The Wonder

by Emma Donoghue

Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine—that was the doctors’ domain—but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation.

From having nursed alongside a variety of women, Lib knew that self-mastery counted for more than almost any other talent.

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

But that was part of the definition of madness, Lib supposed, the refusal to accept that one was mad.

Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions. Like small gods, children formed their miniature worlds out of clay, or even just words. To them, the truth was never simple.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.

“He carried it back and put it on the old woman’s tongue, and the curse was broken, and she was released from her pain.” The child fumbled the sign of the cross. “Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her, may she rest in peace.” Released from her pain meant she’d died, Lib realized. Only in Ireland would this count as a happy ending.

Calm was crucial; a strident female voice caused men’s ears to close.