by Alena Dillon
“Holy Mother Mary,” Evelyn said, already limping toward the entryway. “I think that woman just left a baby.” When she opened the door and saw what the woman had delivered, a shrill groan roiled from her belly.
A steak knife was stuck into the baby’s chest. Its body and the swaddling blankets were all doused in a red so deep it was almost black. Evelyn’s wound roared as she dropped to her knees on the stoop and groped for the baby’s vitals. But as her heart pounded in her ears and her fingers brushed the baby’s neck, she realized with a start that this was not a real infant. It was only a doll.
She tried to close the front door behind her, to shield this gruesome image from the girls running down the hall, but their hands reached out and pushed and blocked the way. Evelyn shifted her body in front of the doll, but not before Mei-Li screamed and Esther’s mouth and eyes were opened by horror.
“It’s just a doll,” Evelyn said. “It’s fake.” She noticed then that there was a note pinned to the blanket. Eye for an eye, it read. Kill and be killed.
“What sick fuck?” Desiree asked, craning around the doorway to search the streets. “This is some Hester Prynne–level hate.”
“Go back inside,” Evelyn said. “This isn’t real.” But the terror that still flowed through her veins felt authentic. Though the baby wasn’t real, the threat was.
Although the doll was just a prop, Evelyn couldn’t carry it any other way than cradled against her chest. She circled around to the alley beside the row house and reluctantly deposited it into a trash barrel, resisting the urge to apologize to it, to kiss its forehead.
Maria and Josephine had gathered the residents in the living room. Esther was especially shaken. Her arms wrapped and rewrapped around the front of her body, as if searching for a comforting position. She bit her thumbnail. Then scratched her jaw. Then crossed her legs.
Seeing her, it was clear what Evelyn had to do. She inhaled and exhaled long and slow, the way Maria instructed the residents to breathe during meditation. When she spoke, her words were even. “I’m moving out this afternoon.”
Protests mounted from the girls and hovered in the room like the whipping blades of a helicopter. Evelyn lifted her palms against the noise.
“The bishop used our campaign against me. We fought for visibility so the community would know about us and our mission. Now that they know our story, when news of my excommunication spreads, and the reason for it, the crazies know where to find me. The house will become a target. A target meant for me, but you’ll be collateral damage. And I won’t have that. I’m going to leave, at least temporarily, until this all settles down. It’s the only way to ensure your safety.”
“But where will you go?” Josephine asked.
It was a good question. Since Evelyn had left home fifty years before, her entire world had been made up of rosary beads, vows, and service to others—of being a nun. Now that she was no longer welcome in that world, and had no safety net of her own, she’d be forced to ask for help from people in her life before the convent.
She might as well begin with the only person she’d kept in touch with.
Sleepy Hollow Correctional Facility was surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall concrete wall topped by loops of barbed wire, and prison guards stood in towers at the wall’s four corners. It looked like a fortress, an ecosystem just as intent on keeping people out as it was keeping inmates in. No matter how many times Evelyn had approached this facility over the years, as soon as the gravel agitated beneath her tires and the intimidating facade came into focus, she shuddered. And it didn’t help her nerves on this day to know the convent in which she was formed was a mere thirty minutes away. It was kind of poetic, really. She began her identity as a nun in this neighborhood, and when it ended, this is where she returned.
Evelyn had rented a car for the day for far too large a percentage of her net worth and arrived at the gate ten minutes before visitation hour began. “Just in time. I was about to lock up the entrance. Lucky you,” a female detention officer said gruffly, before letting her pass through.
There was a famous colloquial expression adopted from Proverbs that rang in Evelyn’s mind: Pride goeth before a fall. It bothered Evelyn that it failed to outline what, exactly, happened after the fall. What happened to Cain after he slayed his brother Abel? Yes, he moved to another land, married, and had a son, Enoch—but what happened to his heart, his humanity? What became of Lot after he slept with his daughters? How did he live with himself? And how did Pontius Pilate survive having allowed the crowd to crucify Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews?
Certainly, though not to the extent of those biblical figures, Evelyn had fallen in her own way; she lay prostrate on the figurative muddy ground. And yet here she was, at a goddamned maximum-security prison in the Hudson Valley, still at the mercy of her pride, still avoiding asking for help from the family that could actually provide it. Instead, she was seeking out the one sibling who had nothing tangible to offer her.
So, what goeth after a fall?
Or, God forbid, had she not yet finished falling?
She sat at her typical seat in the visiting room and, after ten minutes of waiting, her rear chilling on the metal chair, her fingers drumming against the table’s surface to distract herself, her brother Sean shuffled through the door. An orange jumpsuit billowed on his shriveled figure. He certainly resembled a Fanning, but at eighty-five he was now decades older than their father had been at his death. Sean’s nose was long, his ears were as large as conch shells, his hair had turned to dove feathers, and white whiskers prickled his jaw. His bones could no longer hold his stature erect, and so he hunched and padded across the room, his progress restricted by his chained ankles.
A little piece of Evelyn’s heart broke every time she saw this frail prisoner, her brother, withering away in a jumpsuit, knowing he was behind bars in the dangerous company of young, muscled convicts. Sometimes she imagined what they could do to him, how they could take advantage of their feeble peer. Thieving, physical abuse, sex crimes—it would all be effortless. Sean would be in agony without their pulses ever elevating.
Normally, as a matter of survival, she blotted those images from her thoughts. But today, she just didn’t have the strength. Everything inside her felt crushed, shattered into shards, like a dropped box of glass Christmas ornaments, ruined and rattling, their fragmented contents made worthless. And so tears streamed freely down her cheeks.
She gestured at her brother’s shackled wrists. “Is that really necessary?” she asked the prison guard who stood at the door, a three-hundred-pound beefcake with a buzzed head and a roll of extra skin at his nape. “Is he posing a threat to anybody in this room? Doesn’t anybody around here have a speck of goddamned decency?”
“Ma’am, lower your voice,” the guard warned.
Evelyn stood as Sean reached her table and she braced his elbow as he lowered himself into a seat. She dared the prison guard to reprimand her for touching an inmate. He watched them steadily, but didn’t say a word. Perhaps he had some decency after all.
“I thought, with your hip, you weren’t supposed to drive long distances for another couple weeks,” Sean said after he’d caught his breath. She’d written him a letter detailing the reason she would miss that month’s visit. She knew what it was like not to have visitors, to lose contact with family, and didn’t want Sean to think she’d forgotten him, or that he wasn’t worth the trip.
“Sean,” she said, struggling to properly order her words. “If you do a bad thing for a good reason, is the reason enough to make your actions right?”
His light blue eyes seemed to have shrunk, sinking into the depths of his skull, hidden behind the drooping flaps of his eyelids. “It depends how bad the thing is, and how good your reason.”
Evelyn nodded and pressed her eyes closed. “The reason was good. I think it was.” Sobs welled in her belly, and she strained against their force.
“Spud,” Sean said, softly, using a term of endearment t
hat was as old as she was. He leaned forward and placed his hand as close to hers as he could without actually touching her. “What happened?”
The sweet sound of her nickname rocked through her. No matter her age, she felt like a small girl beside him. She laid her forearms down on the table, leaned forward, and rested her cheek on her sleeve so she could still look sideways and see her brother. “I’m not a nun anymore.”
His eyes widened. “You quit?”
She smiled sadly and shook her head. In her next blink, a tear rolled over her nose and dropped onto her arm. “They kicked me out.”
“Why?”
“Because I did something terrible.”
“I doubt that.”
“I did,” she said, although she still wasn’t sure if this was true. “I’ve killed.”
His eyes narrowed as he studied her, and then he sat back in his chair and chuckled. “Like hell you have.”
Evelyn prickled, surprised by his reaction to her grave words, but a cloud of relief also formed in her gut. “I have according to the Catholic Church.”
“Well to hell with them.”
In her fragile state, she couldn’t trust her own judgment anymore; it swung from one end to the other, like a loose pendulum. She felt lightened by his confidence in her. She sniffed, sat up, and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Whether they are right or wrong doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the fact that they don’t want me anymore.” She hung her head and then looked up at him, her face damp with tears. “I have nowhere to go. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”
His forehead wrinkled and his mouth tightened. “Do you have money?” he asked, and she shook her head. “A friend outside the convent. Someone you can call?” She shook her head again. “Then I think we both know what you have to do.” Evelyn nodded, and Sean reached out and squeezed her wrist, prison guard be damned. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll finally get the chance to choose your own life.”
The sun was nearly blinding as she exited the prison that had been so devoid of natural light. She squinted against it and thought about what her brother had said about choice, free will—supposedly God’s greatest gift to humanity.
As she hobbled toward her car, a voice called behind her, “Sister.” She turned instinctively, forgetting that the title no longer fit. It was an African American prison guard, one who had been friendly to her in the past, and courteous to her brother. His jogging slowed as he approached her, but he was still breathless. “Sister, I’d like to ask you a favor. My mother came down with pneumonia. She may not have long. Would you light a candle for her?”
His eyes were so wide, so pleading. She reached for him, but then her hand fell to her side. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
Evelyn was lucky she had her siblings’ numbers stored in her cell phone; she figured she’d better make use of the device before the church deactivated it.
Evelyn shivered in the front seat of her rental car and raked her hands up and down her thighs. The phone rang three times before a thin voice answered. “Hello?”
“Fay? It’s Evelyn. Evie. Your sister.”
Silence dragged tortuously. Evelyn thought of her eldest sister sitting opposite her in the motherhouse visitation room, delivering the news of Sean’s crime. She wished her sister had been more loving in that moment, that she’d been more sisterly. That they could have been together in their grief. But perhaps Fay wished the same of Evelyn. When Fay finally responded, her tone was distant, aloof. “What a surprise.”
“I know. I’m sorry to call so suddenly, out of nowhere. It’s just that, I—I need some help.”
“From the way Maureen described her visit to your hospital room, it sounded as if you are doing quite fine on your own.”
Evelyn closed her eyes. It seemed they wouldn’t be making this easy on her, but then again, had she expected them to? Had she earned their kindness? “My situation has changed. You see . . . they . . . I’m . . .” Evelyn’s fingers whitened around her knee. “I’m not a nun anymore.”
“Oh?” Fay’s surprise was her first sincere response.
“They asked me to leave, and I can’t stay on Chauncey Street. So, the thing is, I have nowhere to go.”
“I see.”
Outside, a seagull soared on wind currents. They were miles from the Hudson River, even further from a body of saltwater. Unlikely things happened all the time. “And I was hoping you might not mind some company for a while.”
On the other end of the line, Fay burst into laughter, which quickly dissolved into hacking coughs. Evelyn winced at the sound and pulled the phone an inch away from her ear. Evelyn imagined Fay smoking in a dark bedroom, propped up against her headboard, her ample body taking up most of the mattress space. Her sister finally said, “If you ever bothered to ask, Evie, you might know that isn’t possible. I’m in an assisted living facility now. Have been for almost five years. Five years, my dear. Needless to say, they don’t allow overnight guests.”
“Oh, all right. I understand.”
“Yes, and for old times’ sake, let me spare you from any further embarrassment. Patty, your other older sister—remember her? She lives with her daughter now. I doubt that’s a viable possibility. And Luke, the brother who isn’t a cold-blooded killer? The brother you don’t speak to? He moved to Florida with his second wife, Janice. A terrible woman, mind you, but she owns a condo on the beach, so at least there’s that.” She paused in her rant, and when she spoke again, something had deepened in her voice, made it more complex; perhaps it was intensified by a layer of compassion, by the unending loyalty built into familial bonds. “Your best bet is Maureen. She lives in a three-bedroom ranch in New Jersey. She has the space, anyway. I can’t speak to her other hesitations. After your recent spat, I imagine she was last on your list to call, but there you have it.”
Evelyn’s tears collected at the back of her throat. “Okay. Thank you, Fay. And, listen”—Evelyn took a deep breath that was rattled by her tears—“I’m sorry I’ve never been in touch. I’ve been . . . angry. So angry. And it’s possible you didn’t deserve all that anger.”
Fay’s voice was lower, quieter. “The years have gone by now, Evie.”
She screwed her eyes shut and nodded. “I know.”
“We all had children you could have known and loved. Grandchildren too.”
“I know.”
Fay sighed into the phone. “Listen, I’m only an hour from Maureen. Maybe once you get settled you can stop by. It’d be nice to see you before we meet our Maker.”
Evelyn sniffed and swallowed down tears. “I’d like that.”
“Okay, then. Good luck to you.”
Evelyn pressed the button to end the call. She clutched the phone against her breast and remembered Fay as a young woman, laughing too loud at the neighbor’s joke, tossing her hair and leaning forward to expose her cleavage. She married that neighbor, but he’d died too young—in his fifties—from a heart attack. And Evelyn wasn’t there to console her sister. She was more intent on helping strangers than comforting her own flesh and blood, all because she’d believed her family hadn’t done right by her. Evelyn wondered how Fay had handled the death of her husband at such a young age, if she still grieved for him so many years later. And Evelyn wept. She wept for her sister, and she wept for the many years of relationships she’d squandered. Maybe she deserved to be alone. And she would continue to collect her punishment. After her sobs evened, she dialed the next number.
“Maureen, it’s Evelyn.”
“Hello, Evelyn.” Her sister’s tone was one of tempered irritation.
Evelyn hurried ahead before she lost the courage. “I know you have no reason to help me. You were good to visit me in the hospital and I was cruel to you. I’ve avoided you, Patty, Fay, and Luke all these years. It was petty of me. I could have buried the hatchet, but I didn’t, and for the rest of my life I will regret what I’ve lost by ignoring you. I don’t know what heartache you’ve suffered over the years
because I’ve never been there for you, and so I understand if you don’t want to be there for me now. But I have no one else to turn to, so I have to ask you this favor.” She took a deep breath and continued, “They’ve excommunicated me. I need a place to stay. Do you have room for me in your house? In your life?”
Maureen paused and Evelyn imagined her on the other end of the line absorbing that flood of information. Would she smile spitefully? Would she roll her eyes in annoyance? Would she sympathize? “Do you have transportation?” she asked.
The rental car was due back that night. She couldn’t afford to renew it another day. “I’m afraid not.”
“I see,” Maureen said, and Evelyn felt her chances drifting away, a raft floating out to sea. Then her sister continued, “I’d come get you now, but I don’t drive very well at night. My eyes aren’t what they used to be and it’ll get dark soon.”
Relief surged up from Evelyn’s belly with almost enough force to make her laugh. Maureen would take her in. She had a place to stay. It was nothing short of a miracle. “I’m fine for tonight. I can stay on Chauncey Street, where I’ve been living.”
“Should I pick you up there tomorrow morning, say ten o’clock?”
Evelyn imagined Maureen’s car pulling up to the sidewalk outside Mercy House. The goodbye scene. “It’ll be easier for you to get me at the church. Thank you, Maureen. Truly.”
“All right. Hang tight. And Evelyn?”
“Yes?”
Maureen sniffed. “About us. Our past. The whole thing.”
Evelyn held her breath. “Yes?”
“We all played our part.”
The line disconnected and, as tears streamed down her face, Evelyn allowed herself to laugh, out of nerves and gratitude. She wiped her face with her palms and took several calming breaths. Everything would be, if not great, then at least all right. She may have been beaten down, but she would survive it.
