Kitty looked startled but didn’t argue; she left the room.
“My holy cards and books and things,” Anna murmured, looking towards her chest.
“Would you like to see them?” asked Lib.
She shook her head. “They’re for Mammy. After.”
Lib nodded. There was a kind of poetic justice in that, paper saints standing in for a child of flesh. Hadn’t Rosaleen O’Donnell been nudging Anna towards the grave all along—perhaps ever since Pat’s death, last November?
Once the woman lost Anna, perhaps she’d be able to love her without strain. Unlike a live daughter, a dead one was impeccable. This was what Rosaleen O’Donnell had chosen, Lib told herself: to be the sorrowful, proud mother of two angels.
Five minutes later, Reilly’s van moved slowly off. Lib, watching at the window, thought: He’ll be back. She supposed a posthumous composition would be even easier to arrange.
An hour later, Malachy O’Donnell came in and knelt down heavily beside the bed where his daughter was dozing. He joined his hands—his knuckles making white spots on the red skin—and muttered an Our Father.
Watching his bent, greying head, Lib wavered. This man had none of his wife’s malignity, and he did love Anna in his own passive way. If he could only be roused from his stupor, to fight for his child… Perhaps Lib owed him one last chance?
She made herself go around the bed and lean down to his ear. “When your daughter wakes,” she said, “beg her to eat, for your sake.”
Malachy didn’t protest; he only shook his head. “It’d choke her, sure.”
“A drink of milk would choke her? But it’s the same consistency as water.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?” demanded Lib.
“You wouldn’t understand, ma’am.”
“Then make me!”
Malachy let out a long, ragged breath. “I promised her.”
Lib stared. “That you wouldn’t ask her to eat? When was this?”
“Months back.”
The clever girl; Anna had tied her fond father’s hands. “But that was when you believed her able to live without food, correct?”
A bleak nod.
“She was in good health at the time. Look at her now,” Lib said.
“I know,” muttered Malachy O’Donnell, “I know. Still and all, I promised I’d never ask that.”
Who but an idiot would have made such a commitment? But it would do no good to insult the man, Lib reminded herself. Best to focus on the present. “Your promise is killing her now. Surely that cancels it?”
He writhed. “’Twas a secret and solemn vow, on the Bible, Mrs. Wright. I’m telling you only so you won’t blame me.”
“But I do,” said Lib. “I blame all of you.”
Malachy’s head drooped as if it were too heavy for his neck. A stunned bullock.
Valiant in his own dull way; he’d risk any consequences rather than break his word to his daughter, Lib realized. Would see Anna die before he’d let her down.
A tear jerked down his unshaven cheek. “Sure I still have hope.”
What hope, that Anna would suddenly call out for food?
“There was another little colleen stone-dead in her bed, eleven years old.”
Was this a neighbour? Lib wondered. Or a story out of the newspaper?
“And you know what Our Lord said to the father?” said Malachy, almost smiling. “Fear not. Fear not, only believe, and she shall be safe.”
Lib turned away in revulsion.
“Jesus said she was only sleeping, and he took her by the hand,” Malachy went on, “and didn’t she get up and have her dinner?”
The man was in a dream so deep that Lib couldn’t wake him. He clung to his innocence, refusing to know, ask, think, question the vow he’d made to Anna, do anything. Surely being a parent meant taking action, rightly or wrongly, instead of waiting for a miracle? Like the wife he was so unlike, Lib decided, Malachy deserved to lose his daughter.
The pale sun edged lower in the sky. Would it never go down?
Eight o’clock. Anna was shaking. “How long,” she kept mumbling. “Be it done. Be it done.”
Lib had Kitty warm flannels at the fire in the kitchen and then laid them over Anna, tucking them in on both sides. She caught an acrid whiff. You, she thought. Every flawed, scrawny, or bloated part, every inch of the real, mortal girl, I treasure you.
“Will you be all right if we go to the votive mass, pet?” asked Rosaleen O’Donnell, coming in and hovering over her daughter.
Anna nodded.
“Sure now?” asked the father at the door.
“Go on,” the girl breathed.
Get out, get out, Lib thought.
But then, after the couple withdrew, she hurried after them. “Say good-bye.” Her voice a low caw.
The O’Donnells goggled at her.
Lib whispered, “It could come at any time now.”
“But—”
“There isn’t always a warning.”
Rosaleen’s face was a torn mask. She returned to the bedside. “I think maybe we shouldn’t go out tonight, pet.”
Now Lib cursed herself. Her one chance, the one possible time to put her outrageous plan into action, and she’d thrown it away. Did she lack the nerve, was that it?
No; it was a matter of guilt, because of what she was about to try. All she knew was, she had to let the O’Donnells take a proper leave of their child.
“Go on, Mammy.” Anna’s head lifted heavily off the bed. “Go to the mass for me.”
“Will we?”
“Kiss.” Her swollen hands reached for her mother’s head.
Rosaleen let herself be pulled down. She placed one kiss on Anna’s forehead. “Good-bye now, lovey.”
Lib sat turning the pages of All the Year Round blindly so none of them would guess how much she wanted this to be over.
Malachy leaned over his wife and child.
“Pray for me, Dadda.”
“Always,” he said thickly. “We’ll be seeing you later.”
Anna nodded, then let her head drop onto the pillow.
Lib waited for them to go into the kitchen. Their voices, Kitty’s. Then the thump of the front door. Merciful silence.
Now it began.
She watched Anna’s narrow chest rise and fall. Listened to the small creak of her lungs.
She hurried into the empty kitchen and found a can of milk. Sniffed it to make sure it was quite fresh, and found a clean bottle. She half filled that with milk, stopped it up with a cork, and chose a bone spoon. There was a discarded oatcake too; Lib broke off a piece. She wrapped everything in a napkin.
Back in the bedroom, Lib drew up her chair very close to Anna. Was it sheer hubris to believe that she could succeed where everyone else had failed? She wished she had more time; greater powers of persuasion. O God, if by any chance there is a God, teach me to speak with the tongue of angels.
“Anna,” she said, “listen to me. I have a message for you.”
“From who?”
Lib pointed upwards. Her eyes rose too, as if she saw visions on the ceiling.
“But you don’t believe,” said Anna.
“You’ve changed me,” Lib told her, honestly enough. “Didn’t you once tell me that he can pick anyone?”
“That’s true.”
“Here’s the message: What if you could be another girl instead of yourself?”
The eyes went wide.
“If you could wake up tomorrow and find that you’re somebody else, a little girl who’s never done anything wrong, would you like that?”
Anna nodded like a very small child.
“Well, this is holy milk.” Lib held up the bottle as solemnly as any priest in front of an altar. “A special gift from God.”
The girl didn’t blink.
What gave Lib’s tone conviction was that it was all true: Didn’t the divine sunshine soak into the divine grass, didn’t the divine cow eat the divine grass, didn’t she give the divine milk for the sake of her divine calf? Wasn’t it all a gift? Deep in her breasts Lib remembered how her milk had run down whenever she’d heard the mewing of her daughter.
“If you drink this,” she went on, “you won’t be Anna O’Donnell anymore. Anna will die tonight, and God will accept her sacrifice and welcome her and Pat into heaven.”