by Alena Dillon
In her more melodramatic moments, she likened herself to Jesus on the crucifix, abandoned by His father. She stared at the single photo she was allowed to keep of her family and asked, “Why have you forsaken me?”
There were dark days. Once, when Mother Superior caught Evelyn sneaking a scrap of turkey before dinner, she made Evelyn lie down in the doorway so all the other nuns had to step over her on their way into the kitchen. Some days were darker still.
In fact, one of the few times she laughed in those first few years was when one of the older sisters stood too close to a prayer candle and her veil caught fire. While the smoldering sister and several other nuns flailed about, slapping the side of her head, trying to swat out the flame, the priest, Father Stephens, continued with his service as if they weren’t squawking like a brood of hens at the back of the room.
Evelyn wouldn’t have survived her formation had it not been for Eloise Harper. Eloise entered the order shortly after Evie. Eloise taught her to read body language when words were forbidden, to hear God in the silence. Eloise taught her to want to be a nun, not just because of her father’s promise, but because the vocation suited her, made her better. She began to find comfort in the communion of sisters, peace in prayer, and purpose in the commitment and sacrifice. Her habit (with the loose white veil of the novitiate years) made her part of a higher calling. It gave her a new family.
Her father died of liver failure before Evelyn took her vows—what she once thought of as his vows. But by the time Evelyn sheered her hair down to its fuzzy roots in order to fit into the guimpe that hugged her face and held the black veil like a crown, they were indeed her vows—mostly, anyway.
* * *
When Evelyn opened her eyes the next day, it took several blinks to orient herself. She was slouched in her rocking chair in the Mercy House living room, her olivewood rosary beads still laced through her fingers from her prayer the night before, and Mei-Li, a nineteen-year-old resident of the house, clasped Evelyn’s shoulders and rubbed her hands up and down to generate warmth.
“You’re shivering,” she whispered. Having been there six months, Mei-Li was the house veteran, and so Evelyn knew her better than the other residents. She’d learned she worked at a theater concession stand so that she could escape her reality by watching movies for free, including Twilight seven times; she was almost always smiling, but was rarely happy; and although she appeared shy and compliant on the outside—her uncle had trained such a demeanor—when overwhelmed, she held her breath and didn’t release it until she was on her own and could emit the exhale along with a deluge of profanities spat in three languages: English, Russian, and Mandarin. The first time Mei-Li returned from one of these private outbursts, Evelyn said, “If you want to curse so only God can hear you, that’s between the two of you. But there’s no need to censor yourself for anybody else’s sake; don’t hide your fire under a bushel.”
In the rocking chair, Evelyn gathered her beads into a fist and shifted, a call for a status update from her body. She was answered by severe stiffness in her back and would pay for this restless night’s sleep all day long.
“You should stop giving up your bed. It isn’t right,” Mei-Li said, straightening. Her skin was pale and smooth, her nose was set on a sturdy wide base, and her eyes danced with the complex joy of teardrops in a paisley pattern. “Bring new girls into our rooms, even if it is three in the morning. This isn’t good for you, popo.” Evelyn was told the Mandarin phrase was one of respect for an older woman, but she liked Mei-Li so much, it could have meant “trash hag” and Evelyn wouldn’t have wanted her to stop using the endearment. Mei-Li began to leave the room, but then hesitated in the doorway. “How is she? The new girl?”
Evelyn twisted in her chair despite the pinch she knew the movement would trigger in her back. She loved Mei-Li for asking about Lucia. She loved her in the way she grew to love all of her residents, women who had been broken by men, but who put themselves back together, who asked after others despite what was stored up inside themselves. Evelyn forced her voice to be tender through her pain. “You remember what it was like.”
Chapter 2
Mei-Li
When I was a girl, my father played paper dolls with me every evening after work, and when he cut out the dresses and hats for my little paper girls, he worked cautiously around their edges so they’d be just right. His eyebrows bunched together like two hairy caterpillars. His scissors closed slowly, millimeter by meticulous millimeter. He worked like he wasn’t a New York taxi driver who shared his cab with his terrible older brother and two other Russian men in our apartment building who smelled of gasoline and borscht. He worked like this was his living. He was a paper tailor—and a good one.
I was careless. Too eager to get past the tedious preparation and down to the business of playing. I sliced through an abdomen without looking, or cut off a sleeve. And when I realized what I’d done, I’d collapse against the kitchen table and wail. (This was before I learned sharing my emotions was a disadvantage to survival.)
“Zolotse,” my father would say, his hand on my back. “My gold. Don’t despair. You’ve done nothing that can’t be undone.”
With those reassurances in mind, I’d push myself up from the table to watch him repair my mistake. Because he was not just a paper tailor. He was also a paper surgeon.
He’d mend the wounds with precisely measured bits of scotch tape bound to the backs of the dresses so the stitching would be invisible. When he was finished, they looked as good as new. He was a paper miracle worker.
My mother watched us from the stove, where she prepared food to satisfy both of their palates. For her, hot and sour soup, whose chili oil made my father’s eyes water just from sharing the same room as its powerful essence, and for him, Olivier salad, a far blander mound of hard-boiled eggs, peas, and potatoes slathered in mayonnaise. Then there was always a third dish, one they could both sample: sautéed carrots and beets coated in soy paste. I still don’t know if this is a traditional Chinese dish that happened to incorporate elements of my father’s Russian heritage, or if my mother invented it after she listed herself in a catalog and agreed to marry a man she’d only seen in a photograph. She arrived in the United States two years before I was born, and was relieved and grateful to discover she could love the stranger who would be her husband. Grateful to be a wife in America, that her daring yielded positive results. Grateful enough to cook and eat beets.
“You spoil her. You fix her mistake over and over. She’ll never learn. She’ll never do well herself.”
“You is right, my love, lyubov moya,” my father answered. “Of course you is right.”
But he was my paper friend. He continued to fix my mistakes, over and over again. Until the day he died.
Uncle Nikita moved from his apartment into ours the day after my father’s funeral. I was fourteen then. “Ivan would very not want you alone,” he said. “I watch over you. Keep you safe. For my brother.”
He slept on the couch that night, and the night after that. When he was still in our living room a week later, drinking Moskovskaya out of my mother’s porcelain teacups, she said, “Nikita, you been so good to us. But you don’t have to stay here no more. We’re fine. I have Mei-Li and she have me. We do okay.”
His stare didn’t waver from the television, where the American soccer team struggled against South Africa. Nikita loved to see Americans lose. His voice was gruff, almost threatening, when he said, “It isn’t right to leave women on their own.”
My mother gripped her hands at her waist and smiled in a way that scared me. “We be fine. Mei-Li is smart girl. And I am strong. We take care of each other. And you live close. If we need anything, we find you in no time. But you can go home. Don’t be uncomfortable just for us.”
His gaze slid toward her. The darkness in his eyes made me put my pencil down. “Listen, Fan, you do not sound so hospitable.”
My mother chuckled and shook her head. “Oh no. You misunderstand.�
�
Nikita shot to his feet and whacked my mother upside the head. It wasn’t forceful, but the sudden cruelty of it still caused me to gasp. “Do not you talk back to me. If I say you is inhospitable, you is inhospitable,” he said, and then he returned to the game as if nothing had happened.
Violence in our home was so strange, neither my mother nor I knew how to react. I couldn’t see her face from where she was standing, but her body was rigid. After a few frozen moments, she turned on her heels, walked down the hall, and closed her bedroom door behind her. The announcer’s voice hummed in the background, but I couldn’t focus on his words. I could hardly even breathe. Nikita didn’t look back at me. He sloshed another helping of Moskovskaya into my mother’s teacup, one of the few items she’d brought with her from China, and when the American team scored a goal, he screamed, “Otva`li, mu`dak, b`lyad!” and hurled the cup against the wall, where it smashed.
As I brushed my teeth that night, he walked down the hall and into my mother’s room. The brush stilled in my hand. I caught a glimpse of her sitting on her bed, a photo album open in her lap. When he appeared, her eyes widened in surprise, and perhaps in fear, but she said nothing to stop him. He closed the door.
Instead of going to bed, I gathered the shards of my mother’s teacup and laid them on the kitchen table. As Nikita’s grunts and my mother’s whimpers drifted through the walls, I hummed to myself and tried to glue her precious keepsake back together. But this time what was done could not be undone. It had been broken into too many pieces.
If I ever have a daughter, I will give her a male name. Something like Zhaolong, meaning “like a dragon.” Boys get names like that in my mother’s country. Jianjun: “building the army.” Lei: “thunder.” Huojin: “fire metal.” Yingjie: “brave and heroic.” Girls are too often defined by their grace, their docility. Baozhai: “dainty and loving.” Luli: “dewy jasmine.” Renxiang: “benevolent fragrance.”
My name, Mei-Li, means “beautiful.” What good did beauty ever do me?
It took a year from that first awful night for Uncle Nikita to come into my bedroom. Perhaps I should be grateful it took him that long.
My mother tugged on his arm. She asked him to come back to her room. But she knew she couldn’t stop him. Her name is Fan, which means “orchid.” A sudden change in weather will cause an orchid’s petals to drop and will wither its stem. Although she was strong and courageous, having traveled to a country with a foreign tongue in order to marry a man she’d never met, my uncle was stronger. Nikita is a Russian name meaning “supreme, unbeatable.”
My uncle wrapped his thick hands around her neck and squeezed until her eyes bulged. He wanted both of us to know he was capable of killing us. We only lived because he let us. He was the god of our universe.
Or maybe he wanted my mother and me to understand that, if one of us left, if one us so much as said a word against him, he could kill the other. That was his leverage.
My mother sputtered. Her fingers clawed at his unrelenting noose.
“Stop! Do whatever you want to me. Just stop,” I cried.
And he did what he wanted. He was going to, anyway. He alternated between my mother and me for the next two years.
One day, when my mother was sick with the stomach flu and Nikita wanted beef stroganoff for dinner, I brought home the wrong cut of meat. He walked me down to the corner grocery store to show me exactly how stupid I’d been.
That’s where I first met Sister Evelyn. She stole glances at Uncle Nikita and me, and I don’t know how she understood but, when our eyes met, she recognized something in me. I felt it. She saw me in a way nobody else had—not my neighbors, not my teachers, not my Aunt Antonina. Or perhaps those people did see that thing in me, that broken thing, but they chose to look away because it was easier, safer. Sister Evelyn didn’t look away. And neither did I. I saw something in her too.
As we approached the counter with a package of cube steak and a bottle of Nikita’s Moskovskaya, she appeared with a cart full of bagged groceries, wearing an oversized Mets sweatshirt. “Excuse me,” she said sweetly to Nikita. “I couldn’t get my shopping cart over that step in front of the door, so I left it out on the sidewalk, and now I need to transfer all of these heavy bags. You’re big and strong. Would you help a feeble old woman?”
As soon as Nikita was out the door, she grabbed my wrist and her voice dropped into a lower, throaty register. “Two eighty-four Chauncey Street.”
I pulled my arm back. “What?”
“Two eighty-four Chauncey Street. Mercy House. We can help you.”
Uncle Nikita had half of the bags in the outside cart now. Later that night he would describe his act of heroism to my mother as she shivered with fever. Because despite everything, sometimes it seemed he wanted her approval. Even beasts long to be loved.
“Help me with what?” I asked.
She meant business and didn’t have much time. She leveled her stare. “You don’t deserve any of this. You need to get yourself out of this situation as soon as possible. Two eighty-four Chauncey Street. It’s the one with the angel doorknocker. Arrive any time. Day or night. You can be safe.” Then she turned to the Middle Eastern man behind the counter and nodded. “Sorry about the switch, Abdul. I’ll bring your cart back tomorrow.”
The next morning, before Uncle Nikita woke, I told my mother what the old woman had said, and that I wanted us to leave. She didn’t look up from where she diced cooked beets for vinegret. She didn’t make anything but Russian meals anymore. Not Chinese, and never her hybrid. She replied to me in Mandarin, “I have no work, no friends, and no family. How would I survive? Where would I go? Back to China?” Red juice pooled on the cutting board like fresh blood.
I asked her four more times. Let’s go to Mercy House. At least listen to what they have to say. But her answer was always the same. And I couldn’t imagine leaving her alone with him. If I stayed, at least we had each other.
I resigned myself to this fate until the day Nikita didn’t like the tone I used to tell him dinner was ready and he put a knife to my throat. The steel was cool and sharp against my skin and his breath was warm and sour. His eyes were crazed; his pupils dilated the way they did when he thrust himself into me. He was getting pleasure from this moment. It pleased him to have his way with my body, to have his way with my life.
That’s when I decided I would be more than just beautiful. I would be like the dragon.
I told my mother, when I left for work at the theater the next day, I wouldn’t be returning. And I wanted her to come with me, to meet me at Mercy House at three o’clock, during Nikita’s taxi shift.
I waited on the front steps of 284 Chauncey Street for two hours before I lifted the angel doorknocker.
Sister Evelyn answered. “I’m glad you decided to come,” she said. And then she opened the door wider. “Welcome home.”
Worry for my mother filled my stomach, my head, and my mouth. There wasn’t room for anything else. It took a week to keep down a proper meal, and twice that before I spoke. I was afraid that if I parted my lips, my mother would spill out. So I kept her in. I stored up my worry and rage until I couldn’t hold them in any more, and they bubbled out of me. No matter how badly I wanted to be like the dragon, it couldn’t happen all at once. I’d have to learn.
Hope for my mother lives on. Here’s the thing about orchids. Even after their last petal drops, they can always bloom again.
Chapter 3
Sister Maria wore a men’s crew-neck sweater, but her cleavage line was still visible, running almost up to her clavicle, and her belly bulged beneath an electric-yellow apron that read “Hot Stuff Coming Through.” While Evelyn assembled ingredients for a slow cooker dinner, Sister Maria removed muffins from the oven. She eyed the browned mounds in their tin and said, “Bran is nobody’s favorite, but it won’t kill us to be health conscious. Our bodies are temples, after all.”
After she dusted her hands of flour and slipped the apron over her ne
ck, Maria prepared for her daily Reiki ritual. She arranged her pad on top of the kitchen table and pressed play on her 1990s-era boom box, which emitted ethereal Eastern flute music, just in time for the first resident to descend the stairs for her treatment.
“Morning, Sisters,” Esther said as she shuffled in, rubbing sleep from an eye with the heel of a hand. At five foot nothing, Esther was a compact woman from Haiti. She immigrated as a girl, so her speech offered only a trace of her roots, revealed most clearly when her puckered lips made short o’s long, and when words beginning with th, like “think” or “thanks,” sounded like they started with a soft, almost imperceptible d. Her skin was smooth chestnut, her chest ample, and her limbs solid—so solid Evelyn wondered why she had tolerated her ex-boyfriend’s mistreatment for as long as she did. But Evelyn had been in this ugly business long enough to know victims weren’t just at the mercy of their abusers’ physical strength. Emotional control was often a more formidable force. Esther arrived on the sisters’ doorstep two months earlier with a bloody nose, an overnight bag, and a positive pregnancy test. She wasn’t pregnant anymore.
“Blessed morning, Esther,” Maria said with a grin so broad and genuine Evelyn didn’t know whether to roll her eyes or hug the woman. Inspired by The Sound of Music and The Flying Nun, Maria had joined their order forty years earlier, back in the late 1960s after the change to Vatican II, in the sweet spot when becoming a nun wasn’t such an ordeal but the station was still respected by the general population. But it was not quite as fun as Maria had expected; she imagined living with a bunch of women would be like a sleepover that lasted a lifetime. She’d made the best of it though, sunbathing nude on the roof of the convent, curling women’s hair with toilet paper rolls, organizing games of charades, and writing and directing plays and spoof songs that teased the older nuns.
Maria clasped her hands atop her belly. “How’d you sleep?”
