AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE SECOND floor, Sister Miriam was on duty at the nurses' station.

If Sister Miriam grips her lower lip with two fingers and pulls it down to reveal the pink inner surface, you will see a tattoo in blue ink, Deo gratias, which is Latin for "Thanks be to God."

This is not a statement of commitment required of nuns. If it were, the world would probably have even fewer nuns than it does now.

Long before she ever considered the life of the convent, Sister Miriam had been a social worker in Los Angeles, an employee of the federal government. She worked with teenage girls from disadvantaged families, striving to rescue them from gang life and other horrors.

Most of this I know from Sister Angela, the mother superior, because Sister Miriam not only doesn't toot her own horn-she does not have a horn to toot.

As a challenge to a girl named Jalissa, an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had great promise but who had been on the gang path and about to acquire a gang tattoo, Miriam had said, Girl, what do I have to do to make you think how you're trading a full life for a withered one? I talk sense to you, but it doesn't matter. I cry for you, you're amused. Do I have to bleed for you to get your attention?

She then offered a deal: If Jalissa would promise, for thirty days, to stay away from friends who were in a gang or who hung out with a gang, and if she would not get a gang tattoo the following day as she intended, Miriam would take her at her word and would have her own inner lip tattooed with what she called "a symbol of my gang."

An audience of twelve at-risk girls, including Jalissa, gathered to watch, wince, and squirm as the tattooist performed his needlework.

Miriam refused topical anesthetics. She had chosen the tender tissue of the inner lip because the cringe factor would impress the girls. She bled. Tears flowed, but she made not one sound of pain.

That level of commitment and the inventive ways she expressed it made Miriam an effective counselor. These years later, Jalissa has two college degrees and is an executive in the hotel industry.

Miriam rescued many other girls from lives of crime, squalor, and depravity. You might expect that one day she would become the subject of a movie with Halle Berry in the title role.

Instead, a parent complained about the spiritual element that was part of Miriam's counseling strategy. As a government employee, she was sued by an organization of activist attorneys on the grounds of separation of church and state. They wanted her to cut spiritual references from her counseling, and they insisted that Deo gratias be either obscured with another tattoo or expunged. They believed that in the privacy of counseling sessions, she would peel down her lip and corrupt untold numbers of young girls.

You might think this case would be laughed out of court, but you would be as wrong as you were about the Halle Berry movie. The court sided with the activists.

Ordinarily, government employees are not easily canned. Their unions will fight ferociously to save the job of an alcoholic clerk who shows up at work only three days a week and then spends a third of his workday in a toilet stall, tippling from a flask or vomiting.

Miriam was an embarrassment to her union and received only token support. Eventually she accepted a modest severance package.

For a few years thereafter, she held less satisfying jobs before she heard the call to the life she now leads.

Standing behind the counter at the nurses' station, reviewing inventory sheets, she looked up as I approached and said, "Well, here comes young Mr. Thomas in his usual clouds of mystery."

Unlike Sister Angela, Abbot Bernard, and Brother Knuckles, she had not been told of my special gift. My universal key and privileges intrigued her, however, and she seemed to intuit something of my true nature.

"I'm afraid you mistake my perpetual state of bafflement for an air of mystery, Sister Miriam."

If they ever did make a movie about her, the producers would hew closer to the truth if they cast Queen Latifah instead of Halle Berry. Sister Miriam has Latifah's size and royal presence, and perhaps even more charisma than the actress.

She regards me always with friendly but gimlet-eyed interest, as though she knows that I'm getting away with something even if it's not something terribly naughty.

"Thomas is an English name," she said, "but there must be Irish blood in your family, considering how you spread blarney as smooth as warm butter on a muffin."

"No Irish blood, I'm afraid. Although if you knew my family, you would agree that I come from strange blood."

"You're not looking at a surprised nun, are you, dear?"

"No, Sister. You don't look at all surprised. Could I ask you a few questions about Jacob, in Room Fourteen?"

"The woman he draws is his mother."

From time to time, Sister Miriam seems just a little psychic herself.

"His mother. That's what I figured. When did she die?"

"Twelve years ago, of cancer, when he was thirteen. He was very close to her. She seems to have been a devoted, loving person."

"What about his father?"

Distress puckered her plum-dark face. "I don't believe he was ever in the picture. The mother never married. Before her death, she arranged for Jacob's care at another church facility. When we opened, he was transferred here."

"We were talking for a while, but he's not easy to follow."

Now I was looking at a wimple-framed look of surprise. "Jacob talked with you, dear?"

"Is that unusual?" I asked.

"He doesn't talk with most people. He's so shy. I've been able to bring him out of his shell…" She leaned across the counter toward me, searching my eyes, as if she had seen a fishy secret swim through them and hoped to hook it. "I shouldn't be surprised that he'll speak with you. Not at all surprised. You've got something that makes everyone open up, don't you, dear?"

"Maybe it's because I'm a good listener," I said.

"No," she said. "No, that's not it. Not that you aren't a good listener. You're an exceptionally good listener, dear."

"Thank you, Sister."

"Have you ever seen a robin on a lawn, head cocked, listening for worms moving all but silently under the grass? If you were beside the robin, dear, you would get the worm first every time."

"That's quite an image. I'll have to give it a try come spring. Anyway, his conversation is kind of enigmatic. He kept talking about a day when he wasn't allowed to go to the ocean but, quote, 'they went and the bell rung.'"

"'Never seen where the bell rung,'" Sister Miriam quoted, "'and the ocean it moves, so where the bell rung is gone somewhere new.'"

"Do you know what he means?" I asked.

"His mother's ashes were buried at sea. They rang a bell when they scattered them, and Jacob was told about it."

I heard his voice in memory: Jacob's only scared he'll float wrong when the dark comes.

"Ah," I said, feeling just a little Sherlocky, after all. "He worries that he doesn't know the spot where her ashes were scattered, and he knows the ocean is always moving, so he's afraid he won't be able to find her when he dies."

"The poor boy. I've told him a thousand times she's in Heaven, and they'll be together again one day, but the mental picture he has of her floating away in the sea is too vivid to dispel."

I wanted to go back to Room 14 and hug him. You can't fix things with a hug, but you can't make them any worse, either.

"What is the Neverwas?" I asked. "He's afraid of the Neverwas."

Sister Miriam frowned. "I haven't heard him use the term. The Neverwas?"

"Jacob says he was full of the black-"

"The black?"

"I don't know what he means. He said he was full of the black, and the Neverwas came and said, 'Let him die.' This was a long time ago, 'before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.'"