“It’s on the busy road,” the girl explained, tugging at her sleeve.
“You live there with your mother?”
Amy said nothing. She had a way of neither looking nor speaking, of being alone with herself even in the presence of another person, that Lacey had never encountered. There was something even a little frightening about it. When the girl did this, it was as if she, Lacey, were the one who had vanished.
“I have an idea,” Lacey declared. “Would you like to play a game, Amy?”
The girl eyed her skeptically. “What kind?”
“I call it secrets. It’s easy to play. I tell you a secret, and then you tell me one. Do you see? A trade, my secret for your secret. How does that sound?”
The girl shrugged. “Okay.”
“All right then. I’ll start. Here is my secret. One time, when I was very young, like you, I ran away from home. This was in Sierra Leone, where I come from. I was very cross at my mother, because she wouldn’t let me go to see a carnival without doing my lessons first. I was very excited about this carnival, because I had heard they did tricks with horses, and I was crazy about horses. I bet you like horses too, don’t you, Amy?”
The girl nodded. “I guess.”
“Every girl like horses. But me—I was in love with them! To show her how mad I was, I refused to do my lessons, and she sent me to my room for the night. Oh, I was so angry! I stamped around the room like a crazy person. Then I thought, If I run away, she’ll be sorry she has treated me this way. She’ll let me do what I like from now on. I was very foolish, but that is what I believed. So that night, after my parents and my sisters were asleep, I left the house. I didn’t know where to go, so I hid in the fields behind our yard. It was cold and very dark. I wanted to stay there all night, and then in the morning I would be able to hear my mother crying my name when she woke up and found I wasn’t there. But I couldn’t do this. I stayed in the field a little while, but eventually I was too cold and frightened. I went back home and got into bed, and nobody ever knew I was gone.” She looked at the girl, who was watching her closely, and did her best to smile. “There—I’ve never told anyone that story, not until now. You are the first person I’ve told in my life. What do you think of that?”
The girl was watching Lacey attentively now. “You just … went home?”
Lacey nodded. “You see, I wasn’t so angry anymore. And in the morning, it all seemed like a dream I’d had. I wasn’t even sure it had actually happened, though now, many years later, I know that it did.” She patted Amy’s hand encouragingly. “Now it is your turn. Do you have a secret to tell me, Amy?”
The girl lowered her face and said nothing.
“Even a little one?”
“I don’t think she’s coming back,” said Amy.
The police officers who took the call, a man and a woman, got nowhere either. The female officer, a heavyset white woman with a cropped haircut like a man’s, spoke to the girl in the kitchen, while the other officer, a handsome black man with a smooth, narrow face, took a description of the mother from Lacey. Did she seem nervous? he asked her. Was she drunk, on drugs? What was she wearing? Did Lacey see the car? On and on he went, but Lacey could tell he was asking only because he had to; he didn’t think the girl’s mother would turn up, either. He recorded her answers with a tiny pencil on a pad of paper that, as soon as she’d finished, he returned to the breast pocket of his uniform. In the kitchen, a flash of light: the woman officer had taken Amy’s picture.
“Do you want to call Child Protection, or should we do it?” the policeman asked Lacey. “Because, seeing as how you are who you are, it might make sense if we waited. No use putting her into the system right away, especially over the weekend, if you don’t mind keeping her here. We can put out a description of the woman and see if we get anywhere. We’ll also put the girl in the missing child database. The mother might come back, too, though if she does, you should keep the girl here and call us.”
It was a little past noon; the other sisters were all due back at one o’clock from the Community Pantry, where they’d passed the morning stocking shelves and dispensing boxes of canned goods and cereal, spaghetti sauce, and diapers. They did this every Tuesday and Friday. But Lacey had been nursing a head cold all week—even after three years in Memphis, she still hadn’t adapted to the damp winters—and Sister Arnette had told Lacey to stay home, no use making herself sicker. It was like Sister Arnette to make a decision like this, even though Lacey had woken up feeling perfectly well.
Looking at the officer, she made a quick decision. “I will do it,” she said.
Which was how, when the sisters returned, it happened that Lacey failed to tell them the truth about the girl. This is Amy, she told them, as they were taking off their coats and scarves in the hall. Her mother is a friend, and she was called away to visit a sick relative, and Amy will be spending the weekend with us. It surprised her, how easily the lie came; she had no practice with deceit, and yet the words had assembled themselves quickly in her mind and found their way to her lips without effort. As she spoke she glanced at Amy, wondering if she would expose her, and she saw a flicker of agreement in the girl’s eyes. She was, Lacey understood then, a girl used to keeping secrets.
“Sister,” said Sister Arnette, speaking with her old woman’s air of perpetual disapproval, “I’m glad to see that you are offering our help to this girl and her mother. But it is also true that this is something you should have asked me about.”
“I’m very sorry,” Lacey said. “It was an emergency. It will only be until Monday.”
Sister Arnette looked appraisingly at Lacey, then down at Amy, who was standing with her back pressed to the pleats of Lacey’s skirt. While she did this, Sister Arnette removed her gloves, one finger at a time. Cold air from outside still swirled in the close space of the hallway.
“This is a convent, not an orphanage. This isn’t a place for children.”
“I understand, Sister. And I am very sorry. It simply couldn’t be helped.”
Another moment passed. Dear Lord, Lacey thought, help me to like this person more than I do, Sister Arnette, who is imperious and thinks much of herself, but is Your servant, as I am.
“All right,” Sister Arnette said at last, and sighed irritably. “Until Monday. She can use the spare room.”
It was then that Sister Lacey wondered why: why she had lied, and why the lie had come so easily, as if it weren’t a lie in the larger sense of things-true and things-untrue. Her story was also full of holes. What would happen if the police returned, or telephoned, and Sister Arnette discovered what she’d done? What would happen Monday, when she had to call the county? And yet she felt no fear about these matters. The girl was a mystery, sent to them by God—and not even to them, but to her. To Lacey. It was her job to figure out what the answer to this mystery was, and by lying to Sister Arnette—not necessarily a lie, she told herself; who was to say the mother hadn’t gone to visit a sick relative after all?—she had given herself the time required to unravel it. So perhaps that was why the lie had come so easily; the Holy Spirit had spoken through her, inspired her with the flame of a different, deeper sort of truth, and what it had said was that the girl was in trouble and needed Lacey to help her.
The other sisters were pleased; they never had visitors, or at least very rarely, and these were always religious—priests, other sisters. But a little girl: this was something new. The minute Sister Arnette had climbed the stairs to her room, they all began to talk. How did Sister Lacey know the girl’s mother? How old was Amy? What did she like to do? To eat? To watch? To wear? They were so excited they scarcely noticed how seldom Amy spoke, that in fact she said nothing at all; Lacey did the talking. For dinner, Amy would like hamburgers and hot dogs—these were her favorites—with potato chips, and chocolate-chip ice cream. She enjoyed coloring and crafts, and liked to watch movies with princesses in them, and rabbits if they had anything like that at the store. She would need clothes; her mother, in her haste, had forgotten the little girl’s suitcase, she was so frazzled by her own mission of mercy (to Arkansas, near Little Rock; the little girl’s grandmother was diabetic, with heart trouble), and when she’d said she would go home for it, Lacey had insisted no, she could easily manage. The lies poured forth so gracefully upon ears so willing to believe that, within the hour, all the sisters seemed to have a slightly different version of the same story. Sister Louisa and Sister Claire took the van to Piggly Wiggly for the hamburgers and hot dogs and chips, then to Walmart, for clothing and movies and toys; in the kitchen, Sister Tracy set about planning the evening meal, announcing that not only could they expect the promised hamburgers and hot dogs and ice cream, but to go with the ice cream, a three-tier chocolate cake. (They always looked forward to Fridays, Sister Tracy’s night to cook. Her parents owned a restaurant in Chicago; before she’d entered the Sisters, she had trained at Cordon Bleu.) Even Sister Arnette seemed to catch the spirit, sitting with Amy and the other sisters in the den to watch The Princess Bride while dinner was prepared.
Through it all, Sister Lacey set her mind on God. When the movie, which everyone agreed was wonderful, ended, and Sister Louise and Sister Claire took Amy to the kitchen to show her some of the toys they’d bought at Walmart—coloring books, crayons and paste and construction paper, a Barbie Pet Shop Kit that had taken Sister Louise fifteen minutes to free from the prison of its plastic package with all of its little parts, the combs and brushes for the dogs and the tiny dishes and the rest—Lacey climbed the stairs. In the silence of her room she prayed on this mystery, the mystery of Amy, listening for the voice that would sweep through her, filling her with the knowledge of His will; but as she lifted her mind to God, all that came to her was the feeling of a question with no certain answer. This, she knew, was another way God could speak to a person. His will was elusive most of the time, and although this was frustrating, and it would be nice if, from time to time, He chose to make His intentions more explicit, this wasn’t how things worked. Though most of the sisters prayed in the little chapel behind the kitchen, and Lacey did this too, she reserved her most earnest, searching prayers for this time alone in her room, not even kneeling but sitting at her desk or on the corner of her narrow bed. She’d put her hands in her lap, close her eyes, and send her mind out as far as she could—since childhood, she had imagined it as a kite on a string, lifting higher as she let the line out—and wait to see what happened. Now, sitting on the bed, she sent the kite as high as she dared, the imaginary ball of string growing smaller in her hand, the kite itself just a speck of color far above her head, but all she felt was the wind of heaven pushing upon it, a force of great power against a thing so small.
After dinner, the sisters returned to the living room to watch a program on TV, a hospital show they had been following all year, and Sister Lacey took Amy upstairs to prepare for bed. It was eight o’clock; usually all the sisters were in bed by nine, to rise at five for morning devotions, and it seemed to Lacey that these were the kind of hours a girl of Amy’s age could also keep. She gave Amy a bath, scrubbing her hair with raspberry shampoo and working in a dollop of conditioner for the tangles, then combing it all out so it was straight and glossy, its rich black hue deepening with each pull of the comb, before taking her old clothing downstairs to the laundry. By the time she returned Amy had put on the pajamas Sister Claire had bought that afternoon at Walmart. They were pink, with a pattern of stars and moons with smiling faces, and made of a material that rustled and shone like silk. When Lacey entered the room, she saw that Amy was looking at the sleeves with a bewildered expression; they were too long, flopping clownishly over her hands and feet. Lacey rolled them up; while she watched, Amy brushed her teeth and put her toothbrush back in its case and then turned from the mirror to face her.
“Do I sleep in here?”
So many hours had passed since she’d heard the girl’s voice that Lacey wasn’t sure she’d heard the question correctly. She searched the little girl’s face. The question, strange as it was, made sense to her.
“Why would you sleep in the bathroom, Amy?”
She looked at the floor. “Mama says I have to be quiet.”
Lacey didn’t know what to make of this. “No, of course not. You’ll sleep in your room. It’s right next to mine, I’ll show you.”
The room was clean and spare, bare-walled with just a bed and a bureau and a small writing table, not even a rug on the floor to warm it, and Lacey wished she had something to make it nice for a little girl. She thought that, tomorrow, she would ask Sister Arnette if she could buy a small rug to put by the bed, so Amy’s feet wouldn’t have to touch the cold floorboards in the mornings. She tucked Amy under the blankets and sat on the edge of the mattress. Through the floor she could hear the faint rumble of the television downstairs, and the tick of pipes expanding behind the walls, and outside, the wind fingering the March leaves of the oaks and maples and the soft hum of evening traffic on Poplar Avenue. The zoo was two blocks behind the convent, at the far end of the park; on summer nights when the windows were open, they could sometimes hear the colabus monkeys, whooping and screeching in their cages. This was a strange and wonderful thing for Lacey to hear, so many thousands of miles from home, but when she had visited the zoo she’d discovered it was an awful place, like a jail; the pens were small, the cats were kept in barren cages behind walls of Plexiglas, the elephants and giraffes wore chains on their legs. All the animals looked depressed. Most could barely be bothered to move at all, and the people who came to see them were loud and boorish and let their children throw popcorn through the bars to make the animals notice them. It was more than Lacey could bear, and she had left quickly, close to tears. It broke her heart to see God’s creatures treated so cruelly, with such coldhearted indifference, for no purpose.
But now, sitting on the edge of the bed, she thought that it might be something Amy would like. Perhaps she’d never been to a zoo at all. As long as there was nothing Lacey could do to ease the animals’ suffering, it didn’t seem sinful, a second wrong piled on top of the first, to bring a little girl who had so little happiness in her life to see them. She would ask Sister Arnette in the morning about this, when she asked about the rug.
“There now,” she said, and adjusted Amy’s blanket. The girl was lying very still, almost as if she were afraid to move. “All safe and sound. And I’m just next door if you need anything. Tomorrow we’ll do something fun, you’ll see. The two of us.”
