The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

“Margaret, can you hear Nora?”

  “Yes,” she whispers. She is not used to talking out loud and it feels wrong and her tummy feels wrong.

  “Margaret, are there others inside helping Nora?”

  “No, it’s just me.” This is too many questions. She needs to go back in.

  “Margaret, do you know anything about St. Margaret?”

  She bites the side of her bottom lip and moves the pillow so there is a tiny space for air. She loves St. Margaret. She will tell him. “We have the same names and she fought a dragon and then the dragon swallowed her but she got out and then the dragon came back as a man and tried to trick her and she caught him by the head and threw him to the ground and put her foot on his neck and said, ‘Lie still, thou fiend, under the feet of a woman.’” She peeks up for a moment, but then her face is back into the pillow. “Liar, liar, liar,” she says.

  “Margaret, who’s a liar?”

  “Liar, liar, liar,” she says again, her voice making itself loud. She is mad at Nora. Very, very mad.

  “Margaret, please, tell me. Who is a liar?”

  “Nora … she … she prayed to Saint Margaret. A lot. Nora wanted Saint Margaret and then she made me and now she says she doesn’t even know me!” Margaret forgets to be careful, forgets to hide her face. She looks at David’s back. He is still looking at the window, so he is not mad with her. Then a man’s voice from outside the door! It is him! A scream shoves out of her mouth.

  “Margaret?” David swivels around in his chair. She is curled up in the corner of the couch, her hands covering her face.

  Silence fills the room.

  “Margaret?”

  Nora opens her eyes slowly, realizes her hands are covering her face. Tentatively, she brings her hands down, feeling lightheaded and jumbled. There is David across the room, observing her. She realizes her knees are up and quickly straightens them.

  “When I came back from putting the clock away, Margaret was here,” David says. He stops for a moment and glances at her uneasily, as if checking her ability to handle all this.

  “And?” she says.

  “Did you hear her?” he asks.

  “No,” she says with difficulty. Her mouth feels separate from her, unfaithful. “Why couldn’t I? I can hear everything else.” She is quiet for a moment, listening intently. “I can hear the gulls, the ferry horn, people out in the hall. I heard that goddamn clock hidden in a closed drawer. Why can’t I hear her?”

  “Each of these situations is different, Nora. Some people can hear the change, some cannot. Think about it like this: Assume your brain has one box holding all the stress in your life. That box is full; things are overflowing. In your attempt to keep order, you’ve created another container. That container holds Margaret and her memories. You’ve had a tight lid on that box—and now it’s loose.”

  “Do you think there are others?” She’s been thinking about Sybil since their last meeting. She’d seen the movie in college, and it had terrified her so much she’d left the theater, ran out on her date. Yesterday, she’d gone to the library to read about multiple personalities, but when she’d arrived at the mental health shelves she’d panicked. She’d stood there, blinking and disoriented, and then she’d walked over to the encyclopedias and read about St. Margaret. She’d read hundreds of saint stories in school, and their deaths always terrified her. All the flames and burning faces and sizzling hair and hearts and heads stabbed onto stakes and screams for mercy while thousands of faces watched. There were always faces watching.

  But she read the article and looked for clues. Margaret was a girl who lived in Turkey in the early fourth century. Daughter of a pagan priest. Her mother passed on soon after her birth, and she was given to a woman who raised sheep out in the country. The woman raised Margaret in Christianity, which pissed off her father, who said she’d have to choose between religion and him. She chose the church. One day, a Roman wanted her to be his wife. Again, she said no. He was humiliated and had her arrested for being a Christian. When she wouldn’t give up her faith, he tried to burn her, but the flames didn’t hurt her. Then he tried to boil her in a cauldron of scorching water. As guards plunged her into the water, the heavens opened, and a snow-white dove flew down and placed a crown on Margaret’s head. She stood up without any sign of burns. This, of course, angered the Roman even more, so he threw her into prison. Satan then visited her in the form of a dragon. The dragon swallowed her, but she stabbed his innards with her cross, and he spit her out. Finally, they chopped off her head. No one knows what happened to the blonde head of hers, but her hand is now under glass at the Vatopedi Monastery in Greece.

  “Nora?”

  She opens her eyes, though she doesn’t remember closing them. Her heart is beating madly, and she is filled with rage. Rage for the faces who stood by and watched a still-alive woman burn to ash.

  “Nora, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she snaps. “What the hell were we talking about?”

  He leans forward. Looks at her intently, his brown eyes sharp and steady. “You asked if there might be others.”

  She takes a deep breath. Unclenches her fists. She is not angry with him. “Do you think there are?”

  “I asked Margaret that—she says there are not,” he says, his voice soft. “But we’ll have to wait and see.” He pauses for a moment. “It’s really too early to know for sure.”

  “Too early to know for sure? Shouldn’t you know something by now? God, are you even qualified for this type of problem?” She stares then at the certificate hanging on the wall, reads it aloud in an acrid tone, “David Forrester, MD, University of Wisconsin, Certified in Adult, Adolescent, and Child Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.”

  She turns to him and says, “What does that really mean? That you’re certified to save a screaming, slipping, cracked mind by nodding and saying, ‘Mmmhmm,’ repeatedly for a hundred bucks an hour?”

  She can feel herself becoming cruel, but he is not unnerved, only looks at her calmly, like a parent managing a child going through a phase, which pisses her off even more. “You hardly seem worried at all. Are you so desensitized from listening to story after story of abuse and infidelity and messed-up human beings that you know there’s nothing you can do anyway, that it’s not your problem—” She stops then, glares at her shoes. The anger. Christ, the anger. Her pulse races, berserk as a rabid animal.

  David gets up and walks to the window, opens the blinds a crack, looks through the slats. Sunlight stripes his face, neck, and chest. “Look,” he says, “if you decide to continue with me, I’m not going anywhere. No matter what. Do you hear me? I’m here for the long haul.” He hesitates for a moment, turns, and looks hard at her, “And for the record, most of what I know comes from my life, not school. Don’t you think for a moment I haven’t had my share of hell.” His face is so fervent she has to turn away, but the surprise of his admission, the intensity of it, has a strangely calming effect on her.

  “And,” he continues, “it is critical you work with someone you are comfortable with, so if you don’t feel comfortable with me, we should find you someone else.”

  She looks at the certificate, the ceiling, the absoluteness of him. “I’ll work with you,” she says, finally, in a whisper.

  He nods. “Good. And here’s another truth—ultimately, you are the one who will save you. Not me. You. You’ll have to work hard. Harder than you’ve ever worked on anything in your life. I can support you, advise you, but in the end, you are the one who will reconstruct the broken pieces, patch the cracks. You will make the choice to transcend this—whatever it is.”

  She pushes her hair back from her face. Tears spring to her eyes.

  His voice is softer now. “You have what it takes, Nora. Just the fact you are here shows incredible strength. Very few people take this step, you know.” He reaches for
the tissue box near his chair and hands it to her.

  She wipes the tears off her face. She wants to believe she has what it takes. She wants to believe she is not broken; she is fixable.

  “Listen. I’ve had clients come to me who have had alternate personalities speak during sessions, but nowhere else. My concern would be much greater if Margaret took control of your life outside of this office—which leads to my next question.”

  He leans forward in his chair, clasps his hands together, taps his thumbs together a couple of times and says, “Have you ever felt that you blanked out and found yourself somewhere unexpected? Like you left for school but ended up in a department store and didn’t know how you got there?”

  She thinks for several moments, shakes her head no.

  “Has anyone ever mentioned you were talking to yourself?”

  She shakes her head again and says, “Well, maybe, but everyone talks to themselves a little, don’t they?”

  “Yes, of course, and like most things, this is on a continuum. But have people commented to you about it—your talking aloud to no one in particular?”

  “No. No, they haven’t.”

  She is silent for a long time. Until the last few weeks, she has always felt in control of her life. Perhaps not completely in control (look at the way she binges and starves, binges and starves) but she has always felt present. So okay, maybe she can relax now, maybe this is a temporary thing. This voice, this Margaret, is merely a part of her consciousness, that’s all, a voice she’ll work with in therapy, in this office. But now, new thoughts flash through her mind. What if Margaret shows up outside this office now that the cat’s out of the bag? What if she shows up again at school?

  Nora imagines herself standing in front of her class showing how adverbs can weaken a perfectly good sentence, when everything becomes blurry and her eyes close and Margaret appears and curls up on the floor and the students panic and call the administration. And here is John, running down the hall and bursting into the classroom door, seeing her, the Department Head of English, huddled up, skirt rolled around her waist, underwear on display, lips opening and closing, babbling things in a child’s voice. The students staring; they are shocked, fascinated, disturbed. Some look away and then back again.

  Or what if Paul sees Margaret? Puts a hand on her and she freaks? What if Fiona is watching? Nora sees Fiona there, the face and body of her, frozen. Oh, God. Paul will take her away forever.

  All this could happen. A few months ago she would have said no, this could not happen, but now she knows it could. She whispers, “Do you think she’ll speak outside of this office?”

  “I don’t know, Nora. I don’t know. My sense is that she feels safe speaking here, with us, and if we help her it will stay that way.”

  “Why hasn’t she spoken before? Why now?”

  He shrugs. “Perhaps she was resting. You’ve said before how safe you felt with your grandparents, how lovely it was to live with them—my sense is she rested then. And perhaps this last fifteen years with Paul has been fairly uneventful, am I right? So perhaps something has happened lately—something has triggered her need to come out—or maybe she needed you to be at a place in your life where you could handle what she needs to say. Or maybe it’s because she’s the same age as Fiona. I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.” He looks at his watch. “Nora, our session is almost over, and I haven’t yet told you what Margaret said.”

  “Shit.”

  “If this feels like too much, I can tell you next time.”

  “No. Tell me now.”

  “She was very upset.”

  “She’s very upset?” Nora says, a bit angrily.

  David watches her, hesitates.

  “Tell me.”

  “She said you prayed to St. Margaret and to use her words, she said you prayed to her a lot. And Nora,” he says gently, almost like he is apologizing, “she said you are a liar.”

  “A liar? A liar? What the hell?” Nora feels haunted, deranged, violated, like a house that’s burglarized and then the robber turns out to be someone you know.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The evening of January 27, 1997

  When Nora arrives home, Paul is coming down the stairs. He looks worried. “Fiona’s been sick to her stomach and vomiting for the last two hours. I took her temperature, and it’s normal—” but before he’s finished, Nora is up the stairs, fast, to Fiona’s bedside. Fiona looks miserable. Her face flushed pink, her bangs damp on her forehead.

  “Mommy,” she cries. “I don’t feel so good.”

  Nora brushes Fiona’s bangs to the side and bends down to kiss her cheek, breathing in the faint odors of sweat and vomit.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart, I’m here now.” Nora lies down next to Fiona and gathers her close, pulls the blanket over the two of them, whispers, “Do you know how much I love you?”

  Fiona presses hard into Nora, two pieces fitting together like small countries in a private continent. “Beyond the stars and back,” Fiona says softly.

  “Yes, my love, beyond the stars and back,” she says, stroking Fiona’s hair until she is asleep.

  When Paul comes to the doorway, she whispers, “I think she’s fine. Probably just something she ate at school.”

  He slides a hand slow over his face, through his hair, says in a voice flat as a granite slab, “I’ll be downstairs if you need anything, okay?”

  Once he’s gone, she thinks about him. The way he’s become more and more unstrung—the pressure of his relentless business deals—she’s heard him on the phone arguing and dictating terms with bankers and lawyers—the strain of doing more of the housework because she’s been too upset to care. Her not wanting to have sex. His obvious affair with Elisa. And she still hasn’t said anything to him about Margaret. She can’t bring up the right words. Paul, I might be a multiple personality. Paul, I might be schizophrenic. She can see his eyes flash alarm, his face stiffen into disbelief, images of his mother tearing through his mind.

  No, she isn’t ready.

  And now, Margaret has called her a liar. An imaginary entity within her, something she’s invented in her mind, has called her a liar. Fiona whimpers a little, and Nora pulls her closer. She will survive this. She will lean on her logical mind. Logically, something must have happened to hurt her so badly she was unable to face it, is still unable to face it. Has she missed something about her mother’s death? Her mother fell down the stairs because she was drunk, not because she, Nora, wouldn’t stop playing the piano. Still, she feels guilty, but logically, she knows guilt is a normal response. So, what is she not facing? Her father’s abandonment? Her rational mind knows her father had his own struggles. That he wasn’t capable of caring for two children on his own. Yes, it hurts like hell that he completely disappeared, but that couldn’t possibly be enough to trigger this—this craziness, this Margaret, this child. Why a child? And why had she prayed to St. Margaret? And why had Margaret called her a liar?

  Only one other person in her life had called her a liar.

  “Liar!” her mother shouted, snatching the rosary from Nora’s six-year-old fist. “Where did you get this?”

  “S-s-sister Rosa gave it to me.”

  “Liar!” Her mother’s red hands shaking the rosary close to Nora’s face.

  “P-p-please Mommy, give it back.”

  “You want it back? Here!” And then her mother’s angry fingers wrenching the rosary apart until SNAP! The white thread breaks, and all fifty-nine blue beads pop into the air and clatter to the floor. Her mother leaving her there then, in the sudden silence of it all, Nora smearing tears off her cheeks and scrambling to find each precious bead.

  “Liar!” her mother shrieked the morning she’d found an empty package of lemon-crème cookies in Nora’s bed.

  “It wasn’t me, Mommy,” Nora cried. “It wasn’t me.”

 
; “Liar!” her mother hissed after she’d pulled Nora out of the confessional at church. “You spit on the priest. The priest! Through the screen!”

  “But I didn’t, Mommy! I didn’t!”

  She remembers being angry with the priest. But she doesn’t remember why or what she’d said. And she doesn’t remember spitting on him.

  Lying there in the dark, Nora remembers these things. But she doesn’t remember why there was an empty package of cookies in her bed. And she does not remember praying to St. Margaret.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  January 29, 1997

  “I’m worried about Fiona,” Nora says to David a couple of days later. She is clutching a paper cup of coffee with both hands. “She’s been getting stomachaches. The pediatrician thinks it’s anxiety.”

  “What do you think?” he asks, cleaning his glasses with the bottom of his shirt.

  “Well, I think he’s probably right.” She puts her cup down next to her ankles and rubs her fingers hard into both her temples. “I stayed home with her the last couple of days, and she seemed to feel better quickly. We had such a lovely time, but …” she closes her eyes and rubs her temples even harder.

  “But it wasn’t enough,” he says.

  “No.” She thinks of the last few days with Fiona, how they’d spent almost every moment together, played dress-up, Fiona becoming a princess in an evening gown Nora had found at a garage sale, read Heidi, Little House in the Big Woods, Charlotte’s Web. They’d written a funny story about an onion named Miss Pearl, sung along with Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” Fiona dramatically falling to the ground each time the chorus came around and then breaking into giggles. It had been such a relief to hear her laugh, the sound of it bright as a sunrise, and yet there had been moments, too, when Fiona reached for her and wouldn’t let go, whispering, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” and Nora had tried not to fall to pieces. You can’t keep secrets from children. Fiona knows something is wrong, and her worries are making her sick.