In the time since she'd taken her final vows, Cathleen could have said that she had never thought about Sister Emanuel, not once, not since the last time they'd seen each other, just before the end of their novitiate.
She could have said that, but she didn't, because it would have been a complete and utter lie.
Instead, it would be more truthful to say that she had managed to scrub herself clean of the memory - slowly, over time, managing to block those lingering thoughts of her touch, letting them dissolve into the past like early mist on a sunny day. Gradually, every turn of the clock brought a welcoming distance between herself and that insidious temptation that dwelled deep within her - or had, long ago. Not anymore.
She was able to resign those memories to the a moment of weakness - a slip of judgment, unique in its occurrence. After all, hadn't she delivered her penance? Hadn't she been allowed to stay? Not just by the Reverend Mother, of course, but by God himself, who had sent her exactly the sign she had asked for? How likely could it have been, she reassured herself, for that cross - the permanent fixture which had stood undisturbed throughout her entire novitiate - to have clattered resoundingly to the floor at just the right moment? How much clearer a sign could she have been given?
And never - not once, not even when she was lying awake late at night, cold in her small, single-sized bed - did she ever wonder if perhaps, it was just a badly placed nail.
So she let the images go fuzzy in her head, turning them indistinct until she could barely remember the specific details - like the exact placement of the clock hands, the way she'd knocked three times, softly, and then twice more. It was easier, she thought, that the whole thing had taken place at night. The darkness obscured everything, made it seem like a dream. A fevered hallucination, perhaps, brought on by her starvation-induced illness.
Cathleen never thought about Sister Emanuel.
Perhaps that was a lie, but she worked hard to turn it into truth.
Two years, almost to the day, had passed since she had taken her final vows. Cathleen could count them on her fingers, the days remaining to mark that period, though there was no point in it. No nun kept an anniversary of her years devoted to God - or if they did, they kept it to themselves, safe inside their head. Safe, where nobody could see it, except God, if even he kept track of those things.
Her mom had long since stopped coming to every single visiting day. At the start she did, and Cathleen had made an effort to be friendlier, to reach out to her - but the rift was so wide. She had the feeling that her mother looked at her and saw only dark robes and a habit, the empty casing of a daughter forever lost to the self-righteous that her mother so darkly prescribed to the church. And yet, at the same time Cathleen found herself often biting down on the urge to desperately confess her sins - and to her mother of all people.
She didn't, though. She couldn't. For however much she could rationalize it - loneliness, a wavering of faith, or even desperation in the absence of the correct sex - it didn't matter. Those kind of things were forbidden, not just inside the Church, but everywhere. It was unheard of, despicable. A sin, or if not that, a medical condition. Her sins from that night were two-fold; not just the impermissibility of touching another person, but the abhorrence of touching another woman.
Not that it mattered, for it would never happen again. It was a one off thing, a singular trip-up - and in any case, Sister Emanuel was long gone. Cathleen would never have to worry about such a thing again. So she buried the memory and continued in her work, and never thought about that night or Sister Emanual again - or at least, tried to, and even succeeded for the most part.
That is, until she came back.
Cathleen was just finishing up her morning chores when she got the notice that a visitor had arrived for her. There was nothing abnormal about the message, passed on by a postulant, a young, fresh-faced girl who seemed far too excited about being surrounded by God's presence everyday. She chattered about her experiences as she accompanied Cathleen to the visiting area, and as Cathleen listened she couldn't help but think of the next few months, the year and a half of the novitiate that lay in wait, and felt bad for her. Still, she just smiled and nodded along, and almost got caught up in a rather entertaining story about the girl's chronic inability to arrive on time to Mass when she entered the visiting room and saw her.
It was Sister Emanuel.
Cathleen's heart froze. The air in her lungs turned to ice, and she was strike by the sudden inability to breathe.
Sister Emanuel was waiting for her, dressed in regular, normal clothes, faded jeans and a soft looking sweater, and she was watching Cathleen with wide, worried eyes.
"Cathleen - hi," she said when she saw her, and took a step forward. Cathleen tried to speak, and found the words to be stuck in her throat.
"Sister -" A quick, almost indiscernible shake of her head caused Cathleen to fall silent. Right. Not a sister anymore. She gave a laden glance to the postulant, who took the hint and scurried out of the room, leaving the two alone.
"It's just Gabrielle now," she said after a moment of heavy silence, and clasped her hands together in a jerking fashion, as if she couldn't think of what else to do with them. "I'm not a - well, you know I never became a nun, and so I thought it was rather silly to go by my last name so -"
"Right. Gabrielle." Cathleen gave a twitchy nod of her head, as if by confirming the tidbit of information she could pretend that everything was going normally, and that this was a regular, unshocking occurrence. "I - I'm surprised you came to visit."
Sister Eman - Gabrielle - gave her another smile, and it struck Cathleen that she had never really gotten the chance to see her smile when she'd been a Rose. She had always seemed so serious, so somber. So...holy.
"Don't be," she said softly, and her eyes crinkled at the corners with the words. "If I'm being honest, I've been thinking about visiting you for a while. I just...well, I didn't have the courage, I guess."
A handful of words, and yet they contained an overwhelming directness, far too much feeling to be directed at another person - to be directed at her. Sisters didn't spend much time discussing their feelings towards one another. It was unnecessary, undesirable. If one had so many emotions towards another sister, then perhaps it was time to re-examine, to redirect those emotions towards God.
And now Sister Emanuel - no, she was Gabrielle, Gabrielle - was standing here, telling Cathleen that she had missed her, in so many words.
It was a lot to unpack.
"Thank you," she said for lack of anything better, and then immediately felt like an idiot. A part of her desperately didn't want Gabrielle to see her so unbalanced, so...uncool. Then she remembered that it really wasn't supposed to matter what Gabrielle thought of her at all, and so she pushed the thought away, though the embarrassment lingered, a hot prickling on her skin that she couldn't shake off. "I mean, thank you for visiting. It's nice...to see you."
The words kept getting stuck in her throat, and she could feel her face heating up, and to make matters worse she was almost certain that Gabrielle could see it too. So she gestured towards the chairs set up at a respectable distance (they had gotten rid of the webbed window over a year ago), and said quickly, "Do you want to sit down?"
"Oh - sure." Gabrielle glanced at the chairs, and then at Cathleen, before sitting down delicately and folding her hands across her lap. Cathleen followed suit and they sat like that for a second, silently, each waiting for the other to speak. An oppressive restlessness began to fill the room, the air turning heavy between them. Cathleen began to shift self-consciously in her seat, uncertain of what to do.
"So how is -" Gabrielle began after a few moments.
"Why did you come visit me?" Cathleen blurted out the question before she could stop herself, cutting off whatever Gabrielle had been about to say. It came out rude, overly direct, but she couldn't bring herself to take it back. Now that she was here, sitting directly across from Gabrielle, there was a strange swelling in her throat, a restless expanse of nameless emotion that she couldn't push down. Suddenly, the need for an answer, for understanding, that she'd thought she'd dropped two years ago had come back in full demanding force.
Gabrielle didn't look overly pleased at the question, and paused to suck in a breath before answering.
"That's a complicated question," she answered after a moment's pause.
Cathleen shook her head. "It really isn't."
Gabrielle looked surprised at the almost forceful rebuttal, but Cathleen didn't care. It suddenly seemed hot, cloaked in her dark robes, even though it was the middle of winter, and she could feel her pulse pounding in her ears, her blood coursing hotly with something that was close to anger, close to excitement, or maybe both. A strange sense of outrage tingled over her skin, and she couldn't figure out who it was directed at. Perhaps it was towards herself, towards her body - or was it her heart, or her fickle mind? - that had completely and utterly betrayed her meticulously curated discipline.
Or perhaps it was at Gabrielle, who had the gall to just waltz right in, after all this time, and within just a few short minutes throw all of Cathleen's careful self-control out the window - as if it were nothing.
Gabrielle took a too-long second to answer, mulling over her response at what seemed an agonizingly slow pace.
"I kept thinking about you," she answered, finally, and with the answer came an unwelcome wave of relief. It washed over Cathleen, and she sucked in a breath at its intensity, wishing it away. It didn't go, and she let out the breath, unsure how to feel about that. There was a part of her that had been waiting for that exact answer, she realized. Waiting, or hoping.
Gabrielle didn't hate her. She had thought about her. Missed her even. A weight eased in her chest. She hadn't even known she'd been carrying it.
"I suppose because I left you here." Gabrielle was still talking, explaining, and Cathleen snapped her attention back to the other woman. Her hands, clasped together and buried inside her sleeves, clenched tighter.
"I felt guilty," she continued, and then backtracked almost immediately as she registered the look on Cathleen's face. "No - not like that. Not regretful of you. I felt guilty for leaving, without even saying goodbye. For not talking to you."
"Oh." Cathleen nodded, and felt her fists, tightly clenched, relax ever so slightly. "That's okay. I mean, it wasn't your fault. And I sort of - I forced you. I made it happen."
Gabrielle shook her head immediately, eyes wide. "No - that's not - you didn't force me to do anything. Those were all my own decisions. To leave, and to - everything."
"Okay." Cathleen accepted the reassurances dubiously, but put them aside for the moment, to consider later on. She would not, she decided in that moment, dwell on all the doubts collecting in her head and clouding her thoughts, not when Gabrielle was sitting across from her in person, so achingly present that it made her heart throb. She wondered if Gabrielle knew just how hard Cathleen had toiled to lock away the memory of her, stuffing it away towards the back of her mind like a wrong puzzle piece, unable to fit into any of the other parts that made up her life. Now it had been drawn out, that ill-fitting piece, and it stuck obstinately in her mind's eye. She couldn't find it in her to throw the piece away. She wasn't sure just what that meant for her.
Gabrielle was studying her intensely, doubt lingering in her brown eyes, as if she wasn't quite sure that Cathleen believed her. Cathleen wasn't quite sure herself, but she didn't want to focus on that. She shifted uncomfortably, letting her sleeves fall away from her hands, and lifted her gaze to meet Gabrielle's, who gave her a small smile. "I'm not sure if I already said this yet, but I'm happy to see you."
"Me too," Cathleen answered, and then, because she could see the question on the other woman's lips, plunged right into a new subject. "So what are you doing now? What have you been doing?"
The question fell from Gabrielle's lips as she considered Cathleen's query, and Cathleen felt a small wave of relief as she waited for her answer. Gabrielle had been about to ask about the convent, she was sure of it. She probably wanted to know the exact thing that Cathleen didn't want to answer - whether Cathleen had been afflicted with the same crisis of faith as the countless sisters that had left the monastery in a steady stream over the past two years, thanks to Vatican II.
Cathleen would allow, in this moment, that perhaps she had struggled with a crisis of faith. But it wasn't because of Vatican II.
"You ask big questions," she told her, and Cathleen answered her with a small smile and the ghost of a shrug.
"To answer your question, I've been doing a lot of things. Nothing very interesting. Some traveling, mainly working in different cities, towns. Just living. Trying to - find something, I guess."
Cathleen nodded, absorbing the words. It was the barest bones of a description. She wanted more. "It must have been more interesting than here though. What kind of places did you go visit? Any big cities?"
"Well…" Gabrielle tapped her lip thoughtfully, and Cathleen stared. It was wrong to look at the other woman's lips. Wrong to think about them. She didn't tear herself away. "I did make it all the way to San Francisco."
Cathleen let out an unintentional gasp of admiration, and immediately colored pink as Gabrielle caught the look and gave her an almost cheeky smile. "That's - wow. That's so far!"
She could have sworn Gabrielle was teasing her, because her eyes twinkled as she raised an eyebrow. "Impressed?"
"No," Cathleen said immediately, almost defensive, and Gabrielle laughed, the sound filling the room. She had a pretty laugh, Cathleen noticed absently. "I mean - it's just far. Did you see the Golden Gate Bridge though? What was it like?"
"Yes, and it was very neat. It's not gold though, did you know that? It's red, but it's enormous." Gabrielle seemed amused by Cathleen's enthusiasm, if the quirk of her lips was any indication.
"Oh, I knew that," Cathleen said before she could stop herself, and realized immediately that it was a silly, pointless lie - first, because she would have to confess later, and second, because Gabrielle obviously didn't believe her.
"Right," she answered, one eyebrow still raised, and leaned back in her chair, bringing one leg up over the other. Her jeans were faded, worn even, and Cathleen traced the whitened seams down to the scuffed brown flats she wore. Her whole outfit seemed well traveled in, as if it had stories to tell - as if she had stories to tell. "I wish I could say I had some far out stories to share about Cisco, but I just worked as a dishwasher there. It wasn't very interesting."
"C'mon," Cathleen urged, and to her own surprise the words came out playful. A far away part of her wondered just what she was doing. "There must have been something interesting. You must have gotten all that - that slang from somewhere."
"Slang?" Gabrielle tilted her head to the side, her dark hair tumbling to over her shoulders with the movement. "What do you mean?"
"Oh, you know," Cathleen said, and realized suddenly that she had been watching the way her hair tumbled freely around her neck far too closely. She ducked her head and looked down at her lap, busying her hands with a loose thread on her sleeve. "Cisco, far out, that kind of stuff."
"Oh." Gabrielle seemed taken aback as she considered this, and Cathleen wished she hadn't said anything. She didn't want her to change the words, to stop using them. They hinted at something larger, at other things in the world that she couldn't see - that she didn't know about. Things about the two year gap that lay between them, where it seemed as if Cathleen's life had simply stayed the same, whilst Gabrielle's - well, it had become all kinds of different. And there was some part of her that wanted to know every detail.
Cathleen wasn't supposed to care about those sorts of things. She knew she wasn't, knew she couldn't, but - there was something about Gabrielle's presence here which sparked that same dangerous desire in her that she'd felt two years ago.
The longing for something more. For some richness in life that she couldn't exactly picture, but could feel lurking just out of reach.
It was dangerous. It was too dangerous.
"You know what, I think I have to go." She stood suddenly, ignoring the small stab in her chest at the fallen expression that stole across Gabrielle's face. "I have a lot to do, you know, and I just -"
"It's okay, I understand." Gabrielle stood too, and Cathleen could tell by the look in her eyes that she was understanding in just the way that she didn't want her to. "I probably shouldn't have come back to visit, I know it's very unusual, for non family members - "
"It's fine, fine," Cathleen stammered, and joined her hands together under her sleeves, twisting them together anxiously, hidden beneath folds of cloth. She began to back away towards the door "I'm glad you came, really, I am. I just need to -"
"Of course." Gabrielle dipped her head, drawing her arms tightly over her chest. Her breath came out in puffs of white, and as Cathleen suddenly realized just how cold it was. She had gotten used to the chill of late fall, and her heavy robes helped, but Gabrielle was standing shivering in a worn red sweater, which hardly looked thick enough to keep out the cold.
She had nothing to offer her to defend against the chill, no extra sweater or article of clothing. The thought of reaching out to take her hand crept across her brain, and she banished it immediately. "Are you cold?"
"No, I'm fine," Gabrielle answered, but it was a lie and they both knew it. She gave a rueful smile. "I'll have to dress warmer next time."
Cathleen's eyes widened at the words, as did Gabrielle's, as she realized just exactly what she'd said. "I mean, I could come visit if you want me to, but I won't, of course, because I'm not family, and I don't want to be a distraction -"
"You're not a distraction," Cathleen jumped in, and Gabrielle fell silent, snapping her mouth shut. "I mean, you could come visit if you wanted to. I'd like it - and my mom doesn't come very much anymore," she added awkwardly.
Gabrielle nodded quickly, her cheeks flushing a faint pink - maybe from embarrassment. Cathleen couldn't tell, but it made her stomach flutter strangely. "Okay, that's great. I mean, I'll come to visit. On the next visiting day."
"Good," Cathleen answered, and silence feel between them. She couldn't think of anything to say, but she felt like she had to say something, so she opened her mouth - only to be interrupted by the bells that signaled the end of the visiting time.
"I suppose that's all?" Gabrielle asked as the toll of the bell trailed off, and Cathleen nodded.
"Now I really do have to go," she said, and turned to the door behind her, pushing it open - and then paused, hovering on the threshold. "Gabrielle?"
"Hmm?" Gabrielle answered from across the room, unconsciously rubbing her arms up and down against the chill. She looked a bit uncertain, standing forlornly in the small yet conspicuously bare room.
"Thank you for coming," Cathleen said, and risked one last quick smile, the kind that filled up her face and reached all the way to her eyes. She didn't see if Gabrielle returned it, because she was already out the door and halfway down the hallway before the sickening realization of what she had done hit her. Her breath began to come quicker, short gasps puffing out in white clouds, as her brain caught up to her chest. Her heart was beating fast, not like the fluttering that it had been doing in the room. This was a bad sort of fast, the kind of panicky pounding that came from knowing that she had done something wrong. Something bad.
And the worst part, the part that filled her stomach with a guilty nausea, was the airy happiness bubbling obstinately up in her throat from the meeting. She shook her head, trying to shake the image of Gabrielle, waiting for her in the drab visiting room, her red sweater hanging loosely over her thin frame, her faded jeans and her dark hair which feel freely over her shoulders, the way she laughed, her brown eyes crinkling warmly -
No. No. It was wrong. She couldn't think about Gabrielle like that. Couldn't think about her at all.
Her thoughts spun as the guilt sank heavily into her stomach, and Cathleen began to run.