The Wonder (26 page)

Had the girl always been ready to answer so candidly the moment she was asked? If only Lib had been a little less contemptuous of pious legends, she might have paid more attention to what the child was trying to tell her.

She remembered the way Rosaleen O'Donnell had sidled in for the permitted embrace morning and evening, smiling but oddly silent. So full of chatter at other times, but not when she came to hug her daughter. Yes, Rosaleen always kept her mouth shut tight until after she'd bent down to wrap her whole body around Anna.

Lib moved closer to the small ear. “She passed it from her mouth to yours?”

“By a holy kiss,” said Anna, nodding, with no sign of shame.

Fury shot through Lib's veins. So the mother had chewed food to pap in the kitchen, then fed Anna right in front of the nurses, making sport of them twice a day. “What does manna taste like?” she asked. “Milky, or porridge-like?”

“Like heaven,” said Anna, as if the answer were obvious.

“She told you it was from heaven?”

Anna looked confused by the question. “That's what manna is.”

“Does anyone else know? Kitty? Your father?”

“I don't think so. I've never spoken of it.”

“Why?” asked Lib. “Did your mother forbid you? Threaten you?”

“It's private.”

A secret exchange, too sacred to be put into words. Yes, Lib could imagine a woman of strong character persuading her little girl of that. Especially such a girl as Anna, growing up in a world of mysteries. The young placed such trust in the grown-ups into whose hands they were consigned. Had the feeding begun on Anna's eleventh birthday or perhaps developed gradually long before that? Was it a sort of sleight of hand, the mother reading the daughter the manna story from the Bible and confounding her with mystical obscurities? Or had both parties contributed something unspoken to the invention of this deadly game? After all, the girl was brighter than the mother, and better read. Families all had their peculiar ways that couldn't be discerned by outsiders.

“So why tell me?” Lib demanded.

“You're my friend.”

The way the girl's chin tilted up then. It broke Lib's heart. “You don't take the manna anymore, do you? Not since Saturday.”

“I don't need it,” said Anna.

Didn't I feed her as long as she'd let me?
Rosaleen had wailed. Lib had heard the woman's grief and remorse and still not understood. The mother had set Anna up on a pedestal to shine like a beacon to the world. She'd had every intention of keeping her daughter alive indefinitely with this covert supply of food. It was Anna who'd put an end to it, one week into the watch.

Had the child had any sense of what the consequence would be? Did she grasp it now?

“What your mother spat into your mouth”—Lib spoke with deliberate crudity—“that was food from the kitchen. Those doses of mush are what's been keeping you alive all these months.”

She paused for some reaction, but the child's eyes had gone unfocused.

Lib seized her thick wrists. “Your mother lied, don't you see? You need food like everyone else. There's nothing special about you.” The words were coming out all wrong, a rain of abuse. “If you won't eat, child, you'll die.”

Anna looked right at her, then nodded and smiled.

shift

a change, an alteration

a period of working time

an expedient, means to an end

a movement, a beginning

Thursday came scorching, the August sky a terrible blue. When William Byrne walked into the dining room at noon, Lib was alone, staring into her soup. She looked up and tried to smile at him.

“How's Anna?” he asked, sitting down across from her, his knees against her skirt.

She couldn't answer.

He nodded at her bowl. “If you aren't sleeping, you need to keep up your strength.”

The spoon made a metallic scraping when Lib lifted it. She brought it almost to her lips, then put it down with a small splash.

Byrne leaned over the table. “Tell me.”

Lib pushed away her bowl. Watching the door for the Ryan girl, she explained about the
manna from heaven
delivered under cover of an embrace.

“Christ,” he marvelled. “The audacity of the woman.”

Oh, the relief of unburdening herself. “Bad enough that Rosaleen O'Donnell's been making her child subsist on two mouthfuls a day,” said Lib. “But for the past five days, Anna's refused to take the manna, and her mother hasn't said a word.”

“I suppose she doesn't know how to speak up without condemning herself.”

A qualm struck her. “You can't publish any of this, not yet.”

“Why not?”

How could Byrne have to ask? “I'm aware that it's in the nature of your profession to broadcast everything,” she snapped, “but what matters is saving the girl.”

“I know that. And what of your profession? For all the time you've spent with Anna, how far have you got?”

Lib put her face in her hands.

“I'm sorry.” Byrne grabbed her fingers. “I spoke out of frustration.”

“It's perfectly true.”

“Still, forgive me.”

Lib slid her hand out of his, the skin still burning.

“Believe me,” he said, “it's for Anna's sake that the hoax should be shouted to the four winds.”

“But a public scandal won't do anything to make her eat!”

“How can you be sure?”

“Anna's quite alone in this now.” Lib's voice lurched. “She seems to welcome the prospect of death.”

Byrne thrust his curls out of his face. “But why?”

“Perhaps because your religion's filled her head with morbid nonsense.”

“Perhaps because she's mistaken morbid nonsense for true religion!”

“I don't know why she's doing this,” admitted Lib, “except that it has something to do with missing her brother.”

He frowned in puzzlement. “Have you told the nun about the manna yet?”

“There was no opportunity this morning.”

“What about McBrearty?”

“I've told no one but you.”

Byrne looked at Lib in a way that made her wish she hadn't blurted that out. “Well. I say you should share your discovery with the whole committee tonight.”

“Tonight?” she echoed, confused.

“Haven't you and Sister been called in? At ten o'clock, they're gathering in the back room here”—he jerked his head towards the peeling wallpaper—“at the doctor's behest.”

Perhaps McBrearty had taken in something of what Lib had told him yesterday after all. “No,” she said, sardonic, “we're only the nurses, why would they want to hear from us?” She leaned her chin on her knotted hands. “Perhaps if I went to him now and told him about the manna trick—”

Byrne shook his head. “Better to march into the meeting and announce to the whole committee that you've succeeded in the task for which they hired you.”

Success? It felt more like a hopeless failure. “But how will that help Anna?”

His hands flailed. “Once the watch is over, she'll have room—time—out of the public eye. A chance to change her mind.”

“She's not keeping up her fast to impress the readers of the
Irish Times,
” Lib told him. “It's between her and your greedy God.”

“Don't blame him for the follies of his followers. All he asks us to do is live.”

The two of them eyed each other.

Then a grin lit Byrne's face. “D'you know, I've never met a woman—a person—quite as blasphemous as you.”

As he watched Lib, a slow heat spread right through her.

Sun in her eyes. Lib's uniform was glued to her sides already. By the time she reached the cabin, she'd decided she had to go to this committee meeting tonight, invited or not.

Silence as she let herself in the door. Rosaleen O'Donnell and the maid were plucking a scrawny chicken at the long table. Had they been working in tense quiet or had they been talking—perhaps about the English nurse—until they'd heard her come in?

“Good day,” said Lib.

“Good day,” they both said, eyes on the carcass.

Lib looked at Rosaleen O'Donnell's long back and thought:
I've found you out, you fiend.
There was almost a sweetness to it, this sense of holding in her hand the one weapon that could demolish the woman's shoddy imposture.

Not yet, though. There'd be no going back from that point; if Rosaleen threw her out of the cabin, Lib would have no more chances to change Anna's mind.

In the bedroom, the child lay curled up, facing the window, ribs rising and falling. Her cracked mouth gulped air. Nothing at all in the chamber pot.

The nun's face was drawn.
Worse,
she mouthed as she gathered her cloak and bag.

Lib put a hand on her arm to stop her from leaving. “Anna confessed,” she said in the nun's ear, barely voicing the words.

“To the priest?”

“To me. Until last Saturday, the mother was feeding her chewed-up food under cover of kisses and convincing the girl that it was manna.”

Sister Michael blanched, and crossed herself.

“The committee will be at Ryan's at ten this evening,” Lib went on, “and we must speak to them.”

“Has Dr. McBrearty said so?”

Lib was tempted to lie. Instead she said, “The man's delusional. He thinks Anna's turning cold-blooded! No, we must make our report to the rest of the committee.”

“On Sunday, as instructed.”

“Three more days is too long! Anna may not last,” she whispered, “and you know it.”

The nun averted her face, big eyes blinking.

“I'll do the talking, but you must stand with me.”

Haltingly: “My place is here.”

“Surely you can find someone else to watch Anna for an hour,” said Lib. “The Ryan girl, even.”

The nun shook her head.

“Instead of spying on Anna, we should all be doing everything we can to induce her to eat. To live.”

The smoothly wimpled head kept swinging like a bell. “Those aren't our orders. 'Tis all dreadfully sad, but—”

“Sad?” Lib's voice too loud, scathing. “Is that the word?”

Sister Michael's face crumpled in on itself.

“Good nurses follow rules,” Lib growled, “but the best know when to break them.”

The nun fled from the room.

Lib took a long, ragged breath and sat down beside Anna.

When the child woke, her heartbeat was like a violin string vibrating just under the skin.
Thursday, August 18, 1:03 p.m. Pulse at 129, thready,
Lib noted down, her hand as legible as ever.
Straining for breath.

She called Kitty in and told her to gather all the pillows in the house.

Kitty stared, then rushed off to do it.

Lib banked them up behind Anna so the girl could lie almost upright, which seemed to ease her breathing a little.

“Thou that liftest me up from the gates,”
murmured Anna, eyes shut.
“Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies.”

How gladly Lib would have done that if she'd known how, delivered Anna, set her free from her bonds. The way a message was delivered, or a blow, or a baby. “More water?” She offered the spoon.

Anna's eyelids flickered but didn't open; she shook her head.
“Be it done to me.”

“You may not feel thirst, but you need to drink all the same.”

The lips clung together stickily as they opened and let in a spoonful of water.

It would be easier to talk frankly outdoors. “Would you like to go out in the chair again? It's a lovely afternoon.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Lib.”

Lib put that down too:
Too weak to be wheeled in chair.
Her memorandum book wasn't just to supplement her memory anymore. It was evidence of a crime.

“This boat's big enough for me,” mumbled Anna.

Was that a whimsical metaphor for the bed, the child's one inheritance from her brother? Or was her brain becoming affected by her fast? Lib wrote,
Slight confusion?
Then it struck her that perhaps she'd misheard
bed,
slurred, as
boat.

“Anna.” She took one of the bloated hands between her two. Cold, like a china doll's. “You know of the sin called self-murder.”

The hazel-brown eyes opened, but angled away from her.

“Let me read you something from
The Examination of Conscience
,” said Lib, snatching up the missal and finding the page she'd marked yesterday.
“Have you done anything to shorten your life, or to hasten death? Have you desired your own death, through passion or impatience?”

Anna shook her head. Whispering:
“I will fly and be at rest.”

“Are you sure of that? Don't suicides go to hell?” Lib forced herself on. “You won't be buried with Pat, even, but outside the wall of the churchyard.”

Anna turned her cheek to her pillow like a small child with an earache.

Lib thought of the first riddle she'd ever told the girl:
I neither am nor can be seen.
She leaned closer and whispered: “Why are you trying to die?”

“To give myself.” Anna corrected her instead of denying it. She began muttering her Dorothy prayer again, over and over:
“I adore thee, O most precious cross, adorned by the tender, delicate and venerable members of Jesus my Saviour, sprinkled and stained with his precious blood.”

By the last light of the afternoon, Lib helped the child into a chair so she could air the bedclothes and smoothen the sheets. Anna sat with her knees up under her chin. She hobbled to the pot but produced only a dark drip. Then back to bed, moving like an old woman, the old woman she'd never grow up to be.

Lib paced as the child dozed. Nothing to do but call for more hot bricks, because all the heat of the day couldn't stop Anna's shivers.

The slavey's eyes were rimmed with scarlet a quarter of an hour later when she brought four bricks in—still ashy from the fire—and tucked them under Anna's blankets. The child was deep in slumber now.

“Kitty,” said Lib, before she knew she was going to speak. Her pulse hammered. If she was wrong—if the maid was as bad as Mrs. O'Donnell and in on the plot with her—then this attempt would do more harm than good. How to begin? Not with accusation, or even information. Compassion—that's what Lib needed to rouse in the young woman. “Your cousin's dying.”

Water brimmed in Kitty's eyes at once.

“All God's children need to eat,” Lib told her. She lowered her voice further. “Until a few days ago, Anna's been kept alive by means of a wicked trick, a criminal swindle practiced on the whole world.” She regretted
criminal,
because fear was flaring in the maid's eyes now. “Do you know what I'm about to tell you?”

“Sure how could I know that?” asked Kitty, with the look of a rabbit scenting a fox.

“Your mistress”—
Aunt?
Lib wondered now.
Cousin of some sort?
—“Mrs. O'Donnell, has been feeding the child from her own mouth, pretending to kiss her, you see?” It struck her that Kitty might blame the girl. “In her innocence, Anna thought she was receiving holy manna from heaven.”

The wide eyes narrowed all of a sudden. A guttural sound.

Lib leaned forward. “What did you say?”

No answer.

“It must be a shock, I know—”

“You!” No mistaking the syllable this time, or the fury contorting the maid's face.

“I'm telling you so you can help me save your little cousin's life.”

A pair of hard hands seized her face, then clamped over her mouth. “Shut your lying gob.”

Lib staggered backwards.

“Like a sickness you came into this house, spreading your poison. Godless, heartless, have you no shame?”

The child in the bed shifted then, as if disturbed by the voices, and both women froze.

Kitty dropped her arms. Took two steps to the bed and bent down, planted the lightest of kisses on Anna's temple. When she straightened up, her face was striped with tears.

The door banged behind her.

You tried,
Lib reminded herself, standing very still.

This time she couldn't tell what she'd done wrong. Perhaps it was inevitable that Kitty would have blindly sided with the O'Donnells; they were all she had in the world—family, home, the only means of earning her crust.

Better to have tried than to have done nothing? Better for Lib's conscience, she supposed; for the starving girl, it made no difference.

She threw out the shrunken flowers and tidied the missal back into its box.

Then on an impulse she took it out again and leafed through it once more, looking for the Dorothy prayer. Out of all the formulae there were, why did Anna recite that one thirty-three times a day?

Here it was—the Good Friday Prayer for the Holy Souls as Revealed to Saint Bridget. The text told Lib nothing new:
I adore thee, O most precious cross, adorned by the tender, delicate and venerable members of Jesus my Saviour, sprinkled and stained with his precious blood.
She squinted at the notes in minute print below.
If said thirty-three times fasting on a Friday three souls will be released from purgatory, but if on Good Friday the harvest will be thirty-three souls.
An Easter bonus, multiplying the reward by eleven. Lib was about to shut the book when she belatedly registered one word:
fasting.