Anna Quinn - The Night Child

“You asked me to move,” he says, and she can see he is struggling to be careful with his words.

“What are you talking about?” she asks in a whisper.

“The words … of a little girl were coming from you.” He pauses as if he is waiting for some sort of reaction from her. “She didn’t want me near her, so I moved over here.”

Nothing feels real. “She? What? What are you talking about?”

Again he says, “You spoke in the voice of a little girl … Nora, did you hear anything she said?”

“No, I didn’t fucking hear anything.” Nora rocks back and forth. She is close to tears. This is the moment she’s worried about. The moment when the neurons in her brain misfire into complete chaos and it’s too late to do anything about it. She should have taken medication to hold them together long before this, and now it’s probably too late.

“Listen, whoever she is, she needed to speak, and you had the courage to allow her to do so.”

“What the hell are you saying? How could you let this happen?” Nora says, her voice rigid with anger and fear. She stops rocking and pushes deeper into the back of the couch, clenching the pillow to her chest. Her mind is a collision, a multivehicle accident. No survivors.

He moves to his usual chair, faces her directly. “You are allowing yourself to remember something. I believe she is assisting you.” He says all of this as if he says it every day, to everyone, to anyone who sits on his couch.

“Do you hear yourself?” Nora whispers.

“She is you, Nora.”

“She is me? What the hell are you talking about?” She shakes her head in disbelief that something this bizarre could be happening to her.

The tears come then, a burst of sobs, huge and consuming, her shoulders lurching up and down, and she can’t breathe, and she chokes on the swallowed tears, and David won’t stop saying, “Breathe, Nora, breathe,” and she would strangle him if she could, breathe if she could, but she’s drowning and she can’t remember if she’s cried like this before, and then her grandfather’s words in her ear, You are tough, you are stronger than you think, and she catches her breath, and now the tears diminish into a few short, quick breaths and slowly, finally, come to a stop.

“This is difficult. I know. But we will figure this out,” David says leaning toward her, his face serious, his hands folded on his knees.

“We’ll figure this out?” she gasps out, her throat tight. “What am I supposed to do now? Go home?” She pauses, needing to swallow. “What if I go crazy at home?” she whispers and then rocks back and forth, bringing her hands to her face, covering her wet cheeks. All she wants is to curl up into a little ball, climb under something, and melt into oblivion.

“Nora. Stop. You’re scaring yourself. If I for a minute, for even a minute, thought you weren’t safe leaving here, I wouldn’t send you home.”

Nora isn’t sure what to think. “Is this—shit, like Sybil ?”

“The case portrayed in Sybil was extremely severe—and rare, perhaps less than .01 percent of the general population. Dissociation occurs along a continuum and is part of the range of normal experience. Nora, it is far too early to speculate about what is happening for you and where this falls on that spectrum.” He stops for a moment, looks at her gently, as if giving her time to assimilate what he’d said. When she says nothing, only continues to bite her lip, he says, “It seems to me that your brain is working hard to remember something. If we could somehow connect with that past wiring, the past memories, we could understand how to rewire the pathways so your brain could be healthy again. But look, this is a lot for today. I think you should rest, process this, and we’ll talk about it more next time—”

“I’m going home,” Nora says then, without making an effort to stand.

“Please, rest for a minute. It will be okay. Can you come in tomorrow—Saturday?”

She stands up, but her legs are useless with shaking, and she sits back down.

“Nora? Did you hear me? Can you meet Saturday?” he stands up and walks over to his desk. He moves his index finger down the calendar page. “How about 10:00 a.m.? Will that work?”

She nods her head and stands again, more steadily now. She pulls on her coat and opens the door. The cold startles her.

“See you tomorrow,” he says.

She rushes out, toward home, rushes down the dark street, past the glittering bookstores and coffee shops, past the Space Needle with its weird alien suggestions, past the stutter and stammer of rush hour traffic. All the way home she thinks, This can’t be happening . God! How does this happen to a person?

Finally, here is her home. She almost can’t bear to look at it. The weight of it. A 1930s red brick bungalow with ivy growing up the chimney. A red brick path edged in purple hydrangeas leads to the bright red door. She was twenty-three, he was twenty-eight when they moved in. The first night he’d officially carried her over the threshold, turned the key to unlock the brown door (they’d painted it a week later), and they’d shared a pepperoni pizza and Coors beer on the renovated wood floor in the living room. They’d talked about furniture and future plans (no children for at least three years) and where to put the recycling bins. They’d felt like grown-ups. Now the house gazes back at her as if she is a stranger, as if it’s observing her, deciding if she is worthy of entrance.

“I’m back,” she says, standing in the doorway of Paul’s study, feeling blurred and insecure.

“Fiona’s in bed,” he says indifferently, keeping his eyes on his computer, his back toward her. Next to him: a plate with crumbs and a balled-up paper napkin, a trace of whiskey in a glass.

“Still working on the Lincoln Plaza?” she asks, pangs of guilt now.

“Still? Do you know how long a deal like this takes? This is the biggest project Bellevue’s seen in a decade! Do you know what it means if I land this?”

She does know. Points on his scorecard. He needs to stay at the top of the heap. Like her father. She pictures her father then, decades ago, sitting in the kitchen, papers and files arranged in neat piles around him. She’d sit across from him working out math problems or writing a story. Her mother washing dishes. The quiet way her mother had wiped her hands on a towel, hesitated by the table, then asked her father to take a walk, take a minute away from his work. The way her father had looked at her mother, exasperated. As if she was stupid. The way he’d said, “This deal will put me on the map, Maeve. On the map.”

Nora leaves Paul and walks up the stairs to her daughter’s bedroom. Fiona snoring softly, one arm under her head, another around her stuffed orca. Nora bends down and kisses her on the cheek, her skin a flower blossom. She sits in the rocking chair by Fiona’s bed. This chair was the first thing she’d purchased when she’d become pregnant. She remembers the deep sense of responsibility she’d felt placing the chair in Fiona’s bedroom. Her first normal, motherly thing. She’d sat in the chair, on the polished wood, her hands pressed upon her pregnant belly, and she’d known happiness then. Intense happiness. And she had nursed Fiona in this chair, lullabied her to sleep in it, Fiona’s murmurings intertwining so magically with her own. A sane mother rocking her baby to sleep.

“Nora?” Paul’s voice from the bedroom brings her back, makes her aware she is rocking fast and hard in the chair. She hadn’t heard him come up the stairs.

“Have you seen my gray Nike sweatshirt?”

She stands and walks into the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed. “No,” she says, wearily. She hears him rummage through hangers.