The Wonder(36)

Impossible to match wits with a journalist. “They’ll speak up if she starts to weaken,” she insisted, “one or both of the parents, the maid, whoever’s behind this. Especially since I’ve put a stop to the milking of visitors for cash.”

Byrne’s eyebrows soared. “They’ll speak up, take the blame, and let themselves be hauled before a judge for fraud?”

Lib realized she hadn’t thought through the criminal side of the matter. “Well. A hungry child will break down and confess, sooner or later.”

But as she said it, she realized with a chill that she didn’t believe it. Anna O’Donnell had somehow passed beyond hunger.

Lib lurched to her feet. “I must sleep now, Mr. Byrne.”

He raked back his hair. “If you really have nothing to hide, Mrs. Wright, then let me in to see the girl for myself for ten minutes, and I’ll sing your praises in my next dispatch.”

“I don’t like your bargains, sir.”

This time he let her go.

Back in her room, Lib tried to sleep. These eight-hour shifts played havoc with the body’s rhythms. She heaved herself out of the hollow in her mattress and beat her pillow flat.

It was then, sitting up in the dark, that it occurred to her for the first time: What if Anna wasn’t lying?

For a long moment, she set all facts aside. To understand sickness was the beginning of real nursing, Miss N. had taught her; one must grasp the sufferer’s mental as well as physical state. So the question was, did the girl believe her own story?

The answer was clear. Conviction shone out of Anna O’Donnell. A case of hysteria she might possibly be, but utterly sincere.

Lib felt her shoulders drop. No enemy, then, this soft-faced child; no hardened prisoner. Only a girl caught up in a sort of waking dream, walking towards the edge of a cliff without knowing it. Only a patient who needed her nurse’s help, and fast.





CHAPTER THREE

Fast


fast





to abstain from food





a period of fasting





fixed, enclosed, secure, fortified





constant, steadfast, obstinate





Five a.m., Thursday, when Lib entered the bedroom. By the light of the reeking lamp, she watched Anna O’Donnell sleep. “No change?” she murmured to the nun.

A shake of the coif-covered head.

How could Lib bring up Dr. Standish’s visit without expressing her opinions? And what would a nun who believed a little girl could live off manna from heaven make of his theory that Anna was a self-starving hysteric?

Sister Michael took up her cloak and bag and left.

The child’s face on the pillow was a fallen fruit. Puffier around the eyes this morning, Lib noticed, perhaps from lying flat all night. One cheek scored red by a pillow crease. Anna’s body was a blank page that recorded everything that happened to it.

She pulled up one of the chairs and sat staring at Anna from no more than two feet away. The rounded cheek; the rise and fall of the rib cage and belly.

So the girl truly believed herself not to have eaten for four months. But her body told another story. Which had to mean that until Sunday night, someone had been feeding Anna, and she’d then somehow… forgotten the fact? Or perhaps never registered it at all. Could the feeding have been done with Anna in a kind of trance? In a deep slumber, could a child swallow food without choking, the way a sleepwalker might fumble through a house, eyes shut? Perhaps when she woke, Anna knew only that she felt sated, as if she’d been fed celestial dew.

But that didn’t explain why, by day, four days into this watch, the child showed no interest in food. More than that: despite all the peculiar symptoms that plagued Anna, she remained convinced that she could live without it.

An obsession, a mania, Lib supposed it could be called. A sickness of the mind. Hysteria, as that awful doctor had named it? Anna reminded Lib of a princess under a spell in a fairy tale. What could restore the girl to ordinary life? Not a prince. A magical herb from the world’s end? Some shock to jolt a poisoned bite of apple out of her throat? No, something simple as a breath of air: reason. What if Lib shook the girl awake this very minute and said, Come to your senses!

But that was part of the definition of madness, Lib supposed, the refusal to accept that one was mad. Standish’s wards were full of such people.

Besides, could children ever be considered quite of sound mind? Seven was counted the age of reason, but Lib’s sense of seven-year-olds was that they still brimmed over with imagination. Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions. Like small gods, children formed their miniature worlds out of clay, or even just words. To them, the truth was never simple.

But Anna was eleven, which was a far cry from seven, Lib argued with herself. Other eleven-year-olds knew when they’d eaten and when they hadn’t; they were old enough to tell make-believe from fact. There was something very different about—very wrong with—Anna O’Donnell.

Who was still fast asleep. Framed in the small pane behind her, the horizon was spilling liquid gold. The very idea of terrorizing a delicate child with tubes, pumping food into her body above or below— To shake off these thoughts, Lib picked up Notes on Nursing. She noticed a sentence she’d marked on first reading: She must be no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about her sick except to those who have a right to ask them.