Angela Faulkner Pham

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Angela Faulkner Pham was born in 2008 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and is living today in Lafayette, where she works as a nurse on a medical ward. She is a woman of the House of Faulkner and of the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but she was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. She is the only child of the security guard Brian Pham and of the court clerk Crystal Faulkner Delacroix, who were married in 2006, the granddaughter of the slayers Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, The Sable Reeve, and Felix Delacroix, The Red Bridle, and the niece of the paramedic Linda Faulkner. The family remembers her as the youngest of the cousins and the one who was always going to be a nurse, a brisk, funny, unflappable girl who learned to take a pulse at ten and who is the first in the family to have been trained in a hospital before she was finished at school. A ward at four in the morning, Angela says, is the quietest place in the world with a hundred people in it. She works the night shift on a medical floor at a hospital in Lafayette, in a pair of navy scrubs with a pen in the pocket, looking after patients who are old, sick and not, as a rule, in a hurry. She is the youngest nurse on the floor by six years, having taken, at the age of sixteen, a place in a hospital-run programme for school-leavers, an accelerated course in which she spent the mornings in a classroom and the afternoons on a ward, and which allowed her, at eighteen, to sit her licensing examination in the spring of 2026. She passed with a mark that her tutor described as unnecessary. She has been a working nurse since the summer, and her ward sister, a tall, grey, severe woman of sixty who has never been seen to smile, says that Angela is the only new nurse in a decade who writes legibly. She was born in the winter of 2008, in Lafayette rather than in New Orleans, and the cause was an aunt. Her father Brian, who was twenty-two and a security guard in the Garden District, came from a family of Vietnamese Gulf Coast fishermen, shop-keepers and cooks, and his mother's sister, a retired nurse who lived on the west side of Lafayette in a house with a rice cooker, a shrine and a lemon tree, had declared in the autumn of 2007 that no great-niece of hers would be born in a hospital that was still, two years after the flood, short of beds. Crystal, who was twenty-four and had been a clerk in the court since the age of nineteen, was not a woman to be told. She was also seven months gone, and the aunt was a retired nurse. She went. The baby was born on a cold bright morning in the first week of February, at a hospital that the aunt had worked in for thirty years, in a room in which three nurses who had trained under her came in, uninvited, to inspect the child. They pronounced her perfect. The aunt named her, privately, Little Doctor, and the name stuck for about a year. She grew up in New Orleans, in a rented half of a double house in the Garden District and, later, in a small brick house in Gentilly that her parents bought in 2013, with a porch, a mango tree that has never fruited and a smell of lemongrass. Her father, who is quiet and very kind, worked nights, and she was brought up between her parents and her grandmother Lorraine, who waited tables on the morning shift and picked her up, after school, in a car with a bumper sticker. Lorraine was the first person who ever took her to a hospital on purpose. When the girl was nine, in the spring of 2017, her grandmother, who had twisted her knee on a wet kitchen floor, was taken to the west bank to be X-rayed, and the child, who was sitting beside her, said that she would like to see how the machine worked. A radiographer, struck by the solemnity of the request, let her stand behind the screen. She has never been so happy. She said, in the car on the way home, that she wished to know what everything inside a person was called. She was told what the family was at sixteen, by her grandmother, in the kitchen of the house in Gentilly, after a Sunday dinner, in the plain words in which the Faulkner women tell it. Her grandfather Felix, whom she had never met, had been a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, an insurance adjuster who had worked by introductions and who had died when her mother was seven. Her grandmother Lorraine was a slayer too. Her aunt Linda and her mother were not. There was a family, there was a choice, and she need not make it. Angela listened with her chin on her fist, in the manner of her mother, and said that she thought she had always known, that the house had too many locks, and that what she wanted to know was whether the hunters ever needed a nurse. Her grandmother, who is not given to emotion, put down a plate. She said that they did, constantly, and that the Ledger's cousins had been looking after one another's cuts for five hundred years and had never once, to her knowledge, been taught how. She finished school in 2026, in the same spring as her examination, and was almost at once taken on by the hospital that had trained her. Her years, of course, had not been quite ordinary. She was eleven in the spring of 2020, in the first season of the pandemic years, when the schools closed, the wards filled and the whole of the city seemed to go into a mask, and she watched it from the kitchen of the house in Gentilly, where her father, who was a security guard at a hospital entrance, took his temperature at the door each night, changed his shirt in the porch and showered before he sat down. She remembers him standing in the doorway in his mask. She remembers that he said, every evening, that he had checked a thousand foreheads and that she was the only one he was glad to see. She has said that this was the beginning of it. She is, as the family says, very good. She has her mother's patience with a form, her father's calm in a corridor and, from the Delacroix side of the house, a trained observer's eye for a patient who is saying one thing and showing another. The Ledger has never asked her for anything, and she has not volunteered, but she has, in the first months of her work, been given a small private instruction by her grandmother, which is to look at the neck. It is not a duty, and nobody has made it one. A nurse who turns a patient in the night sees what no one else sees, and Angela, who has been told what to watch for, writes it in a notebook that she keeps in her locker, in a small, upright hand, in the manner of every nurse in the family since the Civil War. She has so far written three entries. She has telephoned her grandmother once. She is eighteen, a small, quick, dark-haired young woman with her father's calm brown eyes and her mother's chin, a pair of white clogs that she has already worn out once and a ward-sister's habit of straightening anything that is crooked. She shares a small flat near the hospital with a friend from the programme, goes home to New Orleans on her days off to eat her grandmother's rice and her father's noodles and tells everybody that she is the happiest person alive. On the first Sunday of every month, she sits at the end of the long table at her grandmother's, between her aunt Linda, the paramedic, and her cousin Gaspard, the bartender, who is six years older and who has been teaching her to carry a tray. Her parents, who are both at work in the city and who telephone her every evening at seven, worry about the night shift and have said so a great many times. Angela Faulkner Pham is remembered in the Faulkner family as the youngest of the cousins and the nurse of the Lafayette ward, the granddaughter of The Sable Reeve and The Red Bridle who walked from school into a hospital at sixteen and never once looked back. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the nurses, the night sisters and the keepers of the chart, who proved that a hunter's family is held together at the bedside as much as at the door, and that the people who are there at four in the morning with a clean dressing and a quiet word are the ones who make the next night possible.