s door. Snapping it open, she springs her daughter out of the station wagon and into the cold.

  Using her best grown-up voice, she says. “This is my baby girl.”

  The cop nods hello.

  “Vinnie’s going to take us to the mall in his police car, honey. He’s a real live Trooper. Aren’t you, Officer Golluscio?”

  “Oneida County. Safest traffic patterns in the state!”

  Cee-Cee stares up at the cop, eyeing his shiny badge. “What about kidnappings?”

  But Glory grips her arm tight, as if she were a tiny criminal who might try to flee, and gives her the stink-eye, which means she should shut up. Before she can decide whether or not to obey, Baby Pauly propels himself out of the station wagon with surprising force.

  “STOP!” he screams, taking a lap around the station wagon. “YOU’RE UNDER ARREST!”

  Shoving Cee-Cee into the cop’s arms, Glory tackles Baby Pauly from behind. She manages to sit on his legs and cover his mouth with her hands.

  Looking up at Vinnie, she tries to smile. “This will just take a sec.”

  Vinnie backs away, pulling Cee-Cee with him to the cop car. He helps her into the passenger seat, where the heat is blasting and a ham radio blares out static. Slamming her door, he jogs around the car and climbs into the driver’s seat, rolling down the window to await further instruction.

  Baby Pauly struggles under Glory’s weight, kicking up snow in the space behind the station wagon, yelping and struggling. He tries to bite her, but Glory has the advantage of weight and size. She pins his arms and legs with her own.

  “Get the boxes, Roadie,” she yells.

  Roadie springs into action, wrapping his arms around a stack of packages with stickers that say “Love, Daddy,” and carrying them over to the cop car.

  Vinnie unlocks the back seat. “You can sit back there if you want. I’ll even let you play with the handcuffs.”

  Roadie unloads the gifts and heads back over to Glory, who is still on the ground straddling Baby Pauly, trying to sweet-talk him out of his tantrum.

  As if nothing out of the ordinary were happening, Vinnie yawns, revving the engine with his shiny black boot. He turns on the a.m. radio, switching stations, smiling nervously.

  “Pretty soon they’ll have astronauts orbiting the earth,” he says. “Can you believe it? People—just like you and me—shuttling around up there like it’s nothing?”

  Cee-Cee does not answer. Never talk to a cop, Frank always says.

  “Wonder what we’d look like down here from up there. Ever think of that?” He sighs, shaking his head. “Probably a lot better from that far away.”

  When Cee-Cee closes her eyes, she sees Vinnie without a uniform, peering into a pink bedroom and then coming across a small kid’s single shoe under his sofa. One minute he’s sitting at the dinner table with his wife and kids; the next minute they are gone. All the cereal bowls, crayons, peanut butter crackers, peas ground into the rug, homework, teddy bears, tears—packed and removed, divorced.

  She feels how it always surprises him—an unexpected stab in the lungs.

  Cee-Cee and the cop both take a sharp breath in. He looks at her knowingly. She doesn’t meet his eyes, but instead watches Glory shaking Baby Pauly on the snowy ground near the station wagon in front of the cop car, Glory’s messy hair and unzipped coat.

  “Nothing’s easy,” Vinnie says, watching out the window. “But you seem no worse for the wear.”

  Cee-Cee can feel that sitting in this vehicle with her makes him feel better.

  “Problem is, it only gets harder.”

  Cee-Cee concentrates on St. Lucy with her eyes plucked out.

  “Ever see a pair of eyeballs on a silver plate?” Cee-Cee says, breaking her rule about talking to cops.

  He seems uncertain. “A pair of what?”

  Outside in the snow near the station wagon, Baby Pauly squirms under Glory until Roadie’s dark hair, and Glory’s dark hair, and Baby Pauly’s dark hair are all the way white with freshly fallen snow. Roadie touches their mother’s shoulder.

  Then, just like that, it’s over. Glory picks herself up, brushes herself off, and shakes out her long black hair.

  She looks at the ground as though none of these children belong to her.

  Through the windshield of the cop car, Roadie nods at Cee-Cee, who begins to inch toward the passenger door. Vinnie gets out to free Cee-Cee into the snowy air.

  Roadie stands motionless in the driveway, waiting for his sister to catch up. His arms are full of Baby Pauly, who is whimpering quietly now.

  Defeated, Glory heads toward the little patch of white snow next to the cop car where Cee-Cee is standing.

  “Sorry, Glory,” Cee-Cee says.

  But Glory makes a wide circle around her daughter and climbs into the cop car, slamming the door without a word.

  Baby Pauly pops his thumb out of his mouth. “Let’s go watch The Price Is Right.”

  Roadie carries him toward the house. “C’mon, Cee-Cee. We’re going inside.”

  The storm, too, has taken a sudden turn, dropping wet snow like apologies. Baby Pauly tips his head back on Roadie’s shoulder and catches a few flakes on his tongue.

  Cee-Cee doesn’t have to turn around to know that Glory and the cop are backing down the driveway onto Route 177; she sees them in her mind. As they pull away in the cop car, Cee-Cee can feel them staring for just a moment at the back of her head, small and unhooded, a fiery orb barely detectable through the chalky white snow.

  Amanda Whalen loves snow.

  Mornings like this, she can almost catch a whiff of childhood: maple syrup and firewood. Walking across Our Lady’s schoolyard, she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. The vague lights behind her eyelids form the hint of her mother’s face, the hazy outline of her father standing at the kitchen door. It always surprises her to find them still there after all these years.

  Amanda’s father worked on the railroad. Her whole young life people said he’d surely get run over by a train, the way he climbed around tinkering on engines, sometimes while the cars were still moving. But one night only a few hours after he’d come home from work, a wayward spark escaped from the wood burning stove while they slept; it set fire to the kitchen tablecloth, which spread to the drapes, sending flames up the wall.
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  Asleep in the front of the house, five-year-old Amanda was wakened by firemen sounding their sirens and calling to her from the street.

  Jump, they said into a bullhorn. Come to the window and jump.

  Instead, Amanda crawled to the hall and shouted for her parents. When no one answered, she rolled down the staircase to the open front door, where she stood up and walked right out of that burning building. More than half her body was covered in third-degree burns.

  In the hospital, they peeled her blisters every day and scrubbed them with soap, a painstaking process that went on for hours and made her scream for her mother. She’d missed her parents’ funeral, her chance to say goodbye. The next several years she spent in a blaze of white pain that obliterated everything and kept her apart from the world. When she was finally released from medical care, a cousin came and picked her up outside the hospital where she stood bracing herself against the cold air and sunlight; they seemed to make her scars tighten and hurt all the more. Against all odds, there she stood alone in the world for the first time with a handful of presents from the nurses and doctors who’d been her only friends.

  For a while, Amanda was passed from relative to relative, until finally she was placed in St. Mary's Home for Wayward Girls, an orphanage in Montreal run out of an old Victorian house by the Canadian Sisters of Mercy.

  To keep them safe, the Sisters tied their girls together with ribbons. At bedtime they told cautionary kidnapping stories, spinning out the tales of Little Benny Foster and the Lindbergh baby, wealthy boys snatched from their beds for ransom, as if something equally terrible might happen to them. You could spot a pair of St. Mary’s girls a mile away by the purple bindings they wore on their wrists. They were never allowed to walk anywhere alone, not outside the orphanage, not inside—not even to go to the bathroom.

  Where is your inseparable, Little Miss? A clever idea—instant belonging. Why are you here on your own?

  It was an innocent time—a time before children routinely went missing—but the Sisters of Mercy were nervous as hens. They were all the more riled up when just a few short miles across the border from St. Mary’s, a little girl named Sharon Hill had reportedly disappeared on her walk home from school. Her family waited with the police, praying for a ransom note that never came. It was a mystery: if Sharon Hill hadn’t been kidnapped for money, then—what? The Sisters of Mercy speculated and prayed, tying their orphans together all the tighter.

  Amanda’s inseparable was a small but pretty one-armed girl named Carolyn Hayes, who was quick with a smile, sweet and blue-eyed. From the moment her wrist had been tied to Carolyn’s—tricky at first for Carolyn—Amanda felt soothed, happy almost. It was an unexpected gift, having someone permanently near.

  For the first time since her parents had died, Amanda’s heart opened. The terrible burns under her clothing, strange shiny webbings that had formed from her chest to her thighs, seemed to ease a little. What did scars matter when she had the imperfect, beautiful, smooth-skinned Carolyn at her side? They slept in the same bed, bathed together, compared their physical deformities, and confessed their past tragedies. They dreamed of sharing a future as Catholic Sisters running their own orphanage in America, where children would be as loved as they were.

  Amanda couldn’t believe a world in which Carolyn existed a mere arm’s length away was the same world in which she had lost so much. Everything had been up for grabs: her family in the fire, her grandmother from pneumonia, her relatives in Canada too poor to keep her. But at least she didn’t have to worry about potential adoptive parents taking Carolyn away: Who would want a one-armed girl?

  When the ribbon tying them together was abruptly cut one night while they slept, Amanda saw her mistake. Carolyn had contracted scarlet fever and was carried off to the hospital. When she died later that week, Amanda’s question had been answered. God had wanted a one-armed girl, even if no one else did. God had taken her.

  Months later, little Sharon Hill’s mutilated body was found caught in a storm drain a few blocks from her home. The newspapers in Canada all quoted U.S. authorities, indicating that the crimes committed against the girl were unprintable, which meant sexual. The Sisters were convinced that Sharon Hill’s murder marked the beginning of something awful and evil, a time of danger for children.

  Now, all these years later, Carolyn’s death and the tragedy of little Sharon Hill blur together for Amanda. She makes a point of treating each child passing through Our Lady as a precious gift, ephemeral but special, in need of rescue, yet as fleeting as the wind.

  Through the snowfall, Amanda spots the bright green Pinto in Our Lady’s parking lot. The driver’s ebony skin is barely visible through the early dawn as he ducks into his car, then steps back out.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mother!” he says in his velvety Nigerian accent. “Dark out here.”

  Amanda winces at the day’s first jarring reminder that she is no longer the lost and hopeful Amanda Whalen, but the serious leader of a Catholic order of teaching sisters with an equally serious name. “We’ll have to keep an eye on the weather.”

  Brother Joe nods, tilting his head in her direction. He wears a dark sweatshirt and sneakers, not his usual attire.

  “I was just thinking of my childhood,” Amanda says. “How I was once just a girl named Amanda before I was anyone’s Mother.”

  Brother Joe nods. “I think the rest would feel more comfortable if you went by your religious name.”

  She smiles at him. "It’s good for them to stretch their minds.”

  No matter how hard she tries, Amanda cannot get a unanimous vote from the Sisters on abandoning their arcane male names and returning to their birth names. But on principal, she insists they call her “Sister Amanda,” rather than “Sister Stephen” or worse, “Mother Stephen.” She wants them to see that God loves her whatever she calls herself, that modernizing does not ruin faith. So far, though, no one else has followed her lead. They call her “Mother General” on principle.

  Amanda would like to think she respects the sanctity of tradition as much as anyone. Hadn’t she observed years of silence and study and servitude? Hadn’t she donned a crown of thorns and lain face down before the altar in the symbolic death of her worldly self? Just like every last Sister, she too had risen from the floor anew and emerged from the chapel as a Bride of Christ. She ate the sweet wedding cake and drank champagne. She had even been as convinced as anyone, if not more so, that her spiritual name, Stephen, would transform her into someone pious and wise, someone worthy of bearing the name of the very first disciple to be martyred. And yet in the end she’d discovered that she was, still and all, just herself—sometimes her better and more divine self, sometimes her weak and flawed self. But whatever anyone called her, she was still just Amanda Whalen, secretly deformed, raised by Canadian nuns, protester of wars and advocate for girls in trouble.

  Amanda had to admit that she was also at times fierce and exacting, wrong-headed and stubborn. She had ideas and agendas. But wasn’t that exactly why God had called her to service? Wasn’t her fierceness the point, her ability to survive against all odds? She’d always meant to bring her whole self to her vocation—good and bad, wise and impetuous—damaged even. Surely God knew what He was getting Himself into.

  Brother Joe takes her sack of supplies and puts it in the hatchback.

  “Where are the others?” Amanda asks.

  Brother Joe points through the dark past the schoolyard, through the snowy distance, to the three figures trudging toward them. Amanda opens the back car door for them, noticing one is wearing an arcane smock, long black skirts, a habit with a matching veil, and a box-style wimple cutting a square around her face.

  “Again?” Amanda says. “You’ll freeze!”

  Sister Robert-Claude hikes up the heavy skirts to reveal red leggings. “Long Johns, Mother!” Hopping into the back seat, she sits next to Sister Eugene and Sister Pius. Like Amanda, today they are dressed in warm civilian clothing from the charity
bin. Sister Eugene wears a down coat and matching scarf. Sister Pius, standing no taller than 4’3”, is decked out in a child’s red snowsuit.

  Amanda herself has on a pair of small round blue sunglasses, a warm brown turtleneck with boots and plaid bell-bottoms. This morning she brushed out her hair and parted it in the center, smiling at herself in the dark window. It’s the one thing she misses most since having donned the veil as a Bride of Christ: her beautiful blond hair.

  Amanda settles into the passenger seat as the rest of her party slam the back doors.

  Brother Joe pulls out of Our Lady’s parking lot.

  “You don’t think the habit is a bit much?” Amanda says. “You were already all over the news this week.”

  Sister Robert-Claude unearths a tobacco pouch from deep inside her gigantic woolen sleeve and rolls a cigarette. “If we’re going to get arrested, I want the public to know who I am: a Catholic Sister with an ax to grind for peace! The only way anyone recognizes us is in these old getups, Mother. Our newfound subtlety of dress is lost on the public.”

  Sisters Eugene and Pius chuckle.

  Earlier in the week the three had accompanied Amanda and Brother Joe to a protest where getting arrested was a distinct possibility. Together the five of them joined the Valley’s most well-known war protesters, mostly peaceniks from Utica, a few parishioners, and members of the region’s notorious Radical Peace Circle. Leading the protest was Daniel Flannigan, an extreme philosopher and activist, best known for being the first American priest to be arrested for civil disobedience.

  On the railroad track, no one had gotten arrested. They’d lain their bodies down on the cold rusty tracks and held hands to form a human chain. The idea was to stop the 5:33 a.m. train from delivering munitions to the Caxton Air Base where they were to be loaded onto planes and flown to Europe, then to Southeast Asia. Amanda and the others had recited the Rosary and sung peace songs, staring up into the sky. The snow formed a fine white blanket over their bodies, but Daniel Flannigan’s hand was warm. Amanda followed the steady sound of his reassuring breath.