The old nun stares at me, her eyes glistening. It’s hard to tell if this is emotion, because her eyes are always a little wet. We are, for a moment, in a silent stare-off. The deeper I look into her big swimming pool eyes, the more I notice a glimmer of something. A pale white that could be a shadow, a ghost, or a cataract.
Slowly, she begins to speak.
“How do you know about Harry?”
There’s no way of answering this truthfully without admitting that I was snooping in Sister Assumpta’s car.
“I’m looking to do a project,” I say quickly. “About the legalization of divorce. I thought she might be a good person to ask?”
“Harry wrote an essay,” she says fondly. “They sent her to America to read it.”
“Yes,” I urge. “I’ve heard. Maybe you could dig out the essay. Or, maybe you could give me her phone number?”
Sister’s face screws up in confusion. She looks like she has just eaten a bad grape.
“No,” she says, then looks at me as if she’s just seen me for the first time. “Harriet’s not with us any more.”
“No, I know that Sister, she graduated a long time ago, but…”
Sister Assumpta shakes her head again.
“She died.”
Silence.
“What?”
“She died,” Sister repeats, her voice cracking. “She died, and that gurrier father of hers, that lout – he didn’t even come to our memorial service. The poor mother shows up with both her eyes black. The little sister, Fionnuala Evans bawling her eyes out. I ask you. I ask you.”
She takes a long inward breath, and closes her eyes.
“Mind, he didn’t last long either. He was dead a fortnight later. Fell in the river drunk, and good riddance.”
I am certain that Sister Assumpta is about to start crying, and I wonder whether I should hug her.
She’s fidgeting, her right hand fumbling in her skirt pocket. She starts pulling at something, her fingers rotating and moving within the material. Her eyes are still closed. She starts to murmur softly.
Oh my God, what is she doing?
I see a brown, beaded string hanging out of her clothes. Rosary beads. Oh, thank God for that.
“Sister?”
But she doesn’t hear me, she just moves her fingers up the beads. She is saying a decade of the rosary. I wonder if this is my cue to leave. But I know that this chance might not come again. How often do you get Sister Assumpta alone, with no one else around?
Instead, I wait.
She opens her eyes. I know I need to tread carefully. That Sister Assumpta is not the kind of person you can ask direct questions.
“Do you pray for her, Sister?”
She nods slowly. “I do,” she says. “I try.”
Then, a long sigh. “I don’t know if it will do much good.”
“Why is that?”
“People like Harry don’t get to be with the Lord.”
What?
“What do you mean by that, Sister?”
“They don’t get to be with the Lord,” she repeats. “So I pray. I pray for Harry. I pray that she gets to be with Him.”
“Who?” I ask instinctively, and then almost slap myself. Him. God.
She turns away from me, either bored or upset by the conversation. She puts a hand on the handle of her office door.
“I think He will forgive her,” she concludes. “The God I know forgives.”
And she hobbles back into her lemon-walled office, and closes the door.
I wander to the bus and get the 5.15, hoping that Roe won’t be on it. I need to process this on my own, without the pressure of performing the information for him. So much of being around him is such a fog now. I’m glad we’re friends, but there’s an awkwardness with just the two of us. We’re a Scooby Doo gang now, and I’m Velma to Fiona’s Daphne.
“They don’t get to be with the Lord. So I pray. I pray for Harry. I pray that she gets to be with Him.”
I hold on to my knees, a wave of nausea sweeping through me. Did Sister Assumpta mean witches? Sensitives?
Either?
Both?
Am I also barred from heaven for practising witchcraft, or is this just the suspicious ramblings of a deeply religious old woman?
I look through Harriet’s news clippings again, feeling a little guilty for having stolen them. I’ll just photocopy them on Dad’s scanner, and bring them right back. I start writing down everything in my refill pad, trying to get everything straight in my head. I don’t want to risk forgetting anything that Sister Assumpta has told me. I draw it out, like a flow chart quiz at the back of a magazine.
Harriet was a divorce activist, and the reason she was a divorce activist was because her father was beating her mother. She went to America, bought a (“haunted???” I write) tarot deck, and probably summoned the Housekeeper to bring justice to her dad. She threw the whole city out of whack, making the snow fall, making the cats run away. Then she died. And her father died quickly afterwards.
Life for a life: it’s straightforward black magic, isn’t it? Give big to get big.
But how does that apply to me and Lily? I never wanted Lily to die. I just wanted her to go away, and even then, it was just a split second of idiocy, not a lifelong grudge match. If Harriet had died, why hadn’t I? Did that come later? If we got Lily back, would the Housekeeper take me instead?
No. No, that didn’t make any sense. Especially as Harriet’s father died after Harriet did.
I google, Harriet Evans death, 1990, and find one listing on RIP.ie. My dad checks it every day. He has that Irish obsession with death, seeing it as a weird Duck, Duck, Goose game that he has managed to stay duck on. “Nora!” he’ll yell across the house, “you’ll never guess who died!”
There’s one entry for Harriet, but it doesn’t give much detail. A seventeen-year-old who was tragically taken too soon, blah, blah, blah. The
