The Wonder(69)

A merciful silence between them, at last.

Anna twitched, and turned her face against the threadbare velvet. One drop of rain, then another. Lib clawed at the black canopy of the bath chair with its rusty hinges, and Byrne helped her unfold it over the sleeping child a moment before the rain slammed down.

She couldn’t sleep in her room at Ryan’s, couldn’t read, couldn’t do anything but fret. She knew she should have some supper, but her throat felt sealed up.

At midnight the lamp was burning low on Anna’s dresser, and the child was a handful of dark hair across the pillow, her body hardly interrupting the plane of the blankets. All evening Lib had talked to the child—at the child—until she was hoarse.

Now she sat close to the bed making herself think of a tube. A very narrow, flexible, greased one, no wider than a straw, snaking between the girl’s lips, so slowly, so very gently that Anna might possibly even sleep on. Lib imagined trickling fresh milk down that tube into the child’s stomach, just a little at a time.

Because what if Anna’s obsession was the result of her fast as much as its cause? After all, who could think straight on an empty stomach? Perhaps, paradoxically, the child could learn to feel normal hunger again only once she had some food in her. If Lib tube-fed Anna, really, she’d be fortifying the girl. Tugging Anna back from the brink, giving her time to come to her senses. It wouldn’t be using force so much as taking responsibility; Nurse Wright, alone out of all the grown-ups, brave enough to do what was needed to save Anna O’Donnell from herself.

Lib’s teeth pressed together so hard they ached.

Didn’t adults often do painful things to children for their own good? Or nurses to patients? Hadn’t Lib debrided burns and picked shrapnel out of wounds, dragging more than a few patients back into the land of the living by rough means? And after all, lunatics and prisoners survived force-feeding several times a day.

She pictured Anna waking, beginning to struggle, choking, retching, her eyes wet with betrayal. Lib holding the girl’s small nose, pressing her head down on the pillow. Lie still, my dear. Let me. You must. Pushing in the tube, inexorable.

No! So loud in her head, Lib thought for a moment she’d shouted it.

It wouldn’t work. That was what she should have told Byrne this afternoon. Physiologically, yes, she supposed slop forced down Anna’s throat would supply her with energy, but it wouldn’t keep her alive. If anything, it would speed her withdrawal from the world. Crack her spirit.

Lib counted the breaths for a full minute on her watch. Twenty-five, too many, dangerously fast. But still so perfectly regular. For all the thinning hair, the dun patches, the sore at the corner of the mouth, Anna was beautiful as any sleeping child.

For months I was fed on manna from heaven. That’s what she’d said this morning. I live on manna from heaven, she’d told her Spiritualist visitors last week. But today, Lib noticed, it had come out differently, in a wistful past tense: For months I was fed on manna from heaven.

Unless Lib had heard it wrong? Not for months. Four months, was that it? Four months I was fed on manna from heaven. Anna had started her fast four months ago, in April, and subsisted on manna—whatever secret means of nourishment she meant by that—until the arrival of the nurses.

But no, this made no sense, because then she should have begun to show the effects of a complete fast no more than a couple of days later. Lib hadn’t noticed any such deterioration until Byrne had alerted her to it on Monday of this second week. Could a child really have gone seven days before flagging?

Lib flicked back through her memorandum book now, a series of telegraphic dispatches from a distant battlefront. Every day during the first week had been much the same until— Refused mother’s greeting.

She stared at the neat words. Saturday morning, six days into the watch. Not a medical notation at all; Lib had jotted it down simply because it was an unexplained change in the child’s behaviour.

How could she have been so blind?

Not just a greeting twice a day; an embrace in which the big bony woman’s frame had blocked the child’s face from view. A kiss like that of a great bird feeding her nestling.

Lib broke Miss N.’s rule and shook the girl awake.

Anna blinked, cringing away from the harsh light of the lamp.

Lib whispered, “When you were fed on manna, who—” Not who gave it to you, because Anna would say that manna came from God. “Who brought it to you?”

She was expecting resistance, denial. Some elaborate cover story about angels.

“Mammy,” murmured Anna.

Had the girl always been ready to answer so candidly the moment she was asked? If only Lib had been a little less contemptuous of pious legends, she might have paid more attention to what the child was trying to tell her.

She remembered the way Rosaleen O’Donnell had sidled in for the permitted embrace morning and evening, smiling but oddly silent. So full of chatter at other times, but not when she came to hug her daughter. Yes, Rosaleen always kept her mouth shut tight until after she’d bent down to wrap her whole body around Anna.

Lib moved closer to the small ear. “She passed it from her mouth to yours?”

“By a holy kiss,” said Anna, nodding, with no sign of shame.

Fury shot through Lib’s veins. So the mother had chewed food to pap in the kitchen, then fed Anna right in front of the nurses, making sport of them twice a day. “What does manna taste like?” she asked. “Milky, or porridge-like?”