Free Missing Sisters -SA by Gregory Maguire Page A

stars. It stirred in its bed, almost imperceptibly. Alice had an idea of diving into the water, even with her stupid Eliza Doolittle costume on. They hadn’t even been clapping for her, but for some girl named Miami they were mixing her up with. Every little happiness got shattered into smithereens. Nothing was fair. She hoped she never saw Naomi Matthews again. She couldn’t wait till tomorrow to go home.

    THE T WILIGHT Z ONE

    Alice did not consider herself a quick thinker. But a few days later, back in the baking summer heat of the third floor of the Sacred Heart Home for Girls, she had to congratulate herself on her initiative. She was looking at the addresses she’d collected at camp. On a scrap of notebook paper were scrawled the home addresses of Sally the reluctant novice, an RFD route in Feura Bush; of Wendy Beasley in Schaghticoke; of Naomi Matthews in Watervliet. At the bottom, printed in Sally’s neatest nun-in-training script, was the address of Miami Shaw: 86
    South Allen Street, Albany.

    It had been easy to find the Miami Shaw address. Alice had simply told Sally the truth.
    People were confusing Alice with a camper who’d been enrolled in the previous session. Alice wanted to write her a letter. Could Sally dig up the address in the office? The extra hug Alice gave Sally ahead of time was only mildly a bribe. When Sally came back with the goods, the next hug was genuine.

    Alice sat on her bed. During the summer the home was unusually quiet; some girls were always away at the camp, and the sisters rotated supervising the rest. Alice chewed on the long pointed collar of her striped shirt. She told herself: Think. Think. But she wasn’t really sure what she should be thinking about.

    Why and how there could be somebody living ten miles away who looked like her, that was what to think about. But Alice couldn’t get past just the fact of it. Was it really true? How could it be? It seemed like a miracle. It would’ve been good to be able to drift downstairs to the kitchen now and peel potatoes with Sister Vincent de Paul. The subject could’ve come up. What would Sister Vincent de Paul have to say about it? Try as she might, Alice couldn’t imagine. In her mind Sister Vincent de Paul opened her mouth with an expression of mighty strong opinion, but there wasn’t any way of telling what the opinion was. Short of asking her, of course. But how to do that?

    It was six months. Six long months since Sister Vincent de Paul had left. Now the sun pelted upstate New York with blasts of hot air, lashings of buttery heat. The ice-rain storm was a distant impossibility, an adventure story that had already become boring by overtelling. Now the tar on the roof of the home grew sticky and melted in the heat, and the smell eddied in through the gray screens at nighttime, followed by the sweet vegetable-rot aroma of the weedy saplings that grew in the alley. It was a different season, and Alice supposed she was a different person.
    But she would’ve liked Sister Vincent de Paul there anyway. A new nun, a young, smooth-faced, cranky one named Sister Paul the Hermit, had come in and taken over the cooking. The girls called her Sister Paul the Hermit Crab. That her name was somewhat like Sister Vincent de Paul’s made Alice anxious, as if one nun could blot out another just like that, by having a similar name.

    So Alice sat and pondered. In the absence of Sister Vincent de Paul she had few choices.
    She kept the folded-up address list and the ten-dollar bill she’d won as her share of second prize in the talent show in the little Camp Saint Theresa wallet, which she’d decorated with a holy card. The bill and the holy card and the address list seemed to operate on each other like ingredients in a stew. Having no other ideas, Alice decided to act.

    On Thursday there was an outing to Thacher Park. Sister John Boss herself was going to drive one of the station wagons, and Sister Francis Xavier the other. Most of the