by Alena Dillon
Chapter 23
Evelyn didn’t sleep that night. She was kept awake by all the unknown that stretched before her like an unlit road, and by Desiree’s throaty snoring down the hall. But the restlessness made it easier to get out of bed before the others, to exit Mercy House while it was still dark. The old Irish goodbye.
Only Joylette, smoking a cigarette on her balcony across the street in the early hours of the morning, saw Evelyn leave. While she inched the front door closed, careful not to disturb the house, Joylette called to her. “Sister, what’s with the tote?”
Evelyn looked to her overnight bag as if seeing it for the first time. When she answered, she tried not to raise her voice enough to wake anyone inside Mercy House. “It appears I’m leaving. For a while, anyway.”
“How am I going to look down from my fire escape and not see you there?”
Evelyn forced a smile and a shrug. “You’ll survive. We all do.” Then her fingertips caressed the cheek of the angel on their doorknocker, and she turned away.
The air was cold and wet, the kind of atmosphere that sank through skin and into bones. She pulled the collar of her coat tight.
She used too large a percentage of her remaining petty funds to buy two coffees and two bagels with cream cheese from Abdul at the corner bodega and crossed the avenue to St. Joseph of Mercy Church. Her sister wouldn’t be there for a couple hours. Until then, she sat down beside Miss Linda on the bus stop bench outside the church, and handed the woman half of her purchases.
“Light and sweet,” Miss Linda said after the first sip of coffee. Her eyelids fluttered with pleasure. “You remembered.”
“You know the church is always open. You don’t have to be out in the cold. You can sit inside.”
“Same goes for you, don’t it?”
A train rattled in the distance. Evelyn carried her paper cup to her lips and the coffee slid down her throat like warm salve. “I suppose it does.”
“Seems like we’re both just fine where we are then.”
As the sky lightened with morning and storeowners hauled open their metal gates, Evelyn’s pocket began to buzz with a barrage of texts. She imagined the sisters and residents checking her room, finding the covers of her bed pulled taut, her crucifix missing from the wall.
“Where you at?”
“Popo, you didn’t leave, did you?”
“How could you just ghost? No goodbye? After everything??”
And then, from Josephine, “Evelyn. We are worried and you aren’t responding. Just tell me this. Are you drinking again?”
To her, Evelyn typed back, “Not yet.”
When Maureen was twenty minutes late, Evelyn told herself there was always traffic on I-78. After forty minutes, she called her sister’s phone. No answer. After an hour, she accepted the reality. Maureen had changed her mind. She didn’t want to come to her sister’s rescue. She didn’t owe Evelyn anything.
With this realization, Evelyn slapped her knees and turned to Miss Linda, sounding stiffly upbeat. “I’m going to call some women’s shelters, see if they have room. Would you like me to ask on your behalf as well?”
Miss Linda’s eyebrows rose, but she spared Evelyn the embarrassment of asking why she had nowhere else to go. “No,” Miss Linda answered. “I’ve got my place.”
Just then, the window of a maroon minivan cranked opened and revealed Maureen’s face. “I’m sorry. I left late. Then the Holland Tunnel was a parking lot. And I forgot my phone at home. I always do that. I should glue the thing to my car key.” She waddled around the car to Evelyn and paused at the sight of Miss Linda. Then Maureen touched Evelyn’s elbow in greeting, and Evelyn misread the gesture as the beginnings of a hug. She leaned in to embrace her older sister, sensed the miscommunication, and wrenched back upright.
The car ride to Morristown was mostly quiet, sprinkled with honking horns, engine revs, and small talk. Evelyn asked about Maureen’s children, Patrick, Samuel, and Eileen, whom Evelyn mistakenly called Elaine and she had to be corrected. Maureen volunteered a description of her grandchildren: the ten-year-old girl who had been pretty all her life but was beginning to enter an awkward phase, the artsy eight-year-old boy they worried might be gay, the six-year-old who was intelligent for her age, and the two-year-old rascal they already knew was a troublemaker. “But not in any real sense,” Maureen had said to qualify, flashing Evelyn a meaningful look. “Not like, criminally.”
Evelyn caught her reassurance—either to Evelyn, herself, or both—that although violence might run in their blood, her grandson didn’t inherit it, he’d been spared. He was benignly mischievous, not a convict in the making, like their older brother. But Evelyn was too preoccupied with an earlier descriptor, another quality Maureen mentioned that might run in the family. “The eight-year-old, your artsy one,” Evelyn said, steadying her stare on the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan lingering in her side mirror. “If he is gay, would that be so bad?”
Maureen scoffed and her hands shifted on the wheel. “Hard to believe they excommunicated you.”
Evelyn tried not to spend too much energy interpreting Maureen’s behavior. Did providing only one pillow symbolize her stinginess with forgiveness? Was the Bible on the bedside table considerate of Evelyn’s recent culture or a passive aggressive attack on her excommunication? Evelyn was encouraged by the bundle of fresh carnations in a glass vase on her dresser but discouraged by the dresser drawers and closet still being chock-full of Maureen’s belongings—as if to say, Don’t get too comfortable. You aren’t staying for long.
Maureen clanked around the kitchen—she never had been light on her feet. Although, perhaps she was being intentionally noisy, trying to make herself known like a hiker shaking a bear bell in the woods. The question was: Was she alerting Evelyn to her whereabouts so that Evelyn would join her or so that Evelyn would avoid her? But Evelyn had ignored her sister long enough. Perhaps it was time to try something different.
As Evelyn entered the kitchen, her sister’s back was to her. Maureen turned on the faucet, filled her miniature two-cup coffeepot, and emptied the water into the machine. “Coffee?” she asked, without turning.
“Sure. Thank you.”
“Do you drink Dunkin’?”
“I’m not picky.”
Evelyn’s gaze wandered. So much could be learned from a person by surveying her kitchen, and when it came to her sister, Evelyn knew so little; she would have to be a quick study. The space looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. A tea towel featuring a cartoon granny and the words “Grandma’s Kitchen” was laced through the oven door handle. It was hard for Evelyn to accept that her sister was a grandmother—she’d barely even known her as a mother. But further evidence covered the top door of her refrigerator-freezer. Affixed by a plastic four-leaf clover magnet was a laminated collage of family pictures: Maureen and her children and grandchildren at barbecues, beachside vacations, making silly faces over birthday cakes, baptisms, graduations—happy occasions spanning perhaps forty years. Forty years Evelyn had missed—she’d chosen to miss.
Evelyn scanned the collection for images of Maureen’s husband but she didn’t find any. There were no other signs of him in the house and Maureen hadn’t yet mentioned his name. Evelyn would have to wait for the right time to ask about his story.
At the center of the kitchen table, a ceramic saltshaker rooster kissed a ceramic peppershaker chicken. Also on the table was that morning’s edition of the New York Times, folded open to the New York section. Her stare locked on the headline: “Nun Excommunicated for Allowing Abortion of Raped Woman.”
Evelyn’s stomach tightened. Damn, news traveled fast.
“Anything good in the paper?” Evelyn asked.
Maureen stilled for a moment at the counter but then continued to fumble in the cabinet for mugs. “I guess that depends what you consider good,” she said, a chill in her voice.
Evelyn rolled her eyes. “And what do you consider good, Maureen?”
The mugs cli
cked against the countertop. “Who am I to say? I’m not God.”
“You may not be saying anything, but it sure feels like you have an opinion.” The coffeemaker hissed and dripped. Steam seeped from the lid. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” Evelyn said, squeezing her arms. “But it was the right one.”
Maureen placed her palms down on the counter and leaned into them, hunching her shoulders. Her voice was restrained when she said, “You are always so sure you’re right, Evelyn. Aren’t you?”
Evelyn’s nostrils flared. In the past, she would have chosen to flee over facing her family’s coldness. Evading was easier than challenging. But, in the past, she had somewhere else to go.
“And what would you have done? Would you have forced a young woman to carry around a reminder of the worst moment of her life, let it reshape her body and her brain, and then wreak havoc as she birthed it? Don’t you think she would have terminated the pregnancy on her own? At least this way she didn’t have to be lonely and ashamed. At least this way she didn’t think about ending it irresponsibly, about hurting herself.”
Maureen spun around. Anger etched her face. “You were a nun. Her spiritual guardian. Maybe if you convinced her it could be a blessing in disguise, she wouldn’t have done it. Now this family is disgraced—again. As if one murderer wasn’t enough.”
Evelyn leveled her stare. “It isn’t the same thing,” she said, but heat flared up her neck.
“Seems the same to me.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Ask God for guidance? Talk to a priest? Maybe if you weren’t so self-righteous as to consider yourself infallible, that baby would still be alive today.”
“I’m infallible? The homeless excommunicated nun? No, my dear. I’m afraid I’m wrong quite often. More often than I’d like. I was wrong to think this arrangement might turn out to be a good thing. I was wrong to hope the Catholic Church could ever be just and reasonable. And I was wrong to listen to you people all those years ago, because look where it landed me. In your damn guest room!”
“Not this again. You didn’t do it for us. You did it because you were Daddy’s little angel, weren’t you? I wanted his approval too, just as much as you. But did he ask me? No, I was passed right over. I wasn’t good enough. You were his nun in the making! And you ate it up. You loved all the attention until it turned out it was more fun preparing to be a nun than actually being one. That’s why you got so mad at us. Because nobody fawned over you at the convent. Nobody praised you for all your sacrifice, because everyone there was in the same boat. They were all self-righteous martyrs. And you realized you didn’t want to be that, you just wanted people to believe you were that, for people to treat you like God’s chosen one. So don’t blame us because the party wasn’t as fun as planning for it. Nobody ever stopped you from calling it quits. Take some goddamned responsibility.”
Evelyn pressed her eyes closed. Every September, on the Feast of Saint Michael, she knelt between her daddy and her big brother Sean in front of their icon of the patron saint of warriors, and her daddy lit a candle and thanked the saint, once again, for his son’s life and for the life of the daughter whose commitment saved it. In those moments, and in the many other moments throughout the year that her father honored the sacrifice she’d agreed to, she felt almost holy herself. Where was Maureen in those memories? Evelyn couldn’t picture her sister. Perhaps her ego had been so large, it filled her vision. It seemed they’d been fated by names given at birth: she was Aibhlín, the wished-for child. And Maureen, from the Irish Máire, meant “bitter.”
Evelyn collected herself and then lowered her voice. “I wasn’t mad because it was hard. I loved being a nun, eventually. I was mad because as soon as I was out of the house, I was out of all your lives. You didn’t even care . . . didn’t even notice . . .”
“Notice what?” Maureen demanded.
Evelyn’s throat tightened. She shook her head. “Never mind.”
Maureen shifted her weight from one foot to the other and seemed to soften. “Okay. We didn’t visit often during the seven years or whatever it took for you to become a nun. But after that, you were able to contact us too, and you didn’t visit for the next forty years.”
A thud against the front door caused the sisters to pause their argument; they studied each other’s faces as if their expressions might hold the answer to the source of the sound. Maureen broke away first to investigate and Evelyn followed.
Lying askew on the front stoop was a small black plastic bag, the top knotted closed.
“Eat shit, baby killer!” The shout came from a heavyset bald man hanging out the window of a white pickup truck idling in front of the house. He drifted back into the truck and then emerged again, another bag dangling from his fingers.
Evelyn yanked Maureen’s arm. Her sister shifted back just in time for the next missile of what Evelyn could pray was only dog feces to smack against the doorway. Although she wasn’t hit, Maureen yelped.
First Mercy House, now Maureen’s house. The hate was following Evelyn, and she sensed it wouldn’t stop. “I should leave. I’ll find somewhere else to go.”
Maureen’s eyes glinted with rage. At first Evelyn thought the fury was directed at her, and her pulse quickened. Then Maureen’s hulking form advanced onto the stoop. She bent to retrieve the most recent projectile and whipped it at her side. Then she slung the poop at the truck like David hurling a steaming, stinking stone at Goliath. “You eat shit, asshole!” she screamed.
Although it landed on the sidewalk, her toss got close enough to make the man flinch. His features twisted with ugly hate. Then his chin retreated into his neck and pitched forward as he hocked a gob of mucus onto her lawn, and followed that up by spitting the word “Bitch.”
“Real clever,” Maureen said. She leaned over and pinched the remaining bag between her thumb and forefinger. “You get this load from your shit-for-brains?”
The man’s lip curled. His body disappeared into the cab, but his arm shot out to deliver a blunt middle finger as punctuation. The truck’s tires squealed as he sped away.
The bag fell from Maureen’s hand. She stepped back into the foyer, shut the door behind her, leaned against it, and closed her eyes. Her chest was heaving from exertion or emotion or both.
Just as Evelyn was about to apologize for the trouble she’d accidentally dragged across state lines, Maureen’s shoulders rose, slowly, like a construction crane hoisting a steel beam. When they reached a certain height, she couldn’t repress the urge any longer. Her hand covered her mouth, but laughter choked out of her throat, and her shoulders juddered along with it.
Relief bloomed and bubbled out of Evelyn’s own mouth. The sisters laughed together over the absurd tension, Maureen’s unlikely reaction, and the joy of their immediate forged alliance.
When Maureen’s mirth settled, she dabbed her eyes with her sleeve and exhaled her last laugh as an audible sigh. Then she turned to Evelyn. Her head tilted and her chin crinkled as she considered her sister. When she spoke, her voice was soft with seriousness. “I dumped Wayne’s ass ages ago. We never officially divorced, mind you, but the only way we are wed is on paper. I’m sure that’s not what God had in mind when he designed marriage. I guess I’m not exactly the perfect Catholic girl either.”
Evelyn nodded, gratefully. She reached out until her fingertips grazed her sister’s wrist. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way we planned.”
“Me too.” The words were fragile, prone to shattering.
Evelyn hesitated to soil their first sincere moment, but something tickled at the back of her mind, and she knew this might be her only chance to satisfy that itch. Despite her trepidation, she scratched it. “Let me just say this one thing and then I swear we can drop it. What you said about Sean earlier . . . he isn’t a murderer. He is a good person who saw a lot of bad things, and maybe because of those things, in a moment of insanity, he did something unspeakable. But he is still a good perso
n, a veteran, and our brother. And just as I was unfair to snub you all these years, maybe, just maybe, you were unfair to him.”
Maureen was still smiling from their recent amusement, but her lips stiffened. When she spoke, she sounded tired, like she wanted to lie down right after she got this last bit out. “And maybe, just maybe, there’s a part of you that doesn’t believe all that hooey. Maybe you dedicated your life to mending the damage done by violent men because your brother was a violent man, and that shames you the same exact way it shames me.”
Her words were blows that knocked the breath from Evelyn’s gut. She had memorized and was comforted by her own narrative of their family history. She and Sean were the good guys, the misunderstood, slighted exiles. Her other siblings were the coldhearted villains. But, with a single remark, Maureen had recast the story.
And yet Maureen didn’t know everything. She didn’t know what else might have motivated Evelyn’s mission against assault. She didn’t know about another character who, Evelyn realized with dread, demonstrated a similar darkness to that of her own blood.
A machine sizzled from the kitchen, wheezed to finish its cycle, and beeped. Maureen said, “The coffee is ready.”
Chapter 24
Evelyn was beginning to go stir-crazy at her sister’s house when the doorbell rang, and Maureen’s footsteps echoed down the hall.
“Johnny? Is that you? Lord, I haven’t seen you in ages! What a pleasant surprise. Come in, come in.”
Sitting at her laptop (also purchased by the church, but it’d be a cold day in hell before she’d return it), Evelyn became very aware of her breathing. It was amplified and labored, like the sound of a horse exhaling. On her keyboard, a stray silver hair curled itself around the numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7, parenthesizing exactly what she was feeling: “$%^&.” Evelyn snorted, and hoped God was chuckling with her.
She pushed herself to her feet as soundlessly as possible, tiptoed to her bedroom door, and pressed her ear against it. Her sister and Father John caught each other up on the last several decades. The priest sounded disinterested, or distracted, but he still filled Maureen in on the death of his parents and his work with the parish. Maureen shared news of her offspring.
