by Greg Herren
But Faye knew Martine was reciting from childhood memory and that knee-jerk thing that Faye herself always felt when people talked about the dangers of New York. But this was not New York and she had just spent days looking at the torn-apart bodies of several dozen women. Faye was beginning to understand why Vandana began to scream as night fell.
*
Faye fell into a deep sleep after the sex with Martine. This time it was Martine who held her and Faye felt that sense of safety she had hoped Martine would give her.
Then the dreams came.
18.
After that first summer, Faye had been grateful when school started and she could see Rosario again. She liked being out of her grandparents’ house. She liked being in the crisp blue blouse and navy blue skirt of her uniform. She liked the music at the school and she liked running her fingers through the cuts in the neck of St. Cecelia as they walked down the steps to the assembly every morning after Mass. If she couldn’t be in her real home with her parents, she could be here. In the afternoons she would go to the grotto and pray to the Virgin Mary to make her parents come back, even though she knew God didn’t give people back once he took them.
Faye started to bring little gifts to Mary—a flower, a pretty leaf, a drawing. She knew that in the Bible there were animal sacrifices, but she didn’t want to kill anything. She wondered if the lady’s head was still in the basement and if that would count, but she didn’t want to go down there again, she didn’t want to touch it, and somehow she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do—that God might actually punish her for that. If not for stealing, then for whatever had happened to the lady, because Faye never told anyone and she knew, she really did know, that she should have told someone.
If she’d told anyone, it would have been Sister Anne Marie. Sister had been very kind to her since she had come to St. Cecelia’s and Faye felt like she could tell her things.
It was October when Faye was helping Sister Anne Marie at lunchtime by clapping erasers outside on the fire escape and sweeping the leaves that gathered around the door to the little music cottage where they had choir every other afternoon.
Faye could tell Sister Anne Marie was trying to get her to talk about her parents, but Faye didn’t want to. She had already talked to Rosario at camp that summer about her parents and Rosario had been really strange to her afterward. So Faye hadn’t said anything else and Rosario had stopped being weird and Faye began to understand what her grandmother meant when she said, “We don’t share family things outside the house, Faye. It’s not proper. You understand what proper means, don’t you?” And Faye hadn’t. What she did know was that secrets were supposed to be kept, not shared. That’s what her grandmother meant.
But Sister Anne Marie wanted her to share secrets with her and Faye thought it would be different, because Sister was a nun and Rosario was just another kid, like she was. Rosario had her own family secrets and always felt bad after she told them to Faye. But Faye was better at listening than Rosario was, so she always knew to look solemn and nod her head and not say anything but maybe just put her hand on Rosario’s shoulder like her grandmother did with her. That always seemed to work. So Rosario kept sharing her secrets and Faye just kept listening.
Faye liked autumn. She liked the leaves and the crisp air and the way everything smelled. She liked that it was mostly gray outside and windy, and that she had to wear a jacket and that her hands were always cold. She liked Halloween and Thanksgiving—or she used to.
She stood by the door with the broom in her hands and she was surprised to feel the tears running down her face. Sister Anne Marie came and took the broom away. She shut the door and led Faye to a small bank of chairs behind the music stands and they sat down. Sister asked Faye what was wrong, but Faye didn’t say anything. Then she said, “I would have brought the things from the basement to the Virgin if I thought they would bring my parents back, but I don’t think they will. I don’t want to kill any animals, but that’s what they do in the Bible. I’ll kill something if I have to, to bring my parents back, but I really don’t want to. I brought other things, but I think I’m supposed to kill something.”
Sister Anne Marie had looked away for a moment and her hand had flown up to her face in the same way as the women in the photographs Faye’s grandfather had taken. She turned back to Faye and said, her voice a little funny, “Why do you think you have to kill someone, Faye?”
“In the Bible there’s always animal sacrifice. A lamb or a goat. Or a calf. Or some doves. I don’t even know where you get those things in Brooklyn. I don’t think it’s the same if you get them from the Italian Market where they are already dead and in the butcher shop. But I would get one if I knew how. I would do what Abraham did if it would save my parents, the way it saved Isaac.”
Sister Anne Marie had looked different then—the scared look on her face had changed to a worried look. She had talked to Faye about her parents and said that they couldn’t come back, but that Faye would see them later, in Heaven.
Faye had told her that she wished she had died with them, that she wished she could live at St. Cecelia’s with the girls in the dorm. That she had liked being at camp, that she didn’t want to be at her grandparents’ house anymore. Then she told Sister about the photographs and the table and the things on the plates and the head. She knew this was what her grandmother had meant about not telling secrets, that it wasn’t proper. But Faye knew that even if the table and the plates and the things on the bed weren’t real, the head was real. And now that Sister knew, maybe she would let Faye come and live at St. Cecelia’s all the time with the other girls who were orphans, like she was.
Faye hadn’t planned any of this. She hadn’t planned to tell Sister Anne Marie about any of the things she told her. And now she couldn’t take it back. All she could do was say again, “I think I should live here. I think it’s what my parents would want. I think that’s why I am supposed to go and pray to Mary every day. Because then she will intercede like the priest says, and if my parents can’t come back, then I can come here, instead.”
*
It was almost Halloween when Faye had first seen Sister Anne Marie slapping her hands on the slate outside the grotto until they were bloody. It was almost Thanksgiving before she told Faye that she was going to talk to Faye’s grandfather and “get to the bottom of this.”
That day, that first fall day when Faye had been crying, Sister had asked her again and again about the photographs and everything else. She had asked Faye about the doctor and the medication and when Faye had fainted and been in bed and all of that. She had asked Faye if she understood what she was saying and Faye had told her yes to everything and said that she didn’t go into the darkroom anymore now that she knew what the photographs were, because they frightened her and sometimes they made her sick and that she didn’t eat meat anymore because of what she saw on the plates and she thought that was what was making her sick—the pieces from the ladies in the photographs that her grandfather took that were on the plates and then maybe in the refrigerator and then on the plates. Their plates, the plates they ate from every day.
Sister Anne Marie had left the room then. She had told Faye to stay there and she’d be right back, but Faye had heard her in the lavatory outside the music room, throwing up and making gurgling noises and running water in the sink and when she came back her face was red and she looked like she had been crying.
“We’ll find a way to fix this,” was all she had said then, and she had put her arms around Faye and held her really tight. Then she had sent her back to class.
19.
In the dreams Faye had on her last night in Congo, she was running through the lush rainforest of Kivu, trying to save Martine. Faye had been in the Land Rover with Martine, but then they had hit something—a great gaping hole in the road—and Martine was no longer in the car with her. It was late in the afternoon, nearly evening, just as it had been when they had left the care center after talking to Vandana, and
the shadows had begun to fall as the sun set. Faye had gotten out of the Land Rover and had gone searching for Martine. She had tried to call her name, but no sound would come out of her. So Faye ran, looking near where the car was stuck in the big hole in the road, then further and further into the rainforest.
In the dream, Faye was out of breath from running, and she could hear her own breath and her heart pounding in her ears as she ran. She was frightened, as frightened as she’d ever been, because there was no one near where she was and she couldn’t find Martine and she knew she had to find her, had to find her, something had happened to Martine, where was she?
Faye had fallen, then, as she whirled around in a circle trying to see everything she could before it got dark, trying not to lose sight of the road so she didn’t get lost among the trees and plants. She could hear the insects and the birds and some small sounds of shrews or weasels or whatever ran along the ground here in this place she knew almost nothing about.
She had fallen, tripped over some plant or root or something and when she fell, everything around her was wet. But it was always wet in the rainforest, that was why it was called rainforest, she told herself, as she tried to get up out of the wetness. It was then that she realized the wetness was blood and the ooze of entrails and damp, gory pieces of bodies—hands, feet, ears, a head, then another head, all crawling with maggots and worms and other slithery things she couldn’t identify, didn’t want to identify.
She had tried to scream, had put her blood-drenched hand up to her mouth and seen that maggots were dripping from her hand onto her legs. She had felt the pressure in her lungs of screaming, but no sound would come out. She could feel her lips pulled tight across her teeth, her mouth wide, as wide as it had ever been, but no sound, no sound at all came from her, none at all.
*
It was after that when Faye began to get sick. Very sick. So sick that it took her over a week once she was back in New York to understand how sick she was. She was sick with images that would not go away, sick with remembering. She lay in her own bed, in her own apartment, paralyzed with fear, paralyzed with the photographs in her head that just kept flipping by like when she was at school, back at St. Cecelia’s, and the nuns would run the little round carousel slide projector that had been there forever and the girls in her class had all giggled because it seemed so old-fashioned. The images in Faye’s head ran like that—over and over, clicking past, and then starting again. She was literally reeling from the intensity and how many pictures there were in her own personal memory card—hundreds, hundreds, how had she taken all these photographs, how had she seen all those things?
It wasn’t just Bukavu she was remembering.
It was Chinatown, it was Fresno, it was Esperanza lying under the train, it was the accident with the decapitated man, it was the fire in the theater at Christmas and all the incinerated children, it was St. Cecelia’s. It was her grandparents’ house. She was remembering it all now. And then, one night, she was awakened by her own screaming.
20.
Sister Anne Marie had made up the little bed for Faye at the end of the row in the junior dorm at St. Cecelia’s. There was a small table next to the bed that had two little drawers in it. On the table was a little wooden crucifix, but it was just the cross, there was no Jesus on it.
The bed was small. A single bed with a flat wooden headboard. It was low to the floor and Faye thought there wasn’t even room for there to be someone her size under it, let alone a monster.
There were fourteen beds in the room, which was on the top floor—the fourth floor—of the dormitory. All the girls in the junior dormitory were twelve years old and younger. In the senior dormitory, the girls were teenagers. There were more of them—thirty in all. The first floor had a big living room kind of room with chairs and sofas and a TV and there was a kitchen and a dining room.
When Sister Anne Marie made the little bed for Faye, she told her that she would be staying there from now on. She said that she had spoken to Mother Superior and that Faye shouldn’t worry. She was going to see Faye’s grandfather “This very day,” and from then on, Faye would be what she called “a ward of the State.”
She patted the end of the bed when she had finished with the sheets and the dark blue blanket and Faye sat down and Sister sat next to her. “We will pray now,” she told Faye. “We will pray for your parents, who are in Heaven, and for your grandmother, for Jesus’s forgiveness, and we will pray for the salvation of your grandfather’s soul. And we will pray for…those women in the photographs.”
Faye wasn’t sure what Sister meant about her grandparents, but she said the three Hail Marys and the two Our Fathers with Sister, out loud.
Sister pulled a little box out from under the bed—it was cardboard, but flat. She put it on the end of the bed and opened it and inside were pajamas and underwear and a pair of slippers and a thin robe.
“These are for you. They are yours now. You can wear them tonight when you go to bed. In the drawer here”—and she had opened the top drawer in the little table—“there is a toothbrush and everything else you need. I’ll have Theresa show you everything tonight. You know her, she’s in the fifth grade. She sleeps in the bed next to yours.”
Sister Anne Marie put the underwear in the second drawer, along with the robe, which she folded very flat. She put the pajamas underneath the pillow and put the slippers on the floor under the bed, by the table. She looked at Faye, still sitting on the bed, and then she came over and put her arms around Faye.
“St. Cecelia will watch over you, Faye. She will. She was brave, like you.”
Then she had taken Faye’s hand and they had gone downstairs. Faye had sat in a window seat with her notebook and watched as Sister Anne Marie walked down the walkway to the end of the driveway and turned down the street, toward the bus stop that went to the subway that went to Faye’s grandparents’ house.
Faye never saw her again.
21.
More than a week had passed since Faye had returned to New York and she had barely left her apartment. She had stayed away from the newspaper, she had stayed away from friends, she had stayed out of her own studio. Faye had told her editor she was ill, really ill, some kind of parasite, she never should have eaten that food, and that she was being treated, but that she was too weak to come in.
Faye said she’d e-mail him photos to look at in a few days, but he told her to rest, they had time before the story ran, two weeks, maybe more, wiggle room, don’t worry. Faye told him she had a rough draft of the copy, but thought she might need help from rewrite. “The pictures don’t tell the whole story,” she’d said as she thought of the chunks of flesh torn out of Vandana’s body and what Vandana had told her. “For the first time, the pictures really don’t tell the whole story.”
*
On the eighth night after she was back, Faye woke up drenched in sweat and screaming. She picked up her iPhone, Googled a number, and called the suicide hotline.
“I want to be dead,” she said to the woman who answered the phone. Her voice was flat, monotonal. It held none of the hysteria she’d awoken with. She repeated, “I want to be dead. I need to be dead.” And then she had hung up before the woman could say anything at all.
22.
Before she had left for the DRC, Faye had been planning her exhibit. Every night she had spent a few hours in her studio, ambient music playing as she sorted through boxes of notebooks, memory cards, negatives, and actual photographs. She had gone to the cabinet time after time, taking out this jar or that. She had been writing the copy to go with the exhibit, knew exactly what she wanted, had already settled on the gallery, signed the contract, knew that very little was missing. When she returned from this assignment, she’d have everything she needed.
It was time to reveal the upper shelves, time to tip the jars open and let the contents spill at the feet of the those who came to be titillated by mayhem, time to show what happened when St. Cecelia didn’t die, yet the wounds d
idn’t close, either. Time for the screaming to begin.
23.
Theresa had shown Faye around the dormitory that first night. Faye had thought it would be scary, but it wasn’t. The girls in the junior dorm all laughed a lot and threw things at each other and then Sister Mary Margaret had come in and told them to “simmer down” and “get ready for bed,” but she was kind of laughing with them and then said, “I mean it, now,” and tried to look stern, but it didn’t work, but the girls started to get ready for bed anyway, because they didn’t want Sister Mary Margaret to get mad.
Faye had fallen asleep right away, before she even finished all her prayers, and she hadn’t woken up until Sister Mary Margaret came back for them in the morning.
The police had come to St. Cecelia’s just after dinner two days after Sister Anne Marie had left to go to Faye’s grandparents’ house. Sister Anne Marie had never come back to St. Cecelia’s, and Mother Superior had reported her missing.
The police had sent a detective over to the dormitory and Sister Mary Margaret had come to get Faye because the detective wanted to talk to her, to ask her what she had told Sister Anne Marie.
They had all gone into a little room off the living room in the dormitory, the room that Sister Mary Margaret called the office. There was a desk and three chairs and a lamp and a big, plain crucifix on the wall over the desk. Mother Superior sat down behind the desk and Sister Mary Margaret sat in one of the chairs and had Faye sit next to her. The detective, who said, “Call me Tom, Faye, my name is Tom,” asked her about different things—her parents, if she was sad, if she was angry.