Contrition

  “We had some real adventures with candidates before we implemented this screening process.” Benedicta shook her head.

  “We’ll also need documentation of your citizenship, credit record, proof that you’ve been confirmed in the Catholic Church, et cetera.” Sister Scholastica handed me a manila folder full of forms through the slats of the grille. “You have been confirmed, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.” I took the folder. “In seventh grade.”

  “Good. That’s one less hoop you’ll have to jump through,” Mother said. “I believe that does it for the technicalities. The real question on our minds is your reason for joining us.”

  I looked at the women, confused.

  “We want to make sure you’re not entering the convent out of some sense of guilt over Sister Catherine’s pending departure.” Sister Scholastica pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “She’s made her own decision to leave despite our best efforts to convince her to stay.”

  I nodded. “I understand that, but I still feel guilty since I was the one who made the public aware of her talent.”

  “If you hadn’t introduced her art to the world, someone else would have.” Mother Benedicta touched the cross around her neck.

  “Very likely,” Scholastica said.

  “Despite what’s happened, I can honestly say I’m here of my own volition and on my own terms,” I said. “I’ll admit that it was Catherine who drew me here at first, but as Mother pointed out, that could have just been God’s way of calling me. I still love my sister and her paintings, but now I love this place, your way of life, and what you stand for, too. I do wish Catherine would stay. I can’t imagine leaving such a beautiful place.”

  “It is beautiful here, but monastic life isn’t easy,” Mother said. “There are always new challenges—some big, like finances, others small, like construction. In order to keep our vow of seclusion, we’ve had to alter our schedule to avoid the workers making repairs inside the cloister. As for our finances, the proceeds from Catherine’s paintings and the recent donations, yours among them, will enable us to stay in Big Sur indefinitely, thank God.” Mother looked skyward and clasped her hands together.

  “I’m glad. But I’d follow you wherever you go,” I said.

  “What about a husband and children?” Scholastica asked. “How do you feel about never getting married or becoming a mother?”

  “Okay at this point,” I said. “I’m not very good at romantic relationships. From the sisters I’ve spoken to, I understand that the real grief about never giving birth or having a family comes later, so I guess I’ll have to deal with the issue then.”

  “That’s true,” Scholastica said. “And there’s no way out of the pain but through it. Most sisters survive and remain here, strengthened by the struggle.”

  “Right now I’m more worried about missing the family and friends I already have,” I said.

  “Will the monthly Visiting Day be enough for you?” Mother looked worried.

  “I think so.” I hoped so.

  “We understand that you sold your father’s painting for quite a sum,” Sister Scholastica said. “How will you handle material temptation? What’s to stop you from walking out of here and enjoying your money?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said. “I don’t know how I’ll resist temptation until I’m faced with it, but I’m hoping God will help me out there. Besides, Mother got a glimpse of life in the fast lane at the gallery opening, and I’m sure she’ll agree that it isn’t all that.”

  “Indeed,” Mother nodded. “The rich and famous are a noisy bunch.” The prioress stood up. “Well, since we’ve covered most of the relevant issues in previous discussions with you over the past months, I think we can conclude this interview. Welcome to our community, Dorie.”

  “Thank you, Mother.” I dried my sweaty palms on my skirt before I stood and shook their hands through the grille. “I’m honored.”

  “Oh, and regarding temptation, we recommend that you hold onto your home, car, and bank account for six months to a year after you’ve entered so you’ll have something to go back to if you decide the cloister life isn’t for you,” the prioress said.

  “So I’ve heard,” I said as we exited. “I know someone who can make good use of them in the meantime.”

  • • •

  An hour later, I went back to the parlor in search of Sister Teresa but found Mother Benedicta, Catherine, and Father Charles there instead. The priest handed some official-looking documents through the bars to the women on the cloistered side of the grille.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I backed out of the room. “I was looking for—”

  “Can she stay?” Catherine asked. She wrung her hands and fidgeted.

  “I don’t see why not.” The prioress pulled a small table from the corner, placed it near the grille and set the paperwork on it. “It’s unusual to have a secular person witness these proceedings, but if it makes you more comfortable—”

  Catherine nodded.

  “Is that all right with you, Father Flash, I mean, Charles?” I turned beet red when I realized I’d used the nickname the nuns had given him.

  “Fine by me, though I can’t promise it’ll be as speedy as my sermons,” the priest reassured me with a relaxed smile. “Come on in, shut the door, and we’ll get to it.”

  I closed the door and joined Father Charles on the public side of the grille.

  “Those are your dispensation papers, Sister Catherine.” The priest pointed to the documents as Mother organized them on the table. “Look them over carefully. Once you sign them, you are released from your religious vows. That means you will no longer be a nun or a member of this religious community. If you ever change your mind and want to return to religious life, you’re free to reapply here or at any order you hope to join, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be accepted. Do you understand?”

  Catherine nodded and looked at the ground.

  “Canon law requires me to ask if you thoroughly examined your conscience and sought God’s guidance with this decision,” Father Charles said.

  “I have,” Catherine replied with a slight quiver in her voice.

  “Okay. After you sign on the dotted line there, Mother and I will both sign as witnesses.”

  The priest passed a silver fountain pen through the grille. Catherine took the pen and signed with a shaky hand.

  Frowning as she took the pen from my twin, Mother paused and gave Catherine a searching look.

  Catherine looked Mother in the eye and nodded.

  Mother sighed, added her own signature and then handed the pen and papers through the grille to Father Charles. The priest took them and signed.

  “That’ll do it.” Father Charles folded the documents and put them in his jacket pocket. “I’ll send this off to the archdiocese right away.”

  “Thank you,” Catherine managed to say.

  “Yes, thank you, Father,” the prioress said.

  We all stood avoiding each other’s gaze until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “I brought you some clothes.” I handed a Gap bag to Catherine through the grille bars. “I hope they fit.”

  Catherine took the bag and left the parlor. Mother Benedicta, Father Charles, and I waited in silence until my sister reappeared a few minutes later looking very young and boyish in a T-shirt and jeans. Without the habit, she was thinner than I’d realized and the clothes hung on her frame. A red kerchief covered her short hair. She carried the pair of sandals I’d bought her in one hand and her carefully folded habit in the other. As she handed the habit, her wedding band, and her rosary over to Mother, Catherine hesitated for the briefest moment. Benedicta smiled and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s all right, Catherine.” The prioress gently took the wedding ring and habit from the now-former nun but closed the rosary back into my sister’s hand. “Keep the rosary to remind you of your time here. And I have something else for you.”

  Mother turned and remo
ved Catherine’s cleaned, pressed, yet paint-splattered habit from the chair behind her and held it out to the artist. “The laundry never did get the paint out of your spare, so you may have it as a keepsake if you like.”

  Catherine took the habit with a nod of thanks.

  “I’ll pack the car while you say goodbye.” I was eager to escape the sad scene. “Where are your things?”

  Catherine picked up a small gym bag from the floor and handed it to me through the grille.

  “That’s it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, I guess that’s good considering how small my car is.”

  Catherine shook hands with Father Charles through the grille and then turned to leave.

  “God bless you, Catherine,” the priest called out.

  Catherine mustered a small smile before exiting the parlor with the prioress.

  After saying goodbye to the priest myself, I took the gym bag and waited for Catherine at the cloister door. When it opened, I saw all the sisters in the community assembled at the threshold to send my twin off. Catherine didn’t look at them as she made her way toward me, but then she returned to the nuns and hugged every one of them.

  “Keep an eye on the bread, the ovens run a little hot,” she told Sister Dominica.

  “Good luck with the ping pong,” she said to Sister Carmella.

  When Catherine hugged Teresa and Scholastica in turn, the extern shook with heavy sobs and Sister Scholastica had to clean her tiny glasses because her tears had fogged them up.

  Catherine remained dry-eyed until she got to Mother Benedicta at the end of the line. Then the formerly silent nun again lost her words and wept.

  “Oh, you dear child.” The prioress hugged Catherine. Tears welled up in Mother Benedicta’s eyes and this time she let them fall without wiping them away. “We will miss you and pray for you. Come back to see us any time.”

  A lump lodged in my throat as I watched Mother and my sister say goodbye.

  Catherine slid into the sandals I’d bought her and stepped through the cloister door to the world outside. Aside from holding my arm for support, she carried herself with aplomb as we walked from the hallway into the public courtyard. We passed by the wandering visitors unnoticed, as no one expected to see the famous nun in secular clothes. Once we were in the car, she hid under a blanket in the back seat for good measure. I navigated past the tourists along the driveway and highway shoulders.

  “My place is pretty small, but we’ll only be sharing it for a couple of weeks, so we shouldn’t drive each other too crazy,” I said when Catherine emerged from beneath the blanket once we were well down the road. “I just wish you were going to be in the cloister with me.”

  “I wish you would stay out here with me.” Catherine climbed into the front passenger seat and stared at the Pacific outside her window.

  I smiled. Our relationship had come a long way since the days when Catherine had hesitated to meet me, much less trust me.

  “You’ll be fine, and so will I.” I hoped I was right for both our sakes. “I’ll do everything I can to help you get set up before I go. What will you do for money? I’d be happy to share the wealth.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I should be okay. The community gave me a little and Trish said she’s got someone who wants to commission a painting. But I’ve never handled my own finances.”

  “We’ll work out a budget for you. Can you drive?”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “You should learn. Public transportation is lousy, but you’ll have the use of my car. As far as my rent-controlled apartment goes, we’ll have to...” I stopped when I noticed Catherine’s eyes glaze over. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure.” She seemed resolute. “If part of me hadn’t wanted to do the show to begin with, I never would’ve agreed to it, and if part of me wasn’t ready to leave the convent, I’d still be there. Given that I lost my connection to God while inside the cloister walls, I have to believe that He’s calling me to search for Him elsewhere, at least for now.”

  “If you don’t belong in the convent, then neither do I,” I said. “I didn’t seek out a vocation. I came looking for you and found God along the way. At least I hope I did, or I’m making a huge mistake.”

  “It’s not a mistake.” Catherine shook her head. “At least my devotion to painting helped bring you to your vocation.”

  “And my lust for professional recognition drove you away from yours.” I didn’t want to believe that my vocation came at a cost to Catherine, but it was hard not to.

  “Maybe we were meant to have each other’s lives and were holding places for each other in the world,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  There were no paparazzi awaiting us when Catherine and I arrived in Venice that evening.

  “Looks like your departure hasn’t leaked to the press,” I said, parking the car outside my apartment. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

  Catherine nodded and exited the car. She bypassed my front door and headed straight for the rock totems and cairns on the beach, apparently as fascinated by them as I’d always been.

  “I love these,” she said, admiring them. The sun was setting behind the mountains, framing my sister and the totems in golden light.

  “Aren’t they cool?” I asked, catching up. “The wind blows them down most nights, and every morning, people come by and build them back up.”

  “The ultimate in temporary art,” Catherine said. She had already begun building one of her own. Unlike me—whose impatience and grand plans often made building totems a frustrating, toppling business—my sister’s artistic, steady hand soon built an elegant tower of stone. Sisyphus would have approved.

  “For you,” she said, gesturing toward her creation. “Happy Birthday.”

  “Oh, my God.” I sat down next to a cairn. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Catherine nodded and seated herself beside me, burrowing her feet into the sand. “I don’t usually celebrate.”

  “Me neither. In fact, I try to block it out.” It was comforting to talk with someone who shared at least part of my birthday losses. “I wonder what our mother was like. Have you seen any pictures of her?”

  “No. Dad found it too painful to keep any around, but he said she looked like me, I mean, us, freckles and all. And that she snorted when she laughed in a really endearing way that totally horrified her. Oh, and he said she was brilliant. More talented at writing than he was at painting.”

  “Have you ever read her poetry?”

  “No.” Catherine shook her head. “But I lost two teeth trying.”

  I looked at her askance.

  “Dad told me he’d boxed it all up along with the pictures and gotten rid of it after she died,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe him, so I spent years looking for it around the house. When I was about eleven, I saw a couple of boxes up in the rafters of his studio and was convinced I’d hit the jackpot. I got up on a ladder and fell trying to carry them down, knocking out my teeth. Stupid boxes had old eight track tapes in them.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “I survived. Flaws are interesting, so I liked the gap, but Mother Benedicta decided the cloister should spring for a bridge last year.” She pointed to her left canine and the adjoining bicuspid. “It does make it easier to chew, but it doesn’t bring me any closer to finding Mom’s poetry.”

  “I would’ve loved to have read it,” I said.

  “Me, too. I’m still convinced it’s out there somewhere. I wish I could have known her.” Catherine turned to me. “I’m jealous that you got to grow up with a mom. Dad sometimes had girlfriends, but I didn’t let myself get close to them because they were never around for long. What was it like?”

  I paused, taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me that the twin our father kept might be jealous of my adoption. I was suddenly very grateful for both of my parents.

  “It was...safe,” I said. “We were very diffe
rent and fought all the time, especially when I was a teenager. But that’s to be expected. Puberty sucks.”

  Catherine nodded.

  “Try having your famous father buy your first feminine products for you,” she said. “Two different women recognized him while we stood there, clueless, in the tampon aisle. He ended up asking one of them for advice. I wanted to crawl under the display shelf.”

  “No thanks.” I laughed. “But as much as we sometimes struggled to get along, my mom was always there for me. Whenever we hugged, all this love came gushing out of her and went straight into me.”

  “Sounds amazing.”

  “It was.” I nodded. “I wish I had told her I loved her more often. She died on my, I mean our, birthday too. Our eighteenth.”

  “No way. That’s awful.”

  “Yep.” I stood up, jiggling my car keys and willing myself not to cry. “C’mon. It’s time we had ourselves a party.”

  • • •

  It was dark by the time Catherine and I sat eating a King Sooper’s birthday cake directly from the box on the well-worn grass beside Lucy and Rene Wagner’s graves. Paint brushes and flowers left by admirers leaned against Rene’s simple headstone. Our father’s fame made the spot a bit of a tourist attraction, but we were the only ones there at that late hour.

  Catherine glanced around the cemetery. “This is my first time back since Dad’s funeral. I looked for you at the memorial service. I knew he hadn’t told you about us, but I thought maybe you’d figured it out on your own.”

  “No, but it’s possible all three of us were here for her funeral,” I said, pointing to our mother’s headstone. “He didn’t place me for adoption until we were six weeks old.”

  “Sounds likely, then.” Catherine laid her palm on the grass over our mother’s grave. “I feel like I have to make something of my life, since she lost hers.”

  “Me, too.” I caught myself shrugging off a shiver and consciously sat up straight instead. “But you know what? I bet all she’d really want is for us to do something that makes us happy.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, I’d say we’re doing all right,” Catherine concluded. “Even if we’re screwing up, nobody can say we didn’t try.”