CHAPTER 1
THE VEIL
POV: MAE
The bell for Lauds rings at ten past five, and I wake up knowing someone was in my room.
I don’t move.
I lie on my side with my hand under my cheek and my eyes shut and I listen. The pipe behind the wall knocks twice. Sister Bernadette coughs. Down on Adams Street, a plow scrapes past with its orange light turning.
Nothing else.
But the air is wrong.
My cell smells like starch and radiator dust and the vanilla lotion I buy at CVS when it’s on sale. It has smelled like that every morning for two years.
This morning, under all of it, there’s something else.
Cedar. Candle wax, but not the cheap paraffin we burn at vespers. Something older and richer, like a church in Rome. And leather. Wet leather, like a coat that walked in out of the snow.
My heart starts to pound.
I should be afraid. Any normal woman would be afraid. I’m alone on the third floor of a convent with a window that faces the street and a stranger’s smell in my sheets.
I’m not afraid.
That’s the part I’ll have to confess.
What I feel is the thing I’ve felt every night since October, when I first noticed the black car at the curb. Heat at the back of my neck. A pull low in my stomach. The strange, shameful relief of being seen.
I open my eyes.
My phone is on the windowsill, plugged into the one outlet that works. I reach for it first, because I always do. Some stupid part of me thinks the number will change overnight.
It doesn’t.
Checking: $38.40.
One new voicemail. Dad. 11:52 p.m.
I delete it without listening. I learned that trick my first month here. If I don’t hear his voice, I can’t hear what he wants. If I can’t hear what he wants, I don’t have to say no.
I put the phone down.
That’s when I see the box.
It’s on my pillow. Right where my face was. So close that if I’d turned my head in the night, my lips would have touched it.
Black. Square. Tied with a ribbon the color of old wine.
I sit up so fast the bedsprings shriek.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. Then, out of habit: “Sorry.”
Sorry to God. Sorry to the box. Sorry to whoever stood in the dark close enough to put it there.
My hands shake when I pull the ribbon.
Inside, folded on black tissue, is a veil.
Not a postulant’s veil. Not the plain white cotton I pin on every morning. This is lace. Black, fine as smoke, long enough to fall past my shoulders. The kind old Italian women wear to funerals. The kind a bride would wear to marry the devil.
Under it, in a velvet slot, is a ring.
Gold. Thin. Shaped like a single decade of a rosary, ten tiny beads curving around, and where the cross should hang, a letter.
R.
Under that, a card. Heavy cream stock. Black ink, pressed so hard the letters dent the paper.
Pray for me.
I read it four times.
Then I get out of bed and go to the door, because the door is the only thing I can think of.
The old bolt is gone.
For two years my door has had a sliding bolt that sticks in wet weather. Sister Bernadette oiled it once and made it worse. Last night it jammed halfway, the way it always does, and I left it.
Now there’s brass in its place. Heavy. New. A thumb-turn on my side.
I open the door a crack and look at the hall side. Nothing. No keyhole. No handle. Just smooth painted wood.
It only opens if I open it.
Someone came into my room while I slept. Left me a veil and a ring. Changed my lock so that no one can ever walk through that door again unless I let them.
He didn’t lock me in.
He left the next step to me.
I close the door. I turn the brass. It slides home with a sound like a promise.
I lean my forehead against the wood. I don’t cry. I don’t scream. I don’t go down the hall to wake Mother Clare.
I think: Did he read it?
The breviary is on the chair, spine up, one corner hanging over the edge. Exactly how I left it.
Exactly how someone careful would leave it.
I cross the cell and open it between Compline and the Psalms.
My line is there. If it’s you, come closer.
Under it, in pencil, pressed so hard the lead has torn the paper, in a hand that isn’t mine:
Soon.
My face goes hot all the way to my collarbone.
He came closer.
He’s coming closer still.
***
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Sister Bernadette says.
We’re in the basement laundry, feeding sheets through the mangle. It’s the warmest room in the building and the loudest. Bernadette is seventy-three and built like a mailbox, and she has run the laundry at St. Agnes since before I was born.
“I didn’t sleep well.”
“Mm.” She folds a pillowcase into a perfect square. “The Monsignor kept you late after vespers.”
My hands stop on the sheet.
“He wanted to talk about my father.”
“Mm,” she says again. She doesn’t look at me. “That man talks to a lot of young women about their fathers.”
The mangle hisses. Steam rolls up between us.
“What does that mean, Sister?”
“It means,” Bernadette says, snapping a sheet straight, “that when a man in a collar asks you to come see him alone, you bring a friend. And if you don’t have a friend, you bring me. I’m old, I don’t sleep, and I bite.”
I laugh. It comes out wrong.
Under my collar, on the chain of the little silver crucifix my mother gave me, the gold ring swings against my breastbone. I put it there before Lauds. I told myself I was hiding it.
I wasn’t. I wanted it on my skin.
Tuesday nights. My office.
I think of Monsignor Albright’s knuckle on my jaw. The damp, soft weight of it. The way he said forgiven like something he could sell me.
Then I think of a hand I’ve never seen, taking off a glove in the dark to set a box beside my face. Changing my lock. Leaving without touching anything but my hair.
I don’t know how I know he touched my hair.
I just know.
***
At vespers, the chapel is gold and cold.
I kneel in my pew, third from the front, left side. I open my mouth for the Magnificat, and the weight settles on the back of my neck like a palm.
I know that weight. On the walk to the soup kitchen. In the pharmacy line. At my window at night, with the blind up.
Tonight it’s heavier.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat.
I look up.
The choir loft is dark. Empty. Nothing moves behind the rail.
But the rail is new. I never noticed. The wood up there used to be black with age, and now it’s pale and smooth.
When did that happen?
And hath exalted the humble and meek.
I lower my eyes. My pulse beats in the ring under my collar.
I sing the rest of the canticle without hearing a single word.
***
At ten o’clock, the convent goes dark.
I don’t.
I stand in my cell with the lamp off and the streetlight pouring in. I take out my hairpins one by one and set them on the sill. I unbutton the collar of my nightgown. Two buttons. Three.
The blind is up.
It’s always up. That’s the sin I confess every Saturday. Vanity, Father. It isn’t vanity. I just can’t make myself pull it down.
Tonight I don’t even pretend.
I take the black veil out of its box.
The lace is cool and weightless. I lift it over my head and let it fall. It settles on my hair, on my shoulders, and the streetlight turns it into a net of shadows on my skin.
In the dark glass, a woman looks back at me. Black veil. Open collar. Gold ring hanging between her breasts.
She doesn’t look like a postulant.
She looks like she’s waiting for someone.
I slide the ring off its chain and put it on my finger.
It fits.
Of course it fits.
Down on Adams Street, parked against the ridge the plow left, is the black car.
Engine off. Lights off.
I put my palm flat against the freezing glass.
The headlights flash once.
White. Then dark.
My knees go weak.
“Oh God,” I whisper. I don’t know if it’s a prayer.
I back up until my legs hit the bed and sit down hard, veil and all, facing the window. I should turn around. I should lie down and pull the blanket up and say an Act of Contrition and go to sleep.
Instead I pull my nightgown up over my knees.
My skin is all gooseflesh. My thighs tremble. I watch my own hand in the dark glass as it slides up the inside of my leg, and I think about his hand. The one I’ve never seen, taking off that glove.
I’m already wet. I’ve been wet since Lauds.
I touch myself the way I learned at nineteen, in the dark, ashamed. Slow circles over my clit through the cotton, then under it, my fingers slick, my breath fogging the air. The ring is cold. Every time the gold slides over me, I feel it like a second hand.
R.
I don’t know his name. I don’t know his face.
I know he stood where I’m sitting and watched me sleep.
I know he read come closer.
I know he’s watching now.
The thought closes around my throat like a hand, and my hips lift off the mattress. I push two fingers inside myself and grind the heel of my palm against my clit and stare at the black car through the black lace, and I let him see.
See me. See this. See what you did.
It builds hot and fast and mean, nothing like the guilty little ripples I’ve given myself before.
My thighs shake. My toes curl against the cold floor.
I bite the edge of the veil to keep quiet and it doesn’t work.
A sound comes out of me I’ve never made in my life, low and broken, and I come so hard my vision whites out at the edges.
I stay there with my hand between my legs, gasping, forehead nearly touching my knees.
Down on the street, the headlights flash again.
Twice this time.
I laugh. It comes out wet and shaky, and I press my clean hand over my mouth.
Then I do the worst thing I’ve ever done.
I take my other hand from between my thighs. I lift it slowly, so he can see. And I press my palm flat to the window, right over the spot where my breath has fogged the glass.
The car doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
After a long time, I lie down on my side facing the street, the way I always do. I pull the blanket to my chin. I don’t pull the blind. The brass is turned. Nobody comes through that door tonight unless I open it.
I lie there and wonder how long before I do.
I should take the veil off.
I don’t.
I sleep in his veil.