Then she wipes a tear away and turns back to the set, her arm still around me.
That night when I’m putting Oren to bed (another privilege Mattie has sweet-talked the nuns into giving me), he says to me, “I was wrong about this being a bad place. The bad things that happened here were a long time ago. Everyone here now is really nice. Mattie’s friend Wayne said he’s going to bring his telescope one night. They’re both coming tomorrow to take us to the Cookie Walk. We’re going to carry lanterns and walk through the village and eat as many cookies as we want. You’ll come, won’t you?”
I tell him I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I don’t ask him about the bad things that happened here a long time ago or how he knows about them. Instead I go the next day at four o’clock—the best time to catch her, Mattie has told me—to Sister Martine to ask her instead.
“I guess you could say that bad things did happen here,” she tells me. We’re in her office having tea and “biscuits,” which turn out to be cookies. “St. Alban’s ran a home for ‘wayward girls,’ as they were called then, from the 1890s through the 1970s. I came here in the 1960s and the first thing I did was read all the files. It was hair-raising, let me tell you; the maternal and infant mortality rate was five times the contemporary national average. It was clear no one cared very much about those girls and their babies. ‘It is perhaps a blessing,’ one of my predecessors had written, ‘that the poor doves go so quickly to their maker, considering what lives lie ahead of them.’”
“Wow,” I say, “that’s cold.”
“As the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno,” Sister Martine responds. “I tried to improve conditions. I enlisted local doctors and health care advocates, wrote many an angry letter to the bishop. But perhaps what helped the most was just changing attitudes toward out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Once it was no longer considered a shameful secret, something to be hidden away, many girls could stay in their own homes rather than come to a place like this. And then, of course, there was Roe v. Wade and girls had other options.”
Sister Martine must see the shock on my face—a nun remarking favorably on abortion?—because she smiles. “I’m not saying it’s the best option, but it certainly did decrease our numbers. So much so that the diocese threatened to shut us down. I pointed out, though, that there were many other ways to help women and children. And of course there were still girls—and women—who needed a safe place to come and have their babies.”
“Mattie,” I say. “She had Caleb here.”
Sister Martine places her hands together in a prayer position and then interlaces her fingers as if she is holding something inside them. “I can’t discuss any of my girls.”
“I understand,” I say, “only, I wondered . . .”
“Yes?” she prods when I hesitate. She opens her hands, palms up, and I have the feeling that I could spill whatever secret I wanted into those hands and it would be protected forever, the weight of it taken off my shoulders.
“I understand you can’t give out anyone else’s record, but what about a person’s own record? The thing is . . . I think I was born here. My adoptive parents lived up here in Ellenville, so I wondered if I have a file and . . . would I be able to see it.”
Sister Martine leans toward me, elbows on her desk, face grave. “Well,” she says, “as you may know, New York is a closed-records state, which is one of the reasons that if you were indeed born here I would not have been able to keep track of you.”
I nod. “When my adoptive parents died I ended up in the foster system. I always thought—”
“That if your birth mother had known she would have come to rescue you?”
“Yes,” I say, embarrassed that she’s guessed my secret fantasy. I look up and see from the look of compassion on her face that she’s guessed my other one. “It’s not Mattie, is it? I’d hoped . . . when I learned she’d had a baby . . .” I stop, unable to go on, all the longing to belong to someone rising up, cutting off the air in my lungs.
“That you were her baby?” Sister Martine says so gently it sounds like a prayer.
I nod, unable to speak.
Sister Martine gets up, comes around the desk, and perches on the edge of it. She takes my hand. “Do you think Mattie Lane could love you and that boy any more than she already does if you were?”
I shake my head, letting loose a couple of tears. “No, but . . .”
“But nothing.” Sister Martine clucks her tongue. “If you want to find your birth parents, I will help you. Mattie will help you. She and I found her own daughter a few years back. She’s happily settled in Buffalo with a family of her own. She’s never looked for her birth mother. She doesn’t need me, Mattie said when I asked if she wanted to make contact. But you do. And if you ask me, you’re the daughter Mattie needs. Just as Oren needs you to be his mother.”
I nod and dry my eyes. Sister Martine gives me a tissue and a glass of water. Then she reminds me that our friends are gathering on the hill to go into town for the Cookie Walk. I get up to go and find myself embraced in Sister Martine’s strong, bony grip. “Go on,” she says. “I’ll be right behind you.”
It occurs to me that Sister Martine needs a few minutes alone to collect herself. What must it feel like to watch a baby she handed over to the world sit in front of her all grown up? Does she wonder what she could have done differently to make my life easier? Will Mattie?
When I get outside I see it’s almost dark, the sky a lovely clear violet, like Mattie’s eyes. I see her standing on the hill with Oren and Wayne and Doreen. They’re all holding lanterns; as I watch, Mattie starts lighting them. Atefeh, the woman from Stewart’s, is there too, with her two kids. When all the lanterns are lit they make a pattern, like a constellation, against the sky. But it feels incomplete.
A few nights ago, when I was putting Oren to bed, he told me something he had read about in a book that Wayne gave him. He said that hundreds of years ago an astronomer had thought there might be stars we couldn’t see. He’d been watching the way stars moved and thought there was an unseen force pulling them into one orbit or another. The astronomer called that force dark stars.
Watching the group, I picture the people who have made them the way they are: Mattie’s parents, Frank, Davis, Wayne’s dumbass brother-in-law, Doreen’s son, Atefeh’s brother and husband. I picture the people who have shaped my life: my birth parents, my adoptive parents, Travis and Lisa, Davis, Mattie, Sister Martine. All the dark stars have brought us to this particular moment and this particular pattern. We may not see them, but they’re always here with us, pulling us out of orbit and bringing us back in.
Oren and Mattie lift their heads at the same moment and, seeing me, grin and wave as if pulled by the same force. I feel its tug too, and move forward to join them.
Acknowledgments
I thought a lot about family and community during the writing of this book. I’m grateful for the community of support I’ve found at William Morrow, starting with the amazing Katherine Nintzel, the best editor I could have wished for, and Vedika Khanna, Camille Collins, Molly Waxman, Shailyn Tavella, Rachel Meyers, and everyone else who has made William Morrow such a welcoming home. I wouldn’t have found that home without the faith and hard work of my agent, Robin Rue, and her assistant, Beth Miller. Writers House has been a true sanctuary.