Angelology(11)

from the turret completely. Upon each visit she noticed how her mind attenuated, how her thoughts

became clear and sharp as she ascended the steps, and even clearer as she peered over the landscape

of the convent.

Standing at the window, she recalled the dream that had woken her that morning. Her mother had

appeared to her, speaking softly in a language Evangeline could not comprehend. The ache she’d felt

when she tried to hear her mother’s voice again had remained with her all morning, and yet she did

not remonstrate with herself for thinking of her mother. It was only natural. Today, the twenty-third of

December, was Angela’s birthday.

Evangeline remembered only fragments of her mother—Angela’s long blond hair; the sound of her

rapid, mellifluous French as she spoke on the telephone; her habit of leaving a cigarette in a glass

ashtray, the air filling with nets of smoke that dissolved before Evangeline’s eyes. She recalled the

incredible height of her mother’s shadow, a diaphanous darkness moving upon the wall of their

fourteenth arrondissement apartment.

On the day her mother died, Evangeline’s father picked her up from school in their red Citroën DS.

He was alone, and this was unusual in itself. Her parents had the same line of work, a calling

Evangeline knew now to be extremely dangerous, and they rarely went anywhere without each other.

Evangeline saw at once that her father had been crying—his eyes were swollen and his skin ashen.

After she climbed into the backseat of the car, arranging her coat and dropping her bookbag on her

lap, her father told her that her mother was no longer with them. “She has left?” Evangeline asked,

feeling a desperate confusion fill her as she tried to understand what he meant. “Where has she

gone?”

Her father shook his head, as if the answer were incomprehensible. He said, “She has been taken

from us.”

Later, when Evangeline understood fully that Angela had been abducted and killed, she could not

quite understand why her father had chosen the words he had. Her mother had not simply been taken:

Her mother had been murdered, extinguished from the world as thoroughly as light leaves the sky

when the sun sinks behind the horizon.

As a girl, Evangeline had not had the ability to understand how young her mother had been when

she’d died. With time, however, she began to measure her own age in relation to Angela’s life,

holding each year as a precious reenactment. At eighteen, her mother had met Evangeline’s father. At

eighteen, Evangeline had taken vows as a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration. At twenty-three,

the age Evangeline had reached at present, her mother had married her father. At thirty-nine, her

mother had been killed. In comparing the timelines of their lives, Evangeline wove her existence

around her mother as if she were wisteria clinging to a trellis. No matter how she tried to convince

herself that she had been fine without her mother and that her father had managed the best he could,

she knew that in every minute of every day Angela’s absence lived in her heart.

Evangeline was born in Paris. They lived together—her father and mother and Evangeline—in an

apartment in Montparnasse. The rooms of the apartment were burned upon her memory so vividly that

she felt as if she’d lived there yesterday. The apartment rambled, each room connecting to the next,

with high, coffered ceilings and immense windows that filled the space with a granular gray light. The

bathroom was abnormally large—as big as the communal lavatory at St. Rose, at least. Evangeline

remembered her mother’s clothes hooked upon the bathroom wall—a lightweight spring dress and a

brilliant red silk scarf knotted about the hanger’s neck and a pair of patent-leather sandals placed

below them, arranged as if worn by an invisible woman. A porcelain bathtub crouched at the center

of the bathroom, compact and heavy as a living thing, its lip glistening with water, its clawed feet

curled.

Another memory Evangeline held close, playing and replaying it in her mind as if it were a film,

was of a walk she had taken with her mother the year of her death. Hand in hand they went along the

sidewalks and cobblestone streets, moving so fast that Evangeline had to jog to keep up with

Angela’s stride. It was spring, or so she guessed from the colorful abundance of flowers in the

window boxes hanging from the apartment blocks.

Angela had been anxious that afternoon. Holding Evangeline’s hand tightly, she led her through the

courtyard of a university—at least Evangeline had believed it to be a university, with its great stone

portico and the abundance of people lounging in the courtyard. The building appeared exceptionally