The Wonder(86)

Eight o’clock. Anna was shaking. “How long,” she kept mumbling. “Be it done. Be it done.”

Lib had Kitty warm flannels at the fire in the kitchen and then laid them over Anna, tucking them in on both sides. She caught an acrid whiff. You, she thought. Every flawed, scrawny, or bloated part, every inch of the real, mortal girl, I treasure you.

“Will you be all right if we go to the votive mass, pet?” asked Rosaleen O’Donnell, coming in and hovering over her daughter.

Anna nodded.

“Sure now?” asked the father at the door.

“Go on,” the girl breathed.

Get out, get out, Lib thought.

But then, after the couple withdrew, she hurried after them. “Say good-bye.” Her voice a low caw.

The O’Donnells goggled at her.

Lib whispered, “It could come at any time now.”

“But—”

“There isn’t always a warning.”

Rosaleen’s face was a torn mask. She returned to the bedside. “I think maybe we shouldn’t go out tonight, pet.”

Now Lib cursed herself. Her one chance, the one possible time to put her outrageous plan into action, and she’d thrown it away. Did she lack the nerve, was that it?

No; it was a matter of guilt, because of what she was about to try. All she knew was, she had to let the O’Donnells take a proper leave of their child.

“Go on, Mammy.” Anna’s head lifted heavily off the bed. “Go to the mass for me.”

“Will we?”

“Kiss.” Her swollen hands reached for her mother’s head.

Rosaleen let herself be pulled down. She placed one kiss on Anna’s forehead. “Good-bye now, lovey.”

Lib sat turning the pages of All the Year Round blindly so none of them would guess how much she wanted this to be over.

Malachy leaned over his wife and child.

“Pray for me, Dadda.”

“Always,” he said thickly. “We’ll be seeing you later.”

Anna nodded, then let her head drop onto the pillow.

Lib waited for them to go into the kitchen. Their voices, Kitty’s. Then the thump of the front door. Merciful silence.

Now it began.

She watched Anna’s narrow chest rise and fall. Listened to the small creak of her lungs.

She hurried into the empty kitchen and found a can of milk. Sniffed it to make sure it was quite fresh, and found a clean bottle. She half filled that with milk, stopped it up with a cork, and chose a bone spoon. There was a discarded oatcake too; Lib broke off a piece. She wrapped everything in a napkin.

Back in the bedroom, Lib drew up her chair very close to Anna. Was it sheer hubris to believe that she could succeed where everyone else had failed? She wished she had more time; greater powers of persuasion. O God, if by any chance there is a God, teach me to speak with the tongue of angels.

“Anna,” she said, “listen to me. I have a message for you.”

“From who?”

Lib pointed upwards. Her eyes rose too, as if she saw visions on the ceiling.

“But you don’t believe,” said Anna.

“You’ve changed me,” Lib told her, honestly enough. “Didn’t you once tell me that he can pick anyone?”

“That’s true.”

“Here’s the message: What if you could be another girl instead of yourself?”

The eyes went wide.

“If you could wake up tomorrow and find that you’re somebody else, a little girl who’s never done anything wrong, would you like that?”

Anna nodded like a very small child.

“Well, this is holy milk.” Lib held up the bottle as solemnly as any priest in front of an altar. “A special gift from God.”

The girl didn’t blink.

What gave Lib’s tone conviction was that it was all true: Didn’t the divine sunshine soak into the divine grass, didn’t the divine cow eat the divine grass, didn’t she give the divine milk for the sake of her divine calf? Wasn’t it all a gift? Deep in her breasts Lib remembered how her milk had run down whenever she’d heard the mewing of her daughter.

“If you drink this,” she went on, “you won’t be Anna O’Donnell anymore. Anna will die tonight, and God will accept her sacrifice and welcome her and Pat into heaven.”

The girl didn’t move a muscle. Her face a blank.

“You’ll be another little girl. A new one. The moment you take a spoonful of this holy milk—it has such power that your life will start all over again,” said Lib. She was rushing so fast now that she stumbled over the words. “You’re going to be a girl called Nan who’s only eight years old and lives far, far away from here.”

Anna’s gaze was dark.

Here’s where it was all going to fall apart. Of course the girl was sharp enough to see right through this fiction, if she chose. All Lib could gamble on was her instinct that Anna must be desperate for some way out, longing for a different story, inclined to try something as improbable as tying a rag on a miracle tree.

A moment went by. Another. Another. Lib didn’t breathe.

Finally the muddy eyes lit like fireworks. “Yes.”

“Are you ready?”

“Anna will die?” A whisper. “That’s a promise?”