The Night Child

by Anna Quinn

“Nora?”

  She opens her eyes, folds her hands on her lap. “Presidents’ Day break is coming up next week, and I’m spending every free moment with her. I just wish I could understand what’s going on in my head and be done with it without … damaging her.”

  David leans forward, giving her the whole attention of his being. “What you are working through is the opposite of damaging, to you or Fiona. Your healing will be the greatest gift you can give her. Concealing your pain keeps a part of you in darkness, and trust me, that isn’t good for anyone.”

  She tells herself he is probably right, she is doing the right thing. In a few months everything will be fine again. She promises herself she will take charge of this; she will resolve it.

  “Nora, do you want to talk about our last session? When you left you were pretty upset.”

  She should tell him about the other times she was called a liar, about the broken rosary, but she is aware now that she is becoming sleepy, and she has the vague awareness these feelings are the ones preceding the appearance of Margaret. This awareness frightens her, and she quickly sits up straight and takes a large gulp of coffee. She is in charge here.

  “Nora, what were you feeling the night after our last session?”

  After Fiona had fallen asleep, after she had remembered the other times she’d been called a liar, she’d crept down to the kitchen and eaten a fistful of cookies, then bread with butter and jam, and then more cookies. And then she’d vomited it all into the toilet. But she doesn’t tell David these things—she can’t.

  “Nora, how do you feel about Margaret calling you a liar?”

  Nora tries to speak then, but when she opens her mouth, the silence in the room rushes into every pore of her, until, with the huge weight of it, she closes her eyes and her head falls to her chest.

  “Don’t look at me,” she says, her head down. Her voice a higher pitch.

  “Margaret?”

  “Please—please, can you sit in the other chair?” Margaret says, and she carefully peeks as David moves to the green chair by the window. He is old and moves slowly, like her grandfather, and she thinks he also looks like him, which makes her feel safer. David turns his head to the window like last time. She can see the black of the night sneaking in through the cracks in the blinds. She needs to tell him. It is her job.

  “I’m glad you are here, Margaret.”

  “Mommy broke our rosary and I tried to find all the beads but I couldn’t find them all and it was me who spit in the priest’s face,” she says. She cannot stop shaking. His hands are wrapped around his coffee mug, and he stays looking at the blinds when he talks. It could be a trick, but she doesn’t think so because his body is leaning back.

  “And I’m the one who ate the cookies in bed,” she says watching him, watching the door. “I ate the cookies because Daddy tasted yucky and I’m really, really sorry.” No one is coming in, but she will talk fast. “And I stole money from Daddy’s suit pockets and also I steal money from Paul. I keep it in an orange shoe box with the rosary beads in Nora’s closet … the one with the little white check mark.” She stops then and watches him look out the window for a long time without speaking, like he’s thinking and will never talk to her again because of all the bad things she has done. She can’t think of what else to do right now, but then he talks.

  “Margaret, why did you steal money from your daddy?”

  “Because … because … I needed it. I was saving up for me and Nora to run away.” She is really scared now and keeps looking at the door in case someone comes in and she has to get away fast.

  “Margaret, can I ask you one more question?”

  No one is coming in now, and David is not mad about the money, so she says, “Yes.”

  “Why did you spit in the priest’s face?”

  She closes her eyes tightly. She grabs the pillow and brings her legs up to her chest until she is a tight ball, but then she is right there in the smell of incense, and she is kneeling and waiting and waiting and waiting for the red light to turn green on the big box where the priest waits. Now the red light turns green, and it is her turn, and she tiptoes up to the big box, opens the large door, and steps in, heart stammering, kneels with her face close to the little closed window and now the window slides open and there is a black screen and she can see the shadow of the priest’s face and hear his breathing.

  “Bless me father for I have sinned,” she says shyly. It is only her second time in the big box of confession and she does not know this priest because this is not the church where her school is and she doesn’t know why her mother came here instead of their regular church.

  “And what are your sins my child?” She is scared to tell him the bad things, but her mother says you have to tell everything if you don’t want to go to hell. She takes a big breath and says “I … I did a very, very, very, bad thing.”

  “You are too little to do a very, very, very bad thing. So tell me. Tell me what you did wrong.”

  “I … I … I … touched …” She can’t tell him. This is too scary.

  “You touched what, my child? Something your mother asked you not to?”

  “I touched … I touched …”

  The priest leans his face close to the screen. “What did you touch? Tell me. Remember, whatever you tell me is a secret between you and me and God. No one else will ever know.”

  “I … I … touched … daddy’s hard thing.”

  “His … hard thing?”

  “The … the … hard thing between his legs. He put my hand down there in his pants and I touched it and he moved my hand up and down and up and down and—”

  “Stop!” the priest says. “Stop saying such things. Why would a nice little girl like you make up such bad things? Did your teacher not tell you to honor your father and mother? Why would you tell such lies?”

  “Because. I told you. I am a very, very, very bad girl,” and she starts to cry.

  “I want to know what you did exactly. Tell me.”

  She whispers the words between her sobs. “Daddy … he … put my hand on his hard thing and he said you are my little princess, my little princess, my little princess, and he … he … put my face on his lap and he—” but she stops then because she can hear the priest breathing hard and she knows he must be getting angry about her being such a horrible little girl and he might break through the screen and slap her or tell her mother or—

  “He what? Did you put his hard thing in your mouth?” the priest asks, so close to the screen now, his breathing faster, faster, faster. She can feel his breathing now and his voice is strange and suddenly he sounds like Daddy and she is scared so much and knows something is wrong. She stands up and spits at the screen and runs from the box.

  “Margaret,” David says. “It’s okay. It’s okay. No one will hurt you. You are safe. I promise. No one will hurt you. It’s okay now. You are here. With me. David. You are safe.”

  “He … he sounded like Daddy and I hated him and spit on him and he told our mother and she beat up Nora so hard because I was such a bad, bad, bad girl!”

  “Oh, Margaret,” he says, “I am so sorry this happened to you. I’m so sorry. You are not a bad girl! You are not!”

  “I AM a bad girl!” she screams and she bursts up from the tight ball into a frenzy and runs to the door and slams her head against it, SLAM, SLAM, SLAM! And then the monster’s hands are grabbing her shoulders and loud horrible sounds are coming from him and she twists around and there he is! She raises her fists and fights him, kicks out at him, pounds her fists into his head but the monster is too strong for her and grabs her wrists and she screams, “Let me go! Let me go!”

  “Stop!” shouts David. “Stop! I am not him! I am not him! I am David. I am David!” And his grip on her wrists loosens, and she sees it is not the monster. It is David. Her mouth is frozen open, but she stops screaming and sta
res at him, her face wet with tears, and he drops her wrists and she crumbles to the floor into a ball and hides her face between her shaking knees and rocks and rocks, sobbing in quick, ragged breaths.

  “I am not him,” David says again, kneeling in front of her.

  Margaret looks up at him then, still whimpering, and here is his white hair and the safe room and the green chair and green couch and the pillow with the raven on it.

  “Margaret. No one will hurt you now. No one. Ever again.” And he holds her hands together within his, like a prayer, and slowly, slowly, slowly she stops rocking and closes her eyes.

  David calls for Nora. She opens her eyes and finds she is sitting on the floor, her back against the door in David’s office. He is kneeling down in front of her.

  “Oh, my God!” she shouts, jumping up. “Oh, my God, what the hell?”

  “Nora, please,” he says, standing. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s okay? What the hell? Why was I on the floor?”

  He looks uncertainly at her. “Margaret was here. Please, can you please just sit on the couch?”

  She sits. Her heart thudding. She looks to her left and to her right as if to see if someone is there. She looks at her watch. It’s an hour later than when she looked a few moments ago. She looks at David. “Shit,” she whispers.

  “It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right.”

  She puts her head in her hands. Her forehead hurts.

  “Nora, did you hear anything?” he asks.

  “No,” she says, her teeth chattering. “No, I didn’t hear anything.” She rocks back and forth, her head still in her hands. She is caught in a nightmare, but it is not a nightmare. It is a cutting reality, an aggressive invasion of her sanity.

  And then David is saying things that don’t make sense. Things about stolen money and orange shoe boxes and boxes of confession, and she is trying to listen, trying to understand, but it’s all too much. Too much. Too many pieces careening through her mind, smashing reason and logic to smithereens.

  David walks to the couch and sits by her.

  She doesn’t move. “There’s something else isn’t there?” she asks in a barely audible voice.

  He hesitates. She can feel him shifting his body to face her more directly. “Nora, I think this might be enough for today.”

  “Tell me,” she says, staring straight ahead.

  “Nora,” he says, his voice very even, very serious, “she said, ‘I am a bad girl.’ She said, ‘Daddy forced me to touch his penis.’”

  His words: a punch in the face.

  Nora keeps her eyes straight ahead, but the blow is dizzying, her eyes bleeding red.

  “Nora …”

  “No,” she says, standing up, holding her hand up like a stop sign. “My father would never do such a thing,” she says in a gasp before she flees.

  She runs home. To the toilet. Lifts the lid. Vomits. Sits on the tub. Head between her knees. “No. No. No,” she whispers, teeth chattering. This can’t be true; surely, she’d remember, she’d remember, she’d remember the skin the wrinkled flesh the bad thing smell, she’d remember, don’t think of this don’t make Margaret’s memories yours, you are not her, you are not her, this is wrong wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong—

  And now, Fiona is calling for her, Paul is shouting, “I got takeout Chinese!” and she stands then, scrubs her hands hard, and walks downstairs to eat dinner with her family.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  January 30, 1997

  Nora distributes copies of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to her students. She’s too tired to say much about it—only that it was his last play, written in 1610, during the Renaissance. It depresses her that on top of everything else, she has to teach this play—so schizophrenic, one minute serious, the next, foolish. She doesn’t need schizophrenic right now.

  Her first year teaching Honors English, she’d fought to have The Tempest switched to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but came up against tenured faculty member Dorothy Bowman. Gray hair clipped close to her scalp, Dorothy was an in-your-face activist and never missed an opportunity to show a student how they could fix the broken world. She thought Shakespeare was a significant historical figure implicated in the politics of his time. She believed The Tempest was concerned with European domination of New World natives, interpreting Caliban not as a monstrous villain but as a heroic rebel against Prospero’s oppression.

  “Are you saying it was a coincidence that British Colonization was underway at the exact moment the play was written and performed?” she’d said loud into Nora’s face, hazel eyes snapping. She even quoted Caliban, slamming her fist on the table, “‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak’st from me.’” And then shaking her head in a condescending way, “Of course, Shakespeare intended to show oppression.”

  “How can you know what Shakespeare intended?” Nora had said, face flushing. “He’s been dead over four hundred years. You can’t know. And since when do we advance our own agendas?” Nora knew full well they did it all the time, but still, doing it with art, with literature, really bothered her. “Aren’t we supposed to challenge our students to come to their own conclusions? Their own truths?”

  “Their own truths?” Dorothy said. “Most of them walk in here laden with patriarchal attitudes. It’s our job to enlighten. Period.”

  And then, first-year faculty member Bruce Baker, a math teacher with a psychology minor, had weighed in. Bruce, who was assigned freshman English at the last minute because Denise Abano quit to start an olive oil business in Pike Place Market—“Too many desperate kids,” she’d said to Nora over the phone. “Too many. Coming to school hungry, hopeless, drugged out. Where are the parents? Where are the goddamned parents?” Bruce, with his new-teacher glow, voted to keep The Tempest. “They must love it,” he’d said, “a banished dude seeks revenge using magic!” His knowledge surprised Nora, since English wasn’t his thing. “My dad’s in the theater,” he’d shrugged. “Played Prospero seven times.” When Nora suggested they switch plays, she’d teach Romeo and Juliet and he could have The Tempest, he raised a hand, said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. If I have to hear ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ and ‘How our little life is rounded with sleep’ one more time, I’ll fucking kill myself.” He’d tapped his pencil on the table then. Looked at her hard. “Yeah, and the whole rape thing, that’s gotta be a bitch to explain. I couldn’t do it. I mean a father wants to rape his own daughter. That’s so fucked up.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Prospero didn’t rape Miranda,” Nora had said, her heart rate increasing, startling her. “Caliban wanted to—”

  “Oh, come on,” Bruce interrupted, no longer tapping his pencil. “The Freudian paradigm? Caliban is Prospero’s id. Ariel’s his superego. Do the math. Prospero wanted to rape his own daughter.”

  “Oh, jeez,” Nora said in a dismissive way, though a sudden flood of heat into her face had contradicted her nonchalance, flustered her for a moment.

  “See, this is what I’m talking about,” she said. “Forcing art into some cultural scheme.” She arranged her notes into a neat pile and placed them into a file folder. Tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. Looked at him, looked at Dorothy. “I just want a more relevant story, that’s all. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has the anguish between young people, the impact of inequality on a relationship, and it deals with beauty, or what we call beauty, what beauty really is, not the clichés, something internal. I just want—I just want to offer art and let the art work its magic. Let the art shape them, find them—” but she stopped then, realized she was rambling.

  “It’s all moot anyway,” Dorothy said. “There’s no money for new books.”

  Nora remembers how distraught she’d become in that discussion, especially when Bruce brought up Caliban as a projection of Prospero’s desires. She hadn’t questioned her feelings the
n, had merely felt she’d spoken her mind with conviction and passion. But now, with David’s suggestion of PTSD, maybe there was more.

  She said, “Daddy forced me to touch his penis.”

  A wave of nausea slams her. She considers running out of the classroom, running the five blocks to the ferry and jumping on board, and on the other side, boarding a bus to Canada and never coming back again. She’s on dangerous ground, and she knows it. She clings fast to herself, breathes slow and deep into the sick feeling, deep and slow until she can continue. “It was the age of discovery,” she says to the class now, her voice quivery. “A time when Europeans were expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the Middle Ages, when people thought the world only consisted of Europe, Africa, and Asia.”

  “You mean a time when white bastards took over land that wasn’t theirs and called those lands new worlds?” Elizabeth says.

  “There are those, many in fact, who would agree with you,” Nora says, but keeps her opinions to herself, fights the urge to shout, Yes! White bastards, fucking assholes! “And others who read it purely as an artistic story without a political bent.”

  “Well, Shakespeare wasn’t an idiot, was he?” Jaleesa says. “So of course this is political.”

  “Ummm, seems kind of obvious what this is about,” Jason says, studying the book’s cover, “There’s a big-ass storm and a ship and a pissed off god in the sky shooting fire at it and—”

  “You mean goddess,” Jaleesa says. “Don’t you see her long red hair, her flowing gown?” And then, “Though of course, it is a white goddess. When are we ever going to read something with a black goddess?”

  “Well, this goddess is pissed,” Lidia says. “Whoever’s in that ship is screwed.”

  “I hope she kills them all,” Elizabeth says.

  “Well, she’ll probably kill all but one guy, and he’ll swim to the island, blah, blah, blah,” Jason says. “Typical shipwreck story.”

  “We don’t know which side of colonization Shakespeare was on,” Elizabeth says, ignoring them, staring at the cover. “But I’ll bet he’s against it. He cared about art and beauty. He’d make the mariners survive so they’d know what it feels like to be tormented and controlled by something stronger.” Her tone is angry, and she continues to stare at the cover. She sits very still, very straight in her black T-shirt and baggy camouflage pants, her black combat boots. Nora is worried about her. She’s been increasingly edgy lately, her body and face so tight. Nora makes a mental note to catch Elizabeth after class, find out what’s going on, let her know she’s not alone.