The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

  She let herself in and waited on one of the three-legged stools the Irish called creepies. Like babies, the Catholics, babbling as they squeezed their beads. Sister Michael’s head was up, at least, eyes on the little girl, but was she concentrating on her or on the prayers?

  Anna was in her nightdress already. Lib watched her lips shaping the words over and over: Now and at the hour of our death, amen. She trained her gaze in turn on the mother, the father, the poor cousin, wondering which of them was plotting to evade her scrutiny tonight.

  “Sister, you’ll stay for a cup of tea with us?” asked Rosaleen O’Donnell afterwards.

  “I won’t, Mrs. O’Donnell, but thank you kindly.”

  Anna’s mother was flaunting her preference for the nun, Lib decided. Of course they’d like Sister Michael, familiar and inoffensive.

  Rosaleen O’Donnell was using a little rake to tidy the embers into a circle. She set down three fresh sods like spokes in a wheel and sat back on her heels, crossing herself. Once the fresh turf flared up, she scooped ash from a bin and shook it over the flames, damping them down.

  Lib had a dizzying sense that time could fall into itself like the embers. That in these dim huts nothing had changed since the age of the Druids and nothing ever would. What was that line in the hymn they’d sung at Lib’s school? The night is dark, and I am far from home.

  While the nun was doing up her cloak in the bedroom, Lib asked her about the day.

  Three spoonfuls of water taken, according to Sister Michael, and a short walk. No symptoms any better or worse.

  “And if you’d seen the girl engage in any surreptitious behaviour,” asked Lib in a whisper, “I hope you’d consider this a relevant fact and mention it to me?”

  The nun nodded guardedly.

  It was maddening; what could they be missing? Still, the girl couldn’t hold out much longer. Lib would catch her out tonight, she was almost sure of it.

  She chanced saying one more thing. “Here’s a fact. Manna from heaven,” she murmured in Sister Michael’s ear, “that’s what I heard Anna tell a visitor this morning, that she’s living on manna from heaven.”

  The nun gave another tiny nod. Merely acknowledging what Lib had said, or affirming that such a thing was quite possible?

  “I thought you might know the scriptural reference.”

  Sister Michael furrowed her forehead. “The Book of Exodus, I believe.”

  “Thank you.” Lib tried to think of some more conversational note to end on. “It’s always intrigued me,” she said, letting her voice rise, “why you Sisters of Mercy are called walking nuns.”

  “We walk out into the world, you see, Mrs. Wright. We take the usual vows of any order—poverty, chastity, obedience—but also a fourth, service.”

  Lib had never heard the nun say so much before. “What kind of service?”

  Anna broke in: “To the sick, the poor, and the ignorant.”

  “Well remembered, child,” said the nun. “We vow to be of use.”

  As Sister Michael left the room, Rosaleen O’Donnell came in but didn’t say a word. Was she refusing to speak to the Englishwoman now, after this morning’s spat about the visitors? She turned her back on Lib, bending to wrap the tiny girl in her arms. Lib listened to the whispered endearments and watched Anna’s thick hands, dangling at her sides, empty.

  Then the woman straightened up and said, “Let you sleep well tonight, pet, and may only the sweetest of dreams come to your bed. Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here.” Dipping again, her forehead almost touching the child’s. “Ever this night be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.”

  “Amen.” The girl joined in on the last word. “Good night, Mammy.”

  “Good night, pet.”

  “Good night, Mrs. O’Donnell,” Lib put in, conspicuously civil.

  After a few minutes, the slavey came in with an unshaded lamp and set it down. She struck a match and lit the wick till it flared, then crossed herself. “There you go, ma’am.”

  “That’s a great help, Kitty,” said Lib. The lamp was an old-fashioned thing with a burner like a forked stick inside a conical glass chimney, but its light was snowy white. She sniffed. “Not whale oil?”

  “’Tis burning fluid.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  This mysterious burning fluid smelled something like turpentine; alcohol in the mix, perhaps.

  We must be scavengers in a time of calamity; that line of Miss N.’s came back to Lib now. At Scutari the nurses had had to root through storerooms for chloride of lime, tincture of opium, blankets, socks, firewood, flour, lice combs… What they couldn’t find—or couldn’t persuade the purveyor to release—they had to improvise. Torn-up sheets became slings, sacks were stuffed to make tiny mattresses; desperation was the mother of the makeshift.

  “Here’s the can, and the lamp scissors,” said Kitty. “After six hours you snuff it and trim off the charred bit and top it up and light the yoke again. And watch out for draughts, the fellow said, or they can shoot soot through the room like a black rain!”

  The child was on her knees by the bed, pressing her hands flat together in prayer.

  “Good night, pet,” Kitty told her with a wide yawn, and she trudged back to the kitchen.

  Lib opened to a new page and took up her metallic pencil.

  Tuesday, August 9, 9:27 p.m.

  Pulse: 93 beats per minute.

  Lungs: 14 respirations per minute.

  Tongue: no change.

  Her first night shift. She’d never minded working these hours; there was something steadying about the quiet. She made a last pass over the sheets with the flat of her hand. Searching for hidden crumbs had already become routine.

  Lib’s eyes fell on the whitewashed wall, and she thought of the dung, hair, blood, and buttermilk mixed into it. How could such a surface ever be clean? She imagined Anna sucking it for a trace of nourishment, like those wayward babies who ate fistfuls of earth. But no, that would stain her mouth, surely. Besides, Anna was never alone anymore, not since the watch had begun. Candles, the girl’s own clothes, pages out of her books, fragments of her own skin—she had no chance to nibble on any of these things unobserved.

  Anna finished her prayers by whispering the Dorothy one. Then she made the sign of the cross and climbed under the sheet and the grey blanket. Her head nestled into the thin bolster.

  “Have you no other pillow?” asked Lib.

  A tiny smile. “I didn’t have one at all till the whooping cough.”

  It was a paradox: Lib meant to expose the girl’s stratagems to the world, but she wanted her to get a good night’s sleep in the meantime. Old nursing habits died hard.

  “Kitty,” she called at the door. The O’Donnells had disappeared already, but the maid was setting up an old tick on the base of the settle. “Could I have a second pillow for Anna?”

  “Sure take mine,” said the maid, holding out a lumpen shape in a cotton slip.

  “No, no—”

  “Go on, I’ll hardly notice, I’m that ready to drop.”

  “What’s the matter, Kitty?” Rosaleen O’Donnell’s voice from the alcove; the outshot, that was what they called it.

  “She’s wanting another pillow for the child.”

  The mother pushed aside the flour-sack curtain. “Is Anna not well?”

  “I simply wondered if there might be a spare pillow,” said Lib, awkward.

  “Have the both of them,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell, carrying her pillow across the floor and piling it on the maid’s. “Lovey, are you all right?” she demanded, poking her head into the bedroom.

  “I’m grand,” said Anna.

  “One will do,” said Lib, taking Kitty’s pillow.

  Mrs. O’Donnell sniffed. “The smell of that lamp’s not making you sick, is it? Or stinging your eyes?”

  “No, Mammy.”

  The woman was parading her conc
ern, that was it, making it seem as if the hardhearted nurse was doing the child damage by insisting on a brutally bright light.

  Finally the door was shut, and nurse and child were alone. “You must be tired,” Lib said to Anna.

  A long moment. “I don’t know.”

  “It may be hard to drop off, as you’re not used to the lamp. Would you like to read? Or have me read you something?”

  No answer.

  Lib went closer to the girl, who turned out to be asleep already. Snowy cheeks as round as peaches.

  Living on manna from heaven. What hogwash. What exactly was manna, some sort of bread?

  The Book of Exodus, that was in the Old Testament. But the only volume of Scripture Lib could find in Anna’s treasure box was the Psalms. She riffled through it, careful not to disturb the little cards. No mention of manna that she could see. One passage caught her eye. The children that are strangers have lied to me, strange children have faded away, and have halted from their paths. What on earth did that mean? Anna was a strange child, certainly. She’d halted from the ordinary path of girlhood when she’d decided to lie to the whole world.

  It came to Lib then that the question to ask was not how a child might commit such a fraud, but why? Children told fibs, yes, but surely only one with a perverse nature would invent this particular story. Anna showed not the slightest interest in making her fortune. The young craved attention, perhaps even fame—but at the price of an empty belly, an aching body, the constant fretting about how to carry on the hoax?

  Unless the O’Donnells had come up with the monstrous scheme, of course, and bullied Anna into it so they could profit from the visitors beating a path to their door. But she didn’t seem like a child under compulsion. She had a quiet firmness about her, an air of self-command unusual in one so young.

  Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib’s experience, those who wouldn’t cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they’d entered and what they’d done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives’ smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets.

  The holy cards were distracting her, with their fancy details—edges like filigree lace, some of them—and exotic names. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Philip Neri, Saint Margaret of Scotland, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary; like a set of dolls in national dress. He can pick anyone, Anna had said, any sinner or unbeliever. A whole series about the final sufferings of Christ, Our Lord Stripped of his Garments. Who could think it a good idea to put such grim images in the hands of a child, and a sensitive one at that?

  One card showed a little girl in a boat with a dove over her head: Le Divin Pilote. Did the title mean that Christ was piloting her boat invisibly? Or perhaps the pilot was the dove. Wasn’t the Holy Ghost often shown as a bird? Or was the figure Lib had taken for a girl actually Jesus, with childish proportions and long hair?

  Next, a woman in purple—the Virgin Mary, Lib guessed—bringing a flock of sheep to drink at a pool with a marble rim. What a curious mixture of elegance and rusticity. In the next card, the same woman was bandaging a round-bellied sheep. That dressing would never stay on, in Lib’s view. Mes brebis ne périssent jamais et personne ne les ravira de ma main. She struggled to make sense of the French. Her somethings never perished and no person could ravish them from her hand?

  Anna stirred, her head rolling off the two pillows to lie crooked against her shoulder. Lib quickly closed the cards up in their book.

  But Anna slept on. Angelic, as all children looked in that rapt state. The creamy lines of her face proved nothing, Lib reminded herself; sleep could make even adults look innocent. Whited sepulchres.

  Which reminded her of something: the Madonna and Child. She reached past the books in the little chest and took out the candlestick. What might Anna have entrusted to this pastel-painted figurine? Lib shook it; no sound. It was a hollow tube, open at the bottom. She peered up into the shadowy head of the Virgin, looking for a tiny store of some richly sustaining food. When she put the candlestick to her nose, she smelled nothing. Her probing finger felt… something she could barely brush with her short nail. A miniature packet?

  The scissors in her bag. Lib slid the blades down the rough inside of the statuette, digging. A hook was what she needed, really, but how to find one in the middle of the night? She gouged harder—

  And hissed as the whole thing cracked in two. China child broke away from china mother in her hands.

  The packet—insubstantial, after all that—peeled away from its hiding place. When Lib undid the paper, all she found was a lock of hair; dark, but not red like Anna’s. The yellowing paper had been torn, apparently at random, out of something called the Freeman’s Journal towards the end of the preceding year.

  She’d broken one of the child’s treasures for nothing, like some clumsy novice on her first shift. Lib set the pieces back in the box with the hair packet between them.

  Anna slept on. There was nowhere else for Lib to look, nothing else to do except stare at the girl like some worshipper venerating an icon. Even if the child was somehow stealing the odd bite, how could it be enough to dull the pangs of hunger? Why weren’t they racking her till she woke?

  Lib angled the hard-backed rope chair so it faced the bed directly. Sat and squared her shoulders. She looked at her watch: 10:49. No need to press the button to learn the hour, but she did anyway, just for the sensation—the dull thud against her thumb, ten times, rapid and strong at first, then getting slower and fainter.

  Lib rubbed her eyes and fixed them on the girl. Could you not watch one hour with me? She remembered that line from the Gospels. But she wasn’t watching with Anna. Nor watching over her, to keep her safe from harm. Just watching her.

  Anna seemed restless at times. She rolled herself up in the blanket like a fern furling. Was she cold? There wasn’t another blanket; something else Lib should have asked for while Kitty was still up. She draped a plaid shawl over the child. Anna muttered as if saying prayers, but that didn’t prove she was awake. Lib didn’t make a sound, just in case. (Miss N. never let her nurses wake a patient, because the jarring effect could do great mischief.)

  The lamp needed trimming twice and refilling once; it was a cumbersome, stinking thing. For a while after midnight, it sounded as if the O’Donnells were talking by the fire next door in the kitchen. Refining their plots? Or just chatting in the desultory way people often did between their first sleep and their second? Lib couldn’t make out Kitty’s voice; perhaps the maid was exhausted enough to sleep through it all.

  At five in the morning, when the nun tapped on the bedroom door, Anna was taking the long, regular breaths that meant the deepest slumber.

  “Sister Michael.” Lib leapt up, stiff-legged.

  The nun nodded pleasantly.

  Anna stirred and rolled over. Lib held her breath, waiting to be sure the child was still asleep. “I couldn’t find a Bible,” she whispered. “What was this manna, exactly?”

  A small hesitation; clearly the nun was deciding whether or not this was the kind of conversation their instructions allowed. “If I remember right, it fell every day to feed the children of Israel when they were fleeing across the desert from their persecutors.” As she spoke, Sister Michael took a black volume out of her bag and leafed through the shimmering onionskin. She peered at one page, then the one before, then the one before that. She put one broad fingertip to the paper.

  Lib read over her shoulder.

  In the morning, a dew lay round about the camp. And when it had covered the face of the earth, it appeared in the wilderness small, and as it were beaten with a pestle, like unto the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another: Manhu! which signifieth: What is this! for they knew not what it was. And Moses said to the
m: This is the bread, which the Lord hath given you to eat.

  “A grain, then?” asked Lib. “Solid, even though it’s described as a dew?”

  The nun’s finger shifted down the page and came to rest at another line: And it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste thereof like to flour with honey.

  It was the simplicity of it that struck Lib, the silliness: a child’s dream of picking up sweet stuff from the ground. Like finding a gingerbread house in the woods. “Is that all there is?”

  “And the children of Israel ate manna forty years,” the nun read. Then she slid the book shut.

  So Anna O’Donnell believed herself to be living off some kind of celestial seed flour. Manhu, meaning “What is this?” Lib was strongly tempted to lean in close to the other woman and say, Admit it, Sister Michael, for once can’t you suspend your prejudices and acknowledge that this is all balderdash?

  But that would be exactly the kind of conferral that McBrearty had forbidden. (For fear the Englishwoman might prove too skilled at brushing away the old cobwebs of superstition with the broom of logic?) Besides, perhaps it was better not to ask. It was bad enough, to Lib’s mind, that the two of them were working under the supervision of an aged quack. If she were to be confirmed in her suspicion that her fellow nurse believed a child could live off bread from the Beyond, how could she carry on working with the woman?

  In the doorway stood Rosaleen O’Donnell.

  “Your daughter’s not awake yet,” said Lib.

  The face disappeared.

  “This lamp’s to be kept burning all night from now on,” she told the nun.

  “Very good.”

  Finally, a small humiliation: Lib opened the little chest and pointed to the broken candlestick. “I’m afraid this was knocked over. Could you pass on my apologies to Anna?”

  Sister Michael pursed her lips as she fitted Mother and Child back together.

  Lib picked up her cloak and bag.

  She shivered on the walk to the village. Something was kinked in her spine. She was hungry, she supposed; she hadn’t had a bite since supper at the inn yesterday before her night shift. Her mind was foggy. She was tired. This was Wednesday morning, and she hadn’t slept since Monday. What was worse, she was being outwitted by a little girl.