As she drove me home, I asked, “Why did you make me go to the doctor? What brought that on? You never made me go before. Did you notice something about my health that I missed? What aren’t you telling me, old woman?”
She scowled—she is ten years younger than me, and hates to be called “old woman.” Then she said, “My husband told me to make you go.”
“Why would my husband tell you such a thing?”
“Mysterious ways, perhaps.”
“Oh, bullshit!” I said to Mother Superior, whose face had turned to stone as she drove with her precious iPad resting on the console between us.
“Jesus Christ came to me in a dream again, Sister Maeve,” the Crab said, without taking her beady little black eyes off the road. “He said it was the first step of many necessary steps. Taking you to the doctor would set in motion a grander plan, He told me. But let’s not tell the other sisters about that, shall we?”
Mother Superior may be a crustacean, but she also has the visions, like I do, so she is an ally and a confidante, albeit an extremely ornery one.
Not all nuns have the visions—in fact, most don’t.
And it is best to use the visions without making the other nuns feel jealous or lesser because they have no eyes to see, nor ears to hear.
“The first step toward what?” I asked her.
“He didn’t say. But He obviously wanted us to know that your allotted time to put in motion His divine plan was . . . as we now know . . . extremely limited.”
Back at the convent, I prayed my afternoon prayers and then ate dinner with the sisters, who all kindly inquired about my trip to the doctor. I told them the findings were inconclusive, although I wasn’t sure why I misrepresented the truth at the time. Mother Superior raised her eyebrows at me from the head of the table, but said nothing to contradict what I had told my sisters in Jesus Christ.
When I retired to my room that night, I prayed the rosary, read my scriptures (in good old American English!), and then I thought about what to do with my remaining time. What unfinished business did I have in this world?
Of course, your name was first in my thoughts—my beautiful sweet boy.
After you were attacked, in the hospital, you yelled at me and told me never to contact you again, and have since refrained from answering my many letters now for years, making it painfully clear that you have cut me out of your life for good—just like your father did to both of us, I might add—but I had also stopped writing you, and I didn’t want you to think that I could ever relinquish the possibility of having you in my life again.
With my last breath I will wish for your forgiveness.
My life here at the convent has been bliss, except for the rift that my faith has created between us—that is my one regret, or maybe I should more accurately say it is my one source of suffering.
I thought about you for hours, wished I could have called you on the phone even, but I have no number for you, and because I had searched for one many times and found none—not even a trace of you in any phone book or Internet website Mother Superior could find—I came to believe that you might not even have a telephone, but have removed yourself from the world, as you threatened to do so many times before.
My greatest fear is that you are no longer even alive. I worry so much about you, and on this night my worry was intensified one hundred thousand times.
Late in the night, and after some wine, God found it in his heart to calm my mind, and I went to sleep, which was a minor miracle in itself.
Soon I was dreaming, and I was in a warm vacation-type place—somewhere south where the sun shines bright and you can smell salt water in the air—and across the street was an impressive modern corporate-looking building covered in large rectangular windows that reflected like mirrors. Standing out front was a crowd made up of many different people of all backgrounds, some fervently praying the rosary, and when I followed their gazes, I saw reflected in nine window panes the Blessed Virgin Mary, appearing like a gas rainbow in a puddle on the giant mirrored windowpanes. She looked beautiful and so full of love and grace, her bust glowing some thirty feet tall maybe, as if she had taken Noah’s rainbow and bent it into her own form.
“Come,” I heard Mother Mary whisper to me in my dream. “Come, Sister Maeve, to this place, and you will have your closure. Have faith. Come.”
Then I sat up in bed, wide awake, knowing that God had sent me another vision, so in my slippers and nightgown I tiptoed through the halls of the convent to the old Crab’s palace of a bedroom—with her own bathroom even!—knocked lightly, and entered.
Mother Superior was snoring like a drunken bear.
I turned on her bedside lamp, but the light did not wake her, so I pinched her nose shut and covered her mouth with my palm. She was wide awake in fifteen seconds or so, swatting at my hands, gasping for air, and even letting out a little swear disguised as a prayer.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said, pupils opening up quickly. When she saw me, her eyes narrowed. She shook her head. “You—”
“My husband sent me a message in a dream,” I said in a whisper, so we wouldn’t wake up the others.
“What did my husband show you?” she whispered back.
“He showed me a flock of God-loving Catholic people—many of them olive-skinned, maybe Mexican—gathered in front of a big building made of huge—”
“Windows that reflected like mirrors?” She lifted her eyebrows.
“Yes,” I said, and then Mother Superior and I were wearing the smiles of conspirators.