The Wonder(66)

“Not actual bread,” muttered Anna.

“It’s actual bread that an actual child needs,” Lib told her. “Jesus shared the loaves and fishes with the five thousand, didn’t he?”

Anna swallowed slowly, as if she had a stone in her throat. “He was merciful because they were weak.”

“Because they were human, you mean. He didn’t say, Ignore your stomachs and keep listening while I preach. He gave them dinner.” Lib’s voice shook with wrath. “At the Last Supper he broke bread with his followers, didn’t he? What did he tell them, what were the exact words?”

Very low. “Take ye and eat.”

“There!”

“Once he’d consecrated it, the bread wasn’t bread anymore, it was him,” said Anna in a rush. “Like manna.” She stroked the leather binding of the Psalms as if the book were a cat. “For months I was fed on manna from heaven.”

“Anna!” Lib tugged the volume away from her, too hard, and it thumped onto the floor, scattering its cargo of precious cards.

“What’s all the commotion?” Rosaleen O’Donnell put her face around the door.

“Nothing,” said Lib, on her knees, heart pounding as she snatched up the tiny pictures.

A terrible pause.

Lib wouldn’t look up. She couldn’t afford to meet the woman’s eye in case her feelings showed.

“All right, pet?” Rosaleen asked her daughter.

“Yes, Mammy.”

Why didn’t Anna say the Englishwoman had thrown down her book and was bullying Anna to break her fast? Then the O’Donnells would no doubt lodge a complaint against Lib, and she’d be sent packing.

Anna said nothing else, and Rosaleen withdrew.

Once the two were alone again, Lib stood and put the book back in the child’s lap, the cards in a small pile on top. “I’m sorry they’re out of place.”

“I know where they all go.” Her thick fingers still deft, Anna tucked each one back where it belonged.

Lib reminded herself that she was quite prepared to lose this job. Hadn’t William Byrne been cashiered at sixteen for the seditious truths he’d told about his famished countrymen? That had probably been the making of the man. Not so much the loss itself as his surviving it, realizing that it was possible to fail and start again.

Anna took a long breath, and Lib heard the faintest of crackles. Fluid in the lungs, she registered. Which meant there was little time left.

I’ve seen you where you never were, and where you never will be.

“Will you listen to me, please?” Dear child, she almost added, but that was the mother’s soft language; Lib had to speak plainly. “You must see that you’re getting worse.”

Anna shook her head.

“Does this hurt?” Lib leaned down and pressed where the belly was roundest.

Agony shot across the child’s face.

“I’m sorry,” said Lib, only half sincerely. She tugged Anna’s cap off. “Look how much hair you’re losing every day.”

“The very hairs of your head are all numbered,” the girl whispered.

Science was the most magical force Lib knew. If anything could break the spell that held this girl—“The body’s a kind of engine,” she began, trying to summon up Miss N.’s most teacherly tone. “Digestion is the burning of fuel. Denied fuel, the body will destroy its own tissues.” She sat down and laid her palm on Anna’s belly again, gently this time. “This is the stove. The food you had the year you were ten, the amount you grew that year as a consequence—it’s all been used up in the past four months. Think of what you ate at nine, at eight. Burnt to cinders already.” Time rolled backwards sickeningly. “When you were seven, six, five. Every meal your father toiled to put on the table, every bite your mother cooked, is being consumed now by the desperate fire inside you.” Anna at four, three, before she’d formed her first sentence. At two, toddling; one. All the way back to her first day, her first suck of mother’s milk. “But the engine can’t run much longer without proper fuel, do you see?”

Anna’s calm was a layer of unbreakable crystal.

“It’s not just that there’s less of you every day,” Lib told her, “it’s that all your workings are winding down, beginning to seize up.”

“I’m not a machine.”

“Like a machine, that’s all I mean. No insult to your Creator,” Lib told her. “Think of him as the most ingenious of engineers.”

Anna shook her head. “I’m his child.”

“Could I speak to you in the kitchen, Mrs. Wright?” Rosaleen O’Donnell, in the doorway, long arms akimbo.

How much had the woman heard? “This is not a convenient time.”

“I must insist, ma’am.”

Lib stood up with a short sigh.

She’d be breaking the rule about leaving Anna alone in the room, but what did it matter now? She couldn’t imagine the child leaning out of bed to scrape crumbs out of some hidey-hole, and, frankly, if that were to happen, Lib would be glad. Cheat me, hoodwink me, so long as you eat.

She shut the door behind her so Anna wouldn’t hear a word.

Rosaleen O’Donnell was alone, looking out the smallest kitchen window. She turned and brandished a newspaper. “John Flynn got hold of this in Mullingar this morning.”