Lisa Scottoline - Everywhere That Mary Went

“I understand why you miss her so much,” Mike said, fiddling with the top of a red squeeze bottle of ketchup. “It would mean a lot to me if she could be at our wedding.”

“Our wedding?”

“Our wedding.” He grinned and slid the ketchup bottle toward me. On the red cone of its lid hung a small diamond solitaire.

That was Mike’s proposal, and I accepted, but Mike didn’t get his wish. Angie wasn’t allowed out of the cloister to go to his wedding.

They did let her go to his funeral, however.

Iwalk alongside the convent’s high stone wall until I find the front gate. It’s an ancient iron gate, painted in a color impossible to determine in the twilight: forest green, maybe, or black. I can’t see through the gate-it’s opaque and reaches at least ten feet high, culminating in a crucifix. Of course.

Boom! Boom!I bang on the gate. Its bubbled paint flakes off.Boom! Boom! Boom!

Silence.

“Is anybody there? Can anybody let me in?”

More silence.

Boom!“Please, it’s an emergency! Please!”

“Wait a minute,” says a thin female voice on the other side. I hear the metallic clatter of a barrel latch being retracted, and the door opens a crack. One blue eye peers out from behind a rimless spectacle. I catch a glimpse of a white veil-a novitiate-whose face comes happily to life when she sees me. “You look exactly like one of my sisters!”

“Really?”

“Yes! Sister Angela Charles.”

Hersister. I’ll never get used to this. “Angela’s my twin. I’m Mary DiNunzio. I need to see her. It’s a…family emergency.”

The novitiate looks alarmed. “Oh, my. Well. Good thing I was out here. Come in, please.” She yanks on the iron gate, grunting with effort. I push on the gate from the outside, but even with both of us laboring, it’ll only open enough to let me through sideways. “Sorry about that,” she says, with an easy laugh.

“That’s okay. I appreciate your letting me in.”

“No problem. Follow me. I’ll tell Mother you’re here.” She bounces ahead of me, up a flagstone path that winds through the grass to the convent. Over a hundred years old, the convent’s made of Brandywine granite and covered with lush ivy. If it weren’t holding my twin sister captive, I’d say it was beautiful. The roof is terracotta tile, like the rooftops of Florence, and the arched windows are a stained glass that seems to glow with deep colors, radiating light from within on this dusky evening.

As we approach the front door, unmarked except for the Sacred Heart at its keystone, I can hear the nuns singing in the chapel. Their voices, forty in all, carry in the still night, floating over the lawn. One of the voices belongs to Angie. An alto, like me.

“In we go,” says the novitiate, as she opens the carved oak door.

It’s the smell that hits me first, the smell of holy water. It’s a faint and sweet scent, vaguely like rosewater. The novitiate’s breath smells of it too, and I wonder how this is so, or if I’m imagining it. I hear the singing, louder now that I’m inside, and we pass the closed chapel doors, over which is stenciled:

CHAPEL

DEDICATED TO ST. JOSEPH

RECOLLECTION

Angie is inside.

The novitiate leads me to the parlor. Above the door it says:

PARLOR

DEDICATED TO ST. L. GONZAGA

DISCRETION, MODESTY

The novitiate flicks on a lamp, which barely illuminates the room. “Please wait a minute while I tell Mother that you’re here,” she says.

“Thank you.”

She closes the door, leaving me alone. The parlor looks larger now that it’s empty, but it still evokes frustration in me. I sit among the vacant wooden chairs on the civilian side of the trellis, wondering how many twin sisters have sat here in the past century and if any of them felt like I do. The order used to be much more isolated, and Angie says there’s talk of moving to a remote location in the Adirondacks. That’s so far away I’d never get to see her. It makes me feel sick inside.

“Miss DiNunzio?” says the novitiate, back at the threshold. The singing intensifies with the open door. “Come with me. Mother is waiting to see you in her cabinet.”

“Cabinet?”

“Office. Cabinet is the French term, but we still use it.”

“Force of habit, huh?”

She smiles.

“I got a million of ’em.”

I follow her down the bare, narrow hallway. The hardwood floors shine even in the dim light. The novitiate pads ahead softly; I clatter obscenely in my pumps. I look around the pale walls, reading the writing stenciled in black letters at the top.I HAVE A SAVIOR AND I TRUST IN HIM. I KNOW NOTHING SWEETER THAN TO MORTIFY AND CONQUER SELF. WALK BEFORE ME AND BE PERFECT.

The hallway ends in a white door, and the singing stops suddenly. This is the door that encloses the cloistered area. I live on the outside of it; Angie lives on the inside. Over the jamb it says:GIVE GLORY TO THE LORD OF LORDS AND HIS MERCY ENDURETH FOREVER.

It should say:POINT OF NO RETURN.

We pass through the door in silence. I take in everything as we go by, trying to imagine what Angie’s daily life is like. We enter another hallway, also clean and spare, and come to a door on the left, over which is stenciled:

SUPERIORESS’S CABINET

DEDICATED TO OUR HOLY MOTHER

LONGANIMITY

“What does that mean?” I ask the novitiate. “Longan…”

“It’s a toughie, isn’t it? Longanimity. It means forbearance. This is your stop. Mother will be along in a minute. You can have a seat in her office.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure thing,” she says and pads off.

I sit down in a hard mission chair across from a desk so clean it could be for sale. The office is empty and bare, except for a two-tier set of bookshelves and an old black rotary phone. The tinny fixture in the ceiling casts a dim pool of light over the desktop. My chest tightens around the ball at its core. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m back in school, waiting in the principal’s office to answer for some sin. Like an abortion.

Suddenly, with awhoosh of her thick habit, the Mother Superior enters the office. She’s tall, bone-thin, and at least seventy-five years old. There are deep wrinkles etched into her face, which contrast with the starchy smoothness of her guimpe, the cloth covering her neck and shoulders. A heavy sterling crucifix swings from a pin in her habit. “Ah, yes, Miss DiNunzio,” she says. “You look more like Sister Angela Charles every day.”

I rise and smile. It occurs to me that this is a variant of pop-up-and-grin. “I’m sorry to barge in, but I need to see my sister. It’s a family emergency.”

“So I understand. I have sent for Sister Angela.” The tall nun sits down, very erect, in a wooden chair. “Please, sit.” She waves me into the chair with a bony hand.

There’s a soft rapping at the door. “Come in,” says the Mother Superior. The door opens, and it’s Angie.

“Angie!” I blurt out happily. At the sight of her, the hardness in my chest breaks up, like ice floes on the prow of a tanker.

Angie looks guarded. “Yes, Mother?”

“Sister Angela, I understand there is an emergency.”

Angie’s eyes widen with fear as she turns to me. “Pop? Is it Pop?”

“No, Angie. Not Pop. They’re both fine.”

Her shoulders relax visibly. She steps into the room and closes the door quietly behind her. “What’s the matter?”

I glance at the Mother Superior. “Is it possible for me to speak with my sister alone?”

The Mother Superior purses her lips, which are so thin that they’re merely a vertical wrinkle. I wonder fleetingly if my mother ever noticed them. “As you know, we frown upon interruptions of this sort.”