For months I was fed on manna from heaven. That’s what she’d said this morning. I live on manna from heaven, she’d told her Spiritualist visitors last week. But today, Lib noticed, it had come out differently, in a wistful past tense: For months I was fed on manna from heaven.
Unless Lib had heard it wrong? Not for months. Four months, was that it? Four months I was fed on manna from heaven. Anna had started her fast four months ago, in April, and subsisted on manna—whatever secret means of nourishment she meant by that—until the arrival of the nurses.
But no, this made no sense, because then she should have begun to show the effects of a complete fast no more than a couple of days later. Lib hadn’t noticed any such deterioration until Byrne had alerted her to it on Monday of this second week. Could a child really have gone seven days before flagging?
Lib flicked back through her memorandum book now, a series of telegraphic dispatches from a distant battlefront. Every day during the first week had been much the same until— Refused mother’s greeting.
She stared at the neat words. Saturday morning, six days into the watch. Not a medical notation at all; Lib had jotted it down simply because it was an unexplained change in the child’s behaviour.
How could she have been so blind?
Not just a greeting twice a day; an embrace in which the big bony woman’s frame had blocked the child’s face from view. A kiss like that of a great bird feeding her nestling.
Lib broke Miss N.’s rule and shook the girl awake.
Anna blinked, cringing away from the harsh light of the lamp.
Lib whispered, “When you were fed on manna, who—” Not who gave it to you, because Anna would say that manna came from God. “Who brought it to you?”
She was expecting resistance, denial. Some elaborate cover story about angels.
“Mammy,” murmured Anna.
Had the girl always been ready to answer so candidly the moment she was asked? If only Lib had been a little less contemptuous of pious legends, she might have paid more attention to what the child was trying to tell her.
She remembered the way Rosaleen O’Donnell had sidled in for the permitted embrace morning and evening, smiling but oddly silent. So full of chatter at other times, but not when she came to hug her daughter. Yes, Rosaleen always kept her mouth shut tight until after she’d bent down to wrap her whole body around Anna.
Lib moved closer to the small ear. “She passed it from her mouth to yours?”
“By a holy kiss,” said Anna, nodding, with no sign of shame.
Fury shot through Lib’s veins. So the mother had chewed food to pap in the kitchen, then fed Anna right in front of the nurses, making sport of them twice a day. “What does manna taste like?” she asked. “Milky, or porridge-like?”
“Like heaven,” said Anna, as if the answer were obvious.
“She told you it was from heaven?”
Anna looked confused by the question. “That’s what manna is.”
“Does anyone else know? Kitty? Your father?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never spoken of it.”
“Why?” asked Lib. “Did your mother forbid you? Threaten you?”
“It’s private.”
A secret exchange, too sacred to be put into words. Yes, Lib could imagine a woman of strong character persuading her little girl of that. Especially such a girl as Anna, growing up in a world of mysteries. The young placed such trust in the grown-ups into whose hands they were consigned. Had the feeding begun on Anna’s eleventh birthday or perhaps developed gradually long before that? Was it a sort of sleight of hand, the mother reading the daughter the manna story from the Bible and confounding her with mystical obscurities? Or had both parties contributed something unspoken to the invention of this deadly game? After all, the girl was brighter than the mother, and better read. Families all had their peculiar ways that couldn’t be discerned by outsiders.
“So why tell me?” Lib demanded.
“You’re my friend.”
The way the girl’s chin tilted up then. It broke Lib’s heart. “You don’t take the manna anymore, do you? Not since Saturday.”
“I don’t need it,” said Anna.
Didn’t I feed her as long as she’d let me? Rosaleen had wailed. Lib had heard the woman’s grief and remorse and still not understood. The mother had set Anna up on a pedestal to shine like a beacon to the world. She’d had every intention of keeping her daughter alive indefinitely with this covert supply of food. It was Anna who’d put an end to it, one week into the watch.
Had the child had any sense of what the consequence would be? Did she grasp it now?
“What your mother spat into your mouth”—Lib spoke with deliberate crudity—“that was food from the kitchen. Those doses of mush are what’s been keeping you alive all these months.”
She paused for some reaction, but the child’s eyes had gone unfocused.
Lib seized her thick wrists. “Your mother lied, don’t you see? You need food like everyone else. There’s nothing special about you.” The words were coming out all wrong, a rain of abuse. “If you won’t eat, child, you’ll die.”
Anna looked right at her, then nodded and smiled.
CHAPTER FIVE
Shift
shift
a change, an alteration
a period of working time
an expedient, means to an end
a movement, a beginning
Thursday came scorching, the August sky a terrible blue. When William Byrne walked into the dining room at noon, Lib was alone, staring into her soup. She looked up and tried to smile at him.
“How’s Anna?” he asked, sitting down across from her, his knees against her skirt.
She couldn’t answer.
He nodded at her bowl. “If you aren’t sleeping, you need to keep up your strength.”
The spoon made a metallic scraping when Lib lifted it. She brought it almost to her lips, then put it down with a small splash.
Byrne leaned over the table. “Tell me.”
Lib pushed away her bowl. Watching the door for the Ryan girl, she explained about the manna from heaven delivered under cover of an embrace.
“Christ,” he marvelled. “The audacity of the woman.”
Oh, the relief of unburdening herself. “Bad enough that Rosaleen O’Donnell’s been making her child subsist on two mouthfuls a day,” said Lib. “But for the past five days, Anna’s refused to take the manna, and her mother hasn’t said a word.”
“I suppose she doesn’t know how to speak up without condemning herself.”
A qualm struck her. “You can’t publish any of this, not yet.”
“Why not?”
How could Byrne have to ask? “I’m aware that it’s in the nature of your profession to broadcast everything,” she snapped, “but what matters is saving the girl.”
“I know that. And what of your profession? For all the time you’ve spent with Anna, how far have you got?”
Lib put her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry.” Byrne grabbed her fingers. “I spoke out of frustration.”
“It’s perfectly true.”
“Still, forgive me.”
Lib slid her hand out of his, the skin still burning.
“Believe me,” he said, “it’s for Anna’s sake that the hoax should be shouted to the four winds.”
“But a public scandal won’t do anything to make her eat!”
“How can you be sure?”
“Anna’s quite alone in this now.” Lib’s voice lurched. “She seems to welcome the prospect of death.”
Byrne thrust his curls out of his face. “But why?”
“Perhaps because your religion’s filled her head with morbid nonsense.”
“Perhaps because she’s mistaken morbid nonsense for true religion!”
“I don’t know why she’s doing this,” admitted Lib, “except that it has something to do with missing her brother.”
He frowned in puzzlement. “Have you told the nun about the manna yet?”
“There was no opportunity this morning.”
“What about McBrearty?”
“I’ve told no one but you.”
Byrne looked at Lib in a way that made her wish she hadn’t blurted that out. “Well. I say you should share your discovery with the whole committee tonight.”
“Tonight?” she echoed, confused.