Excerpt from THE GIRL IN THE WHITE CAPE, Barbara Sapienza

THE GIRL IN THE WHITE CAPE

Fifteen-year-old Elena lives in a church attic in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood, where she is cared for by her guardian, a kind Russian priest named Father Al. Six days a week, Father Al sends her out of Our Lady, across the meadows and ponds of Golden Gate Park, and all the way to Baba Vera’s house on Taraval Street for Baba’s version of school.

Unlike regular school, however, Elena’s learning is unnerving. Baba Vera’s preposterous demands, dizzying antics, and house—which is full of skeletons, brooms, strange implements, and guinea pigs, among other oddities—seem straight out of a Russian fairy tale Father Al used to read to Elena . . . not life in 2020. If not for her beloved doll, Kukla—bequeathed to her by the mother she never got to know, but of whom she often dreams—Elena would be overwhelmed. Yet she works hard at every task given her, understanding intuitively that there is a purpose to every one of her grandmother’s strange assignments.

Frank, a young taxi driver, enters Elena’s world on the day he delivers a strange, witch-like woman named Anya to Our Lady. Upon meeting Anya and Elena, a dream-world begins to spin for him—and he feels a deep, protective pull toward Elena. In the days that follow, Frank devotes himself to saving her from the harm he is sure Anya intends toward her. What he comes to understand, as he enters more deeply into Elena’s story, is that she has magic of her own. He thought he was supposed to save her—but in the end, the two of them may just save each other.

EXCERPT

CHAPTER 1: The Doll

Elena, on the eve of her fifteenth birthday, closes the book of fairy tales and wonders what this year will bring. Resting in the attic room of the Russian church Our Lady of Sorrow, her head touches the book—a remnant from her childhood. The frayed pages of the fairy tales give off the scent of loneliness for all these years gone by without a mother.

She remembers how Father Al would read this book to her whenever she could not stop crying. Her favorite story, the one she insisted he read over and over, was “Vasilisa the Beautiful and
Baba Yaga.” She especially liked the part with the doll because she, too, had a doll she kept in her pocket. Even now, as she’s about to turn fifteen, she keeps Kukla there. When she caresses her, she can hear Father Al whispering his kind words.

“Listen—hush, little child—listen for the unbroken cord,” he would repeat until she stopped crying and peeped out from under the wool blanket.

His eyes, wet too, would drip tears over a smiling face. “Hug your little doll when you’re sad and scared, ask her to help you. You know she’s a gift from your mom.”

Thus comforted, she would fall asleep with the little dollin her hand. In her dreams, she would see her beautiful mother standing in a garden, holding out the doll.

As the years passed, she sometimes wondered if she should ask Father Al what had happened to her mother, but thinking of asking always gave her a crick in her neck or a cramp in her stomach. She knew her mother would not have left her if not for a good reason. And besides, she didn’t want to know what made that stiffness inside her. Still, each time Father got near the end of “Vasilisa the Beautiful” she would say, “Again, Father,” hoping for some clue to the mystery. Again and again he read the story until she fell asleep—but no clues ever surfaced.

Though she knows the story by heart, she doesn’t know its ending or what lies ahead for her. All she knows is she wakes up each morning in a cozy attic room with her lovely little Kukla tucked close into her side, and a sense of living in a dream—of being a storybook girl who goes every day, except Sundays, to Baba Vera and Dedushka Victor’s.

As a child, Elena became Vasilisa the Beautiful. And like Vasilisa, she was adopted. Father Al found her on the doorstep of the church when she was just a few days old. Pinned to her infant nightie was a loving note from her mother, and in her bassinette was the beloved doll who has been her friend and confidante all these years since. Like Vasilisa, Elena keeps her doll in her pocket and goes into the woods to her baba’s house, where magical things happen. Elena’s baba is not Baba Yaga, however, but Baba Vera. Father Al says baba means grandma, but Elena doesn’t think she’s a real grandma like the old ladies who come to Father Al’s masses and show him pictures of infants.

Elena doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that she grew up listening to this fairy tale. She wonders if Father Al has ever noticed the similarities between her and Vasilisa, or knows that Vasilisa was her imaginary friend for many years—one who made magic things happen, like a flying broom she could spin on to make herself dizzy; who helped her not to be afraid in the woods; who climbed with her up the low horizontal trunk of that old bay laurel in the courtyard all the way to where the trunk split, then swung down with her on the same branch to the garden floor, where they laughed themselves silly. She and her imaginary friend were sisters. We imagined getting lost and found in the woods, we were best friends, and together, we were not so alone, she remembers.

V used to say, “Make yourself dizzy, Elena—spin, spin. Don’t be afraid.” They knocked themselves out spinning, laughing, and falling down. Now Elena makes room for the mysterious nature of her life—like Kukla, who helps her to complete her tasks, and like Baba, who seems to have no age. Father Al says she’s ageless. Sometimes Elena imagines the fairy tale foreshadows her life. It’s like having a map. Knowing that comforts her. She just has to stay within the borders and spin sometimes, like V told her to do long ago.

Elena rolls over and curls into the soft bed, clutching Kukla, contemplating the parts of the story that have holes in them. She’s never understood, for instance, why Vasilisa got kicked out of her stepmother’s house and was sent into the woods alone to find fire and then had to bring it back in a skull. Imagine! That’s too weird! But then she’s also never understood why Father Al started taking her every day to Baba Vera’s house to work when she was just a little girl, when she would have been happy enough sorting prayer cards and playing with the rosaries in the church chapel or digging or swinging with her imaginary friend in the courtyard.

Baba Vera acts a bit like a witch. Elena’s scared of her but Father Al says she shouldn’t worry, “She took care of me and she’s there like a grandmother to help you out.” She knows he’s telling her the truth by the way he looks into her eyes, the way his lips curve in a crescent moon, and the way his long, smooth hands pat her shiny red hair. Sometimes he takes her hand in his as a reassurance. And yet Baba can scare the heck out of her.

One day when they were walking across Golden Gate Park, Elena asked Father Al who Baba really was and why she couldn’t just stay in the pretty church with him with the colorful candles reflecting on Saint Seraphin, her favorite saint. He said that Baba, who he sometimes called Auntie, had helped him when Elena came to stay at his church—even advised him. Then, walking
with a lighter step, he said, “Baba is the eternal spring; she just keeps flowing.”

In that moment Elena’s eyes must have lit up like a Christmas tree, because what he said about an eternal spring made her feel all wired inside with sparks. She loved water and the way it moved; she tried to fit Baba into that image.

Father Al chuckled. “That one! She never gets old.”
Elena wanted to hear more about Father Al’s experiences when he was a boy and more about Baba, the flowing stream, but she didn’t ask. She was content just to stay with his light step. She was learning that each thing had its time and place and maybe this was one of those places to hold back. Like Vasilisa, Elena shouldn’t ask certain questions, and this was a certain question.
The holes in the fairy tale seemed to mirror the holes in her life. Sometimes things seem strange—but maybe that’s the magic.

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Barbara Sapienza, PhD, is a retired clinical psychologist and an alumna of San Francisco State University’s creative writing master’s program. She writes and paints, nourished by her spiritual practices of meditation, tai chi, and dance. Her family, friends, and grandchildren are her teachers. Her first novel, Anchor Out (She Writes Press, 2017), received an IPPY Bronze for Best Regional Fiction, West Coast. Her second novel, The Laundress (She Writes Press, 2020), received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. Sapienza lives in Sausalito, California, with her husband

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing