Who is Mavis Albright from Paradise and what is their importance?

Mavis Albright accidently allows her twins die of suffocation in a car while she is inside a grocery store. She carries great guilt over their deaths, though she denies being away for more than a few minutes. As a result, Mavis abandons her family and winds up at the convent where she settles in with Connie and lives for many years. Mavis claims that her twins, Merle and Pearl, live in the Convent with the women, but she spends most of her life afraid of arrest for having killed her twins. She believes that her husband is searching for her, and that there's an arrest warrant out for her, both which make her unwilling to go back and seek out her remaining three children, even though she puts herself in a position to be able to see them at school.