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The couch was clear of suitcases, but that didn’t make it a great resting spot. It was a newer couch, not the one that I had sunk into during those many college retreats, though it occupied the same place the other did. I supposed the old one wasn’t salvageable after so long. In fact, it was likely that all the furniture needed to be upgraded when the cottage’s purpose changed. After all, this might have been free housing, but the sort of people it was meant to serve had standards and the voice to express those standards with some sort of biting derision.
They were also the sort to not sleep on their couches. They had their lives in order and would have cleared the bed or properly unpacked long before calling it a night. They wouldn’t have lost themselves in thoughts of the past and the unfortunate present.
So the couch wasn’t comfortable. Or at least, not when it came to sleeping. But that didn’t mean the couch was comfortable. It was too stiff. It didn’t just resist one’s weight, but it seemed to actively try to throw one off of it. But it was only supposed to be for one night. Or that’s what I kept reminding myself as I drifted off to sleep, ready to assume that the morning would be kinder.
And it wasn’t, as it would turn out. My naivety came back to haunt me immediately.
Sometimes, when you’re lying in a really uncomfortable position, your body doesn’t sleep, it knocks itself. Because survival mechanisms, otherwise nondescript and all that. Rest is important, a necessity, even, but in that situation, rest won’t come to you easily. So, compromise, your body says, and you pass out, resting in a way that nothing and no one can disturb you. Which is great until you have to wake up. That’s when you find out that your body made no attempt to find positions that wouldn’t strain your muscles or otherwise cause you harm. And suddenly, your day is already wrecked before it has any chance to begin.
Just like that, I went from being indifferent about this stiff couch to hating it with a burning passion, a burn that mirrored the one in my neck: strong and hot. And latent in that burn was some sort of threat of more misery if the wrong move was made.
It probably would have been worse had I slept for a moment longer, so it was fortunate that my phone was ringing right in my ear. I had turned the ringtone’s volume up when I was waiting for Chris, and apparently turning it back down never came to mind. And in the haze of that lingering terrible pseudo-sleep, I didn’t hesitate to answer the phone or bother to check the caller ID. Which I probably should have done because it was Erika, and I was far from being in the mood for one of our talks.
“Hello,” I groggily greeted.
She cut straight to the chase. “Do you realize I have to close myself to queries for a while?”
Yep, it was Erika. I reached up to rub my eyes.
“Hi Erika,” I said. “And no, I didn’t realize. How could I?”
“It was somewhat obvious given the bulk of this. It’s like a Costco delivery in my inbox, Mia.” In the glory of that clever one liner, she sighed. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? Good morning, my darling, darling client. Time for us to talk about what we’re going to do about all this work you sent over.”
I tried to sit up, but the muscles in my neck and back weren’t too thrilled with that idea. They voiced their initial discontent, which I countered by trying to move anyway. After what felt like a sharp stab into my neck as a rebuttal, they won, and I fell back onto the couch, groaning lightly under my breath.
“I thought you were going to figure that out,” I whined.
Erika sighed with a very palatable frustration. “Are we really going to do this?”
“Hey!” I objected. “Hey. I warned you I can be like this. I warned you that I’m a little marshmallow of indecisiveness, and you warned me that you could be a little heavy handed. We agreed we were compatible. And now we’re stuck in this devil’s bargain.”
Erika’s nose likely twitched at the phrase “devil’s bargain” and my potential misuse of it. It probably felt accurate, whether or not it made a great deal of technical sense. She sighed again. I could hear her pacing in her office. Her steps were heavier than she wanted to admit, and the low thuds made their way into the phone.
“Mia, you know you’re one of my favorite clients,” she started.
Mentally, I braced myself for the ensuing break up or professional separation, whatever the term was. Because why cushion what you're going to say if it was innocuous?
As if to further prove me right, Erika struggled with the next part of her sentence, which didn’t help my anxieties. Her words sat in her mouth for a moment too long, and as I waited for them to emerge, my heart fluttered in my chest. I was left waiting for it, just waiting and swallowing my nerves as my mind raced. Maybe she wasn’t dropping me, but maybe I hadn’t sent over anything of worth. And that’s what she needed to tell me. Which wasn’t an easy thing to say considering the dramatics about getting everything sent over in the first place. But the delicacy of the situation aside, I should have been expecting that. Hell, I knew nothing in that pile was any good. It was why I hadn’t sent it over sooner. I hadn’t wanted to trouble her with any of that garbage. There just came a time when I just didn’t have much of a choice. I had rushed into this deal.
And maybe it didn’t end there. Once upon a time, Erika thought I was a good writer. Maybe I had finally proved her wrong.
I winced in anticipation of what she was about to say, but her remark surprised me.
“And I’m worried about you,” she finally declared.
My panic melted into confusion. I sat up in surprise with such a quickness that the pain receptors in my body and the neurons in my brain couldn’t even register what I had done and how unwise it was. There was no time for them to catch their bearings. The resulting objections–when they finally came–were dull aches that I could easily ignore.
I stammered, “Why would you be worried?”
“Well, let’s see. You don’t send me anything for a couple years and then an outright AVALANCHE of content early in the morning. After a broken engagement. After taking a fellowship impulsively.”
“Hey, you were the one who brought it up to me,” I pointed out.
“You accepted the offer and wanted to move out the next day,” she deadpanned. “Hell, if you knew where they hid the key, you’d probably have gone the same day.”
Fair point, I thought but didn’t say.
“And now, you’re disinterested in the process of actually publishing all of this.”
“On that,” I cut in, “please remember that I have never wanted to be involved in this process. I don’t like negotiating and pleasantries. And all the stuff you’re good at. That’s why I have an agent. That’s why I specifically have you.”
My voice was shaking a bit as I spoke. The conviction I wanted to muster just wasn’t there. And while I could play pretend rather well, it wasn’t a performance I could consistently rely on.
Erika didn’t address that part, though. She knew how pointless it was. Instead, she got to the heart of what she really wanted to say to me.
“Look, I’m not trying to be your armchair therapist here, but in my untrained opinion, this almost looks like a maniac episode following a depressive spell.”
I stood up and started to pace the floor. Professional etiquette aside, Erika was right that my behavior had been off lately, relative to a normal human’s sense of time, but for as long as we worked together, I had never been the model of great behavior. There were certain quirks about me that had caught her attention, and there were aspects of these idiosyncrasies that lined up worryingly well with various conditions. However, I didn’t have those conditions; it was simply a resemblance, a strong one at that. It was like how certain artists might use the same color palette that Vincent Van Gogh did when he was painting The Starry Night. Sure, they might look similar in the right (low) light and at the right (distant) angle, but they’re different works entirely. As confirmed by various mental health professionals, my abnormality wasn’t a diagnosable condition. (Which also meant it couldn’t be treated easily, but one thing at a time.) While it was always there, it had just flared up recently, and I could have recited a long list of contributing factors. But Erika was my agent, and as my agent, my personal life really wasn’t something she signed on to deal with. Also it was full of things I didn’t want to talk about.
But there were things she already knew, so I stuck with those. I put on my biggest (but fake) smile and cheerily recited my supposed issues into the phone. “Erika, I was in a terrible relationship until–golly gee–the same time I got offered this fellowship. At my alma mater. That alone offered solutions to a lot of my problems. So obviously, I’m going to feel better and clear through the backlog. That’s all this is.”
And whether or not you agree, it’s not like Erika and I hadn’t commiserated about failed relationships before. Back then, it was her past marriage and my father’s many marriages, but there was no reason to think that sort of goodwill couldn’t be adapted to another context.
She sighed, and in that push of air, I could hear the subtle and gentle call out. But it was coupled with more frustration. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and ominous, which initially I tried to ignore because that was just how Erika spoke. It was a tone that suited her and her kick ass attitude, but there was an edge to it this time, and said edge was meant for me.
“Mia, I’m only going to say this once to you. I have worked with my fair share of dysfunctional artistic types and sometimes they fetishize their own sadness and sometimes they don’t. But all of them struggled needlessly until they decided they wouldn’t, and in the interim, I and everyone around them were walking on eggshells to keep from pushing them over the edge. We tried to help them. But at the end of the day, it was their responsibility, Mia. It always was. They were the only ones who could help themselves. So I’m not going to push this issue. Get help if you need it, but I can’t force you to do anything good or bad.”
Instinctively, I replied, “Got it” because that’s the sort of thing that I thought I was supposed to say in a time like that. It was better than nothing.
Erika sighed yet again, marking some sort of break between the various segments of this conversation. It was a chance for us to redirect our minds and focus on the next topic at hand. It was a chance to regroup our thoughts or to take a moment of rest. Whatever we could claim for ourselves in that singular instant was fair game. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t pull myself together quick enough to grab even the smallest scrap.
“Well, on that note, we need to start strategizing what we should do with all this stuff,” Erika said.
“Got it,” I said again but with more obvious hesitation.
“Now we don’t want to flood the market with your material. You don’t want your readers to get any sort of fatigue.”
I winced at the thought of my readers, which was a reaction that was immediately coupled with guilt. I did appreciate them, but I wasn’t good to them. I was distant and avoided the thought of them whenever I could. It was just a way of avoiding my own failings, sure, but it had to sting for the people who had essentially given me my career to be so wholly ignored.
Erika shuffled some papers in front of her. The rustling irritated my open wounds. Presumably, she was at her desk, and presumably she was shuffling through her notes or maybe even a few printouts of the things I had sent over. Either way, she took that moment to adjust.
“I think we should start with this middle grade series. That’s a great market right now. Kids are hungry for books like this. But the problem is that this is not an area I know well.”
“Okay, but you are not the sort of person to mention a problem without a solution,” I ventured.
Her mood lifted at the acknowledgment. It’s always nice to hear that other people thought you were the exact person that you wanted to be or portrayed yourself as. And Erika wanted to be the sort of person who dealt almost exclusively with solutions.
“Of course not. And here’s the solution. We have a new junior agent here. Cecelia Mallari. Great agent. So much potential. Going to make waves in the middle grade market. But she needs to pad out her list.”
“Ok–”
“And I know how much you hate interacting with new people, so I will handle that if you just sign the deal with her,” she finished.
“You know me so well, Erika,” I replied, ignoring the conversation we had just been having about my destructive tendencies. Those thoughts needed to be kept separate.
At that point, the conversation was swiftly brought to an end, and my phone–trying to be useful–resumed playing the podcast episode lined up in the queue. Bless its heart, it had been running all night, assuming that’s what I wanted. It had tried its best to discern my intention in the absence of any input, which I did appreciate, even if that was just programming. But as endearing as that was, by then, it had run out of episodes of the animal podcast to play. In its place, a theology podcast had started. It was one I had chosen to follow, but I didn’t think I’d get to it like this. I thought there would be a more conscious selection going on should I ever listen to an episode. I thought it could wait. I thought it would be content sitting in my phone waiting for me to be in the right mindset to listen and maybe even savored the lessons therein, but of course, nothing–no matter how simple–was ever going to go my way.
The bishop who hosted the podcast had a strong and steady voice, which is the sort of voice you would want a man of faith to have. It’s a position that requires confidence, tempered with a compassion evidenced by a soft melodic tone as one’s voice recited dense theory and strolled through hundreds of years of history with care and grace. No matter what one thinks of religion as it stands, there is undoubtedly an art form to being religious. There is an art to preaching, and very few have truly mastered it, especially when it came to the voice one used.
While theology is allegedly useful for creatives, that wasn’t why I decided to follow that show. It was his voice that sold me on the podcast. I immediately came to trust it and place great value in.
So my heart sank when I heard this recording of him say, “We all have a purpose. Each and every one of us was designed with some end in mind, to be part of the larger whole–”
It had elicited a sense of deep dread and fear within me, the sort of thing that I could usually keep buried, but that voice–skillful and well cultivated as it was–could reach deep within those depths within me and yanked it back to the surface, forcing me to face it again. I was left staring into the dark, empty eyes of this part of my soul of this fear that I was always so desperate to avoid.
Facing it wasn’t something I could handle doing, though. So I cut him off by shutting off the player, though I did consider throwing the entire phone into the woods for some added and unnecessary drama. But it wouldn’t have done me any good.
Despite the briefness of the encounter and the swiftness of my escape, the thought lingered in my mind. It was the sort of thing I had heard before, frequently. It comes up a lot when you’re raised in a religious home. That’s part of what religion is meant to give you, after all. It offers meaning and purpose meant to serve as an anchor when the storms of life get overwhelming. For most people, that’s comforting, but I didn’t react to most things like other people do. So instead of feeling comforted in the face of that sentiment, I just felt ill. Because if my life did have a purpose, I obviously wasn’t living up to it.
But while I didn’t want to listen to that specific podcast episode anymore, I couldn’t handle the resulting silence. And though there were a vast number of solutions available to me, my mind drew a blank as I tried to figure out what to do next. I could just play a different podcast, or I could pull out my laptop to play a video or two. Volume would be an issue without my speakers, but I would just have to put up with it. But even if I could put up with it, the mere thought reignited my earlier frustration, but it was more intense now that I was fully awake and not fighting slumber’s claws freshly pressed into my skin. The misplaced speakers were an insignificant thing to be frustrated about and not having them was entirely my fault. But more importantly, there were plenty of solutions: I could go and get them, replace them, or just live without them. All of them were doable. But regardless, it was easier to beat myself up about it. That came naturally to me.
But before I could fall too deeply into that self-loathing, I was interrupted by a hard knock on the door. It wasn’t particularly aggressive, but it had a presence to it that I was wholly unprepared for. As I jumped in surprise, the door seemed to jump in its frame. The two were not properly fitted to each other. The gap was slight and usually easy to ignore until an encounter like that, until a knocking that a well paired door and frame could have endured together.
“Mia,” a familiar voice called from outside before she knocked again.
My name fits the Haitian accent rather nicely, if I do say so myself. Or maybe my judgment was clouded by the joy of hearing my name called out by a very familiar nun. Either way, my heart leapt in excitement as I ran to the door, tossing my phone to the couch because it really didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did. Certainly not that bishop’s voice and the old fear it had awakened in me.
“Sr. Agatha!” I called out as I flung myself forward.
Forgetting I had locked the door, I immediately went to swing it open only to comically fail when the lock held firm. With a quick flick of my wrist, I released the lock and opened the door.
“I’m sorry. I was just so excited.”
But even that thought and all the shame that entangled in it soon faded from my mind. In its place, there was Sr. Agatha, just like I remembered her in one of her many loose T-shirts and faded jeans. The pale color palette brought out the dark, earthy glow of her skin just like her smile did. But her smile was focused less on highlighting her features and more on conveying how happy she was to see one of her “girls” again after so long apart. I felt it too.
I wanted to hug her. I started to, but the large food container in her hands insisted I hold back.
“I brought you breakfast,” Sr. Agatha explained. “Plantains and eggs.”
When she said that, my heart was so happy it just about died. It’s not that happiness can be fatal, per say. It was just the whiplash, the impact that came from being flung from one side of a long spectrum to the other. In this case, I had been thrown from a terrible low to a great high, and that momentum wasn’t too easy on the body, even if it was welcome or needed.
My sudden elevation wasn’t just from seeing Sr. Agatha again but also from seeing the food she had prepared for me, like she always did for the young women of Penhale Hall during finals week or whenever we were drowning in our stress. We’d be dragging ourselves back to Penhale from class or the library or any of the campus’s many science labs to be greeted at the door by the smell of comfort food wafting out of Penhale’s kitchen. When we ventured inside, Sr. Agatha would be bent over the stove, diligently working to feed 200 young women. It was quite the feat. The kitchen was in a small corner of the building, and it had terrible ventilation. Heat would build up. It would quickly get unbearable. But rather than complain, Sr. Agatha set up fans. And when she did speak, it was to say that we needed a good meal to get us through the stress.
While she wasn't wrong, it wasn’t just about the food. Her labor was a reminder that she cared about us. When we felt like we were worthless and imposters, undeserving of the opportunity Stella Maris had given us, Sr. Agatha wanted to remind us that we were still loved and valuable.
Her willingness to keep up that tradition when I was no longer her charge, per say, was enough to almost bring me to tears. But I held it together and stepped aside to let her in. And yet, as she was walking past me and the opportunity presented itself, I threw my arms around her for a quick hug from the side.
“Yes, yes,” Sr. Agatha chided. “I am happy to see you too, but the dish is hot. Or hopefully it is. Plantains and eggs are both better fresh.”
“I’ll take anything right now,” I joked, but I obliged and released her. “I only have some leftover pizza. I didn’t get a chance to go to the store yesterday. Not that my cooking compares to yours, anyway.”
Sr. Agatha hummed in some sort of acknowledgement as she sat the dish on the kitchen counter, but I could tell she was thinking about something. A flicker of worry sounded, but I went to the cabinet and pulled out plates and silverware, but as for the napkins, I took them from the stack Chris had left behind. The cartoon pizza of the Happy Flour Pizzeria printed in dark red ink stood out from the light brown material. I hadn’t thought about it when I grabbed them. In my mind, there wasn’t much to think about. Those napkins were right there, and they needed to be used. However, when Sr. Agatha caught a glimpse of them as I gave her the plates, she was left smirking.
“Pizza, huh? From the Chris boy.”
Even though I had just been thinking of him, the mention of his name froze me in place. My heart skipped a beat or two and then refound its rhythm, but while it was flailing about, it smacked my lungs. I choked a bit as air rushed out of me but largely kept myself together.
Stammering, I asked, “How do you know Chris?”
It was a stupid question. He was the son of the owner/manager/new owner of one of the main pizza providers to Stella Maris. Of course he would have met all the dorm rectors a time or two. It only made sense. But in my mind, we weren’t talking about the pizza-shop Chris but the young man I had a crush on when I was younger and still believed that sort of thing could be simple and uncomplicated.
“He asked about you, you know?” she explained. “The semester after you graduated. He didn’t know you left.”
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, we talked about that for a little bit last night.”
“You two used to talk a lot back then,” she mused.
On her first attempt, she pulled open the drawer that had the serving utensils and grabbed a large black serving spoon. She took to this residence with an enviable ease that I couldn’t hope to replicate despite being the one living in it. With the spoon in hand, she opened the lid off of the container and immediately began to fill both plates. The stray billow of steam would rise up as she worked, promising a needed degree of heat but not enough to burn me. And in the rest of the open air, the familiar smell of cooked plantains danced with the smell of bell peppers that had also been lying in wait. They had been waiting for that moment, for that chance to come together as foretold in a prophecy written out by Sr. Agatha’s wooden spoon.
And all the promises of that prophecy were being fulfilled. It was obvious.
“Sweet, yes?” Sr. Agatha suddenly asked.
As the smell invaded my mind, it had flushed out any logical thought I had with it. With my mind now blank, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Nor did I know where to begin searching for whatever conversational thread I had dropped.
“You like your plantains on the sweeter side, not the salty one, right?” she clarified.
Though I was still stunned, I found myself smiling. Sr. Agatha had remembered. But unfortunately that’s not the only thing she remembered because suddenly we were right back on the topic of Chris.
Without any preamble, she just said, “I remember catching the two of you talking by the hall’s side door.”
“Just talking,” I added with a quivering nerve in my voice and a slight arch of my brow.
“Yes but talking, talking, talking for much longer than a pizza delivery takes.”
I didn’t have an answer ready, but as she handed me the plate, I also didn’t care. My main priority was not my pride but the food in front of me. I put a spoonful of eggs into my mouth. The pepper loudly reminded me that it was there, and it was welcomed because I do love peppers, I just don’t have the patience to take them apart and put them in a pan.
“I did like him, a little bit,” I confessed. “He’s cute and dorky, and the whole reason he wanted to meet me was that I was good to his employees. That was a big thing to him, and a girl’s gotta like a guy with priorities like that, right? But he had a girlfriend then.”
“Then?” she repeated.
I said nothing in response.
Sr. Agatha leaned against the counter with her plate in hand. She didn’t dive into her food like I did, which made sense, considering she could have her cooking any time she wanted, but there was something ominous about having her attention directly solely onto me. I gulped nervously.
“So you dumped the boy you had before like I told you to?” she asked.
Bless Sr. Agatha for jumping to the conclusion that painted me in the most favorable light.
I nodded as I stuck a piece of plantain in my mouth. It was still warm and tasted divine. My soul melted from the touch of heaven on my tongue. Nothing could be wrong when I was eating something this good, and so I didn’t bother to even consider softening what I was about to say.
“Done,” I assured her. “But not soon enough, I guess. We broke up just the other week. After I found out he was still seeing my sister behind my back.”
She clicked her tongue in disapproval. “I told you, didn’t I? A man that cheats on you with your family will not change. At that point, he’s too far gone.”
“I thought the Bible told us to forgive, Sister.”
“Forgive, yes, but don’t give someone the ability to sin against you again. Better to enter the Kingdom of Heaven without a hand, remember? That line is in there, too.”
And it meant something different than what she was claiming but whatever. I chuckled and stared into the eggs for a second, but no call–whether of the void or of a deep sadness–could outweigh the allure of food so delicious. I immediately started eating again.
While chewing, I managed to say, “Well, it’s done now. Maybe it’s splitting a hair that my sister and I weren’t that close, but c’est la vie.”
Briefly, I wondered if I was misusing that line. Then again, a lot of people did, and considering that language evolves, maybe that was the proper usage now.
As she prepared to take another bite of her own, Sr. Agatha hummed briefly. “Then she was a sore spot. Same ole. Same ole. It doesn’t matter so much. He shouldn’t have done that.”
I sighed. “And I shouldn’t have taken him back. No one’s entirely innocent here.”
Sr. Agatha extended a hand for my now almost empty plate: a silent way of asking if I wanted seconds. And of course, I wanted seconds. Maybe even thirds.
“I thought I made enough for you to have leftovers,” she said as she filled my plate. “It wouldn’t be as good, but it would hold you over until you got settled in, filled your refrigerator and the like, but it looks like your stomach has other plans.”
A twinkle of mischief flashed in her eye as she returned my plate. The sight sent a shiver up my spine. I knew that look and it didn’t typically bode well for its recipient.
I wasn’t the only one to think so, either. As a member of a religious order, Sr. Agatha had to get her superior’s approval to take a job as a rector of a dormitory belonging to a university run by an entirely different religious order. It was even in a different state from the convent she should have been living in. There were complications and distance to consider. There were plenty of reasons for her superiors to say no, but to hear her tell the story–as she did the first Sunday mass we had in the dorm’s chapel–they were all eager to send her to us, so even before the job offer was finalized, she had their permission to take it.
She was excited about the opportunity, her sisters in the order were excited for her to take this journey, and Stella Maris “didn’t know better,” as Sr. Agatha put it.
There was a collective gulp at that part of the story. What did she mean by that, we wanted to ask, but no one had the nerve to. Fortunately, we weren’t left in the dark for long. After a couple of weeks, she introduced the phrase “plausible deniability” into our vocabulary, answering the unasked questions from before. The phrase was meant as a reminder that we were adults who had to make our own decisions (or mistakes, as they often were) and stand behind the consequences in equal measure, and as long as she could pretend she didn’t know what we were up to and–therefore–could not be punished for it herself, she wouldn’t actively curtail our independence like other rectors of women’s halls did.
And we loved her for it. We loved the promise of freedom that she was offering. Of course, we hadn’t considered what might come with it or what else might be said about the sort of person who introduces that phrase to young women who were supposed to be living a more sheltered life.
When Sr. Agatha first introduced herself, that story, and that phrase, the twinkle had been there. And now that I was seeing it again, old nerves rose to the surface.
“But that young man Chris is very handsome, though,” Sr. Agatha teased as she gave me my newly filled plate.
He was, in his own dorky way. He had this cute smile with a slight gap between his teeth and warm eyes. The fact that they remind me of chocolate gave a youthful dimension to his charm. And those were things I wanted to say. The fact that I was talking to a woman I trusted made this the perfect opportunity for me to just fall into the warm and bubbly, kindling first phase of love that I had never truly known before. It was the sort of thing I had only seen on television and in the movies. I wasn’t even sure if it was real or just some sort of writing device to move the plot of rom coms along. Either way, it was something I genuinely wanted for myself, and yet, I was reluctant to take it. I couldn’t take it. And at the thought, I could no longer eat. My face was twisting up too tightly for a single bite.
I was hardly discreet in my distress. But even if I had been, Sr. Agatha likely would have noticed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Hmm? Did he say something bad to you?”
“No,” I quickly replied in his defense, lest her accusations escalate.
But I left it at that for a while. It took me a few moments to gather my thoughts. Or rather, I was trying to pull them away from the main block in my mind. Because really, the idea of pursuing Chris wasn’t inherently wrong. The timing still felt off, though. I was skipping a step, one might say. There was someone else I had to think about before I could indulge too much in the fantasy of him.
And yet, it didn’t come easily to me. Lynette might have lingered in the back of my mind, but she was reluctant to take center stage. She didn’t know how to. Or I didn’t know what lighting or entrance cue she needed. All I really had was her name and the knowledge that she existed. It wasn’t much, but I still wanted to use it.
Besides, I thought as Sr. Agatha turned to her plate to give me some semblance of privacy, she had asked what was wrong. It wasn’t my fault that the question was vague and there were a lot of potential answers.
And so, the resolve to speak set in. “I have... Yet another sister for any potential partners to cheat on me with.”
My timing could have been better, however. She had just taken a rather large bite of a plantain when the words left my mouth. She ended up choking. On what, I wasn’t exactly sure. The bite had already been ambitious. The extra weight of my words ensured it would jam in her throat.
With a cough, she choked out, “What?”
“Yeah, this–this has not been my year.,” I mumbled into my eggs.
That was an understatement, of course, and for Sr. Agatha to fully understand it, I had to recount the story of the private investigator in the cemetery and the ensuing phone call from my agent. For context, I included what else happened that day: like the cheating revelation and the ensuing separation.
Towards the end of it, Sr. Agatha asked, “So she called you?”
That was the worst part: Lynette hadn’t. And sure, you could understand the appeal of taking it slow. There was likely some wisdom in taking one reunion or pseudo-reunion at a time. She had already met our deceased grandparents and maybe even the Hynes family down at the diner if they swung that way. I just had to wait my turn. But still, I didn’t do well when I was left waiting for something. The silence and the anticipation ate me away, and those bites–done with their serrated teeth–were painful.
With that confession out of my system, there was room for another mouthful of breakfast. I eagerly took it and ignored the sudden bitterness that cut through the flavor profile I had previously been enjoying. There was no need to pay it any heed. After all, it was all in my head.
But once that bite was gone, I fell back into that aimless state where words just wandered out of my mouth and said, “I don’t know what to say to her when she does call me. Like, she’s going to ask about Dad, right? And... Well, having four daughters from four different women is telling, but it’s not a great picture. Also, he was sick most of my life. Then he passed away. So, there’s definitely a limit to what I can tell her about him.”
That was all I could say, in fact. Rationally, I knew there was more to him than that, but my mind drew a blank. Vague memories flashed in my mind, but they weren’t the sort of things I could put words to. I didn’t even know what I was looking at.
As if she could see my struggle, Sr. Agatha tried to console me. She took a step towards me and gently rested her hand on my arm. Part of me thought to pull back, to recoil at her touch, but the rest of me didn’t want to be rude. I kept still and took what small shreds of comfort she was offering.
She gently said to me, “You know, it’s easy to fall into the negative side of things. And maybe sometimes it is necessary. But there was good to him.”
“It’s not in his medical history,” I joked.
Sr. Agatha didn’t enjoy my joke. Or maybe she knew I was trying to change the subject. Regardless, she pushed on. “He raised you, didn’t he?”
“Part of the way,” I mumbled.
Before she could respond, I put one more plantain in my mouth. We didn’t need to talk about that part. It just wasn’t worth the misery.
For good measure, I charged on before she could say anything. “Look, I know... Well, I don’t know what I know. But regardless of what happened between her mom and our dad, she has a right to know who he was. And in theory, I know who he was. But I don’t know how to tell that story.”
She paused for a moment before asking, “What do you mean?”
Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what I meant. I was parsing it out on the fly. “Dad kept to himself. He wasn’t one to talk about the past. Not to me and not to my mom. The thing about my sisters was that once they existed, they couldn’t be ignored. But as for everything else... Large chunks of his life are completely blank. If she asks me about them, I’m going to be pretty useless.”
Sr. Agatha’s eyes were kind as she carefully considered what I was saying and how. The whole picture told a better story than the words I was struggling to string together. And what a sight I must have been: eyes blank and wearing an oversized maroon podcast t-shirt and torn-up sweatpants, potentially with literal egg on my face and hunched over from the sheer weight of my general existence. I was a mess. I had always been. At least now, there was a reason.
“I don’t want to be useless,” I added.
“No one wants to be useless,” she affirmed.
Her words weren’t as helpful as we both hoped they would be, but they gave me enough strength to lift my head. When I did so, our eyes locked despite how hard eye contact usually was for me.
“But I don’t have anything to tell her. And I want us to build some sort of relationship.”
Sr. Agatha agreed. “Of course because she’s your sister.”
The agreement only spurred me on more, but all I had left in me was another question. So I asked her, “Then are we really going to start a relationship on a failure?”
It was something I had wanted to ask for a while, but there had never been a chance. The moment had never felt right. And it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing I could have ever considered on my own, in the minefield from which all of my thoughts sprung. But it was coming out now, though, for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I just trusted Sr. Agatha, if I had to guess. She was one of the few people who could make me feel safe enough to lower the drawbridge that normally kept those sorts of thoughts in.
And Sr. Agatha was not one to disappoint. In a soft and gentle voice, she said, “It wouldn’t be the first time one has. God has the ability to create true beauty from our mistakes and failings. Who is to say that couldn’t happen here?”
Was that what I really needed to hear right then? No, it decidedly was not. God and I didn’t have a good relationship. Something about Him taking my dad when I was still growing up, you know? But as a nun, there’s something inevitable about her bringing up God. And hey, I took a bunch of theology classes in college and hung out with other devout Catholics, so I knew damn well that there were worse ways she could have put it, ways that were more self-gratifying than actually helpful. Sr. Agatha at least meant well. She meant that the outcome wasn’t fully on my shoulders, success was possible even if I couldn’t manufacture it, and failure wouldn’t entirely be my fault, either.
And it helped, of course, that she coupled that sentiment with an idea. “You know, though,” she began, “it’s not like you aren’t in a fellowship that would give you... certain resources like money and connections that might make an investigation possible. As long as you produced some sort of work to show for it. Not a memoir, per say, because this was supposed to be a fellowship for a fiction writer, but who can really tell the difference between a memoir and a novel without some sort of label to guide them? If you were to take the truth and say that it’s fiction... Many writers do, I suspect. Writers take things that happen to them and change some names and details around to make it fiction, and no one minds it. No one ever complains. And no one is the wiser, you know?”
I did know. I knew immediately what she was talking about.
But just for good measure, she added, with that twinkle of mischief renewed in her eyes, “But I’d never recommend something like that. Using university resources for a personal quest. That’s just... Well, I won’t even entertain the thought. Plausible deniability and all that.”
Plausibility deniability indeed.