The Wonder(29)

The child was on her knees by the bed, pressing her hands flat together in prayer.

“Good night, pet,” Kitty told her with a wide yawn, and she trudged back to the kitchen.

Lib opened to a new page and took up her metallic pencil.

Tuesday, August 9, 9:27 p.m.

Pulse: 93 beats per minute.

Lungs: 14 respirations per minute.

Tongue: no change.

Her first night shift. She’d never minded working these hours; there was something steadying about the quiet. She made a last pass over the sheets with the flat of her hand. Searching for hidden crumbs had already become routine.

Lib’s eyes fell on the whitewashed wall, and she thought of the dung, hair, blood, and buttermilk mixed into it. How could such a surface ever be clean? She imagined Anna sucking it for a trace of nourishment, like those wayward babies who ate fistfuls of earth. But no, that would stain her mouth, surely. Besides, Anna was never alone anymore, not since the watch had begun. Candles, the girl’s own clothes, pages out of her books, fragments of her own skin—she had no chance to nibble on any of these things unobserved.

Anna finished her prayers by whispering the Dorothy one. Then she made the sign of the cross and climbed under the sheet and the grey blanket. Her head nestled into the thin bolster.

“Have you no other pillow?” asked Lib.

A tiny smile. “I didn’t have one at all till the whooping cough.”

It was a paradox: Lib meant to expose the girl’s stratagems to the world, but she wanted her to get a good night’s sleep in the meantime. Old nursing habits died hard.

“Kitty,” she called at the door. The O’Donnells had disappeared already, but the maid was setting up an old tick on the base of the settle. “Could I have a second pillow for Anna?”

“Sure take mine,” said the maid, holding out a lumpen shape in a cotton slip.

“No, no—”

“Go on, I’ll hardly notice, I’m that ready to drop.”

“What’s the matter, Kitty?” Rosaleen O’Donnell’s voice from the alcove; the outshot, that was what they called it.

“She’s wanting another pillow for the child.”

The mother pushed aside the flour-sack curtain. “Is Anna not well?”

“I simply wondered if there might be a spare pillow,” said Lib, awkward.

“Have the both of them,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell, carrying her pillow across the floor and piling it on the maid’s. “Lovey, are you all right?” she demanded, poking her head into the bedroom.

“I’m grand,” said Anna.

“One will do,” said Lib, taking Kitty’s pillow.

Mrs. O’Donnell sniffed. “The smell of that lamp’s not making you sick, is it? Or stinging your eyes?”

“No, Mammy.”

The woman was parading her concern, that was it, making it seem as if the hardhearted nurse was doing the child damage by insisting on a brutally bright light.

Finally the door was shut, and nurse and child were alone. “You must be tired,” Lib said to Anna.

A long moment. “I don’t know.”

“It may be hard to drop off, as you’re not used to the lamp. Would you like to read? Or have me read you something?”

No answer.

Lib went closer to the girl, who turned out to be asleep already. Snowy cheeks as round as peaches.

Living on manna from heaven. What hogwash. What exactly was manna, some sort of bread?

The Book of Exodus, that was in the Old Testament. But the only volume of Scripture Lib could find in Anna’s treasure box was the Psalms. She riffled through it, careful not to disturb the little cards. No mention of manna that she could see. One passage caught her eye. The children that are strangers have lied to me, strange children have faded away, and have halted from their paths. What on earth did that mean? Anna was a strange child, certainly. She’d halted from the ordinary path of girlhood when she’d decided to lie to the whole world.

It came to Lib then that the question to ask was not how a child might commit such a fraud, but why? Children told fibs, yes, but surely only one with a perverse nature would invent this particular story. Anna showed not the slightest interest in making her fortune. The young craved attention, perhaps even fame—but at the price of an empty belly, an aching body, the constant fretting about how to carry on the hoax?

Unless the O’Donnells had come up with the monstrous scheme, of course, and bullied Anna into it so they could profit from the visitors beating a path to their door. But she didn’t seem like a child under compulsion. She had a quiet firmness about her, an air of self-command unusual in one so young.

Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib’s experience, those who wouldn’t cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they’d entered and what they’d done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives’ smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets.

The holy cards were distracting her, with their fancy details—edges like filigree lace, some of them—and exotic names. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Philip Neri, Saint Margaret of Scotland, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary; like a set of dolls in national dress. He can pick anyone, Anna had said, any sinner or unbeliever. A whole series about the final sufferings of Christ, Our Lord Stripped of his Garments. Who could think it a good idea to put such grim images in the hands of a child, and a sensitive one at that?