Chapter 1
Prompt: "I'm homesick for a place that I'm not even sure exists" from writing-prompt-s on Tumblr. Thanks to lovetheturners for the beta
Sister Bernadette lay awake in her cell praying. She knew she should be sleeping. After all, it was only three hours until she would be awakened for Lauds and then another day on call would begin. But she could not stop her mind from turning, ever turning back to that smile… that face which dogged her dreams of late. And rather than dwell on what she could not have, what she knew she should not want to have, every time his face surfaced in her mind, she would pray.
She had been praying a lot lately.
She prayed over her confusion. She prayed over her doubt. She prayed for forgiveness of her vanity – why did she care so much about what her hair looked like, no one would see it? Why did she care that the nurses loved her new glasses? Why did she wish a certain doctor would notice them? She prayed and prayed and prayed.
And yet, his face, that lopsided grin, the unruly bit of hair falling into his eyes, those eyes that held grief and joy, sadness and love, kept reasserting itself in her mind's eye. "Forgive me, Lord…" she whispered softly, "I don't know what to do!"
There was his face again. It was becoming more and more insistent of its presence in her mind. It grew handsomer by the day and Sister Bernadette had no way to stop it. It just kept coming back: his smile, his hair, his eyes, his muscular forearms… she gasped, suddenly breathless. That picture was a new one. She felt the need to sit up in the bed, attempting the shake away the image from her mind and regain air into her lungs. Why had she never noticed those forearms before?
The prayers began again. They continued another hour until Sister Bernadette was finally exhausted enough to sleep. The prayers persisted as she spent the day with Dr. Turner on the x-ray van, increasing as he gave her that loving smile. When Dr. Turner broke the news of the TB found in her lungs, she thought that the prayers might finally shift away from this man toward something else – shouldn't she begin to pray for her physical healing now? Instead, the prayers took on a desperate tone in her mind as she stood with her habit unbuttoned and he slipped his stethoscope just below the top of her slip. He never touched her skin, but he didn't have to. Her mind was filled only with images of him, of what it would feel like if he had touched her or if he had held her in his arms the way she desperately wanted him to.
Sister Bernadette didn't sleep that night. She was not at all surprised. "What do I do now? What happens next?" she prayed fervently, seeking answers from a God who had seemed to grow silent lately. "I feel lost and confused. It's like I'm homesick for a place that I'm not even sure exists! How could it exist? I am a nun, I have taken a vow, I have made a commitment to my sisters… how could any other place be home?" Yet even as she prayed those words and that man appeared in her mind again, she knew she wanted to find out.