The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

  Nora became aware that she was zipping and unzipping the pillow fast. She released it, tossed it to the other end of the couch. “He helped out a lot at church too—built a new sign and fixed the cross once when it broke in a tornado. The priest told me once how lucky I was to have such a kind father.”

  “Did you feel lucky?”

  Heat creeps into her face and crouches there. Sweat drips under her breasts.

  “Yes,” she says, focusing on her folded hands. “Until he disappeared. I loved him more than anyone—until he disappeared.” It is difficult to say this aloud, and she wishes she still had the pillow to hold.

  “I’m sorry,” David says.

  “Anyway,” she says and shrugs.

  “Nora,” he says, his voice soft. “Would you look at me for a moment?”

  A slant of sun has slipped through a crack in the blinds, and she watches it light up his white hair. Another streak of light from a different crack stripes across his beard.

  “What would you do if you ran into him on the street?” David asks. From the hallway the sound of a door slamming makes her jump. Her father could be right outside this building. And she is not ready. She is not ready to face the cauterized truth of him.

  It is then that Nora sees the same disturbing twist in the air that blurred her vision in the classroom, in the hotel. She blinks, blinks, blinks rapidly to bring David’s face into her line of vision.

  “Stay with the feeling,” David is saying. “Stay with the feeling, Nora. You are safe,” but it’s becoming difficult to hear him and she is going away and a gauzy curtain unrolls slowly, slowly from the ceiling and it is floating, floating between them, swaying there and now she is fading, fading like a memory into silence. Her eyes close.

  “Just let go,” he says, sounding farther and farther away. “Let go. I’m right here. You are safe.”

  She lets go.

  And now a huge startling movement in her head, as if a sliding door has opened along her cerebral cortex, a continental shift from her left hemisphere to the right. She opens her eyes.

  “Nora, can you hear me?”

  “I am Margaret,” says a tiny voice.

  “Nora?”

  Margaret’s heart is banging, banging.

  “Nora, is that you?”

  “I am Margaret.”

  “Margaret?”

  “Please. Move away from me.”

  David moves to the green chair by the window. “How’s that?” he says.

  Now she doesn’t know what to say. He is acting very nice.

  He asks softly, “Margaret, why are you here?”

  Silence.

  She wants to talk to him. She wants to tell him things.

  “How old are you, Margaret?”

  “Six.”

  “Six. Well, Margaret, is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  Margaret pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. She hides her face on her knees. She will be in big trouble now. She is not supposed to talk to anyone.

  “It’s all right. You are safe,” he says.

  She says nothing.

  “Margaret?” he says. “Hello?” And then, a bit louder, “Nora?”

  From a distance Nora hears David calling her name. She opens her eyes, slowly, her lids heavy. She is disoriented, the way one feels upon waking up in a hotel room. The kind of hotel room you stay in at the last minute because nothing else is available.

  “Nora,” David says gently. “Just breathe.”

  She fixes her eyes on him, and after a few moments, remembers where she is, who he is. He looks worried. She realizes her arms are wrapped around her knees, which are folded into her chest, and a ripple of confusion shoots through her. She thrusts her feet to the ground and folds her hands on her lap, trembling.

  After a long silence he says, carefully, “What are you feeling?”

  “I … I … I don’t know.” She brings her shaking hand up to her cheek, touches it as if she is unsure she exists.

  “You’re okay. Take some deep breaths.”

  Nora looks at him and shudders. Through chattering teeth she asks, “Why are you sitting over there?”

  “You asked me to move,” he says, and she can see he is struggling to be careful with his words.

  “What are you talking about?” she asks in a whisper.

  “The words … of a little girl were coming from you.” He pauses as if he is waiting for some sort of reaction from her. “She didn’t want me near her, so I moved over here.”

  Nothing feels real. “She? What? What are you talking about?”

  Again he says, “You spoke in the voice of a little girl … Nora, did you hear anything she said?”

  “No, I didn’t fucking hear anything.” Nora rocks back and forth. She is close to tears. This is the moment she’s worried about. The moment when the neurons in her brain misfire into complete chaos and it’s too late to do anything about it. She should have taken medication to hold them together long before this, and now it’s probably too late.

  “Listen, whoever she is, she needed to speak, and you had the courage to allow her to do so.”

  “What the hell are you saying? How could you let this happen?” Nora says, her voice rigid with anger and fear. She stops rocking and pushes deeper into the back of the couch, clenching the pillow to her chest. Her mind is a collision, a multivehicle accident. No survivors.

  He moves to his usual chair, faces her directly. “You are allowing yourself to remember something. I believe she is assisting you.” He says all of this as if he says it every day, to everyone, to anyone who sits on his couch.

  “Do you hear yourself?” Nora whispers.

  “She is you, Nora.”

  “She is me? What the hell are you talking about?” She shakes her head in disbelief that something this bizarre could be happening to her.

  The tears come then, a burst of sobs, huge and consuming, her shoulders lurching up and down, and she can’t breathe, and she chokes on the swallowed tears, and David won’t stop saying, “Breathe, Nora, breathe,” and she would strangle him if she could, breathe if she could, but she’s drowning and she can’t remember if she’s cried like this before, and then her grandfather’s words in her ear, You are tough, you are stronger than you think, and she catches her breath, and now the tears diminish into a few short, quick breaths and slowly, finally, come to a stop.

  “This is difficult. I know. But we will figure this out,” David says leaning toward her, his face serious, his hands folded on his knees.

  “We’ll figure this out?” she gasps out, her throat tight. “What am I supposed to do now? Go home?” She pauses, needing to swallow. “What if I go crazy at home?” she whispers and then rocks back and forth, bringing her hands to her face, covering her wet cheeks. All she wants is to curl up into a little ball, climb under something, and melt into oblivion.

  “Nora. Stop. You’re scaring yourself. If I for a minute, for even a minute, thought you weren’t safe leaving here, I wouldn’t send you home.”

  Nora isn’t sure what to think. “Is this—shit, like Sybil?”

  “The case portrayed in Sybil was extremely severe—and rare, perhaps less than .01 percent of the general population. Dissociation occurs along a continuum and is part of the range of normal experience. Nora, it is far too early to speculate about what is happening for you and where this falls on that spectrum.” He stops for a moment, looks at her gently, as if giving her time to assimilate what he’d said. When she says nothing, only continues to bite her lip, he says, “It seems to me that your brain is working hard to remember something. If we could somehow connect with that past wiring, the past memories, we could understand how to rewire the pathways so your brain could be healthy again. But look, this is a lot for today. I think you should rest, process this, an
d we’ll talk about it more next time—”

  “I’m going home,” Nora says then, without making an effort to stand.

  “Please, rest for a minute. It will be okay. Can you come in tomorrow—Saturday?”

  She stands up, but her legs are useless with shaking, and she sits back down.

  “Nora? Did you hear me? Can you meet Saturday?” he stands up and walks over to his desk. He moves his index finger down the calendar page. “How about 10:00 a.m.? Will that work?”

  She nods her head and stands again, more steadily now. She pulls on her coat and opens the door. The cold startles her.

  “See you tomorrow,” he says.

  She rushes out, toward home, rushes down the dark street, past the glittering bookstores and coffee shops, past the Space Needle with its weird alien suggestions, past the stutter and stammer of rush hour traffic. All the way home she thinks, This can’t be happening. God! How does this happen to a person?

  Finally, here is her home. She almost can’t bear to look at it. The weight of it. A 1930s red brick bungalow with ivy growing up the chimney. A red brick path edged in purple hydrangeas leads to the bright red door. She was twenty-three, he was twenty-eight when they moved in. The first night he’d officially carried her over the threshold, turned the key to unlock the brown door (they’d painted it a week later), and they’d shared a pepperoni pizza and Coors beer on the renovated wood floor in the living room. They’d talked about furniture and future plans (no children for at least three years) and where to put the recycling bins. They’d felt like grown-ups. Now the house gazes back at her as if she is a stranger, as if it’s observing her, deciding if she is worthy of entrance.

  “I’m back,” she says, standing in the doorway of Paul’s study, feeling blurred and insecure.

  “Fiona’s in bed,” he says indifferently, keeping his eyes on his computer, his back toward her. Next to him: a plate with crumbs and a balled-up paper napkin, a trace of whiskey in a glass.

  “Still working on the Lincoln Plaza?” she asks, pangs of guilt now.

  “Still? Do you know how long a deal like this takes? This is the biggest project Bellevue’s seen in a decade! Do you know what it means if I land this?”

  She does know. Points on his scorecard. He needs to stay at the top of the heap. Like her father. She pictures her father then, decades ago, sitting in the kitchen, papers and files arranged in neat piles around him. She’d sit across from him working out math problems or writing a story. Her mother washing dishes. The quiet way her mother had wiped her hands on a towel, hesitated by the table, then asked her father to take a walk, take a minute away from his work. The way her father had looked at her mother, exasperated. As if she was stupid. The way he’d said, “This deal will put me on the map, Maeve. On the map.”

  Nora leaves Paul and walks up the stairs to her daughter’s bedroom. Fiona snoring softly, one arm under her head, another around her stuffed orca. Nora bends down and kisses her on the cheek, her skin a flower blossom. She sits in the rocking chair by Fiona’s bed. This chair was the first thing she’d purchased when she’d become pregnant. She remembers the deep sense of responsibility she’d felt placing the chair in Fiona’s bedroom. Her first normal, motherly thing. She’d sat in the chair, on the polished wood, her hands pressed upon her pregnant belly, and she’d known happiness then. Intense happiness. And she had nursed Fiona in this chair, lullabied her to sleep in it, Fiona’s murmurings intertwining so magically with her own. A sane mother rocking her baby to sleep.

  “Nora?” Paul’s voice from the bedroom brings her back, makes her aware she is rocking fast and hard in the chair. She hadn’t heard him come up the stairs.

  “Have you seen my gray Nike sweatshirt?”

  She stands and walks into the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed. “No,” she says, wearily. She hears him rummage through hangers.

  “God, this place is a shit hole!”

  “Sorry. But Paul?”

  “What?” He is more irritated lately. He emerges from the closet with three gray sweatshirts and stands looking at her for several moments before holding each of the shirts up and inspecting their logos. He finds the Nike, pulls it over his head, and walks to the mirror. He speaks to her in the reflection. “Christ, you look terrible. I thought therapy was supposed to make you feel better.”

  She knows he is frustrated, scared—he’s not prepared to be married to a crazy person.

  “Paul, in the session today, I—”

  He turns around and walks over to his dresser, opens the second drawer, and grabs a pair of fresh socks. For the few seconds it takes him to pull them on, she changes her mind. She still can’t tell him about the voice. It wouldn’t do any good to talk about it right now. Not with this hostility between them and not when she herself doesn’t even know what is real and what is not.

  “I’m going to head over to Mahoney’s and watch the game, have a beer.”

  “Fine.” But then she notices that he’s freshly shaven, something he never does before going to Mahoney’s. He’s lying.

  Once he’s gone, she walks downstairs, her hand on the railing, to the kitchen, where she swallows spoonful after spoonful of artificially sweetened vanilla ice cream.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The morning of January 25, 1997

  It is Saturday. Fiona stands barefoot on a wooden stool at the kitchen counter in her favorite flannel nightgown, the one with the bluebirds on it, mixing pancake batter. Paul, still wearing the same clothes from the night before, (he must have slept on the couch) holds the large red bowl steady for her. The Sonics game blares from the radio, and Paul is shouting at Payton to “Run, damn it! Pass! Get off your damn knees!”

  “Yeah!” Fiona yells, “Get off your damn knees!”

  “Paul, can I talk to you for a moment?” Nora calls from the doorway. “In the living room?”

  “I’ll keep listening, Daddy,” Fiona says. “I’ll tell you what happens.”

  Paul follows Nora into the living room and flops on the couch, his arm over his eyes. She sits on the opposite end, near his feet.

  She stares at his feet then and realizes she has never kissed his body from head to foot like you read about in the magazines, see in the movies. She’s never even squirted whipped cream on his toes or fingers or anywhere and sucked it off. An unexpected thorn of failure stabs at her, even though, in fifteen years of marriage, he has never asked for whipped cream, has never voiced those kinds of needs, those kinds of desires. But maybe now he’s had a change of heart, maybe now he wants more. Of course he wants more. She considers shouting, “DO YOU WANT ME TO SQUIRT WHIPPED CREAM ON YOUR BODY? ARE YOU HAVING AN AFFAIR?” She isn’t prepared for a fight though, doesn’t have the energy, feels she needs to reserve her fortitude for putting herself back together again. Instead she says, “David wants to see me this morning.”

  “Why?” Paul asks, almost angry, making her aware she is the one changing the rules.

  “I don’t know,” she lies.

  “But on a Saturday?” Paul says, sitting up, his hair and clothes rumpled and sideways. “Look at this place.”

  She looks. Looks at the messy living room: Christmas cards still on the fireplace mantle, most of them tipped over, pine needles scattered on the wood floor (Paul had taken the tree to the curb weeks ago), Fiona’s stuffed animals strewn around. A naked Barbie doll facedown on the floor near a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich on a paper plate. Morning light slanting through the window magnifies soft piles of dust in every corner.

  “What’s happened to you?” he says. He stands and picks up the paper plate, folds it in half and then in half again, the sandwich squished inside it. “You used to be meticulous. You used to care.” Something catches in his voice then, and she thinks he might cry.

  She jumps up and grabs the Barbie doll, begins to collect the stuffed animals. “Oh, Paul, I’m
sorry, I—” but then a shriek, a loud thump from the kitchen. “Shit!” Nora gasps, drops the toys, and runs into the kitchen, Paul close behind.

  A white-faced Fiona sits on the floor, the flames of the propane stove high.

  Fiona rubs her elbow, eyes welling. Paul rushes to turn off the stove, and Nora goes to Fiona, kneels down by her, moves her bangs from her eyes. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I turned on the stove, and the fire scared me, and I fell off the stool.”

  “Here, stand up, sweetheart, let’s be sure you’re okay.”

  Fiona stands for a moment then wiggles her body in place. “I’m okay, Mommy.”

  Paul draws in a slow deep breath, turns off the radio, says, “Sweetie. Don’t ever, ever do that again. You could have been burned very badly.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy, I wanted to help. I wanted—” but then she bursts into sobs, sits down on the floor, blonde head in small hands.

  “What is it, honey?” says Nora, stroking Fiona’s hair. “Did you want to show us you’re a big girl?”

  “No … I … I wanted to make you … and Daddy breakfast so … you would be happy … and …”

  “And what?” Paul says, gentler now.

  “And like each other again.”

  Over the top of Fiona’s head, Paul’s eyes meet Nora’s with a look of guilt that shoots straight from his heart into hers.

  * * *

  “How are you feeling?” David asks her once he is settled back to listen and she has adjusted the raven pillow on her lap, folded her hands on its wings, careful to leave the black of its eye exposed. Her grandfather told her once that ravens were omniscient, the wisest of all animals. “There is wisdom in a raven’s head,” he’d say whenever one flew over the house.