Mercy House Read online

  Dedication

  For Rowen, whose alchemy set everything in motion

  and whose magic continues to delight us.

  And for all women who recognize themselves in these pages.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  January 2010

  Sister Evelyn knew she was on call that night—it was her turn to answer any knocks or rings after midnight—and so, when she heard the first tentative rap at the door, she groaned and pried one eyelid open just enough to read the red numbers glaring from the digital clock on her bedside table: 2:43 A.M. An ungodly hour. Evelyn burrowed deeper into her pillow. She’d answer the door. She would. After thirty more seconds of sweet rest.

  The second strike was more assertive.

  “Get your lazy bones out of bed, Evie,” Sister Josephine cried from the neighboring room. “This is your calling, after all.”

  Evelyn struggled up onto an elbow. “If you’re awake enough to be clever, you’re awake enough to answer the door yourself.” She was satisfied with that response and waited twenty, then forty seconds for Josephine to stir. When her housemate ignored her, Evelyn sighed, pushed herself upright, and began the painful process of extricating herself from bed.

  Ever since Evelyn entered the convent fifty years ago and was required to rise with the sun, she worshipped sleep like it was a false god. But now that Evelyn was sixty-nine, the physical difficulty of making her way from her cot to the ground was a relatively recent development. Her body had thickened, her bones had become brittle, and her joints were stiff and reluctant to bend. Every inch of her skeleton creaked when used, but gouty arthritis precipitated the worst of it: the condition swelled her toe, tightened her ankle, and sent a burning ache through her knee. The slightest movement was a reminder of her nearly decade-long status as a senior citizen.

  Certainly when God created man, He knew human life expectancy would eventually extend; couldn’t He have designed the aging process to be just a bit more graceful? Even a half century after her formation period, Evelyn could still hear the response of her first Mother Superior. “Who are you, young novice, to question the will of almighty God?”

  Hobbling around in the darkness of her bedroom, Evelyn muttered, “Forgive me, Lord. I am but Your meek and humble servant. But you, Mother Superior? You can kiss my fat Irish ass.”

  Evelyn tucked an arm through the sleeve of her ratty bathrobe and winced as she laced the terry cloth around her other shoulder. As she slipped her puffy feet into moccasins whose insoles retained her impressions, her bladder stung with fullness. She had to pee; she always had to pee. She shuffled toward the bathroom just as another thump on the front door echoed up the stairs. “For crying out loud.” She’d have to delay relieving herself, which was just as well. It meant she wouldn’t capture a peek in the mirror of the disheveled face she was presenting to this newcomer. Because of her matronly shape and dowdy gray hair, one of her former residents said she looked like Flora, Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother—if Flora had been fired, lost her wand, and was forced to live on the street. With that in mind, Evelyn braced the thick wooden banister and descended the Mercy House staircase, step by careful step.

  Mercy House was a safe haven for victims of domestic violence, founded and operated by Sister Evelyn, Sister Josephine, and Sister Maria, nuns of the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Mercy. Their five-bedroom, hundred-year-old row house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn was almost always at capacity. As Evelyn said, Good for business, bad for humanity.

  In the entryway, Evelyn pressed the security code into the system’s keypad: 0–4–1–6, for Hebrews 4:16. “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Maria had chosen the verse because it contained two of her favorite words: “grace” and “mercy.” Evelyn had voted for 2–8–3–6, numbers on the keypad that corresponded with “at em,” as in, “Let me at ’em,” because revenge was often her sinful impulse when she saw the battered women who arrived at their door. The other sisters didn’t think this instinct should be condoned, and her suggestion was vetoed.

  When Evelyn pulled the door open, she found a girl whose skin was tan, even in winter, and whose black-walnut hair was rigid with gel and coiled in miniature ringlets over her shoulders. Thick charcoal liner, smudged from crying, rimmed her eyelids.

  Her face acted as a history of her relationship with her assailant, and Evelyn’s experienced eye—she was trained as a nurse in the convent and practiced medicine for many years—surveyed the girl’s injuries. A fresh red welt circled from her cheekbone to her forehead, like a swollen parenthesis left open, to what, Evelyn didn’t know; a scab, an older wound, ran vertically down her bottom lip like dried-blood stiches; and her nose took a sudden detour in its center, a trademark break from a previous run-in. No matter how many times Evelyn saw such marks of violence, they still made her stomach turn. Beneath the bruising, there was softness to the girl’s face that suggested her features were still developing; God had not yet finished his carving. Based on this and her still-budding form, Evelyn guessed her age to be about sixteen.

  “Sorry for knocking so much. I didn’t know if you heard me.” The words rushed from her mouth, as though she were afraid she’d been followed and wanted to explain herself and get out of sight as quickly as possible. The girl squeezed her full, cracked lips together and then released them. “I heard this was a place for, you know . . .” Her stare darted from Evelyn to the uncertain night at her back. She faced Evelyn again and shrugged. Her eyes welled with fresh tears. “Do you have room or what?”

  Sister Evelyn had been doing this long enough to know she wouldn’t sleep again for hours, maybe not until the following night. Maybe not even then. She swallowed, opened the door fully, and gestured down the hallway. “There’s always room for one more.”

  Evelyn twisted the cap off the rusty teakettle and flipped on the sink faucet. She ignored the girl while the kettle filled, allowing her time to settle into her new surroundings and some privacy to apply the ice pack Evelyn had nonchalantly deposited onto the table. She’d also set out the ham and swiss that had been sitting in the fridge; she made a sandwich every evening before bed, just in case a resident—current or newly arriving—needed a snack in the middle of the night. Evelyn loosed an unencumbered yawn without bothering to cover her mouth. The burner clicked three times before the flame caught.

  It never took long for Evelyn to become endeared to each of their residents—well, to most, anyway. But when they first arrived, she had to remind herself: although this was just an ordinary day for her—just another interrupted night’s sleep, just another stranger at her door—it was probably one of the wo
rst nights of their lives.

  The girl sat hunched at the table with the ice pack pressed against the left side of her face. Her eyes cast about the kitchen, as if something were about to jump out at her, but she just didn’t know from where.

  Rage swam through Evelyn’s veins and poisoned her heart. Let me at ’em. “What’s your name, dear?” she asked.

  The girl straightened, as if startled to remember she was not alone in that room. “Lucia.”

  Evelyn reached into the cabinet and brought down two chipped mugs. One read in chunky hot pink letters “Best Sister Ever!” a gift from a former resident of the house. The other read “What Would Jesus Brew?” Evelyn couldn’t remember the origins of the second ware, but it was her favorite. She reached back into the cabinet for teabags, but then hesitated over the selection: black, green, or chamomile. This girl didn’t seem the green tea type, and who really liked chamomile? Then again, judge not and all that crap. “Black?” Evelyn asked.

  “Puerto Rican,” Lucia said.

  The misunderstanding took a moment to register. “I meant your choice of tea, dear.”

  “Oh, right.” Her chin dipped, embarrassed. “Yeah, black. Whatever.”

  Evelyn dropped a Lipton bag into each mug. “Lucia is a fine name. Saint Lucia is one of only eight women named in Canon of the Mass. She was a virgin martyr.”

  Lucia snorted. “Yeah, well, I ain’t no virgin.”

  She was too young to make that remark so offhandedly, and frustration and sympathy for this girl bloomed anew. In all probability, her sexual experience was not voluntary. Evelyn wished she could detect in her traces of her young age: more naivete, more curiosity, more innocence. More joy.

  “Virginity is about the only requirement for sainting a woman. Men need to have accomplished something, but women just need to have kept their legs crossed. Otherwise, you’re guilty of bewitching a good man into sin,” Evelyn said. The kettle hissed and she extinguished the flame. “But, from my experience, the whole virginity thing is overrated.” Her stare casually drifted over to Lucia’s, and she was satisfied to find raised eyebrows; startling newcomers out of their funk was one of her routines. With Evelyn’s coarse silver hair cut bluntly across her forehead and her lined expression permanently set in a scowl, nobody expected the gruff nun to have a sense of humor, especially not a crass one. Evelyn’s lips pitched up into a grin to emphasize the gag, and then fell almost immediately. She was at once the joker and the straight man.

  Lucia’s eyebrows pulled from surprise to suspicion, and an acrylic fingernail wandered up to her lip. She propped it between her teeth. “So, how does this work?”

  From years of cooking, cleaning, carrying, and caring, Evelyn’s hands were so thick and calloused, she thumbed the metal cap from the teakettle’s spout without an oven mitt. Boiled water cascaded into the mugs. “What do you mean?” Evelyn asked. She pinched the paper tags and bobbed the teabags until they were saturated with water and began to seep sepia.

  “I mean, like, what do you do here? What do you do for someone like me?”

  “What do you want us to do?” Evelyn asked. Lucia worked her lips together and then shrugged. Her eyes began to water and she blinked her lids quickly to pat the tears down. “Do you need medical attention?” Evelyn glanced up at Lucia, again assessing the damage to her face and wondering what hurt might be lurking beneath her clothing. Lucia shook her head. Evelyn knew not to press this early. She spooned sugar into each cup. “Do you want to pray together?” Lucia again indicated no. Girls very rarely responded to that suggestion from the onset; prayer was too hokey, or perhaps too intimate. Prayer was something they agreed to only when they were ready, and often never at all. Evelyn pulled open the refrigerator, heaved out the jug of milk, and plunked a drop into each mug. The milk swirled independently in the tea and then blended, a foreign body assimilating. “Do you want to talk about why you’re here?” Evelyn asked, and Lucia stared into her lap. Her chin jutted to the side. Evelyn stirred the cups, knowing the ceremony of tea—the boiling, brewing, mixing, and heat of the ceramic between her hands—would be a comfort all its own.

  She gripped the handles and shuffled toward the table. Her knee cried out with each step, and her square body rocked atop her limp. She placed one mug before Lucia, who appeared grateful for something on which to focus her attention. Then she dragged a chair out, clamped her teeth, braced herself, and lowered her body into the seat. She exhaled a groan and closed her eyes against a sear up her right leg.

  A resident had once offered her marijuana to treat the pain, but that was a slippery slope, and Evelyn knew from experience she had trouble maintaining her footing.

  “You all right?” Lucia asked in a tone that was more a comment on how Evelyn was, so obviously, not all right.

  “Just another Tuesday morning.” Evelyn swallowed and then reopened her eyes. “Want some advice? Don’t get old,” she said, only afterward realizing, from that angry lump that would last for weeks, Lucia was already well acquainted with pain.

  Lucia’s finger skimmed the edge of the plastic plate that held her sandwich. She didn’t meet Evelyn’s eyes when she asked, “You got potato chips?”

  Evelyn straightened. Hunger was a good sign. A very good sign. “I have pretzels. Would you like some pretzels?”

  She shook her head. “I put chips in sandwiches. I like the crunch.”

  “Well I hope this doesn’t affect our Yelp review,” Evelyn said, but she made a mental note to pick up some potato chips from the corner bodega later in the morning. She sensed that this girl, like so many, was in need of simple, healthy love, the kind without agenda or ulterior motive. And she prayed the girl would find it there.

  * * *

  When Evelyn was four years old, she was bartered into the sisterhood by her father, a scrawny Irishman who lived on a diet of sausage, eggs, and whiskey. He promised God, if his oldest son returned safely from the invasion of Normandy, he’d commit his youngest daughter, Little Evie, to His eternal service. The name Evelyn came from the Irish Aibhlín, meaning “wished for, longed for child.” When Sean returned in one piece, without even a hairline fracture—except inside his mind, her daddy said, “Little Evie, look what you did. Look what wishes you keep making come true.”

  Evie, who worshipped her gregarious daddy, accepted her fate.

  Lucky for her, she loved everything about being a Catholic. As a child, instead of having tea parties, she practiced serving Communion to her dolls. Since she always knew she’d become a nun, she viewed her family’s house of worship as a home. The nuns, who glided around the halls of her church and school like a robe-swishing, rosary-clanging army, were aware of her pact with God, and, when they were allowed to speak, discussed her future in “whens,” not “ifs.” Priests were paternal figures—so much so that when she had a more serious sin to confess, like stealing bubblegum, she walked an extra mile to a different parish so none of her priests would recognize her voice.

  She liked the ceremony of her religion, and felt secure in the predictability and order of the Mass as well as in the familiar words of the liturgy. She appreciated the solemnity with which the priests lifted a chalice from the altar, the way they whispered the Eucharistic prayer, as if murmuring directly into God’s ear, and the elegance of the thick gold stole draped around their necks.

  Evelyn felt she belonged in church, often more than she felt she belonged in her own house, where all her siblings were over a decade her senior and treated her like the spare sibling who was leaving, and her parents frequently forgot they still had one last daughter to raise.

  But then there were times when she watched her high school English teacher, Sister Angelica, gaze out the classroom window, mournfully, as if trying to recapture a precious memory that slipped away. And in those rare moments, she wondered if the fate awaiting her was a happy one—if there were better lives to live. Like the ones her high school peers prepared for by taking training courses and dressing for dates at the drive-in
or sock hop. But boys never took an interest in Evie. She suspected it was because she wasn’t very pretty with her bristly auburn hair and wide, flat nose. Her biggest insecurity was her neck. It didn’t elongate, and was barely thinner than her face. She wished it were more delicate, as a woman’s should be, but instead it was as sturdy as a redwood. Maybe it was best that she had a groom in Jesus.

  If the Dodgers could leave Brooklyn, she supposed she could too.

  She entered the Hudson Valley convent when she was nineteen, in 1960, at the tail end of Vatican I, when the sisters still abided by the Code of Canon Law, two thousand restrictive regulations to keep nuns reverent, including no newspapers, magazines, radio, or television; letters were censored and not delivered during Advent or Lent; no personal belongings or spending money; female visitors only once a month and none during Advent or Lent; daily silence, except for forty-five minutes of conversation allowed after both lunch and dinner, with total silence on Sundays; and clothing limited to the habit, a head-to-toe wool uniform marked with her assigned number—106—that was only washed four times a year. Maintain custody of your eyes, meaning don’t let your stare linger anywhere for too long. No chewing gum or swinging of the arms. No razors or sweets. No congregating in groups of fewer than three to prevent intimacy. No tampons or eating bananas, because both were suggestive. No classical music by Claude Debussy because it was too racy.

  Inside the convent, the women knew little of the cultural and social evolution occurring outside their walls: Beatlemania, the Space Needle, West Side Story, Marilyn Monroe, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, Spiderman, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, LSD, the civil rights movement, and the first breast implants. To them, the 1960s didn’t look very different from the 1860s.

  Although the convent was a short hour-and-a-half drive from Brooklyn, Evie wasn’t allowed to visit home, and she rarely heard from her family. She felt used up and spit out, like she’d satisfied her role, paid her debt to God on their behalf, and now they had no use for her. Suddenly her Irish name, Aibhlín—longed for child—seemed cruel in its irony.