“I said, the latch is in place, Carrie. Want to come see?”
She was bending over the body where it rested on the blanket-draped table, straightening her robe. She didn’t look up.
“That’s all right. I know you did a great job.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a great job.” Dan leaned back and surveyed his work. “Adequate is more like it. Won’t keep out anybody really determined to get in, but it should deter the idly curious.”
“That’s what we want,” she said, straightening. She turned toward him and held out her hand. “Come see.”
Dan moved to her side and laid an arm across her shoulders. A warm tingle spread over his skin as he felt her arm slip around his back. This was the closest they’d been since leaving Israel.
“Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Dan didn’t know how to answer that. He saw the waxy body of an old woman with wild hair and mandarin fingernails, surrounded by candles and wilting flowers. He knew Carrie was seeing something else. Her eyes were wide with wonder and devotion, like a young mother gazing at her newborn first child.
“You did a wonderful job with this place. No one would ever know it was once a coal room.”
“And no one should ever know otherwise. This is our little secret, right?”
“Right. Our little secret. Our big secret is us.” Dan turned and wrapped his other arm around her. “And speaking of us...”
Carrie slipped from his embrace. “No, Dan. Not now. Not here. Not with...her.”
Dan tried to hide his hurt. Just being in the same room with Carrie excited him. Touching her drove him crazy. Used to drive her crazy too. What was wrong?
“When then? Where? Is your brother—?”
“Let’s talk about it some other time, okay? Right now I’ve got a lot still left to do.”
“Like what?”
“I have to cut those nails, and fix her hair.”
“She’s not going on display, Carrie.”
“I know, but I want to take care of her.”
“She’s not a—” Dan bit off the rest of the sentence.
“Not a what?”
He’d been about to say Barbie Doll but had cut himself off in time.
“Nothing. She did fine in that cave with nobody fussing over her.”
“But she’s my responsibility now.”
Dan repressed a sigh. “Okay. But not your only responsibility. We’ve still got meals to serve upstairs. I’m sure she wouldn’t want you to let the guests down.”
“You go ahead. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Good.” Dan wanted out of here. The low ceiling, the dead flowers...the atmosphere was suddenly oppressive. “You remember the lock combination?” “Twelve, thirty-six, fourteen.”
“Right. See you upstairs.”
He watched Carrie, waiting for her to look his way, but she had eyes only for the Virgin.
Shaking his head, Dan turned away. This wouldn’t last, he told himself. Carrie would come around soon. Once it seeped into her devotion-fogged brain that her Virgin was merely an inert lump, she’d return to her old self.
But there was going to be an aching void in his life until she did.
‡
Carrie listened to Dan’s shoes scuff up the stone steps as she pulled the zip-lock bag from her pocket and removed the scissors from it.
Poor Dan, she thought, looking down at the Virgin. He doesn’t understand.
Neither did she, really. All she knew was that everything had changed for her. She could look back on her fourteen years in the order—fully half of her life—and understand for the first time what had brought her to the convent, what had prompted her to take a vow of chastity and then willfully break it.
“It was you, Mother,” she whispered to the Virgin as she began to trim the ragged ends of dry gray hair that protruded from under the wimple. “I came to the order because of you. You are the Eternal Virgin and I wanted to be like you. Yet I could never be like you because my virginity was already gone...stolen from me. But you already know the story.”
She’d spoken to the Blessed Virgin countless times in her prayers, trying to explain herself. She’d always felt that Mother Mary would understand. Now that they were face to face, she was compelled to tell her once more, out loud, just to be sure she knew.
“I wanted a new start, Mother. I wanted to be born anew with that vow. I wanted to be a spiritual virgin from that day forward. But I couldn’t be. No matter how many showers I took and scrubbed myself raw, no matter how many novenas I made and plenary indulgences I received, I still felt dirty.”
She slipped the hair trimmings into the plastic bag. These cuttings could not be tossed into a dumpster or even flushed away. They were sacred. They had to remain here with the Virgin.
“I hope you can understand the way I felt, Mother, because I can’t imagine you ever feeling dirty or unworthy. But the dirtiness was not the real problem. It was the hopelessness that came with it—the inescapable certainty that I could never be clean again. That’s what did me in, Mother. I knew what your Son promised, that we have but to believe and ask forgiveness and we shall be cleansed. I knew the words, I understood them in my brain, but in my heart was the conviction that His forgiveness was meant for everyone but Carolyn Ferris. Because Carolyn Ferris had be involved in the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unpardonable.”
She kept cutting, tucking the loose trimmed ends back under the Virgin’s wimple.
“I’ve been to enough seminars and read enough self-help books to know that I was sabotaging myself—I didn’t feel worthy of being a good nun, so I made damn sure I never could be one. I regret that. Terribly. And even more, I regret dragging Dan down with me. He’s a good man and a good priest, but because of me he broke his own vow, and now he’s a sinning priest.”
Carrie felt tears welling in her eyes. Damn, I’ve got a lot to answer for.
“But all that’s changed now,” she said, blinking and sniffing. “Finding you is a sign, isn’t it? It means I’m not a hopeless case. It means He thinks I can hold to my vows and make myself worthy to guard you and care for you. And if He thinks it, then it must be so.”
She trimmed away the last vagrant strands of hair, then sealed them in the zip-lock bag.
“There.” She stepped back and smiled. “You look better already.”
She glanced down at the Virgin’s long, curved fingernails. They were going to need a lot of work, more work than she had time for now.
“I’ve got to go now. Got to do my part for the least of His children, but I’ll be back. I’ll be back every day. And every day you’ll see a new and better me. I’m going to be worthy of you, Mother. That is a promise—one I’ll keep.”
She just had to find the right way to tell Dan that the old Carrie was gone and he couldn’t have the new one. He was a good man. The best. She knew he’d understand and accept the new her...eventually. But she had to find a way to tell him without hurting him.
She placed the bag of clippings under the table that constituted the Virgin’s bier, then kissed her wimple and blew out the candles. She snapped the combination lock closed and hurried upstairs to help with lunch.
‡
Carrie was adding a double handful of sliced carrots to the last pot of soup when she heard someone calling her name from the Big Room. She walked to the front to see what it was.
Augusta, a stooped, reed-thin, wrinkled volunteer who worked the serving line three days a week, stood at the near end of the counter with Pilgrim.