Her face looks like a sprouted potato, but it’s her personality that sticks with you. Gran would call it having “no front porch”—you can pretty much see straight into her mind, like looking into a cluttered living room, and it’s obvious how she feels. I’d have known even if I hadn’t overheard her talking to Sister Bernadette. They didn’t know I was in the pantry, right off the kitchen where they were obviously arguing.
SISTER AGNES: I really thought Mother Superior had had enough of her nonsense by now.
SISTER BERNADETTE: Oh, Sister Agnes—how can you hold such a grudge after all this time?
SISTER AGNES: It’s like an illness that just keeps getting passed on down the line in that family.
SISTER BERNADETTE: The abbess would disapprove of your assessment, Sister.
SISTER AGNES: The abbess did her best with Marguerite and obviously it had no effect.
SISTER BERNADETTE: OH, SISTER, HUSH.
SISTER AGNES: I can understand once, but three times? When is she going to put her foot down?
I was so confused that the name Marguerite went sailing right over my head. If the Sisters hadn’t opened the pantry door at just that moment, I might have caught on sooner, but they found me sitting on a big bag of rice with a box of crackers in my hand, crumbs all down the front of me, and suddenly I had bigger fish to fry. (I get really hungry between meals.) Finding me in there only seemed to have proved some point that Sister Agnes was trying to make, because she looked at Sister Bernadette with an I-told-you-so expression.
Sister Bernadette and Sister Agnes are so ancient, they could easily be ghosts. But they bicker like sisters. I didn’t realize nuns could be so human—holding grudges, arguing, making faces at each other and then storming away from disagreements like large winged bats. It’s this unforeseen display of humanness that makes me feel better about them, like they’re real people. Hearing them also makes me miss Lily in the most unexpected way.
I try to make sense of the strange conversation I heard in the pantry, but as the days go by, I have other pressing matters to think about. Such as my bladder now being the size of a walnut. I wake up almost every hour and waddle down the long, echoey corridor to the bathroom. All fourteen stations of the cross are lined up so that I walk by each one before I finally get there—the ripe smell of incense lingering in the hall, coming up through the vents and mingling with the sweet, honeyed scent of melted candle wax. Maybe I’m just dreaming and this isn’t real. It’s just a bad dream in which I’m trapped inside my old copy of The Children’s Illustrated Bible. But it’s a long walk with a full bladder, and it’s definitely real.
There is Jesus, carrying his cross right beside me. We are quite the pair—he and I—but everyone knows what’s in store for him at the end of that long walk, and I wouldn’t put it past Gran to have sent me here solely to scare the living daylights out of me. Even after I’m back in bed, it’s pretty hard to forget the images of the crown of thorns and the nails stuck in his hands and feet—the soldiers divvying up his clothes like vultures.
Catholics are pretty good at keeping Jesus nailed to that cross, rather than focusing more on that happy bit where he rose from the dead and freed us from sin and evil. It’s like Gran not wanting us to feel too good about ourselves. As if that’s a concern anymore. I’m not sure there will be any rising from anything after I’m done here. Unlike Jesus ascending into heaven, I feel like I’m just headed right over a cliff.
—
The nuns do a lot of different things to support themselves. They make soaps and lotions and have beehives that make honey and chickens that lay eggs. Sister Josephine takes everything to the mercantile in town once a week, and I get up my nerve to ask if I can go with her. Sister Bernadette frowns, like she thinks this is a very bad idea, but I tell her I’ve done all the laundry already and what harm can it do for me to go out into the world for just one day? She eyes my belly as if she’s thinking that a person’s life can actually change pretty dramatically in just one day, but then she looks