Debrah Miszak By Debrah Miszak
Maggie promised Sister Teresa she would maintain her commitment to pray the rosary every morning during her visit home. She relished the pain in her knees as they supported her weight on the hardwood floor.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Maggie crossed herself. She used her great-grandmother’s set of beads. They’d been like a security blanket to her since she died ten years prior. Maggie meditated on the first Sorrowful mystery: the Agony in the Garden. She pictured Jesus in Gethsemane, alone and afraid amongst his sleeping apostles.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
She didn’t have friends.
She had her sisters (her real sisters, as they often reminded her), Stacy and Lindsay. She left them for the Dominicans. During their final conversation about her vocation, she told Stacy— the oldest— that she couldn’t criticize her. Because Stacy left them for Peter. In truth, nobody else felt left behind except for Maggie; nobody else was angry at her, or hurt, but she didn’t tell Stacy that. She didn’t say she missed her, or that she was restless, and the order offered a way for her to structure her life and to belong somewhere. Such vulnerability would’ve been abhorrent.
At least she wasn’t a slut. That was the thing Maggie said instead. Stacy hung up on her after that.
Before her parents dropped her off at the airport, she thought about calling Stacy to make things right. Before she could dial her number, she imagined the smugness in her voice— how she would say she knew that Maggie would come around eventually and admit she was wrong. She thought about texting her instead. She typed out a long-winded apology but deleted it as soon as she finished.
They didn’t speak for the first two months of her postulancy. Stacy sent a birthday card to the convent, and after that, they sporadically sent each other funny videos via text message. Everyone was surprised she got to keep her cell phone, but, secretly, it was one of the reasons she chose the Dominicans. She spoke with a girl on retreat once who was joining a Carmelite order in California. She said they would only allow her one phone call to one relative a week. Her parents were divorced, and she had seven siblings.
At the time, Maggie couldn’t imagine having to choose between her family and her vocation in that way. In her small bedroom at the motherhouse— smaller than her dorm at college— she stayed awake late into the night, missing them and resisting the urge to call her mother and ask to come home. She wished she didn’t have a choice.
Maggie and Stacy hadn’t heard each other’s voices since The Phone Call until three days ago, when Maggie had squished her body into the middle of her parents’ backseat. Stacy’s voice had been tight. Her syllables had come out hard and over-pronounced. Maggie had waited for her to loosen up.
Three days later, she was still waiting.
It surprised her that everyone was still asleep when she tiptoed downstairs. Every other morning, when she reluctantly tore herself away from the quiet protection that prayer offered to her introverted nature, she had found her parents and sisters at the table, laughing with one another at such a volume that Maggie’s chest tightened with every step forward. Even as a child, she had to brace herself for the intensity of their social interactions. It was a relief to beat them to the kitchen. She could slip out the front door without her mother shoving a plate of eggs and bacon into her face.
In three more steps, she would be in her mother’s car and en route to St. Edith’s. Daily Mass was obligatory at her stage of discernment. She knew older nuns who sometimes skipped Sunday Mass and confessed it to a priest later, but she couldn’t understand them. The inside of a church was the only place she could feel God. Sister Bernadette had laughed at that when she said it in total earnest her first weekend there.
“I’m seventy-five,” she had said, “and I can’t understand how young people like you think that way. Isn’t it obvious that God is in the spaces between everything else? That God is in the changes we all go through?”
The conversation still confused her six months later. Even in prayer by herself, God wasn’t there. The saints? Sure. The Virgin Mary? Absolutely. Jesus? No. God? No. The Holy Spirit? No. It didn’t bother her before Sister Bernadette’s comments. No one had ever told her she should find God anywhere alongside her. So, she relished in going to Him. There were no musicians at Daily Mass, and while she liked to hear the choir on Sundays, there was something penitential about the somber, quiet service. She looked forward to it.
Father Ben, the priest from her childhood, the one who baptized her, and her parents, too, when they were babies, was a gift. He was the one who guided her toward her vocation, the one who told her to listen to her yearning. It was a consolation to hear his voice again. She hadn’t been able to say a proper hello to him since she came home. She would arrive early this time so they could catch up with one another.
Before she could touch the brass door handle, a familiar noise stopped her.
Lindsay. She knew the way her younger sister’s breathing sounded right before she began to cry from many childhood temper tantrums and mistake-laden piano recitals.
“Are you okay?”
“Do you have a minute?” Lindsay asked. “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. She bit the inside of her cheek to stop her face from betraying the annoyance rising within her. She just wanted to leave. “It’s okay. What’s going on?”
Lindsay took a deep breath before sliding her cell phone out of her pocket. Her clammy hand brushed against Maggie’s as she passed her the phone with an unlocked screen.
“These are texts between Stacy and me. I pulled her aside to ask why Peter didn’t come home with her this year because Mom and Dad were being cagey about it. I don’t know what to do, and—”
“Give me a minute.” Maggie held her hand up to prevent Lindsay from talking.
“To be honest,” Maggie said once she finished, “I don’t see what the big deal is. These things happen in a marriage. She shouldn’t be talking to you about this. You’re too young.”
“Who is she supposed to talk to?” Lindsay asked. “You?”
Maggie sighed.
“What did Mom and Dad say? Do they know? If anybody has to deal with this, it should be them. They like Peter.”
Lindsay put her head in her hands. Maggie rubbed her back, but her eyes focused on the white wall in front of her. She pictured Stacy. Stacy, the prettiest and smartest of them all. Stacy, who married her college boyfriend and moved as far away from Michigan as she could. She bought a house with an open-concept floor plan and an in-ground pool when she was only twenty-five.
The first time their parents flew to Texas to visit, they said it was like going to a resort. Maggie imagined it, the paradise she traded their wasteland of defunct steel mills and seedy corner bars for, and hated her for it even more now, because she knew she’d done the same. Stacy invited her to visit, to stay for a week before she “made a commitment she might regret.” That was before The Phone Call. She’d brushed her off. She didn’t want to see Stacy’s middle-class Mount Olympus. She willed away the nausea that encroached upon her empty stomach and threatened to send her to the bathroom to vomit up dinner from the night before. Self-loathing was indulgent and inappropriate.
“They only know about the cheating,” Lindsay said. “Not the drugs.”
Maggie shrugged.
“Stacy took vows,” she said. “‘In sickness and in health,’ remember? She has to see it through. It’s not your problem, or mine, or Mom and Dad’s that she picked a crappy husband. They’re married. She’s pregnant. They can’t just break up because things are rough.”
“I know, I’m not saying they should split up. I just—”
“Then I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation,” Maggie said.
“I don’t understand you anymore,” Lindsay said. “I’m not asking you to fix their marriage, or to beg her to leave him, or to do anything like that.”
“What do you want, then?” Maggie asked.
“For the love of God,” she said. “I want you to give a damn about your big sister. She cares about you. She said so. Everyone worries about you, and your choices, and your journey and blah, blah, blah. Could you try having some empathy? That’s what I want.”
Maggie shifted in her seat. She softened.
“Listen,” Maggie said. “I know it’s been hard on you to be caught between the two of us. I do care about Stacy. I care about her a lot. I love her a lot, and this all sucks. Could you just tell her—”
“I’m not telling her anything,” she said. “Grow up.”
Lindsay walked up back up the stairs. Maggie could tell she was being careful not to stomp too much, so as not to bother anyone still asleep, but just enough to convey her disdain.
She drove to the parish in silence. When St. Edith’s came into view, some of the tension in her shoulders dissipated. As soon as she opened the heavy door, she realized she missed the liturgy.
Father Ben emerged from an old, dusty confessional with a silver-haired woman who hugged him before dabbing at her cheeks with a lipstick-stained tissue that she dug out from her coat pocket.
With his bent posture, he stood shorter than Maggie, and he was thinner than she remembered him. She never noticed him growing smaller before. In her mind, he looked the way he did fifteen years ago when she made her First Communion. This undeniable evidence of time’s passage frightened her.
He teased the woman, who kissed his cheek and left a reddish-pink mark in her wake.
He still had the same warmth about him that she remembered from childhood. Once, when Maggie was serving Mass in fifth grade, an old man, Mr. Opalewski— whose wife had died long before— chastised a volunteer for handing him the wrong hymnal at the beginning of Mass. He was so distraught that he yelled at her in front of everyone about how he needed to sit in his pew no later than ten minutes before Mass so that his wife’s soul would be accepted into heaven. The injustice of it angered young Maggie, but when she asked Fr. Ben about why the volunteer didn’t stand up for herself, he told her the Church only existed for broken people. It didn’t answer her question.
The old woman turned to leave. Fr. Ben waved her over to him.
“Stacy! You came for Reconciliation?” His voice was quieter and more diminutive than she remembered.
“No, actually. I wanted to come to Mass. I must have had the time wrong, and it’s not Stacy, Father Ben. It’s me, Maggie.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “Maggie. Your sister is Stacy, though, correct?”
Maggie’s eyes wandered. She couldn’t look at him. His agedness made her chest tighten. She knew he had a stroke while she was gone. Her mother called her, crying, asking her to pray for him. Nobody told her it had affected him so much.
“Yes,” she said. He clasped her hand. “My older sister is Stacy; my younger sister is Lindsay. I’m the one who’s becoming a Dominican, Father.”
“My apologies, Maggie,” he said. “It’s my age, you know. It makes things harder to keep track of. You had the time right, but we don’t do Mass on Thursdays anymore. There wasn’t enough of a demand. We only do Confession. Anyway, how long since your last confession?”
“Longer than I should’ve pushed it.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. We all do that. It’s a hard sacrament. Do you mind if we do it in a pew? I don’t want to be in the confessional anymore. Old people like it, but I don’t.”
Maggie forced herself to smile.
“I might be eighty-five, but what they say about age and mindsets is true. I keep my mind set on God. He’s not done with me yet.”
He sat beside her.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Don’t you want me to list my sins?”
“Is that what you want to do? I think talking through the things that bother us or the things we feel bad about can be more healing than rattling off a written list of times we were rude to our mothers or gossiped about our friends.”
Maggie picked at her cuticles, then looked up at his blue eyes. Cataracts were forming within them.
“My sister and I can’t stand each other because I ruined our relationship.”
Father Benjamin nodded. She waited for him to prompt her, to say something wise without making her beg for it, but a kind smile remained fixed on his closed mouth.
“How do you think you ‘ruined your relationship’?”
“I said horrible things to her. Things she won’t forgive me for. I wouldn’t even ask her to.”
“Maggie,” he said. “It’s good to confess to God, but you’ll find your penance when you apologize to your sister.”
“We can’t talk. I don’t know how to talk to her anymore.”
“Is Stacy the one in high school?” Father Ben asked. He didn’t wait for her to answer. “She’s probably getting ready for college. Talk to her about your experience. Talk to her about your order. Find some common ground. What led you to your vocation and her to whatever she chooses to study? Love. Love is something you both have in common.”
“Sorry, father, that’s Lindsay. Stacy is the one who is married, and I know you might think love comes—”
“Sorry, Maggie,” he said, hitting himself on the forehead. “It’s my damn age again. One day, I’ll be out of this old body, but when that happens, I won’t get to talk to you so easily, and so I appreciate what I can do right now.”
Maggie stared at the kneeler at the bottom of the pew in front of her, ashamed of herself for correcting him, of reminding him of his mortality.
“I don’t know if she and I have love in common either. I don’t know if that’s how we found our vocations, I mean. She left first, and she left me here—”
Fr. Benjamin’s demeanor changed. He sat straighter in the pew. Maggie stared at his mouth, then at the pained expression of Christ on the cross. He didn’t respond to what she said.
“Did I ever tell you how I came to join the Jesuits?”
“Yes, Father,” she said, restraining herself from stating her name. “You were a teenager, like I was. You knew God wanted more from you.”
His brow furrowed, and he placed his hand on her shoulder.
“No,” he said. “That’s not the story.”
He shook his head and looked up at her face. He clutched her hand.
“I joined the Jesuits because I was afraid.”
Maggie stared at the nails in Jesus’s hands and feet.
“My father was an alcoholic. He hit my mother. I was a little boy.”
The old man wept, and his frail body quivered. Maggie froze, terrified of his emotion.
“My father had a pistol. Late one night, my father and mother were yelling at each other, and I got out of bed. My older sister did, too. My mother was on her knees and crying, and he—”
His voice cracked.
“He had the gun to her head. I hid by the stairs, but my sister went out to where they were. My father saw her, and he dropped the gun, and he left. My mother just stared at my sister. She just stared and her face was— I can’t even describe it. I don’t know what happened after that because I ran back to my room and hid.”
He paused and stared into his lap.
“The next morning, we were home alone. The gun was back in my father’s sock drawer. My mother, even during all that, thought to put the gun away. I found it, and I buried it in the backyard using her garden trowel. It was the only thing I could think to do, but I had to do something because I had hidden when my sister swallowed her own fear to protect our mother.”
He stopped to steady his breathing.
“I went inside covered in filth, and my sister found me standing in the living room. She held me, and I couldn’t stop crying, and she told me everything would be alright. When she got home that night, Mother told us she had spoken to a lawyer about a divorce. But then, Father came home. They continued on like that.”
He looked up at her, and his gaze forced her to meet him there. His eyes were wide in horror.
“I went to the seminary when I was fourteen and made first vows when I was eighteen,” he said. “I left my older sister to deal with our parents herself. I left her. I left her there and I never apologized or thanked her. Even when she grew up and started her family, they were her burden. Like a good sister, she never asked me for help. She was the daughter, and I— I was the one with the calling, the one who God chose. It was an honor to have a priest in the family. My mother always said that when I made my quick visits. I could never stay long enough to hear her complain. I couldn’t forgive her for staying with him. I couldn’t forgive him. Joining the priesthood was the only thing I could do.”
Maggie looked away. She stared at the red-and-white poinsettias decorating the stairs up to the altar. Christmas was only a few days away. It was the end of Advent, the end of the period of hopeful anticipation of things to come.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said all that. The doctor said I’m losing my filter. I’m sorry. Is there anything else I can talk to you about? Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
Maggie pitied him, and the arrogance of the feeling disgusted her.
“Yes, Father. Thank you.”
“Wait,” he said. “Mary, did I ever tell you that the Church is for broken people?”
She paused.
“Yes.”
He nodded. She waited.
“Good,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
He stood up from the pew and performed the absolution blessing. When he finished, he leaned down and kissed her forehead. He told her to be well and shuffled away toward the rectory.
In the car, the sun was pale and bright through the wispy clouds. She put the key in the ignition, but the act of turning it seemed like an impossible gesture.
Out of an old, absent-minded habit, she opened the center console to take a piece of her mother’s spearmint gum. Lying on top was a wrinkled, coffee-stained photo she recognized from its previous tenure as a fixture in her mother’s wallet. There they were: Stacy, Maggie, and Lindsay at twelve, seven, and two, posed in their Easter dresses against a pink backdrop.
Finally, her own tears erupted. Her body convulsed and shuddered in the seat, and she held the steering wheel to steady herself. When the earthquake within her subsided and quiet tears replaced the panicked, hot ones, she stared down at the photo once more before folding it back into its neat, small square. She placed it back where she found it and started the car.
She drove home in silence, in case the quiet would help her hear something holy, something that would make more sense to her for once. No nonmigratory birds sang for her. No schoolchildren whooped or hollered on the playground she drove past. The terrier in the backyard on the corner didn’t bark in her direction. The quiet hum of the running vehicle droned on. She kept crying. Frigid, gold sunbeams enveloped her when she turned onto her parents’ street, acting as Midas to the SUV and everything in it.
Saltwater droplets slid down her face and fell onto the photo, which was distorted now from the morning light’s illumination. Her breath quickened as she tried to avoid the glare. She put the car in park when she finally reached the driveway, put her head in her hands, and wiped her eyes on the way back up. She reached for the picture once more. The girls in it smiled back at her with the placidity of strangers.
They were taunting her, and the wetness staining her cheeks, and the trails her tears left behind. No, she realized, moving the photo out of the light and into a spot of shade on her lap. They weren’t making fun of her. They wanted her to remember them. She slipped the picture into her purse.
Prayer would give her the courage needed to leave the warmth of the vehicle. She reached into the interior zipper pocket for her great-grandmother’s rosary and felt the carved wooden beads between her fingers. Her hand glided to her forehead and began the Sign of the Cross, but she found herself frozen. The words to these prayers, the ones she said multiple times a day, would not come. She took a deep breath and looked at her family’s small house through the window. It was time to step into the cold morning sun.
Tears swelled out of her eyes again as she reached for the door. They felt something like anointing oils, something like the waters of baptism, and something like instruments of grace.
Debrah Miszak is a writer in Metro Detroit, where she lives with her fiance and their husky/Boston terrier rescue, Frodo. Her work has appeared in The Opiate, Wrongdoing Magazine, and Spoonie Mag.
Why we chose this piece: Debrah’s exploration of fraught sibling relationships against the backdrop of the complexities of religion and faith is thoughtful and resonated with us a lot. We also appreciated how Debrah unapologetically showcases Maggie’s flaws and that people’s imperfections eventually bring on her own self-awareness.
