by Alena Dillon
She ascended the Mercy House stairs, not Sister Evelyn Fanning, just Evelyn Fanning. Not a nun, just an old woman. She paused at the angel doorknocker. Its lips were parted as if asking God a question with no answer.
Inside, the girls were in the midst of chores: dusting, sweeping, scrubbing countertops, and cleaning windows. They were playing one of Katrina’s Fleetwood Mac albums off the laptop. Desiree was lip-syncing “Gypsy,” using the broom handle as a microphone. When she saw Evelyn in the doorway, she slammed the laptop shut to silence the song.
“Sister, what happened to you? You look like you seen dead people.”
“I’m not . . . I’ve been . . .” Evelyn struggled for the words. Called by her shaking voice, everyone abandoned their tasks. When she saw Maria at the top of the stairs and Josephine rounding the doorway of the kitchen, she spoke to them, desperately. “They excommunicated me.”
“Holy shit,” Maria said, out of character. Then she rushed down the stairs and threw her arms around Evelyn. She smelled of peppermint and wool.
“It’s a disgrace. We can’t allow it.” Josephine stood rigid, a cobra prepared to strike.
“Excommuni— What does that mean?” Lucia asked.
“It means,” Evelyn said, and threw her arms up, “I’m not a nun anymore.”
“Because of . . .” Josephine’s voice trailed off but her eyes finished the sentence by looking in Esther’s direction.
Evelyn didn’t want Esther to feel any responsibility, because of course it wasn’t her fault. She answered quickly, “Yes.”
Mei Li said, “We have to fight.”
“There is nothing to do. It’s done.” And although Evelyn knew it was true, to see them outraged on her behalf made her feel, at least temporarily, less alone.
Josephine shook her head, still incensed. “It shouldn’t just be you. Maria and I are equally guilty. We should take the blame along with you.”
But Evelyn couldn’t allow them to do that. Josephine had already saved her once. She remembered her friend all those years ago, standing in the kitchen the morning Evelyn had forgotten about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She remembered Maria joining Josephine in the weeks that followed, both taking turns rubbing her back as she vomited, dabbing her forehead with a cool washcloth, praying over her, and dutifully, painfully, denying Evelyn one last drink, no matter how she begged for it. They accompanied her to meetings. They celebrated her eventual sobriety. And, whenever Evelyn encountered times of stress over the next forty years, they reminded her of her coping tools. They didn’t let her struggle with addiction on her own. Now, decades later, they were still standing steadfastly by her. It shouldn’t just be you. Evelyn smiled and shook her head. “Let it be me.”
“I can’t believe it’s come to this. That the jerk actually took it this far,” Maria said, her eyes brimming.
“That man is a . . . ”—Mei-Li searched for the right word—“a svolach. A fucking svolach.”
Lucia crossed her arms over her chest. “A mamabicho.”
“Evil,” Esther added.
“A motherfucking asshole-licking dick sniffer,” Desiree said, finishing the chorus.
“Yes, well.” Evelyn coughed to clear a clot of emotion from her throat. “I suppose I better collect my things. Take stock. Figure out my next step.”
Mei-Li’s forehead furrowed. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know yet,” Evelyn answered.
“Why are you going anywhere?” Katrina asked.
“Because. I’m no longer . . . everything is different now.”
Lucia’s face was etched with conviction. “You were already squatting here against the wishes of that bastard. What’s changed? Now you aren’t a nun. So what? Neither are we.”
Desiree snorted. “Far from it.”
Maria took Evelyn’s hand and squeezed. “Stay. We’ve still got work to do.”
That night, before Evelyn lay atop her covers to wait until it was no longer the day she was excommunicated, there was a knock on her bedroom door. She opened it to Katrina standing in the hallway, wearing her pink nightdress.
“What’s the matter, dear?” Evelyn asked.
“I just wanted to say . . . I just wanted you to know . . .” Katrina shook her head at her own inarticulation. She toed a dark spot on the wood floor before her. Finally, she looked up. “You aren’t alone. We all had our own bishop,” she said. “And he might still have us if it wasn’t for you.”
Evelyn never told anybody in Mercy House the full extent of her relationship with the bishop, but it seemed she didn’t have to. The residents understood it implicitly.
Chapter 21
Katrina
A child should be raised. Simple as that. I knew I was missing something being shuffled around the foster care system, tossed from one temporary house to another. Something necessary. So I searched for a family to raise me, like that little bird in Are You My Mother?, a children’s book one of my foster parents kept around the house to—I don’t know—mock us, maybe. After years of hunting, I finally found my tribe on CDs I checked out from the library and refused to return: Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, Fiona Apple. I found mothers and aunts and sisters. I had no use for fathers or uncles or brothers; I’d had enough of them already.
There was Allen, who sat by my bed while I was sleeping and touched himself. Larry, who removed the locks from the bathroom doors so he could walk in while I was using the toilet. Martin, who said my foster brother grabbed my breasts because I looked like I wanted it. Frank, who seemed nice at first, but ended up being the worst one. He convinced me I was a target, that men couldn’t resist a childlike voice coming out of such plump lips. But he promised I’d be safe if I slept in his room. He’d take the couch. Then he got tired of the couch.
Through all this, I wore cargo pants so I could carry my family around in my pocket, snapped inside a CD player I found on the side of the road on top of a pile of castoffs. I hooked in my earbuds and pressed play in the morning when I wanted to forget what had happened in the night; over dinner when I needed to escape the hungry watch of everybody around the table; on the school bus, amongst kids who were still kids, who didn’t know what I knew. I pressed play whenever I needed to hear from my musical family. Mother Joni plucked her acoustic guitar and shifted from her chest voice to her head croon.
And then there was my sister, Fiona Apple.
Once, when riding the F train from Queens, through Manhattan, down to Brooklyn, and back up again, anything to avoid going “home,” I was switching Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours to Fiona Apple’s Tidal, and the train bumped. The Tidal disc slipped from my fingers and rolled along the subway floor. I clasped Rumours in the closed player for safekeeping and chased down Tidal, which had clattered, to my relief, facedown, saving the iridescent back from scratching. Just as I reached for it, the train hit a bend. A woman stumbled backward, and her stiletto heel pierced the CD like a dagger to a heart.
“No, no, no.” I knelt beside it, gathered it in my hands, and held it against my chest. But it was too late; the CD had cracked.
My library account was blacklisted from so many overdue items, so the next day I took a bus to RadioShack and slipped a new copy of Tidal inside my jacket. When the alarms triggered at the exit, I ran.
I’d do anything for Fiona, even shoplift. Because we weren’t just family, we were kindred spirits. She was raped in Harlem when she was twelve years old, and then developed an eating disorder to punish the body she thought of as bait.
My body was bait too. That’s what Martin and Frank said. I was asking for it. I was just the right combination of innocent and sensual. Like a nymph. Men lost control around me. It wasn’t their fault. They were defenseless against their instincts. I was responsible for parading my sexuality in front of them, for looking at them like I was asking for it, for sleeping in their beds. How else could I explain this type of thing happening to me over and over? I was the constant in every scenario. I
t was me. I made people do bad things.
Fiona knew the truth when she sang about bad girls and delicate men.
Her songs were electric, plugged in. She flipped the switch from her lowest register to a falsetto, added vibration, and laced her sound with emotion. She controlled her voice expertly, maybe because she’d learned long ago it was the only thing she could control.
I met Sister Evelyn on the subway. It was fall, and all of New York City was trading miniskirts for leggings, and sandals for knee-high leather boots. Except me.
A man in an orange hoodie pulled over a flat-brimmed Rangers cap slid onto the bench next to me. His mouth moved in my peripheral vision, but Aunt Janis was singing at full blast. I pretended I didn’t notice and prayed for him to leave.
I felt a tug as he plucked out the earbud closest to him. He leaned in close. “Why don’t you give me a smile? You’re too pretty to frown,” he said. I thought of Allen and Larry, Martin and Frank. I wasn’t sure how I’d enticed this man, but obviously I had. All of my muscles constricted as my body did its best to turn to stone. “Relax, beautiful. I’m just saying hello. I’m not gonna bite.” It was early afternoon, but he smelled of corn chips and cheap beer. Tears stung my eyes.
“She’ll smile when there’s something to smile about. And I guess you aren’t it,” an old lady said as she elbowed her way through standing passengers. When she reached us she waved the Rangers fan away. “Now move it along.”
“Are you her bodyguard?” he asked with a mocking laugh and turned to me, as if I might be in on his joke. When I didn’t react, he continued to egg her on. “What, you gonna hit me?”
Her eyebrows rose, a challenge. “Stick around and find out.”
He pushed himself to his feet, and for a moment I thought he wanted a fight. Then he said, “She isn’t pretty enough for this bullshit,” and shoved his way through the subway car.
The woman waited for him to gain some distance before she asked me, “You okay?” I nodded, and she asked, “Where you headed?”
“Home,” I said. I don’t know what made me clarify, why I felt I could or should share something extra with her, but I added, “My foster home.”
She considered me for a moment, and then she said, “Well, if you ever need a different home, you can find it at Mercy House.”
A month later, I took Sister Evelyn up on her offer and ran away from Frank in order to wait out the last few months before I turned eighteen and was free from the foster care system. I went to Mercy House, not to protect myself, but to protect others from me.
My first night on Chauncey Street, I woke mid-scream from the kind of night terrors I’d been having regularly for years, probably waking the whole house with me.
Mei-Li roomed with me then. She did her best, sitting on the edge of my bed and touching my arm, trying to stir me from my terrible sleep, but I thought she was him, and that just made me shriek louder. Mei-Li returned to her bed, away from me, and I didn’t blame her.
Then I heard Sister’s voice outside the door. She knew not to come into my room. People always came into my room.
“Katrina. You had a nightmare. But it’s okay. You’re safe,” she said from the hall, as if she woke up to someone sobbing and screaming bloody murder every night. “And you know, now that I’m here, I’ve been meaning to ask you something, but I always seem to forget. Now is as good a time as any, I suppose. So, tell me, what’s your favorite movie?”
Hot tears fell from my eyes and my heart still pounded like a medieval drum calling for war. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to swap small talk. “What?”
“I’m so busy, I don’t have the chance to watch many movies, but lately I’ve had a hankering, and I’m looking for recommendations. So, do you have a favorite?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just one you like, then.”
“I don’t know. Maybe Ratatouille?”
“Oh, is that good? I think I saw advertisements back when it first came out in theaters. What’s it about again?”
By the time I finished telling Sister about Remy, the cute little rat who followed his dream of becoming a chef in Paris, I felt calmer. Not calm, but calmer. And of course that was the whole point. Because she’d seen Ratatouille. Everyone had seen Ratatouille.
How many nights did we end up that way, me curled up on one side of the door and Sister Evelyn on the other? Six? Nine? She was the first stranger I had trusted in a very long time. The first person at all, really.
Eventually, I opened the door and joined her on the other side. Some nights, Sister brought colored pencils and paper; she knew I liked to create pretty things, to counteract the world’s ugly stuff.
A couple weeks into my stay, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sister Evelyn on the hallway floor at two in the morning, I confessed my wrongdoings, the list of men I’d tempted.
She looked so sad that night. So tired and sad. Instead of assigning me prayers for penance like a priest might, she swore I had no reason to feel shame. The constant in the equation of abuse wasn’t me. It was bad men with little accountability. I was young, eager for love, and homeless. I was at their mercy. And they took advantage of that. They knew they could do anything to me, and the odds were they wouldn’t get caught. There’d be no proof. Even if I told, which they figured I wasn’t brave enough to do, the system was too unwieldy to keep track of accusations without proof.
She said, “This started when you were ten years old, Katrina. Ten years old. There is not a nightgown short enough to make you the tempter. This is not your fault. You didn’t seduce them. You couldn’t. Some people are just evil. And you’ve had the misfortune of crossing paths with a few. But you didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t deserve to shut yourself off from people. To be alone. You deserve to be safe. You deserve to love and to be loved.”
Chapter 22
Bishop Hawkins took control of Evelyn’s story by issuing a press release to National Catholic Reporter, Christian Today, and National Catholic Register, all of which published the story the next day. The Hawk must have known secular news would follow, perhaps with their own liberal biases, but at least his perspective would be the first version told. And Evelyn’s heroics with the gangster wouldn’t be enough to absolve her of the crime he broadcasted.
Nun Excommunicated After Convincing at Least One Woman to Kill Her Baby.
By the time Evelyn woke the next morning, her email inbox was full of hate mail. The messages she received were fueled by odium, and their content often made it clear the author hadn’t read beyond the headlines.
“You are evil, and you will pay for these sins in the next life.”
“That poor woman and her beautiful little baby! He could have grown up to be the greatest president to ever live. Or the pope!”
“It’s vermin like you that is wrong with this world. Liberal commie, go back to where you came from.”
“Hitler! Demon! Burn in hell!”
“The KKK knows what you done. That’s the Ku Klux Klan, killer bitch. Sleep with one eye open.”
“She trusted you! You disguised yourself as a religious figure, but you’re nothing but Satan in a habit! Shame on you.”
Evelyn found the last one particularly careless, since it’d been forty years since she’d worn a habit.
Interspersed among the hate, there were a few positive messages too.
“Nun of the year!”
“An advocate of female reproductive rights.”
“Thank you for bravely making the world a better place.”
And while Evelyn hardly believed she was nun of the year, she also hoped she wasn’t as evil as some of the emails suggested. If she were lucky, she would come to believe she fell somewhere in the middle.
A fire crackled in the living room, licking the interior of the chimney with orange and red tongues, leaving a trail of soot saliva behind. Esther sat in the armchair closest to the flames and gripped the National Catholic Register in her hands. Her foot alternately flexed
and pointed. “Someone stuck this through the mail slot,” she said. Her expression was quietly grim. “They decimate you in here. Because of me.”
Evelyn hovered a couple feet behind Esther. She leaned forward with both hands on her cane. “You weren’t the only one.”
“But I was the one that got you caught. It was my journal that served as proof.”
“He would have found something else, some other reason. This is what he wanted all along. He wasn’t going to stop.”
Esther folded the paper carefully and laid it on her lap. “Why did you do it?”
“It’s what you wanted.” Outside, a garbage truck rumbled and clanged over a pothole. Evelyn stepped forward and lowered her voice, not wanting the girls in the other rooms to hear. “All those years ago, when the bishop . . . I’ve never been in your position. Even if I had been, I still wouldn’t know what it was like to be you. Only you understand your own experience.” That was the closest she’d ever come to talking about her trauma to anybody but Eloise. It made her tremble with nerves, maybe a little exhilaration too—the glimpse of freedom from her secret. But this wasn’t about her. It was about Esther. She stepped back. “It wasn’t my place to tell you what was wrong. It wasn’t my place to know.”
“Do you think it was wrong?”
“I’m contending with many decades of indoctrination,” she said, but she hadn’t answered the question, and Esther didn’t appear satisfied with her diversion. Evelyn sighed. “My brain and my heart have different answers.”
“Which do you listen to?”
“When it comes to Mercy House? My heart. Always.”
Esther’s finger traced the newspaper headline at her knee, pausing over the word “excommunicated.” “Still, your life is forever changed. I feel responsible.”
“Don’t. I would do it again.”
A car with a broken muffler clanked and coughed, making itself known along the street. Evelyn turned to the window at the sound and saw a dark-haired woman carry a bundle up their walkway, abandon it on their porch, and dash back down the steps to the car, which ran loudly idle.