by Greg Herren
Mother Superior and Detective Tom had told her that Sister Anne Marie had had an accident when she had gone to Faye’s grandparents’ house. They had told her there had been a fall down a flight of stairs, a broken neck, a twisted body on the basement floor. Things like this happen sometimes, Mother Superior had told her in the little office, while Detective Tom had looked off to the side, not meeting Faye’s eyes. But Mother Superior had looked like she had been crying. Mother Superior, who was in charge of everything, had looked scared.
That night Faye had prayed until she fell asleep. Prayed for Sister Anne Marie, who had been her friend, and who had protected her. Prayed for Mother Superior, who had told Faye lie after lie because she knew the truth was too awful to bear. Prayed for Detective Tom, because he had found Sister Anne Marie, and Faye knew what that meant. Prayed for her grandparents, because she was afraid they would go to hell and never see Jesus. Prayed for herself, because as she had sat in the little office, she had felt like Detective Tom and Mother Superior were both afraid of her, and if they were too afraid, Mother Superior might not let her stay at St. Cecelia’s. Mother Superior might call Detective Tom, and he might put her in jail. Because they knew she knew. They knew Faye knew about everything. Maybe, Faye thought, maybe they thought that she was part of it.
And maybe, maybe, maybe, she was. Which was why she had to pray.
28.
A couple of nights before the opening, Faye was lying in bed, trying to sleep, trying not to think, trying not to worry that it wouldn’t be a success. She had begun taking sleeping pills ten days after she’d gotten back from the DRC. The morning after the night when she’d wanted to kill herself, when she couldn’t remember what had happened and she’d awakened from the terrible dream about Sister Anne Marie, she’d made an appointment with her doctor, gotten some Ambien and hoped that it would work. And it had—she’d slept through night after night with barely a dream. Until that last night.
Faye wasn’t sure at first if she was awake or asleep as she sat on the floor of her studio, the sharp halogen beam of the little gooseneck lamp beside her the only light in the room. On the floor around her were bits and pieces of things she was taking to the gallery—the last-minute touches she’d been considering and reconsidering since the last exhibit and the book about Esperanza. These were things she’d been putting together since she’d first decided on what she wanted the exhibit to be. These were, she thought, the subtly horrifying nuances that would complement the photographs.
Faye turned her head—she thought she heard something in the other room—and she saw the apothecary cabinet was open and the contents were in different places around the room. Not turned over, but out from their shelves. Faye didn’t remember taking them out, but she knew you could do things on Ambien that you didn’t remember. Her doctor had even warned her about that before she had written Faye the prescription. Faye’s friend Dorcas had taken Ambien and ended up driving to Connecticut to an ex-girlfriend’s house in her underwear and almost getting arrested.
Open in front of Faye was her oldest notebook—the one she had kept that first year at St. Cecelia’s. On the verso page was a drawing—a really good drawing, actually—of a dead squirrel. Faye stared at the details: the throat had been torn apart, probably by one of the feral cats that roamed the school grounds and the woods just beyond. The squirrel’s eyes were open and in the drawing, the mouth was open, too, and the teeth were bared in what Faye now knew was the death scream. It was a child’s drawing, but it had a surprising verisimilitude to it. So much so that Faye thought back to Detective Tom McManus and wondered what he would have thought had he seen it. Would he have reconsidered letting her stay at St. Cecelia’s?
On the opposite page there were several rough dark smears and at the bottom of the page, in Faye’s careful, looping, second-grade cursive was the notation: Sister Anne Marie’s blood from in front of the Virgin Mary at school. Faye could still remember the day she had seen Sister Anne Marie at the grotto slapping her hands on the slate until they bled. She could still feel the texture of the blood mixed with dirt and leaves when she had touched it on the cold, slate path.
Faye closed the notebook and stood up. She walked to the window and opened the blackout drapes. She looked down onto the street six floors below. Would she die if she leapt from the window? What if she went out backward? Was she more likely to smash her head irreparably if she went that way? Would she be more assured of “dying instantly,” as they said? She thought about the people jumping from the towers on 9/11, their bodies ablaze. She thought about the immigrant girls jumping to their deaths from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, their hair and skirts on fire. She thought about those little parchment Amaretto papers that flew up at the end when you lit them in a restaurant after dinner. Maybe she should set herself on fire first. Maybe someone would take a photograph of her as she sparked through the air to the ground below. Maybe she would set the timer on one of her own cameras first, before she did it, so it would be recorded in real time.
Faye opened the window. A rush of cold air hit her. The air smelled like snow, but there had been very little snow that winter. She sat on the edge of the sill, listened to the sounds of Manhattan below her, and thought about just leaning back, how easy it would be. She thought it might be like falling backward into a pool. She thought it would be quick. She thought she should just close her eyes and do it. But when she closed her eyes and started to lean back into the air, into the cold embrace of the winter night, she felt a hand, strong, on her arm, pulling her back. She opened her eyes, startled. There was Shihong.
“I don’t think you want to do that,” Shihong said in her low, whispery, slightly accented English as she pulled Faye back into the room. “Not when I’ve brought you these for your exhibit.” Faye half-stumbled back into her studio and looked toward where Shihong was pointing.
On the long table across from the window were four jars—four of the same jars Shihong had shown her in that black-market shop in Chinatown. And now when she saw them, just as she had then, Faye couldn’t keep from screaming.
This time she did not wake up. She wasn’t dreaming.
29.
A few months before the end of her senior year, Mother Superior called Faye into her office. Faye had watched different classmates brought in for what other girls had always called the “separation” talk. The girls who were orphans could stay at St. Cecelia’s throughout the summer after their graduation, but they had to spend that summer looking for work and a place to live if they weren’t going to college in the fall. St. Cecelia’s gave every girl a small stipend when she left the school. Still, over the years a few had ended up staying at the school and working there. Three girls who were in the high school when Faye was in eighth grade had actually gone on to become nuns.
Faye was going to college. She had gotten financial aid to NYU. But she was not eager to leave St. Cecelia’s. She felt safe there, protected. She had let herself be sheltered. There were the things she knew and the things she didn’t want to know. There was nothing Dickensian about St. Cecelia’s. She loved it there. She loved Sister Mary Margaret, who was like a den mother to the girls in the dormitory. She loved the strength and calm of Mother Superior. She even loved the Latina nun who had taken Sister Anne Marie’s place with the music, Sister Fatima Dolores.
In the ten years Faye had spent at the school, she had never climbed on a chair or a stepstool to see what was in the uppermost jars outside Mother Superior’s office. She had never gone into Manhattan to search the newspaper files at the public library with the stone lions out in front to see what she could find out about Sister Anne Marie’s death, or even about what had happened to her own grandparents. Mother Superior had told her, after Sister Anne Marie’s disappearance, that Faye wouldn’t be seeing them again, that legally she belonged to St. Cecelia’s now. She had told Faye that there were some rules that her grandparents had broken and that there would be some punishment involved, just as there was at St. Ce
celia’s. That was all she said, and over the years they had never spoken about it again.
Until the day Faye went to the office for what she thought would be the separation talk.
It was a chill gray day in late March. The daffodils were in full bloom by the grotto as Faye walked that same path she had taken every day she had been at the school. She had stopped and said a small prayer to Mary just as she always did. She listened for a moment, as she had continued to do all these years later, listened for the sound of Sister Anne Marie crying in the music room when she thought no one could hear. Sister Fatima Dolores never cried. She was relentlessly cheerful, always humming, always smiling. Faye never thought of her as Sister Anne Marie’s replacement. She just thought of her as someone else. But Faye still listened for Sister Anne Marie. She couldn’t help it.
Mother Superior opened the door to the office and another girl, one of the Theresas, slipped past Faye. Her head was down and she only murmured “Hi” to Faye without looking at her as she walked hurriedly away. Faye looked after the retreating girl and then turned to Mother Superior, a questioning look on her face. Faye hadn’t thought the separation talk was going to be that bad. Her stomach flipped a little as she walked into the office and shut the door.
She’d been in this office many times over the years. She’d memorized it—from the spare black crucifix to the small glassed-in cabinet with the prayer books to the oval print of Raphael’s Madonna of the Streets that hung opposite Mother’s desk.
“You know we have a separation talk with all the senior girls who live here, right, Faye?” Mother began. Faye nodded and Mother continued.
“Ours will be a little different, dear.” Mother had reached across the desk then and held out her hand toward Faye. Faye reached back. It was strange and somewhat unsettling. Faye had never remembered Mother touching anyone except shaking the hands of parents. Mother only grasped her hand for a minute, then let go.
“I have something for you. I don’t want you to take it to the dormitory and I am not altogether sure I should even be giving it to you. But it belongs to you, so you should have it. And since you will be leaving here soon—” Here she paused and looked toward the small window, then back at Faye. “You need to have it before you go…out there.” Mother waved her hand in the direction of the world outside the window, the Brooklyn neighborhood outside St. Cecelia’s protected little enclave.
“We’ve never talked about this, but now we have to,” she continued. “We have to talk about Sister Anne Marie and your grandfather.”
Faye hadn’t realized how straight she’d been sitting in her chair, her hands folded in her lap the way they’d been taught by Sister Mary Margaret. Now she gripped the arms of the hard wooden chair. She could feel her heart racing.
“I don’t want to talk about that, Mother, if you don’t mind. I just don’t…” Faye had that hot, dizzy feeling she’d had so many years ago at her grandparents’ house. She didn’t want to feel like this. She wanted to leave. She had actually started to get up out of her chair when Mother said, “Please sit down, Faye. We have to talk, whether either of us wants to or not.”
And then Mother began. She bent over and picked up a white cardboard carton, the kind that Xerox paper came in, with a lid on it. Neatly printed on the side was FAYE ELIZABETH BLAKE and Faye’s old address, the one she had with her parents. Faye felt tears pricking behind her eyes. She didn’t want to cry. She wanted to leave.
“I haven’t looked in this box, Faye,” Mother Superior said, and Faye believed her, although she couldn’t imagine how Mother had kept her curiosity at bay all these years. Maybe, like Faye, she really didn’t want to know what was inside. “I’m sure there are things here that could be upsetting. And I would prefer, given what happened with Sister Anne Marie, that you not discuss this with your friends, even though you may want to. It’s especially important that you not say anything to Rosario Lopez or Theresa Flynn, as they are both already in a somewhat unstable situation.” Faye thought about how Theresa had been when she had left Mother’s office a few minutes ago. She wondered what was wrong.
Mother continued, “Whenever you want to look at the contents of this box, let me know, and I will provide a space for you to do so. I think that it would best if you do that here or across the hall in the biology lab.”
Faye thought about the appropriateness of the jars of horrifying things as she looked through whatever it was that was in the box.
“We have never discussed this, but I think you have known this whole time that Sister Anne Marie did not have an accident.” Mother looked at Faye and got up from behind the desk, came around, and stood in front of Faye.
Faye could feel a fine film of sweat break out over her whole body. She felt clammy and cold and her teeth started to chatter uncontrollably. She didn’t want to hear this. It was time to go. She got up out of the chair and moved toward the door, but Mother was faster and put her hand against the door, keeping it shut, before Faye could open it.
“Please…” was all Faye said, her hand still on the doorknob, her back to Mother.
“You must hear this, Faye, because you cannot leave here not knowing. Other people know. They know out there. They know and it’s quite possible when they hear your name or where you went to school, that someone will say something to you. Someone will ask you if you are the girl whose grandfather murdered the nun and…well…”
It was out now. There was no taking it back. Faye didn’t even feel it when her body hit the floor. She was already unconscious.
30.
The gallery looked perfect. The bottle-green velvet drape on the front window was pulled across. It would be pulled back only after the gallery opened at seven. In the window, centered in front of the drape, was the poster that Persia had done for the show. It was the photograph of the bodies of the children in the morgue in Fresno, with the maggots, along with Faye’s name and the name of the show, Ordinary Mayhem, and the gallery and the dates. The photo was black and white and the titles were in a dark blood-red—Persia’s idea, naturally. That this was the least disturbing of the photos in the show struck Faye as she walked into the gallery. There were small programs printed up in a stack with the same image on them and inside, a statement by Faye about the content of the show and the meaning of the work.
Faye had hung everything herself early that very morning. She had asked that Nick and Persia not be there and they had agreed. A long red satin drape had been strung across the photos on each side of the gallery on a little pulley. The drapes would be pulled away once everyone had arrived at the gallery. Faye had also arranged all the other pieces on the series of tables that Nick had provided for her. The tables were covered with pieces of velvet in a dark claret and black. Even Nick and Persia had not seen what was underneath. The show was going to surprise them as much as it would the public. Persia had wanted to see, but Nick, who always seemed permanently bored, was obviously excited by the idea that here was something that might stimulate his jaded palate.
At the back of the long room was a table with various canapés of the most chic New York kind. The bar stood at an angle to the food. It all looked splendid. There was a display of flowers in dark reds, with a series of rather frightening-looking greens that reminded Faye of Little Shop of Horrors.
“When do you want to take the drapes off the tables, Faye?” Persia was sleek and alien-looking in a tight, black silk Chinoise dress with impossibly high black platform shoes and one long black earring that dangled to her shoulder. She looked magnificent, and not for the first time, Faye thought perhaps she should have invited her home before this. After the show, Persia might not be as interested as she had seemed during the preparation.
“What do you think?” Faye asked. “Should we have an unveiling after people arrive or do it now, for you and Nick and the waitstaff and then cover everything over again? We have a half hour. What do you think? Do you think people will hear the screaming from here?” Faye didn’t laugh when she said thi
s and she thought she saw Persia flinch involuntarily. For the first time, Faye felt apprehensive. She knew what was under the little drapes. She knew even the cynical Nick and the cool aesthete that Persia was would be unsettled. Maybe they should wait until there was an audience and do it all at once. Like ripping off a bandage.
“I say let’s do it now,” Persia said, looking around for Nick, who was on his cell phone in the back, a glass of red wine in his hand. “I want to see what’s going to slither out from under the rock.”
31.
Faye lay flat on her bed in the dorm staring up at the little blue stenciled crosses. She was still in her uniform. It was almost dark and the only light was the small one on the little table near the door that led to the landing at the top of the stairs. She hadn’t wanted to take the box Mother had given her. She hadn’t wanted to look inside. She hadn’t wanted to remember the things she had spent ten years—most of her childhood—trying to forget.
But Mother had wanted her to take it. She had waited ten years to give it to Faye. And she clearly wanted Faye to have time to recover before she went off to college. But how could she ever recover from this, from what Mother had told her? From what was in the box?
*
After she had fainted, Mother had brought her around with smelling salts. Faye remembered that her mother had had the same old-fashioned bottle on her dresser. Faye had wanted to take the bottle from Mother and hold it, the sense memory of her own mother, her dead mother, her burned-alive mother, was so vivid in that moment. But instead she had pulled herself up off the floor and sat down in the chair in front of Mother’s desk and started to cry.
