Mercy House

by Alena Dillon

  Evelyn marveled at Josephine’s cunning. Of course that was the only way—fight power with higher power.

  The bishop scoffed. “I’m sure such a discussion will be unnecessary, as long as Sister Evelyn can manage to be seen and not heard.”

  For better or worse, Evelyn had spent many years developing just that skill.

  There were three facts Evelyn worried her residents might disclose. Two were about Desiree: she was a proud bisexual and an even prouder prostitute who gladly serviced both genders. The last significant and significantly damning truth was about Esther.

  Chapter 11

  Esther

  My mother said I was always a serious child. I was the youngest, but while my brother and sisters played outside, chasing one another through the trees or drawing pictures on the ground with sticks, I preferred to help with the chores. I followed my mother down to the spring and brought back water in buckets we carried on our heads. I picked vegetables from the garden and washed them for dinner. I swept our dirt floor with a leafy branch I selected with care. My mother called me lonbraj mwen, “my shadow.” And I called her the Haitian Creole word for mother, Manman, which I would later appreciate for its English implication, because it was true: my mother had the strength of two men.

  When she got the opportunity to join her cousin in the United States, she did so without hesitation, even though it meant leaving us under the care of my eldest sister until Manman earned enough money to send for us. We were poor. Water dripped through the slats of our roof whenever it rained. We relieved ourselves in the woods and buried our excrement so it wouldn’t stink or run into our water supply. We were illiterate. We didn’t stand a chance in Haiti. And so she left us, so she could save us.

  When we arrived in the United States two years later, I was afraid to see my mother. I thought maybe I wouldn’t recognize her. Or worse: she wouldn’t recognize me. And there were so many people in the airport. More people than I’d ever seen in one place. I held onto my sisters’ wrists like they were branches beside a mighty river whose current wished to sweep me away. Although I fought them, tears pricked my eyes. But then she was there. Manman. And though she was fifteen hundred miles from home, she still smelled of Haitian soil.

  My mother told us to forget about Haiti. She wanted us to become Americans. And so she allowed us to speak only English in the apartment. She no longer practiced vodou. Instead of fried goat and plantains, we ate chicken fingers and fries. But some things couldn’t be changed; they were ingrained in us. We still walked like we were balancing something on our heads, something important we didn’t want to spill, something as essential as water.

  There were several good years living with my mother and her cousin’s family in Brownsville. But then my grandmother became ill back home, and my mother returned to the island to care for her. When her mother passed away months later, my mother wasn’t allowed to return to the United States. She’d overstayed her visa once before. Immigration wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  There was an ocean between her and her children once again, but this time closing the distance would mean damning us to a life of need. And she wouldn’t do that. We’d have to remain a world apart.

  Without my mother anchoring us, my brother and sisters drifted in different directions. My eldest sister married and moved with her husband to South Carolina. When she sent pictures of palm trees, my other sister followed her, hoping for a taste of home. And my brother moved to the Bronx and currently earns money in ways that would make my mother weep.

  I was the only member of my family to stay in Brownsville. I finished high school and began taking classes at Kingsborough Community College. I would get a degree, a good job, and a green card so I could visit my mother. See her again. That was the plan. As an undocumented teen, I was what the United States called a Dreamer.

  In the meantime, I sent my mother letters, and once every two months she walked miles and miles to the nearest bus stop and rode into Port-au-Prince so we could video chat over Skype. Often I’d sit in the bedroom I shared with my second cousins, staring at the screen, waiting for her icon to appear, not knowing her bus had broken down or that the internet café decided to close early.

  I met Emmanuel at the Caribbean restaurant where I worked, a place called Some ’Ting Nice. He’d recently emigrated from Haiti, and I ignored his wolfish smile, the way his eyes glinted like a steel blade, because he’d been to the village where my family lived, where my mother still was, and the cadence in his voice sounded to me like love.

  I remained blind even when I learned his father was in a Haitian prison for murder. As my mother would say, the son of a tiger is a tiger. It took far too long for me to see his stripes.

  He didn’t like to watch me study. Perhaps because education is power, and he couldn’t allow me that. At first he lured me from my textbooks with sweetness. “Come, sit with me. I miss you.” Or “There’s a party at the Haitian Community Center. We should go.” Or “Let’s make griyo together. It would make your mother proud.” But once he made himself the most important part of my life, once I loved him, he didn’t have to add honey to his persuasion. Instead he said, “If you don’t have time for me, I’ll find a woman who does.” Or “What kind of wife do you think you’ll make with your nose in your book and nothing on the stove?” Or “What is the point of all of this? Do you think you’ll become a doctor some day? How many Haitian women do you know who are doctors? Don’t be foolish.”

  So I didn’t study, and when I failed an important exam, I snapped and said, “See what happens when I listen to you?”

  He crossed his arm over his body and backhanded my face. “How can you say such a thing to someone who loves you as much as I do?”

  In vodou, there is no heaven or hell. There is only this world. And from my experience, that is heaven and hell enough.

  I wish I could say I walked out on him that day, but I stayed with Emmanuel for one more year. Perhaps it’s part of my ancestry. Haitian women have suffered by the hands of cruel men ever since Christopher Columbus landed on our shores. Or perhaps it’s part of my nationality. My country became a wife brutalized by her husband when the United States occupied it over a century ago, exploiting its people as laborers, destroying their temples and the drums that kept its heartbeat. Or perhaps it’s just me.

  One afternoon, Emmanuel accused me of looking at his friend Junior with eyes of lust. And so he punished my eyes, purpling them. I had a Skype appointment with my mother that evening, but I couldn’t let her see me so battered and swollen. So I skipped it. And when four o’clock came around, I pictured her sitting in the internet café, having walked seven miles in flip-flops, paying for an hour-long bus ride and the use of a computer, so excited to see my face and hear about my classes. She’d wait fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Maybe even thirty. And when my icon failed to appear, she would think I had finally forgotten about her, stranded across the sea, a mother without her children, in a place that was beginning to feel to me like a fading photograph.

  I heaved gulping sobs of shame and sorrow. They cleansed me of all the cowardice I’d been harboring, and I came to the conclusion I should have come to long ago. If I stayed with Emmanuel, I would be accepting a lesser fate, and insulting my mother’s sacrifice in getting us to this country. I was a Dreamer, and Emmanuel was poison to my dreams.

  I went to his apartment and told him we were finished. His jaw tensed and his eyes burned with a tiger’s fury. He held me down, tore off my pants, and proved I didn’t have the power to end our relationship. He would have me for as long as he wanted me. He would draw blood.

  In Haiti, one punishment for rape is marriage. I don’t know whether this is meant to chastise the victim or the criminal. But I wasn’t in Haiti anymore.

  When I returned to my apartment, my second cousin intuited what had happened. She saw the loss of humanity in my posture. I could no longer balance something of great importance on the crown of my head. She told me about Mercy
House. And for fear that Emmanuel would come for me, I went.

  On my first night, Sister Evelyn served me a sandwich and tea and told me I shared a name with one of the great biblical heroines. Esther was an orphan who became queen, and through her beauty and intelligence she saved her people. But I was not like that biblical queen; I had not saved my people. I had betrayed them. I’d squandered the education that could bring me back to my mother. And the worst was to come. When I learned I was pregnant, I terminated my people. Anyway, I doubt how much meaning there is in a name. Emmanuel is also biblical. It means “God with us,” but I did not feel God near in those dark moments with Emmanuel.

  I knew I would pay for what I did to that life in my belly. In vodou, we learn you can’t ignore the spirits, and my ancestors would not be pleased. There are always consequences to your actions, or as my mother would say, after the dance, the drum is heavy. And my drum was about to become too heavy to hold.

  The earthquake was my reckoning.

  I hadn’t been back to Haiti in fifteen years, and yet I felt that earthquake in my bones. It ripped through my heart. It echoed in my hollow womb.

  They are still sifting through the rubble, turning over rocks and finding bodies beneath, even weeks later. The dead fill mass graves. The living fill tent cities and become violent over rice. Peacekeepers fire rubber bullets.

  I still haven’t heard from my mother.

  The evangelical minister Pat Robertson said Haitians are paying for their sins with that 7.0 magnitude quake. I am terrified that he is right.

  Sister Evelyn came downstairs in the middle of the night and found me in the living room rewatching clips of Pat Robertson, my diary open in my lap to the date of my procedure. My heart raced. I couldn’t breath. My body trembled uncontrollably, as if reliving the quake, but this time it originated from within me.

  “Don’t you listen to that giant-eared moron. He’s equal parts hate and insanity,” she said. But when she saw my panicked state, her face softened and she lowered to her knees before me. Her voice was gentle but assertive—a nurse’s voice. “Look at me, Esther. Look into my eyes and follow my breathing. Deep inhale in, slow exhale out. That’s it. That’s right. Again. Deep inhale in, slow exhale out.”

  “If I’d just kept it,” I managed to say.

  “You can blame the earthquake on a fault, but the fault isn’t yours. It’s the one that runs through the Caribbean and North American Plates. That’s a little earth science wordplay. You can laugh at that later. Now, I don’t mean to say you can’t feel regret over what happened. That’d be perfectly normal, and if you wish we hadn’t gone through with it, you can tell me. I’d understand. We can talk about it. Pray about it, if you wish. So, earthquake aside . . . do you wish we hadn’t gone through with it?”

  Sister Evelyn’s expression was built in layers, like those of the Earth. On the surface, she was compassionate, focused on me. Open to whatever I was feeling. But beneath that layer there was harder stuff. A defensive wall. And she needed that wall to protect what was at her core. I didn’t know what her bottom layer was made of, but I had a feeling it looked a lot like what was inside me.

  If I regretted the abortion, her justifications would shake and topple over. It would crush her.

  If I’d carried Emmanuel’s baby, I’d never be free from him. His claim that I couldn’t end the relationship would prove to be true. I’d no longer be a Dreamer. I’d be his. He’d hold power over me forever. So I took that evil seed he planted in me and ripped it out like a weed before it had the chance to rise up into my throat and strangle me.

  There is much I regret in this life. But, earthquake aside, I don’t believe the abortion is one of them.

  Chapter 12

  Katrina brought her knitting to her interview and ticked her needles together like a court stenographer at her keyboard. She wore a single earbud and let the other dangle down her chest. Evelyn heard the faraway drone of music from across the room, a miniature world whose entirety existed only for Katrina.

  “What are you working on?” the bishop asked, trying to sound amiable.

  Evelyn knew the answer: it was an extra-wide scarf for Joylette, who lived across the street. Katrina spent many mornings listening to her music and gazing out the front window, perhaps relishing the quiet of dawn in Brooklyn, or maybe searching for any sign of danger. At her station, she’d observed Joylette on the corner waiting for the B47, pulling her collar up to her chin and bobbing to keep warm; Katrina went to work.

  “A bathing suit,” she answered in such a deadpan, the bishop couldn’t discern if she was serious or not.

  Although Evelyn had seen Mei-Li rattle swears like a vulgar racetrack announcer, with the Hawk, she played the part of a perfect lady. She sat primly, legs crossed at the knee, her expression fixed into amiable engagement. The interview went smoothly, and he appeared encouraged by a pleasant conversation with at least one woman in the house.

  As Evelyn walked Mei-Li out, the resident paused in the doorway, turned, and said, “Bishop Hawkins?”

  “Yes?” he asked with the good nature of their newly established rapport.

  “Cào nǐ zǔ zōng shí bā dài,” she said.

  His eyebrows twitched with incomprehension, but then he bent his head to receive the farewell.

  When they were out of his earshot, Evelyn touched Mei-Li’s arm. “What did that mean?” she asked.

  Mei-Li beamed. “Fuck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation.”

  Esther entered the room, and Evelyn swallowed down only a speck of trepidation. She was confident Esther wouldn’t volunteer information about her procedure—it preoccupied the young woman in the weeks following their visit to the medical facility and even now she often seemed distant. Still, Evelyn’s muscles tensed as Esther took her seat, and she paled when the bishop asked a question he hadn’t asked the other girls, a question that was startlingly relevant.

  “The Catholic Church values Sister Evelyn’s education as a nurse. Have you required any sort of medical attention since arriving at Mercy House?” he asked. His hands were clasped over a knee, and one thumb caressed the other.

  “Yes,” Esther said. She sat erect on the couch without using the back for support.

  “What sort, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I’ve suffered panic attacks, which Sister has helped me through.”

  “That’s all?”

  “When I arrived, she treated some body aches. I believe my ribs were broken, but I didn’t let on to that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I knew they would make me go to the hospital and I didn’t want to go to the hospital.”

  “And why was that?”

  Esther shifted in her seat and swallowed before answering. “Because the doctors would have to call the police, and I wasn’t ready for that. I was too afraid.”

  “Since your admittance, though, you have filed claims against your offender?” the bishop asked. And just like that, the conversation shifted from a medical discussion to a legal one. Evelyn studied Esther, perched so seriously on the couch cushion, and wondered at the workings behind her still features, because Evelyn knew Esther had no broken ribs. That would have been impossible to hide from Evelyn’s trained eye. Why lie about that detail, if not to artfully redirect the bishop’s interest? Her admiration for Esther inflated inside her chest.

  It was Desiree’s interview that concerned Evelyn most of all—the resident who sang her profession from the rafters, who introduced herself and issued that information all in the same breath. Desiree: courtesan, trollop, harlot, whore, butt broker. So, when she entered the room, Evelyn prayed: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. But she found she was not in the presence of the loudmouthed, spirited young woman she had come to know. The individual who walked into the living room and sat on the side of the couch farthest from the Hawk was only a whisper of Desiree. That morni
ng’s humiliation at the hand of the bishop had tarnished her vibrancy, and Evelyn hated him for it.

  “Hello, Desiree,” the bishop said. Desiree focused her stare on the top left corner of the ceiling and didn’t respond. “Thank you for coming downstairs. I have just a few things to ask you, and I thank you in advance for your honest answers. Where were you before arriving at Mercy House?”

  Evelyn knew the answer to this question. She was living in her mother’s apartment in the Jefferson House Projects. Many of Desiree’s clients lived in the same complex as she did, and the rest she picked up after dark in a variety of nearby playgrounds. Evelyn could still picture the first time she saw Desiree, sitting on the bottom of the slide, humming to herself, rocking gently back and forth. She looked like a little girl waiting to be picked up by her mother.

  Desiree’s current johns were low-income, most surviving on government subsidies. She aspired to move up the ranks and become a high-class call girl, a corporate lady of the night, from streetwalker to Wall Street. You couldn’t claim Desiree wasn’t ambitious.

  “Jefferson Projects,” she answered truthfully.

  “And what did you do?”

  Evelyn held her breath. Desiree had told the truth before. If she told the truth now, it was only a matter of time before the bishop received confirmation that the nuns had done little in the way of saving her Mary Magdalene soul. Six excruciating seconds passed before Desiree responded. “Lots of stuff.”

  “I mean, what did you do for a living?”

  “I was a street entertainer.”

  “Is that right? And what is your talent?”

  Desiree’s jaw slid to the left. When she righted it, she said, “I have many talents.”

  “I have no doubt. What I’m asking is how you earned money in the field of street entertainment.”

  Desiree flashed him a stare so sharp it could have pierced skin. “I have a lovely singing voice. Wanna hear it?”