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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."