The cell phone protruded from the garbage bin of the bathroom stall I was in at the Metropolitan Museum. It rang four times before I grabbed some toilet paper, wound it around my hand like a glove and answered.

“Thank goodness,” the woman on the phone said. “I’ve been driving for hours.”

“Hello?”

“The roads are black.”

“Ma’am, who are you trying to reach? “

“I got you, didn't I?”

“This isn’t my phone, I found this phone, it’s not—“

“I know why I’m going now.”

“Ma’am, listen to me.”

“In my dream I was moving. There was something in the distance and I was moving toward it and my life made sense to me right then. I’m headed in the right direction. If only these roads weren’t so damn dark.”

Her voice was nasal, but there was a hoarse undertone to it that came from smoking cigarettes, I supposed, or drinking hard alcohol. It was a voice that was on the verge of cracking in two, like a wishbone.

“Who is this? Tell me who you are,” I said.

She breathed in and let the breath go, so that she sounded like a balloon that was losing air.

"You’re either running away or running toward something. That’s what you need to ask yourself,” she said, and then the line went dead.

The Metropolitan Museum was nearly empty when I made my way downstairs, the phone in my hand. I felt as if I had been woken up from a deep sleep—lost but calm. On the way out, I studied Pisarro’s The Old Road to Ennery at Pontoise. The desolate path, the bare landscape, the lone woman on horseback, making her way, slowly; another woman following on foot. Between a haystack and a tree, there was a group of peasants. Above, thick clouds drifted—a promise that the skies would clear at some point. I wished that I could enter the world of the painting, merge with the image of the girl on foot and just keep going, not look back. But then, upon closer examination, I wondered if Pissaro’s roads, instead of meandering into the unknown, were roads that regardless of the twists and turns and the miles covered, would lead me back to my starting point. That’s what I was beginning to discover about life—that you were always in this process of returning, which made me wonder why you ever left anywhere and set off in the first place.

Outside, the early evening was crisp and cool and silent, as if the wind had scurried everyone home on this pre-Halloween Sunday night. I had felt the moon swelling in me all week and seeing it now in full bloom, I prayed that like the moon, from this day forth I would deflate and that in two weeks time, I would arrive at a fresh start.

Feeling the phone in my jacket pocket as I walked the quiet streets made me feel secure, like how you feel when you?re driving a car with a full tank of gas. I had wandered into the museum late that Sunday afternoon to lose myself, to forget that Sister Alice Carmel Donaughty was losing her mind. She was one of my clients at the nursing home on the Upper East Side where I counseled elderly, no-longer-out-in-the-world nuns. I was supposed to meet Sister Alice's brother. He hadn’t showed, and when Sister Alice told me once again that he would be coming to see her on the following Sunday, sharing with me the details of his visit, I realized that I was listening to a recording from inside her. She had no idea that she had shared this same monologue with me last week during our sessions, no recollection of our committing to 2:00 p.m. as the time I would come to meet her brother this Sunday. This was a new hurdle for me: in the seven months I had been working with Sister Alice, her memory and her mind had been relatively intact.

The woman on the phone didn’t trouble me in the way that my clients at the nursing home did; with them, it was all about their movements and eye contact and the way they groomed themselves. I could walk into one of the nuns’ rooms, and before she had opened her mouth, I was able to judge how our session was going to go by the way her hair was combed, or not, by the way a shirt was tucked in, whether or not a pair of shoes was tied.

Perhaps there was something to this anonymous over-the-phone confession arrangement. I wondered if I could accomplish more if I spoke to a voice rather than a face. Wasn’t that the way priests had been hearing confessions for centuries? I wasn’t sure if I could help the nuns find peace as they approached their impending deaths or why it wasn’t a priest that sat with them and talked with them each day. What did I know about redemption and faith? I had never had religion, never needed it as long as I stayed en route and lived by my passion, which was, at one time, to serve others.

Since I had started working with the nuns, though, I no longer knew what my passion was. The nuns’ unyielding devotion to serve God, their desire to live their lives above and beyond the flesh was their supreme driving force. Listening to these women talk about the beautiful simplicity of their lives — helping other people to achieve grace through prayer, and their days spent helping out in children’s homes and hospitals and working with the homeless — made me feel useless.

The only thing that I really knew about life at this point had to do with my breakup with Rowyn, my beau through college and grad school: I liked sleeping alone. The more single I became — two months, three months, four months now — the more comfortable I felt with myself, and it worried me as much as it calmed me. At night, I rolled left then right in my bed, free and unconfined. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to connect with another person in an intimate relationship—life seemed so much easier when you were on your own. You wanted to go someplace, you went. You wanted to eat something, you ate. No fuss, no compromise, no hassle, no trying to condense yourself into something that couldn’t contain you.

*****

Sister Alice looked up at me from her wheelchair when I entered the room. She was watching Live with Regis and Kelly. All the occupants of the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home had their own television sets, which were always on—whether or not they were being watched.

“I didn’t think you were coming today,” Sister Alice said, her eyes on the TV.

“And what would make you think that? I always see you on Mondays,” I said, about to pull up the shades in her room.

“No,” she said.

“You don’t want any sunlight?”

“Not today,” she said.

She took my hand and nodded at my watch. She made me take it off when I came into her room. Watches reminded her of ticking bombs and rushing and people leaving. She had told me that her father always looked at his watch before he left for work each day and kissed her and her brother good-bye. That was when she was a little girl, and her family lived in Ireland. One day her father didn’t come back home; he had been on a bus on his way to work that was blown up by a bomb.

“Did you sleep well?” I said, shaking her orange juice container and opening it up, putting the straw in it. It was a morning ritual; she would leave her orange juice container from breakfast for me to open for her. Sometimes she would let me pull the shades up before she drank her orange juice. Other days she would need to drink the juice before she was willing to let the sunlight in.

“My brother didn’t come to see me yesterday like he said he would.”

“Sister Alice, yesterday you told me that he was coming the following week.”

“The following week?” she said, looking at me. Her breath quavered, as if she were running along sand. “I said that?” Her voice was bland and noncommittal, so that I had to decide where I thought the emphasis belonged.

I nodded. “You said that.”

She was wearing her cotton candy pink do-rag today and matching sweatpants. The do-rag troubled me the way that the poodle I had seen on the street wearing a tiara troubled me; somehow it was all wrong, and it made her look silly, and yet I couldn’t stop looking at it. I forced myself to stare at the pleated waistband of her pants, which ballooned from her hips. They reminded me of genie pants. I imagined her granting me three wishes.

“What did I say on Sunday?” she said.

“You said that your brother would be coming to visit next Sunday. We made a date, you and I—at 2:00 p.m. next Sunday I would come to meet your brother.”

“I did say that,” she said.

I would wish for more hours in the day to walk, the power to heal people with a touch, and a map to myself. She pointed to the shades, and I moved to open them. Sunlight pierced the room, ricocheting off the metal of her wheelchair, so that I had to squint as I looked at her. The first time I met her she had told me that her favorite thing to do was to go down to the cafeteria by herself each afternoon at 4:00 and eat an English muffin with strawberry jam and drink a glass of very light tea. She had said that it made her feel luxurious and carefree, and thinking about her feeling luxurious always made me smile.

“What will you do today?” I asked, knowing that Monday afternoons were devoted to arts and crafts—Sister Alice was working on a mural composed of magazine cutouts. Monday nights were Night at the Movies night. The movie listed on the bulletin board for tonight was Casablanca. I liked thinking of the nuns all sitting around enamored of Humphrey Bogart.

“Look the lady with Regis,” Sister Alice said. “Isn’t she lovely? The way she carries on,” Sister Alice said, laughing, turning to me for confirmation.

“She’s very lovely,” I said.

“I want my brother to marry someone like her,” she said.

“Your brother is married,” I said. “You like his wife.” She had shared with me the story of how her brother married their next-door neighbor.

“He is married, isn’t he?” she said, her eyes squinting in the sunlight that shadowed the room. The dust particles all around her made her look as if she were emanating light. Then, softer, as if she were speaking to some invisible person in front of her, she whispered “next Sunday.”

*****

At my apartment, I put the documentary on nuns entering the convent—Open Arms— into my VCR and got comfortable in bed with a bowl of popcorn. The prioress at the nursing home had given it to me that afternoon; she was always giving me brochures and books and other nun-recruiting materials. She told me that the video would help me to understand what the nuns’ community was all about—that while a sister may feel lost, she was never alone.

In the documentary, one of the nuns-to-be was leaving home because she was sexually abused by her father for as long as she could remember; another had seen the Virgin Mary in a vision and said that the Virgin Mary had invited her into her home. There was a woman who had been raised in foster homes that said she wanted to arrive at her one and only home. There were so many factors and details that drove people to where they ended up: I wondered if I would find a catalyst to get me wherever I needed to be.

The popcorn spilled over my comforter, and I watched it tumble onto the floor. If Rowyn had been with me, he would have paused the tape and got out the hand vacuum to suck it all up. I tossed some more popcorn on the floor and smiled.

“What are you doing?” That’s what Rowyn had said when he found me on the floor in his bathroom almost a year before. I had gone to wash up before bed, but when I saw myself in the mirror—my eyes so bloodshot that it looked as if I had lined them with red lipstick—something in me shattered. The tears came all at once, and my body shook as if it were experiencing an earthquake; I wilted down onto the floor, folding into myself. I had found one of the addicts at the drug rehab clinic where I worked dead with a needle sticking out of his elbow—an overdose. I don’t remember if I was crying for the dead addict that night, or for how sick the world was. I remember that I felt as if my life was gone to shit; that I was in a relationship with a boy I didn’t love, and that there was no one that I could share the details of my day with. Who would understand? I was in my twenties; I was supposed to be having the time of my life and here I was wasting precious months and years and the thing about time was that you couldn’t get back what you had lost, and it was all my fault because when I was with Rowyn I would smile and laugh and things were not bad, but a boy had lost his life without ever connecting to anyone or anything.

“I can’t do this,” I had told Rowyn.

“I want you out of that clinic tomorrow,” he had said.

I was afraid to run away—from Rowyn, from the clinic—fearful of the implications it would have on my life. I worried that running away would weaken me in the long run. I didn’t want to spend my life chasing myself. I thought of the people running on the treadmill in the gym on the corner that I passed by each day on my way home: going nowhere fast.

When I had applied for a position with the nuns at the nursing home a few blocks from my apartment, something clicked for me. At the drug clinic, patients merged daydreams with truth, so that I had no way of distinguishing what was real and what was made up. They had made me feel desperate and lonely inside, so that after listening to them nothing in my life had made sense. I wanted to shake them, to make the drugs fall from them like dead leaves, and to force them to stare into a mirror and see themselves: desperate, alone, lying, clinging. Or maybe it was that they made me need to dissect myself, to figure out if I too had confused my daydreams for my truths, if my reality was in any sense real.

When I quit the clinic, I told the director the truth: that I was on the verge of a breakdown. Three months into the nursing home, I was able to look Rowyn in the eye and tell him that I wasn’t in love with him—that it was over for us.

*****

The foster home nun-to-be wore tight jeans and a turtleneck sweater. She looked like anyone else—she could have been going on a date, off to shop at the mall. If I’d seen her on the street, I would never have guessed that she wanted to be a nun. This modern deviation from typical nun garb was somewhat of an issue for me. I still couldn’t accept the fact that people were not who or what they appeared to be. I had a hard enough time thinking of the nuns I counseled as holy women while they wore sweatpants and housecoats and wheeled around the halls in their electric wheelchairs. I found it even more disturbing when they all sat around chatting about television shows and what was for dinner that evening. When I had first started working with the nuns in the home, I listened to their stories and thought, I have smoked pot and drunk alcohol and I like sex—even if I am celibate like you right now.

In the movie, the camera panned from one nun-to-be to another as each of them walked through the convent doors. Although their stories were independent of one another, listening to each of them it was clear that collectively they were part of something greater than themselves. This made sense to me in a way that nothing had in a long time. I didn’t really know the first thing about organized religion except that faith, ritual, and acceptance were the key ingredients. The thing I was most religious about these days was walking. I was up and out of bed in the wee hours each morning to walk. It was a time for me to hear myself think, work out whatever was troubling me, watch the world come to life, and bloom with it each day. I would dart around people and cars, searching for clearings. The clearings would keep me moving. Rowyn didn’t get my walking the way he didn’t get anything that took me away from him. When we were out with friends, he would tell them that he was going to hide my sneakers one morning so that I couldn’t go off on my pre-dawn expeditions.

At first, I liked that Rowyn and I were different. He was a money/numbers guy; I was a people person. We met at Columbia during our junior year, almost seven years back. He was waiting in line behind me one day when I was buying a cup of coffee and discovered that I didn’t have my wallet on me; he had paid for my coffee and told me that the second date was on me. After that we would see one another in the library by chance and end up talking about everything from professors to the weather to our dreams for the future. When he asked me why I wanted to be a counselor, what came to me was that listening to other people meant that I didn’t have to think about me. Then and there, I had understood that there was a manipulative quality to being a therapist—that it was a way of keeping myself away from me. I wouldn’t realize until two years later that I would have to get back to myself. That’s what living was. The farther I traveled, the longer the trip back.

He repeated his question: “Do you know why you want to be a counselor?”

I said: “I think that if everyone in the world had someone to listen to them, the world would be a saner place.” I believed that.

Rowyn. The first time we made plans to meet off campus, we hadn’t realized it was the afternoon of the New York City marathon. He lived on the Upper West Side and I lived on the Upper East Side. When it was an hour past our designated meeting time, I thought he wasn’t going to show up, and I was disappointed. Talking to him those afternoons, hearing about his life—that he loved waking up each day because there was a chance to start again, and that he wanted to own a big farmhouse like the one where he spent his summers working the land—reminded me that the world was such a big place full of so much possibility. Our conversations made me tap into and begin to think about what it was I really sought: a simple, quiet life. I didn’t know then that for Rowyn a chance to start again each day meant a chance to make more money each day. I didn’t know then that the farmhouse summers were something he’d forget as soon as he settled into a Wall Street job.

When he did show up at my apartment that day, two hours late, with a dozen roses and someone’s discarded marathon number, we smiled at one another and in a minute he was telling me about his journey to get to the East Side. At some point in our seven years together, though, Rowyn and I stopped letting each other in on our day-to-day stories so that what we shared consisted of time in which we were supposed to be relaxing together and enjoying one another at the movies or at dinner parties or at home resting on the couch. “Quality time” was what we called it, believing that this free-of-shop-talk time would solve all of our problems. Something, though, was missing in this quality time; it kept us from talking about what filled our hearts and minds and after a while I didn’t even know what was in my mind and heart. It was as if he was on one road and I was on another. I believed that somewhere down the way our paths would cross, only somehow our roads missed one another and we kept going, each on our way, separate, alone.

The nuns I counseled spoke to me as if I were going their way, and that was fine with me. Ever since I had broken up with Rowyn, I felt as if I were one of them: apart and focused. The nuns brought me into their world of separateness, and I felt as if my wanting to be alone was a legitimate way of life. They were calm and peaceful, and when they shared the stories of their lives with me (because that’s what counseling them was about—listening and learning), the stories were of love and faith and commitment—unlike the stories of revenge and hatred and denial I had heard when I counseled recovering drug addicts at the clinic.

The nuns in the movie stood around one another in their habits, bowing to the prioress, smiling softly at one another each time their eyes met. The one who had been abused by her father had tears in her eyes as the priest placed a wafer under her tongue. The movie cut to a flashback and the girl, back in street clothes, was saying that her life was so different now that she had found God; there was someone to listen if she needed to talk, and she was able to pray without blaming herself or her father. She had found forgiveness in her heart, and she urged other people to find the strength to go on. I thought of the woman on the phone, driving in the night. Was the woman running away from someone or to someone? Was she safe? Afraid? Alone? It started me thinking about myself—if I were to take off, would anyone notice that I was gone? Would I call with a reason for why I had left, or would people know why I had gone? And if I were to call, who would I want to talk to? The thought of the voice over the phone needing me gave me a shiver. I felt something just then that I couldn’t name—fear, excitement—I wasn’t sure. My head on my pillow, I cocked my chin up toward the ceiling, my neck stretching, and looked up at the one-day-less-than-full moon looming outside my window. In thirteen days, the new moon would come. I looked back at the screen to see the three new nuns in habits, praying, and switched off the TV via remote control. Always, there was the chance in life to start over.

*****

When I walked into Sister Alice’s room on Wednesday morning, the Scrabble board was already set up. During my first month at the home, I had earned her trust by playing Scrabble with her. My words—and somehow they were always derivations of the same words, as if they were baggage that I carried around—sparked something in her: silence, detachment, solitude, disconnection, unexplainable darkness.

“You have a busy internal life,” she had said. And then she put her hand on my hand and looked into my eyes with an intensity that made me feel as if no one had ever looked at me before. “You’re not alone,” she had said and squeezed my hand.

Scrabble day meant that we didn’t have to talk, that we could just spell it out on the board. She tapped her wrist and I took off my watch and put it on top of the TV. I opened the orange juice container and handed it to her, but she shooed it away today.

“It’s your turn,” she said as I pulled up the blinds.

“Drink your juice,” I said.

“It’s your turn,” she repeated.

The pale gray sky lit up the room like fluorescent lights so that Sister Alice looked a sickly yellow.

“What’s wrong, Sister Alice?” I smiled, and the way her eyes opened up—crystal blue pools—I wished that I could dive in.

She shook her head, her wispy white hair taking flight.

“I don’t belong here,” Sister Alice said.

“Where do you belong?” I asked.

She was watching the TV again. Regis was back on. She was smiling.

“Sister Alice?”

“Not here,” she said.

“Where do you want to be?”

She shrugged.

It was so easy to get lost in this world, to disappear. I was afraid that if I got lost, there would be no one to help me to find my way. She pointed down at the word she had created: freedom. I thought about Sister Alice going downstairs to have her English muffin with jelly. I thought of the woman on the phone getting farther and farther from what bound her. I thought about leaving the rehab clinic, about leaving Rowyn. We were all always going, always seeking freedom.

“It’s your turn,” she said.

I studied my letters and put down the word search.

“I think about you,” she said, her eyes on the board. There was an intensity to her voice that I’d never heard before, as if something inside of her was trying to get out, reach me.

“I think about you, too,” I said.

She looked to the TV and then back at me. With her hair flat on her head, she looked like a grandmother in need of a beauty parlor appointment.

“You’re not like the others,” she said.

“What others?” I asked.

“The others,” she said, pointing at the TV screen, motioning out her window.

“We’re all just people,” I said. “We’re all in this world together.”

“No,” she said. “We’re all in it alone. What each of us thinks and says and does matters. What you think matters,” she said.

“I don’t always know what I think.”

“You know that there’s a reason you’re here.”

I laughed a forced laugh, and then I closed my eyes. “Sister Alice, I don’t always know why I’m here,” I said.

“You do,” she said.

I didn’t know if she was trying to tell me that my destiny was to be a nun or that it was to be a counselor or that if I had some other destiny altogether that I was blind to.

“Keep going,” she said. “Keep believing.”

I nodded. I was trying to figure out what I believed in, but just then, all that I could see clearly was the word I would put down the next time my turn came: evolve.

We sat in silence for the rest of the session, with her holding my hand. With her fingers she closed my eyes and then rested her palm on my forehead. I felt as if she were extracting something out of me, and in a few moments I was floating.

“Can I get you anything Sister Alice? Are you okay?” I asked when it was time for me to go. I stood up shakily and sat back down. She moved my hand to her heart, and I felt her bones coming through her flesh. Then she moved my hand to my heart. The beat was thick and slow.

“Listen,” she said. “All the answers you seek are inside.” And then she kissed my hand and told me to go. When I looked back at her from the doorway, she was changing the channel on her TV.

*****

In my dream the woman on the phone kept calling. Each time I hung up on her, she called back. Finally, I told her she had the wrong number and she laughed.

“You’re sly, aren’t you?”

“Just honest,” I said.

“You can’t just turn me off and think I’m going to disappear,” she said.

“I’m not who you’re looking for.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“If you don’t tell me who you’re looking for or where you’re going, I’ll hang up again.”

“I’ll keep calling you back.”

“What is it that you want from me?”

“You tell me,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“You forget that we’re in this together,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You’re running away and I’m not.”

“Just because I left and you’re still there doesn’t mean that you’re not running.” Even in my dream, I didn’t know if there was any truth in this.

“Do you plan on coming back?” I asked. I waited and asked again, “Are you going to return to whatever it is you’re running from?”

“We’re always returning little girl. Round and round we go,” she said, and then the line went dead.

*****

Sister Alice and I had began writing one another letters a few months back, after she shared excerpts with me from her journal in which she had described growing up in Ireland in a concrete house on a hillside that overlooked a meadow full of burnt grass and sheep. After I listened to her that day, she began pulling the pages out of her journal and giving them to me. Soon after, the journal entries were addressed to me. She wrote to me about her family’s move to France, where she lived in Vernon, and about her house that had a wall going through it because it had been built during the German occupation. She wrote about how she and her brother used to pretend that they were angels, and they would pray for people whom they passed on the street in their village.

In one letter, she wrote about the bitterly cold December day over fifty years back when she had told her mother that she wanted to become a nun. Her mother had been changing the bedsheets, and her voice cracking, Sister Alice, then Alice May, had walked into the room and spoken while her mother’s back was to her: I cannot ignore the voice that calls to me. I don’t know where it comes from or why it has chosen me, but I must follow that voice. God has come for me, and I must follow him. It is time for me to go. Her mother had turned and looked her in the eye and Sister Alice felt as if it were a stranger looking at her. Then and there she knew that she was on a different route from the rest of her family, and while they may not ever understand her path, she prayed for their acceptance.

Reading Sister Alice’s letters, I felt as if I were a pilot passing over her life, flying low to take it all in. She would leave me a letter on top of her television set once a week or so, and I would write her back and leave her a letter on her night table. There were things we would discuss in our letters that we would never talk about in person. I felt strange walking into her room after I had read one of her letters—as if I were looking at her through a hole in her wall. The way her mind worked on paper—precise, vivid—made me feel as if she were two different people.

The beauty of our letter-exchange relationship was that when we were together, there was nothing much to take care of—just our being able to be there together. I liked the way I could live a double life with one person—carry on business in a behind-the-scenes-way. But the thing with double lives is that one of them is real and the other one is not as real. I could never tell which life was more real. I think that’s how I felt in my relationship with Rowyn. I would think certain things when I wasn’t with him, and then I would be with him and do things that didn’t relate to the things I thought. In the relationship with Rowyn that evolved in my mind, I was always loving him and telling him so and doing nice things for him. Then, when we would be together, some other me would take over and Rowyn would feel like an obstacle in my life—something I had to pick apart, destroy, get past if I were to move ahead. Toward the end of our relationship, it was me against me each time I was with him. He had fallen out of the equation of “us” when I caught him reading one of Sister Alice’s letters while he waited for me to get ready.

“What are you doing?” I had asked, coming out of the shower. He didn’t even flinch.

“Those are private,” I said, and he looked up at me with laughter in his eyes. “How dare you?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. This woman is bonkers.”

I pulled the letter away from him. I wanted to run away—far and fast—only there was nowhere for me to go because I was home, where I was supposed to feel safe and free. Then, something changed on Rowyn’s face. Perhaps something inside of him merged with my soul, but the next moment, he was laughing again.

“Those nuns are loony tunes,” he said, and if I had been sensing that we were over, debating it, just like that, I knew we were.

*****

On Friday mornings, Sister Alice met me in the lobby of the nursing home. If it was nice outside, she liked to sit out front in her wheelchair with me and watch the people and cars go by. Some Fridays we would be lucky enough to see famous people walking into Sotheby’s auction house, which was directly across the street on First Avenue.

“How are you today?” I said, smiling at her big.

“Let’s go outside,” she said.

“It’s cold outside, Sister Alice,” I said.

She held up her patchwork quilt and stuck out her feet, on which she had her sheepskin slippers, and made her way toward the door.

“The fresh air is good for you,” she said. The automatic door opened, and I followed her outside. She breathed in deep and exhaled a stream of air; it looked as though a ghost was drifting from her mouth.

“Are you cold?”

She shook her head. It was always odd seeing her outside. I couldn’t imagine her in the world outside of the nursing home. She sat like a dog, watching everyone go by. Whenever someone looked her way, they looked away fast as if they would catch her oldness.

“Do you want to talk about anything?” I asked.

She looked at me and looked away, shaking her head. She pulled a letter out from her pocket and from the lavender paper, I could tell that it was from me.

“So many people,” she said. “Everyone is in such a rush.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you in a rush?” she said.

“Some days, yes, I am.”

“Why?”

“I have appointments to get to.”

“You should never be in a rush. You should make life go at your pace,” she said. “The world will wait for you.”

I was tired. I didn’t feel like talking.

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Afraid? Of what?” I asked.

“Life.”

I laughed. “Sometimes.”

“Are you afraid of moving on with your life?”

“I move on with my life each day,” I said.

“Do you?” she said.

My mind was on overload. Right then, I wanted the world to wait for me, while I hid away for a few hours and recharged.

“Do you move on with your life each day?” she repeated.

I shrugged. I didn’t know.

Before it was time for us to go back inside, Sister Alice maneuvered her wheelchair into the corner of the entrance, pulled out the letter from me, and told me to close my eyes.

“Listen,” she said. She read from my letter:

I am always looking to the sun and the moon and the stars for signs, trying to associate my moods with these external forces. But maybe it's time for me to stop looking outward. Maybe I have my own little solar system inside of me and if I looked inside more I would be able to go towards that brightness. And maybe, when I let that light into the darkened crevices of my heart and soul, I will come alive in ways I never imagined possible. Instead of feeling bad about leaving things behind, instead of torturing myself with why’s, perhaps I should celebrate my ability to leave things behind and see it as an optimistic threshold in my journey—a belief in the future.

I had written those words months back, when I had just left Rowyn. Hearing my words come back at me in her voice made everything inside of me freeze. How was it that I could have answers a few months back and forget them?

When I took her back up to her room at the end of the session, she beckoned me to kneel down by her chair.

“If you never left anything behind, there would never be room for anything new.”

She handed the letter back to me all folded up and told me to use that paragraph like a map whenever I felt lost. I put it in my jacket pocket and made my way from her in a fog.

“Don’t forget Sunday,” she called to me when I was at her door. “My brother is coming this Sunday.”

“I won’t forget,” I said. “I’ll be here.” She looked at me and then turned on her TV.

*****

The clock alarm blared in the darkness like a siren: 4:06 a.m. I jumped up in bed, still trying to figure out who, when, why, where. On my night table, I saw the progress report that I was required to hand in to my supervisor at the nursing home each Monday morning to recap the previous week and set goals for the week at hand. I had meant to fill it in before going to sleep the previous night, but my mind was too tired to think.

Your perception of the patient’s progress.

There were three neat and tidy lines on which I was to write my comments. I wondered what I would write up about myself in three lines: that I felt tired, alone in the world, and that I was passing through a funk?

A month after Rowyn and I broke up, when I was still in that self-deceiving limbo stage and had made a deal with myself that if I couldn’t live without him, I would seek his company, I went to visit him at 4:30 a.m. one unseasonably cool and rainy July morning. We wrapped blankets around ourselves and sat out on his fire escape, an umbrella propped up behind us like a parachute. He wanted to go inside, get warm. I liked being cold just then—it helped me to talk about our relationship. I told him that I thought we never knew one another.

“No one really knows another person,” is what he had said. Then, “Your relationship with the nuns scares me. I feel like you’re going to send me a note any one of these days announcing that you’re going to become a sister.”

A car had rushed past below, dragging me away with it. I couldn’t even look at him. I thought of the car, pulling me far and away. As the sun began to rise, I got up to leave. My time there was over.

“You’re the only girl that I will ever love,” he said. I wanted to laugh, but instead I just looked at him—blank, dead. What did that mean? I didn’t even know what we had shared in our six and a half years together other than time, and I guess it was as much a reflection on me as it was on him. When I walked out the door of his apartment building into the street, I understood that in some way I was passing through a doorway that I would never reenter. During my walk home that July morning, I realized that the thing I missed most about not having a boyfriend was that I felt as if I were floating and that if I were to disappear, no one would look for me.

4:20: I got up and found the phone in my night table drawer. It beeped when I turned it on, which meant there were messages. I wouldn’t be able to retrieve them without the code. I tossed on sweats and put the phone in my pant pocket. Tomorrow, it would be a week since I had found the phone, put it to sleep in my drawer. I wondered where the woman was, if she was okay.

Your perception of the patient’s progress.

Sister Alice is losing her mind.

I am afraid of losing her.

I am afraid of losing my mind.

*****

Outside, rain drizzled from a bleak sky, and under the glare of the streetlights, the world looked smudged. November in New York City: gray and bland and cold in a way that December never was. In December I was ready for the chill, for the deep dark skies and the desolate early-morning streets. In November the coldness caught me by surprise, and as hard as I tried to hold onto the fall, it was moving away, drifting beyond my reach, tree limbs waving good-bye to me, scattering the pavement with hard crisp leaves that crunched apart when I stepped on them.

Groups of people in fluorescent orange windbreakers were setting up on First Avenue for the marathon right in front of the nursing home and for a moment, I thought of Rowyn and wondered if this day meant anything to him. Then I thought about Sister Alice and wondered if her brother would in fact show today, and if we would watch the race with him. The truth was that I wished that like today’s runners, I could run past everyone, keep going, push myself from inside.

I imagined the woman on the phone pushing herself—moving beyond me—and I had a strange empty feeling that I might never know why she was going and where. But maybe our reasons for going were just quick-fix answers to give people so that we could keep escaping, never really knowing where or why we were going, but going nonetheless.

I walked beneath Sister Alice’s window and wondered what it was she saw when she looked out at the world below. I didn’t know what I saw any more. It was as if I were a camera caught on close-up mode. I wanted to see beyond the here and now, glance around the corner at the tomorrows of my life, but I couldn’t get past where I was. I was afraid—of taking a wrong turn, getting more lost.

People—doctors, residents—were walking to and from the hospital down the street. Taxis rushed by. It seemed bizarre to me that people went to work in the dark and left in the dark. It was so easy for days to disappear. I had an uneasy conviction that life was passing me by— that if I didn’t claim a route, one would be assigned to me—and that thought sent me into overdrive. I didn’t get how other people knew if they were doing the right thing—whether it pertained to their job or their love life or to something as simple as the block they were walking down. I didn’t understand why someone would choose to be a nun versus an attorney versus a teacher. Was it circumstance or choice or chance or a mixture of everything, and if the ingredients had somehow yielded the wrong concoction, who was to say when and where and how it was to be undone, redone, cooked a bit longer? I dug my hands into my pockets, wishing I could move inside myself, and felt a folded up piece of paper. It was the letter—my letter—that Sister Alice had returned to me. My map. I was about to pull it out, but I didn’t.

I was on a bench on the East River Pavilion, overlooking the East River, a few blocks away from the nursing home, when I hit redial on the phone. It was just before dawn, the darkest hour. Whenever my life spun out of control, I tried to remember that after darkness, light would come. She picked up just as the first ring ended.

“Hello,” I said.

She laughed. “I was expecting your call,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m a million miles past where I was last week,” she said.

“Where are you headed?”

Below, cars dodged by on their way to and from. When I was a little girl, as I sat in our car, I would stare into the cars beside my family on the highway and make up stories about the people in the other cars—where they were going, where they were coming from. My dad could be beeping at someone shaking his fist, and I would imagine that they were on their way to the airport to catch a flight, or that they were going to visit a sick relative in the hospital, and I would touch my dad’s arm and shake my head so that he would stop beeping and shaking his fist, and one look at me and he would be still. That always amazed me — that big as he was and loud and strong, my little tap on his arm could still him.

“Where the road leads me.”

The cars below were zooming by so that it looked as if they would crash into one another at any moment. I was on edge; I wanted the drivers to mind their lanes.

“You’re going to have to stop at some point.”

I had an urge to tell her all about myself, my story, but the problem with stories is that they have borders. There was so much to a life that you couldn’t fit into the confines of a story.

The woman laughed again. “Hickory Dickery Dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck five and said, you must drive, and I said okay, I won’t stop.”

A taxi in the left lane cut off a van in the middle lane, so the van’s driver screeched on the brakes to avoid slamming into the car in front of it. I waited for the crash, but it didn’t come.

“Why are you going?” Maybe, I thought, running away wasn’t about disliking the situation you were in. Maybe it was much more complicated than that. Maybe people ran away because various aspects of their lives became unbearably entwined—like ivy—complicated and substantial and thick. Maybe people ran away so that they could be alone, silent. Maybe you had to leave before you could return.

“Because I have to,” she said.

I didn’t want to get lost in what was invisible— the woman on the phone, Sister Alice's deteriorating mind. I couldn’t pinpoint these things because they existed in the realm of my imagination. There was a whole world out there. Above, a half-moon hung from the sky like a comma. I didn’t know what preceded it, what came after it.

“Now it’s my turn. Why did you call me?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you call me?” she said again.

“Because I’m lost.”

“Congratulations.” I heard her breathing and tried to breathe in rhythm with her. I knew that in the silence was where the answers awaited me, and yet it was so hard to get there.

“Why am I going?” she asked. If there was an unhinged quality to her voice, it was gone now. She sounded gentle, serene, as if somehow I had passed a test and that the game of hide-and-seek we had been playing was over.

*****

I pulled out my map and read the last line over and over to myself:

Instead of feeling bad about leaving things behind, instead of torturing myself with why’s, perhaps I should celebrate my ability to leave things behind and see it as an optimistic threshold in my journey—a belief in the future.

Cars exited in the distance, while cars merged into the right lane. So much movement. The truth was that if you got off at the wrong stop, there would be a chance down the road to get back on, go on from there. And if you got on, you were always able to get off at some point. You just had to make sure you were in the driver’s seat.

"Why am I going?" she whispered.

In another week, the new moon would come, and then in a few weeks the full moon would bloom again. It was a cycle. We were sane; we were crazy. We were moving; we were still. There were always times that we would be in limbo—it could be a passing moment of a lifetime or the place we lived. That was up to us.

“Because you can,” I said.

“Why am I going?”

“Because you’re done with the past.”

“Why am I going?”

“Because you believe in the future.”

“Amen,” she said, and then the line went dead.

I looked up at the fading shadow of the half-moon. If it was a comma, it was separating darkness from light. Light was what was ahead. When I got up, I left the phone on the bench, because I too was on my road. Like my fellow traveler, I was a million miles from where I had been, and I had the power to leave things behind. I took my first step into this new day and didn’t look back.