She stuffs the little booklet into an open pocket of my purse.
“Do what I do,” she says. She takes hold of the crucifix with her right hand and crosses herself again. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” she says. I clasp the crucifix in my right hand and cross myself in the same way. It feels strange and intimate at the same time. She prays words I’ve never heard before, but that somehow sound familiar. She moves her fingers along the beads with each prayer, demonstrating for me to do the same. I recognize the Our Father, but am not sure if I should pray with her or remain silent. As she leads me through a series of Hail Mary’s, I begin to feel the constriction in my body loosen. A sensation, ephemeral yet immutable at the same time falls over me as the recitation of words becomes a sort of meditation of grace. After the first set of beads, Sister Margaret stops and crosses herself again. She sits back in the pew.
“That was one decade,” she says. “But you’ll read all about it in that little pamphlet I gave you.”
“But I’m not Catholic,” I say.
“Hey,” she says, winking and ribbing me with her elbow. “Nobody’s perfect!” She lets out a quiet cackle.
“Listen, Sister Margaret, this was very nice, but it doesn’t really solve anything. My husband is still a drunk and he is still gone.”
“Are you going to find him and drag him into a hospital?” she asks.
I let out a flustered giggle. “No,” I answer.
“Well then, there you go!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You pray, dear. Pray to know God’s will.”
“I’m not so sure about this whole ‘God’s will’ thing; I mean there’s so much evil in the world. So many people who do bad things. Sometimes it seems to me that God doesn’t care.” I say this in a whisper because I suddenly feel ashamed of my own doubt.
Sister Margaret looks up at the statue of the Madonna.
“If you take all of the evil in the whole world, throughout time; all the Hitlers, and killers, murderers, every bad thing you can possibly think of and lump all of that together, all of it combined wouldn’t be equal to a single drop in the ocean compared to God’s love for us.”
“But then why is there evil in the world? How can God allow all of that?” I ask. I’m aware that I must sound like a petulant child, but she brought up the subject.
“The more important question to ask is, ‘why do we allow it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how can a middle class, average person walk down the street, say, walking to their daily job, and pass by someone who is obviously homeless, hasn’t eaten for a week and is dying of AIDS, and do absolutely nothing? Or how can a businessman, on his way to a lunch meeting at a fancy restaurant, step over a drunken bum in the parking lot and do absolutely nothing? Is this God’s fault? Or is it ours? We can hardly blame God for allowing the suffering that we ourselves let our brothers and sisters endure every single day.”
I had never thought about these kinds of issues this way. I remain silent, and stare at the rosary in my hand.
“In the world there is a disconnection. There is an ‘us’ and then there is a ‘them’. When we evolve to a point where the ‘us’ realizes that we’re exactly the same as the ‘them’, we could end to world hunger, and homelessness just like that,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Once we see that the homeless vet isn’t just some man, but he’s our brother, our father, our uncle, we will truly be able to say we are Christ-like. Until that time, we reach for that ideal.”
“We can’t all be Mother Teresa,” I say. I do not mean to sound so ill-tempered. The words are out of my mouth before I even think.
“ Saint Paul says we are all different parts of the same body. You can’t have a complete body if all the parts are just eyeballs. How could you eat if you didn’t have a mouth? In the same way we are each called to accomplish different things. I was called to be a nun. You were called to be a wife and mother.”
“I guess,” I say, thinking of Rob probably drunk is some bar. “At least the mother part.”
“If what you say is true and your husband Rob is an alcoholic, he has a disease. The same as if he had cancer or diabetes. Now, would you just abandon him if he had cancer?”
“Of course not,” I respond.
“Okay then.” She stops as if those two words explained everything.
“But I don’t know what to do!” I say.
She laughs, shaking her head. “I told you, dear. Pray.” She smiles at me. “When you have forgiveness in your heart, all things are possible.” She inhales a deep breath and then raises and drops her shoulders. “Alright then. Come on. I want to show you something else.”
I do not think I want any more revelation in my world today, but I say nothing and follow Sister Margaret to the very back of the church and into a small room containing empty vases, candles holders and the like. From a cabinet, the nun extracts a plain white box.
“I thought Chevy might like this,” she says, opening the box.
Inside is a pale rose colored print blouse. The pintuck design at the shoulders is completed by flutter sleeves and long ties at the neck done into a pretty bow.
“Wow,” I say, unable to imagine Chevy in such an article of clothing.
“Think she’ll like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” I reply.
The nun carefully folds the blouse back into the confines of the box and replaces the lid. “Do you have the time?”
“Time?”
“To come with me and give this to her,” she says, producing her keys from the shadowy pocket of her habit. I open my mouth to fabricate some sort of excuse, but those bright gray eyes will brook no refusal. She thrusts the box into my hands.
“Come on.”
She takes me to a large building nestled between other large apartment style buildings. The name on the window of the front door reads SafeHouse.
“Safehouse is for women eighteen and older who are trying to get out of prostitution. It was co-founded by my order, The Sisters of the Presentation and a woman by the name of Glenda Hope. The founder of my order, Nano Nagle, dreamt of establishing safe havens for prostitutes nearly two hundred years ago. This place is the fulfillment of that dream. It’s a place to start over,” Sister Margaret says as we walk through its main corridor. “I got special permission to house Chevy here while she recovers from her injuries.”
“How long can she stay?” I ask.
“As long as she wants to.” She leans closer to me and whispers, “and I’m hoping this might even get her off the streets permanently.”
We turn a corner, to another hallway. The halls smell of fresh paint. Inside Chevy’s room, the décor is simple but inviting. A strawberry colored swag over the window lets in soft rays of the morning sun. There is a small vase of fresh flowers on a simple pine dresser opposite the bed. The bed itself doesn’t have a headboard, but the quilt on top matches the window swag and looks homey and warm.
Chevy is in the bed, asleep. Sister Margaret raps softly on the opened door of the room and the young girl opens her eyes. Even from this distance I can see that the wounds on her face are nearly healed. The large gash that was so prominent on her forehead looks now to be a distant memory covered by three Steri-strips, and her left eye that was blackened and swollen shut looks nearly back to normal, the dark eggplant color is now much lighter and edged in yellow.
“Knock, knock,” the nun says.
Chevy opens her eyes and seeing us both, smiles.
“Hey,” she says, her voice cracks.