The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

  “But it’s yours,” said the girl, shuddering.

  “I don’t need it on a mild summer night. Do you feel the warmth yet?”

  Anna shook her head. “I’m sure I will, though.”

  Lib looked down at the small figure lying as straight as a Crusader on a tomb. “Go back to sleep, now.”

  Still, Anna’s eyes stayed wide. She whispered her Dorothy prayer, the one she said so often that Lib barely noticed it anymore. Then she sang some hymns, barely above a whisper.

  The night is dark,

  And I am far from home,

  Lead thou me on.

  On Sunday morning Lib should have been catching up on her sleep, but the clanging church bells made that impossible. She lay awake, stiff-limbed, going through everything she’d learned about Anna O’Donnell. So many peculiar symptoms, but they didn’t constitute anything Lib recognized as a disease. She would have to speak to Dr. McBrearty again, and this time pin him down.

  At one o’clock, the nun reported that the girl had been distressed at not being allowed to go to mass but had agreed to recite the liturgy for the day in her missal with Sister Michael instead.

  For their walk, Lib set a very slow pace so as not to overtire Anna as she had the other day. She scanned the horizon before they set out to make sure there were no gawkers nearby.

  They picked their way across the farmyard, their boots slithering. “If you were looking stronger,” she said, “we might have gone a half a mile that way”—pointing west—“as far as a very curious hawthorn I’ve found with strips of cloth tied all over it.”

  Anna nodded with enthusiasm. “The rag tree at our holy well.”

  “It didn’t have what I’d call a well, exactly, just a tiny pool.” Lib remembered the tarry whiff of the water; perhaps it had some mildly disinfectant power? Then again, there was no use looking for a seed of science in a superstition. “Are the rags some kind of offering?”

  “They’re for dipping in the water and rubbing on a sore or an ache,” said Anna. “After, you tie the rag on the tree, see?”

  Lib shook her head.

  “The badness stays on the rag, and you leave it behind. Once it rots away, what was ailing you will be gone too.”

  Meaning that time heals all ills, Lib supposed. A cunning legend, this one, because it would take so long for cloth to disintegrate, the sufferer’s complaint would be almost sure to be cured by then.

  Anna stopped to stroke a vivid cushion of moss on a wall, or perhaps to catch her breath. A pair of birds picked at red currants in the hedge.

  Lib pulled a bunch of the gleaming globes and held them up close to the child’s face. “Do you remember the taste of these?”

  “I think so.” Anna’s lips were just a hand span from the currants.

  “Doesn’t your mouth water?” asked Lib, her voice seductive.

  The girl shook her head.

  “God made these berries, didn’t he?” Your God, Lib had almost said.

  “God made everything,” said Anna.

  Lib crushed a red currant between her own teeth and juice flooded her mouth so fast it almost spilled. She’d never tasted anything so dazzling.

  Anna picked one small red ball from the bunch.

  Lib’s heart thudded loud enough to hear. Was this the moment? As easy as that? Ordinary life, as close as these dangling berries.

  But the girl held out her palm quite flat, the currant in the middle, and waited till the bravest of the birds dived for it.

  On the way back to the cabin, Anna moved slowly, as if she were walking through water.

  Lib was so tired, stumbling back to the spirit grocery after nine that Sunday evening, she felt sure she’d sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

  Instead her mind sprang to life like a buzzing hornet. It weighed on her that she might have misjudged William Byrne yesterday afternoon. What had he done but ask, one more time, for an interview with Anna? He hadn’t actually insulted Lib; it was she who’d leapt to conclusions so touchily. If he really found her company so tedious, wouldn’t he have kept their conversations brief and focused on Anna O’Donnell?

  His room was just across the passage, but he probably hadn’t gone to bed yet. Lib wished she could talk to him—as an intelligent Roman Catholic—about the child’s last meal having been Holy Communion. The fact was, she was getting desperate for someone else’s opinion of the girl. Someone whose mind Lib trusted; not Standish with his hostility, McBrearty with his fey hopefulness, the blinkered nun or bland priest, the besotted and probably corrupt parents. Someone who could tell Lib if she was losing her grip on reality.

  Let me try, Byrne said again in her head. Teasingly, charmingly.

  Two things could be true at once. He was a journalist, paid to dig up the story, but might he not also truly want to help?

  One week exactly since Lib had arrived from London. So full of confidence she’d been—misplaced confidence in her own acuity, it had turned out. She’d thought to be back at the hospital by now, putting Matron in her place. Instead she was trapped here, in these same greasy-feeling sheets, no nearer to understanding Anna O’Donnell than she’d been a week ago. Only more muddled, and exhausted, and troubled by her own part in these events.

  Before dawn on Monday, Lib slid a note under Byrne’s door.

  When she arrived at the cabin, precisely at five, Kitty was still stretched out on the settle. The maid said there’d be no work done today except what was needful, given that it was a Holy Day of Obligation.

  Lib paused; this was a rare chance to speak to Kitty on her own. “You’re fond of your cousin, I think?” she asked under her breath.

  “Sure why wouldn’t I be fond of the little dote?”

  Too loud. Lib put her finger to her lips. “Has she ever intimated”—she reached for a simpler word—“hinted to you as to why she won’t eat?”

  Kitty shook her head.

  “Have you ever urged her to eat something?”

  “I’ve done nothing.” Sitting up, the slavey blinked in fright. “Get away with your accusations!”

  “No, no, I only meant—”

  “Kitty?” Mrs. O’Donnell’s voice, from the outshot.

  Well, she’d made an utter hash of that. Lib slipped into the bedroom at once.

  The child was still sleeping, under three blankets. “Good morning,” whispered Sister Michael, showing Lib the bare record of the night.

  Sponge bath given.

  2 tsp. water taken.

  “You look tired, Mrs. Wright.”

  “Is that so?” snapped Lib.

  “You’ve been seen tramping all over the county.”

  Lib had been seen alone, did the nun mean? Or with the journalist? Were the locals talking? “Exercise helps me sleep,” she lied.

  When Sister Michael had left, Lib studied her own notes for a while. The velvety white pages seemed to mock her. The numbers didn’t add up; they failed to tell any tale except that Anna was Anna and like no one else. Fragile, plump-faced, bony, vital, chilly, smiling, tiny. The girl continued to read, sort her cards, sew, knit, pray, sing. An exception to all rules. A miracle? Lib shied from the word, but she was beginning to see why some might call it that.

  Anna’s eyes were wide, the hazel flecked with amber. Lib leaned over. “Are you well, child?”

  “More than well, Mrs. Lib. ’Tis the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption.”

  “So I understand,” said Lib. “When she was lifted up to heaven, am I correct?”

  Anna nodded, squinting at the window. “The light’s so bright today, with coloured halos around everything. The scent of that heather!”

  The bedroom seemed dank and musty to Lib, and the purple tufts in the jar had no fragrance. But children were so open to sensation, and especially this child.

  Monday, August 15, 6:17 a.m.

  Reports having slept well.

  Temperature in armpit still low.

  Pulse: 101 beats per minute.

  Lung
s: 18 respirations per minute.

  The readings went up and down, but on the whole they were creeping upwards. Dangerously? Lib couldn’t be sure. It was doctors who were taught to form these judgments. Though McBrearty seemed unfit for the task.

  The O’Donnells and Kitty came in early to tell Anna that they were off to the chapel. “To offer the first fruits?” Anna asked, eyes lit.

  “Of course,” said her mother.

  “What’s that, exactly?” asked Lib, to be civil.

  “Bread made with the first pull of the wheat,” said Malachy, “and, ah, a bit of oats and barley thrown in too.”

  “Don’t forget there’ll be bilberries offered too,” Kitty put in.

  “And a few new potatoes no bigger than the top of your thumb, God bless them,” said Rosaleen.

  From the smeary window, Lib watched the party set off, the farmer a few steps behind the women. How could they care about their festival in the second week of this watch? Did it mean they’d nothing on their consciences, she wondered, or that they were monsters of callousness? Kitty hadn’t sounded callous earlier; worried for her cousin, more like. But so nervous of the English nurse, she’d misunderstood Lib’s question and thought she was being accused of feeding the girl in secret.

  Lib didn’t take Anna out till ten o’clock this morning because that was the time she’d specified in her note. It was a beautiful day, the best since her arrival; a proper sun, as clear as that of England. She tucked the child’s arm in hers and set a very cautious pace.

  Anna was moving in what struck Lib as an odd way, with her chin stuck out. But the girl showed a relish for everything. Snuffed at the air as if it were attar of roses instead of cows and chickens. Stroked every mossy rock that they passed.

  “What’s the matter with you today, Anna?”

  “Nothing. I’m happy.”

  Lib looked at her askance.

  “Our Lady’s pouring such a great deal of light on everything, I can nearly smell it.”

  Could eating little or nothing open the pores? Lib wondered. Sharpen the senses?

  “I see my feet,” said Anna, “but as if they belong to somebody else.” Looking down at her brother’s worn boots.

  Lib tightened her grip on the girl.

  A black-jacketed silhouette at the end of the path, out of sight of the cabin: William Byrne. He lifted his hat and unleashed his curls. “Mrs. Wright.”

  “Ah, I believe I know this gentleman,” remarked Lib as casually as she could. Thinking, did she know him at all, really? The committee could dismiss her for arranging this interview if any of its members heard about it. “Mr. Byrne, this is Anna O’Donnell.”

  “Good morning, Anna.” He shook her hand. Lib saw him eyeing the bloated fingers.

  She began with bland nothings about the weather, her mind skittering along underneath. Where could the three walk to run the lowest risk of being spotted? How soon would the family come back from mass? She steered Byrne and Anna away from the village and took a cart track that looked little used.

  “Is Mr. Byrne a visitor, Mrs. Lib?”

  Startled by the child’s question, she shook her head. She couldn’t have Anna reporting to her parents that the nurse had broken her own rule.

  “I’m in these parts just for a little while, to see the sights,” said Byrne.

  “With your children?” asked Anna.

  “Sadly, I have none, as yet.”

  “Have you a wife?”

  “Anna!”

  “That’s all right,” Byrne told Lib, and he turned back to Anna. “No, my dear. I very nearly had one once, but at the last minute, the lady changed her mind.”

  Lib looked away, at a stretch of bog studded with shining puddles.

  “Oh,” said Anna sorrowfully.

  Byrne shrugged. “She’s settled in Cork, and good riddance to her.”

  Lib liked him for that.

  Byrne found out that Anna loved flowers, which was a very great coincidence, he told her, because he did too. He broke off a red stem of dogwood with one last white bloom and gave it to her.

  “At the mission,” she told him, “we learned that the cross was made of dogwood, so the tree only grows short and twisted now because of being sorry.”

  He bent right down to hear her.

  “The flowers are like a cross, see? Two long petals, two short,” said Anna. “And those brown bits are the nail prints, and that’s the crown of thorns in the middle.”

  “Fascinating,” said Byrne.

  Lib was glad she’d risked this meeting after all. Before, he’d been able only to crack jokes about the case; now he was getting a sense of the real girl.

  Byrne told a story of a Persian king who’d halted his army for days just to admire a plane tree. He broke off to point out a grouse running by, gingery body vivid against the grasses. “See its red eyebrows, like mine?”

  “Redder than yours.” Anna laughed.

  He’d been to Persia himself, he told her, and Egypt too.

  “Mr. Byrne is quite a traveller,” said Lib.

  “Oh, I’ve thought of going farther,” he said.

  She looked sideways at him.

  “Settling in Canada, perhaps, or the States, even Australia or New Zealand. Wider horizons.”

  “But to sever all your connections, professional as well as personal…” Lib fumbled for words. “Wouldn’t it be like a little death?”

  Byrne nodded. “I believe emigration generally is that. The price of a new life.”

  “Would you like to hear a riddle?” Anna asked him suddenly.

  “Very much,” he told her.

  She repeated the ones about the wind, paper, and flame; she turned to Lib only to confirm one or two words. Byrne failed to guess any of them and rapped himself on the skull on hearing the answer every time.

  He tested Anna on birdsongs next. She correctly identified the melodic sobbing of a curlew and a drumming made by the wings of what she called a bog bleater, which turned out to be an Irishism for snipe.

  Finally Anna admitted that she was a little tired. Lib gave her a searching look and felt her forehead, which was still stone cool, despite the sunshine and exertion.

  “Would you like a little rest here to fortify you for the walk back?” asked Byrne.

  “Yes, please.”

  He took off his coat with a flap of the tails and spread it out on a large flat rock for the child.

  “Sit down,” said Lib, crouching to pat the brown lining, still warm from his back.

  Anna subsided onto it and stroked the satin with one finger.

  “I’ll have my eye on you all the time,” Lib promised the girl. Then she and Byrne stepped away.

  The two of them drifted till they reached a broken wall. They stood close enough that Lib could feel the heat coming off his shirtsleeve like a vapour. “Well?”

  “Well what, Mrs. Lib?” His voice was oddly tight.

  “What do you make of her?”

  “She’s delightful.” Byrne spoke so quietly that she had to lean in to make it out.

  “Isn’t she?”

  “A delightful dying child.”

  Lib was suddenly winded. She looked over her shoulder at Anna, a tidy figure on one edge of the man’s long jacket.

  “Are you blind?” asked Byrne, still as softly as if he were saying something kind. “The girl’s wasting away in front of you.”

  She was almost stuttering. “Mr. Byrne. How, how—”

  “I suppose that’s exactly it: you’re too close up to see it.”

  “How can you—what makes you so sure?”

  “I was sent to study famine when I was only five years older than her,” he reminded her in the quietest of snarls.

  “Anna isn’t… her belly’s round,” Lib argued weakly.

  “Some starve fast, some slow,” said Byrne. “The slow kind swell up, but it’s only water, there’s nothing there.” He kept his eyes on the green field. “That waddle, the ghastly fuzz on her face.
And have you smelled her breath lately?”

  Lib tried to remember. That wasn’t one of the measurements she’d been taught to record.

  “It goes vinegary as the body turns on itself; eating itself up, I suppose.”

  Lib looked over and saw that the child had crumpled like a leaf. She ran.

  “I didn’t faint,” Anna kept insisting as William Byrne carried her home, blanketed in his jacket. “I was just resting.” Eyes looking as deep as bog holes.

  Lib’s throat was constricted with fright. A delightful dying child. He was right, damn the man.

  “Let me in,” Byrne told Lib outside the cabin. “You can tell the parents I happened to be passing and came to your aid.”

  “Get away from here.” She wrenched Anna out of his arms.

  Only when he’d turned towards the lane did Lib dip her nose to the girl’s face and inhale. There it was: a faint, awful fruitiness.

  When Lib woke that Monday afternoon to the rattling of rain on Ryan’s roof, she was groggy. A rectangle of white at the base of the door confused her eye; she thought it was light, and only when she dragged herself out of bed did it turn into a page. Handwritten, hastily but without mistakes.

  A chance and fleeting encounter with the Fasting Girl herself has at last given this correspondent an opportunity to form a personal opinion on this most heated of controversies, as to whether she is being used to perpetrate a nefarious fraud upon the public.

  First, it must be said that Anna O’Donnell is an exceptional maiden. Despite having received only a limited education at the village’s National School, under a teacher who is obliged to supplement his income by cobbling, Miss O’Donnell speaks with sweetness, composure and candour. As well as the piety for which she is known, she displays great feeling for nature, and a sympathy striking in one so young. The Egyptian sage wrote some five millennia ago, Wise words are rarer than emeralds, yet they come from the mouths of poor slave girls.

  Second, it falls to this correspondent to give the lie to the reports of Anna O’Donnell’s health. Her stoical character and elevated spirits may obscure the truth, but the lurching walk and strained posture, the chill, distended fingers, the sunken eyes, and above all the sharp-scented breath known as the odour of famine, all testify to her state of malnutrition.