The Wonder (24 page)

Lib looked her in the eye.

The nun hesitated, then went out without another word.

In the night, she'd decided on her tactics. She'd choose the weapon most likely to shake the girl: Holy Writ. She took the whole stack of Anna's pious volumes into her lap now and started skimming them, marking passages with strips torn out of the back page of her memorandum book.

When the girl woke a little later, Lib wasn't ready yet, so she put the books back in the treasure box. “I have a riddle for you.”

Anna managed a smile and a nod.

Lib cleared her throat.

I've seen you where you never were,

And where you never will be,

And yet you in that very same place

May still be seen by me.

“A mirror,” said Anna almost at once.

“You're getting too clever,” Lib told her. “I'm running out of riddles.” On impulse, she held the hand mirror up to Anna's face.

The child flinched. Then considered her reflection steadily.

“See what you look like these days?” asked Lib.

“I see,” said Anna. And she crossed herself and clambered out of bed.

But she was wobbling so much that Lib made her sit down right away. “Let me change your nightdress.” She took the fresh one out of the drawer.

The child struggled with the tiny buttons, so Lib had to undo them. Lifting the nightdress over Anna's head, she sucked in her breath at the extent of the brown patches on the skin, the reddish-blue spots that were like a scattering of coins now. New bruises too, in odd places, as if invisible assailants had been beating the girl in the night.

When Anna was dressed and wrapped in two shawls to stop her shivering, Lib prevailed on her to take a spoonful of water. “Another tick, please, Kitty,” she called from the door.

The maid was elbow-deep in a bucket of dishes. “We've no others, but the colleen's welcome to mine.”

“What will you do?”

“I'll find something by bedtime. It doesn't matter.” Kitty's tone was desolate.

Lib hesitated. “Very well, then. Could I have something soft, too, to put on top?”

The maid wiped her eyebrow with a scarlet forearm. “A blanket?”

“Softer than that,” said Lib.

She pulled the three blankets off the bed and shook them so hard they made a dull slap.
Piled all the blankets in the house on his bed,
Rosaleen O'Donnell had said. This must have been Pat's bed, it occurred to Lib; there was no other except in the outshot where the parents slept. She ripped off the grimy bottom sheet, baring the tick. Her eyes traced the indelible stains. So Pat had died right here, cooling in his little sister's warm grip.

In the chair, Anna seemed folded up into almost nothing, like the Limerick gloves in their walnut shell. Lib heard voices arguing in the kitchen.

Rosaleen O'Donnell bustled in a quarter of an hour later with Kitty's tick as well as a sheepskin she'd borrowed from the Corcorans. “Quiet this morning, sleepyhead?” She held her daughter's misshapen hands in hers.

How could this woman think
sleepy
was the word for such lethargy? Lib wondered. Couldn't she see that Anna was melting away like a halfpenny taper?

“Ah, well. A mother understands what a child doesn't say, as the proverb has it. Here's Dadda now.”

“Good morning, pet,” said Malachy from the doorway.

Anna cleared her throat. “Good morning, Dadda.”

He came over to stroke her hair. “How are you today?”

“Well enough,” she told him.

He nodded as if convinced.

The poor lived for the day, was that it? Lib wondered. Lacking control over their circumstances, they learned not to borrow trouble by looking any farther down the road?

Or else this pair of criminals knew exactly what they were doing to their daughter.

When they'd left, Lib made the bed again, with the two mattresses and then the sheepskin under the bottom sheet. “Hop back in now and rest some more.”

Hop:
a ludicrous word for the way Anna was crawling into bed.

“Soft,” the girl murmured, patting the spongy surface.

“It's to prevent bedsores,” Lib explained.

“How did you begin again, Mrs. Lib?” The words came low and gravelly.

Lib put her head to one side.

“When you were widowed.
A whole new life,
you said.”

She was ruefully impressed that the girl could rise above her own suffering and take an interest in Lib's past. “There was a dreadful war in the east, and I wanted to help the sick and wounded.”

“And did you?”

Men had spewed, soiled, sprayed, seeped, died. Lib's men, those Miss N. had assigned to her. They'd died sometimes in her arms but more often while she was obliged to be in another room stirring gruel or folding bandages. “I believe I helped some of them. Somewhat.” Lib had been there, at least. She'd tried. How much did that count? “My teacher said this was the kingdom of hell, and it was our job to haul it a little closer to heaven.”

Anna nodded, as if that went without saying.

Wednesday, August 17, 7:49 a.m.,
Lib noted down.
Tenth day of watch.

Pulse: 109 beats per minute.

Lungs: 22 breaths per minute.

Unable to walk.

She took out the books again and worked through them until she had what she needed. Lib expected Anna to ask her what she was doing, but no. The girl lay still, eyes on the dust motes dancing in the rays of morning light.

“Would you like another riddle?” asked Lib at last.

“Oh yes.”

Two bodies have I,

Though both joined in one.

The stiller I stand,

The faster I run.

“‘The stiller I stand,'” repeated Anna in a murmur. “‘Two bodies.'”

Lib nodded, waited. “Do you give up?”

“Just a minute.”

Lib eyed the second hand of her watch going around. “No answer?”

Anna shook her head.

“An hourglass,” said Lib. “Time falling like sand through the glass, and nothing can slow it.”

The child looked back at Lib, unshaken.

Lib drew her chair very close to the bed. Time for battle. “Anna. You've convinced yourself that God has chosen you, out of all the people in the world, not to eat?”

Anna took a breath to speak.

“Hear me out, please. These holy books of yours, they're full of instructions to the contrary.” Lib opened
The Garden of the Soul
and found the line she'd marked.
“Look upon your meat and drink as medicines, necessary for your health.
Or here, in the Psalms.” She flipped to the right page. “
I am smitten as grass, and my heart is withered, because I forgot to eat my bread.
And what about this:
Eat, and drink, and be merry
? Or this line that I hear you say all the time:
Give us this day our daily bread
.”

“Not actual bread,” muttered Anna.

“It's actual bread that an actual child needs,” Lib told her. “Jesus shared the loaves and fishes with the five thousand, didn't he?”

Anna swallowed slowly, as if she had a stone in her throat. “He was merciful because they were weak.”

“Because they were human, you mean. He didn't say,
Ignore your stomachs and keep listening while I preach.
He gave them dinner.” Lib's voice shook with wrath. “At the Last Supper he broke bread with his followers, didn't he? What did he tell them, what were the exact words?”

Very low.
“Take ye and eat.”

“There!”

“Once he'd consecrated it, the bread wasn't bread anymore, it was
him,
” said Anna in a rush. “Like manna.” She stroked the leather binding of the Psalms as if the book were a cat. “For months I was fed on manna from heaven.”

“Anna!” Lib tugged the volume away from her, too hard, and it thumped onto the floor, scattering its cargo of precious cards.

“What's all the commotion?” Rosaleen O'Donnell put her face around the door.

“Nothing,” said Lib, on her knees, heart pounding as she snatched up the tiny pictures.

A terrible pause.

Lib wouldn't look up. She couldn't afford to meet the woman's eye in case her feelings showed.

“All right, pet?” Rosaleen asked her daughter.

“Yes, Mammy.”

Why didn't Anna say the Englishwoman had thrown down her book and was bullying Anna to break her fast? Then the O'Donnells would no doubt lodge a complaint against Lib, and she'd be sent packing.

Anna said nothing else, and Rosaleen withdrew.

Once the two were alone again, Lib stood and put the book back in the child's lap, the cards in a small pile on top. “I'm sorry they're out of place.”

“I know where they all go.” Her thick fingers still deft, Anna tucked each one back where it belonged.

Lib reminded herself that she was quite prepared to lose this job. Hadn't William Byrne been cashiered at sixteen for the seditious truths he'd told about his famished countrymen? That had probably been the making of the man. Not so much the loss itself as his surviving it, realizing that it was possible to fail and start again.

Anna took a long breath, and Lib heard the faintest of crackles. Fluid in the lungs, she registered. Which meant there was little time left.

I've seen you where you never were, and where you never will be.

“Will you listen to me, please?”
Dear child,
she almost added, but that was the mother's soft language; Lib had to speak plainly. “You must see that you're getting worse.”

Anna shook her head.

“Does this hurt?” Lib leaned down and pressed where the belly was roundest.

Agony shot across the child's face.

“I'm sorry,” said Lib, only half sincerely. She tugged Anna's cap off. “Look how much hair you're losing every day.”

“The very hairs of your head are all numbered,”
the girl whispered.

Science was the most magical force Lib knew. If anything could break the spell that held this girl—“The body's a kind of engine,” she began, trying to summon up Miss N.'s most teacherly tone. “Digestion is the burning of fuel. Denied fuel, the body will destroy its own tissues.” She sat down and laid her palm on Anna's belly again, gently this time. “This is the stove. The food you had the year you were ten, the amount you grew that year as a consequence—it's all been used up in the past four months. Think of what you ate at nine, at eight. Burnt to cinders already.” Time rolled backwards sickeningly. “When you were seven, six, five. Every meal your father toiled to put on the table, every bite your mother cooked, is being consumed now by the desperate fire inside you.” Anna at four, three, before she'd formed her first sentence. At two, toddling; one. All the way back to her first day, her first suck of mother's milk. “But the engine can't run much longer without proper fuel, do you see?”

Anna's calm was a layer of unbreakable crystal.

“It's not just that there's less of you every day,” Lib told her, “it's that all your workings are winding down, beginning to seize up.”

“I'm not a machine.”

“
Like
a machine, that's all I mean. No insult to your Creator,” Lib told her. “Think of him as the most ingenious of engineers.”

Anna shook her head. “I'm his child.”

“Could I speak to you in the kitchen, Mrs. Wright?” Rosaleen O'Donnell, in the doorway, long arms akimbo.

How much had the woman heard? “This is not a convenient time.”

“I must insist, ma'am.”

Lib stood up with a short sigh.

She'd be breaking the rule about leaving Anna alone in the room, but what did it matter now? She couldn't imagine the child leaning out of bed to scrape crumbs out of some hidey-hole, and, frankly, if that were to happen, Lib would be glad.
Cheat me, hoodwink me, so long as you eat.

She shut the door behind her so Anna wouldn't hear a word.

Rosaleen O'Donnell was alone, looking out the smallest kitchen window. She turned and brandished a newspaper. “John Flynn got hold of this in Mullingar this morning.”

Lib was taken aback. So this wasn't about the things she'd been saying to the girl just now. She looked at the paper, folded open to an inside page. The banner at the top identified it as the
Irish Times,
and her eye immediately picked out Byrne's article reporting on Anna's decline.
A chance and fleeting encounter with the Fasting Girl herself…

“How did this blaggard come to have a chance encounter with my child, may I ask?” demanded Rosaleen.

Lib weighed how much to admit.

“And where did he get this nonsense about her being
in grave danger
? I caught Kitty bawling into her apron this morning because she heard you say something to the doctor about a
deathbed.
”

Lib decided to go on the attack. “What would you call it, Mrs. O'Donnell?”

“The cheek of you!”

“Have you looked at your daughter lately?”

“Oh, 'tis you who knows better than the girl's own physician, is it? You, who couldn't even tell a dead child from a living one?” Rosaleen scoffed, gesturing at the photograph on the mantel.

That stung. “McBrearty imagines your daughter to be turning into something like a lizard. This is the dotard you're trusting with her life.”

The woman's fists were clenched, white knobs in red. “If you hadn't been appointed by the committee, I'd have you out of my house this minute.”

“What, so that Anna can die all the faster?”

Rosaleen O'Donnell rushed at her.

Startled, Lib stepped aside to evade the blow.

“You know nothing about us!” the woman roared.