Anna Quinn - The Night Child

“No worries. Let me rephrase.”

She nods, stops twisting the ring, and reaches for the raven pillow. Sets it on her lap. Folds her hands together on top.

“What else might be important for me to know about your mother?”

One of Fiona’s favorite books, The Important Book , comes to her mind. The important thing about a spoon is you eat with it. It’s like a little shovel. The important thing about a shoe is you put your foot in it. You walk with it.

“Nora?”

“I don’t know.” She can feel herself struggling for something more to say about her mother. She hadn’t felt a thing when telling of the accident. She’d long ago buried any feelings for her mother. She needs to talk about the face and the voice, but she is unable to say so and doesn’t know why.

“Nora?”

She refolds her hands. “I guess it’s important that she was fifteen when she emigrated to America. And seventeen when she married my father.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Pretty young to leave home—to come so far.”

Nora thinks of a Polaroid she keeps in the bottom drawer of her desk. She hasn’t looked at it for years, hasn’t felt the need. Her father had given it to her after the funeral. “Your mother used to be happy,” he’d said and dropped the picture on her desk. “Damned alcohol.”

In the picture her mother and father are young and look like they don’t need anything else in the world but each other. They’re already married (a diamond sparkles from her mother’s finger) and are living in Chicago. They are sitting at a round wooden table in a dark bar. Her mother wears a sleeveless, low-cut red dress, her wavy auburn hair loose, falling onto her exposed cleavage. She is laughing, holding out a martini to the camera as if toasting it, her bright white teeth flashing against red lipstick, her other arm around Nora’s father. She looks like a movie star, like Maureen O’Hara. Nora’s father holds a cigarette, wears a large gold watch, and is smiling at her mother, looks as if he might kiss her.

“Nora? Did you hear me? That’s pretty far for such a young woman to travel.”

She looks away from him. Stares at the closed blinds. “My grandfather said that of all his eight children, she was the wildest—the one born for adventure. The bravest one.” And now these words, “ The bravest one ,” breathe out a lost memory.

Nora is fourteen. Lying in bed. Her aunts and her grandmother talking in the kitchen. The aunts visit on Sundays. They sit around the large kitchen table with their mother, drinking whiskey in their black tea and eating pie and having interesting conversations about recipes, neighbors, love, and death. Nora hears her mother’s name, Maeve. She creeps down the hall and listens at the doorway.

“I miss Maeve more than anything,” Claire whispers. Claire is the younger of the two aunts. She is tall and beautiful with long black hair. She lives down the road with her husband and three little boys.

“Ach,” her grandmother says, sadness filling her voice. “It was wildness killed that one.”

“Mam! It wasn’t her wildness killed her, and ye know it!” Claire cries.

Nora stands there in the hall in her flannel pajamas and wool socks. She stands very still.

“Hush!” her grandmother says. “She was fifteen. What would ye have had us do? Would ye rather all of us be called out in contempt every Sunday in church? Would ye have had those damned nuns pounding on our door, day after day demanding we put her in those evil homes or burn in hell? They’d have had her washing laundry until her fingers were raw.” And now her grandmother’s voice is deathly flat. “Sending her to America was the best we could do. She’s lucky my sister took her in, aye, and was willing to take her to that doctor.”

“And what of Seamus?” her aunt Caroline says angrily. Caroline is the oldest sister, an unmarried woman who runs a bakery in town. “Sure he walks around town like he owns the place, no one even knowing it is him who was the father and poor Maeve sent off full of shame for a secret abortion and now … now she’s—” Caroline is crying now. “Sure ’n’ I hope I never have a girl in this damned country.”

Nora stands, openly now, in the doorway. Tears stream down her face. “My mother had an abortion?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” her grandmother says, reaching her arms out to Nora then, but it is Claire Nora runs to, pressing herself into her aunt’s breasts. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” her grandmother says again and again. And now, Caroline’s arms around her too. The three of them weeping into the silences of loss, guilt, and shame.

Later, in bed, Nora cried hard again, thinking of her mother, only a year older than herself, exposed on the doctor’s table, legs spread wide, the doctor sucking the baby out with a machine. “Mommy,” she’d cried.

“Nora,” David says. “Are you okay? Would you like some water?”

Nora stands and walks over to the blinds. Pulls the cord so they open slightly. Outside, a female parking attendant with white gloves slashes a yellow line of chalk across a car tire. She moves from car to car, in her navy uniform with its orange vest, gray hair poking out from her hat. She bends and rises, making her mark over and over again.

Nora adjusts the blinds until only a bit of light comes through. “My mother was so pretty,” she says into the slats. “Beautiful. Especially when my father came home at night. She wore lipstick. A light shade of pink. Sometimes she’d put it on my lips, and we’d dress up in her cocktail dresses and waltz around the house to the Kingston Trio.” She turns toward David. “She loved to sing ‘Tom Dooley.’ She’d pick up a hairbrush and pretend she was Dave Guard—you know, one of the Kingston Trio? Her voice was amazing.”

“What else do you remember?”

Nora sits on the windowsill. “Her skin was soft. She told me once how her mother sometimes warmed up milk in a huge pot on the stove, to soften her face and her sisters’ faces—that’s how Irish women kept themselves beautiful. And before I went to bed sometimes, she’d dab my face with Pond’s Cold Cream and tell me I had beautiful skin, too.”

“Lovely.”

“But then—”

“What?”

“I don’t know. She stopped being pretty. I don’t remember exactly when. I only remember that her lips tightened into a hard line, and she stopped wearing lipstick. And she had a shot or two of gin every day around three.” Nora hears her speech become more agitated, but she keeps going. “Sometimes she would sit at the kitchen table with her head in her hands and cry. I felt sorry for her, but she was just so …”

“So what , Nora?”

“Just so fucking—” Did I just say “fucking” out loud? She can feel a headache beginning and presses her fingers into her temples.

“So fucking …?” David repeats her words as calmly as if she had said, “ So very.”

God, it must be easy to become a therapist , she thinks. You basically take the last word the client says and repeat it back to them in the form of a question . She is tempted to tell him her mind feels too blurry, that his questions and important books, abortions and shots of gin are all colliding in her head, making it hard to concentrate.

“Nora, is there something else?”

She walks back to the couch and sits down. Crosses her right leg over the left. The foot of the right leg moves back and forth, back and forth. She watches it for a moment then stops it. The shoe on the foot is untied. She reaches over to tie it, but her fingers are trembling. She uncrosses her legs and presses her knees together.

“Is there something else you’d like to say, Nora?”