by Alena Dillon
“Do you recognize who he’s with? Friends, girlfriends?”
James eyed Evelyn while he chewed. “If you’re asking something, go ahead and ask it.”
Evelyn struggled to swallow the bran; the walk had parched her. She could use a long pull from a water bottle—or better yet, a beer—and her mind ran through a list of the nearest convenience stores. “Is he the type who rotates girls in and out, or does he put his claws into one at a time?”
James chewed and stared at her dully. The whites of his eyes were cloudy, perhaps yellowed. It reminded Evelyn of her father’s in his last years, and she wondered if James suffered from liver disease, if he sought medical attention for it, if he was even aware of the possibility. “I don’t spend time in the boy’s bedroom, but I’d wager a bit of both.”
“What do you mean?”
“I only ever see him out with one girl, but that don’t mean he don’t spread his love around when she ain’t looking.”
Evelyn closed her eyes and nodded. That’s the answer she was afraid of. That one girl—Angel’s one girl—was sitting at her kitchen table. And he’d want her back.
James intuited her concern. “Let me guess. You got a new girl last night, and Angel got trouble in paradise?”
“That bruise on her eye didn’t look like paradise to me.”
James’s lips parted into a smile, revealing a tooth gap. “Hey, love hurts.”
Only a person who wouldn’t be on the receiving end of domestic abuse could say such an asinine thing. She shook her head. “If you really loved someone, you wouldn’t hurt them.”
James’s eyelids lowered and he extended his hand for another baked good. “Maybe you ain’t never really loved nobody.”
Her final stop was a necessary evil.
At the end of Gates she turned to head north on Broadway, an avenue that ran under the J train. The steel beams of the track overhead created the illusion of being inside a tunnel, and when the train thundered above, her whole world rattled and screeched; it almost felt like the locomotive roared right through her.
She was now in the section of Bed-Stuy where bananas sold for nineteen cents a pound, people took buses to work rather than the subway, and liquor store owners had to sit behind bulletproof glass.
A few vacant storefronts with roll-down security doors were marred by illegible graffiti. The acrid scent of piss stung Evelyn’s nostrils and she walked a little faster.
She was early for her next appointment, so she stopped in a bodega for a bottle of water and a bag of potato chips for Lucia. While she waited to be rung up, her eyes scanned the New York Post, their neighborhood’s periodical of choice. She still remembered the front-page story about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the infamous underwear bomber, who had hidden explosives in his pants and attempted to detonate them while onboard a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day. The headline had read “Great Balls of Fire!” in all caps. That paper couldn’t take anything seriously. Evelyn passed the G Spot, a clothing store where mannequins posed in the display window wearing Lycra dresses with holes cut in odd places and fake leather pants with corset ties up the legs. Evelyn imagined trying to shimmy her way into one of those outfits. “Lord help us all,” she said.
The door of Avenue Pharmacy dinged as Evelyn pushed it open. Steve was doing his morning count at the open register. He thumbed the bills faster than a bank teller. Evelyn found the swishing sound almost soothing.
Her small cardboard box was already waiting on the counter. She pulled it against her hip and nodded at Steve, not wanting to interrupt. He nodded back, his lips working through the numbers. His white coat was stiff with starch and impeccably clean. But his features were tired and almost hung from his face, and his eyes, positioned just too close together, were dull; perhaps the light had extinguished back when necrotizing fasciitis poisoned his son’s blood and killed him. Surely that was the reason Steve agreed to this arrangement. Evelyn felt guilty leaving him looking so downcast, but she had an appointment to make. Besides, she’d be back in thirty minutes. She’d minister to him then.
Sharpie was already waiting on the sidewalk outside Miss Bubbles Laundromat, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. When he saw Evelyn coming, he nodded and dipped inside without waiting for her.
The place smelled of sitting water and detergent. Sharpie lounged on a folding chair in the shadows of the back corner.
Evelyn didn’t know where Sharpie got his nickname, but she’d guess it was the dark eyebrows that looked like they’d been drawn in. But it could just as easily have been his frame; he was tall enough to be mistaken for a basketball player, and thin enough to be named for a permanent marker.
“Hey, Sharpie. Want a muffin? I have one left. Just for you.”
His ebony eyebrows pulled together as if her suggestion was ridiculous. But they quickly relaxed. “Yeah, okay.”
The Laundromat owner, an older Asian woman, slipped into the back room, out of sight. Evelyn hated the idea that she was involved in a transaction this woman didn’t want to witness. And she wondered what debt Sharpie held over the woman’s head that obliged her business to host his seedy operations.
“Let’s trade, then,” Evelyn said and placed her last remaining muffin on top of the cardboard box. Sharpie took both. Then he stuck his free hand inside his Timberland winter coat and pulled out a sterile sampling bag filled with used syringes that she’d bring back to Steve.
This wasn’t Evelyn’s preferred strategy for addressing the drug problem in her area. In fact, she’d tried several more palatable methods. She’d found dealers alternate jobs—at soup kitchens, restaurants, grocery stores—but they all eventually quit and went back to the streets, where they made more money on their own schedules. She’d posted flyers about Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and when they were inevitably torn down, she’d posted more. She’d even tipped the cops off to when and where drugs were sold, but she soon discovered that when dealers were arrested, others simply rose up to take their place. After years of fighting and failing to purge the area of drugs, she resigned herself to at least making users safer, to reduce the incidents of hepatitis, HIV, tetanus, and other bacterial infections. An opportunity presented itself when a lapsed Catholic she knew from his boyhood became the head honcho of the local drug circuit. She approached him on the street one day and appealed to the guilt and fear her religion tended to imbed in its faithful, promising to pray for his deceased father’s soul if he agreed not to sell to kids younger than eighteen, and if he provided sterile needles to his users along with their junk. Sharpie reluctantly agreed—his father had been convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree; his soul would need her prayers. Talking Steve into the needle exchange program was easy; he was a good person, and the cause made him feel connected to his deceased son. But Sharpie refused to pick up or drop off the needles himself. That was fine; Evelyn wouldn’t have trusted him to anyway. Like it or not, she had to stay involved.
“I score food and you walk with some filthy ass needles? Sister, you got the shit end of this deal,” Sharpie said and bit into the muffin.
She held the sterile sampling bag by its corner. The skinny syringes inside probably contained blood and residue of the brown heroin that obliterated the mental anguish plaguing so many, the same anguish that had plagued Evelyn in a previous life, and sometimes snuck its way back into her current one. She’d never gone so far as opioids. In her darkest days, she’d turned to the Irish drug of choice, and had floated on alcohol’s current for much of the 1960s. Even all those decades later, having drug paraphernalia in her possession awakened an old thirst, or at least a curiosity. How much better might she feel if she just gave in? She reminded herself such a feeling was only an illusion, a selfish escape from a place that still existed, even if you closed your eyes to it. A place that needed her.
She dropped the paraphernalia into her now-empty basket and nestled the bodega’s plastic bag on top to make her stash discreet. Then she said
to Sharpie, “Yeah, I’d say you’re getting away with murder.”
Back in the 1990s, after the AIDS crisis had roared through New York City but before needle exchange programs were established, Evelyn had cleaned syringes herself. She would sit in her little concrete backyard beside a bucket of water and a bucket of bleach, fill the syringes with one liquid, then the other, empty the blood residue into the storm drain, remove the plungers, soak the disassembled pieces in the Clorox and then rinse them, her hands red and stiff from the cold air despite her rubber gloves, whispering the Magnificat all the while. He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly. He fills the starving with good things, sends the rich away empty. And every morning, she woke and wondered if this was the day they’d finally make her sick.
At least this was better than that.
Chapter 4
Evelyn returned to Mercy House to find Maria performing Reiki on Katrina, a seventeen-year-old waiflike flower child with blond hair streaked with pink. She’d been a resident for about a month, and in that time Evelyn had spent hours counseling her, beginning with polite small talk and gradually, methodically, scraping away the defensive exterior to reach the root.
Katrina was rescued from abusive birth parents at eight years old, and then spent a decade being shuffled around foster homes. With her high-pitched and airy voice, fair skin, spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, bubblegum lips, and slight frame, she was an easy target. She was assaulted most recently by her foster father, who convinced her she was too weak, sweet, and innocent to be safe in the house on her own, but that he would protect her. First he hugged her tight. Then he took her on errands. Then he invited her to nap on his bed. Then he persuaded her to sleep there overnight while her foster mother was away. He took advantage of a girl who was starved for love.
Katrina often woke up sobbing.
Perhaps as a counterbalance to the ugliness of her foster home, she perpetually wore earbuds and carried an outdated CD player around with her, and spent her free time listening to music and crafting, knitting the sisters and residents scarves and lopsided winter hats, and constructing glittery cards to send to foster children she’d met along her route.
Evelyn propped the bag of potato chips on the counter where Lucia could see it.
The glass of the kitchen window rattled in its pane. Evelyn turned to find Sister Josephine standing in the entryway, her eyes rounded, as if she’d seen Beelzebub himself.
Maria addressed Katrina in her Reiki trance voice. “Imagine a babbling brook. A lovely babbling brook.” Then she and Evelyn hurried down the hall.
Josephine wore attire typical of Vatican II nuns released from their habit: a long, loose cardigan over a button-down shirt and a floor-length skirt—all shapeless. Her purse rocked on her wrist. Permanent creases radiated around the circumference of her lips, like millimeter marks on a ruler. A former resident called Josephine “Sister Gollum” because of her frail frame, but this nickname had one serious flaw—Josephine’s impeccable pose. She always stood erect, with picture-perfect posture, as if she were made of wood.
Josephine had joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Mercy before the shift to Vatican II, drawn to the vocation by its earnestness and its devotion to knowledge and work. Her passion was scholarly; she was entranced by the literature of the mystics and the history of nuns. Back when she was a teenager, nuns were the pioneers of feminism, and joining the sisterhood was one of the only ways for a girl to pursue higher education, so that’s what she did. In her lifetime, she’d earned a doctorate in theology and two master’s degrees, one in nursing and one in philosophy.
“It’s what we’ve feared,” Josephine said. “It’s him.”
“Him?” Evelyn asked, her hands clenching into fists at her side, her pulse rising.
“Him,” Josephine confirmed with a single nod. “He knows, and he’s coming.”
Rumors had been circulating their order for months that Bishop Robert Hawkins—whom they called the Hawk—was coming for an extended stay as part of the apostolic visitation, a nationwide Vatican-initiated scrutiny of religious sisters. A team of investigators was spending two years touring the United States, sticking their beaks into every order, examining them with microscopic eyes, hunting for deviations from doctrine. Hawkins was chosen by Cardinal Franc Rode, who initiated this great “nun-quisition,” reproaching American nuns for their “secular mentality” and “feminist spirit.”
Although nuns across the country took the same vows, the culture and beliefs of orders were as varied as the culture and beliefs of all Americans. On one end of the spectrum were the conservative orders. These nuns still wore habits and lived cloistered lives cut off from the rest of society, like medieval nuns. Some were so extreme they self-flagellated, and were so isolated they received Communion through a gate. On the other end were liberal nuns, sisters who didn’t attend church regularly, who didn’t consider themselves servants of the Vatican, who went so far as to refer to God as a She, and who wanted female ordination. One hundred and fifty such women had performed the Mass ceremony despite the papal edict that forbade it, and they were promptly excommunicated.
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Mercy, Evelyn’s order, fell somewhere in the middle, perhaps with a leaning more toward the “God as She” end of the spectrum. It was their type of order that many church leaders begrudged, calling them “radical feminists.” It was their type of order the Catholic Church hoped to “repair”—and, if not repair, then to purge.
In addition to the sisters’ beliefs, the Vatican—led by Pope Benedict XVI—took issue with their missions. They did not approve of much of the nuns’ work in the United States. They alleged sisters spent too much time focusing on social justice—advocating for human rights—and not enough time advancing church doctrine—No abortions! No contraception! No homosexuality! No divorce! They wanted less emphasis on love, equality, and fairness, and more energy spent promoting rules and regulations. Spare the rod, spoil the American child.
A year earlier, in 2009, the Vatican had distributed a questionnaire to the fifty-thousand-some-odd remaining American nuns, a fraction of their maximum number of two hundred thousand in 1965. Evelyn did not take this survey seriously.
Question: How do you understand and express the vow and virtue of obedience?
Answer: Well, that depends. Did my superior say, “Simon says?”
Question: What are the procedures for dealing with matters of criminal activity?
Answer: We make the wrongdoer smoke the entire pack of criminal activity—all in one sitting.
Question: How does the manner of dress, as specified in the proper law of your religious institute, bear witness to your consecration, and to the dignity and simplicity of your vocation?
Answer: I try to keep body glitter to a minimum. But I’m only human!
Although she supposed it was technically true, Evelyn didn’t consider herself a servant of the Vatican. She’d never been to Rome, she’d never met the current Pontiff, and she had virtually no desire to do so. Pope Benedict XVI wore red velvet capes with ermine fur trim. He commissioned his own cologne, which Evelyn called Pope-pourri. He was chauffeured around in a Mercedes. He had a personal library of more than twenty thousand books. It took two hundred architects and engineers to restore his Rome palace, and he resided in his other palace while the construction was underway. That lavish lifestyle bore little resemblance to her experience in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where gunfire rattled through the night, where she added more broth to stretch soup for dinner, where she applied for endless grants in order to afford heat and electricity, where girls cried themselves to sleep because they were hurt and scared and lonely. She and Pope Benedict may have shared the same God, the same Blessed Mother, but this community was her congregation. It was here she best served, and it was in the faces of her neighbors that she witnessed the love and compassion of Jesus Christ. She may have attended Mass once or twice a week, but Mercy House wasn’t just her minis
try—it was her true church.
The Vatican didn’t quite see it that way.
Evelyn’s priest, Father John, a childhood friend who had grown up down the block from her family and become an affable man—if a little spineless—explained the Vatican’s intention in benign clichés: They just want to touch base with you. They are taking the pulse of our parish. They want to get to know your work better and find better ways to support you. You all are great; you have nothing to be concerned about.
But the sisters knew the truth. The Vatican had swept three thousand cases of priest pedophilia under the rug, protecting those criminals at the cost of their own morality and worldwide respect, but when it came to nuns, they wanted blood. This was an inquisition. A probing. And, if need be, a culling.
The sisters were rightfully concerned. Not just for the sake of Mercy House and their identities as nuns, but for their own survival. The church owned their house and provided them health insurance, cell phones, and a weekly stipend. They were senior citizens without belongings or bank accounts—who would support them if they were tossed from the order? Who would hire them? Where would they sleep? What would they eat? They might very well end up living in the kind of shelter they’d devoted their lives to operating.
To make matters worse, not only was Bishop Robert Hawkins a threat to the sisters’ work and well-being, he and Evelyn had a history. In fact, he was one of the few people on God’s good green earth whom Evelyn despised.
* * *
March 1962
Evie still wore the white veil of the novitiate when Father Robert Hawkins first touched her. She was twenty-one years old.
He began innocently enough. While she polished the sacred vessels for that morning’s service, Father Hawkins grazed her hip with his fingertips as he skirted behind her to access his vestment. He wasn’t even supposed to be there at the same time as Evie, but who was she to correct him? Anyway, she didn’t mind the company; she’d spent nearly two years in isolation. Her family didn’t bother to contact her anymore, and the vow of silence was secluding. She was lonely. Besides, Father Hawkins wasn’t necessarily a handsome man, but he was a competent young priest, and that made him attractive in his own way. She may have taken a vow of celibacy, but she was still human and had occasional fancies she didn’t immediately squelch. If nothing else, it was nice to feel acknowledged at a time when, as a nun, she was meant to be invisible. So, when he didn’t leave, and in fact slipped the heavy emerald brocade chasuble over his head right then and there, she felt privileged that he was comfortable enough with her to dress in such close proximity. She savored the warmth that lingered from his touch.
