The Wonder(12)

The girl shrugged.

Where the stockings had been tied below Anna’s knees, the marks stayed concave. The same with the backs of her heels. Lib had seen this kind of swelling in pregnant women and the occasional old soldier. She pushed her finger into the girl’s calf, like a sculptor forming a child out of clay. The pit remained when she removed her finger. “Does that pain you?”

Anna shook her head.

Lib stared at the indented leg. Perhaps it wasn’t too serious, but something was wrong with this child.

She carried on lifting one piece of clothing at a time. Even if Anna was a fraud, there was no need to mortify her. The girl shivered, but not as if embarrassed, only as if it were January rather than August. Few signs of maturity, Lib jotted down; Anna seemed more like eight or nine than eleven. Smallpox vaccination on upper arm. The milk-white skin was dry to the touch, brownish and rough in places. Bruises on the knees, typical in children. But those tiny spots on the girl’s shins, blue-red—Lib had never encountered them before. She noticed that same fine down on the girl’s forearms, back, belly, legs; like a baby monkey. Was this hairiness common among the Irish, by any chance? Lib recalled cartoons in the popular press depicting them as apish pygmies.

She remembered to check the calf again, the left one. It was as flat as the other now.

Lib glanced through her notes. A few troubling anomalies, yes, but nothing that lent weight to the O’Donnells’ grandiose claims of a four-month fast.

Now, where could the child be hiding her food? Lib compressed every seam of Anna’s dress and petticoat, feeling for pockets. The clothes had been darned often but well; a decent kind of poverty. She checked each part of the girl’s body that could possibly hold the tiniest store, from the armpits down to the crevices (cracked in places) between the swollen toes. Not a crumb.

Anna made no protest. She was whispering to herself again now, lashes resting on cheeks. Lib couldn’t make out any of the words except for one that came up over and over and sounded like… Dorothy, could it be? Roman Catholics were always begging various intermediaries to take up their petty causes with God. Was there a Saint Dorothy?

“What’s that you’re reciting?” Lib asked when the girl seemed to have finished.

A shake of the head.

“Come now, Anna, aren’t we to be friends?”

Lib regretted her choice of word at once, because the round face lit up. “I’d like that.”

“Then tell me about this prayer I hear you muttering on and off.”

“That one, ’tis… not for talking about,” said Anna.

“Ah. A secret prayer.”

“Private,” she corrected Lib.

Little girls—even honest ones—did love their secrets. Lib remembered her own sister keeping a diary hidden under their mattress. (Not that it stopped Lib reading every anodyne word of it.) Lib screwed the sections of her stethoscope together. She pressed the flat base to the left side of the child’s chest, between the fifth and sixth rib, and put the other end to her own right ear. Lub-dub, lub-dub; she listened for the minutest variation in the sounds of the heart. Then for a full minute, by the watch that hung at her waist, she counted. Pulse distinct, she wrote, 89 beats per minute. That was within the expected range. Lib moved the stethoscope to different positions on the child’s back. Lungs healthy, 17 respirations per minute, she recorded. No crackles or wheezes; despite her odd symptoms, Anna seemed healthier than half her compatriots.

Sitting down on the chair—Miss N. always began by breaking her trainees of the habit of perching on a patient’s bed—Lib put the device on the child’s belly. She listened for the least gurgle that would betray the presence of food. Tried another spot. Silence. Digestive cavity hard, tympanitic, drumlike, she wrote. She percussed the belly lightly. “How does that feel?”

“Full,” said Anna.

Lib stared. Full, when the belly sounded so empty? Was this defiance? “Uncomfortably full?”

“No.”

“You may dress yourself now.”

Anna did, slowly and a little awkwardly.

Reports sleeping well at night, seven to nine hours.

Intellectual faculties seem unimpaired.

“Do you miss going to school, child?”

A shake of the head.

The O’Donnells’ pet apparently wasn’t expected to help with the housework, Lib noticed. “Perhaps you prefer to be idle?”

“I read and sew and sing and pray.” The child’s voice undefensive.

Confrontation was beyond Lib’s remit. But she might at least be frank, she decided. Miss N. always recommended it, since nothing preyed on a patient’s health like uncertainty. Lib could do this little faker real good by setting an example of candour, holding up a lamp for the girl to follow out of the wilderness into which she’d strayed. Snapping shut her memorandum book, Lib asked, “Do you know why I’m here?”

“To make sure I don’t eat.”

Of all the skewed ways of putting it… “Not at all, Anna. My job is to find out whether it’s true that you aren’t eating. But I would be most relieved if you’d take your meals as other children—other people—do.”

A nod.

“Is there anything at all you could fancy? Broth, sago pudding, something sweet?” Lib was only putting a neutral question to the child, she told herself, not pressing food on her in such a way as to influence the outcome of the watch.