WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES, Dolly and I were gliding into an old familiar setting, and a much more naturally scenic one.
Why does returning to your Catholic girls’ high school campus make hot sessions with your road-trip lover rerun obsessively through your head as if you needed to make an accurate count of every little mortal sin for Saturday confession?
Maybe because my familiar had morphed into a hidden but taunting rainfall necklace of tiny silver beads shimmying over my breasts. Instead of wafting the scent of the motel’s no-name soap, I feared I reeked with the aroma of fresh guilt.
Why should I? The co-star of my mental blue movie collection was off bonding in the boonies with Leonard Tallgrass and Quicksilver. The trio was becoming such a steady partnership I was almost jealous. …
Actually, I relished being on my own, since Our Lady of the Lake had sole custody of a four-year chunk of my sketchy history. Today’s expedition was just Dolly and me, with Irma on standby, the way I’d left Wichita two months ago.
Dolly had never seen Our Lady of the Lake, but her whitewall tires spun up and down the gently rolling, landscaped hills. The glint of the man-made lake at the campus’s heart sparkled like a blue diamond through the lush shrubbery and trees. I also glimpsed campus buildings constructed of what we students had called “mellow yellow,” the native limestone mined from the state’s Flint Hills scenic area.
In a few hours, I’d moved from the ugly scene at WTCH to meeting Caressa’s weird sister to cruising the only natural scenery I’d ever recalled reacting to with a … sentimental glow.
Please. So not us, Irma commented. I’m happy you are going to get the goods on the reason for our inner angst and that annoying supine phobia of yours—not mine, I assure you—but let’s move on here.
I’d thought I was.
Were you with me here too, way back when, Irma? I wondered.
I didn’t have many vivid memories of this place, just a blur of classrooms and talking nuns in Flying Nun head-dresses, and of myself bundled up to the frowning black eyebrows, wallowing across the snow-piled campus in deep winter, shivering. With tiny icicles forming on my eyelashes.
My graphic memories bestirred Irma again.
Brrr. Toss the Nanook of the North reminiscences. You and me were on and off here, depending on which clique you ticked off and your nondating life. I mean, all girls. Duh. I gave up on you totally at that dorky state college, and then you hit the big time at WTCH. But I will agree that this place looked cool, at least. Too cool for half the year! Snow, I’m talking, and not our seriously sexy Vegas empire builder. I mean winter, and the falling white stuff that freezes your nose and toes. Not mine, of course, but I do suffer along with you, on the inside.
Snorting, I tuned out Irma after her mention of my confounding rock-star … “nemesis” was not too strong a word.
Dolly slipped into a small lot carved out for gawkers as I stopped for a look-see. My conservative pump heels moved like clodhoppers over the sloping grassy hill to the lake.
Birds were shrieking.
Well, not really. I realized then that you don’t hear birds chirping on the Las Vegas Strip, unless a few are bopping around the greenery in the Paris’s Le Cafe Ile St. Louis restaurant.
As I neared the teardrop-shaped lake, I spotted a single tree-thick island in its center, reached by a wooden footbridge. I felt a creeping sensation at my neck. The silver familiar was off sex patrol and changing into an innocuous chain with a long, freshly cold pendant. The familiar ran hot and cold, depending on my whereabouts, the air temperature, and my personal emotional tenor. Now it was less “Fever” and more The Waltons.
Saints preserve me from so-square John-Boy, Irma wailed.
I lifted the pendant. Maybe the ambiance was more … Camelot. The familiar had morphed into a miniature sword with an aurora borealis crystal on its pommel.
I told you, Irma said. Cool.
The smile in her voice brought one to my lips. This had been a calm retreat after the group homes. Here, I had apparently ditched real memories of any trauma or abuse for occasional nightmares too unbelievable to bother anybody else with.
I studied the sun-dappled lake and tested a wetted finger to the light wind, as evening prepared to don her best gown and thought about dimming the sky. Soon the sun’s rays would be slanting through the trees, and then, hours later, maybe moonlight. I searched the gentle ripples for signs of an immortal woman’s naked arm.
Nope. Still no lady in the lake.
Smiling again, I climbed the hill to reclaim Dolly’s driver’s seat, and I didn’t stop until we parked at the limestone administration building. Maybe even an orphan can go home again.
The Young Thing at the reception desk had matching “Edward” tattoos inside her wrists and wore her long uniform sleeves rolled up to her elbow like a workman’s shirt, the better to flaunt her workout muscles.
Golly. They were allowing visible self-expression here now?
“Is the mother superior still Sister Regina Caeli?” I asked, pronouncing the Latin properly as “Chay-lee.”
“She goes by Sister Ermangarde Wallace now. Yeah. You got it the first time. Ermangarde. You can kinda see the vocation coming there, from the baptismal certificate. Who wouldn’t want to exchange that bummer name for something like Queen of Heaven? Not many new nuns now. Maybe the first names got better. You’re a grad, right? I recognize the navy. Never lost the uniform, huh? The campus is crawling with all these, like, older women, coming back. Like this was fun.”
“It’s a beautiful campus.”
“Try getting a date for the St. Lancelot’s military ball on that one.”
“St. Lancelot’s boys’ high school is still a going concern?”
“Do punks have pimples? We mostly date the guys from State College, unless there’s a big St. Lancelot’s formal ‘do,’ where we can put on the bustiers and the black lipstick shtick. Of course the nuns forbid cleavage, but they don’t go to the dances. You don’t look like a drag hag. I mean, like you haven’t been gone that long.”
“One piece of advice I’ll give you—?”
“Carnaby. Horrible first name, I know. My grandparents used to be counterculture. Still not worth going into the convent over.”
“Okay, Carnaby. You are going to be uncool so soon. Enjoy the hip now.”
“If you say so. That is a sweet pendant you’re wearing. You should have called for an appointment, but what the heck. Gimme your name? Mother Superior Ermangarde is still here. She never leaves.”
“Delilah Street,” I said, trying out the truth.
“Ooh. Delilah. Biblical bad girl. I’d kill for that name. Major cool. You ever done any black lipstick? With your white skin that would wring the Goth boys out and throw them away for the duration.”
“I’ve done some radical lip gloss in my day,” I purred. “What are you complaining about? Carnaby is a cute name.”
“I know, dammit. ‘Cute’ is so lame today. Hold on. I’ll ring the olde dame.”
Somehow, the way she said “olde dame” had a Chaucer-like, uh, ring. I bet English Literature was still a required course here. Particularly the Arthurian Cycle.
Had it only been seven years? Felt like seven centuries. I hesitated before knocking at the head nun’s age-darkened wooden door. It had an opaque pebbled-glass window like a noir private detective’s.
“Enter,” an imperiously distracted voice commanded before my knuckles hit wood. Nuns had a ninth sense.
For a moment, I longed to be back in a stinky, darkening pasture with Ric and Quicksilver and Leonard Tall-grass.
I opened the door, overcome by a scent of lemon oil.
Through the big old-fashioned sash windows behind the desk, the sun was setting, going for the gold before it turned bloodred and sank pouting into the horizon.
Sister Regina Caeli wore the same habit as always, the bulky headdress producing a decades-outdated, Matterhorn-peaked silhouette against the dusk. Its profile reminded me of the mythical Minotaur, the horned and bullish beast from ancient Crete. From what I remembered of her seven years ago, by now Sister should be about as ancient as Crete.
“Delilah Street,” her firm but rasping voice greeted me. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Whee. Welcome someplace at last. I felt the silver familiar changing into a chain mail necklace that covered my chest and décolletage. Especially any hidden cleavage.
Ric would so want the details of this. The conversation, that is, not the familiar making an armored nun’s wimple on my chest. Too kinky for a Catholic boy.
“WE ENJOYED WATCHING your reports on WTCH in the convent recreation room, Delilah,” Sister said when I was seated before her. “They were most informative. And then you recently … disappeared.”
“Pretty much fired,” I said.
“Ah. Women still have an uphill fight in the media. So now you are—?”
“A PI in Las Vegas.”
“We watch the CSI Las Vegas show religiously.”
“Did you see … uh, me, as a corpse?”
“Oh, doing some work as an extra, are you, Delilah? Most interesting experience, I imagine. Sorry, no. We don’t really watch the gruesome parts. You did wear a complete sheet?”
“Yes, Sister,” I said virtuously.
I had been clothed during my recently filmed cameo, which certainly couldn’t have aired yet. And all eyes here at the convent had turned away at Lilith’s nude appearance. Why watch a forensics TV show, though, if you shut your eyes at the autopsies?
“Why have you been waiting for me?” I asked.
“Our Lady of the Lake was the closest thing you had to a home here in Kansas. Many of our girls do return for class reunions, but you missed yours in oh-eleven.”
“That was only five years out,” I said quickly. “I’ll make the tenth.”
Sister’s cumbersomely attired head shook. “It’s not that, is it, Delilah?”
So, I was going to have to admit to the mother superior and academic dean, scenic campus aside, that my four high school years were mostly forgotten and might have been as unpleasant as my group home sojourn? Naw. Better to shrug it off.
“Even the pundits can’t decide if the true millennial year is the turn of two thousand,” Sister Ermangarde went on, “or two thousand and one. Graduates from both of those years seem to have made themselves scarce when it comes to school spirit, including donations.”
“Really?”
The reporter in me was getting interested. I’d always assumed I was the only disaffected one around as a kid, blaming it on being orphaned.
“Is the reason the Millennium Revelation or the upheaval of the nine/eleven attack, do you think?” I asked. “They almost coincided.”
She tented pale white hands, balancing her chin on their prayerful support.
“What an excellent question, Delilah. You always asked good questions in class. We hadn’t considered, frankly, that the … ah, spiritual upheaval of the Revelation may have affected certain of our graduating students in those two years even more than the unprecedented political assault of mass murder.”
I stared at Sister Regina. Ermangarde was just not a name I could stomach. Then it hit me. Ermangarde. Irma? Irma who is a guard? Just when did my internal voice show up?
Please, Irma herself interjected. I am eternal. I don’t punch time cards.
I brushed her rude comment aside.
“When you say ‘spiritual,’” I told Sister Ermangarde, “you really mean … ‘supernatural.’”
Her hands parted and slipped over the large wooden rosary lying atop the broad white wimple. At her gesture, I felt the familiar shape-shift into something smaller and longer again, like the sword. I wondered if she’d spotted my morphing metal accessory in action.
Luckily, Sister’s faded hazel eyes were fixed on mine. “Spiritual? Supernatural? Aren’t they the same? Unlike your eyes.”