The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

“Whatever could possess a man to leave you?”

Lib had been so unlucky as to lose a husband less than a year after catching him.

Catching him

But the one question her mother and father hadn’t asked Lib was, How could he?

There was one light in the small window of the O’Donnells’ cabin that had not stopped blazing for eleven days and nights now,

innocence preserved;

“He wants me,” whispered Anna.

Now and at the hour of our death, amen.

the dearest girl in the world.”

Was Lib her deliverer or another enemy?

“You must be in pain.” “That’s not the word,” whispered Anna. “Whatever you call it, then.” “Sister says ’tis the kiss of Jesus.”

A rattling breath. “I just wish I knew how long it’ll take.” Lib asked, “Dying, you mean?” The girl nodded.

“Are you afraid?” A hesitation. Then a tiny nod.

“I don’t believe you truly want to die.”

“Thy will be done,” the girl whispered, crossing herself.

The watcher. Ever this night be at my side.

A murder.

“He said it was double.”

My love is mine, and I am his;

“He married me in the night.”

He comes in to me as soon as I’m asleep, Anna had said, but she hadn’t meant Jesus. He wants me.

“I was his sister and his bride too,” the girl whispered. “Double.”

“Marriage is forever.”

“When brothers and sisters marry, it’s a holy mystery. A secret between us and heaven, Pat told me. But then he died,”

“Maybe God took Pat because of what we’d done. ’Tisn’t fair, then, Mrs. Lib, because Pat’s bearing all the punishment.”

brother and sister, ’tis a mortal sin, the second worst of the six species of lust. Poor Pat never knew!”

“he never got a chance to go to confession. Maybe he went straight to hell.”

“In hell the flames aren’t for cleaning, they’re for hurting, and there’s no end.”

“Anna! You did nothing wrong.” “But I did.”

Anna shook her head. “I loved him double too.” Lib couldn’t say a word.

“Just brother and sister again.”

Rosaleen corrected her: “She’s made her choice.”

guilt?

“That’s the same filthy falsehood Anna came out with after Pat’s funeral,” Rosaleen went on, “and I told her not to be slandering her poor brother.”

It would be treachery to expose the secret that the child carried within her puny body to a man, any man,

what Lib saw as incestuous rape, others would call seduction. Wasn’t it so often the girl—no matter how young—who got blamed for having incited her molester with a look?

“You’re buying the damn spoons.”

“Better to drown in the surf than stand idly on the shore.”

“Wiping away the stains. The sins she’s committed with each part of her body,”

we should speak nothing but good of the dead.”

Pat had done to her. I’ve been telling the poor girl for months.

in the spring, Anna had opened her heart to her parish priest, told him of all her confusion about the secret marriage, all her mortification. And unlike Rosaleen O’Donnell, he’d been clear-sighted

“Fear not. Fear not, only believe, and she shall be safe.”

“Be it done. Be it done.”

Every flawed, scrawny, or bloated part, every inch of the real, mortal girl, I treasure you.

O God, if by any chance there is a God, teach me to speak with the tongue of angels.

What if you could be another girl instead of yourself?”

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?

“You’ll be another little girl. A new one. The moment you take a spoonful of this holy milk—it

“Anna will die?” A whisper. “That’s a promise?”

“Pat and Anna, together in heaven?” “Yes,” said Lib.