The Wonder (30 page)

Lib nodded.

“Maybe God took Pat because of what we'd done. 'Tisn't fair, then, Mrs. Lib, because Pat's bearing all the punishment.”

Lib pressed her lips together so the child would keep talking.

“Then at the mission—” Anna let out a single hard sob. “The Belgian priest, in his sermon, he said brother and sister, 'tis a mortal sin, the second worst of the six species of lust. Poor Pat never knew!”

Oh,
poor Pat
knew well enough to spin a glittering web around the thing he was doing to his little sister night after night.

“He died so fast,” the girl wailed, “he never got a chance to go to confession. Maybe he went straight to hell.” The wet eyes looked greenish in this light, and the words came out in gulps. “In hell the flames aren't for cleaning, they're for hurting, and there's no end.”

“Anna.” Lib had heard enough.

“I don't know if I can get him out, but I have to try. Surely God must be able to pluck someone—”

“Anna! You did nothing wrong.”

“But I did.”

“You didn't know,” Lib insisted. “This was a wrong your brother did to you.”

Anna shook her head. “I loved him double too.”

Lib couldn't say a word.

“If God grants it, we can be together soon, but no bodies this time. No marrying,” Anna pleaded. “Just brother and sister again.”

“Anna, I can't bear this, I—” Lib was crouching on the edge of the bed now, blinded, as the room turned to water.

“Don't cry, Mrs. Lib.” Those spindly arms were reaching out for her, enclosing Lib's head, pulling her down. “Dear Mrs. Lib.”

She muffled her weeping in the blankets, the hard double ridge of the child's lap. The upside-downness of it: to be consoled by a child, and such a child.

“Don't fret, 'tis all right,” Anna murmured.

“No, it's not!”

“All's well. All will be well.”

Help her.
Lib found herself praying to the God that she didn't believe in.
Help me. Help us all.

She heard only silence.

In the middle of the night—Lib couldn't wait any longer—she felt her way through the kitchen, past the shape of the sleeping maid on the settle. The skin of Lib's cheeks was still tight and salty from weeping. When her fingers found the rough curtain that partitioned off the outshot, she whispered: “Mrs. O'Donnell.”

A stir. “Is it Anna?” asked Rosaleen hoarsely.

“No, she's fast asleep. I need to speak to you.”

“What is it?”

“In private,” said Lib. “Please.”

After long hours of brooding, she'd come to the conclusion that she had to reveal Anna's secret. But only to one other person, perversely the one Lib trusted least: Rosaleen O'Donnell. Lib's hope was that this revelation might wake Rosaleen to a sense of mercy for the tormented girl at last. This story was the family's, and the mother of Pat and Anna was entitled, if anyone was, to hear the truth about what one of them had inflicted on the other.

The hymn to Mary sang in Lib's head:
My mother, look kindly on me.

Rosaleen O'Donnell shoved the curtain aside and climbed out of the little chamber. Her eyes were uncanny in the trace of red light from the banked-up fire.

Lib beckoned, and Rosaleen trailed her across the hard earth floor. Lib opened the front door and Rosaleen hesitated for only a moment before following her out.

With the door shut behind them, Lib spoke fast, before she could lose her nerve. “I know all about the manna,” she began, to gain the upper hand.

Rosaleen looked back at her, unblinking.

“But I haven't told the committee. The world doesn't need an explanation of how Anna's lived all these months. What matters is whether she'll go on living. If you love your daughter, Mrs. O'Donnell, why don't you do everything in your power to get her to eat?”

Still not a word. Then, very low: “She's chosen.”

“She's been chosen?” Lib repeated, disgusted. “You mean by God? Called to martyrdom at the age of eleven?”

Rosaleen corrected her: “She's made her choice.”

The absurdity of it choked Lib. “Don't you understand how desperate Anna is, how racked with guilt? She's not
choosing
any more than she might choose to fall down a bog hole.”

Not a word.

“She's not intact.” Lib's circumlocution sounded absurdly prim.

Rosaleen's eyes narrowed.

“I must tell you that she's been interfered with, and by your own son.” The syllables plain and brutal. “He began tampering with her when she was only nine.”

“Mrs. Wright,” said the woman, “I won't stand for any more scandalmongering.”

Was it too inconceivable a horror for Rosaleen to take in? Did she need to believe Lib was making it up?

“That's the same filthy falsehood Anna came out with after Pat's funeral,” Rosaleen went on, “and I told her not to be slandering her poor brother.”

Lib had to lean on the gritty wall of the cabin. So this wasn't news to the woman at all.
A mother understands what a child doesn't say,
wasn't that how the proverb went? But Anna
had
said it. Grief for her dead Pat had given her the courage to confess the whole shameful story to her mother, back in November. Rosaleen had called her a liar and maintained that now, even as she watched her daughter pine away.

“Not another word out of you,” growled Rosaleen, “and may the devil take you.” She swept back inside.

Just after six, Saturday morning. Lib pushed a note under Byrne's door.

Then she left the spirit grocery and hurried away across the muddy field under a shrinking moon. This was the kingdom of hell, drifting irretrievably out of the orbit of heaven.

The hawthorn at the tiny holy well stood up before her, its disintegrating rags dancing in a breath of warm wind. Lib saw the point of such superstition now. If there was a ritual she could perform that offered a chance of saving Anna, wouldn't she try it? She'd bow down to a tree or a rock or a carved turnip for the child's sake. Lib thought of all those people walking away from this tree over the centuries, trying to believe that they'd left their aches and sorrows behind. Years on, some of them reminding themselves,
If I still feel the pain, that's only because the rag's not quite rotten yet.

Anna wanted to leave her body, drop it
like an old coat.
To shed her creased skin, her name, her broken history; to be done with it all. Yes, Lib would have liked that for the girl, and more—for Anna to be born all over again, as people in the Far East believed was possible. To wake up tomorrow and discover that she was someone else. A little girl with no damage done to her, no debts to pay, able and allowed to eat her fill.

And then came a hurrying outline against the lightening sky, and Lib felt at once what she'd never really known until this moment: the body's claims were undeniable.

William Byrne's curls were snakish and his waistcoat was buttoned up wrong. He clutched her note.

“Did I wake you?” Lib asked foolishly.

“I wasn't sleeping,” he said, grabbing her hand.

Despite everything, warmth spread through her.

“At Ryan's, last night,” he said, “no one could talk of anything but Anna. Word's spread about you telling the committee that she's failing fast. I believe the whole village will attend this mass.”

What collective madness had the townspeople in its grip? “If they're concerned that a child is being allowed to kill herself,” Lib demanded, “why don't they storm the cabin?”

Byrne gave a great shrug. “We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism.”

He tucked her arm through his, and they walked under the trees. The sun was up, and it looked set to be another horribly lovely day.

“Yesterday I was in Athlone,” he told her, “arguing with the police. This officer, a piece of apathetic pomposity with his hat and musket—he kept stroking his moustache and saying that the situation was
one of considerable delicacy.
Far be it from the constabulary, says he, to invade a
domestic sanctum
in the absence of any evidence of a crime having been committed.”

Lib nodded. And, really, what could the police possibly have done? Still, she appreciated Byrne's impulse to try something, anything.

How she wished she could tell him all that she'd learned the night before, and not just for the relief of sharing it but because he cared for Anna as she did.

No. It would be treachery to expose the secret that the child carried within her puny body to a man, any man, even one who was Anna's champion. How could Byrne ever look at this innocent girl the same way afterwards? Lib owed it to Anna to keep her mouth shut.

She couldn't tell anyone else either. If Anna's own mother had called her a liar, most likely so would the rest of the world. Lib couldn't put Anna through the violation of a medical examination; that body had endured so much probing already. Besides, even if the fact could be proved, what Lib saw as incestuous rape, others would call seduction. Wasn't it so often the girl—no matter how young—who got blamed for having incited her molester with a look?

“I've come to a dreadful conclusion,” she said to Byrne. “Anna can't live in this family.”

His brows contracted. “But they're all she's got. All she knows. What's a child without a family?”

The nest is enough for the wren,
Rosaleen O'Donnell had boasted. But what if a baby bird of rare plumage found herself in the wrong nest, and the mother bird turned her sharp beak on the chick? “Trust me, they're no family,” Lib told him. “They won't lift a finger to save her.”

Byrne nodded.

But was he convinced? “I've watched a child die,” she said, “and I can't do it again.”

“In your line of work—”

“No. You don't understand.
My
child. My daughter.”

Byrne stared. His arm tightened around hers.

“Three weeks and three days, that's how long she hung on.” Bleating, coughing like a goat. There must have been something sour in Lib's milk, because the baby had turned away or spat it out, and what little she got down had made her dwindle as if it were the opposite of food, a magical shrinking potion.

Byrne didn't say,
Such things happen.
He didn't point out that Lib's loss was only a drop in the ocean of human pain. “Was that when Wright left?”

Lib nodded. “Nothing to stay for, was how he put it.” Then she added, “Not that I much cared, at that point.”

A growl: “He didn't deserve you.”

Oh, but none of it was a matter of deserving. She hadn't
deserved
to lose her daughter; Lib knew that even on her bleakest days. She'd done nothing that she shouldn't have, for all Wright's dark hints; had left nothing undone that she should have done. Fate was faceless, life arbitrary,
a tale told by an idiot.

Except at rare moments such as this one, when one glimpsed a way of wrestling it into a better shape.

In her head, Miss N. asked:
Can you throw your whole self into the breach?

Lib held on to Byrne's arm like a rope. She found her mind hadn't been quite made up till this minute. She told him, “I'm going to take Anna away.”

“Away where?”

“Anywhere but here.” Her eyes scoured the flat horizon. “The farther the better.”

Byrne turned to face her. “How would that persuade the child to eat?”

“I can't be sure, and I can't explain it, but I know she must leave this place and these people.”

His tone was wry. “You're buying the damn spoons.”

For a moment Lib was confused, then she remembered the hundred spoons at Scutari and almost smiled.

“Let's be clear,” he said, urbane again. “You mean to kidnap the girl.”

“I suppose they'd call it that,” said Lib, her voice rough with fright. “But I'd never compel her.”

“Would Anna go with you willingly, then?”

“I believe she just might, if I can put it to her the right way.”

Byrne was tactful enough not to point out the unlikelihood of this. “How do you propose to travel? Hire a driver? You'll be caught before you get to the next county.”

All at once, Lib felt her tiredness catching up with her. “Odds are I'll end up in prison, Anna will die, and none of it will have made any difference.”

“Yet you mean to try.”

She struggled to answer.
“Better to drown in the surf than stand idly on the shore.”
Absurd to quote Miss N., who'd be appalled to hear that one of her nurses had been arrested for child abduction. But sometimes the teaching held more than the teacher knew.

What Byrne said next astonished her. “Then it must be tonight.”

When Lib arrived for her shift, at one o'clock on Saturday, the bedroom door was closed. Sister Michael, Kitty, and the O'Donnells were all on their knees in the kitchen; Malachy held his cap in one hand.

Lib went to turn the door handle.

“Don't,” snapped Rosaleen. “Mr. Thaddeus is in the middle of giving Anna the sacrament of penance.”

Penance; that was another word for confession, wasn't it?

“Part of the last rites,” murmured Sister Michael to Lib.

Was Anna dying? She swayed on her feet, and thought she might fall.

“It's not only to help a patient make a
bona mors,
” the nun assured her.

“A what?”

“A good death, that is. It's also for anyone in danger. It's even been known to restore health, if God wills it.”

More fairy tales.

A high bell rang in the bedroom and Mr. Thaddeus opened the door. “You may all come in for the anointing.”

The group got off their knees and shuffled in after Lib.