The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

The clouds are heavy with snow, and the tips of Nora’s fingers sting, but she holds her tongue. She stands and drops her hands to her sides, feeling stupid and alien, as if she doesn’t live in this house, as if this isn’t her daughter or her husband. Fiona bites her lip, says, “You’re the worst mom ever.”

  Nora’s heart stalls. Her cheeks redden. She resists the urge to crumple. She takes a deep breath and stares at Fiona, stares at her until she knows what to say next. Fiona glares back, fists clenched, says, “The worst,” but then her eyes well up with tears.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Nora says, filled with tenderness for her daughter. She bends down, takes Fiona’s mittened hands in hers, kisses her wet cheeks, her long eyelashes. “Honey, I am really sorry I’m late. Really sorry.” Nora kisses her little cold nose, the tiny bone of it, says, “Sometimes mommies mess up, make mistakes. But listen! We’ve got hours until it’s dark! Let’s go get that tree! Let’s get a huge one!”

  Fiona sniffles. Looks at Nora as if gauging the truth of her mother’s words.

  Nora kisses her nose again. “Everything’s okay, bug,” Nora says. “Please don’t worry.”

  “Can we get a tree that touches the ceiling?” Fiona whimpers, still a bit uncertain.

  “We’ll get the perfect one!” Paul says, suddenly forgiving, suddenly kind, making Fiona’s worry fade, making her smile. “We’ll get one so tall, we’ll need a ladder to put the star on top!”

  “This will be fun,” Nora says, “I’ll just run quick to the bathroom and be right back.”

  She shuts the bathroom door, sits on the edge of the tub and puts her face in her hands. Blood pulses against her temples. Her hands form into fists. She is angry. Angry at herself for being late. She bangs her fists against her head. Angry at David for making her talk about her mother. Bang, bang, bang.

  In her mind she is seven, hiding in the bathroom with James, her hands pressed over his ears, trying to block out the voices of their parents fighting and slamming doors, slamming each other. Bang, bang, bang.

  Paul revs the car engine outside the window. She needs to compose herself. “You are not your mother,” she whispers. “You are not your mother. And you will go out in the car with your family and chop down the tree.” She unclenches her fists slowly. “You will chop down the Christmas tree.” She pushes herself up from the tub, leaves the bathroom, walks outside, and gets in the car.

  Fiona sings from the back seat: “Silent night, foamily night, all is calm, all is bright, ’round John Virgin, another child.”

  Paul is staring straight ahead, his eyes fixated on the taxi parked in front of them. The taxi driver is holding the cab door open for a lovely young woman, maybe thirty, who looks as though she is dressed for the opera. She glances their way and for a moment it seems she might wave, but then she quickly steps inside the cab. Nora wonders if they’ve met before, asks Paul if he knows her. “No idea,” he says nonchalantly.

  Nora smiles at Fiona then and begins to sing along with her, determined her daughter will feel what children ought to feel at this time of year. And for the second time that day, she thinks she might cry—something she hasn’t done for a long time—a sensation that startles her. Children ought not sing Christmas carols alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  December 21, 1996

  “I’m seeing a psychiatrist,” Nora says to John, her breath pulsing little clouds into the cold air, her heart racing with the worry of how much to expose. They’re strolling side by side around the school grounds, shoes crunching on dirty crusted snow over gravel, making their presence known to the smokers and potheads, not because they’re particularly concerned (they’re not, they both smoked plenty in high school), but because the parents need reassurance their kids are well looked after.

  Nora and John sign up for the early morning patrol year after year because no one else wants to do it, and it’s given them time to become friends, to get to know each other beyond their professional lives. He knows how much she loves being a mother, how she’d do anything for Fiona, that she’d never known such love was possible, how the surge and pulse of it continually startles her and makes her want to be a better person. He knows how she practically stops breathing when she talks about a student who’s written words that cut to the core, who’s found a true way to express what they feel. He knows she loves to write poetry and will stay up late into the night until she finds just the right word, the accurate shape to describe something she’d seen that day, and that she’d like to climb through the underground cities of Cappadocia just to feel the ancient dirt under her nails.

  Nora knows things about him too: That he was adopted by a Seattle couple (a gynecologist and a fourth-grade teacher) when he was a baby and that his birth parents were teenaged Cherokee kids and that sometimes he wonders where he’d be if he’d been born after the Indian Child Welfare Act. He’s shy, never married. He doesn’t like to cook and eats takeout while watching PBS documentaries or reading Faulkner. Sometimes he goes to powwows in Spokane or Yakima, but mostly he feels he’s not really welcome, that he’s just tolerated, treated like a spectator, a blunt instrument, a fraud, and he comes home depressed and unable to sleep for weeks because sounds of drumming, constant drumming, keep his eyes open.

  “A psychiatrist?” he says, but now there is something in his voice that doesn’t sound right. “Really? But you’re one of the strongest people I know.”

  Nora wraps her arms around herself, her fingers still cold through her gloves. “I’ve been having nightmares, and …” But she can’t do it. She can’t tell him about the face, about the voice whispering “Remember the Valentine’s dress.” She looks away. A few boys walk by, huddled and hunched under their backpacks, eyes to the ground. The bell rings.

  “Nora, can we talk more about this after school?”

  “I have to pick up Fiona …”

  “Listen, vacation starts tomorrow, and if you want to take a few days off after that, if you need more time—”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says and walks away, heart in her throat.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  December 22, 1996

  The next day, Nora dismisses thoughts of the hallucinations and prepares for Christmas, even though her relationship with God is rocky. She’s never understood the arbitrary nature of God, the logic behind “some are blessed and some are damned,” hates when people exclaim, “I’m so blessed!” every time they get a parking spot or survive cancer, as if people who can’t find a parking spot or die from cancer aren’t blessed and should work harder to earn God’s favor and protection. She’d stopped capitalizing “god” and attending Mass in secondary school when she learned about the Holocaust, saw photos of naked bodies piled high, knees and arms bent, shaved heads with their eyes open but not focused.

  And it wasn’t only a matter of her not believing in God. She’d felt for a long time God didn’t believe in her either. She doesn’t remember when exactly this vague realization came to her, but she knows she was five or six when Sister Catherine emphatically told the entire class, “God loves you; there is nothing you can do to make God stop loving you,” and Nora had squirmed in her chair and felt with an absolute certainty this was not true for her. But maybe the doubt had come later, maybe it was when her mother had fallen down the stairs and died. Nora remembers how questions—Why would God love me anyway? Why should God love me?—had circled like sharks in her brain.

  She remembers when she’d told her grandfather she no longer believed in a monotheistic God, could no longer attend Mass. A Sunday morning in 1975. She’d just turned fourteen. He was piling turf onto the fire, and the smoky dirt scent of it, the ancient plant and animal of it, permeated the room.

  “Your grandmother already left for Mass,” he’d said into the red sparks. “Ye best run fast to catch up with her.”

  She stood there in her wool sweater and jeans, her feet bare on the slate floor. “I’m not
going to Mass anymore,” she’d said.

  He prodded the turf more than necessary. He prodded so long she said, “Grandfather?” her heart loud against its bony cage.

  He’d stood then and faced her, his blue eyes intent upon hers for several moments.

  “Well now, you’re old enough to decide then, I suppose,” he’d said and sat down in his chair, picked up the Irish Times, and began to read.

  Her grandmother only commented about her decision once. Nora lay reading Sylvia Plath in bed that evening, and her grandmother came quiet into the room. She stood at the end of the bed, her reddened, rough hands wrapped tight around the foot rail. “You’ve broken me heart,” she said, and when Nora opened her mouth, had intended to argue, to explain, her grandmother crossed herself and said, “We’ll say nothing more about it,” and left the room.

  Ever since, Nora had enjoyed living her own life, had enjoyed setting her own terms and conditions, but when she’d become pregnant with Fiona and felt a heart pulse within her, the tiny bones fluttering against the soft inside of her belly, lighting the closed spaces, she’d allowed “god” to become synonymous with love. Simple as that.

  But she wants Fiona to believe in magic, wants to ease the tension in the household, so she wraps presents and signs them, “Love, Santa,” and winds strings of white lights through the limbs of the spruce tree in the living room. Fiona helps her, sings carols and throws bunches of silver icicles on the branches, stepping back every few moments to clap her hands and exclaim, “Oh Mommy, it’s magic!” Nora watches her and wants to freeze the moment, wants to remember every enchanting detail.

  Paul brings them a small gift each night: one night, a pair of hand-knit orange mittens for Fiona, a lavender candle for Nora. “For the twelve days of Christmas,” he says as he hands them each a wrapped box, always tied with a pretty ribbon, each time kissing Fiona on the cheek and Nora quickly on the lips.

  She tries not to think about who else he is kissing. She’s more convinced now than ever that he’s having an affair, though she really doesn’t have any good evidence, only that he’s been working later and later each night, and by the time she wakes up in the morning, he’s gone. She could ask him about it, straight out, the way he likes things, direct—she could say, “Are you having an affair?” but she fears that if anything else should go wrong right now, that if he answered her, “Yes, Nora, I love someone else,” she might lose her mind once and for all, and so she keeps silent until she feels strong enough for the truth.

  “Oh, Daddy!” Fiona says one night when he gives her a book called The Mitten. The three of them sit around the sparkling Christmas tree to read it even though it’s way past her bedtime. Paul had come home late, and Nora had allowed Fiona to wait up for him.

  “It’s about a little boy in Ukraine,” Paul says, as Fiona climbs onto his lap with the book. “Ukraine is close to where my grandparents lived.”

  “In Poland!” Fiona says, proud to have remembered.

  It surprises Nora that Paul is talking about his family. He rarely does. Fiona knows his grandparents immigrated to America—New York, had changed their name from Bronowski to Brown. She knows his father was in the Korean War, same as Nora’s father, and that his father was a pilot—that his plane was shot down and he was a hero. But Paul hasn’t told her about his mother. They’d both agreed that Fiona was too young to know what really happened—that at nineteen, he’d found his mother in the closet, hanging by his father’s best Sunday tie. That, as her only child, Paul had tried for a decade to draw her out of sadness, quit school to make money for them, but nothing had worked. They remained in poverty, and it was only much later he’d realized she’d been manic-depressive. Sometimes, to Nora, it seems like he still believes that if he makes enough money, she’ll come back to him.

  “I’m sad your mommy and daddy died,” Fiona says, hugging him.

  “Me too,” he says. “Me too.”

  He looks so sad that for a second Nora thought he might cry, but then he says, “Let’s read the story, okay?” And he reads it to her twice, until she is asleep in his arms, and he carries her upstairs to bed. When he returns, he says, “She’s ready for her goodnight kiss.”

  “Okay.” Nora is in the living room trying to write a Kafkaesque poem about a woman who woke up with a book for an arm and was overcome by the feeling that other parts of her body might grow into books and she might be reduced to paper and words and become unrecognizable to herself and to others.

  “I’ve got some work to catch up on; don’t wait up, okay?” he says.

  His words an arrow between her eyes. “There are pork chops in the oven,” she says. “And some cheesy broccoli.” She is disappointed he isn’t going to sit by the tree with her.

  “I grabbed a tuna sandwich from the deli,” he says. “But again, thanks.” He’s lying about the sandwich, and she can see it in his eyes. Her chest begins a slow ache.

  “The Redmond deal’s almost cinched,” he says then, as if reading her mind and wanting to change the subject so they don’t have a fight that goes on and on. “It’s almost in the bag, Nora. I’ll get a promotion. More money.”

  “Do we need more money?”

  “That’s not the point. Why can’t you say, ‘Good luck!’ or, ‘I know you can do it!’”

  “Well, I know you can do it,” she says. “Good luck.” But he has already walked away and doesn’t hear her sarcasm. This is what happens when two people begin to separate.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  December 24, 1996

  Her brother, James, is coming from Chicago for Christmas and bringing his new partner, Stephen, who is a doctor. “A pediatrician with a talent for intuitive assessment and a reputation for not over-prescribing medications,” James told her months ago during their Sunday phone call. “I can’t wait for you to meet him!”

  Nora buys fragrant white roses and places them in modern rectangular glass vases on each nightstand in the guest room where James and Stephen will sleep. While she arranges things, she hears in her head, unexpectedly, her father singing “The Christmas Rose,” like he did when she was small, as he tucked her into bed. The flower so small, whose sweet fragrance fills the air, dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere. Remembering this, she feels a tightening in her stomach. Perhaps she misses her father after all, that maybe even after all this time, there’s a bit of love left, a weed pushing through a sidewalk crack. But now her hand is flying, and now the vase of flowers is on the floor, rose petals pierced with splinters of glass, and water, a mess at her feet.

  The doorbell rings and Fiona runs to open it. She is wearing her bluebird pajamas and the plastic rhinestone tiara Paul had given her last year for her birthday.

  “Uncle James,” she squeals.

  “Hey, pipsqueak!” James says, laughing as he sets his suitcase down, sweeping her up into his arms. Stephen stands by his side, grinning. He is tall and slender and appears slightly older than James, who is now thirty-three. His fine brown hair falls across his forehead, and his face is clean-shaven, a sharp contrast to James’ unruly red curls and scruff of beard that’s at least a week old.

  “Fiona, this is Stephen.”

  “Hi, Fiona,” Stephen says, his voice soft, his green eyes filled with warmth.

  “Come on in and see our tree!” Fiona says, squirming down, taking each of their hands and pulling them toward the living room, gusts of winter air blowing in behind them.

  “Wait, wait, love,” James says, closing the door behind him. “I need to hug my big sister!” James hugs Nora then, lifting her off the ground. “Merry Christmas Eve, Sis! Sorry we missed dinner.”

  “It’s so good to see you. I can’t believe it’s been a year,” Nora says once he’s set her back down.

  Stephen embraces her too, kissing her on both cheeks. She likes him already.

  “James, Stephen,” Paul says, offeri
ng a strained smile and a handshake to each of them. Nora hears the tightness in his voice, a constriction that finds its way to her, making her nervous. This is the first time James has brought a boyfriend to their home overnight, and Paul isn’t happy about it. He still thinks being gay is a choice, a bad one.

  “It’s not a choice; it’s biological,” she’d argued each time, his statements making her furious. She’d even thrown a plate at him once, but he’d ducked, and it had shattered against the wall.

  “C’mon,” Fiona calls from the living room. “Look, Uncle James!” she says pointing to a plaster of paris decoration near the top of the tree. James plucks it off, obviously delighted.

  “What’s this?” Stephen says, laughing, taking it from the palm of James’ hand and holding it up to eye-level.

  “It’s Uncle James’ handprint from kindergarten,” Fiona giggles, her face flushed.

  “A born artist,” Stephen says, putting his arm around James and placing the decoration back on the tree as if it is the most precious thing. The two sink into the couch with Fiona giggling on top of them while Paul lights the fire. Nora enters the room carrying a wooden tray with bottles of pinot noir and sparkling cider, glasses, and a plate of sugar cookies shaped like stars. She sets the tray on the coffee table and pours cider into a glass for Fiona.

  “Mommy and me made the cookies!” Fiona exclaims, scrambling off Stephen’s lap and grabbing a cookie in one hand and the glass in the other. “Whew! I’m thirsty,” she says, and takes a big gulp.

  “Honey, slow down. I want to give a toast.” Nora uncorks the wine bottle, fills the glasses, and gives one to each of the men.

  “To Christmas Eve,” she says raising her glass, smiling.

  “Christmas Eve!” they all say, raising their glasses as if love really will conquer all. Even Paul cheers. He is beginning to relax now, in this moment. He’s untucked his shirt, extended his long legs on the ottoman, kicked off his shoes.