“I had a nice dream,” she says.
In Nonna’s dream, lights streamed along the highway, and she was floating above, held up safely by something immense and warm and happy. She understood everything: the suffering, the world, her life, the meaning of all things.
Jesus was there, and all the angels and saints.
“Was I in your dream?” Cee-Cee asks.
“You were my dream,” Nonna says.
After a lunch of sausage and peppers, Nonna feels the great warm light coming toward her again. She has always been obedient, riding out life’s ups and downs without complaining. How strange it seems now that the world should go on without her. It will grind right along with all the same conflict and love, terror and beauty. Now standing in the transom, Nonna sees all this and feels happy at the chance to let it all go: the overflowing toilets, the crying children, the broken hearts.
She’s not afraid of dying. She’s saved herself through prayer.
Nonna clears the dishes and wipes down the counter. She kisses the top of Cee-Cee’s head and makes her way upstairs.
Cee-Cee sits and waits, building a tower of cards.
When the sun starts its ordinary, spectacular descent, she gets up slowly, careful not to knock down her creation.
She puts on her coat, and walks out into the late April afternoon.
Hearing the lonely sound of her own footsteps on the pavement, Cee-Cee realizes for the first time since coming out of the woods that she is still alive.
THE third
It’s half-past five, which means the girl isn’t coming.
Amanda has learned that not every girl can be reached; not everyone saved. In her line of work, you have to be patient.
In a separate pew of Our Lady Queen of Sorrows’ chapel, Cee-Cee is also kneeling and thinking, but Amanda does not know she’s there.
They are praying, but not together.
Amanda sits at the front of the church, Cee-Cee at the back. Cee-Cee watches Amanda straighten the missals on the little wooden shelf, waiting for the right moment to announce herself. Finally, Amanda makes the sign of the cross and gets up, genuflecting at the altar. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of Cee-Cee’s small shadow coming up the aisle.
“Sister Pius, is that you?”
“No. It’s me.”
“Oh, Cee-Cee!” Amanda’s heart lifts. “On a Saturday? To what do I owe this pleasure?”
Cee-Cee points down the hall outside the chapel at a closed door leading to the recreation room. “My father’s in there in a meeting. I have to tell him something.”
“Unsupervised?” Amanda seems alarmed. “Does your grandmother know? Shall we go find her?”
“No, Sister,” Cee-Cee says. “Nonna can’t help now.”
Amanda walks briskly toward the girl. “What do you mean?”
“She’s gone,” Cee-Cee sobs.
In the center aisle of the empty chapel, Amanda drops on one knee and wraps her arms around Cee-Cee as if to absorb her sorrow.
She cries for both their losses: Cee-Cee for losing her grandmother; Amanda for feeling like an orphan all over again. When their tears dry up, Amanda wipes Cee-Cee’s face.
“I’ll see to this,” she says. “You’re safe with me.”
From the phone outside the rectory, Amanda calls an ambulance and arranges to meet the police across the street. Commandeering the first person she comes across, Amanda barks an order.
“Bring Cee-Cee to the sacristy, Sister Edward,” she says. “Don’t let anyone near her until I get back.”
Sister Edward hurries Cee-Cee back into the chapel. “What happened, Miss Bianco? What is this about?”
“Nonna died in her sleep,” Cee-Cee says.
“I see.” Sister Edward checks her watch. “Condolences are in order then.”
“She went with Jesus. It’s what she wanted.”
Sister Edward clears her throat and looks at Cee-Cee’s inky hands, her messy hair. “Why is it, I wonder, God gives you so much information and leaves the rest of us in the dark? You must be much, much better than the rest of us are.”
“God doesn’t care about better, Sister.”
“You pretend to know what God cares about, do you?”
“Only what I’m told.”
Sister Edward nods impatiently. “And so you are…back in communication…”
“It’s different now.”
“And the…visitations…?”
“No,” Cee-Cee says. “Nothing. It’s kind of a relief.”
Staring straight ahead at the altar and the large looming cross, Sister Edward sighs. “Shall we say a prayer for your grandmother’s soul?”
They kneel together in the closest pew and bow their heads.
Sister Edward goes first: “If I were a piece of cloth, Dear Lord and God, my Precious Savior, I would not be worthy to clothe even your poorest, most humble creature on earth, and yet hear now these prayers for your obedient servant Marina Petramala as a measure of my love and humility…”
Looking up from clasped fists, Sister Edward and Cee-Cee are startled to see someone floating toward them from the center aisle. It is a girl so thin and insubstantial that Cee-Cee almost doesn’t see her.
For a brief moment Sister Edward thinks she is the one having the divine vision. A messenger from God, an angel? With all her heart Sister Edward hopes not. She suspects she does not have what it takes to endure the impossible tests of faith and suffering reserved for God’s visionaries.
“Hello?” Sister Edward says reluctantly. “Who’s there?”
The girl steps out of the shadows, revealing that she is not a divine phantom at all, but a dirty, matted thing. “I came to join up.”
Recognizing the red hair, Cee-Cee gets to her feet.
“Join up?” Sister Edward raises her voice menacingly. “This is a private school, child! You must properly apply. There is no joining!”
Cee-Cee takes a step closer. “It’s you! You are alive: I knew it!”
“I’m looking for Mother General’s Peace Army for Orphaned Girls,” Eileena says. “I want to be a soldier. I want to save and be saved.”
“But everyone’s looking for you. Don’t you want to go home?”
“Home?” she looks at Cee-Cee as if she has slapped her face. “No.” Tentative as a trapped animal, she holds steady, taking out a small piece of paper and reads from it. “A nation of girls will rise up in peace…I want that. I want to go to Canada.”
Edward lunges forward to grab her, shouting like a madwoman. “Kneel, child! You’ve been duped by the devil.”
But Eileena slips Sister Edward’s grip and runs out the side door, setting off an ear-splitting alarm.
To Cee-Cee, the high-pitched noise sounds like music. She has seen what could have been, desperate and covered in dirt: her own destiny, the destiny of many narrowly escaped.
She has seen the future that could have been hers.
Across the street in Nonna’s bedroom, Amanda studies the crucifixion: Jesus’ serene face and contorted body. It is a comfort to share her suffering with a God who suffers too. Before the ambulance and coroner arrive, she kneels by the bed and prays for her friend, Marina, who rests in peace on the bed. For the salvation of this pure soul, Amanda offers up her own life, her burns, scars, sacrifices, losses and all.
In the back of her mind, she can’t help also running through Dan Flannigan’s most recent letter. How careless he’s become in his writing, referring to her mission as “a crusade”—just the kind of thing that could ruin her. He knows his correspondence is screened. He knows now more than ever that she cannot afford the exposure. She’s gone so far as to start burning his letters one by one in Our Lady’s furnace in the basement after the others are asleep.
In his letter last week, he wrote:
What the government doesn’t know is that our radical roots—yours and mine—are based not in violence, but in love, not in destruction but in salvation. Jesus was the true
pacifist; you and I strive to live as He did. That is to say, by any means necessary. That is why our work will never be understood by common minds. That is why I so admire your crusade.
Amanda sighs and shakes her head.
By any means necessary? Maybe. But flouting the law is hardly Amanda’s purpose.
If she were going to write back to Dan she would remind him what it means to live through Christ rather than as Christ. As Paul wrote, “He is our peace.” Christ is “…the way, the truth, and the light,” according to John. We are, none of us, Messiahs, nor should we fill ourselves with ego. It has come to light that here is a man with good intentions, but a man who has gone too far; he believes in himself perhaps too much.
But what’s the use at this point in arguing theological differences? She will pray for Dan, but she will not write back—not now, not ever.
There’s no time for such leisurely activities these days anyway.
Amanda has a full schedule.
In a few hours, she will host two of her most recent graduates; the young women will arrive from Canada by train. Brother Joe will pick them up and bring them to Our Lady so they can explore the possibility of a postulancy with the Sisters of Christ’s Most Precious Wounds. But more than that, they will help Amanda with her mission. Spring seems to bring more girls in trouble than she can handle. These older girls—the Mirandas—are always eager to be of service for a time, though none of them ever want to join the order. Of course Amanda can hardly blame them. Would she choose her dusty Sisters today if she had the choice of other, more modernized communities?
The Mirandas pass through on occasion, mostly to pay Amanda a visit, and offer some small service, a gesture of gratitude for having saved them from a life of violence. It is simple obligation that brings them, Amanda knows, though these particular Mirandas are also on their way to the Women’s Peace Rally in Seneca Falls, a few hours west of Romeville.
Amanda closes her eyes and pats her dead friend’s hand. “Peace, Marina. Until we meet again.”
She gets up and opens the door, allowing the others in the room to do their various jobs getting her body to the undertaker and readying her for the final rest.
Vinnie walks Amanda back across the street, asking questions. She answers distractedly: the old woman died in her sleep, the State will remand Cee-Cee to a foster home if she doesn’t act quickly. She has promised Marina to guard the child with her life, and she has to move fast, lest the father realize he could make a valid argument for taking Cee-Cee back home.
Amanda and Officer Golluscio meet Sister Edward, who is standing in the hallway outside the chapel with Cee-Cee at her side.
What Sister Edward notices most about her handsome officer is that he is all business today, no smiles. For a moment, Sister Edward wonders if he is playing it cool. Maybe he has come back to haul the Mother General to jail; maybe he has figured out that she is building some sort of radical army. Unless she has fooled him too, the way she’s managed with Father Giuseppe.
The thought alarms Sister Edward.
She tries to signal Vinnie silently with her urgent message about the Mother General. She must let him know that the woman is in deep with terrorists and bombs, revolutionaries.
“Do you have something in your eye, Sister?” Amanda asks.
Sister Edward bows her head. “No, Mother.”
“Officer Golluscio is going to help us inform Mr. Bianco of current events.”
The name sends a strange tingle over Sister Edward’s scalp.
At last he speaks: “I’m sorry, Cee-Cee. I’d like a word alone with you for a minute.”
Amanda steps in and places her hand on the child’s shoulder. “I think we’ve had enough interrogations.”
Surprised, the officer looks up from his notepad. “Cee-Cee is the only witness. It’s important we make sure nothing is amiss.”
“It’s been established that her grandmother died peacefully while taking a nap.” Amanda is immovable when she wants to be, a mountain. “No more interviews…period.”
Cee-Cee perks up, as if she has only just now entered the room.
Such an odd child, Sister Edward thinks.
Vinnie scratches his chin with a pencil. “There’s a whole committee on miracles devoted to this case, Ma’am. The question appears to go beyond criminal matters. I don’t think the Church will be put off easily.”
“Cee-Cee is a child, Officer Golluscio, not a case. There will be no more meetings with committees, whether criminal or liturgical. As long as she is in my care, she will be protected.”
Sister Edward is amazed at how reasonable the woman can sound.
Amanda looks at Sister Edward. “Thank you for your service, Sister. Please tell Sisters Eugene, James, Sebastian, Robert-Claude, and Pius to come see me now.”
Heading for the door, Sister Edward glances at Vinnie one last time, trying to signal to him that something urgent has happened, or perhaps that something will happen if he doesn’t stop it.
Emergency! Sister Edward thinks, pointing her thoughts in his direction as hard as she can.
Yawning, Frank only half-listens to the AA speaker.
In the meeting, he checks his watch, counting the minutes in the moldy church basement where he sits with about twenty other guys in a circle of folding chairs.
Losers.
It’s going to be a long hour. A truck driver on Frank’s left lights up a cigarette, prompting a rash of pocket reaching, cellophane crinkling, and lighter snapping that breaks the mood. In minutes almost everyone in the room is smoking.
Everyone but Moonie and Frank.
Frank reads a sign above the doorway, Queen of Sorrows. No kidding. With all these nuns and his mother-in-law’s crazy religious passion, no wonder Cee-Cee is so confused.
Life is a kick in the teeth, Frank thinks. No games of toss in the backyard with Baby Pauly; no high school football, driving lessons, first dates.
Vegetable.
People regularly come out of unconscious states, the lady doctor at All Saints Rehabilitation has told them. Frank can see by the look on Glory’s face that she’s banking on a miracle. Cee-Cee needs it too; he can feel it whenever he sees her hunched shoulders and lost sparkle.
The room is quiet, except for the fidgeting of these poor sons of bitches, each ugly somber face a reflection of Frank’s pathetic journey toward sobriety.
He hates them almost as much as he hates himself.
By the time his clearance came through for the job at Kodak with Moonie, Frank had sweated out the last of the DTs. His hands were steady enough for him to make it through his first day. Turns out that Moonie’s big work secret is to develop several small prototypes for a reflecting telescope that can be used in space. About a dozen guys work every day polishing orbital mirrors to get just the right fraction of wavelength of red light to capture even the faintest objects. It’s tedious work, but if all goes as planned, theirs will be the model NASA uses to create the first zero-gravity observatory lab in outer space.
The hope is to get there before anyone else does.
Frank looks at Moonie sitting across the circle of alcoholics with his arms crossed, feet still, a peaceful expression on his face. He and Moonie have established a kind of easy rhythm now: AA meetings on their days off, driving together to work and back, occasionally stopping to eat supper at an Interstate diner.
Mostly Moonie listens to Frank bitch about Glory.
Still, the dinners somehow manage to be cheerful, as if life were indeed lurching forward. Booze takes away more than it gives, and Frank is grateful for a clear mind and the company of his brother again.
“Just like the old days, huh?”
“Sure.” Moonie always orders the meatloaf. “Except nothing’s like anything anymore.”
They’re in a whole new game now. After work on Fridays, they pick up the boys and go straight to All Saints Rehabilitation Center. They stand around looking at what’s left of Frank’s youngest son.
&nbs
p; At the diner, they rarely talk about work; it’s confidential, anyway, even between them. Occasionally Moonie breaks code and tells Frank how the mirrors are being incorrectly ground.
“Wrong shape,” he says, “too flat at the edges.”
Frank can barely believe his ears. “But that means…”
“It doesn’t matter.” Moonie says. “Budget’s run out. We’ll get reassigned to the next project.”
“That’s it?”
Moonie shrugs.
Now Frank looks out the window, searching the empty playground, but there’s no one there. It’s Saturday, he reminds himself.
He’s trapped.
He raises his hand to speak, but before he gets his chance, there’s a loud ruckus in the hall behind him. Without warning, the gigantic wooden door swings open, bursting with several nuns in drab knee-length skirts and black veils, led by a very attractive nun he recognizes from somewhere. A few guys on probation shrink in their seats, but Frank stands up.
“This is an anonymous meeting!” one twelve-stepper complains; the others peer at the floor, their shame automatic.
The pretty nun’s cheeks are ruddy. As Frank is about to smile at her, he sees his daughter, small and encircled.
“Cee-Cee…?”
The Sisters block Frank’s way.
“I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your mother-in-law passed away this afternoon.”
Moonie stands up. “She what?”
“Marina Petramala, the girl’s grandmother,” the lead nun repeats. “She’s dead.”
In unison, all the Sisters cross themselves. The alcoholics follow suit.
Frank knows his mother-in-law’s death is both bad and good for his situation. He must act quickly. Lunging between two sturdy nuns, he lifts his daughter straight off the ground, hugging her tight against his chest.
The pretty nun gets tough. “Put the child down.”
“She’s my daughter. She needs to come home now.”
Moonie places a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “The state has to say it’s okay, Frank. You can’t just take her back.”
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