The Passage (19 page)

“I’m sorry—” she began. “I don’t—”

“Look at her!”

The crowds had backed away from the tank, all eyes locked on the little girl with the backpack who was kneeling before it, her hands on the glass, and the four bear faces crowded against it.

Lacey climbed to her feet and moved quickly. The little girl’s head was bowed, water still raining from her drenched hair onto her knees. Lacey saw that her lips were moving, as if in prayer.

“Amy, what is it?”

“That girl’s talking to the bears!” a voice cried, and a buzz of wonder went up from the crowd. “Look at that!”

Cameras began to click. Lacey crouched beside Amy. With her fingers she pulled the dark strands of the girl’s hair away from her face. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, mixed in with all the water from the tank.

“Tell me, child.”

“They know,” Amy said, her hands still pressed to the glass.

“What do the bears know?”

The girl raised her face. Lacey was stunned; never had she seen such sadness in a child’s expression, such knowing grief. And yet, as she searched Amy’s eyes, she saw no fear. Whatever Amy had learned, she had accepted it.

“What I am,” she said.

·   ·   ·

Sister Arnette, sitting in the kitchen of the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, had decided to do something.

It was 9:00, it was 9:30, it was 10:00; Lacey and the girl, Amy, had not returned from wherever they had gone. Eventually Sister Claire had surrendered the story: that Lacey had skipped Mass, and that the two of them had left shortly thereafter, the girl with her backpack; Claire had heard them leave and then watched from the window as they made their way through the back gate, to the park.

Lacey was up to something. Arnette should have known.

The story about the girl didn’t wash, she’d known that right away; or, if not known exactly, then certainly she had felt it, a kernel of suspicion that had grown overnight into the certainty that something was not right. Like Miss Clavel, in the Madeline books, Sister Arnette
knew
.

And now, just like in the story: one of the little girls was gone.

None of the other sisters knew the truth about Lacey. Even Arnette hadn’t learned the full story until the office of the superior general had forwarded the psychiatric report. Arnette remembered hearing something about it on the news, all those years ago, but wasn’t something like that always happening somewhere, especially in Africa? Those awful little countries where life seemed to mean nothing, where His will was the strangest and most unknowable of all? It was heartbreaking, horrifying, but the mind could take in only so much, so many stories of this kind, and Arnette had forgotten all about it; and now here was Lacey, under her care, no one else knowing the truth; Lacey, who, she had to admit, was in nearly every way a model sister, if a little self-contained, perhaps a little too mystical in her devotions. Lacey said, and no doubt believed, too, that her father and mother and sisters were still in Sierra Leone, going to palace balls and riding their polo ponies; since the day she’d been found hiding in a field by the U.N. peacekeepers who had turned her over to the sisters, Lacey had never said otherwise. It was a mercy, of course; it was God’s own mercy, protecting Lacey from the memory of what had happened. Because after the soldiers had killed her family, they hadn’t simply gone away; they’d stayed with Lacey in the field, for hours and hours, and the little girl they’d left for dead might just as well have
been
dead, if God hadn’t protected her by washing her mind of these events. That He had chosen not to take her at that instant was simply an expression of His will, and nothing for Arnette to question. It was a burden, this knowledge, and the worry that came with it, for Arnette to bear in silence.

But now there was the girl. This Amy. Polite to a fault, quiet as a ghost, but wasn’t there something rather obviously wrong with the whole situation? Something completely unbelievable? Now that she thought about it, Lacey’s explanation made less than no sense. She was friends with her mother? Impossible. Except for daily Mass, Lacey barely set foot outside the house; how she would have come into contact with such a woman, let alone a woman who would trust her with her daughter, Arnette could not explain. Because there was no explanation; the story was a lie. And now the two of them were gone.

Sitting in the kitchen at 10:30, Sister Arnette knew what she had to do.

But what would she say? Where would she start? With Amy? None of the other sisters seemed to know anything. The girl had arrived when Lacey was alone in the house, as she often was; Arnette had tried many times to coax her out, for their days at the Pantry and also on small trips, to the store and what-have-you, but always Lacey declined, her face at such instances radiating a kind of cheerful blankness that put the question instantly to rest.
No thank you, Sister. Perhaps another day
. Three, four years of this, and now the girl had appeared out of nowhere, Lacey claiming to know her. So if she called the police, the story would have to start there, she understood, with Lacey, and the story of the field.

Arnette picked up the phone.

“Sister?”

She turned: Sister Claire. Claire, who had just come into the kitchen, still in her sweat suit, when she should have changed for the day by now; Claire, who had sold real estate, who’d been not only married but also
divorced;
who still kept a pair of high-heeled shoes and a black cocktail dress hanging in her closet. But that was an altogether different problem, not the one she was thinking about now.

“Sister,” Claire said, her voice concerned, “there’s a car in the driveway.”

Arnette hung up the phone. “Who is it?”

Claire hesitated. “They look … like police.”

Arnette reached the front door just as the bell was ringing. She drew back the curtain of the side window to look. Two men, one maybe in his twenties, the other older but still somebody she thought of as a young man, the pair of them looking like funeral directors in dark suits and ties. Police, but not exactly. Something serious, official. They were standing in the sunshine at the bottom of the steps, away from the door. The older one saw her and smiled in a friendly way but didn’t say anything. He was nice-looking but unremarkable, with a trim physique and a pleasant, well-shaped face. A bit of gray fanned away at the temples, which shimmered faintly with perspiration in the sun.

“Should we open it?” Claire asked, standing behind her. Sister Louise had heard the bell and come downstairs as well.

Arnette took a deep breath to calm herself. “Of course, Sisters.”

She opened the door but left the screen closed and latched. The two men stepped forward.

“May I help you gentlemen?”

The older one reached into his breast pocket and produced a small billfold. He opened it and in a flash she saw the initials: FBI.

“Ma’am, I’m Special Agent Wolgast. This is Special Agent Doyle.” Just like that, the billfold was gone, returned to the insides of his suit coat. She saw a scrape on his chin; he had cut himself shaving. “Sorry to disturb you like this on a Saturday morning—”

“It’s about Amy,” Arnette said. She couldn’t explain it: she’d just blurted it out, like he’d somehow made her do this. When he didn’t reply, she continued, “It is, isn’t it? It’s about Amy.”

The older agent—his name had already slipped her mind—glanced past Arnette at Sister Louise, sending her a quick, reassuring smile before returning his eyes to Arnette.

“Yes, ma’am. That’s correct. It’s about Amy. Would it be all right if we came in? To ask you and the other ladies a couple of questions?”

Which was how they came to be standing in the living room of the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy: two large men in dark suits, smelling of masculine sweat. Their hulking presence seemed to change the room, make it smaller. Except for the occasional repairman or a visit from Father Fagan from the rectory, no other men ever came into the house.

“I’m sorry, Officers,” Arnette said, “could you tell me your names again?”

“Of course.” That smile again: confident, ingratiating. So far, the young one hadn’t said a single word. “I’m Agent Wolgast, this is Agent Doyle.” He glanced around. “So, is Amy here?”

Sister Claire cut in. “Why do you want her?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you ladies everything. But you should know, for your own safety, that Amy is a federal witness. We’re here to place her under protection.”

Federal protection!
Arnette’s chest tightened with panic. It was worse than she had thought. Federal protection! Like something on TV, on those police shows she didn’t want to watch but sometimes did, because the other sisters wanted to.

“What did Lacey do?”

The agent’s eyebrows lifted with interest. “Lacey?”

He was trying to pretend that he knew, to open a space for her to talk so he could draw information out of her; Arnette could see this clearly. But of course that’s just what she’d done; she’d given them Lacey’s name. No one had said anything about Lacey except Arnette. Behind her, she could feel the other sisters’ silence pressing upon her.

“Sister Lacey,” she explained. “She told us Amy’s mother was a friend.”

“I see.” He glanced at the other agent. “Well, perhaps we’d better talk to her as well.”

“Are we in any danger?” Sister Louise said.

Sister Arnette turned to her with a silencing scowl. “Sister, I know you mean well. But let me handle this, please.”

“I wouldn’t say danger, not exactly,” the agent explained. “But I think it would be best if we could speak to her. Is she in the house now?”

“No.” This was Sister Claire. She was standing defiantly, her arms crossed over her chest. “They left. At least an hour ago.”

“Do you know where they went?”

For a moment, no one said anything. Then, within the house, the telephone rang.

“Please excuse me, gentlemen,” Arnette said.

She retreated to the kitchen. Her heart was pounding. She was grateful for the interruption, as it could give her a chance to think. But when she answered the phone, the voice on the other end was no one she recognized.

“Is this the convent? I know I’ve seen you ladies over there. You’ll have to pardon my calling like this.”

“Who is this?”

“Sorry.” He was speaking in a rush, his voice distracted. “The name’s Joe Murphy. I’m head of security at the Memphis Zoo.”

There was some kind of commotion in the background. For a moment he spoke to someone else:
Just open the gate
, he said.
Just do it, now
.

Then he was back on the line. “Do you know anything about a nun who might be over here with a little girl? A black lady, dressed like you all do.”

A buzzing weightlessness, like a swarm of bees, filled Sister Arnette. On a perfectly pleasant morning, something had happened, something terrible. The door to the kitchen swung open; the agents stepped into the room, trailed by Sister Claire and Sister Louise. Everyone was staring at her.

“Yes, yes, I know her.” Arnette was trying to keep her voice low but knew this was pointless. “What is it? What’s going on?”

For a moment the line was muffled; the man at the zoo had placed his hand over the receiver. When he lifted his hand she heard yelling, and crying children, and behind it, something else: the sound of animals. Monkeys and lions and elephants and birds, screeching and roaring. It took Arnette a moment to realize that she wasn’t just hearing these sounds over the phone; they were coming through the open window, too, traveling clear across the park into the kitchen.

“What’s going on?” she pleaded.

“You better get over here, Sister,” the man said. “This is the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Lacey, breathless and running, soaked to the bone: she was carrying Amy now, clutching the little girl to her chest, the girl’s legs clamped tightly around her waist, the two of them lost in the zoo, its maze of pathways. Amy was crying, sobbing into Lacey’s blouse—
what I am, what I am
—and other people were running, too. It had started with the bears, whose movements had grown more and more frantic until Lacey had pulled Amy away from the glass, and then, behind them, the sea lions, who began to hurl themselves in and out of the water with manic fury; and as they turned and dashed back toward the zoo’s center, the grassland animals, the gazelles and zebras and okapis and giraffes, who broke into wild circles, running and charging the fences. It was Amy who was doing it, Lacey knew—something about Amy. Whatever had happened to the polar bears was happening to everything now, not just the animals but the people too, a ring of chaos widening over the entire zoo. They passed by the elephants and at once she felt their size and force; they stomped the ground with their immense feet and lifted their trunks to trumpet into the Memphis heat. A rhino charged the fence, a huge noise like a car crashing, and began, furiously, to bang it with his massive horn. The air was suddenly swollen with these sounds, great and terrible and full of pain, and people were tearing about and calling out to their children, pushing and shoving and pulling, the crowds parting for Lacey as she raced ahead.

“That’s her!” a voice rang out, and the words struck Lacey from behind—hit her like an arrow. Lacey spun to see the man with the camera, pointing a long finger right at her. He was standing beside a security guard in a pastel yellow jersey. “That’s the kid!”

Still clutching Amy, Lacey turned and ran, past cages of shrieking monkeys, a lagoon where swans were honking and flapping their huge, useless wings, tall cages erupting with the cries of jungle birds. Terrified crowds were pouring out of the reptile house. A group of panicked schoolchildren in matching red T-shirts stepped into Lacey’s path and she twisted around them, nearly falling but somehow staying upright. The ground before her was littered with the debris of flight, brochures and small articles of clothing and blobs of melting ice cream stuck to paper. A group of men tore past, breathing hard; one was carrying a rifle. From somewhere, a voice was saying, with robotic calm, “The zoo is now closed. Please move quickly to the nearest exit. The zoo is now closed … ”