The sound of the key in the door jarred me from my half-sleep. Shoot. I shouldn’t have left it in the usual spot. Then Cat would’ve had to sulk outside, waiting for forgiveness. And it would have served her right.

But the door sprang open and a thin shaft of light fell across the far wall of my bedroom anyway.

I screwed my eyes shut, even as my bed creaked with her familiar weight near my knees. I tried to feign sleep, but it was no use, my breathing wasn’t deep enough, and we both knew it.

Her cold fingertips brushed against my scalp, and my muscles instinctively relaxed. She knew I loved it when she played with my hair, and she brandished that knowledge like a peace treaty.

She swallowed hard and gave a shaky exhale. "Hey.”

I opened my eyes and clenched my jaw, my whole body stiffening in protest.

"Hey, Lu," she whispered. "You okay?"

I snorted in response. What kind of question was that? I stared straight ahead at my curtained window.

"That's a lot of tissues," Cat remarked, undeterred by my silence.

My eyes traveled to the heap of crumpled Kleenex next to my bed. A mountain of woe.

Astute observation, Cat. I'd nearly gone through an entire box.

"You could’ve put them in a trash can, at least."

Something about that comment broke me. Like she could still play the part of the nagging older sister, like she hadn’t just knifed me in the heart two hours ago. I sat up and glared at her through red-rimmed eyes. "My door was locked for a reason, you know. What do you want?"

There was a flash of hurt in Cat's eyes, she shoved it down quickly and gave a soft smile. "I just want to talk to you.” She reached for my hair again, but I ducked out of her reach. "We um…we kind of ended on a bad note earlier, and I just wanted to fix that."

Tears threatened to restart, and I was determined to get Cat out of my room before they did. "Are you still leaving?" Inside me was a volcano, and the words seeping between my teeth were as hot and acidic as magma.

Cat's eyebrows scrunched, and I could tell she was figuring how to answer. But her silence was incriminating enough.

"Right," I said. "Then you can't fix this."

I laid down and drew my blankets over my head with a tug sharp enough to force her to stand. If this was a play, it would’ve been the perfect time for her to exit stage right. Instead, I could feel her hovering there, suspended between hope and hurt.

"Lu.”

The way she said it was almost a whisper, but something in her voice touched a place just above my sternum, and I couldn't help but feel a little guilty. I allowed myself an audible sigh.

"Let's go for a drive," she said.

I was about to tell her that it was her God-given right to drive wherever she pleased, but then my coat hit me in the head. Cat’s footsteps thumped down the stairs.

I sat up and stared at my coat, unsure if I would give her the satisfaction of following. But I would follow her to the ends of the earth, and she knew it.

"Fine," I hissed. I tugged my coat on and hurried down to the garage.

~

I pressed my forehead against the glass and hugged my knees to my chest as we flew down the nearly empty interstate.

Tonight was Christmas night, and it seemed the world was finally at rest. It really was a silent night.

The string lights from houses and lamp poles and window displays all blurred by in hazy streaks. The engine hummed as Cat accelerated and decelerated across lanes. Her geriatric green van vibrated with the exertion.

We might have driven for twenty minutes. It might have been half of an eternity. But soon Cat's tires were crunching over gravel and I was jarred from my hypnotic stupor. The brights swept the foliage on either side of the car, but a wall of black that could have been nothing other than the river kept pace to the left. The trees soon gave way to a wide strip of gravel, rutted with deep tracks and settled silt.

Cat killed the engine, and we sat in silence until the cab lights faded. A couple of barges puttered along, their lights revolving like lighthouses, creating wakes on the surface of the muddy drink and sending the lights from the casino on the opposite shore into a dance over the surface. At last I turned my eyes from a buoy a few yards off shore and said, "Why did you bring me here?"

Cat gave me a withering look from behind the wheel, as if she lacked the strength to produce the obvious answer. She wanted to get me alone, that much was for certain, away from the prying ears of our brothers and parents who’d want to referee. But why she’d chosen the river was anyone’s guess.

We sat for another half an eternity before I spoke again. "You know, I might not have gotten so pissed if you would have told me first."

~

I had no clue that anything was amiss until Cat had sat everyone down after Christmas dinner. She'd corralled our younger brothers and parents into the living room.

She’d stood before us, looking positively radiant in the red velvet dress she’d worn that night to Vigil Mass. The way the light from the Christmas tree had limned her silhouette, she almost looked angelic. But this angel had a sad little smile at the corners of her lips. Her shaking fingers kept playing with the pleats of her skirt.

"Thank you all for a lovely Christmas dinner,” she began. “It means so much to be with you to celebrate Christ's birth together. I love you all very much…"

It was then that her gaze found mine, and she faltered. Her eyes were already asking for forgiveness for what she was going to say next. "I regret to say…that this may be my last Christmas among you all."

My heart was beating fast, too fast. I nearly choked on it.

"Quite recently I submitted an application to be received as a postulant into the Carmelite order. Should I be accepted, my entrance into the convent would occur on the feast of the Assumption on August 15th. As this is a cloistered order, this may be my last Christmas outside the convent—"

Cat kept talking, but I didn’t hear it. My ears roared. The room was too hot. My spit tasted sour. My brothers were asking questions now, too overwhelmed with words like ‘cloister’ and ‘postulant’ to understand the subtext. But I knew. And my question wheezed out through a tight throat: "So in August you're leaving me forever?"

I hadn't meant to sound so demanding. I also hadn't meant to say 'me', but it came out anyway. Cat turned to me with a look so close to pity it made my skin crawl. Clearly this was not the reaction she had hoped for, but the reaction she'd expected.

"If I’m accepted, provided I don't discern that it's not my calling sometime in formation, I won’t leave the convent again. But, I'm allowed to have visitors—"

I don't remember rising. I don't remember marching up the stairs. But just like that, my bedroom door was slammed and locked. I cried until my throat was raw.

~

I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my coat. "Why didn't you tell me first?"

Cat turned to me, reached out to touch my hair again, but her hand fell back as if she too sensed the chasm between us.

"I wanted to," she whispered. "I searched for days for the proper words. But I didn’t have the courage to say it all twice. Once to you and then to the boys. So I lumped you in with them. And I'm sorry. You deserve better than that."

Even if 'sorry' did nothing to close the gap, at least it was something. It was like someone planting a kiss on a broken bone. It didn't fix it. But at least they knew it hurt like hell.

"When did you tell Mom and Dad?"

"When I asked for my application papers at the end of my last visit with the Sisters, I didn't want to worry you over nothing, in case I didn’t end up submitting it. But they…they've known for a while."

My anger reared again, at the thought of my parents’ intentional silence. I slammed my palms down on the dash. "God, Cat! You have your whole life in front of you!"

Cat’s nose wrinkled at my blasphemy, but she didn’t dare correct me. She wet her lips before speaking again, "Do you remember that line that Frodo says near the end of the Return of the King movie?"

I wasn't sure what my affinity for The Lord of the Rings had to do with anything, but I blinked, waiting for her to continue.

"He says," she supplied, "'How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand, there is no going back?'" She let the quote hang there. I let my gaze drift out the window, where the lights still grew and shrank. Our breath ballooned around us in clouds.

"When I first visited the Carmelites two years ago," Cat said. "I didn't really expect much. I mean, I'd visited other orders before. But from the moment I stepped inside, I knew there was something different there…" Cat trailed off and her eyes too drifted to the river. But she wasn't looking at the lights, or the barges, or any of that, instead she was looking past them, toward something I'd never be able to see. "It was so beautiful…"

And suddenly Cat was no longer with me. She was already tucked in a little convent chapel wearing her simple, threadbare habit, somewhere I would never be able to reach her.

"After I left," she whispered, "I knew I couldn’t be the same after that. I couldn't just slip back into my daily life like that place didn't exist. Because it did. And it was a possibility. It's like…" She scrunched her eyebrows and looked down at her palms like she didn't recognize them anymore. "Each time after I visited, when I returned to normal life, it was like I was trying to fit back into shoes that didn’t really fit anymore. Like I was trying to continue a life I’d begun to outgrow…"

And I knew that she considered this a satisfactory explanation, but too much about me was too unsettled to accept it.

"That's all very romantic and everything," I said, my voice boarding on a growl. "But this isn't a damn Whoopi Goldberg movie. This is your life, and you're going to throw it all away at the age of twenty-two to sit and sew chapel veils with a bunch of old ladies."

Cat recoiled like I'd slapped her. "Look, I don't expect you to understand. After all, this isn't exactly a normal thing for someone to want to do, but that doesn't change the fact that I mean to do it."

I searched her, trying to read her, but if there were answers, they were buried too deeply in her soul for me to even begin to reach. "Why now?" I croaked. "Cat, I know you liked it there…but you were just talking about grad school last summer. And you hadn’t mentioned nuns at all in like a year and I…I thought you were going to be around for such a long time."

And I knew the tears were coming again, and I bit my bottom lip and pulled upward with my teeth as if that alone could create a dam strong enough to hold my flood of emotions.

"I know," Cat said. "I thought I had longer too. But—”

“But?”

She fiddled with the knob for the windshield wipers. “My time between visits with the Sisters became agony, Lucy. And the thought of waiting any longer than I have to is so painful—"

"But Cat, what about the things you’re going to miss? My prom? My graduation? My wedding! You were supposed to be there, Cat!" The last three words escalated to a yell, and the dam broke.

My shoulders shook, and Cat looked like she wanted to reach across the car and embrace me, but the chasm between us was too wide, and so she let me grieve by myself. I hugged my arms around my stomach and my next question came out in a shuddering gasp."Why can’t you just stay?”

Cat looked at me and gave me a sad little smile, and at that moment I knew.

Once, when Cat and I were younger, we went to the park to fly kites. I accidentally let go of mine when a particularly strong wind hit. Cat had chased my kite down, and I had run after her until I'd found her over a crest of a hill standing amidst a field of sunflowers, holding my kite, touching her lips, and looking at the sky.

"What is it?" I'd asked her. "Why are you standing like that?"

She’d puzzled over the sky, two fingers still pressed to her lips and she'd said, just loud enough for me to hear, "I feel like I've just been kissed."

I never asked her 'by whom'. Later, Mom told me that Cat had said the same thing after her First Communion.

She had always been His. But I pretended not to know in hopes that she could stay mine.

Cat jarred me from my reflection by rifling through her coat pocket. I thought for a moment she was going to offer me a tissue until I saw her bring a closed fist out of her coat pocket. She passed me two Christmas cookies, wrapped in a napkin.

"I saved these for you," she said. “You were in your room when they finally came out of the oven. I had to fight the boys off for them—you know Auggie can’t help himself—” And just like that, a hiccuping little laugh came out of me as I sucked on the icing of the little shortbread ornament and stared at the rest of the crumbling cookies in my hand. The tears were still coming, but slower now.

I heard a rustling noise, and Cat was smoothing something against the dashboard. She reached up, clicked on the overhead light, and held a little pamphlet out to me. Rows and rows of little brown-habited nuns stared back at me. Some of them were a collection of wrinkles, squished by the confines of their wimples. Others were youthful, wide eyed, near Cat's age. There might've been thirty of them.

"These are, hopefully, my future Sisters," Cat said.

My replacements. The thought came unbidden, but I swallowed it down with another bite of cookie. Cat and I had always lamented that in a family of eight we were outnumbered by boys. She’d hardly have that problem now, would she?

"I'm going to be visiting them again in March if you want to come with me..."

I stared at the picture trying to come up with a reason to hate all of them for taking my sister away, but there wasn't enough hate left in me. In truth, there was something so Cat-like in all of their expressions. It was the same sureness, the same openness that seemed to radiate from her. They would accept her, of course. Why wouldn’t they? Even through a crumpled photograph I knew she'd fit right in.

And I couldn’t resent her, then. For wanting it. For wanting to go somewhere where she’d belong and be so happy. I only resented that it was somewhere I couldn’t follow.

But not so long ago, on the eve of her departure from college, I’d been scared of losing her then, even if she’d just gone across town. But I hadn’t, really. Things had just looked different. And I prayed, even now, that I could get used to a different kind of different.

I swallowed thickly and managed, “Yeah. I think that’d be nice.”

A sob rose and suddenly Cat was sharing my seat with me, her arms were around me, my face pressed into her honey-scented hair.

And there were crumbs on her jacket and mascara smears on my cheeks and Cat's chin was on my head. I felt the rubble of a laugh begin deep in her chest.

"What?" I demanded. "What's so funny?" I pulled back, wiped my nose on my sleeve.

"Nothing," Cat shook her head. "It's just, you're beautiful, Lu. And good.” Her thumb traced my jaw. "And you’ll do so many beautiful things. Even if I'm not here to see them."

Me, always so eager for her praise, soaked in her words like a tree soaking in sunlight.

It would take learning, this would. I’d have to learn how to pack a lifetime into eight months. How to press her into memory like a flower between book pages. I’d have to learn how to live with half of my heart beating in someone else's chest dozens of miles away. I’d have to learn how to remain whole even though the threads connecting us would only stretch further.

"Do you have any more cookies?" I asked with a hiccup.

The corners of Cat's eyes wrinkled. She produced more from her other pocket.

I fell asleep to the thrumming of the car engine and church bells ringing for midnight Mass.