The Wonder(22)

At school Lib and her sister had always been hungry. (It was the time the two of them had got along best, she remembered; the fellow feeling of prisoners, she supposed now.) A sparing diet was considered beneficial for girls in particular because it kept the digestion in trim and built character. Lib didn’t believe she lacked self-control, but she found hunger pointlessly distracting; it made one think of nothing but food. So in adult life she never skipped a meal if she could help it.

Anna made the sign of the cross and got up off her knees now. “Good morning, Mrs. Wright.”

Lib considered the girl with grudging respect. “Good morning, Anna.” Even if the girl had somehow snatched a sip or a bite of something during the nun’s shift or just now with her mother, it couldn’t have been much; only a mouthful, at most, since yesterday morning. “How was your night?” Lib got out her memorandum book.

“I have slept and have taken my rest,” quoted Anna, crossing herself again before pulling off her nightcap, “and I have risen up, because the Lord hath protected me.”

“Excellent,” said Lib, because she didn’t know what else to say. Noticing that the inside of the cap was streaked with shed hair.

The girl unbuttoned her nightdress, slipped it down, and tied the sleeves around her middle. A strange disproportion between her fleshless shoulders and thick wrists and hands, between her narrow chest and bloated belly. She sluiced herself with water from the basin. “Make thy face to shine upon thy servant,” she said under her breath, then dried herself with the cloth, shivering.

From under the bed Lib pulled out the chamber pot, which was clean. “Did you use this at all, child?”

Anna nodded. “Sister gave it to Kitty to empty.”

What was in it? Lib should have asked but found she couldn’t.

Anna pulled her nightdress back up over her shoulders. She wet the small cloth, then reached down under the linen to wash one leg modestly as she balanced on the other, holding the dresser to steady herself. The shimmy, drawers, dress, and stockings she put on were all yesterday’s.

Lib usually insisted on a daily change, but she felt she couldn’t in a family as poor as this one. She draped the sheets and blanket over the footboard to air before she began her examination of the girl.

Tuesday, August 9, 5:23 a.m.

Water taken: 1 tsp.

Pulse: 95 beats per minute.

Lungs: 16 respirations per minute.

Temperature: cool.

Although temperature was guesswork, really, depending on whether the nurse’s fingers happened to be warmer or colder than the patient’s armpit.

“Put out your tongue, please.” By training Lib always noted the condition of the tongue, though she’d have been hard-pressed to tell what it said about the subject’s health. Anna’s was red, with an odd flatness at the back instead of the usual tiny bumps.

When Lib put her stethoscope to Anna’s navel, she heard a faint gurgling, though that could be attributed to the mixing of air and water; it didn’t prove the presence of food. Sounds in digestive cavity, she wrote, of uncertain origin.

Today she’d have to ask Dr. McBrearty about those swollen lower legs and hands. Lib supposed it could be argued that any symptoms arising from a limited diet were all to the good, because sooner or later, surely they’d provoke the girl to give up this grotesque charade. She made the bed again, tightening the sheets.

Nurse and charge settled into a sort of rhythm on this second day. They read—Lib caught up on Madame Defarge’s nefarious doings in All the Year Round—and chatted a little. The girl was charming, in her unworldly way. Lib found it hard to keep in mind that Anna was a trickster, a great liar in a country famous for them.

Several times an hour the child whispered what Lib thought of as the Dorothy prayer. Was it meant to strengthen her resolve every time emptiness cramped her belly?

Later in the morning Lib took Anna out for another constitutional—only around the farmyard, because the skies were threatening. When Lib remarked on Anna’s halting gait, the child said that was just how she walked. She sang hymns as she went, like a stoical soldier.

“Do you like riddles?” Lib asked her when there came a break in the music.

“I don’t know any.”

“Dear me.” Lib remembered the riddles of childhood more vividly than all the things she’d had to memorize in the schoolroom. “What about this: ‘There’s not a kingdom on the earth, but what I’ve travelled o’er and o’er, and whether it be day or night I neither am nor can be seen. What am I?’”

Anna looked mystified, so Lib repeated it.

“‘I neither am nor can be seen,’” echoed the girl. “Does that mean that I amn’t—I don’t exist—or I amn’t seen?”

“The latter,” said Lib.

“Someone invisible,” said Anna, “who travels all across the earth—”

“Or something,” Lib put in.

The child’s frown lifted. “The wind?”

“Very good. You’re a quick study.”

“Another. Please.”

“Hmm, let’s see. ‘The land was white,’” Lib began, “‘the seed was black. It’ll take a good scholar to riddle me that.’”

“Paper, with ink on it!”