She sits on one of the six pews, lulled by the warmth and closeness of the room, and feels herself welling up with discomfort and want, with an ache in her core.

She distinctly remembers sitting on one of the ladder-back chairs in her grandmother’s kitchen, having her hair brushed the morning of her mother’s funeral. It was November, and she wore a dress she hated, and stockings because it was too cold to go bare legged and her grandmother said it was disrespectful.

She liked the feel of the brush, pulling from underneath. It was eight in the morning on a Saturday, when Kateri wanted to be sleeping.

“I am never having kids,” she announced.

Her grandmother stopped brushing and let Kateri’s hair fall, smoothing it with her hands.

“I know you feel that way now,” she said.

“Ever,” Kateri said.

She’d lost both parents in four years, between twelve and sixteen. Heart attack, drug overdose. Her mother just didn’t wake up. They’d been watching TV, and when her mother passed out, which wasn’t unusual, Kateri went to bed.

In the morning she was in the same spot, cold.

Her immediate feeling had been rage. It took her years to feel any sadness or grief at her mother’s death.

Her grandmother kissed the top of her head. “It’ll change,” she said, and Kateri snorted in disapproval and rolled her eyes.

Now she makes a steeple of her hands and presses them against her face, breathing through them. The room is lined with alcoves of saints, most of them women. Both the hospital and the women’s college were founded by nuns. The stained-glass window behind the altar is a blazing immaculate heart, flowers laced between the swords.

She stands, woozy from the warmth of the room, and makes her way down each side of the chapel, stopping at each image. Bridget with her bowl of fire and reed cross. Monica, an old woman, the mother of St. Augustine. Bernadette, the girl saint in her grotto.

Kateri remembers that the sisters she failed slept on cheap blow-up pool mats instead of real beds. The two of them side by side on the living room floor, a string of Christmas lights hanging above them.

They’d been attacked by their mother’s boyfriend.

She remembers her own mother’s boyfriend grabbing her by the wrist and leaning close to her face with beer breath. “You could make a million fucking bucks,” he said, “with those tits, if you just had blue eyes.”

Kateri lights the candle underneath the girl saint and lets the red glass glow.

She doesn’t ask for anything. She doesn’t know how. But she stands for a moment, thinking of little Birdie, with her red hair and her green eyes, and waiting for the ache inside her to go away.

They admit the girl, settle her in a room on the pediatric ward, and give her a sedative. Kateri meets the attending in the hallway. He says the child is in shock.