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or width or maybe his torn shirt, let her go.
    Ulises gathered Isabel into his arms and made for the door.
    Please, everyone! the administrator yelled. Please just take your seats!
    —
    At first they tried to take Isabel home, but the community reporter had made enough calls that when they arrived, a small mob of journalists had congregated at their front door. Willems drove the car in circles around the block in silence until Soledad, her face still white, asked Isabel: Love, what did you mean by all that?
    Was I not clear? Isabel said. She stared blankly out the window.
    What are we to do with you now? Soledad asked.
    The convent, Isabel said.
    Isabel was silent the rest of the way, and no one asked any further questions. Ulises and Soledad feared, each in isolation, that to question Isabel was to somehow question God, a feeling that, despite their lapsed faith, they could not ignore.
    The convent was a granite building with high walls and an outer gate, stuck between a blood bank and a condemned gymnasium. The family found Sister B waiting for them in a cloister outside the convent’s modest chapel. She seemed to have recovered from vomiting, and they were taken aback by the nun’s confession that she’d dreamt of the awards ceremony the night before.
    Not an exact vision, she said, but Isabel was there. In her hand she’d held a book the same size as the plaque, and she spoke to a crowd. Sister B blushed and said, It was too much to see it wide-awake. God has never spoken to me before, not in such a direct manner.
    Ulises thought the nun had been brainwashed by his sister. Isabel could convince anyone of anything through the resolve in her voice. A book, Ulises knew, was not a plaque, and what did she say in the dream? Why would God send a message to a forgetful old woman? Soledad, however, did not turn so quickly to skepticism; she was more concerned with her daughter than with her daughter’s words or an aging nun’s visions. She held Isabel by the shoulders—gently, as though the girl were a new creature, or had a new, fragile body, afraid, almost, to disturb the fabric of Isabel’s modest blue sleeves—and listened to what Sister B had to say, and she nodded sheepishly at the suggestion that her daughter take refuge in the convent.
    Isabel has done nothing wrong, Sister B said, but what she said will confuse everyone. If she stays here, we can protect her.
    Protect her from whom? Soledad asked. The press?
    The public, Sister B said. They will want to know if the Church allowed a young girl to put untended hospital patients to death.
    For how long? Soledad asked.
    Until they stop asking for her, Sister B said. Which they eventually will.
    Have they begun? Willems asked, and it was clear that the idea of leaving Isabel at the convent was strange to him as well as Ulises.
    The phones were ringing when I returned, Sister B said. And the bishop is on his way.
    —
    So began a second schism in the Encarnación family. It was swift and unrelenting. There was the geographical separation of bodies—Isabel stored away at the convent, and Ulises and Soledad back at the house—but there was also the division of blood, the son not wholly convinced of the sister’s religious commitment, the mother convinced only and obsessively that her daughter’s exile was her maternal fault. Soledad was a failed Catholic, but she couldn’t help comparing herself to Mary, the Mother of God, a woman she thought of as stupid for abdicating her only offspring to a waking nightmare. Privately, she feared that Isabel was just as lost, that she’d watched her go without an argument.
    Willems, for his part, was quiet on the matter and spent his time consoling Soledad. Never did he feel so distinct from the Encarnacións as he did just then, and it was a testament to how close and small the Encarnación triangle truly was that the Dutchman still hesitated to throw his hat into the ring. But he was determined to engage the family