“There was another reason,” I said. “I had a boyfriend. His name was Dan. We were only seventeen, but we’d talked about marriage.” I watched a raindrop slide down the window, gathering speed as it joined with another. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. He was the local doctor, and he knew that Dan’s mother had been admitted to a psychiatric institution.” I took a breath. The memory of Dad’s words still had the power to make my insides curl. “He said he didn’t want our family tainted by madness.”
Jack didn’t respond for a moment or two, as if he were sizing me up. “So, you became a nun to spite your father?” He sounded less surprised than I thought he’d be.
“I think I would have done it anyway.” I turned to face him. “I thought I was capable of another kind of love—the kind that doesn’t involve marriage or children.”
He shook his head. “But you were so young. How could you bear to make a decision like that?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to admit that I’d gone to the convent the day after the row with Dad, that I’d been fired up with a white-hot anger that drove all rational thoughts from my mind. And that if my love for Dan had been stronger, I might have chosen a different course. “I knew that it would hurt sometimes,” I said at last, “but at the convent they taught us that it was like pruning a plant: cutting off one possibility of love would encourage you to grow and flourish in different ways.”
“That might work for some women.” He gave me a searching look. “But I’ve seen how you are with Merle’s children. And with young Ned. It didn’t work, did it? Not for you.”
I felt as if a hand had squeezed my heart. How was it that in the space of a fortnight, he was able to understand me better than I understood myself?
“No,” I heard myself saying. “It didn’t work.” It was as if I were hovering above the boat, watching the person who had once been Sister Anthony letting out what she had locked away the day the train had pulled out of the station at Elisabethville. “There were two children in Africa—a boy and a girl. I found them in the jungle when I was on my way to carry out vaccinations at a school. They were babies—newborn twins. They were about to be buried alive with their mother, who had died giving birth to them.”
“Buried alive?” Jack’s voice sounded as otherworldly as my own, like an echo from the depths of the ocean.
“It was a tribal custom to dispose of babies that way if the mother had died. I’d heard of it, but this was the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes.”
“What did you do?”
“I had two native men with me—they were paddling the raft I was in—and through them I persuaded the villagers to let me take the babies to the mission hospital. There was an orphanage there, which I knew would take them.”
“So, they survived? They were all right?”
“Yes. But I wasn’t.” I took a breath, willing away the sting of threatened tears. “I chose Swahili names for them. Kamaria—which means bright, like the moon, for the girl—and Kenyada, which means gem, for the boy. I used to visit them every day. I wasn’t supposed to—I’d been warned about not going there too often when I first arrived in Africa. But I couldn’t help myself. I developed what the sister superior viewed as an attachment to them, something that was frowned upon by the order. That was why the decision was made to send me back to Ireland.”
“They made you leave?”
I nodded. My throat felt tight. “They let me go and say goodbye. The children were far too young, of course, to understand what was going on. I knew they wouldn’t miss me, wouldn’t even remember me. That helped a little. But as I walked away, I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I would never be the kind of nun the order expected me to be—the kind who displays unquestioning obedience and has the ability to give up all worldly attachments.” I turned my face to the sea, but my filmy eyes and the raindrops on the glass turned the waves into a blur of gray. “I suppose, deep down, I’d always known it. But what happened with those children brought it home to me, very powerfully: that being a nun meant having no choice, meant living a life against your natural inclinations, even when those inclinations were good and loving.”
For a moment the only sound was the hum of the boat’s engine. Then Jack said, “Did you ever blame your father? For making you do something you ended up regretting?”