ven as a young child I knew that I had been reborn. I spoke of it to no one and only my mother spoke of it to me, albeit obliquely. I also knew that I had died. God must have some plan for me, I thought, so I waited, timid and anxious. Meanwhile, there was nothing for me to do but get on with life. But how When youve opened with your best act, what do you do next The way came to me, enveloped me. The family rosary in the evenings, holy water by the light switch in the bedrooms, First Communion with white-gloved hands clasped in prayer. Confession, incense, and Latin hymns. Could I do pious I was Bernadette. Lying in bed in the dark, I shook, staring into the corner of my room, terrified that the Virgin Mary would appear and tell me I had to leave home to convert Russia. I had a propensity for visions. I would search the clouds for signs, for suspicious rays of light. I expected miracles. I knew God could see me. I cried easily and often. I fainted periodically. I prayed. I dreamed I was a nun. I dreamed I was a saint, a martyr, even a saviour.

Having two Gails in the family was confusing, especially if we were really only one. I have an early memory of my mother asking me about the framed picture of the other Gail. It had disappeared from the top of the TV. I had no idea where it was. I remember my surprise when she found it face down, buried under clothes in my dresser drawer. For years after that, she hid the picture, putting it back out gingerly when I was an adult.

I started grade one at St. Francis Xavier when I was six, and cried daily for half a year. And at the end of the school year, the teacher presented me with a pale blue plastic shell that opened up to reveal the Virgin Mary and a crystal-coloured rosary. I had stood first in the class. My mother seemed pleased, though it was hard to tell.

My mother’s mother had died when she was eight. Her father’s house in rural pei, where she was the second-youngest of eight children and the only girl, was a rough, sometimes violent home. After her favourite older brother signed up for the war in Europe, her father donated the service pay to my mother’s education. She was sent away to a residential convent school on the northwest tip of the island, where she was raised and educated by nuns, clothed and fed on their bitter but sometimes soothing wisdom. Her gentle-hearted mother was gone and her father, an angry and heavy-drinking
man who surely loved his only daughter, did not visit. Her first Christmas there, other girls celebrated with their families while my mother stayed at the convent. The nuns gave her explanations for her pain. God’s will must be done. You get what you deserve. And they told her to pray.

I had been painless. I had stopped the pain. Or had I My mother rarely seemed happy. Through the 1960s, she raised seven children while my father worked six days a week managing a gas station. He came home late, stiff and numb with fatigue, and left in the morning before dawn. On Sundays, he rested in a solitary stupor. The summer I turned eleven, we moved into my mother’s dream home, a back-split in the Toronto suburbs with three bathrooms, five bedrooms, and a fireplace. But still there was constant tension, a fear of something breaking or snapping. In the summer of 1968, I walked to Mass each morning. I had recurring dreams of being a hero, saving Holocaust children from a burning schoolhouse and an axe-wielding Nazi madman. Dark hair, dark eyes, saving children’s lives.

Under the bed lay a frail, dark-haired secret. Long before E.T., I fed and clothed the alien in my bedroom, peering over the pages of the Sears catalogue for the coordinated turtlenecks and jumpers and stretch pants that I could afford to order for her on my imaginary tight budget. I took care of her. I imagined “the other Gail” as my twin, maybe an inch taller, but more fragile and in need of me. Dark hair, dark eyes, and the only two sisters in the family born without a birthmark. She aged in tandem with me. I was her guardian angel.

he death of the other Gail and my miracle birth had cut a swath through the family. The sibling rivalry for my mother’s approval was deadly and lent a chaotic shape to all our lives, but I felt I was the one to beat. I had two older sisters, two younger sisters, and two even-younger brothers. I made a mockery of birth-order theories. The order of my birth had traded a life for a death. Beat that. My mother gave little praise and few compliments, but I had her attention and I worked to keep it. My every success reinforced my mother’s silent story, keeping her guilt and pain at bay, but causing my siblings to resent me. Eventually I found the solution: nobody envies a sad person.

At fourteen, I read Plato’s Apology and named my cat Socrates. I fell in love with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and memorized “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” reciting it to anyone who would listen. One minute life was dire; the next, absurd. I read Cardinal Newman and C.S. Lewis. But I had a cute track-star boyfriend who wanted to get married. I was publicly pious and privately libidinous. I didn’t know who I was.

It was inevitable that the teenage years would mark the decline in my relationship with my mother. Her unhappiness was like a knife hanging in the air. I tried to walk around it, but she seemed increasingly disappointed with her life, with us, even with me. “And we thought you were going to be a nun,” she once said bitterly.

My enjoyment of the Catholic Mass waned. I critically analyzed hymn lyrics during the car ride back from church. Still, I slept with a rosary under my pillow. At university “my first year of education outside a Catholic school “I started studying the Bible. My world split open. I remember the first Christmas I could no longer believe in the nativity story. I cried after midnight Mass. I’d read too much contemporary biblical scholarship, knew too much about the conflicting versions of Jesus’ birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and its complete absence in John, Mark, and the Epistles of Paul. I had stepped out of the Catholic candlelight and into the dark freedom of post-Enlightenment literature. Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, Eliot. Its not that I believed in nothing, but why would God bring me back to life and not all the other babies who die And what if I did nothing with my life to justify that miracle re-entry