The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

She hasn’t thought about the accident in a long time. She used to obsess about it, running it over and over in her mind. And then one day (she’d just turned thirteen), she’d stood with her grandfather at the end of the jetty, both of them gazing across the Irish Sea, and he had turned to her, had taken her hands into his, looked her hard in the eyes. “Nora, it wasn’t your fault. You were a child. A precious child. It wasn’t your fault.” She remembered his expression, his blue eyes as serious as the sea, and how gusts of wind had carried the scent of hawthorn blossoms to them and how she’d thrown herself against him and sobbed into his chest. And how, after that moment, as they walked home along the shore, the world had suddenly tilted into the light—the water glistening with silver threads, dazzling filaments blowing into the sky.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1969

  Nora pounds the keys on the old piano in the basement, pounds it out, Don’t make it bad, pounds it out, the bruises still raw and red on her face, pounds it out, Don’t let her under your skin, drowns it out. Her mother still screaming from the top of the stairs, “Stop that goddamn noise,” her mother’s words mud thick, suffocating in gin. Nora, in her plaid school uniform and saddle shoes, doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop beating the song into herself, absorbing the flats and sharps, Let it out and let it in.

  But now, a shriek from the top of the stairs, and now, a great thud, and Nora stops beating the keys and twists around and sees the body of her mother, falling. The arms and legs, hips and hands, neck and mouth of her mother crashing down the basement stairs, the glass shattering. And now, a green olive—the green olive alive, moving fast and wild, announcing the falling body, bouncing and coming to a halt next to the black part of Nora’s left shoe.

  And then, a final sudden thud.

  For a long while, Nora waits stock-still in the dead silence, staring at the motionless body, the belly and breasts flattened, the head turned unnaturally to the side, tangled auburn hair obscuring the eyes, nothing moving at all. Finally, Nora stands up and steps over the green olive and walks to the phone and dials “0.” She gasps to the operator, “My mother, it’s my mother.”

  And the operator says, warm as milk, “Someone will be there honey, someone will be there soon.”

  Blood pools from under her mother’s head, pools on the black-and-white checked linoleum, rivulets of red traveling toward Nora and she is frozen there, holding the phone, the operator still saying things in her ear.

  Now there are medics and emergency shouts, and a man’s voice says, “No pulse!” and someone steps on the green olive and flattens it.

  And now, here is Nora standing tight and hunched, in the hush of church, staring with bare eyes into the casket, holding her father’s big hand, the red heat of her guilt eclipsing her bruises, now gone violet on her cheeks.

  And when her father drops her hand to hold his own weeping face, Nora reaches tentatively into the casket and touches the hands of her mother. The hands are cold and she is taken aback for a moment. But now, she begins to stroke the hands, trace the bones and curves with her index finger, trace the lines of the knuckles, the ashen hands inert, dead without the rage, and Nora is startled, startled to feel the skin is so delicate, fragile as Bible paper.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  December 20, 1996

  Nora stares at the fingers of her right hand as they twist the wedding ring around the finger on her left hand. Lately, she’s been thinking of not wearing the ring at all.

  “Can you tell me more about your mother?” David asks. It’s been a week since her last visit, a week since she’d told him about her mother’s fall.

  “That’s a pretty general question, don’t you think?” She immediately regrets her tone, unsure of her resistance to this line of questioning; he’s been so kind to her. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “No worries. Let me rephrase.”

  She nods, stops twisting the ring, and reaches for the raven pillow. Sets it on her lap. Folds her hands together on top.

  “What else might be important for me to know about your mother?”

  One of Fiona’s favorite books, The Important Book, comes to her mind. The important thing about a spoon is you eat with it. It’s like a little shovel. The important thing about a shoe is you put your foot in it. You walk with it.

  “Nora?”

  “I don’t know.” She can feel herself struggling for something more to say about her mother. She hadn’t felt a thing when telling of the accident. She’d long ago buried any feelings for her mother. She needs to talk about the face and the voice, but she is unable to say so and doesn’t know why.

  “Nora?”

  She refolds her hands. “I guess it’s important that she was fifteen when she emigrated to America. And seventeen when she married my father.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Pretty young to leave home—to come so far.”

  Nora thinks of a Polaroid she keeps in the bottom drawer of her desk. She hasn’t looked at it for years, hasn’t felt the need. Her father had given it to her after the funeral. “Your mother used to be happy,” he’d said and dropped the picture on her desk. “Damned alcohol.”

  In the picture her mother and father are young and look like they don’t need anything else in the world but each other. They’re already married (a diamond sparkles from her mother’s finger) and are living in Chicago. They are sitting at a round wooden table in a dark bar. Her mother wears a sleeveless, low-cut red dress, her wavy auburn hair loose, falling onto her exposed cleavage. She is laughing, holding out a martini to the camera as if toasting it, her bright white teeth flashing against red lipstick, her other arm around Nora’s father. She looks like a movie star, like Maureen O’Hara. Nora’s father holds a cigarette, wears a large gold watch, and is smiling at her mother, looks as if he might kiss her.

  “Nora? Did you hear me? That’s pretty far for such a young woman to travel.”

  She looks away from him. Stares at the closed blinds. “My grandfather said that of all his eight children, she was the wildest—the one born for adventure. The bravest one.” And now these words, “The bravest one,” breathe out a lost memory.

  Nora is fourteen. Lying in bed. Her aunts and her grandmother talking in the kitchen. The aunts visit on Sundays. They sit around the large kitchen table with their mother, drinking whiskey in their black tea and eating pie and having interesting conversations about recipes, neighbors, love, and death. Nora hears her mother’s name, Maeve. She creeps down the hall and listens at the doorway.

  “I miss Maeve more than anything,” Claire whispers. Claire is the younger of the two aunts. She is tall and beautiful with long black hair. She lives down the road with her husband and three little boys.

  “Ach,” her grandmother says, sadness filling her voice. “It was wildness killed that one.”

  “Mam! It wasn’t her wildness killed her, and ye know it!” Claire cries.

  Nora stands there in the hall in her flannel pajamas and wool socks. She stands very still.

  “Hush!” her grandmother says. “She was fifteen. What would ye have had us do? Would ye rather all of us be called out in contempt every Sunday in church? Would ye have had those damned nuns pounding on our door, day after day demanding we put her in those evil homes or burn in hell? They’d have had her washing laundry until her fingers were raw.” And now her grandmother’s voice is deathly flat. “Sending her to America was the best we could do. She’s lucky my sister took her in, aye, and was willing to take her to that doctor.”

  “And what of Seamus?” her aunt Caroline says angrily. Caroline is the oldest sister, an unmarried woman who runs a bakery in town. “Sure he walks around town like he owns the place, no one even knowing it is him who was the father and poor Maeve sent off full of shame for a secret abortion and now … now she’s—” Caroline is crying now. “Sure ’n’ I hope I never have a girl in this damned country.”

&nb
sp; Nora stands, openly now, in the doorway. Tears stream down her face. “My mother had an abortion?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” her grandmother says, reaching her arms out to Nora then, but it is Claire Nora runs to, pressing herself into her aunt’s breasts. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” her grandmother says again and again. And now, Caroline’s arms around her too. The three of them weeping into the silences of loss, guilt, and shame.

  Later, in bed, Nora cried hard again, thinking of her mother, only a year older than herself, exposed on the doctor’s table, legs spread wide, the doctor sucking the baby out with a machine. “Mommy,” she’d cried.

  “Nora,” David says. “Are you okay? Would you like some water?”

  Nora stands and walks over to the blinds. Pulls the cord so they open slightly. Outside, a female parking attendant with white gloves slashes a yellow line of chalk across a car tire. She moves from car to car, in her navy uniform with its orange vest, gray hair poking out from her hat. She bends and rises, making her mark over and over again.

  Nora adjusts the blinds until only a bit of light comes through. “My mother was so pretty,” she says into the slats. “Beautiful. Especially when my father came home at night. She wore lipstick. A light shade of pink. Sometimes she’d put it on my lips, and we’d dress up in her cocktail dresses and waltz around the house to the Kingston Trio.” She turns toward David. “She loved to sing ‘Tom Dooley.’ She’d pick up a hairbrush and pretend she was Dave Guard—you know, one of the Kingston Trio? Her voice was amazing.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  Nora sits on the windowsill. “Her skin was soft. She told me once how her mother sometimes warmed up milk in a huge pot on the stove, to soften her face and her sisters’ faces—that’s how Irish women kept themselves beautiful. And before I went to bed sometimes, she’d dab my face with Pond’s Cold Cream and tell me I had beautiful skin, too.”

  “Lovely.”

  “But then—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. She stopped being pretty. I don’t remember exactly when. I only remember that her lips tightened into a hard line, and she stopped wearing lipstick. And she had a shot or two of gin every day around three.” Nora hears her speech become more agitated, but she keeps going. “Sometimes she would sit at the kitchen table with her head in her hands and cry. I felt sorry for her, but she was just so …”

  “So what, Nora?”

  “Just so fucking—” Did I just say “fucking” out loud? She can feel a headache beginning and presses her fingers into her temples.

  “So fucking …?” David repeats her words as calmly as if she had said, “So very.”

  God, it must be easy to become a therapist, she thinks. You basically take the last word the client says and repeat it back to them in the form of a question. She is tempted to tell him her mind feels too blurry, that his questions and important books, abortions and shots of gin are all colliding in her head, making it hard to concentrate.

  “Nora, is there something else?”

  She walks back to the couch and sits down. Crosses her right leg over the left. The foot of the right leg moves back and forth, back and forth. She watches it for a moment then stops it. The shoe on the foot is untied. She reaches over to tie it, but her fingers are trembling. She uncrosses her legs and presses her knees together.

  “Is there something else you’d like to say, Nora?”

  Silence.

  She knows what she should say; she should tell David that sometimes her mother would shriek at her and how if she tried to run her mother would grab her, throw her down, bring her hand hard across her cheek, how the force of the slap sent her reeling against walls and furniture, how sharp and shocking those things felt against her body. She should have told him how her mother pulled her hair out, how she had wanted her mother to die.

  Instead she says, “She was sick. She was sad.” Nora reaches for the raven pillow, places it on her lap, and clenches her hands together on top of the bird’s beak. “An alcoholic.”

  “Nora,” he says in an overtly gentle tone, “Did she hurt you?”

  She focuses on the oak shelves overflowing with books: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, Mental Health or Mental Illness?, Stations of the Mind, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Foundations of Psychology, In a Different Voice, Society’s Betrayal of the Child—

  “Being an alcoholic doesn’t mean you have the right to hurt your children,” he says.

  “I don’t see any Freud, any Jung,” she says, still staring at the books. “Kind of weird.”

  “I have a complicated relationship with them,” he says. “I just think overgeneralizing about what’s masculine and what’s feminine is slippery, you know? The perpetuation of gender myths—but Nora, did you hear what I said? Your mother didn’t have the right to hurt you.”

  “I get why you might not have Freud; the penis-projection theory pisses me off, but I mean, would you even be here without his whole face-to-face talk-therapy thing? It just seems like you’d have at least one book—” “Nora, is this really what you want to talk about?”

  “You don’t think it’s important I know what you believe when it comes to the psyche? Seriously. Isn’t it a good thing we’re aware of archetypal images and confront our feminine and masculine selves? Correct the fucking patriarchal consciousness? And what about how he dared to face the unconscious self? Jesus. How can you as a therapist not have a book on Jung?”

  “Like I said, I have a complicated relationship with him. I just don’t happen to think consciousness has a gender. And it seems a tad misogynistic to me that when he wrote about feminine qualities they were always tied to inferiority.”

  She had forgotten this and wonders why, because it is something she should have remembered. Maybe it’s because of all the stress of remembering things in here—makes it hard to think clearly. Whatever—she is glad they’re talking about Jung instead of her mother.

  “I had a high school science teacher who praised me once for thinking like a guy, and it really pissed me off,” she says.

  He leans down to get his Stanley thermos. Unscrews the attached cup and puts it between his knees while he unscrews the black cover on top of the thermos. He pours coffee into the cup, screws the cover back on, and sets the thermos under his chair. He sips the coffee and says, “I see a lot of people in my practice, and I’m hard-pressed to come up with generalizations based on gender. Women who are assertive and driven should not be called masculine, and men who display passivity or emotion should not automatically have their masculinity questioned. Totally damages self-esteem.” He takes another sip of coffee. “And there’s plenty of new research to support that what is thought of as masculine or feminine is actually culturally determined.” He leans back into his chair.

  She thinks then of how much her father hated when James cried. How much he hated when James played dolls with her. How, when James wanted to be a pink tulip for Halloween, her father said, “No son of mine is going to be a goddamn pansy.”

  “Nora, could we get back to your mother before the time is up? You heard me say your mother had no right to hit you, right?”

  She looks at the clock and sees there’s ten minutes left in the session. Ten minutes is a very long time, especially now that he’s gone back to talking about her mother. “Yes. I heard you and I know that,” she says and tosses the raven pillow off her lap. She stands and plucks her coat from the coat rack.

  “Nora, what’s going on for you right now?” He sits on the edge of his chair with his hands wrapped around his cup.

  She faces him, struggling to put her coat on. “What about this don’t you understand? I SAW A FACE. I HEARD A VOICE.” Her voice is louder than she wants it to be, which alarms her. The tension between past and present makes her want to grab the raven pillow and sh
ove it down his throat.

  “We’re just connecting the dots,” he says.

  She buttons her coat. Stares at the black buttons. Closes her eyes. Dots. In her mind, the dots crowd together and she is a dot and there are so many dots crowding her, too many dots and the dot of her has disappeared in the oppressive mud of dots that stinks like shit and there’s no place to breathe and the mud has already swallowed her. This is why she probably needs medication.

  “Sit down, Nora,” he says. “Please. Sit down.”

  She opens her eyes and stares at him until her eyes are focused again. She can see by the expression on his face, half alarmed and half sympathetic, he has doubts. “I need to go home,” she says, more to herself than to him, and flies out the door. Running home she tells herself things: You are fine and This too will pass, and by the time she arrives home she almost believes it.

  “Mommy’s home!” Fiona yells from the front door. She’s wearing her red wool jacket and red rubber boots. Her face scrunched pink with worry and anger, her arms folded. “Mommy! Did you forget about the Christmas tree?”

  Paul stands in the doorway, tense and upset, glaring at her as if she were a problem child.

  “You’re late,” he says. She doesn’t know what time it is, but she can’t be more than ten or fifteen minutes late.

  “We’ve been waiting for over an hour,” he says.

  “A whole hour!” Fiona says.

  “Geez, I’m sorry,” Nora says, shocked to find out about the time. She’d taken the scenic route, walked along the waterfront to calm herself. She’d needed the ocean smell, the rush of salty wind on her face, but it couldn’t have taken an hour. Unsure of what to say or do, she bends down to put Fiona’s hood up and tie it snugly.

  “Stop, Mommy! That’s too tight!” Fiona protests, pulls Nora’s hands off the hood strings, gives her mother a frightened glance.

  “It’s not that cold,” Paul says, tightly. “She doesn’t need a hood.”