The Wonder(40)

Anna, leaning back in the chair, seemed deaf to all this, mesmerized by the flames.

Instead of taking offence, Rosaleen O’Donnell was smiling in a gratified way. “He looks alive to you, ma’am? Well, there’s a thing.”

Propped up in his mother’s lap. Blackened lips, the first indication of decomposition; Lib should have guessed. Had the O’Donnell boy lain in this kitchen for a whole day, or two or three, while his family waited for the photographist?

Rosaleen O’Donnell came up so close that Lib flinched. She tapped the glass. “A fine bit of brushwork on his eyes, isn’t it?”

Someone had painted whites and pupils onto the corpse’s closed lids in the print; that was why the gaze was so crocodilian.

Mr. O’Donnell came in then, stamping mud off his boots. His wife greeted him in Gaelic, then switched to English. “Wait till you hear, Malachy. Mrs. Wright thought Pat was still on this side!”

The woman had a talent for taking pleasure from terrible things.

“Poor Pat,” said Malachy with an unoffended nod.

“It was the eyes, they tricked her entirely.” Rosaleen O’Donnell fingered the glass. “Worth every penny.”

Anna’s arms lay limp in her lap now, and her eyes reflected the flames. Lib longed to get her out of this room.

“’Twas his stomach that did for him,” said Malachy O’Donnell.

Kitty sniffed and wiped one eye on her frayed sleeve.

“Brought up his supper. Couldn’t touch another thing.”

The man was addressing Lib, so she had to nod.

“The pain took him there, then there, see?” Malachy prodded himself about the navel, then lower down on the right. “Swelled up like an egg.” He was speaking more fluently than she’d ever heard him. “In the morning it’d eased, like, so we thought we shouldn’t trouble Dr. McBrearty after all.”

Lib nodded again. Was the father appealing to her for her professional opinion? For a sort of forgiveness?

“But Pat still felt so faint and cold in himself,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell, “we piled all the blankets in the house on his bed, and put his sister in beside him to warm him up.”

Lib shuddered. Not just at the thing, but at the retelling of it in the hearing of a sensitive girl.

“He panted a bit, and spoke nonsense, as if he was dreaming,” murmured his mother.

“Gone before breakfast, poor lad,” said Malachy O’Donnell. “No time to send for the priest, even.” He shook his head as if to get rid of a fly.

“Too good for this world,” exclaimed Rosaleen.

“I’m so very sorry,” said Lib. She turned back to the daguerreotype so she wouldn’t have to look at the parents. But she found she couldn’t bear the shine of those eyes, so she took Anna by the still-cold hand and went back to the bedroom.

Her eye fell on the treasure chest. The dark brown hair in the statuette she’d broken: that had to be the brother’s. Anna’s silence worried Lib. What a thing to do to a child, put her in beside a dying boy as a warming pan. “You must feel the loss of your brother.”

The girl’s face contorted. “’Tisn’t that. Or—I do, of course, Mrs. Elizabeth, but that’s not it.” She stepped up close to Lib and whispered, “Mammy and Dadda think he’s in heaven. Only, you see, we can’t be sure of that. Never despair, but never presume, they’re the two unforgiveable sins against the Holy Ghost. If Pat’s in purgatory, he’s burning—”

“Oh, Anna,” said Lib, breaking in. “You’re distressing yourself needlessly. He was only a boy.”

“But we’re all sinners. And he fell sick so fast, he didn’t get absolved in time.” Tears plummeted into the girl’s collar.

Confession—yes, Catholics clung to the notion of its unique power to wipe all sin away.

Anna wailed so Lib could hardly make out the words: “We have to be cleaned before we’re let in.”

“Very well, so your brother will be cleaned.” Lib’s tone absurdly practical, a nursery maid filling a bath.

“By fire, only by fire!”

“Oh, child…” This was an alien language and, frankly, one she didn’t want to learn. She patted the girl on the shoulder, awkwardly. Felt the knob of bone.

“Don’t put this in your paper,” said Lib over some kind of stew. (She’d found William Byrne dining in the small room at Ryan’s at half past one when she’d come in from her shift.) “Go on.”

Lib decided to take that as a promise. In a low voice: “Anna O’Donnell’s mourning her only brother, who died of a digestive complaint nine months ago.”

Byrne only nodded and wiped his plate with a crust.

Lib was nettled. “You doubt that’s enough to cause mental collapse in a child?”

He shrugged. “My whole country could be said to be in mourning, Mrs. Wright. After seven years of dearth and pestilence, what family was left unbroken?”

She didn’t know what to say. “Seven years, really?”

“The potato failed in ’45 and only came back fully in ’52,” he told her.

Discreetly Lib removed a fragment of bone from her mouth—rabbit, she thought. “Still, what does Anna know of these national questions? She may feel like the only girl who’s ever lost a brother.” The hymn droned in her head: So shall I never, never part from thee. “Perhaps she torments herself with wondering why he was taken and not her.”