My work is helping kids, it’s not a business, he wanted to say. But he knew better than to talk back to Sister X.
“With insurance companies becoming more selective in paying for residential treatment and the HMOs refusing altogether, we have to ask, who will pay? Private parties can’t—too expensive. Charity beds are out—the hospital will give us no more for the balance of the year. So, who will pay?”
Carter shrugged, uncertain of what she wanted from him.
“I have been asking myself that question the past several months. Finally, I believe I have found the answer.”
She leaned back against her leather chair and smiled for the first time since Carter had entered her office. Still thinking he might be in trouble without knowing it, he missed his cue.
When Sister Xavier smiled, you wouldn’t call her pretty, but she had presence. She wore a tailored, power suit, reminiscent of earlier years when she had studied in Paris and developed her legendarily expensive tastes. Thursday morning’s navy-blue suit shunned the contemporary shoulder pad fad, and probably rightly so—her broad shoulders already made her authentically imposing. Her frame was large yet not overweight, her face plain yet dignified. Whatever she lacked in physical handsomeness, however, she made up for with her powerful eyes: dark-blue beams that gripped you in their gaze and would not let go until they had finished their business with you.
When she had taken over as executive director of Six West two years ago, her first project had been the renovation of her office, once the staff conference room. When the hospital administration had challenged her proposal, she had stared them down with those powerful blue beams and said simply, “If you want me to transform this unit into a profitable business, you’ll have to trust my decisions. Either you’re with me, or you’re in the way.”
The other nuns of her order, the Sisters of Humility, stood by quietly, watching her with expectant pride. The only nun of the order with an MBA, Sister Mary Xavier’s vocation was business. Five years earlier, she had taken over the order’s sagging nursing home and miraculously turned it into a profitable venture for the nuns, primarily through fundraisers that preyed upon local parishioners’ sympathetic generosity. Word was that, with the Mother Superior getting on in years, the order’s thirty-two-year-old wunderkind was being groomed to take over.
In spite of Sister Xavier’s contemporary fashion, she was one of the few remaining nuns who still wore a headpiece. Though not the wimple of medieval days, she wore one of seventies’ vintage, with the cardboard frame atop the head and the trailing cloth that fell over her shoulders. Tipped back slightly on her forehead, it crowned a set of carefully coifed blonde curls. Her stately bearing and corporate decor demanded the respect due an executive, yet Carter could not help but approach Sister X with the reverence shown a nun.
His mother had indoctrinated him with this inflated homage. They had been to the arboretum to see the first flowers of spring pushing their way through the soil: white and yellow crocuses and stalks of tulips with petals still balled like a baby’s fist. On the way home, they had stopped at Saint Anne’s Church to light a candle for Mary and say a prayer.
Coming in from the bright sunshine, Carter’s eyes needed a moment to adjust to the dim lighting. Once they did, he became intrigued by a group of seven women cloistered before the tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament. The women were cloaked in white and wore funny white hats that looked like cloth wigs. They murmured with their heads bent, forearms leaning on the pew in front of them, foreheads bent to clasped hands. Colored sunlight streaming through the stained glass lit their robes in a celestial glow that reminded Carter of the story when Jesus, Moses, and Elijah radiate before the disciples in a special light from heaven.
“Who were they?” Carter asks Mommy that evening when he crawls into her bed. His first impression of nuns—the image of the white-robed women bathed in bright light praying before the consecrated Eucharist—set in his memory like colors on a photographic plate.
“Nuns.” She pronounces the word as though saying a prayer. “Brides of Christ.”
She explains to him how the nun gives herself completely to Christ in a sacred union. Her body becomes a temple of prayer. “Nuns, like Mary, are blessed among women.”
“Why aren’t you a nun, Mommy?”
She does not say anything for what seems a long time. He can hear the snoring from the next room.
“Because I married your father.” She laughs bitterly. “I can’t say who got the better deal, those who live without or me living with him.”
She laughs again, as though to wipe away the thought, and looks down at Carter lying next to her. She hugs him, brushing her hand through his hair. “They wanted me to be a nun, but I wanted to be your mother. Mary herself could not have loved her son more.”
He hugs her back. “I’m going to be a priest and build a church and call it Saint Elizabeth’s, all for you.”
“The county!” Sister Xavier declared triumphantly.
“The county?” Carter repeated, shaken from his reverie.
“The county will pay for treatment where insurance companies and HMOs won’t. I’ve known that for weeks, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was able to convince an old classmate of mine down in Juvenile how the county would benefit.”
This time, Carter caught his cue. “How’s that?”
She smiled, pleased. “Juveniles who successfully complete treatment spend less time in the courts, less time in corrections. The county spends less on them. Why not make an initial investment in a juvenile to save money in the long run?”
“They’ll go along with it?” He was skeptical. It wasn’t clear to him how he fit in her plan.
“That’s where our jobs overlap,” she said in a conspiratorial tone, seeming to read the question in his mind. “Barnes, my high school classmate from Holy Angels, still a dutiful Catholic, has finally agreed to send over a test case. He says this is a tough kid, doesn’t think he’ll make it. I want you to see that he does.”
Carter blanched. You can’t force a kid to recover. At best, a third of the kids who complete treatment stay straight. Another third eventually make it. The rest don’t. Carter’s role was simply to show the way. It was up to them, not him, to surrender and accept help. Ultimately, it was up to the grace of their Higher Power. When a kid did make it, Carter saw it as a miracle. Sister X was commissioning him to guarantee a miracle. He could not explain this to her. He could not even protest.
“I’ll do my best.”
“That’s not good enough.” She gripped him with her navy-blue eyes and said in a tone that made him believe more than his job depended on it, “See that he makes it.”
Perhaps she read the apprehension in his expression because her tone softened. “I’m asking you to do this because the kids look up to you. They respect you for knowing what it’s like, having been there yourself.”
Yet, he thought, sometimes they push me away for the same reason: they don’t want to identify with me as a recovering addict.
“One more thing: others aren’t to know about this arrangement with the county. I want to see that it works first. So this is between us, understood?”
He nodded in mute agreement. She had secured him as her accomplice.
Then, that night, after the couple upstairs had worn themselves out and he had finally fallen asleep, she had awakened him with her phone call.
“Carter?”
“Mmm?”
“This is Sisser Savier.”
“Yeah.”
“What time is it?”
“Huh?”