Sister’s bale of hay topped a small stack near my grandfather’s workbench, his mill, the coiled copper wire, and the copper lightning rods stacked in worn, oily boxes. The chill of the damp stone floor rose through the soles of my sneakers. At no time did Sister speak to me or offer any message about what was to come. I wish to this day that she had. She kept her head bowed, her eyes on her hands folded in her lap. Had she discovered my theft? Was she there to confront me and demand the missal back? Her veil fluttered, and she raised her head. Fearing her accusation, I fled outside, down the white pebbled drive to where my grandparents sat in woven wire patio chairs. Behind them the house’s long porch trim was lacey cutouts, and to their left, beyond the privet hedge, the inground pool shimmered in the morning sunlight. I slid my hand into my grandmother’s, and she held it in her lap’s gabardine folds and patted it while they talked and had their coffee, the spiral of the steam shrouding their faces as they raised their cups.
Later, my family arrived—Leanne and Sarah, Del and my parents. Leanne and Sarah were jealous that I’d spent the night, and they refused to speak to me. Del put her hand in mine; she’d missed me, as I’d missed her. There was a cake and the seven candles I wished on and blew out. I waited in apprehension for Sister to emerge from the barn and join us, but she did not. I would eventually learn that in 1962, driving back to the convent upstate with three other sisters after a convention of the American Benedictine Academy, Sister had been in an accident. A blowing veil, perhaps, had obscured the driver’s vision, and they’d all died on the New York State Thruway, many years before I saw her sitting in the sunlight in my grandfather’s barn. This explained her smooth, youthful face when my grandmother’s was creped and sagging, the outdated serge habit. It did not explain how I saw her, but I never questioned what most people might. A door had opened and I had left it open and maybe because of that, things happened the way they did. That was all I knew, and as a child all I cared to know.
2
On the day my mother deposited me in Ithaca, New York, to attend the university, I thought of Sister. I was leaving behind my home—leaving Del. In many ways I was happy to go. Why spend your life scrabbling at the sad bits of the past? There were things I would be glad to be free of, though I remained doubtful that freedom would ever really be mine. We drove, mostly in silence, past the lonely towns lining the Delaware River, the abandoned farmland along potholed Route 17. We drove through a gentle summer rain, and the grass seemed to glow with phosphorescence, like a radioactive charge, an anomaly of the sun dampening the gray sky with color.
“Look at the pretty hills,” my mother said.
She had dressed that morning in a pressed, white, sleeveless blouse, her trademark Lilly Pulitzer skirt, a pink cotton sweater thrown over her shoulders. The Cadillac’s air-conditioning kept the car’s interior at seventy-two degrees, but every so often I would depress my window’s button, claiming I needed to breathe, and the humid air would blow through the car, and my mother would raise a slender hand to her hair to hold it in place, and flatten her lips in irritation.
“Is this the highway where Auntie Sister died?” I said.
I had dreamed of the nuns driving in a sky-blue sedan with the windows down and the bright sun on the hood. The air on their faces was cool and smelled of cut grass. It caught in their wimples, invaded the seams, and soothed their scalps. Their habits flapped.
“I don’t know,” my mother said, her voice taking that curious tone I’d lately noticed when she spoke to me.
“Do you think they had the radio on?” I said. “Del always said they were listening to ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.’”
I hummed a few bars of the song. They were young women, wedded to God. Their mouths opened and drank in the sun and the wind. Under the black fabric their bodies surged in secret, betraying their vows. I used to pretend being pinioned in that faith, in the rules of their order. I’d feel my heart drawn out in wild longing with the words: devotion, ecstasy, rapture, and betrothal. Lately, I’d come to doubt I would ever find that sort of love.
I sang the chorus of the song out loud. My mother tightened her hands on the wheel. Then she reached out and turned on the radio so I might sing something else.