Flashback
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Contents
Electrifying Praise for Jenny Siler's Novels
ONE
Sister Heloise got up from her place at the back of the nave and made the sign of the cross. It was compline, her favorite of the hours, and normally she stayed till the sweet and bitter end, till most of the other sisters had left and the chapel was dark and hushed. But tonight, with Eve gone, there was the work of two to be finished before bed.
“Your anger has overrun me,” she heard Sister Magdalene read as she turned and headed for the door, “your terrors have broken me.” It was the end of the Eighty-seventh Psalm, the prayer of the gravely ill.
“They have flowed round me like water,
they have besieged me all day long.
You have taken my friends and those close to me:
all I have left is shadows.”
It was a dark prayer, Heloise thought as she stepped out into the cold air, dark and beautiful at the same time. What was it St. Benedict had said? Something about living constantly with death. The door swung closed behind her, muffling the voices of the other sisters. “I cry out to you, Lord, by day and by night. Alleluia.”
It was the first week of Advent, the fifth day of December, and winter had closed in tight. There was a white rime of frost on the grass and on the bare tree branches. A thin shard of moon hung in the crystalline sky. In the time-carved niches of the stone church wall dozens of red votive candles flickered and glowed.
Pressing the flaps of her wool coat up around her bare neck, Heloise started across the icy lawn toward the priory kitchen. There were thirty-five of them, plus some two dozen visitors from a women's church group in Dijon who'd be arriving in the morning. That made sixty mouths to feed, some twenty-odd loaves of bread she'd need for the day, not to mention the usual breakfast. She'd be up half the night.
From the farm just below the convent came the sound of a dog barking and another answering, both of them urgent and purposeful. Monsieur Tane's two watchdogs, most likely running off the fox. It was not like Heloise to begrudge any creature a meal, but the sisters had lost three good laying hens in the last week and she found herself hoping the dogs would succeed. She had a soft spot for the guileless birds.
Protectively, she glanced toward the dark shape of the henhouse. Everything was still and quiet. Or was it? Halfway across the yard she stopped walking and stood in the lacy halo of her own cold breath. She had heard something. She was certain of it. A stutter in the pea gravel on the far side of the priory. Was it the fox, chased up the hill and looking for an evening snack? Or just one of the sisters, forgoing compline, out for a late stroll or a cigarette? Heloise sometimes found herself tempted to do the same.
The noise came again, and this time Heloise was certain it was human and not animal, someone walking on the gravel drive. Satisfied, she reached into her coat pocket, pulled out her heavy ring of keys, and continued forward. She'd have to remember to bring some bones down to the Tanes in the morning, a small reward for the dogs. She let her thoughts drift back to her baking. If she was quick in setting everything out to rise, she'd be able to get a few good hours of sleep.
The sound came again, closer this time, and the nun turned her head to see a dark figure coming around the corner of the priory. Heloise squinted, trying to read the person's features in what little light the building's windows offered. No, it wasn't one of the sisters. It was a man, definitely a man. He ducked into the shadows and disappeared.
“Monsieur Tane?” she called, receiving no answer.
Heloise felt suddenly afraid, a little girl alone in the dark.
Keep us safe, while we are awake.
She whispered the first lines of the canticle to herself and picked up her pace. The keys jangled in her hand.
And then, quick as a fox, he was upon her. Heloise started to scream, but a gloved palm covered her mouth.
“Quiet,” the man whispered. His face was streaked with black greasepaint, his eyes hidden behind strange glasses. Robotic, Heloise thought, inhuman, to see in the dark. He looked like the characters in the American action films Sister Claire liked to watch. He grabbed the nun's coat, pulling her close to him.
Keep us safe, Lord,
she prayed silently. Gripping the keys, she brought her right fist up hard to his face. The metal caught against the glasses, pushing them up, and his head snapped back. When he looked back down at her, she could see his eyes, the pale skin of his lids shining in the darkness. One of the keys had ripped his cheek, and he was bleeding. But she had accomplished little more than to make him angry.
“The American,” he growled, pinning her arms to her sides. “Where is she?” He was foreign, his French slightly accented, though she couldn't tell how.
Heloise shook her head, trying to understand what he wanted.
He brought his face down toward hers. “Where is she?” he demanded, so forcefully that she thought he would hit her, but he didn't. Instead, he turned his head and looked toward the church, and Heloise looked with him. On the frosty lawn, heading slowly toward the chapel, were some dozen dim figures. In the hands of each man was a long black rod. Guns, Heloise thought. She tried once more to scream, but the man's hand tightened over her mouth.
Inside the chapel the sisters were saying an antiphon to Our Lady. Heloise could just make out Magdalene's call and the louder chorus of responses. The man started forward, dragging Heloise with him. In a single clear instant everything she might have felt was replaced by the knowledge that unless she did something to help herself, she was about to die.
Opening her mouth as wide as she could, she clamped down on the man's gloved hand and sank her teeth into the leather. He flinched, his arm relaxing instinctively, and Heloise jammed her knee up into the soft flesh of his groin. The man moved backward slightly, the look on his face more astonishment than anything else. Kicking him hard in the shins with her work boot, Heloise wrested herself from his grip and started for the tangle of woods that bordered the convent.
Run! she told herself. She could feel the man behind her, but she didn't look back.
Keep us safe, Lord,
she prayed again, her eyes on the dark trees, her arms and legs hammering her forward, her boots slipping on the hoary grass. There was a small explosion on the ground next to her, then another, and the muted sound of gunfire. Then suddenly she was in the dark underbrush, careening downward over roots and rocks.
TWO
What is the first thing you remember? The taste of the ocean, the cold shock of snow, or the face of your mother, young as she was and is no more? The first memory I have is of the hour I came into this world. Before that, there are just the ghosts of what I've forgotten.
I arrived on All Saints' Day, a little over a year ago, to a busload of aging virgins on a muddy roadside in Burgundy. How I got there is a mystery to all of us. What I remember is the smell of cattle, the rain-blurred outlines of twelve dark heads against the gray sky, and an unrelenting pain in the left side of my head. What they remember is a scraped-up body in a ditch, a face clouded by blood and bruises, and a young woman who fought them off in gutter English.
Later, the doctors would use the word
miracle
when referring to the single bullet that had pierced the bones of my skull. The tiny piece of lead that by all rights should have killed me had instead navigated the folds of my brain as deftly as a surgeon's blade, sparing my life, sparing my eyesight, sparing everything but the most mysterious of connections, the tender filament of memory.
What little I know about myself is only what the living body can tell, and that is not much. Not surprisingly, it's the mouth that says the most, and mine reveals that I was once loved, or at least well cared for. I have three fillings, no wisdom teeth, and a neat patina of decay preventative sealant on my molars. Someone paid for braces in my adolescence. On my upper left incisor is a cosmetic bond, and beneath it, a yellow scar in the enamel from a fall I took as a child. I have envisioned this mishap so many times nowâa summer day, blue sky, green grass, the cool metal of the monkey bars, and a faceless father on a bench in the distanceâthat it has come to seem like a truth. And who's to say it isn't?
A very American set of teeth, a dentist in Lyon remarked, and given all the other evidence, my North American English, and the U.S. labels in my clothes, it would seem that he was right.
Except for the catastrophe that birthed me, I've come through life so far relatively unscathed. On the outside of my right ankle is a simple birthmark, three black dots that, if connected, might form a lopsided triangle. The skin on my upper arm is smooth, unblemished by the circular scar of a smallpox vaccination, confirming the fact that I was born no earlier than 1971. I do have one old scar, the healed remnants of a laceration that is at once my body's greatest mystery and its biggest clue. It's a small mark, unseeable unless one is looking, from a cut that was made on my perineum to allow a baby to pass through.
A child! Think of all the things you've forgotten and wish you hadn't: the exact weight and shape of your first kiss; the last time you saw your father, your grandfather, loved ones who aren't coming back. And yet, how could you forget your own child? How could you not remember such a thing? When they told me in the hospital, I insisted there had been a mistake.
The doctor who examined me was a woman, small and slightly round, with a spattering of fading freckles. Finally, she brought a mirror and held it so that I could see the scar, the faint, pale line of the episiotomy.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Whether my appearance in that field was accident or design has so far been impossible to determine. In the beginning it seemed inevitable that someone would come looking for me, and the violence of my arrival suggested that someone might not have the best intentions. Better not to advertise, the police had said, and so, other than a discreet correspondence with the U.S. Embassy in Paris, the nuns' discovery was kept quiet.
Don't worry, the U.S. consul told me confidently. People don't just disappear without someone wondering where they've gone to. Especially not people with children, people who have been so obviously cared for. Yes, I thought, hoping he was wrong, not knowing this past year would prove him so, and that in the end I'd wish him to have been right.
