Agony shot across the child’s face.
“I’m sorry,” said Lib, only half sincerely. She tugged Anna’s cap off. “Look how much hair you’re losing every day.”
“The very hairs of your head are all numbered,” the girl whispered.
Science was the most magical force Lib knew. If anything could break the spell that held this girl—“The body’s a kind of engine,” she began, trying to summon up Miss N.’s most teacherly tone. “Digestion is the burning of fuel. Denied fuel, the body will destroy its own tissues.” She sat down and laid her palm on Anna’s belly again, gently this time. “This is the stove. The food you had the year you were ten, the amount you grew that year as a consequence—it’s all been used up in the past four months. Think of what you ate at nine, at eight. Burnt to cinders already.” Time rolled backwards sickeningly. “When you were seven, six, five. Every meal your father toiled to put on the table, every bite your mother cooked, is being consumed now by the desperate fire inside you.” Anna at four, three, before she’d formed her first sentence. At two, toddling; one. All the way back to her first day, her first suck of mother’s milk. “But the engine can’t run much longer without proper fuel, do you see?”
Anna’s calm was a layer of unbreakable crystal.
“It’s not just that there’s less of you every day,” Lib told her, “it’s that all your workings are winding down, beginning to seize up.”
“I’m not a machine.”
“Like a machine, that’s all I mean. No insult to your Creator,” Lib told her. “Think of him as the most ingenious of engineers.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m his child.”
“Could I speak to you in the kitchen, Mrs. Wright?” Rosaleen O’Donnell, in the doorway, long arms akimbo.
How much had the woman heard? “This is not a convenient time.”
“I must insist, ma’am.”
Lib stood up with a short sigh.
She’d be breaking the rule about leaving Anna alone in the room, but what did it matter now? She couldn’t imagine the child leaning out of bed to scrape crumbs out of some hidey-hole, and, frankly, if that were to happen, Lib would be glad. Cheat me, hoodwink me, so long as you eat.
She shut the door behind her so Anna wouldn’t hear a word.
Rosaleen O’Donnell was alone, looking out the smallest kitchen window. She turned and brandished a newspaper. “John Flynn got hold of this in Mullingar this morning.”
Lib was taken aback. So this wasn’t about the things she’d been saying to the girl just now. She looked at the paper, folded open to an inside page. The banner at the top identified it as the Irish Times, and her eye immediately picked out Byrne’s article reporting on Anna’s decline. A chance and fleeting encounter with the Fasting Girl herself…
“How did this blaggard come to have a chance encounter with my child, may I ask?” demanded Rosaleen.
Lib weighed how much to admit.
“And where did he get this nonsense about her being in grave danger? I caught Kitty bawling into her apron this morning because she heard you say something to the doctor about a deathbed.”
Lib decided to go on the attack. “What would you call it, Mrs. O’Donnell?”
“The cheek of you!”
“Have you looked at your daughter lately?”
“Oh, ’tis you who knows better than the girl’s own physician, is it? You, who couldn’t even tell a dead child from a living one?” Rosaleen scoffed, gesturing at the photograph on the mantel.
That stung. “McBrearty imagines your daughter to be turning into something like a lizard. This is the dotard you’re trusting with her life.”
The woman’s fists were clenched, white knobs in red. “If you hadn’t been appointed by the committee, I’d have you out of my house this minute.”
“What, so that Anna can die all the faster?”
Rosaleen O’Donnell rushed at her.
Startled, Lib stepped aside to evade the blow.
“You know nothing about us!” the woman roared.
“I know Anna’s too famished to get out of bed.”
“If the child’s… struggling somewhat, ’tis only from the nervous strain of being watched like a prisoner.”
Lib snorted. She moved in closer to the woman, her whole body stiff. “What kind of mother would let it come to this?”
Rosaleen O’Donnell did the last thing Lib was expecting: she burst into tears.
Lib stared at her.
“Didn’t I try my best?” the woman wailed, water scudding down the lines of her face. “Sure isn’t she flesh of my flesh, my last hope? Didn’t I bring her into the world and rear her tenderly, and didn’t I feed her as long as she’d let me?”
For a moment Lib glimpsed how it must have been. That day in spring when the O’Donnells’ good little girl had turned eleven—and then, with no explanation, had refused to eat another bite. For her parents, perhaps it had been a horror as overwhelming as the illness that had carried off their boy the autumn before. The only way Rosaleen O’Donnell could have made sense of these cataclysms was to convince herself that they were part of God’s plan. “Mrs. O’Donnell,” she began, “let me assure you—”
But the woman fled, ducking into the little outshot behind the sack curtain.
Lib went back to the bedroom, shaking. It confused her, to feel such sympathy for a woman she loathed.
Anna showed no sign of having heard the quarrel. She lay propped up on pillows, absorbed in her holy cards.
Lib tried to collect herself. She looked over Anna’s shoulder at the picture of the girl floating on a cross-shaped raft. “The sea’s quite a different thing from a river, you know.”
“Bigger,” said Anna. She touched one fingertip to the card as if to feel the wet.
“Infinitely bigger,” Lib told the girl, “and while a river moves only one way, the sea seems to breathe, in and out, in and out.”
Anna inhaled, straining to fill her lungs.
Lib checked her watch: almost time. Noon was all she’d put on the note that she’d slipped under Byrne’s door before dawn. She didn’t like the look of those slate-grey clouds, but it couldn’t be helped. Besides, Irish weather turned every quarter of an hour.
At exactly twelve, the clamour of the Angelus went up in the kitchen. She was counting on it as a distraction. “Shall we take a little walk, Anna?”
Rosaleen O’Donnell and the maid were on their knees—“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary”—as Lib hurried by to collect the invalid chair from outside the front door. “Now and at the hour of our death, amen.”
She pushed it through the kitchen, back wheel squeaking.
Anna had managed to clamber out of bed and kneel beside it. “Be it done to me according to thy word,” she was chanting. Lib covered the chair with one blanket, then helped the girl into it and added three more, tucking in her thickened feet. She wheeled her rapidly past the praying adults and out the door.
The summer was beginning to turn already; some of those yellow starry flowers on their long stalks were darkening to bronze. A mass of cloud split as if along a seam, and light spilled through. “Here’s the sun,” croaked Anna, head back against the padding.
Down the track Lib hurried, bumping the chair through ruts and over stones. She turned onto the lane and there was William Byrne, just a few feet away.
He didn’t smile. “Unconscious?”
Only now did Lib see that Anna had slid down in the chair and was lying with her head to one side. She flicked the girl’s cheek lightly and the nearer eyelid flickered, to her relief. “Just dozing,” she told him.
Byrne had no small talk today. “Well, have your arguments done any good?”
“They roll over her like water,” she admitted, turning the chair away from the village and pushing it along to keep the girl asleep. “This fast, it’s Anna’s rock. Her daily task, her vocation.”
He nodded grimly. “If she keeps going downhill so quickly—”
What was coming?