“I love you so much… I can't leave you…” Gabriella sounded like a child again as she clung to her, feeling the stiff wool of the habit against her cheek, knowing her own was about to be taken from her.

“You will always have me with you. I will be praying for you.” And then, without another word, she walked Gabriella to the door and opened it, and signaled to the nun waiting outside to take her to the robing room where she would change her habit and be given two ugly, ill-fitting dresses left there by someone else, and a battered suitcase. The rest of what she needed, whatever it was, she would have to purchase with the money they gave her.

Gabriella stepped out into the corridor on trembling legs, and turned to look at Mother Gregoria for one last time, as tears ran down her cheeks in rivers. “I love you,” she said softly.

“Go with God,” Mother Gregoria said, and then turned slowly around and walked back into her office without looking back, and closed the door gently behind her. Gabriella stood staring at it in disbelief. It was like watching the door of someone's heart close, except that on the other side, the old nun had buried her face in her hands and was silently sobbing. But Gabriella would never know that.

She followed the nun to the robing room silently, both of them still bound by the silence Mother Gregoria had imposed on them. And the young nun pointed to the two dresses that had been left for Gabriella, one an ugly navy blue floral print polyester that was two sizes too large for her, particularly after last week, and an even uglier shiny black one that had stains down the front that hadn't come out no matter how often the Sisters washed it. But it fit Gabriella better than the first one, and the somber color suited her circumstances. She was in deep mourning for Joe, and she exchanged one black dress for the other, and slowly took off her coif, remembering the many times she had done it for him, and left it in the car when they went for walks in the park, or to the borrowed apartment. This was the price she had to pay now. She had lost the coif, and all it represented to her, forever, and all the people who went with it.

She stood in front of the nun who had been assigned to assist her with her departure, and their eyes met and held, and without a sound they embraced as tears ran down their cheeks in silence. It was a sad day for both of them, and the one remaining knew she would never be able to tell anyone what she'd seen, or the sorrow she had seen so clearly on Gabriella's face as she left them. It was a lesson to all of them. She was being cast into the world, alone, with nothing, and no one to help her.

Gabriella put the money, the journal, and the blue flowered dress carefully into the cardboard suitcase, and then left the robing room behind the woman who for twelve years had been her sister and would soon be swept away by the tides that had overtaken Gabriella.

They reached the front door in the main hall all too quickly. She stood there for a moment, and the elderly nun in charge of letting people in and out came forward and opened the door very slowly, and for a long, silent moment, the three of them stood there. The old nun nodded then, showing Gabbie the way out, and with a single, trembling step, Gabriella stepped across the threshold. This was nothing like the days she had hurried out to meet Joe, pretending to do their errands. This was a single step into darkness. And as she stood in the bright sunshine outside, she turned and looked at them, and as their eyes met, the old nun closed the door, and she was lost to them forever.





Chapter 15




GABRIELLA STOOD OUTSIDE the convent door, staring at it, for what seemed like an eternity, and she had no idea where to go, or what to do now. All she could think of was all that she had lost in the past four days, a man, a life, and a baby. The enormity of it was so overwhelming, she felt as though she were reeling.

And then, she picked up her suitcase, and slowly walked away. She knew she had to go somewhere, find a room, and a job, but she had no idea where to go or how to do it. And as she looked at the buses passing by, she suddenly remembered some of the girls she'd gone to school with at Columbia. Some of them lived in boarding houses and small hotels. She tried to remember where they were. Most of them were on the Upper West Side, but she had never really paid any attention.

She still felt numb as she got on a bus and headed uptown, with no particular sense of where she was going. And for a crazed moment, she thought about trying to find her father in Boston. When she got off the bus on Eighty-sixth and Third, she walked into a phone booth and called Boston information. They had no listing for a John Harrison, and she didn't know where he worked, or even if he was alive by then, let alone if he wanted to hear from her. It had been thirteen years since she had last seen him. She was twenty-two years old, and she was starting her life as though she were a baby. And as she came out of the phone booth outside a coffee shop, she suddenly felt very dizzy, and realized she hadn't eaten since breakfast that morning. But she wasn't hungry.

People were hurrying past, and there were children in strollers being pushed along by their mothers. Everyone seemed to be going somewhere, and Gabriella was the only one with no direction and no purpose. She felt like a rock sitting in the river, as the currents and everything they carried with them rushed past her. She walked into the coffee shop for a cup of tea finally, and as she sat there staring into it, all she could think of was what Mother Gregoria had said to her when she left her. She wondered why everyone told her how strong she was. It was a death knell, she knew now, a sign that the people she loved were about to leave her. They were preparing her to be strong, because she would have to be, without them.

And as she finished her tea, she picked up a discarded newspaper. She needed to find a place to stay, and glanced down a list of small hotels and boarding-houses, and she noticed that there was a boarding-house not far away, on East Eighty-eighth Street, near the East River. She didn't know the neighborhood, but it was a start. But without a job, she wasn't even sure she could afford it.

She paid for her tea, and walked slowly back into the sunshine. She still felt dead inside, and the tea had only slightly warmed her. She had been icy cold for days, after all the blood she had lost, and even the hot drink hadn't really helped her. She was still deathly pale, and her whole body ached as she walked east down the long blocks toward the East River, wondering how much a room would cost her. She knew she couldn't survive long on five hundred dollars, or at least she didn't think so. She had never had to take care of her own needs. She didn't know what anything cost, not food or restaurants or rooms or clothes. She had no idea what she could do, or how to manage her money, but she was grateful for what Mother Gregoria had given her. Without it, she knew her situation would have been even more desperate.

She walked past it the first time, missing the small sign. It was a tired old brownstone with a chipping facade, and all the sign said was ROOMS FOR RENT in a dust-streaked window. Nothing about the place looked very inviting. And when she walked into the downstairs hall, it was clean but shabby and smelled of cooking. It was as far removed as anything could be from the stark, immaculate precision and order of St. Matthew's convent.

“Yes?” A woman with a heavy accent poked her head into the dark hallway when she heard Gabriella's footsteps. She had watched her come in, from her window, and wondered what she wanted. “What do you want?”

“I… ah… are there rooms to rent? I saw the sign… and the ad in the paper.”

“There might be.” Gabriella recognized the accent as Czechoslovak or Polish. She still remembered the accents of the people who had come to her parents’ parties, although this woman was very different. And she was looking Gabriella over. She didn't want any druggies or prostitutes, and Gabriella looked younger than she was. The woman didn't want any runaways or trouble with the police either. She ran a respectable house, and she liked old people a lot better. They got their social security checks and they paid their rent, and they didn't make a lot of noise, or give her a lot of trouble, except if they got sick, or died. She didn't want people cooking in their rooms either, and young people were always doing things they shouldn't. Smoking, eating, drinking, cooking in their rooms, bringing people in at all hours, making too much noise. They never followed the rules, or held down proper jobs. And the landlady didn't want any headaches.

“Do you have a job?” the mistress of the boarding-house asked, looking worried. Without a job, Gabriella couldn't pay her rent, and that would be a problem.

“No… not yet…” Gabriella said apologetically. “I'm looking for one.” She didn't want to lie to her and pretend she had one.

“Yeah, well, come back when you get one.” This was no rich girl with a trust fund, or parents on Park Avenue who were going to pay her rent for her. But then again, if she had been, she wouldn't have been there. “Where you from?” Gabriella could see the landlady was suspicious of her, and she didn't really blame her.

Gabriella hesitated for an instant, wondering how she could explain the fact that she didn't have a job and had nowhere to live. It sounded, even to her, as though she'd just gotten out of jail, and she could see that the woman wasn't impressed with her. And the ugly black dress with the stains down the front didn't exactly improve her image. “I'm from Boston,” she settled on, thinking of the father she'd been unable to find that day, “I just moved here.” The woman nodded. It was a believable story.