by Alena Dillon
Patty emerged from behind Evelyn, bent over each of the bags, and maneuvered Evelyn to the one at the center. “This is Angel Perez,” she said, her voice reverent. “But if you wouldn’t mind saying a few words for the one at the end, I’d appreciate it. She was a patient of mine. A real nice lady.”
Evelyn wanted to tell her that she’d pray for them all, the three bodies still waiting to be examined, the ones who’d already been sliced open and sewn back up, the people with hearts still beating floors above them. Instead, she just squeezed her nurse’s wrist.
Then she extended her hand toward Angel. If she hadn’t been playing the hero, he never would have shot her, never would have fallen back, never would have discharged the bullet that ended his life. If she’d come out unarmed, perhaps they could have talked one-on-one, and he’d still be living, breathing, walking. He could have been forgiven, grown, loved, and been loved. He could have reached his full potential.
She’d wanted to lay her hand on him and pray. To pass some warmth onto the limbs that were stiff at least in part because of her. Her hand rested on the frigid table beside him instead.
She wondered who would come for Angel, if it’d be a funeral director or if it would be his own mother. Evelyn imagined the woman who had carried Angel in her womb, who had delivered him into this world and lived too long, long enough to see him enter the next, reaching out for him the way the Blessed Mother had reached for her son as he was taken, lifeless, off the cross.
Evelyn’s eyes stung. She lowered her head and whispered, “In Your mercy and love, blot out the sins Angel has committed through human weakness. In this world he has died: let him live with You forever.”
Later that afternoon, Evelyn woke to Sister Maria at her bedside, head bent over a fraying Danielle Steel novel.
“You don’t have to be here,” Evelyn said. Her lips were parched enough to crack. She winced as she reached for a nearby cup of water—her hip seared as if it’d been bayoneted—and Maria tapped her hand and waved it back.
“Don’t you dare,” she said. She carried the cup to Evelyn’s face and directed the straw between her lips. “And, yes, I do have to be here.”
Evelyn sucked the liquid into her mouth and relished its cool relief. “I have an entire hospital looking after me. You should be with the girls. They need you.” Maria replaced the cup on the table and settled back in her chair. Her gaze drifted to the left of Evelyn, toward the hospital room door. She looked guilty. “Tell me,” Evelyn said.
Maria shifted in her seat. “Well, I wouldn’t leave you alone, except there is someone out in the hall who wants to visit.”
“Who?”
“And I really think you ought to let her come in.”
“Who?”
“Even though you wouldn’t want to see her, under normal circumstances.”
“For God’s sake, Maria. Out with it.”
Maria’s stare settled back onto Evelyn, as if assessing whether or not she was ready for the information that would follow. She sighed. “Maureen.”
The name was familiar, but just out of reach. “Who?”
“Maureen,” Maria said, impatiently. “Your sister. Your blood sister.”
Against all odds, Evelyn’s five siblings, all between the ripe old ages of seventy-nine and eighty-five, were still alive and kicking. They’d avoided the typical culprits of death: heart disease, stroke, car accident, cancer, and stupidity. Certainly this was good luck, a blessing. Although that might be true, had any of them croaked, Evelyn would have been forced to attend the funerals, and it wouldn’t have been since her mother’s death thirty years earlier that she’d gotten together with her family. If it were true, she wouldn’t have gone several decades only visiting, and even only speaking to, one of her siblings—her oldest brother, Sean.
Luke, Patricia, Maureen, and Fay sent the occasional Christmas card, or maybe a child’s wedding invitation every so often, but even those stopped arriving after enough years.
Evelyn thought she had spotted her brother Luke on the subway once, but after she’d gathered up the nerve to approach him, and even touched his elbow, he turned out to be a Polish tourist. She was both relieved and disappointed.
Evelyn didn’t know exactly why she was so averse to reconnecting with her siblings. It could be because they never expressed remorse for the enormous pressure they’d placed on her entry into the convent. Or because they hadn’t cared to notice when she was drowning in the depths of alcoholism and despair.
But it could also be because Evelyn wasn’t the only sibling those Irish assholes had abandoned.
* * *
May 1963
Evelyn’s feet stilled on her bicycle pedals and she sat back in her seat to enjoy the downhill ride. She and Eloise—now Sister Incarnata—were on their way back from the hospital where they were nurses practicing everything except obstetrics, because exposing nuns to infants could infect them with baby-fever, thereby threatening their vow of chastity. Both women gathered the excess fabric of their habits into their laps so it wouldn’t get caught in the wheel spokes. Evelyn snuck a peak at Eloise’s calves: it had been years since the sun had kissed them. They were pure, unsullied, like bridal satin.
When they reached the bottom of the hill, they slowed and slid off their bikes. Eloise let the wool fall to her ankles, a stage’s dropped curtain.
They pushed their bikes through the gravel, leaving wheel-sized tracks in their wake. As they rounded the bend, Evelyn eyed something that made her fists tighten around the handlebars. Eloise noticed her tense and touched her shoulder to inquire. Evelyn pointed ahead at the two-tone Nash Metropolitan parked in the circle drive: her family’s car.
Her mother, Bridget Fanning, sat on a bench in the foyer, hugging her purse to her belly, rocking back and forth and moaning under her breath. Seated beside their mother was Evelyn’s sister Fay, her copper hair frizzed, her nylons sagged, and her legs crossed at her ham-shank ankles.
Mother Superior stood beside them. Her hands gripped each other at her navel, and the long sleeves of her habit met one another like the mouths on two sucking fish. She said to Evelyn, “Visitation isn’t until tomorrow.”
“Just let us speak to Evelyn,” Fay demanded.
“It’s Sister Mary Michael now.”
“Please,” Evie’s mother said. She spoke from the back of her throat, where sobs originate. “It was an awful drive, and it’s an awful occasion. You’re a Sister of St. Joseph of Mercy, aren’t you?”
Mother Superior’s lips tightened. They looked about ready to disappear into her face. She gestured to the dark visitor’s room and then glided away in the opposite direction.
Fay pushed herself to her feet and waddled across the hall, followed by their mother, but Evelyn’s feet rooted her in place. They never visited. Why were they here now? She tried to swallow but the muscles in her throat had hardened.
“Do not be dismayed,” Eloise whispered, “for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you.”
Neither her sister nor her mother acknowledged Evelyn as she sat across from them at the table beneath the painting of Saint Joseph and baby Jesus. Her mother’s breathing was labored, and her fingers whitened as they gripped the edge of the table. Fay gnawed her bottom lip.
Evelyn itched to speak, to demand to know what had happened, but she reminded herself of the value of silence, and waited.
“It’s Sean,” Fay finally said. Her mother whimpered.
Evelyn pictured her oldest brother, tall and wiry, with hair the color of yams. His had been the loudest voice at gatherings. He filled the doorway, and his stories carried above all others. He called her Spud, and the way he looped his arm around her shoulders and dropped all his weight onto her made her feel important.
She still remembered when he’d returned from war. Their house exploded with whoops and cries. He beamed in his uniform. Their sisters threw their arms around him and their brother pounded his back.
Evelyn hadn’t seen h
im since she entered the convent. She wondered if his temples were beginning to silver, the way their father’s had. She wondered if he had died, like their father had.
“He killed his neighbor,” Fay said, flatly.
Evelyn’s arms fell to her sides and she bent forward. “What?” she asked, a little too loudly. The memory of the sound rang in the quiet.
Fay’s stare traveled up to meet hers for the first time that day; perhaps Evelyn’s outburst was finally a behavior her sister could recognize. The words flew from her mouth, then. “Beth was cheating, or at least Sean thought she was. He found his neighbor’s sunglasses on her bedside table. He recognized them because they were Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and his neighbor Jerry always flaunted them like they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Turns out, Jerry had only lent Beth the sunglasses because she was gardening and complaining about the light in her eyes. She forgot to return them before she went inside to shower and left them on her nightstand. So she wasn’t sleeping with Jerry,” Fay finished with a shrug. “She was sleeping with some other guy.”
Evelyn’s tongue felt thick and heavy as she formed the words, “So Sean . . . killed him?”
Fay sat back in her chair and her stare dropped to her lap. “He stabbed him thirteen times. And he stuffed those Ray-Bans down his throat. Sean is in police custody until his trial, and the guy Beth was actually sleeping with moved into his house.”
Evelyn imagined her charismatic brother plunging a blade through another man’s flesh. When had he become so violent, so savage, someone she didn’t recognize, someone she feared? Now he’d be treated like the animal he’d shown himself to be, sitting alone in a cold, dank jail cell and, eventually, burning in hell. She had to forcibly exhale and inhale. Her breathing roared in her ears, like waves crashing on a shore. It was all she could hear until her mother cried, “I wish he never came home from that war. I wish he died over there.”
“Don’t worry, Ma. He’s dead to us now,” Fay said, and crossed her arms over her chest.
Evelyn dug her nails into her palms and concentrated on a pill on the sleeve hem of her habit, the symbol of her sacrifice that supposedly delivered Sean home safely. She zeroed her focus in on that imperfection and blocked out the surrounding smooth area. She couldn’t look at her mother or sister. All she wanted to see was that piece of black.
* * *
January 2010
The last time Evelyn saw Maureen was at their mother’s funeral; Maureen was a middle-aged woman then. She spent the afternoon admonishing her ornery teenagers. Her expression had set into a scowl, as if the world had been unkind to her and she felt she didn’t deserve it.
Now she would be an old woman.
Evelyn couldn’t turn an eighty-year-old woman away, especially one who had journeyed out into the cold of winter to see her estranged sister. Could she?
“Tell her I’m sleeping,” Evelyn said.
Maria swatted Evelyn’s foot through the hospital sheet. “Is that what Jesus would have done to someone who came to him for prayer or forgiveness?” She cocked her elbows out and adopted a false baritone. “‘Hey, Peter. Do me a solid. Tell those cripples I’m not feeling well.’” She tossed her imitation and continued. “Nuns shouldn’t hold grudges.”
“Yeah, and we shouldn’t curse or drink or lie or masturbate. But you can bet your ass we’ve done them all more than once,” Evelyn said. Evelyn was tempted to point out Maria’s own vices—the bag of Hershey kisses she kept in her bedside table, soft porn disguised as paperback novels, or her predilection for online poker—but she knew it would injure her friend, and she had no interest in doing that.
Maria’s voice softened and her expression lost any trace of joviality. Sibling relationships were dear to her. She’d grown up with three lively and protective brothers, and had lost all of them within the last three decades. “Enough is enough. You were shot, for God’s sake. If this experience has taught you anything, it should be that time is ticking. We don’t have forever. Your sister is here. Talk to her.”
Evelyn stared at the ceiling tiles and blinked away tears. One trickled down her temple and into her ear. She wondered what Sean would tell her to do, how he would react if another Fanning showed up. Surely he wouldn’t turn away a visitor. “Fine,” she managed to say. But as Maria moved toward the door, she reached out for her arm. “Do you have a piece of gum? Feels like something turned over and died in here.”
As Evelyn mashed peppermint Trident between her teeth, Maria slipped out of the room. Evelyn’s heart began to pound, and she wasn’t sure where to rest her stare. Should she watch the door and greet her sister upon her arrival? And what the hell was she supposed to say?
She didn’t have much time to agonize, because a round figure soon entered the light of the doorway.
Her auburn hair had silvered and her body, once a defined shape, had filled in around the edges. The skin of her face was waxy, with fine crisscross wrinkles, like netting. A deep line was carved between her eyebrows—the same line as that of the woman who raised her. It was strange to look at her sister and see an older version of her mother. Under the influence of painkillers, Evelyn was overcome at the sight of this person from a former life. She ached with longing for a childhood she hardly experienced, with regret for letting so much time slip by, and with that same old resentment.
Why couldn’t life be simpler, better?
A sob surged up from Evelyn’s belly and hit the back of her mouth like a wave crashing against a breakwater. Maureen’s hand trembled up to her face, but she didn’t come any closer. They cried on opposite sides of the room.
When Evelyn regained some composure, she pressed her face into her bedsheet and let one last ragged breath wrack her chest. “How did you hear?” she asked, not letting her gaze linger on her sister for too long.
“An old nun, wearing nothing but a bathrobe, faces down a gangster to protect a house of abused women? You’re all over the television. As soon as I heard, I called Johnny to find out where they’d taken you,” she said, referring to Father John.
“Are news crews at Mercy House?” Evelyn asked, pushing herself up onto her elbows.
Maureen shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. So, how are you feeling? Does it hurt much?”
“Not for now. They’ve got me pretty doped up.”
They were quiet for a while. Finally, Maureen stepped closer. “It’s been a long time.”
“It has.” Evelyn tugged at the sheet on her thighs. She knew she was setting a trap whose teeth might snap shut on both of them, but she couldn’t help but ask, “Why do you think that is?”
Maureen scratched her temple, perhaps so her hand had something to do. “Oh, you know. It happens sometimes in big families. Too many people to keep track of. When you left, the church made it hard to stay in touch, and by the time the Vatican let you be more accessible, we’d gotten used to so little communication. We’d grown apart.”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
Maureen sighed. “It was the life you chose.”
“Is that the story you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“You think I decided to become a nun? Is that why you came here? So I can reassure you of that? Soothe your guilt?”
Maureen blinked rapidly, as if that could focus Evelyn’s bewildering message. “Of course you decided to become a nun. Nobody took those vows for you.”
“But it was you, all of you, who put me in the convent in the first place. Please, for once in your life, admit that. For the sake of my sanity.”
Maureen placed her hands on her hips and her sweatered arms propped out like teapot handles. “All parents make wishes for their children. Maybe Daddy more than most. But nobody could have forced you to do anything you didn’t want to do. I’m sorry if you’re unhappy with the way your life turned out, but you need to stop blaming us. You’re an old woman, for God’s sake. You of all people should understand free will
. For once in your life, take responsibility. Or at the very least, forgive. Or did they not teach you that at the convent?”
Evelyn turned her head and stared out the window. The clouds were gray and heavy. Another storm was coming. “Get out,” she said.
“Evelyn, please. It’s been so many years. Be reasonable, for once.” Now not only did Maureen look like their mother, she sounded like their mother.
“Get out,” Evelyn said again, this time with more bite. Her stare remained locked on the window, which was hazy with grime. Most rooms in this wing faced Fort Greene Park, a lovely tree-lined green space complete with tennis courts and a Doric column monument dedicated to American lives lost in British prison ships during the Revolution. But not Evelyn’s; her window was opposite the graffiti-faced storefronts on Dekalb Avenue.
“Thanks for the reminder of why we don’t talk,” Maureen said, spitting the words. She spun around and doddered out of the room with as much fury as her advanced age would allow.
As the swish of Maureen’s winter coat faded down the hallway, Evelyn’s temper boiled over, and then diffused into sadness. She went to such lengths to change the lives of complete strangers—why couldn’t she have changed her own life by holding her tongue for five goddamned minutes? Or why couldn’t Maureen have humored her? For all Evelyn knew, it could be another thirty years before her next opportunity at reconciliation.
Evelyn hammered her fists into the cot at her sides. Then she balled the sheet in her hands, yanked it up toward her face, and stretched it over her brimming eyes. The moaning in her side grew, as if it too were exacerbated by the emotional experience, so she dropped the sheet and depressed the button for an influx of intravenous painkiller, hoping it would numb the pain universally. She wished she could speak to Sean at that moment, hold his hand. Feel a connection with one family member. But since she couldn’t, she lay back against her pillow and cried until she fell fast asleep.
