Saint Gabriel's Girls

By KyleeliseTHT

Girl-X, Holland, Concetta, and dead Aoife have been friends since boarding together at Saint Gabriel’s Girls Academy in the 1970s. They shared everything—except the truth of their lives. And those kept secrets debilitate, until they are spared by a conjuring of letters through which dead Aoife annuls their pains and gives air to their suffocated voices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KyleeliseTHT
• Release date: Nov 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311244871

KyleeliseTHT

Kyleelise is a Yankee by birth and a southerner at heart. She was educated at South Central Community and Albertus Magnus colleges and Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has worked as a researcher/writer, print journalist and editor, and producer. Kyleelise writes mostly fiction, now, from her home near the Gulf of Mexico, where she lives with her family. You can learn more about "Kyleelise the fiction writer" at kyleelisetht.com.

Book preview

Aoife floated down in black fog, gathering the sum of nothing more than her descending—Split apart, soul from flesh, her one squared, still one.

She died alone.

By age nine, three people—the square root of a silent self—warned Girl-X never to say a word.

And they taught her to smile broadly and lay gentle hugs so that none would suspect she knew the something withheld.

Sixteen when she split apart.

The root, then four—Secret, Fear, Memory, Complicity, the endpoints of two toxic segments along the infinite line on which lies travel, gather legs, and amble on forever/forever/forever.

Unspeakables/nightmares—the square root of Holland. Her keeping four secrets felt a drag of a universe to a child like her.

If you lay a violent hand against me, Concetta, at the age of twenty-five and for the first time in her defense, warned a man, …you will die by the root of my existence.

He, thirty-six, arced inward, regressed to his root of six and cried—but refused to stop.

At sixty-four Aunt Annie Mae looked back to the perfect squares of her life and understood that the square root of her own self, the wisdom of her little-girl self of eight, had kept her those years of not saying, of not living in the light.

It was then, as when at forty-nine Ruth aligned herself with her root of seven, Aunt Annie Mae was thankful she’d been lucky.

QueenLady split apart—soul from flesh—floated down in black fog, gathering the sum of nothing more than her descending. Therein lies the imperfect root of her own self—surviving.

CHANGED NAMES: STILL WRONG

No Knowing

I can’t recall my age or who I was when QueenLady told me she suffered from depression. This fracture within my memory, the inability to know when my lifetime collided with her admission, has nothing to do with being confused. Simply, I cannot tell you my age or my name because they were changed many times during my early years. Even birthday celebrations were not mine to cherish. They never happened. I was legitimized, instead, at the age of sixteen, and just by happenstance, by a borrowed birth certificate from a dead sibling—I think.

This uncertainty is a thing of my life. And since I’ve never been told a truth I can claim as real, I have given one to myself.

I am Girl-X.

I was a junior in high school and trying to get a summer job when I realized there was no more getting around the documentation thing. I asked QueenLady. But her brush-off was as swift as a flick of cigarette to wind from the driver’s side of her silvery blue 1980 Benz. The car had been a gift to herself for hosting four years of weekend card parties and selling fish dinners in the grand dining room of her 1930s Victorian revival. The monument was a magnificent spectacle, on the side of Dumeers Street so close to the Stratford line that her patrons nearly forgot they were really just in Bridgeport.

QueenLady had hustled forty-nine thousand dollars in tax-invisible Jacksons, Grants, and Franklins from her card-playing guests and seventeen McKinleys from a flashy Westport big shot, during that season in her life.

She’d stuffed a brilliantly colored quilt of rectangular mazes with ninety-five stacks of dollar bills and hung it above the fireplace in the parlor. She cut her eyes away from its admirers each time a mention of its richness was made. And on the second row of her basement canning shelf, she’d hidden thirty jars of those cherished quarters grown men stow away in large sums like pots of gold—right behind her peaches and pickled beans.

Part of the money she used to cover the mortgage and feed the boiler its monthly supply of oil, which was a huge but necessary expense to tame the voracious New England chill that overtook the weather stripping around the windows and rolled towels at the base of doors. She used a little more to cover graduate school expenses left over after scholarships and grants because QueenLady doesn’t believe in loans. She hasn’t a drop of apprehension, however, about deception.

On paper, student QueenLady was broke. But her real-life hustler self could afford the upkeep on her mansion and still have enough to plunk down a good bit on her precious Mercedes, which she kept tucked away in the rear garage while she took the bus to college four times a week. Things earned under the table were best hidden from view, she’d say, which was why we lived in an extravagant home in the best part of Bridgeport and she commuted across its border into the suburb for school.

What does a birth certificate have to do with getting a job? QueenLady snapped the day I pressed for a copy of mine. Her reaction was not a question but a warning to back off. I did.

Worse then was the spectacle of trying to retrieve the thing myself from vital records, where a supervisor interrogated me before telling her employee to give me what I’d asked for. The female clerk unhinged something from a stack of papers filed under QueenLady’s name—not mine—made some changes, and handed me a copy with a saddened and caring look that felt like arms wrapped in mourning about my neck.

Once I had the damn paper in my hands, I noticed the faint imprint of a death certificate, printed right to left on the birth record, as if it had been pressed against it before the ink had dried. Child with my name born October 9, 1963, left to right; child with my name died October 11, 1963 right to left, as if I could be both alive and dead. The clerk had to have noticed when she inspected the document before affixing a seal to prove the certificate was authentic. Even today I remember that look on her face, the supervisor’s inquisition, and then the okay to give me what I’d come for—and much more than I’d expected. Could it all have been a conspiracy to expose a deception without saying?

I should have done something and at that moment, asked questions, called QueenLady from a payphone and demanded that she come to the records office and help sort things out or answer the questions thrust upon me. But I knew she wouldn’t come to explain or sort out anything, just as she’d never done the many, many times before. Instead, I ignored the glaring discrepancy and focused my attention on the unknown declaration where a father’s name should have been. Then I made a trifold of the thing, halved it, and stuck it in my back pocket.

Now, after thirty-nine years of understanding nothing much for sure, I’ve learned one thing that’s true, and I’ve known it since the day QueenLady revealed her secret—that she, a forensic psychologist, believed she could successfully manage her own illness while raising a perfectly normal girl-child within a universe solely constructed by her.

She was wrong.

I Am Who They Say I Am

For years I carried with me a plastic bag full of baby and toddler photographs, never bothering to sort them out, order them by the date printed on borders, or even read the inscriptions written across the back. The birthmark, a darkened heart shape on the child’s lower lip, like the one on mine, assured that the images were of me. But it was my Sisterdoll, as QueenLady called her, sitting next to the infant in her crib that comforted me most. Sisterdoll is the only confirmed memory of that time in my life. Though she did nothing but sit there and stood only when I pushed her legs straight, never uttering a word because she didn’t have one of those talking strings attached to her back, I told her everything. She’d been my closest companion—until the day Father’s rage welled up like a hungry sea monster and devoured her along with Brother before slinking back into the sea and swimming majestically through the carnage he’d left.

Oh, how those who’d known him—his family, scores of friends, and his new girlfriend—were enamored by the smoothness of Father’s hide against the waves he’d caused to rise and crash against us—the family he’d abandoned. They were all so mesmerized by his charm and sorrowful pleas that they made a petition in his defense, and it was given at the trial. This convinced the jury that a tragic accident, a misunderstanding, had been the reason for his eating up our lives. Nobody cared that I’d been a gazing sea urchin, cloistered in the sand ashore, when it all happened. Fear shuttered my mouth during the carnage but my eyes could see. And nobody asked.

Five years, the judge decided, only because he nearly devoured a police officer in his wake.

This stained lustrum echoed lies told over and over again about how it wasn’t really Father’s fault, Sisterdoll and Brother, and how good a man he’d been before that tragic day. No mention of the fact that, weeks before, he’d abandoned QueenLady, me, and Brother because he tired of making excuses night after night for his regular absence from the dinner table—and his side of the bed.

A policeman handed me a quarter. He was the one who’d waved me away when I’d rushed out to show off the pretty birthday card I’d made for my best friend, Tanya. He said I should imagine myself astride the majestic eagle engraved on the quarter’s back, soaring to a safe place above, should my dreams persist in replaying the day’s misery.

Quarter dreams, he said. You just fly away on your quarter dreams, and you’ll be as safe as a bird in the sky.

A whole quarter, I mused, transfixed, as if the thing was magical.

For two hours, I sat on the porch, gazing into the vanishing street fast-filling with the ones who’d heard the news on the radio and the others who’d followed the stampede just because.

I remembered the day I’d laid my candy pop on the ground and started a war: how a thousand ants streamed and crowded and attacked it, and how I realized that I was safe because QueenLady had already told me that I wasn't very sweet. So I placed the quarter beside me on the step, lifted my palms to my mouth and took a lick of each to see if things had changed.

Not too sweet, I thought, though I discovered that I wasn't bitter, either. In fact—I’d made up my mind—I was just right and couldn't understand why the ant army didn't think so when they’d come for my pop. The crowd of people knew I was sweet, too. Pressing right up to the police tape, they nearly broke through to devour me.

I am sort of sweet, I mouthed to the ones up front. That's why you're trying to get me, I whispered a bit more loudly. Then I smiled.

When the social worker lady came, the quarter policeman asked her to ask me a bunch of questions.

Are there any more guns in the house? he said and she repeated it to me, even though I could hear him just fine.

Yeah.

Bullets?

Yup.

Where, sweetie?

In the basement, I answered, rotating the shiny coin between my forefinger and thumb. I was hoping the old man on the front of the coin would run around to the other side, climb the eagle's wings and command that it soar, far, far, far. Perhaps he'd scoop me up and carry me away, too. And to make sure the old man had plenty of room, I put the coin back down, but at the back of the stair, so we’d have a good running start.

Where in the basement, honey? The police officer interrupted the beginnings of my fantastic escape.

With the men.

Men?

G.I. Joooooooe, I sang out, all the while smiling and waiting for the old guy on the coin to make his move.

The policeman was confused, but he sent another officer to the basement to check things out.

Look for G.I. Joe, he called out. He might be armed. He chuckled and eyed me, and I giggled back.

Of course he has arms, I said, between singing in a half hum, half mumble, Zip-a-de-do-da; zip-a-de-ay, my, oh, my, what a wonderful day!

But it wasn’t a wonderful day, and I worried that the policeman might kill Brother’s toys, and then everything of him would be gone in a single day.

Still, the crowd before me loved my song. I could tell because they smiled all the way through my sitting there. One woman was so joyful about my singing that she prayed and hollered, Bless this child, Lord, bless her, please Lord, again and again.

I was amused and distracted even more when the sun struck a star-like sparkle against my quarter, and I snatched it up, just before the last man with the funny suit and the space helmet nearly crushed it on the way back to the big black box with the wide, white letters—S.W.A.T.

The next time I saw the social worker lady she had her own questions, and she was holding Tanya’s birthday card.

I found this inside. Is it yours, honey?

Yep, I answered.

This is your name, here, Tanya?

Yep, Tanya Morales, I said sporting a big, wide grin. Being me right then didn’t feel so good.

We're going to call someone to come get you. Is that okay? the social worker lady asked. I didn’t care either way. I was comfortable on my stoop, enjoying being honeyed and sweetied and peered at. And I marveled the way a simple band of police tape kept all those people peaceful and at bay.

I imagined taking hold of the old man on my coin, and saw myself twisting my hair into a ponytail tight and knotting it close to my head so it wouldn’t get tangled in the wind, then raising my arms upwards then down in winged flight.

Before the social worker lady came, there was a lot of talk about interviews and evidence in the background and whether to question me right away or wait until they could locate some relative, friend, or babysitter.

None of the neighbors knew me because we had just moved into the petite stone Tudor with pink awnings and a canary yellow fence at 175 Lilac Way, just one Monday before the one that turned out to be so much trouble. Besides, even if anyone had noticed one of us before that day, they probably thought we were either the help or lost.

Having a key to the front door on that maple-tree-lined boulevard was a great big deal. Father always wanted to be as good as them, and QueenLady had dreamed of lining her own kitchen shelves with floral sticky paper and mopping and waxing to an impressive glare her own floors—not the landlord’s, of billowing clothes on her very own clothesline, fresh meat from a real grocer, and a car worth showing off in her own driveway. And of course, she dreamed of a yard filled with trees and flowers, and a stone pathway to her very own front door.

I had dreams, too. I was going to be the smartest girl in third grade at my new school. And almost nobody would find out that my family used to live on the other side of town, except for the people in the office and maybe my new teacher. And I would’ve shown them how I could do multiplication and long division and fractions, that I’d read three of Shakespeare’s plays and could recite one of Hermione’s monologues: Who is it that goes with me? Beseech your highness . . . My women may be with me; for you see my plight requires it. QueenLady made sure that I was well read and good at math. Our people have to be doubly smart and work doubly hard and speak real fine English to do well around these white folks, she always said. And I was excellent, even though she insisted that I had a long way to go