Missing Sisters -SA by Gregory Maguire Page B

top ones. Were they to keep girls from falling or from jumping?
    Miami wondered. “Creepy,” said Garth. That just about summed it up.

    Sister John Bosco opened the front door. Father Laverty was in a sitting room off to one side, looking hot and peevish in his black clothes. He bulged inside them as if quilted there. He was fanning himself with an issue of Catholic Digest . A statue of Our Lady, with a chip in her foot, presided from a side table. A plate of homemade cookies and glasses of lemonade waited on a tray. The chairs were a thousand years old, straight and flat and dark and horrible; they made you repent just to look at them. “Won’t you have a seat,” ordered Sister John Bosco. “I’ll get Alice.” Father Laverty, Miami noticed, had taken the only upholstered chair for himself. She couldn’t blame him.

    Then it was “Father Kevin” and “Joe” and “Joan” and “the little ones,” chummy as a cocktail party. Miami blanked out for a while, imagining that Sister John Bosco would return on the run with news that Alice was nowhere to be found.

    “But what a name, Miami,” Father Laverty was saying to her. “There’s no Saint Miami in the community of saints, as you well know.”

    “Yeah, where did my name come from?” Miami had never asked before.

    “She was Carol before,” said Mrs. Shaw. “We had a lot of advice on how to adjust her ideas of family life when she came to us. She was in a bad way. Doesn’t remember much of it, do you, dolly?” She smiled. “So we gave her a new first name and shifted Carol to a middle position, and since we weren’t sure, we invented a new birthday to mark a new beginning for Miami Carol Shaw.”

    “But Miami?” pressed Father Laverty, sneaking a glance at his watch.

    “That was my mother’s maiden name,” said Mrs. Shaw. “I was adopted, too. We wanted to build the sense of family history. My mother died a few years ago, but while she was alive she loved Miami very much, and the name is now passed on.”

    “I sound like a football team or an airport,” said Miami.

    Then Sister John Bosco returned, calmly, quietly, steering Alice Colossus by the shoulder.

    Alice shrugged at Miami. “Couldn’t slip away. Too many nuns around,” she said, or that was what Miami guessed she had said.

    Sister John Bosco passed around the cookies and lemonade. Fanny and Rachelle were set on the floor to gnaw at the legs of the beastly chairs or whatever else they could get into. “Now we’re all together again,” said Sister John Bosco. “The second of many such meetings, I’m sure.
    Will you start, Father Laverty?”

    The priest stared at his cookie as if asking it for guidance. Then he looked around at each of them, a nice uncomplicated look into all their eyes, and said, “We’re here for two reasons.
    We’re here to understand why Alice Colossus is not Alice Shaw, and why she can’t be, won’t be.
    It’ll take a long time to understand this, and today is just a beginning. We also need to invent some ways Alice Colossus and Miami Shaw can come to know each other as sisters. As twins, in fact. They will be in each other’s lives from now on, for as long as they live, and nobody is going to stand in the way of that . So this day’s work is partly hard, and may involve some tears, and partly joyful, because the hand of God and the surprising initiative of Alice have pulled the cloak of mystery away from our eyes.”

    Miami almost murmured, “Amen,” but controlled herself.

    Father Laverty went on with such delicacy, such gentleness, that at times Miami couldn’t follow. But the gist of it seemed to be that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance on a pancake griddle anyone was going to let Alice get adopted by the Shaws. First, there was money. Then there were the laws of the state of New York. There were Miami’s needs as a preteen recovering from nasty early years she could hardly remember. There were Alice’s special needs. There was