Anna Quinn - The Night Child

She gazes at the closed aluminum blinds on the only window as if they are open. Bits of light poke through the holes where the strings attach to the slats. She wants to trust him.

He leans forward. “More people than you might think, so-called ‘normal’ people”—he makes quotation marks with his fingers—“report such visions.”

This is not easy to believe. She doesn’t know anyone who’s had hallucinations and not been on drugs, not been psychotic. What if she believes him when in reality she needs medication? What if she walks out the door feeling normal only to have a hallucination in her classroom tomorrow?

“Nora, what’s going on right now?” He takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirt. “What are you feeling?”

She can’t get a grip on this question. Her mind is clouded, tangled, and worn out. Worn out with visions and the thinking about visions and what’s normal and what isn’t, and the new things: this man, this office, these ideas, this ticking clock, this pillow, this couch.

He looks at the clock.

“We have twenty more minutes,” he says, settling back in his chair. “May I ask you a few questions about the face?”

She nods.

“Were your eyes open when you saw her?”

“Yes, the first time I saw her, I’m pretty sure my eyes were open,” she says quietly. “And yes, the second time my eyes were open. I was sitting in a chair looking out the window, resting.” She sounds apologetic, as if she shouldn’t have been sitting in a chair, resting.

“Did you recognize her? Could it have been Fiona?”

“No. No, it wasn’t Fiona. Fiona’s eyes are blue, but they’re a gray blue. And they weren’t my eyes either. These eyes were the bluest blue, deep sea blue. Not like any eyes I’ve ever seen. The rest of the image was blurry. Just shapes really. Like seeing a face through water.” Her stomach is beginning to hurt.

“But you know it was a child’s face.”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Something like, ‘Remember the Valentine’s dress.’”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“I don’t know. My grandmother sent me a dress once, for Valentine’s Day. I think I was maybe five or six years old.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Well, I’d never seen anything like it before. It was so beautiful. Red. And it had a white collar with two embroidered roses and—” Nora pauses, feeling her description sounds childish.

“Were you close to your grandmother?”

“No, not really. I was closest to my grandfather. I lived with them in Ireland after my mother died,” she says quietly. “James, my little brother, and I lived with them. My mother was born there and after she died, my father left us with her parents and then … he never came back.” After a moment, she adds, “I have no idea where he is.”

“I see.” He flips through the forms. “So your mother was Irish, and your father—”

“American. German American. Well, his parents were German.”

“Did you ever hear from him again?”

“He wrote us a couple of times, and we wrote him, but after awhile, the letters were returned.” She thinks now, with a slight ache, of all those letters she’d written. Dear Daddy, where are you? When are you coming back for us?

“And when did your mother die? I don’t see anything about either of your parents here.”

She wonders where she might have written about her parents. There had been a section called “Other Pertinent Information,” but it hadn’t occurred to her to write about her parents. She doesn’t think of herself as having parents. “I was eleven and James was five,” she says.

“You were both very young.”

“There was an accident,” Nora says stiffly.

“An accident?”

She hasn’t thought about the accident in a long time. She used to obsess about it, running it over and over in her mind. And then one day (she’d just turned thirteen), she’d stood with her grandfather at the end of the jetty, both of them gazing across the Irish Sea, and he had turned to her, had taken her hands into his, looked her hard in the eyes. “Nora, it wasn’t your fault. You were a child. A precious child. It wasn’t your fault.” She remembered his expression, his blue eyes as serious as the sea, and how gusts of wind had carried the scent of hawthorn blossoms to them and how she’d thrown herself against him and sobbed into his chest. And how, after that moment, as they walked home along the shore, the world had suddenly tilted into the light—the water glistening with silver threads, dazzling filaments blowing into the sky.

Nora pounds the keys on the old piano in the basement, pounds it out, Don’t make it bad , pounds it out, the bruises still raw and red on her face, pounds it out, Don’t let her under your skin , drowns it out. Her mother still screaming from the top of the stairs, “ Stop that goddamn noise ,” her mother’s words mud thick, suffocating in gin. Nora, in her plaid school uniform and saddle shoes, doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop beating the song into herself, absorbing the flats and sharps, Let it out and let it in .

But now, a shriek from the top of the stairs, and now, a great thud, and Nora stops beating the keys and twists around and sees the body of her mother, falling. The arms and legs, hips and hands, neck and mouth of her mother crashing down the basement stairs, the glass shattering. And now, a green olive—the green olive alive, moving fast and wild, announcing the falling body, bouncing and coming to a halt next to the black part of Nora’s left shoe.

And then, a final sudden thud.

For a long while, Nora waits stock-still in the dead silence, staring at the motionless body, the belly and breasts flattened, the head turned unnaturally to the side, tangled auburn hair obscuring the eyes, nothing moving at all. Finally, Nora stands up and steps over the green olive and walks to the phone and dials “0.” She gasps to the operator, “My mother, it’s my mother.”

And the operator says, warm as milk, “Someone will be there honey, someone will be there soon.”

Blood pools from under her mother’s head, pools on the black-and-white checked linoleum, rivulets of red traveling toward Nora and she is frozen there, holding the phone, the operator still saying things in her ear.

Now there are medics and emergency shouts, and a man’s voice says, “No pulse!” and someone steps on the green olive and flattens it.

And now, here is Nora standing tight and hunched, in the hush of church, staring with bare eyes into the casket, holding her father’s big hand, the red heat of her guilt eclipsing her bruises, now gone violet on her cheeks.

And when her father drops her hand to hold his own weeping face, Nora reaches tentatively into the casket and touches the hands of her mother. The hands are cold and she is taken aback for a moment. But now, she begins to stroke the hands, trace the bones and curves with her index finger, trace the lines of the knuckles, the ashen hands inert, dead without the rage, and Nora is startled, startled to feel the skin is so delicate, fragile as Bible paper.

Nora stares at the fingers of her right hand as they twist the wedding ring around the finger on her left hand. Lately, she’s been thinking of not wearing the ring at all.

“Can you tell me more about your mother?” David asks. It’s been a week since her last visit, a week since she’d told him about her mother’s fall.

“That’s a pretty general question, don’t you think?” She immediately regrets her tone, unsure of her resistance to this line of questioning; he’s been so kind to her. “I’m sorry,” she says.