Read Angelology for Free Online

river water. Evangeline imagined day-trippers from New York City taking the passenger train along the east side of the Hudson, gazing at the lovely foliage on their way to pick apples or pumpkins. Now the trees were bare, the hills covered with snow.
    Evangeline took refuge in the tower only rarely, at best once or twice a year, when her thoughts drew her away from the community at large and sent her in search of a quiet place to think. It was not the usual order of things for one of the sisters to steal away from the group for contemplation, and Evangeline would often feel remorse for her actions for days after. And yet she could not stay away 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