The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

  “Nora?”

  “I’m afraid,” she says quietly.

  “I understand.”

  “I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “No one expects this.”

  “My body feels strange to me,” she says. She focuses her eyes on the closed window blinds. “And Fiona knows something is wrong.” She pauses for a moment. Outside, someone revs the engine of a car. The ferry horn blows in the distance, and she wishes she were on it, wishes she were gazing out at whitecaps and gulls and islands instead of grimy metal blinds. “I’m scared we’ll mess her up for life.” And then, “Shit, I’m so fucked up.”

  “You aren’t fucked up, and you’re not going to mess Fiona up for life.” He studies her eyes as if he’s deciding whether or not to continue. “Listen—and Nora, you do have to know, I’m not someone who adheres closely to labels, but you may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD—it’s a condition triggered by something horrible, and the symptoms can be flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, hallucinations, and so on.”

  Thoughts of soldiers returning from war without arms or legs or hope come into her mind. She leans back into the couch and stares at the ceiling. No one says anything for several minutes.

  “Dissociation—an altered state of consciousness—is on the PTSD continuum. People sometimes dissociate when they fear death or can’t escape a dangerous situation—they mentally leave the situation, imagine they’re somewhere else, lose awareness of the environment, become someone else. Some may see the event as happening to someone else and watch as if they’re a bystander. Many try to forget the event and contain the memories in a mental lockbox in order to keep functioning in a normal way.”

  She continues to stare at the ceiling. It is beginning to be difficult to track all the words. She feels a bit like she’s listening underwater.

  “Are you with me?” he says.

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “It’s possible your mind pushed a trauma into a corner of your subconscious, and now the memory is coming through—through the altered consciousness of the voice you are hearing.”

  She resurfaces, though her eyes stay fixed on the ceiling. “Why? Why now? Why a voice?”

  “I don’t know. No one really knows—though there is certainly a lot of speculation—”

  “Like what? What kind of speculation?”

  “Well, for example, sometimes when your child reaches an age that was difficult for you as a child, sometimes … things are relived. And the fact that both she and Fiona are six, well, there might be something to this. But what we do know is that at its root is extreme stress, trauma.”

  “Oh, my God,” she says, looking at him now. “Here we go again with the trauma. Did you even hear me when I said I haven’t been traumatized—at least anything near enough to cause this?”

  “Yes, I heard you. Listen, I’m not sure why this aspect of you, this little girl, would need to speak. I just know that whatever is hidden in the subconscious will struggle to reveal itself. You have basically been keeping a secret from yourself all this time.”

  She stares at him, unblinking, rocking gently back and forth.

  “And again, for the record, your mother beating you and dying in front of you is pretty serious.” He pauses. “And your father abandoning you when you were eleven is no small thing either.”

  She says nothing for a moment. Those things are in the past, and except for the last few months, she’s been able to leave them there. “Do I seem like someone who’s been traumatized?”

  “Nora, trauma survivors respond in different ways. They may do well in one area but not in another. They may function well at work but not in personal relationships. They may be great parents but have a debilitating addiction. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just too early in the process.”

  “Shit,” she says, forcing herself to stop rocking. “I can’t believe this, I really can’t believe this.”

  “Dissociation is a normal response to an abnormal situation. It’s a way of coping. We’ll figure this out.”

  “What did she—the voice—say?” Nora asks, finally.

  “She only said a few words. She seemed very in control but very scared. She didn’t want me to look at her, and when I turned away, she was gone.”

  She stares at him for a moment. “But what did she say?”

  “She told me her name.”

  Shock breaks across her face like a slap. “She has a name?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Margaret.”

  Margaret. Nora’s heart pummels her chest. Margaret.

  Then, images: A book. A book with a purple velvet cover and a gold lettered title, St. Margaret. A crown. A sword. A dead dragon. Sister Rosa.

  Nora hears David calling her name and slowly opens her eyes.

  “What is it, Nora?” he asks.

  Nora gets her bearings, stammers, “I … I need to go—I’ll call you,” she says and runs out of the room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  January 25, 1997

  Nora has an hour before she is expected home. She will walk, pull herself together, insist herself into a calmer state. She doesn’t know why images of Sister Rosa, the dragon, and the book of St. Margaret have materialized in her mind. They must have meaning, must have something to do with “Margaret,” but what? And how are they related to the Valentine’s dress? She remembers so little about that time in her life, rarely thinks about it—but she needs to try and remember, to sort this out.

  The day is cold, and she wraps her arms around herself to push away the chill, a chill magnified by apprehension flailing like a trapped sparrow in her chest. Up ahead, in Pike Place Market, there’s a Starbucks, and she thinks she might feel better if she has something to eat. A croissant maybe, or a blueberry muffin and a latte. She enters, orders three croissants (she will bring two home, one for Paul and one for Fiona) and a nonfat decaffeinated cappuccino. “You mean a ‘double nothing,’” the young barista named Clive says, and she nods, smiles a bit—the first time in days. She asks for a pat of butter and strawberry jam. The coffee shop is crowded but quiet, filled with people who seem content and sleepy, relieved it’s Saturday. Billie Holiday plays in the background, and Nora feels a little more in control now.

  She finds a table way in the back with a single chair. She sits down, sets the coffee and white bag on the table, and stares at them. The fat from the croissants seeps through the bag, and she thinks maybe she isn’t hungry after all. She takes out her notebook and a pencil and begins to sketch a picture of Sister Rosa, her old teacher, the one who made them stop and pray a Hail Mary every time a siren zoomed by the school. Nora is startled at how easily the details come to her: the black veil with its stiff white wimple tightly wrapping Sister Rosa’s round face, escaped wisps of black hair in such contrast to the bleached linen; the loose black dress draping to the ground, wooden rosary beads clipped to little hooks on a black woven belt, a large silver crucifix hanging from a black cord around her neck, the simple silver wedding ring on her left hand, the functional black shoes.

  Nora draws question marks in the spaces, traces the outline of Sister Rosa over and over. Then, her hand, the one holding the pencil, suddenly feels like it belongs to someone else. She watches as the hand writes: Everyone has their own way of being brave. And then she remembers these are Sister Rosa’s words—she’d said them to Nora at the convent. The hand puts the pencil down then, takes a croissant from the bag, butters it, smears the jam into the butter, and shoves it into Nora’s mouth. The mouth eats it all very quickly and wants more. The hand feeds the mouth another croissant, and the eyes close.

  Nora is in first grade at St. Raphael’s Catholic School in Illinois. She is marching through deep snow in oversized red boots from the school to the convent. It is her job during lunch recess to bring a carton of milk from
the school cafeteria to the nuns. She counts her steps as she marches. She tries to make it in exactly 256 steps. Sometimes she has to make giant steps toward the end of the path, or it would go over 256. The day is cold, but the sun is strong and the sky a bright blue. A light wind lifts new snow from old snow, and the flakes swirl around her, and she feels like a body in a snow globe.

  Sometimes Sister Rosa invites her into the library and reads her a book.

  “I like this one,” Nora whispers, holding a book with a picture of a beautiful woman riding a white horse on the cover.

  “That’s a book about St. Margaret,” Sister Rosa says, kneeling next to her.

  “Why does she have a sword?”

  “St. Margaret dedicated her life to protecting those in danger. When she was little, her mother died, and her father gave her to a shepherdess in the country. Margaret spent her days watching over the lambs. While she was tending the lambs, she would pray her rosary. Later, when her father found out she was dedicating her life to God, he became angry, and she had to leave their home, and she went off to protect those who were in danger.”

  Nora traces Margaret’s sword with her finger while Sister Rosa speaks.

  “And once she stood in front of a dragon with her sword raised in one hand and the cross of her rosary raised in the other, and the dragon lost all its powers.”

  “Why does she have a pearl necklace on her head?”

  “That’s her crown. The name Margaret comes from the Greek word for ‘pearl.’”

  “I wish I was brave like St. Margaret,” Nora says.

  “Why must you be brave sweetheart? You’re only a child.”

  Nora’s eyes begin to blink rapidly then and well up, and now she is crying jagged sobs that hit the walls and shatter into tiny pieces on the rug and disappear.

  Sister Rosa leans forward and gently tries to bring Nora onto her lap, but Nora pushes her away.

  “Don’t … Don’t …” Nora says between sobs. She wipes at her eyes with her sweater sleeve, stands up, and walks toward the front door.

  “Wait,” Sister Rosa calls, following her. As Nora struggles to pull on her boots, Sister Rosa walks to a little wooden table in the vestibule, opens the top drawer, and lifts out a crystal rosary, each bead an iridescent blue.

  She kneels in front of Nora so their eyes are even, Nora’s blue eyes still watery. Sister Rosa helps Nora button her coat and put on her mittens and says, “I know little girls usually receive this at their first communion, but I want you to have it now.” Sister Rosa places the rosary in Nora’s mittened hand and closes her fingers around it.

  “Keep it in your pocket, and touch it whenever you need help. And Nora?”

  “Yes, Sister?”

  “You can call for St. Margaret to help you anytime.”

  “Thank you, Sister,” Nora whispers. Sister Rosa opens the heavy door for her, and the cold air is sharp as Nora steps out. She looks back at Sister Rosa.

  “Everyone has their own way of being brave,” Sister Rosa says. Nora nods and marches back to school, retracing exactly 256 steps.

  Nora’s eyes open then, agitated and off-center. She blinks. The memory had arrived like a heart, pinkish-gray and pulsing, soft without edges. And now, relief: she has placed all the misplaced pieces—the book with the gold lettered title, St. Margaret; the crown; the sword; the dead dragon; Sister Rosa—into a whole! She did it! David was right about the trauma of her mother beating her, dying in front of her having an impact. She has remembered. She has remembered and now she can move on. She is relieved, pleased.

  She licks the crumbs off her lips. With a napkin, she wipes the greasy remnants from the table into her other hand and dumps them into the white bag and folds the bag closed, squishes it, with the one croissant still left inside, into a ball. She will buy new croissants. Around her, people are still drinking coffee and reading things from the newspaper out loud to each other. Life is moving on. She stands, but then she freezes. Here is Paul in his green winter parka and wool hat standing at the counter. Paul is standing there ordering things, and he is holding Fiona’s hand, and next to Fiona is a pretty woman wearing a Seahawks cap. The woman is touching Fiona’s shoulder, touching Fiona’s red coat, smiling big white teeth, and Fiona smiling back, shyly.

  Nora’s heart stops and her face grows hot and the room is thick as a dark forest. She watches the barista give each of them a cup with a lid. Fiona holds the cup with both mittened hands and blows into the little hole in the lid. The woman and Paul look at each other with open affection, and then the trio exits, Paul smiling and holding the door open for the woman and Fiona.

  The hand takes the third croissant out of the white paper bag and breaks it into little pieces and feeds it to the ravenous mouth.

  “What did you two do this morning?” Nora asks, falsely nonchalant, once the three of them are sitting together at home, eating grilled cheese sandwiches. She wants to see how Paul responds, a part of her hoping the attraction she witnessed was imagined.

  “Not much,” Paul shrugs, his casual tone as exaggerated as her own.

  “We went for a walk with Elisa, and we drank hot chocolate in the park,” Fiona says cheerfully, unaware of life’s complexities.

  “Elisa?” Nora says, adrenaline beginning to pump, and she isn’t sure she won’t start crying.

  “You know her, Mommy—the lady who plays the violin—the lady next door.”

  “Christ, can you lighten up?” Paul says later, after Fiona has gone off to the playground with her friend, Sarah.

  “She touched Fiona,” Nora whispers, clenching her coffee cup until her knuckles are white.

  “Nora! Come on! It was hot chocolate. It didn’t mean a thing.”

  “It goddamn means a thing to me!” she shrieks, and now the mug is flying through the air, a visible obscenity, hitting the refrigerator and shattering into bits at Paul’s feet.

  “You’re crazy,” he yells, grabbing his coat from the hall closet, walking out, slamming the door.

  “Bastard!” she shouts.

  And when Sarah’s mother calls to ask if Fiona can spend the night, “The girls are having so much fun!” Nora is relieved and climbs into bed with her clothes on. And when she hears Paul come home at 3:00 a.m. and walk unsteadily to the living room couch, she closes her eyes and tries not to think about where he’s been.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  January 27, 1997

  “Sister Rosa sounds lovely,” David says, his face expectant as a blank page. He is dressed in jeans and a rumpled shirt with rolled-up sleeves, his hair as rumpled as his shirt. Suddenly she wants to kiss him. Even though he is old enough to be her father, she wants to devour him, get lost in him, lose herself in him. Startled by this urge, the transparent cliché of it, she turns away, embarrassed, tries to clear her mind of it, but ends up closing her eyes and imagining the intimate perfection of his lips on hers.

  “Nora? Are you with me?”

  She opens her eyes, confused and flustered. The image gone, dissolved, defunct. The reality of her cracked life back, her past a malevolent undertow she cannot escape from simply by swimming parallel to and waiting for release; no, this is a force demanding a surrender she cannot allow.

  She sits guiltily, hoping her dreaming, her lust, will not be evident. She thinks of how she must look: dark jeans, black T-shirt, heavy black Doc Martens shoes, all of it overtly unfeminine, undeniably hands-off. Of course he wouldn’t desire her. She hears then the small clock on the cabinet next to her, ticking, ticking, ticking. She clenches and unclenches her fists.

  “Nora?”

  She needs the clock to stop ticking.

  “Nora?”

  “It’s … the clock,” she says. “It’s the ticking—”

  “I’ll move it,” David says. He rises, picks up the clock and places it in the bottom drawer of his desk acro
ss the room, and sits back down.

  “Paul looked like he was in love,” she says.

  “You mean when you saw him at the coffee shop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to talk about that?”

  She doesn’t know what to talk about. She is conscious her thoughts are lurching and spinning and fear is creeping in with its jagged edges and she works hard now to reassure herself she is fine, but she is not succeeding. She wants him to take charge, tell her what to say and do.

  “Nora?”

  “Sister Rosa told me to pray to Saint Margaret if I was scared. Why would she say that? I mean obviously, nuns tell you to pray to the saints, but she seemed to think I should specifically pray to St. Margaret. And now with the voice calling herself Margaret—” she can still hear that clock. She puts her hands over her ears and begins to rock back and forth slightly. “The clock,” she whispers.

  “Nora, it’s okay. Here, I’ll put it down the hall.” He pulls the clock out of the drawer and leaves her there for a few moments. She presses her spine into the back of the couch and grabs the raven pillow and the room is so silent she can hear the ticking of her heart, a ticking that grows louder now, TICK TICK, mocking her, TICK TICK, you can’t hide, TICK TICK—

  “There, how’s that?” David asks, back now, sitting down, once again on his chair, his voice not the least impatient.

  She pulls the pillow up to her face. “One … two … three,” she says, her heart going bang … bang … bang.

  “Nora?” David says in a whisper.

  “Four … five … six … seven … eight …”

  “Margaret? Is that you?”

  “Nine … ten … eleven … twelve …”

  “Margaret? Can you talk to me?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Margaret says into the pillow. She wants to go back inside, but it is her job to save Fiona.

  “I’ll move over here.” He moves to the chair by the window.

  He is nice, but she will be careful.