The Virgin Read online

  “Yes. I have to leave the country. Don’t tell him I’m going. I’m not going to tell you where I’m going so you don’t have to lie when he asks you. The truth is, I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know when I’m coming back. But you can handle things while I’m gone. Yes?”

  “I can, yes,” she said again. This time he heard a tight note of fear in her voice. But she was smart, savvy. She was also barely eighteen years old, but he wouldn’t have hired her if he didn’t trust her judgment.

  “I’m going now. I’ll call when I can. It won’t be for a week or two. But everything’s fine. You believe that?”

  Calliope answered, “No.”

  He cared about her too much to make her believe the lie.

  “Me neither,” he said. “Be a good girl. I’ll call when I can. Take care of the kids for me.”

  “I’ll walk them every day,” she said. “And pet them all the time.”

  “Merci.”

  “Come home soon.”

  Kingsley hung up and tucked his phone away again.

  Once more he fished his keys out of his pocket. He turned back to the lockers. Underneath the one set up for Elle was another locker. He opened it, pulled out a leather duffel and checked it for a passport and money.

  For you, Elle, he said to himself as he walked through the bus station and out onto Forty-Second Street. I’m doing this for you. Or was he?

  He hailed a cab and ordered the driver to take him to the airport.

  Well, it was about time he fulfilled a long-held dream of his. After all, his dream of being a father was dead. But he had other dreams, dreams about seeing parts of the world he hadn’t seen yet. If he didn’t go now, would he ever?

  “Which airline?” the Caribbean-accented cab driver asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” the driver repeated.

  Kingsley leaned forward. “If you had all the money in the world and could use it to go anywhere you wanted, where would you go?”

  “All the money, sir?” the driver asked. “I’d go everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?”

  “Everywhere,” the driver repeated. “And then I’d go home.”

  “Where’s home?” Kingsley asked him. The accent was like music in his ears—French but not French, warm as white sand under the sun.

  “Haiti, sir,” the driver said.

  Haiti. Well, Kingsley had always wanted to go to Haiti. A tropical island, a long history with France. Maybe he would go there. Or maybe he’d do what his driver suggested. Maybe he’d go everywhere. He’d leave today and travel the world. Elle would have one less person to run from, one less man to fear.

  And if Søren wanted to get his Little One back badly enough...

  The bastard could do it himself.

  6

  Upstate New York

  IN THE LAST minutes before midnight, Elle arrived at the Abbey of the Sisters of Saint Monica. It stood before her, a two-hundred-year-old stone edifice rising up three stories from the deep green earth. Spotlights shone on it, illuminating the high gray walls and the cobblestone path that led from the winding driveway to its hulking wooden front door. She knew more about this abbey than any laywoman should. Briefly she’d lived with her mother after graduating college in the hopes of repairing their fractured relationship. Her mother had let her move in for reasons unknown. Perhaps she’d harbored the same hopes. Reconciliation was a sacrament to Catholics, after all.

  It was on the first day back under her mother’s roof that Elle found a white folder embossed with the initials SSM on the front. S and M Elle understood. But no, this was SSM—The Sisters of St. Monica. That place had been a foreign country to her. Soon she discovered her mother was in complete earnest about fulfilling her teenage dream to become a nun, a dream derailed when a one-night fling with a handsome older boy ended in a pregnancy, a shotgun wedding and a quickie divorce soon thereafter.

  Now William “Billy” Schreiber was dead and buried and no one mourned him. Elle was an adult. And now Margaret Kohl was Sister Mary John of The Sisters of Saint Monica, a small order that consisted of five abbeys around the world, less than five hundred women in total. Their charism, according to the literature Elle had read, was to serve Christ like true brides—with love and devotion, and to pray for His church unceasingly until it found salvation, as Saint. Monica, mother of Saint Augustine, had prayed unceasingly for her son’s salvation.

  The nighttime air was still warm with the day’s heat, but Elle had put on the black jacket she’d found in the duffel bag. She had no idea what to wear that would be appropriate for a convent, but she guessed the less skin she showed, the better. Under the jacket she wore a plain white T-shirt and dark jeans. At least in her black-and-white clothes she’d match the sisters in their black-and-white habits.

  She left the car parked at a gas station a mile away and had walked the rest of the way here. The car would sit and sit and sit until the owner called the police and reported it. The police would run the tags and call Daniel, who would likely say he’d lent it to a friend who forgot where he’d parked it. The police would be dubious, but would say no problem, hang up and Daniel would retrieve his car.

  For that moment when owner and car were reunited, Elle had left a little note in the glove compartment for him.

  Dear Daniel,

  I lied. I didn’t leave Søren because he asked me to marry him. I left because of what he did after I said no. If you’d been there, you would never have ratted me out to King. I hope you never have a daughter someday.

  Love, Elle.

  P.S. Fuck you.

  P.P.S. Nice car. I dented the fender on purpose. And the driver’s side door. And the passenger side.

  P.P.P.S. And the hood.

  * * *

  At midnight she crossed the threshold and entered the convent. Silence reigned inside the heavy stone structure. She could hear her own breathing, her own heart beating. She breathed like a wounded runner who’d had to crawl to the finish line. But she wasn’t done crawling yet. Not until she was behind the inner door. Only behind that door would she be safe. Only behind that door could she rest.

  Like every monastery, the convent employed a doorkeeper. Søren had told her about the original doorkeeper for the Jesuit order, Brother Alphonsus Rodríguez, who joined the Jesuits after the death of his wife and his three children. According to Søren, Brother Alphonsus treated every person who knocked on the door of the Jesuit school where he was stationed as if it were God Himself at the door. He worked as nothing more than a porter, a glorified doorman for forty years. In 1888, the world’s most devoted doorman became a saint.

  Elle didn’t feel like God as she walked to the porter’s window. She didn’t feel like the Devil, either. She felt tired and scared, and she wanted more than anything to wake up in her own bed at Kingsley’s to find the past week had been nothing but a dream, nothing but a nightmare. She’d wake up and find Søren next to her in bed, and she’d roll over and stretch out on his chest, press her ear to his heart and listen to it beating. He would stir and wake and stroke her hair and her bruised back until she fell asleep again. When she woke up for the day he would be long gone with only the stains on the sheets, the welts on her body and the scent of winter on his pillow to prove he’d been there.

  That was the Søren she knew and loved. She had no idea who this new Søren was, the one she’d met two nights ago. But she was relieved to know she’d put several hundred miles between them. And yet, several hundred miles wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough until she was behind that door in front of her, the door with a simple brass plaque that read, No Men Beyond This Point. No men allowed. Not even priests.

  She rang the bell and said a prayer to Saint Monica, praying her earthly daughters would take her in and shelter her.

  A wooden panel at a window that reminded her of an old-fashioned bank teller’s was pushed aside and a woman in large glasses peered out at her.

&
nbsp; “Welcome, child. Can we help you?” she asked, her tone kind and curious.

  “My mother is here. Sister Mary John,” Elle said, her voice wavering against her will. “I need to talk to her.”

  “Is it an emergency, or can it wait until morning? Now is the Great Silence and nearly everyone is sleeping.”

  That question utterly flummoxed her. Emergency? Nothing was burning down at the moment...except her entire life. Did that count as an emergency?

  Yes. Yes it did.

  “Someone’s trying to find me, and this is probably the first place he’ll look.”

  The sister’s eyes widened farther behind her glasses.

  “Is this person dangerous?”

  “Very,” Elle said.

  “I’ll find her for you.”

  “Thank you,” Elle said with profound gratitude.

  She closed the wooden panel at the window but she reappeared in seconds at the door.

  “Come inside here,” the sister said, ushering her in. “It’s against protocol, but if someone’s coming after you, you should wait here.”

  Elle could have kissed the woman for her compassion. The elderly nun trundled off down a long dimly lit hallway leaving Elle by the door. Even after the sister disappeared, Elle could hear the sound of her rosary beads and orthopedic shoes echoing off the stone floors and polished wood walls.

  She leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. When she was a teenager, a closed door between her and Søren had been a challenge, a hurdle and a game. If she sat outside his office door and did her homework, it was only a matter of time before the door opened. He would step out, take a seat by her on the bench and go over her homework with her. She never would have survived precalculus without him. When the work was done and she put her things away, Søren would retreat back into his office, shutting the door behind him, and she would sit there staring at the door and loving him with all her heart and dreaming of the life they would have together when he let her behind all his locked doors.

  But never in any of those girlhood dreams had she ever dreamed of this moment. She never dreamed she’d be grateful for the door behind her and the sign on it barring men from entering. She never dreamed she’d be relieved Søren couldn’t get to her. She’d spent the past ten years of her life trying to get to him. Would she spend the rest of her life trying to get away?

  “Ellie?”

  Elle looked up and saw a woman in white coming toward her. White habit, white veil and a ghostly white face.

  “Mom?”

  “Of course it’s your mother.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t...” She didn’t recognize her own mother. Gone was her mother’s long black hair so like her own. Gone were the khaki skirt she lived in and the navy cardigans and her ubiquitous white Keds. Elle hadn’t come to her mother’s entrance ceremony. She would have if her mother had asked, but by then Elle had moved out and they’d stopped speaking. Elle had forgotten that part, that whole not speaking to each other thing. Hopefully her mother had forgotten it, too.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” her mother demanded.

  “That nun let me in here behind the door.”

  “No, what are you doing here? At the abbey?”

  “Oh...long story.”

  “Long story?” her mother repeated. “Long story? I haven’t seen or heard from you in two years—”

  “You called me a whore, Mom. Did you really think I wanted to keep having that conversation with you?”

  Her mother’s spine stiffened visibly.

  “That was wrong of me. I was worried about you, and I took what I’d learned about you...badly.”

  “Is that an apology?”

  “It is.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Elle said, meaning it. Right now she was sorry for everything.

  “Forgive me?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” her mother said.

  “I’ll forgive you for everything you said to me. And if you remember accurately, calling me a ‘whore’ was just the beginning of that discussion.”

  “I overreacted. I had my reasons for overreacting.”

  “I know you did,” she said, although she’d had no sympathy for her mother at the time. Everything had been okay between them until one night Søren had driven her home on the back of his motorcycle. Her mother was supposed to be out late at a church function but had got ill and come home early. One glance out the window and she’d seen her daughter kissing a Catholic priest. Elle had been so angry after her mother had called her a “priest’s whore” she’d spilled everything. The sex. The kink. And if her mother dared speak a word of it, Elle would never speak to her again as long as she lived.

  The next day Elle had moved out.

  “Mom, I need your help with something.”

  “How can I help you?” she asked, sounding both concerned and suspicious.

  “I need to stay here for a while.”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s not possible. Only sisters are allowed in the abbey. You shouldn’t even be behind this door.”

  “Maybe they can make an exception for me. I can work.”

  “Work? How? We do all our own work here. We cook our own food, clean, farm, everything. We don’t hire outside help.”

  “But I can help. You don’t have to hire me. I’ll work for free.”

  “No, Ellie. I don’t know what you’re into or who you’re in trouble with again—”

  “I’m not running from the cops. I’m twenty-six years old. I’m not running away from home, either. I need a place to stay for a while, a safe place.”

  “So you didn’t steal any cars this time?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, one. But that was more like borrowing. And he’ll get it back.”

  “Elle, I don’t have time for your games. I have work to do. I have a life here and you’re not a part of it. You can’t be. You can come to Mass here at the chapel. We can visit once a week. But this is a sacred place, a sanctuary.”

  “I need sanctuary.”

  “Why? Because you got arrested again?”

  “No, Mom. Because I left him.”

  Silence.

  Total silence.

  A great silence even. A silence so loud it echoed off the floors like footsteps. Finally her mother exhaled and crossed herself. Tears shone in her eyes and she whispered, “Benedicta excels Mater Dei, Maria sanctissima.” Elle didn’t know much Latin, but she knew a prayer of thanks to the Virgin Mary when she heard it.

  Before she knew it, her mother had wrapped her up in her arms and Elle’s neck was wet with tears. Not her tears but her mother’s. Elle closed her eyes and breathed in the faint, clean scent of talcum powder. Some things were still the same about her mother. The clothes, the hair, even her name...that was all different. But at least her mother smelled the same.

  “You can stay, baby,” she whispered. “I’ll make them let you stay.”

  “Thank you.” She wanted to cry too but the tears wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t let them. Tears were not welcome here. Elle couldn’t remember the last time her mother had hugged her, had held her like this. Years. It was almost worth it to leave Søren for this one hug alone.

  “You really did leave him?” her mother asked again.

  “I did,” Elle said.

  “For good?” her mother asked.

  Elle nodded against her mother’s shoulder.

  “Forever.”