Echoes Page 0,68

she looked. And on her finger, she wore her mother's ring. She would never take it off again. Ever.

Beata sat riveted as she listened to the prayers, and prayed with them. According to Jewish tradition, Monika had to be buried within a day, and was. Beata followed them to the cemetery, and stood far away from them. They didn't even know she was there. She was like a ghost, watching them, as they each poured a shovel of dirt onto her mother's coffin after they lowered it into the ground. After they left, she went and kneeled beside the grave, and put a small pebble beside it, as a gesture of respect, according to tradition. She didn't know what she was saying, until she heard herself saying the Our Father. She knew her mother wouldn't mind. She stayed for a long time, and then she went home, feeling dead inside. As dead as her father said she was.

Amadea looked at her sadly when she got home, and put her arms around her. “I'm sorry, Mama.” She had told the girls the night before, and they had cried. In their own way, they each loved their grandmother, although they had always had conflicted feelings, particularly Amadea, about the way their grandparents had treated their mother for marrying their father. It seemed wrong to them, and Beata agreed that it was. But she loved her mother anyway. And even her father. They were her parents.

Beata went to her room early that night, and lay on her bed, thinking back to all that had happened, and her early days with Antoine. It was a lot to think about, and absorb, a lifetime that had been worthwhile, though hard. She had paid a high price for love. Losing her mother reminded her that she had no one left now but her daughters. Her father had made that clear. Her whole life was them. She had no life of her own.

It was a month later in June when Amadea took her breath away, yet again. She heard the news as one more death blow to her heart. In some ways, it was like losing her mother, except that at least Amadea would be alive.

“I am going into the convent, Mama,” Amadea said quietly, on her last day of school. Nothing had prepared Beata for the announcement her elder daughter made. She looked at her as though she had been shot, but Amadea's eyes were steady and calm. She had been waiting to announce this decision for months, and had grown more certain every day. There had been nothing hasty or frivolous about the choice she'd made.

“You're not,” Beata said, as though there was no question of it. None. To her own ears, she sounded like her father, but she was not going to let this happen. Even Antoine wouldn't have wanted that, and he was a devoted Catholic. “I won't let you do that.”

“You can't stop me.” Amadea sounded like an adult for the first time. Her voice was solid, like rock. She had agonized too much over the decision to feel any uncertainty at all now. She was absolutely certain she had a vocation, and no one could shake her faith, not even the mother she loved. This was not a pitched battle to go to university. This was a grown woman who knew what she wanted, and was going to do it. Beata was frightened at the tone of Amadea's voice, as much as by the look in her eyes.

“Your father wouldn't want that,” she reasoned, hoping to sway Amadea, by evoking her father's name. It didn't work.

“You don't know that. You gave up everything to marry him, because you believed in what you were doing. I believe in this. I have a vocation.” She said it as though speaking of the Holy Grail. In truth, she had found all she wanted and needed. After talking to her priest for months, she was sure beyond a doubt, and it was written all over her.

“Oh my God.” Beata sat down heavily and stared at her daughter. “You're too young to know that. You're bored, and you think it sounds romantic.” Beata also knew that Edith Stein had become her role model, and she had been in a convent for two years.

“You don't know what you're saying,” Amadea said calmly. “I'm going into the Carmelites. I've already talked to them. You can't stop me, Mama.” She repeated what she had said in the beginning. She