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A blonde woman with fat ankles sat in a receiving parlor at the Convent of the Sisters of Good Hope in Pensacola. Her face was twisted and swollen, the skin on her arms rashy red. For a week now, she'd slept in her car—which meant she hadn't slept, or at least not much. Her face kept twitching. She tried to smooth down the muscles of her jaws, but it wouldn't work. Twitch, twitch, twitch. Never had she never been so exhausted or nervous.

She heard doors closing in the hall and voices talking back and forth nearby. She wanted to know what the voices were saying, but the doors in this old building were tall and thick and turned everything from outside into a low, dull buzz. She had never seen such thick doors or so many crosses, anywhere.

She was Pentecostal, herself. She attended a Worship Center, where everything looked bright and wide open as a hospital lobby. No secrets. This Catholic place was full of closed doors and hidden rooms. It made her think of a mafia funeral in the movies: heavy silver drapes, lilies, dark red carpet. Everything reminded her of death these days, anyway. She felt like she might die soon. She poked at her armpits all the time, wondering if she had a tumor on a lymph node.

After a long silence, the door of the waiting room swung open and in came a wheelchair with a young nun seated in it, leaning to one side. The chair made a swishing sound, like wind through venetian blinds. The nun wore a white habit that fell down across a white robe—such a long white robe; it swallowed up her hands and feet. She was smiling but one side of her face looked strangely crushed, like a withered orange.

"Are you Nancy Jackson?" she asked.

"Yes," said the woman. She took a quick glance and then avoided looking at the nun in the face again. There was something so awful about her—her face was like this secret building and the heavy cross over this couch: it gave you twitches. It made you think about about people getting hurt, hurting themselves.

"You're a nurse, right?" said the nun.

"Yes."

"I'm Sister Theresa. I was asked to talk to you."

The woman winced. A picture flashed in her mind suddenly of the nun cutting herself: blood spraying over the white robe like red champagne.

"My God," she said, and rubbed her jaw and temples. "Won't your head nun or whatever she is talk to me herself?"

"She thought I could explain better."

"Explain what better?" This nun couldn't be more than twenty-five. It was an insult, them sending her. She raised her head, but glanced away. "Who are you? Her assistant?"

Sister Theresa closed her eyes for a moment. "I'm a teacher's assistant here at the school. I'm in the novitiate."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, I'm a junior sister. Like an apprentice."

The nurse licked her dry lips. "Excuse me. No offense. But I think it's obvious your people are putting me off. I mean, after I had the courtesy to call and warn you."

Sister Theresa shifted a little in her seat. She didn't feel insulted, only mystified. Most people were overly polite to her, if anything. She wondered why the woman stared at the ground like that.

"We've been expecting to hear from you," she said. "We've been very anxious to get your statement. But you really surprised everybody by showing up here in person. How did you find us?"

"Oh, I'm smart," said the nurse. She smiled, biting the side of her tongue to discourage more twitching. "I followed your boss in Atlanta. I saw what plane she got on, and then I just went to the library and read about nuns who teach handicapped kids in this area and I found you."

"You knew we taught handicapped children?"

"Yes. At the very beginning they told me that some Catholic nuns would handle things perfectly because they're advocates for the rights of the handicapped. Not that this baby is handicapped. She's not. They thought she had Down syndrome. But she didn't."

"Are you sure she's not handicapped?"

"I'm positive!" The nurse shouted the words, and a loud sob shot out of her, straight from her belly like a huge hiccup. "The mother came to the hospital where I worked because she thought her baby would be deformed. OK? And she wanted to induce early labor before the baby could survive. OK? She wanted to kill it because she didn't want to deal with a handicapped child."

Sister Theresa pressed her one hand to her ribcage, under her robe.

"But that baby doesn't have Down syndrome," continued the nurse. "She came out just fine. They told the mother she was born dead, because they wanted to save trouble and because they're liars. They gave her to me and she was going to die soon because she couldn't survive on her own. I mean, I knew she would die in an hour or two. At twenty-six weeks? I don't know why she was still alive after twenty minutes. And I was—I knew they were just happy she was normal because they could let her die and get more money for her organs, because that's what they do. The tissue companies come in and wait for those fetuses like vultures, so they can harvest their organs."

"But you didn't let that happen," said Sister Theresa.

"Hell, no, I didn't. I told them the fetus was dead and I was taking it to the lab."

"It was a miracle she survived."

"No! It wasn't a miracle, it was because of me!" The nurse opened her eyes wide. "I walked out of that hospital with that child alive. I risked my job, and maybe my life—I mean, they could even come get me for this now, or send somebody after me. I'm not being paranoid. They're really scared." She narrowed her eyes and looked up, right at Sister Theresa. "They've called my house without leaving messages, but I'm not staying there. Because I know some things about them that, if I wanted to, I could hurt them. And I mean, they know that some people could sue them from here to God knows where, and the whole place could shut down. Think about the mother, if she knew. I mean if she knew that her baby was normal and alive."

Sister Theresa nodded. "Yes, I have been thinking about the mother. What she would do if she knew—" She sighed. Her crooked smile trembled. "Anyway, you're right. It's because of you that she is alive, Ms. Jackson. You took her where you knew she'd get treatment. And they saved her."

"But I want her now," said the nurse. "Don't you people get that? It's my right."

"You really do love her. I see that."

"It's even more than that." The nurse clenched her hands together. "I watched her in the ICU, struggling. I thought she would die. I put my name on the birth certificate. It was really like she was my own for a while. I mean, when she got better … oh God, I couldn't believe those doctors would just send her out of the state without asking me. They'd hide her from me and give her to someone else." Sister Theresa shook her head. "They weren't hiding her from you. They were hiding her from the people who had already tried to hurt her."

"But I wouldn't have let anybody have her."

"You'd take her home? People would ask questions. The truth would come out."

"No!"

"Trust me." Sister Theresa looked pained. "This is not simple." She took a breath and shifted again in her chair. "Ms. Jackson, I know you think the baby needs you. I'm here to tell you that what the child needs is your testimony about what happened to her in that place. It's like you said, the right lawsuit could shut them down. It could shut some other places down, too."

The nurse looked at the red carpet, and she had another split-second vision: her feet swimming in clots, her legs transparent and filling with blood like a pair of syringes. She shuddered and shook her head.

"I don't want to give my story to your lawyers. I'm not out to save a million people. I just want one little girl."

"Actually," said Sister Theresa gently, "it's because you saved her that you can't be the one to raise her. Try and understand that."

"The hell with you! My name's still on the birth certificate. I never signed her away."

The nun spoke in a gentle voice. "So what will you do? Get a lawyer? Charge us with kidnapping? Some people might go to jail, but the baby would go back to the mother or become a ward of the state and spend her childhood in foster care. What good would that do? This child may seem 'normal' to you because she doesn't have Down's. She more than likely has cerebal palsy because of the oxygen loss. That's enough for her to deal with, don't you think, Ms. Jackson? The best thing for her, at least for now, is not to know about all this. She should only know a family, and know love. That little girl shouldn't hear that there was ever a day when people tried to hurt her."

"You think I'd tell her that?"

"It would be hard for you not to tell. The time would come when you'd want to." Sister Theresa leaned in even closer and spoke softly. "I was four and I asked the sisters what had happened to me. They told me—not everything, but enough. They didn't want to hurt me, but they believed in their cause so much. They wanted me to take their side. But I wish I hadn't found out so early. I was four, you understand? It caused me worse scars than the ones I've got."

The nurse relaxed her jaw. She put her hand up to her own face. "You were an abortion survivor? Your wound there—?"

"I'm not even sure where I came from, just that a nurse like you brought me here, and I do wish I could find her now and ask her the rest of my questions. But, Ms. Jackson, I'm really glad I didn't meet her then." Sister Theresa sat still, looking straight at the nurse without blinking. "You understand? It would have been even worse."

Nancy Jackson put her head down in her hands and shook with sobs.

"I just can't let that baby go," she said. "I can't."

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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