The cold and rain made the Mass Pike slippery. Callie turned up the radio to listen to Amy Black’s “Alabama” to distract herself from the confrontation with the nuns that she could no longer avoid. The fact was, she was ready for it. She needed answers. Why did they tell me Rose was dead?
The morning the nuns from St. James’s had found her, they’d told her they had been outside with all the students when they heard strange cries echoing down the North River. They’d thought at first it was some animal, a cat trapped under the brick building. After the children were led inside, the nuns had searched the property and finally realized the sound was coming from the hill behind Boston Street. They’d found Callie standing, trancelike and silent. The sounds had ceased.
It was a miracle, they’d said, that she had lived, protected by the rosary she clutched so tightly. The mark it left represented not only the five wounds of Christ but the Virgin Mary herself.
The song on the radio ended, and Callie switched lanes, passing a Massachusetts state trooper car hiding in the underpass. She checked her speed and slowed down.
When the nuns at the children’s home in Northampton had found out about the Goddesses and about Rose, they’d changed their minds. The miracle had quickly turned to sacrilege, and they’d begun to watch her with suspicious eyes, looking for something unholy, fearful that whatever had happened on Halloween night had scarred Callie far beyond the physical. “Why was there no figure of Christ on your rosary?” they’d asked her. “Do the petal scars stand for the five accused witches?”
She was so young; she hadn’t known how to lie or even to keep quiet about things that might be considered strange. When she’d told them she could see things, images of events before they happened, their fears about her had multiplied. In class, Callie often answered questions just before they were asked, as if she could read them as they were forming in the minds of the sisters. It was uncanny, and she’d sometimes been punished for it and called impertinent or, even worse, accused of cheating. Once, during an oral exam, Callie had given the answer before the question was asked, and had been accused of stealing a copy of the questions from Sister Agony’s desk. And there were other things she just seemed to know. Secret things about the nuns that she’d never been told. It worried them.
In self-defense, Callie had taken to eavesdropping on their conversations about her. “Do you think it’s witchcraft?” she’d heard one of the older nuns ask, her voice fearful.
“Well, there are seers in the Bible, too,” a younger nun had responded. “Weren’t the prophets seers?”
“That young girl is no prophet,” the older nun had declared.
The order was known as an old-fashioned one, and the children’s home was a place where, with the exception of Sister Agony, the more timid and world averse sisters of the order often ended up. When it came to superstition and fear, they were easy marks, not entirely unlike the Puritan citizens of Salem whom Rose had often described to Callie. Group hysteria was easy to ignite, and Callie had to admit she wasn’t entirely innocent of lighting that fire. To amuse the other girls, she’d often thrown her voice down a seemingly empty hallway, making one of the nuns turn to see who had spoken and find no one behind her. The young girls had giggled as they hid inside an empty classroom watching one of the more easily frightened nuns shiver, cross herself, and hurry away. It had made the girls admire Callie’s mischief, but it hadn’t made her popular. The truth was, Callie’s history had scared all of them.
Callie checked her speed again as she neared Chicopee, then took the I-91 North exit toward Amherst and her apartment.
Each time the nuns had sent her away to a new foster home, they’d seemed relieved, and every time she’d come back, they’d grown more agitated, studying her for “signs.”
Why did I keep getting sent back to them? And why did they allow it? Callie pounded on the steering wheel in frustration, thinking of all the years she’d spent believing she was alone in the world, when Rose had been just 120 miles away. The last time she’d landed on their doorstep, insisting she wouldn’t be fostered again, the nuns had told her they’d let her stay because they “loved” her…now she knew they’d only done it because there’d been no place else for her to go. She’d often suspected that they also felt tasked to save her soul and make sure she didn’t end up like her mother. Or, worse, like Rose. They must have rejoiced when I went to college.
There was no one at her apartment when she arrived. Her room hadn’t been disturbed. Even though it contained all of her belongings, it still looked as if no one lived in it, which was partly true. Callie had never spent much time here. The bed was always made, and everything was perfectly arranged, a neat and tidy version of postcollege life. The only things that violated the image were the bowls. Four of them were lined up on the dresser; the other three were at the nursing home. She pulled the rest of her clothes from the closet, using them to pad the bowls as she placed them into the Volvo. After she’d cleaned out the room, she left a note for her roommates, telling them she was going to stay on the North Shore for a while and giving them permission to use her room for guests. Happy Holidays, she wrote, signing her name.
She didn’t plan to wish the nuns happy anything. She was too angry. Part of her wanted to grab the bowls and go, but she wasn’t going to do that. She was seething about the lies they had told her. It was time.
She drove to Northampton, parked in her regular spot at the All Saints’ Home, and walked inside, nodding to the receptionist, who was on the phone. She walked directly to Agony’s office and opened the door without knocking, not bothering to close it again as she entered. The nun was seated at her desk reading, her glasses low on her nose. She looked tired. “Callie,” she said with a smile, which quickly faded when she saw the expression on Callie’s face.
“Why did you lie to me?”
“What?”
“Why did you tell me that Rose Whelan was dead?”
The prioress got up and closed the door against Callie’s raised voice.
“She was the only family I had.”
Agony sat down again and quickly folded her hands, the rapid movement summoning a memory. Agony’s nickname had come from the ruler she used to punish the girls. It happened so fast you almost never saw it coming. They’d stopped using the old-fashioned punishment the year after Callie arrived, and Agony had taken to folding her hands, holding them in prayer pose until her knuckles went white in an effort to control her temper. Now the nun’s order formally forbade corporal punishment, but the ruler still sat on the nun’s desk, and Callie remembered its sting. Most of the girls had gotten slapped across their knuckles. Callie had received her lashes across her scar, the stigmata that had become unholy.
Callie watched the prioress’s knuckles go white. It was a long time before she spoke.
“How is Rose?”
Callie stared at her. “Are you fucking kidding me?”