After dinner, the sisters returned to the living room to watch a program on TV, a hospital show they had been following all year, and Sister Lacey took Amy upstairs to prepare for bed. It was eight o’clock; usually all the sisters were in bed by nine, to rise at five for morning devotions, and it seemed to Lacey that these were the kind of hours a girl of Amy’s age could also keep. She gave Amy a bath, scrubbing her hair with raspberry shampoo and working in a dollop of conditioner for the tangles, then combing it all out so it was straight and glossy, its rich black hue deepening with each pull of the comb, before taking her old clothing downstairs to the laundry. By the time she returned Amy had put on the pajamas Sister Claire had bought that afternoon at Walmart. They were pink, with a pattern of stars and moons with smiling faces, and made of a material that rustled and shone like silk. When Lacey entered the room, she saw that Amy was looking at the sleeves with a bewildered expression; they were too long, flopping clownishly over her hands and feet. Lacey rolled them up; while she watched, Amy brushed her teeth and put her toothbrush back in its case and then turned from the mirror to face her.

“Do I sleep in here?”

So many hours had passed since she’d heard the girl’s voice that Lacey wasn’t sure she’d heard the question correctly. She searched the little girl’s face. The question, strange as it was, made sense to her.

“Why would you sleep in the bathroom, Amy?”

She looked at the floor. “Mama says I have to be quiet.”

Lacey didn’t know what to make of this. “No, of course not. You’ll sleep in your room. It’s right next to mine, I’ll show you.”

The room was clean and spare, bare-walled with just a bed and a bureau and a small writing table, not even a rug on the floor to warm it, and Lacey wished she had something to make it nice for a little girl. She thought that, tomorrow, she would ask Sister Arnette if she could buy a small rug to put by the bed, so Amy’s feet wouldn’t have to touch the cold floorboards in the mornings. She tucked Amy under the blankets and sat on the edge of the mattress. Through the floor she could hear the faint rumble of the television downstairs, and the tick of pipes expanding behind the walls, and outside, the wind fingering the March leaves of the oaks and maples and the soft hum of evening traffic on Poplar Avenue. The zoo was two blocks behind the convent, at the far end of the park; on summer nights when the windows were open, they could sometimes hear the colabus monkeys, whooping and screeching in their cages. This was a strange and wonderful thing for Lacey to hear, so many thousands of miles from home, but when she had visited the zoo she’d discovered it was an awful place, like a jail; the pens were small, the cats were kept in barren cages behind walls of Plexiglas, the elephants and giraffes wore chains on their legs. All the animals looked depressed. Most could barely be bothered to move at all, and the people who came to see them were loud and boorish and let their children throw popcorn through the bars to make the animals notice them. It was more than Lacey could bear, and she had left quickly, close to tears. It broke her heart to see God’s creatures treated so cruelly, with such coldhearted indifference, for no purpose.