The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,47

indeed what I said.

“I can’t even imagine the things you see here. The things you have to deal with.”

“What, here? Nothing to deal with here.”

“I didn’t mean—no, never mind.” Casting around for another topic, I remember Gregory’s advice. The official tour. “Listen, while I’m here, why don’t you show me around? I’d be interested in seeing what goes on, if that’s all right.”

“For real?”

After a period of indecision, Mother Zacchaeus gives in. She conducts me through the main room. Along with the readers of the Sunpaper, I see the blaring television and the half circle of kids on the floor watching cartoons under the watchful eye of the teenage girl I spotted before. “This is a day care too,” Mother Zacchaeus explains. In the next room, Aziza, the smoking girl from upstairs, is chatting with a couple of older women. They eye me warily at first, then ignore me entirely.

“Some of these girls, they turned tricks, some was on the pipe—”

“Same difference, most the time,” Aziza says, making the others laugh.

The nun smiles, taking me into the next room. Here a heavily pregnant woman is fishing burnt slices of bread out of a toaster oven while a pair of toddlers circles her legs. The galley kitchen looks surprisingly clean, with canned goods stacked in back for storage. Through the back door we emerge onto the slab of cracked concrete I glimpsed from up above. There’s a rusty grill near the edge of the slab. Then a narrow yard packed with a sun-bleached swing set and cast-off toys.

Mission Up, I realize, isn’t run according to any particular plan. Whatever the needs are when women turn up on her doorstep, Mother Zacchaeus sternly improvises some plan to meet them.

“Are there other nuns who help?” I ask. “People from your order?”

She looks at me oddly.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know the terminology. Nuns don’t live in a monastery, but you don’t call it a nunnery, do you?”

“You mean my convent?” she says, putting the same imaginary quotes around convent that she did professor when we showed up.

“Convent, that’s right.”

She ambles back into the building, seeming to lose interest in the conversation. “And nuns do live in convents.”

So much for that.

I follow her back through the series of rooms, taking it all in.

“Did you paint the sign?” I call after her. “The one over the door.”

“Nobody else did.”

In the vestibule, the door stands open. Gregory is already waiting on the curb out front, looking at his watch. He sees me and beckons.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Well,” I say, turning to Mother Zacchaeus. “It was nice meeting you. I imagine we’ll be back. If there’s anything you can do to help convince Sam to go back to her mother . . .”

She lets the suggestion hang in the air. As I exit, though, she touches my elbow slightly, escorting me out, and for some reason I take this as acknowledgment. In her own way, she will do what she can.

“Thanks,” Gregory calls to her. He turns to me. “Now let’s get out of this hole.”

“Please shut up,” I whisper.

Before getting into the car, I give Mother Zacchaeus an apologetic wave. She nods imperceptibly, then closes the door.

“Greg,” I begin, pulling the door shut, “you didn’t have to be so rude to her . . .”

My voice trails off. As he pulls away, giving the engine some gas, I glance between the seats where he tossed the McDonald’s bag earlier. A twisted mummy of bedsheets lies across the backseat, the matted brown hair and scribbled-out eyes poking out from one end.

“Greg,” I say. “Go back.”

“What?” He floors the accelerator. “A girl can’t change her mind?”

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

“She’s out of it, Eliza. And that place isn’t safe. When she wakes up, she’ll be happy we got her out of there.”

He’s right. I know he’s right. But somehow it still feels like a betrayal of trust to me. I picture Mother Zacchaeus climbing back up those stairs to discover Sam gone, and she’ll think we were exactly the predators she sized us up as to begin with.

But we’re not, I tell myself. And that was no place to leave someone.

chapter 9

The Feast of St. Rick

Everything is under control. Sure, my husband has gone feral out in the shed. Sure, there’s a nineteen-year-old junkie sleeping upstairs in my bed. Sure, Gregory has taken over the plans for Eli’s birthday—such as it is—promising to collect both the ice-cream cake and the birthday boy. “You just relax,”