Anna Quinn - The Night Child

She pulls the pillow up to her face. “One … two … three,” she says, her heart going bang … bang … bang.

“Nora?” David says in a whisper.

“Four … five … six … seven … eight …”

“Margaret? Is that you?”

“Nine … ten … eleven … twelve …”

“Margaret? Can you talk to me?”

“Don’t look at me,” Margaret says into the pillow. She wants to go back inside, but it is her job to save Fiona.

“I’ll move over here.” He moves to the chair by the window.

He is nice, but she will be careful.

“Margaret, can you hear Nora?”

“Yes,” she whispers. She is not used to talking out loud and it feels wrong and her tummy feels wrong.

“Margaret, are there others inside helping Nora?”

“No, it’s just me.” This is too many questions. She needs to go back in.

“Margaret, do you know anything about St. Margaret?”

She bites the side of her bottom lip and moves the pillow so there is a tiny space for air. She loves St. Margaret. She will tell him. “We have the same names and she fought a dragon and then the dragon swallowed her but she got out and then the dragon came back as a man and tried to trick her and she caught him by the head and threw him to the ground and put her foot on his neck and said, ‘Lie still, thou fiend, under the feet of a woman.’” She peeks up for a moment, but then her face is back into the pillow. “Liar, liar, liar,” she says.

“Margaret, who’s a liar?”

“Liar, liar, liar,” she says again, her voice making itself loud. She is mad at Nora. Very, very mad.

“Margaret, please, tell me. Who is a liar?”

“Nora … she … she prayed to Saint Margaret. A lot. Nora wanted Saint Margaret and then she made me and now she says she doesn’t even know me!” Margaret forgets to be careful, forgets to hide her face. She looks at David’s back. He is still looking at the window, so he is not mad with her. Then a man’s voice from outside the door! It is him! A scream shoves out of her mouth.

“Margaret?” David swivels around in his chair. She is curled up in the corner of the couch, her hands covering her face.

Silence fills the room.

“Margaret?”

Nora opens her eyes slowly, realizes her hands are covering her face. Tentatively, she brings her hands down, feeling lightheaded and jumbled. There is David across the room, observing her. She realizes her knees are up and quickly straightens them.

“When I came back from putting the clock away, Margaret was here,” David says. He stops for a moment and glances at her uneasily, as if checking her ability to handle all this.

“And?” she says.

“Did you hear her?” he asks.

“No,” she says with difficulty. Her mouth feels separate from her, unfaithful. “Why couldn’t I? I can hear everything else.” She is quiet for a moment, listening intently. “I can hear the gulls, the ferry horn, people out in the hall. I heard that goddamn clock hidden in a closed drawer. Why can’t I hear her?”

“Each of these situations is different, Nora. Some people can hear the change, some cannot. Think about it like this: Assume your brain has one box holding all the stress in your life. That box is full; things are overflowing. In your attempt to keep order, you’ve created another container. That container holds Margaret and her memories. You’ve had a tight lid on that box—and now it’s loose.”

“Do you think there are others?” She’s been thinking about Sybil since their last meeting. She’d seen the movie in college, and it had terrified her so much she’d left the theater, ran out on her date. Yesterday, she’d gone to the library to read about multiple personalities, but when she’d arrived at the mental health shelves she’d panicked. She’d stood there, blinking and disoriented, and then she’d walked over to the encyclopedias and read about St. Margaret. She’d read hundreds of saint stories in school, and their deaths always terrified her. All the flames and burning faces and sizzling hair and hearts and heads stabbed onto stakes and screams for mercy while thousands of faces watched. There were always faces watching.

But she read the article and looked for clues. Margaret was a girl who lived in Turkey in the early fourth century. Daughter of a pagan priest. Her mother passed on soon after her birth, and she was given to a woman who raised sheep out in the country. The woman raised Margaret in Christianity, which pissed off her father, who said she’d have to choose between religion and him. She chose the church. One day, a Roman wanted her to be his wife. Again, she said no. He was humiliated and had her arrested for being a Christian. When she wouldn’t give up her faith, he tried to burn her, but the flames didn’t hurt her. Then he tried to boil her in a cauldron of scorching water. As guards plunged her into the water, the heavens opened, and a snow-white dove flew down and placed a crown on Margaret’s head. She stood up without any sign of burns. This, of course, angered the Roman even more, so he threw her into prison. Satan then visited her in the form of a dragon. The dragon swallowed her, but she stabbed his innards with her cross, and he spit her out. Finally, they chopped off her head. No one knows what happened to the blonde head of hers, but her hand is now under glass at the Vatopedi Monastery in Greece.

“Nora?”

She opens her eyes, though she doesn’t remember closing them. Her heart is beating madly, and she is filled with rage. Rage for the faces who stood by and watched a still-alive woman burn to ash.

“Nora, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she snaps. “What the hell were we talking about?”

He leans forward. Looks at her intently, his brown eyes sharp and steady. “You asked if there might be others.”

She takes a deep breath. Unclenches her fists. She is not angry with him. “Do you think there are?”

“I asked Margaret that—she says there are not,” he says, his voice soft. “But we’ll have to wait and see.” He pauses for a moment. “It’s really too early to know for sure.”

“Too early to know for sure? Shouldn’t you know something by now? God, are you even qualified for this type of problem?” She stares then at the certificate hanging on the wall, reads it aloud in an acrid tone, “David Forrester, MD, University of Wisconsin, Certified in Adult, Adolescent, and Child Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.”

She turns to him and says, “What does that really mean? That you’re certified to save a screaming, slipping, cracked mind by nodding and saying, ‘Mmmhmm,’ repeatedly for a hundred bucks an hour?”

She can feel herself becoming cruel, but he is not unnerved, only looks at her calmly, like a parent managing a child going through a phase, which pisses her off even more. “You hardly seem worried at all. Are you so desensitized from listening to story after story of abuse and infidelity and messed-up human beings that you know there’s nothing you can do anyway, that it’s not your problem—” She stops then, glares at her shoes. The anger. Christ, the anger. Her pulse races, berserk as a rabid animal.

David gets up and walks to the window, opens the blinds a crack, looks through the slats. Sunlight stripes his face, neck, and chest. “Look,” he says, “if you decide to continue with me, I’m not going anywhere. No matter what. Do you hear me? I’m here for the long haul.” He hesitates for a moment, turns, and looks hard at her, “And for the record, most of what I know comes from my life, not school. Don’t you think for a moment I haven’t had my share of hell.” His face is so fervent she has to turn away, but the surprise of his admission, the intensity of it, has a strangely calming effect on her.