The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

  He nodded back. His spade was a shape Lib had never seen before, the blade bent into wings.

  “Is that another prayer you’re obliged to say?” she asked the child when they’d passed.

  “Blessing the work? Yes, otherwise he might be hurt.”

  “What, he’d be wounded that you didn’t think of him?” asked Lib with a touch of mockery.

  Anna looked puzzled. “No, he might cut a toe off with the foot slane.”

  Ah, so it was a sort of protective magic.

  The girl was singing now, in her breathy voice.

  Deep in thy wounds, Lord,

  Hide and shelter me,

  So shall I never,

  Never part from thee.

  The stirring tune didn’t fit the morbid words, in Lib’s view. The very idea of hiding deep inside a wound, like a maggot—

  “There’s Dr. McBrearty,” said Anna.

  The old man was scuttling towards them from the cabin, lapels askew. He took off his hat to Lib, then turned to the child. “Your mother told me I’d find you out taking the air, Anna. Delighted to see you with roses in your cheeks.”

  She was rather red in the face, but from the exertion of walking, Lib thought; roses was stretching a point.

  “Still generally well?” McBrearty murmured to Lib.

  Miss N. was very stern on the subject of discussing the ill in their hearing. “You go on ahead of us,” Lib suggested to Anna. “Why don’t you pick some flowers for your room?”

  The child obeyed. Lib kept her eyes on her, though. It occurred to her that there might be berries around, unripe nuts, even… Might a hysteric—if that’s what Anna was—snatch mouthfuls of food without being conscious of what she did?

  “I don’t quite know how to answer your question,” she told the doctor. Thinking of Standish’s phrase half starving.

  McBrearty poked the soft ground with his cane.

  Lib hesitated, then made herself say the name. “Did Dr. Standish get a chance to speak to you last night after he left Anna?” She was ready with her best arguments against forcible feeding.

  The old man’s face screwed up as if he’d bitten into something sour. “His tone was most ungentlemanly. After I did him the politeness of letting him, of all the petitioners, into the cabin to see the girl!”

  She waited.

  But clearly McBrearty was not going to report the scolding he’d received. “Is her respiration still healthy?” he asked instead.

  Lib nodded.

  “Heart sounds, pulse?”

  “Yes,” she conceded.

  “Sleeping well?”

  Another nod.

  “She seems cheerful,” he noted, “and her voice is still strong. No vomiting or diarrhoea?”

  “Well, I’d hardly expect that in someone who’s not eating.”

  The old man’s watery eyes lit up. “So you believe she is indeed living without—”

  Lib interrupted him. “I mean, not taking in enough to lead to any kind of voiding. Anna produces no excrement, and very little urine,” she pointed out. “This suggests to me that she’s getting some food—or was until the watch began, more likely—but not sufficient for there to be any waste.” Should Lib mention her notion about night-feedings to which Anna had been oblivious all these months? She quailed; it suddenly sounded as implausible as any of the old man’s own theories. “Don’t you think her eyes are beginning to bulge even more?” she asked. “Her skin’s covered with bruises and crusty patches, and her gums bleed. Scurvy, perhaps, I was thinking. Or pellagra, even. Certainly she seems anaemic.”

  “Good Mrs. Wright.” McBrearty gouged the soft grass with his cane. “Are we beginning to stray beyond our remit?” An indulgent father reproving a child.

  “I beg your pardon, Doctor,” she said stiffly.

  “Leave such mysteries to those who’ve been trained for them.”

  Lib would have given a lot to know where McBrearty had been trained, and how thoroughly, and whether it had been in this century or the last.

  “Your job is simply to observe.”

  But there was nothing simple about such a task; Lib knew that now as she hadn’t three days ago.

  “’Tis her!” A screech in the distance. It was coming from a top-heavy wagon parked outside the O’Donnells’. Several of the passengers were waving.

  Besieged already, even this early in the day. Where had Anna strayed? Lib’s head whipped around till she found the girl, inhaling the scent of some blossom. She couldn’t bear the prospect of the fawning, the flattery, the intrusive questions. “I must take her inside, Doctor.” She ran over and seized Anna’s arm.

  “Please—”

  “No, Anna, you’re not to speak to them. We have a rule and we must stick to it.”

  She hurried the girl towards the cabin, cutting the corner of a field, the doctor at their heels. Anna stumbled and one of her big boots went sideways.

  “Hurt?” asked Lib.

  A shake of the head.

  So Lib pulled her on, around the side of the cabin—why didn’t it have a back door?—and through the knot of visitors arguing with Rosaleen O’Donnell, who was floured to the elbows.

  “Here she comes, the wee wonder,” cried one man.

  A woman pushed up close. “If you’d let me take hold of the hem of your dress, sweetheart—”

  Lib interposed her shoulder, shielding the child.

  “—even a drop of your spit, or a dab of the oil of your fingers to mend this sore on my neck!”

  Only when they were all inside and she’d slammed the door behind Dr. McBrearty did Lib realize that Anna was gasping, and not just out of fear of the grabbing hands. The girl was frail, Lib reminded herself. What kind of slapdash nurse would strain her beyond her strength? How Miss N. would have scolded.

  “Are you ill, lovey?” demanded Rosaleen O’Donnell.

  Anna sank down on the nearest stool.

  “Just out of breath, I believe,” said McBrearty.

  “I’ll warm a flannel for you.” The mother scraped her hands clean before she hung up a cloth at the fire.

  “You got a little chilled on your walk,” McBrearty told the girl.

  “She’s always chilled,” Lib muttered. The child’s hands were blue. Lib brought her over to a high-backed chair beside the hearth and chafed the thick fingers between her own—lightly, for fear of hurting them.

  When the cloth was warmed, Rosaleen wrapped it tenderly around Anna’s throat.

  Lib would have liked to feel the cloth first and make sure there was nothing edible hidden in it, but her nerve failed.

  “And how are you getting along with Mrs. Wright, my dear?” asked the doctor.

  “Very well,” Anna told him.

  Was the child being polite? All Lib could remember were moments in which she’d been snappish or stern with the girl.

  “She’s teaching me riddles,” added Anna.

  “Charming!” The doctor held the child’s swollen wrist between his fingers, checking her pulse.

  At the table by the back window, beside Kitty, Mrs. O’Donnell paused in the work of slapping oatcakes into shape. “What kind of riddles?”

  “Clever ones,” Anna told her mother.

  “Feeling a little better in yourself now?” McBrearty asked.

  She nodded, smiling.

  “Well, I’ll be off, then. Rosaleen, good day to you,” he said with a bow.

  “And you, Doctor. God bless you for stopping in.”

  When the door had shut behind McBrearty, Lib felt flat, grim. He’d barely listened to her; he was ignoring Standish’s warnings. Caught up in his own private fascination with the wee wonder.

  She noticed the empty stool by the door. “I see the strongbox is gone.”

  “We sent it to Mr. Thaddeus by one of Corcoran’s boys, along with the little gloves in the walnut shell,” said Kitty.

  “Every penny gone to aid and comfort the needy,” Rosaleen O’Donnell threw in Lib’s direction. “Th
ink of that, Anna. You’re storing up riches in heaven.”

  How Rosaleen basked in the reflected glory. The mother was the genius behind the plot, not just one conspirator among others; Lib was almost sure of that. She averted her gaze now so her hostility wouldn’t show.

  On the mantel, inches from Lib’s face, the new photograph stood beside the old one of the whole family. The little girl looked much the same in both—the same neat limbs, the not-quite-of-this-world expression. As if time didn’t pass for Anna; as if she were preserved behind glass.

  But the really odd one was the brother, it struck Lib. Pat’s adolescent face was similar to his sister’s softer one, allowing for the fact that boys parted their hair on the right. But his eyes; something wrong with their glitter. The lips dark, as if rouged. He leaned back on his indomitable mother like a much younger child, or a drunken fop. What was that line in the psalm? Strange children have faded away.

  Anna spread her hands to warm at the fire, like an elegant fan.

  How to find out more about him? “You must miss your son, Mrs. O’Donnell.”

  A pause. And then: “I do, of course,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell. She was cutting up elderly parsnips now, wielding the cleaver with one big gaunt hand. “Ah well. God fits the back for the burden, as they say.”

  Milking it rather, Lib thought. “Is it long since you’ve heard from him?”

  The cleaver stilled, and Rosaleen O’Donnell stared at her. “He looks down on us.”

  What, had Pat O’Donnell done well in the New World, then? Too well to bother writing to his plebeian family?

  “From heaven.” That was Kitty.

  Lib blinked.

  The slavey pointed upwards to make sure the Englishwoman understood. “’Twas last November he died.”

  Lib’s hand flew up to cover her mouth.

  “He wasn’t fifteen,” added the slavey.

  “Oh, Mrs. O’Donnell,” cried Lib, “you must forgive my tactlessness. I didn’t realize—” Gesturing at the daguerreotype, where the boy seemed to watch her with contempt, or was it mirth? It wasn’t taken before his death, she realized, but after.

  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.”

  “She seems depressed in her spirits, then?”

  “At times,” said Lib uncertainly. “But sometimes quite otherwise: lit up with a secret joy.”

  “Speaking of secrets, you haven’t yet caught her trying to get hold of any food on the sly?”

  Lib shook her head. Under her breath: “I’ve come round to the opinion that Anna truly believes she’s living on nothing.” She hesitated, but she had to try her idea out on someone. “It’s occurred to
me that one of the household, taking advantage of the child’s delusional state, may have been dosing her in her sleep.”

  “Oh, come now.” William Byrne scraped the red curls out of his face.

  “Such a subterfuge would make sense of Anna’s conviction that she’s not eaten for four months. If she’s been quite unconscious while someone has been pouring slop down her throat—”

  “Possible. But likely?” He picked up his pencil. “May I air this in my next dispatch?”

  “You may not! It’s speculation, not fact.”

  “I’d call it the expert opinion of her nurse.”

  Through her panic, Lib felt a sting of pleasure that Byrne was taking her seriously. “Besides, I’ve been strictly enjoined not to express any opinions until I report to the committee on Sunday week.”

  He threw down his pencil. “So why tantalize me, then, if I can’t use a word of it?”

  “My apologies,” said Lib crisply. “Let’s consider the subject closed.”

  His grin was rueful. “I’m thrown back on reporting gossip, then. And not all of it benevolent. The girl’s far from being a universal favourite in these parts, you know.”

  “You mean some assume she’s a liar?”

  “Of course, or worse. Last night I stood a mad-eyed labourer a drink, and he shared his conviction that the fairies are behind it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The reason Anna doesn’t eat is that she’s some kind of monstrous changeling disguised as a girl.”

  The other crowd… waiting on her hand and foot. That’s what Lib had heard a bearded farmer say the night she’d arrived. He must have meant that Anna had an unseen horde of fairy attendants.

  “The fellow even had a remedy to propose. If ’twas beat, or put to the fire even”—the brogue Byrne put on was brutally accurate—“why, then, ’twould go back where it came from!”

  Lib shuddered. It was this sort of drunken ignorance she found monstrous.

  “Have you ever had a patient remotely like Anna O’Donnell?”

  She shook her head. “In private nursing I’ve encountered specious cases—healthy people who pretend to be in an interesting state of disease. But Anna’s the opposite. An underfed child who maintains she’s in glowing health.”