“I suspected that from the beginning.” And then, humanly, she couldn't resist asking her a question she had always wondered about. “Do you still miss them?” It was the question of the adoptive mother about the birth parents the child might still long for.

“Sometimes. I miss what they should have been, or what I wanted them to be, and never were. Sometimes I wonder where they are now… what their lives are like… if they had other children. It's not important.” But it was, and they both knew that. “Even less so now.” Gabbie lied to herself more than to the woman she had always called Mother. “I have a family now… or I will in August.”

“You have had a family ever since you came here, Gabbie.”

“I know that,” she said quietly, and then tucked her arm into the nun's again as they walked back into the house they lived in, and where Gabriella would stay forever. For her, it was an important decision. It meant she would never have to leave them, and could never lose them. It meant she would never be abandoned. It was all she wanted. The certainty that she would belong to them forever.

“You'll make a very good Sister,” Mother Gregoria said quietly, smiling down at her.

“I hope so,” Gabriella answered with a smile of her own. She looked blissfully happy. “It's all I want now.”

The two women walked arm in arm down the hall, as Gabriella felt a wave of relief wash over her. This was truly her home, and always would be.

And the next day, when Mother Gregoria told the other nuns of Gabriella's decision at dinnertime, there were shouts of jubilation. Everyone congratulated Gabriella and embraced her, and told her how happy they were, and how they had known all along she had a vocation. It was a celebration of major proportions, and as she went back to her familiar room that night she knew with utter certainty that nothing but death could ever take her from them. It was all she had ever wanted. And that night, she slept peacefully, until the nightmares came, with all the sounds and the terrors she still remembered so clearly, the memories of her mothers face, her blows, her hatred… the smell of the hospital… and the sight of her father standing helplessly in the doorway. It came back to her, as it always did, as she huddled at the bottom of her bed, as she had for years, trying to escape them. But even if she never did, if they haunted her for eternity, when she woke and looked around the room that was home to her now, she sat up in bed, trying to catch her breath, and knew that she was safe.

One of the Sisters poked her head into the room, and she saw Gabriella sitting there, looking shaken after the seeming reality of the nightmare. As they so often did, the others had heard her screaming. It no longer alarmed them as it once had, but they felt sorry for her.

“Are you okay?” the Sister whispered, and Gabriella nodded, smiling at her through her tears, trying to return to the present.

“I'm sorry I woke you.” But they were used to it by then. She had had the same dreams ever since she'd come here. She never talked about them, never explained them to anyone, and they could only guess at the horrors that haunted her, or what her life had been like before she'd come here. But here, in the safety of the convent where she had been left, and would stay now for the rest of hex life, she knew that the demons could no longer touch her. She lay down on her bed again, thinking about her parents, and Mother Gregoria's questions yesterday evening, about whether or not she missed them. She didn't miss them anymore, but she still thought of them, and remembered them, and she still wondered on nights like this why it was that they had never loved her. Was she truly as bad as they had said? Was it their fault, or her own? Had they done it to her, or she to them? Had she ruined their lives, or they hers? And even now, she didn't know the answers to her questions.





Chapter 8




GABRIELLA JOINED THE class of postulants at St. Matthew's convent in August. She did everything she had always seen the others do, gave up the clothes she wore, had her hair shorn, and donned the short, simple habit that they wore until they would become novices a year later. She knew that she had a long road ahead of her after her first year, two years as a novice, then another two years of monastic training before she could take her final vows. In all, she had five years ahead of her before her final vows would be taken. To her, and to the others who began with her, it would be longer, yet far more exciting, than college. This was the moment they had all dreamed of.

She was assigned endless chores to do, but to Gabriella most of them were neither distasteful nor unfamiliar. She had done so many menial things in the convent over the years that nothing they asked her to do now seemed repugnant to her. Instead, she embraced whatever humiliation they offered with good grace, and unfailing good humor. And it was quietly discussed among the Mistress of Postulants, the Mistress of Novices, and Mother Gregoria that Gabriella had made the perfect decision about her vocation. She had chosen the name of Sister Bernadette, and among the postulants, they called her Sister Bernie.

She had a good time with most of them. There were eight postulants in the class, and six of them were clearly somewhat in awe of Sister Bernie. The eighth was a girl from Vermont, and she had a dour way of arguing with everything Gabriella said, and trying to make trouble for her with the others. She told the Mistress of Postulants that she thought Gabriella was arrogant, and lacked respect for the older nuns. The Mistress of Postulants explained that Gabbie had lived at St. Matthew's nearly all her life, and it was comfortable here for her. The young postulant from Vermont then complained that Gabriella was vain, and she swore that she had seen her looking at her own reflection in a window, for lack of a mirror.

“Perhaps she was just thinking about something.”

“Her looks,” the girl said glumly. She was an unattractive girl who had decided to join the Order six months after a broken engagement, and the Mistress of Postulants was still somewhat in doubt about the girl's vocation, though not in the least about Gabriella's. No one in the convent ever doubted it for a moment. And Gabriella had clearly never been happier in her life. She was obviously thriving in her new life at the convent. And all of the nuns who had known her all her life beamed each time they watched her.

Gabriella wrote a Christmas story for them all that year, and made little books of it for each of them, working on them late at night in Mother Gregoria's office, and each of the nuns found one at their place in the dining hall on Christmas morning. It was a story she had worked on for months, and which the Mistress of Novices insisted ought to be published.

“She's showing off again!” Sister Anne, the girl from Vermont, complained again, showing very little generosity of heart, and even less Christmas spirit. She left the table and went to her room, tossing the little book Gabriella had handmade for her into the garbage. And later that afternoon, Gabriella went to see her, and tried to explain that this had been her home for many years, and it was hard for her not to be jubilant about joining the Order. “I suppose you think everyone here is in love with you because they know you. Well, you're no better than the rest of us, and if you weren't so busy showing off all the time you might make a better nun. Have you ever thought of that?” She spat the words in Gabbie's face, and reminded her suddenly of her mother. Being told how inept and how wrong she was cut into her heart like a dagger, and later that afternoon, she talked to Mother Gregoria privately about it.

“Maybe she's right. Maybe I am arrogant… and show off without knowing it.” But the Mother Superior tried to explain the obvious to her, that the young nun from Vermont was jealous.

And for the next three months, it became a kind of holy vendetta. She reported on Gabriella constantly, and confronted her with her failings every time the opportunity arose. It became an agony of worry for Gabriella, who constantly feared that the girl saw flaws in her that were really there and would keep her from serving Christ with true humility and the appropriate devotion. Gabriella went to confession constantly, and began doubting her own vocation. By spring, she was beginning to think she'd made a mistake, and that the girl saw faults in her that were clearly there and had to be excised before she could make a final decision about joining the Order. There was something so painful and familiar about the way the young girl went after her that it rattled her to her very soul, and in confession one night she admitted to the priest on the other side of the grille that she had serious doubts about the vocation she had once been so sure of.

“What makes you say that?” The unfamiliar voice sounded puzzled, and Gabriella was startled to realize that she wasn't confessing to one of the priests she had known since her childhood.

“Sister Anne accuses me constantly of vanity and pride, and arrogance, and self-justification, self-importance, and maybe she's right. How can I possibly be of any use to God if I can't express humility and simplicity and obey Him? And what's more,” she blushed in the darkness as she confessed, but it didn't matter anyway, since she didn't know him, “I think I'm beginning to hate her.”

There was a moment of silence on the other side, and then a gentle question. He had a kind voice, and for some odd reason she found herself wondering what he looked like.

“Have you ever hated anyone else before?”

She answered without hesitation. “My parents.”

“Have you ever confessed that before?” He sounded intrigued by her and she told him she had, frequently, for many years, ever since she had come to St. Matthew's. “Why did you hate them?”

“I hated them because they beat me,” she said simply, sounding humbler than he had expected, and far more open. He knew only that she was one of the postulants, but this was only the second time he had come to hear confession there, and he knew nothing about her. The other priests all knew Gabriella, but he didn't. “Actually, my mother beat me,” she went on to explain. “My father only let her… but when I thought about it as I grew up, I hated him for it.” It was the most outspoken she had ever been in any confession, and she wasn't sure why she was doing it now, except that she needed to make a clean breast of everything so as to free herself of her feelings about Sister Anne. She had been utterly tormented by her but was ashamed of her dislike for her.

“Have you ever told your parents how you felt?” he asked, sounding very modern, trying to heal the wounds and relieve her of them, and not just hearing her confession.

“I've never seen them again. My father deserted my mother when I was nine and I never saw him after that. He moved away to Boston, and a few months later my mother left me here, and never came back. She told me she was going away for six weeks to Reno, and she got married again and decided that I didn't fit into her new life. In a lot of ways, it was a blessing. If I'd gone back to her, eventually she'd have killed me.” There was shocked silence on the other side of the grille again.

“I see.”

She decided to tell him the rest of it then, and make a good confession. “Sister Anne is starting to remind me of my mother, and I think maybe that's why I hate her so much. She shouts at me all the time, and tells me how bad I am… my mother used to do that… and I believed her.”

“Do you believe Sister Anne?” Gabriella's knees were beginning to hurt from the length of the confession, and it was terribly hot in the confessional for both of them. It was like kneeling on the floor of an overheated phone booth, and the total darkness made it seem even warmer. “Do you believe what she says about you, Sister? About how bad you are?” He sounded deeply interested in her problem.

“Sometimes. I always believed my mother. I still do at times. If I hadn't been bad, why would they have left me? Both of them. There must have been something pretty awful about me.”

“Or them,” he said gently in a deep voice, as she tried to imagine the face that went with it. “The sin was theirs, not yours. Perhaps the same is true of Sister Anne, although of course I don't know her. Perhaps she's jealous of you for some reason, because you seem so confident and so at home here. If you've lived here for most of your life, she may simply resent it.”

“And what do I do about it?” Gabriella asked, sounding desperate, and this time he chuckled.