The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

“What do you mean?” He drops the comb on the dresser and looks at her, looks worried.

  A lump comes up in her throat. She presses her knees together tightly. Folds her shaking hands. “In the classroom—yesterday—right after I’d dismissed the kids, I, I …”

  He runs his hands through his hair, keeps watching her. She can’t tell what he’s thinking.

  “I saw a girl’s face. She had blue eyes. And she said—”

  “A face spoke to you?” His eyes darken. Everything about his face tightens.

  The window is still open and the waves shush in and out, in and out. Somewhere, the discordant squawk of a gull.

  “Paul,” she says, realizing she is, after all, unprepared to talk about the voice, to say what she’d heard—Remember the Valentine’s dress—without sounding crazy and frightening him more, “would you take Fiona to dinner by yourself? I know, it’s Thanksgiving, it’s just that, if I rest—”

  For a moment, he says nothing. Then suddenly, his face softens. “Please come with us,” he says gently. He walks over to her, takes her hands and brings her to her feet. “We came here to relax, right? We’re both really stressed, that’s all. You probably just fell asleep for a bit, had a dream.” He kisses her cheek. “Let’s stop thinking of all that, okay? I’ll order an amazing bottle of wine—we won’t talk about work. I won’t talk about work, I promise. We’ll listen to Fiona’s stories and eat and drink and come back here and sleep it off. I’ll get her ready; you don’t have to do a thing. Just wear what you have on.” He kisses her forehead. “Okay?”

  She stares at her bare feet. Thinks of Fiona. “Yes, okay,” she says, her voice thin as thread.

  He walks into Fiona’s room and minutes later Fiona emerges, dressed in an orange sweatshirt, jeans, and red Keds with purple laces, an outfit she’d planned especially for Thanksgiving dinner. She comes to Nora, spreads her arms wide and says, “Well, how do I look?”

  “Beautiful!” Nora says. Her anxiety falls away then, and all that matters, all that she wants, is to keep that smile on Fiona’s face. “You’re springtime in November!”

  “Thank you, Mommy,” Fiona says shyly, cheeks flushing pink.

  “Okay, then. Let’s go! That turkey won’t eat itself!” Paul says, helping a giggling Fiona with her jacket. As they leave, Nora reaches for Fiona’s hand and whispers, “Happy Thanksgiving” into her wispy blonde hair.

  “Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Mommy,” Fiona says, clutching Nora’s hand tight, and the three walk downstairs to dinner like any other family.

  All eight tables in the rustic restaurant have a view of the ocean, though no one can see out because the windows are steamed up, dripping with the breath of the patrons. Everywhere, the hint of mildew and thick smell of smoke from the wood stove in the corner. Forks and knives clink on plates and voices rise and fall. Tonight there is an “All-you-can-eat Thanksgiving dinner for only $10.95!” and people are already lined up at the buffet: a young woman with a baby in a stroller, a stooped-over man holding the elbow of an elderly woman (they are wearing matching dark-green flannel shirts) who is using a walker, a young couple touching and kissing each other, everyone talking and laughing. A huge ginger cat slips between the tables, and Neil Diamond blares from the stereo. Fiona bounces with energy—a sense of camaraderie in the air. Nora is glad she came.

  A waitress in her seventies with wide hips and mostly gray hair pulled tight into a ponytail with turquoise dolphins dangling from her ears escorts them to their table.

  “You’re gonna want to get in line ASAP,” she says. “Last year we ran out of gravy before sunset.”

  Paul orders “the best Chardonnay you have,” and they head for the line holding their big white dinner plates. There is a ten-foot long salad bar loaded with greens and toppings and also, because of the occasion, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and triangles of pumpkin pie with a plop of whipped cream on top. At the end of the salad bar a huge galvanized iron pot sits, steaming with clam chowder. A large sweaty man in a white chef’s jacket stands next to the pot and slices up a gigantic roasted turkey and shouts, “Happy Thanksgiving!” every five minutes or so. Paul, Nora, and Fiona load up their plates and make their way back to the table.

  Once they are seated, Paul pours the wine, flashes Nora an I-told-you-so smile, and they clink glasses. The cool stream of wine floats down her throat, and soon the face with the blue eyes is only a vague lingering under her ribs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  December 14, 1996

  Nora hadn’t been able to get the face or the voice or the ache out of her head, so she’d made an appointment with her doctor. When he couldn’t find anything wrong, he referred her to a neurologist who ran test after test and ruled out narcolepsy, epilepsy and Parkinson’s, hemorrhages and seizures, family history, and cultural isolation.

  “Cultural isolation?” Her nose wrinkled up. “But I’m a teacher.”

  He’d only looked at her suspiciously and asked her if she took amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, LSD, PCP? And when she glared at him with an icy quiet, he just shrugged and said hallucinations aren’t well understood and maybe she should see a psychiatrist. She’d bitten her lip. He shrugged again and said, “Emotional trauma can activate a hallucinatory region of the brain, trigger an event.”

  “A region? An event?” Her head began to spin, picturing wild fiestas in Spain and family reunions where everyone wears matching T-shirts—the family name emblazoned across the front.

  Now, Nora sits in the psychiatrist’s office, perched on an overstuffed, green tweed couch. Dr. David Forrester sits opposite her on a chair that matches the couch. He is reviewing her medical history form, and she is impatient for him to finish reading. She doesn’t like the smell of this room—lavender air freshener disguising grief, invisible clouds of uncertainty lingering and descending on those who sit here, infiltrating their heads and lips and words. A tiny clock ticks loudly on the file cabinet next to her. It faces away from her, purposefully placed, she thinks, so she won’t feel the pressure of time. The doctor doesn’t know it is the ticking, the ticking, the ticking in this enormous silence that creates the most pressure for her. She suddenly feels trapped and misplaced. Nearby, a ferry horn blares, and she jumps.

  “Kind of loud, huh?” David says, looking up, adjusting his glasses so they are balanced evenly across his nose. She folds her hands on her lap and nods her head. He has a strong, handsome face, and a tiny silver ring glimmers from the lobe of his left ear. With his white hair and white beard he looks like a thin, hip Santa Claus.

  “Well, you’ve got a clean health report—no medications, no allergies, no past or present disease, hormones balanced, EEG, MRI, blood work, all normal.” He peers at her over his glasses for a moment before he removes them. “So let’s talk. You saw a child’s face, and it spoke to you.” His tone is gentle, nonjudgmental, which of course it would be—psychiatrists are trained for this sort of thing. She’d hoped though, for a bit of surprise from him, some reaction to suggest he knew she was not the type who hears voices.

  She flushes a bit and nods. “Yes, a face, but no body.”

  He folds over page one and begins reading page two. Without looking up, he says, “And your sleep is worsening; you have nightmares, and you feel unable to cope with everyday things.” He looks at her for confirmation. She nods again.

  “Can you tell me more about feeling unable to cope?”

  “Well—” she says quietly, “I … just feel so tense all the time. And the smallest thing, things that don’t seem to bother anyone else, make me feel like I want to break something, and lately it seems worse, and I get these strange headaches that no one seems to be able to explain, and—” she is suddenly aware of her quick acceleration of thoughts and stops abruptly. She does not want to fail at appearing normal.

  “Do you remember when the first strange headache began?”

/>   She closes her eyes. She remembers when it started—three weeks ago at Fiona’s birthday party.

  “Six more days until my birthday!” Fiona announced at breakfast a week before her birthday, holding up six fingers. And then every breakfast after that: “Five more days!” “Four more days!” “Three more days!” “Two more days!” “One more day!” Until finally, she shouted from the top of the stairs, “Today’s the day! Today I’m six years old!”

  And what a beautiful day they had. Nora took Fiona and five of her friends (three girls and two boys because Fiona wanted exactly six kids) on the Metro bus to Golden Gardens, their favorite waterfront park because it has the most sand. Paul (he worked Saturdays) planned to meet them for lunch.

  Nora sat at a weathered picnic table, the salty air filling her lungs, quickening her senses, and watched the children race up and down the beach in their parkas and little rubber boots. They picked up shells, jumped over tide pools, and dodged waves as they broke upon the beach, their boot prints trailing behind, tiny imprints vanishing in a flash with the next foamy wave.

  Her little girl running closest to the waves, fiercely innocent, daring the waves to catch her, and then running away fast, laughing and shouting, “You can’t get me! You can’t get me!”

  When had this happened? When had the milky-breathed infant who sucked hungrily at her breast grown up enough to dare the ocean? Where was the toddler with the chubby legs who waddled about the house, feeding Oreos to her stuffed animals and holding books upside down, pretending to read?

  It was then, in this delicious, bittersweet musing, that the headache began to pound.

  “Nora? Nora, did you hear me? Do you remember when the headaches started?”

  “It was Fiona’s—my daughter’s—birthday party. Three weeks ago. Her sixth birthday.” Her mouth is dry, and it’s hard to swallow.

  “Did you enjoy the party?”

  “Yes. Yes, it was wonderful.” Despite her headache, the day had been perfect. Paul had arrived in time for lunch, and Fiona was thrilled at the sight of him. She’d laughed hysterically with her friends as he sang a solo of “Happy Birthday” in a low, rumbling voice and gave her six big kisses, three on each cheek. In that moment, Nora’s heart had brimmed. Sitting at a picnic table, in this little circle of love with her husband and six children, all with purple lips from the cupcakes—this is how it was supposed to be.

  “Six years old. A sweet age,” David says.

  Nora’s eyes well up, and she wants to be home. She wants to decorate the house for Christmas. It’s Saturday morning and she should be home making hot chocolate for Fiona instead of here in this stale room pushing the edges of her mind to god knows where.

  “This has to be hard, feeling so tired while trying to be a good mother and teacher at the same time,” he says.

  His kindness unnerves her. She presses her back deeper into the couch, presses her knees together with her folded hands between her thighs.

  “Nora, before this—before the headaches, nightmares, and hallucinations—how did you feel?”

  She shrugs. “Fine, I guess.” And she does think that. Mostly. But then, there’s that small, weighted part of her that feels like she’s lying, the part that fires an adrenaline rush through her every time someone asks how she is.

  “Were you happy?”

  She is caught off guard, flustered. The question is so personal. She flushes more deeply, stares at her folded hands.

  He looks at the page and up again. “And you rate your marriage a three out of ten?”

  “Yes,” she says, her face burning now. “It’s just that … I don’t know.” She stops speaking. It all feels too intimate to tell a stranger, and besides, she’s here to talk about the face.

  David folds his hands on her pile of forms. “Hmmm,” he says finally. “So you have a lot of stress.”

  She pulls a pillow onto her lap, a beige canvas one with a huge bird on it—a black raven made from felt stitched on with red thread. She likes ravens, she relates to their preference for privacy.

  “Stress can trigger hallucinations.”

  “And make you crazy?” She traces the raven with her finger.

  “I know you’re frightened, but using words like that doesn’t help, only scares you. We’ll need to have many conversations before I can even make a diagnosis—”

  She closes her eyes. Continues to trace the raven. Wants to throw it in the air and see if it will fly. “Christ,” she says.

  “Listen, I’m sure you’ve heard about experiments on sleep deprivation, how it significantly decreases normal functioning—can cause depression, anxiety, reduce cognitive ability …”

  She opens her eyes and stops tracing the raven. She stares at him.

  “A lack of sleep can cause personality distortions. Even just forty-eight hours can do that. After three days people have been known to hallucinate.”

  “What are the chances I’m not crazy?” She hears herself asking this question and can hardly bear that at this point in her life, this is where she is, on this couch, with this pillow, asking this question.

  “Again, please stop using that word. I’ll be a broken record if I need to be.”

  She crosses and recrosses her legs. She doesn’t want to offend him. “Sorry,” she says.

  He leans forward, fixes his eyes on hers. “I become concerned when a person loses the ability to interpret hallucinations or voices as a problem. You seem very clear that something is wrong. Whether it’s chemical or emotional is for us to find out. And let me be clear with you. There are many in the medical field who are quick to label something like this a disorder, who are quick to prescribe medication, and well, I believe it’s worth looking at other things first—factors outside of our immediate awareness—thoughts, feelings, experiences that influence us, many of which we are not conscious of. Obviously, I’m here to help you explore those factors in a safe environment. I’m not saying I won’t prescribe medication—I will if I feel it’s necessary—but there’s a lot more to be done before we make that decision.”

  She gazes at the closed aluminum blinds on the only window as if they are open. Bits of light poke through the holes where the strings attach to the slats. She wants to trust him.

  He leans forward. “More people than you might think, so-called ‘normal’ people”—he makes quotation marks with his fingers—“report such visions.”

  This is not easy to believe. She doesn’t know anyone who’s had hallucinations and not been on drugs, not been psychotic. What if she believes him when in reality she needs medication? What if she walks out the door feeling normal only to have a hallucination in her classroom tomorrow?

  “Nora, what’s going on right now?” He takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirt. “What are you feeling?”

  She can’t get a grip on this question. Her mind is clouded, tangled, and worn out. Worn out with visions and the thinking about visions and what’s normal and what isn’t, and the new things: this man, this office, these ideas, this ticking clock, this pillow, this couch.

  He looks at the clock.

  “We have twenty more minutes,” he says, settling back in his chair. “May I ask you a few questions about the face?”

  She nods.

  “Were your eyes open when you saw her?”

  “Yes, the first time I saw her, I’m pretty sure my eyes were open,” she says quietly. “And yes, the second time my eyes were open. I was sitting in a chair looking out the window, resting.” She sounds apologetic, as if she shouldn’t have been sitting in a chair, resting.

  “Did you recognize her? Could it have been Fiona?”

  “No. No, it wasn’t Fiona. Fiona’s eyes are blue, but they’re a gray blue. And they weren’t my eyes either. These eyes were the bluest blue, deep sea blue. Not like any eyes I’ve ever seen. The rest of the image was blurry. Just
shapes really. Like seeing a face through water.” Her stomach is beginning to hurt.

  “But you know it was a child’s face.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Something like, ‘Remember the Valentine’s dress.’”

  “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “I don’t know. My grandmother sent me a dress once, for Valentine’s Day. I think I was maybe five or six years old.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “Well, I’d never seen anything like it before. It was so beautiful. Red. And it had a white collar with two embroidered roses and—” Nora pauses, feeling her description sounds childish.

  “Were you close to your grandmother?”

  “No, not really. I was closest to my grandfather. I lived with them in Ireland after my mother died,” she says quietly. “James, my little brother, and I lived with them. My mother was born there and after she died, my father left us with her parents and then … he never came back.” After a moment, she adds, “I have no idea where he is.”

  “I see.” He flips through the forms. “So your mother was Irish, and your father—”

  “American. German American. Well, his parents were German.”

  “Did you ever hear from him again?”

  “He wrote us a couple of times, and we wrote him, but after awhile, the letters were returned.” She thinks now, with a slight ache, of all those letters she’d written. Dear Daddy, where are you? When are you coming back for us?

  “And when did your mother die? I don’t see anything about either of your parents here.”

  She wonders where she might have written about her parents. There had been a section called “Other Pertinent Information,” but it hadn’t occurred to her to write about her parents. She doesn’t think of herself as having parents. “I was eleven and James was five,” she says.

  “You were both very young.”

  “There was an accident,” Nora says stiffly.

  “An accident?”