The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,8

to the highway where the bus had let Jeanette off.

She remembered seeing, on the ride back to the motel, the big stone church with its sign out front: OUR LADY OF SORROWS. If she did the buses right, she figured, they’d go right by there again.

She sat with Amy in the back, an arm around her shoulders to hold her close. The little girl said nothing, except once to say she was hungry again, and Jeanette took another cereal bar from the box she’d put in Amy’s knapsack, with the clean clothing and the toothbrush and Amy’s Peter Rabbit. Amy, she thought, you are my good girl, my very good girl, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. They changed buses downtown again and rode for another thirty minutes, and when Jeanette saw the sign for the zoo she wondered if she’d gone too far; but then she remembered that the church had been before the zoo, so it would be after the zoo now, going the other direction.

Then she saw it. In daylight it looked different, not as big, but it would do. They exited through the rear door, and Jeanette zipped up Amy’s jacket and put the knapsack on her while the bus pulled away.

She looked and saw the other sign then, the one she remembered from the night before, hanging on a post at the edge of a driveway that ran beside the church: CONVENT OF THE SISTERS OF MERCY.

She took Amy’s hand and walked up the driveway. It was lined with huge trees, some kind of oak, with long mossy arms that draped over the two of them. She didn’t know what a convent would look like but it turned out to be just a house, though nice: made of stone that glinted a little, with a shingled roof and white trim around the windows. There was an herb garden out front, and she thought that must be what the nuns did, they must come out here and take care of tiny growing things. She stepped up to the front door and rang the bell.

The woman who answered wasn’t an old lady, like Jeanette had imagined, and she wasn’t wearing a robe, whatever those things were called. She was young, not much older than Jeanette, and except for the veil on her head was dressed like anybody else, in a skirt and blouse and a pair of brown penny loafers. She was also black. Before she’d left Iowa, Jeanette had never seen but one or two black people in her life, except on television and in the movies. But Memphis was crawling with them. She knew some folks had problems with them, but Jeanette hadn’t so far, and she guessed a black nun would do all right.

“Sorry to bother you,” Jeanette began. “My car broke down out there on the street, and I was wondering—”

“Of course,” the woman said. Her voice was strange, like nothing Jeanette had ever heard, like there were notes of music caught and ringing inside the words. “Come in, come in, both of you.”

The woman stepped back from the door to let Jeanette and Amy into the front hall. Somewhere in the building, Jeanette knew, there were other nuns—maybe they were black, too—sleeping or cooking or reading or praying, which she guessed nuns did a lot of, maybe most of the day. It was quiet enough, so she supposed that was probably right. What she had to do now was get the woman to leave her and Amy alone. She knew that as a fact, the way she knew she’d killed a boy last night, and all the rest of it. What she was about to do hurt more, but it wasn’t any different otherwise, just more pain on the same spot.

“Miss—?”

“Oh, you can just call me Lacey,” the woman said. “We’re pretty informal around here. Is this your little girl?” She knelt in front of Amy. “Hello there, what’s your name? I have a little niece about your age, almost as pretty as you.” She looked up at Jeanette. “Your daughter is very shy. Perhaps it is my accent. You see, I am from Sierra Leone, west Africa.” She turned to Amy again and took her hand. “Do you know where that is? It is very far away.”

“All these nuns from there?” Jeanette asked.

Standing, the woman laughed, showing her bright teeth. “Oh, goodness no! I’m afraid I am the only one.”

For a moment, neither of them said anything. Jeanette liked this woman, liked listening