Yesternight (10 page)

“That's Chuck the Fish,” said Janie with a nod to the gaping monstrosity. “Grandpa Simpkin caught him.”

“Well, isn't he lovely?” I tore my attention away from Chuck and instead surveyed the bookshelves we passed. “Are any of these books yours, Janie?”

“No. They belonged to my grandparents.”

“Have you ever read any of L. Frank Baum's novels about little
Dorothy Gale, such as
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, or
The Emerald City of Oz
?”

“No.” She opened a door to the left of the fireplace and stepped into the middle of a small bedroom.

I sidled through the doorway after her and took in the sight of a warm and comfortable-looking bed, covered in a patchwork quilt, along with walls papered in a pale lavender hue.

“What a darling room,” I said. “Thank you for showing me the way.”

“The bed in here is kind of old.” Janie wrapped a hand around a brass bed knob and scratched her left ankle with the inside of her right foot. “It was Mommy's when she was little. She was saving it for a new brother or sister for me, until Daddy moved away.”

I lowered my bags to the floor. “I know it's extremely difficult when parents divorce, Janie, and if you'd ever like to talk—”

“I'm not sure why no brother or sister ever came.” She rested her chin on the knob and blinked.

I put a hand to my chest, remembering the stillborn that Mr. O'Daire had mentioned. That child would have been older than Janie, I realized, but, clearly, the girl pined for a sibling.

“It's really easy to be born if you find the right parents,” she continued. “If you want it badly enough.”

I shivered, in spite of myself. “What do you mean by that?”

“It's just easy.” She shrugged. “Anyone can do it if they feel like giving it a try. I chose Mommy on purpose, you know.”

“You did?”

“She looked so kind and pretty, and I could tell how much she wanted a baby.” Janie lifted her head from the knob. “Did you choose your mother?”

I shook my head, my eyes watering. “No, I . . .” I emitted a nervous laugh. “I don't know if I did. I don't think so. That's not quite how it works, you see . . .”

“That's how it worked for me. I waited and waited, and there she was.”

Before I could even consider a response, Janie swung around with a swish of blue skirts and skipped out of the bedroom.

I just stood there with gooseflesh prickling my arms, unsure if I had just witnessed a performance, a delusion, or a miracle.

M
RS.
O
'
D
AIRE AND
M
ISS
S
IMPKIN
served us supper in a dining room adjacent to the kitchen. They insisted that I call them “Rebecca” and “Tillie,” respectively, and seemed to want to call me “Alice,” even though I feared such informality would demolish all semblances of respect for me. Not only had I been demoted from school psychologist to “test monitor” in the breadth of an evening, but I now seemed to be dwindling from test monitor to “just a visiting girl that Tillie happens to know.”

“Yes, certainly, call me Alice,” I said with my lips stretched into a tight smile, hoping the use of my given name would at the least put Rebecca at ease and allow me to speak further with Janie.

We discussed Gordon Bay's weather, Tillie's decision to become a schoolteacher, Rebecca's brief career working as a cook in one of the local restaurants before she married Michael O'Daire, and the pros and cons of growing up on the coast compared to my childhood in the city of Portland. I avoided the boiled carrots and peas on my plate by nudging them behind my potatoes, not daring to share my repulsion toward vegetables.

Occasionally, I would glance across the table at Janie, who,
unlike me, ate all of her food without hiding any of it. She sat in relative silence and never once lifted her head to stare across the table at me with a chilling gaze reminiscent of my “possessed” student, Frankie—as I feared she might. Nor did she seem troubled by any dark, or puzzling, or ingenious thoughts. She was simply a child eating supper with her family and a guest.

“What is your favorite thing about living on the coast, Janie?” I asked while cutting through a slice of chicken. “What is your best memory of living here by the sea?”

“Flying kites,” she said, poking her fork into a mushy potato, “on the beach.”

Her mother nodded. “My ex-husband's parents used to design kites in the off-season. We have a whole collection of their creations out in a shed in the back.”

“What a wonderful hobby,” I said. “Are you a designer of things, too, Janie?”

“Well . . . I wouldn't say a ‘designer.'” The girl lifted her eyes to mine. “More of a solver.”

She popped the potato wedge into her mouth.

“And what types of things are you solving?” I asked.

She chewed and swallowed. “Equations.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “That's right. You like numbers.”

Her aunt shifted in her chair, but her mother continued eating as though unfazed by my line of questioning.

I cleared my throat. “Is there a particular type of equation that you—?”

“Do you ever attend the theater when you're in Portland, Alice?” asked Miss Simpkin.

I smiled at the obvious turn in the conversation's course. “Why,
yes. Sometimes. My oldest sister, Bea, and I are fascinated by dark family dramas and horror. We try to make an evening of Ibsen or Shakespeare whenever we get the chance.”

Mrs. O'Daire laughed in a manner that resembled a sniff. “Family dramas and horror are the last things I would seek for entertainment.”

“I'm afraid that my normal life is rather boring.” I smiled again. “I need to partake in imaginary dramas to enliven things a bit.”

“I've loved the Brontë sisters' novels ever since I was about fifteen,” said Tillie, “although nowadays I would never marry a Heathcliff or a Mr. Rochester. Can you imagine?”

“Ah, yes, those dear, wonderful Brontës and their brooding heroes,” I said with a laugh. “Bea started bringing ghost and crime stories home from the library when I was far too young to be listening to those sorts of things, and I devoured them as if they were milk and cookies.”

“Drama in real life isn't all it's cracked up to be,” said Mrs. O'Daire without looking at me, cutting close to the bone of a chicken thigh. “Everyone always says how desperately they long for excitement, but I think there's a certain beauty to normalcy and calm.”

“Perhaps you're right.” I took a sip of my water and studied the current sense of tranquility reigning over the table, the gentle clinks of the silverware tapping against plates, the silent chewing and breathing, the relaxed postures.

And yet I could almost hear the pressure—the undeniable
roar
—of the turbulence roiling beneath the O'Daire family's surface.

A
fter supper, I retreated to the guest bedroom and fetched a fountain pen from my briefcase, along with two sheets of Department of Education letterhead. Using a wobbly little bedside table as a desk, I set the first piece of paper before me and penned a letter to the postmaster of Friendly, Kansas.

    
November 13, 1925

    
Dear Postmaster:

                    
I work as a psychologist in the state of Oregon, and I have been given a rather fascinating case of a young child who insists that she knows a family from Friendly. More specifically, she longs to reach out to the family of a deceased Friendly woman by the name of Violet Sunday.

                    
If such a family indeed exists, I would be most grateful if you delivered the enclosed letter to the surviving members. I apologize for not possessing an exact address. The
child has mentioned the possibility of Violet having a sister named Eleanor.

Thanking you in advance, I am,

Yours truly,

A.M. Lind

On the second sheet, I wrote the following:

    
November 13, 1925

    
Dear Sir or Madam:

                    
I apologize in advance for the rather peculiar nature of this letter. I work as a psychologist for the Oregon Department of Education, and I have come across a seven-year-old girl who claims to know your family. Normally, I would not think it unusual for a child to say she knows people in another state; however, this little girl speaks as though she once lived with your family.

                    
I do not mean to pry into your personal history, and I certainly do not want to stir up painful memories from your past, but this child is rather insistent—and specific—about her life in Friendly, Kansas. She claims that her name was Violet Sunday and that she excelled at mathematics. She states that she had a sister named Eleanor and a dog named Poppy, and she says that she drowned at the age of nineteen.

                    
If there is any truth behind these statements, if a woman
named Violet Sunday genuinely existed in Friendly, please write to me at my home address in Portland, Oregon, listed above. If your family has been in contact with the child's father, Michael O'Daire, please also include that information in your letter. Whether this reincarnation mystery is a hoax, or a childhood fantasy, or the symptom of a suppressed memory from the child's own past, I would like to solve the puzzle soon and help the girl find peace of mind.

Respectfully yours,

A.M. Lind

A
ROUND EIGHT O'CLOCK,
someone knocked on the bedroom door. I packed away all letters and notes and called out, “Come in.”

Miss Simpkin opened the door. “Would you like me to draw you a bath?”

“Oh, that sounds divine,” I said with a long sigh, and my entire body melted over the idea of warm water and cleansing soap.

“Stay here,” she said. “Relax. I'll get it started.”

“Is everyone doing all right out there?” I asked before she could shut the door.

She paused with her hand on the tarnished little doorknob. “Yes. I don't think you need to worry about a thing.”

“Well, thank you.” I reached down and took off my right shoe. “It does feel nice to be lodging inside an actual house for a change.”

“Good.” She smiled and closed the door behind her.

D
URING MY SOAK
in the O'Daires' claw-foot tub, I thought I heard someone snicker on the other side of the bathroom door.

I bolted upright and cupped my hands over my breasts.

“Is someone there?” I asked.

Silence ensued. I bit my bottom lip and sank back down into the steaming water, disappointed in myself. Nothing stood outside of that bathroom door other than my own anxieties—my stupefying fear of people seeing the naked and hungry side of me. The sexual side.

Keep your panties on in the future,
my sister Margery had said, and my Lord, how she glared, as though I'd harmed both her and her children through my behavior.
You're an unmarried woman. You can't behave that way. You simply can't!

I draped a washcloth over my forehead and attempted to clear my mind of all worries—the intelligence tests, the pressures of an upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, the enigma of Janie, the ridiculous complexity of just finding myself a damned bed in which to sleep.

Minds do have a way of staying active, however. They don't always agree to blissful meditation. As I reclined there, nude, in the house of strangers, my brain decided to stray toward the subject of blond-haired Stuart from graduate school and his crowded little university apartment that smelled of coffee grinds and wine. I didn't even know why I had agreed to join him in his bedroom; we didn't know each other well. He was a handsome flirt, and I had already discovered my fondness for sex after my brief, romantic entanglement with Tommy, the boy with the umbrella. Stu and I simply gravitated together, drawn by primitive desires and master's theses stresses.

During our little petting party on his lumpy bed, as demurely as possible, I had asked Stu if we could try pleasures of the oral and manual variety to avoid a pregnancy. Tommy had taught
me such delights, for he was a young man of the world—a lady-killer—and I had quite enjoyed the sensation of his velvety lips between my legs. Stu blushed and said he couldn't do such a thing with a lady, but he swore, with a childish cross of his heart, that he would remove his “John Thomas” in the nick of time—which, of course, he didn't.

I slid the washcloth off my eyes and stared up at mildew stains that dotted Mrs. O'Daire's bathroom ceiling. My anger during that short pregnancy reawakened. A door inside my head shot open.

A nasty altercation had followed that sexual blunder.

I had confronted Stu about the baby. I yelled at him in his apartment, and he just shrugged and said, “What do you want me to do about it, Alice? I'm certainly not going to go and marry a girl like you.”

“I don't want you to marry me,” I had shouted. “I just want to have a future, but you ruined that for me. You ruined everything!”

He threw up his hands and turned away. “Aw, you're so loose, some other chap was bound to knock you up anyway.”

Without even realizing what I was doing, I kicked off my right shoe, lunged at Stu, and smashed the thick heel against the right side of his head—not once, but twice. He cried out in pain and dropped to his knees with a hand cradling his skull. Blood seeped through his fingers, and I felt
good.
I hit him a third time, just because I could.

I slapped the washcloth back over my eyes and forced myself to slam that memory shut. What an appalling moment to dredge up in the middle of a bath after such an exhausting week. Stu never pressed charges. He didn't want to have to admit to anyone that a
girl
had beaten him up. I lost the baby just a week or two later and
spent the remainder of graduate school avoiding the sight of Stu and his fine blond hair.

I still wore the shoes with which I had struck him, for they were my favorite pair. Brown slip-on oxfords with a rounded toe. Warm. Sturdy. Comfortable.

Rust-colored stains flecked the squared-off right heel, but I simply walked around upon it and pretended the blood wasn't there.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night, a child's scream pierced the air.

I awoke, entangled in blankets that didn't smell familiar, engulfed in darkness. My knee smacked a wall I couldn't see.

Another cry shattered the silence, this time emerging as a word: “No!” And shortly afterward—“Help! No! Help me, I'm stuck! I'm stuck!”

Someone raced across the floor above me.

I fought my way out of the web of bedding and stumbled across the unfamiliar room, arms outstretched, hands grabbing for obstacles that might guide me. I remembered where I was, as well as the location of the bedroom door.

“I'm stuck, I'm stuck!” shouted a child—
Janie
, I quickly realized—from somewhere in the house. “Drowning! Drowning! It's so cold!”

I opened the door and navigated my way around the front room occupied by that horrible mounted sturgeon. The fish's gray mouth gaped in a slip of moonlight that sliced through the part in the curtains, but it was the only thing in the room I could see.

Someone turned on an electric lamp upstairs, which transformed the staircase into a beacon of light. I scrambled toward it.

Again, Janie screamed, “Help me! Too cold! Too cold!”

“Janie,” said her mother. “Janie, wake up.”

Miss Simpkin flew past the top of the staircase as a blur of red hair and a green robe. I followed after her, rounded a corner, and tripped into a bedroom that froze me in my tracks.

Someone had written numbers all over the bright-yellow walls. No, more than numbers—letters, fractions, parentheses, integers, vertical lines, dashes, square roots, subsets. I didn't know entirely what I was looking at, but it appeared as though an intelligent, frustrated soul had regurgitated the inner workings of her mind across the paint. A bedside lamp cast a dim golden light that made the penciled scribblings look like warnings scrawled across the depths of a cave.

“What is she doing in here?” asked Mrs. O'Daire from the edge of a bed.

I blinked, only then noticing the others in the room—Janie, curled beneath a pink bedspread, crying, her eyes squeezed shut; her mother, with her strawberry hair in curlers, sitting beside the child, gawking at me; Miss Simpkin, huddled over Mrs. O'Daire, her hand on her sister's back. And beyond them the equations. Endless equations. Obsessive calculations.

“Get out of this room.” Mrs. O'Daire jumped up and spun me toward the doorway. “Stop looking at the walls. Stop looking at them!”

She pushed me out to the hallway and slammed the door shut behind me.

I swayed and lost my balance, but even when I steadied myself, I couldn't stop seeing Janie's writing. I closed my eyes and pressed a hand against my ribs, but the scattered numbers and algebraic
letters hovered in front of me, begging me to solve the problems of their creator, pleading with me,
Do something!

D
OWN IN THE
kitchen, I paced the floorboards and longed for a swig of coffee or a shot of mind-numbing liquor. I paced with enough of a commotion for people upstairs to hear me, and sure as rain, once Mrs. O'Daire calmed her daughter down, she thundered down the staircase and blew into the kitchen.

“I don't want you in my house anymore!” she hollered, barreling toward me. “I want you to leave. Tonight.”

“We need to talk, Mrs. O'Daire.”

“No, we don't.” She came right up to me, fists clenched, her curlers wobbling and clicking together. “I know you're not just a simple test moderator. Janie told me the types of questions you asked her at school. And I know my ex-husband is well aware that you're here in Gordon Bay.”

I raised my chin and refused to back away. “I want to talk to you about your daughter.”

“You're not going to take her away.”

“No, I'm not. You're absolutely right.”

A board creaked. I looked up and spotted Miss Simpkin peeking around the corner.

“Rebecca,” she said, her voice small and whispery. “I think you ought to listen to her.”

“You're the worst one of all, Tillie!” Mrs. O'Daire wheeled toward her. “Inviting this
psychologist
”—she spat out the word—“into your classroom and then into our house. I was polite during dinner. I was kind and patient, and look what happened.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Please, go upstairs!” She pointed to the doorway. “You're risking me losing Janie.”

Miss Simpkin darted an apologetic glance my way before backing out of view.

I put out my hands. “Mrs. O'Daire . . .”

The woman spun back around. “I don't want to hear one word about those numbers on Janie's walls. I don't care how curious or horrified those scribblings make you feel, but you're not coming near my daughter ever again.”

“But I know you're curious about her intelligence, too. I saw the journal.”

She recoiled; her mouth twisted into a horrified grimace. “He—he showed it to you?”

“I swear to you, I don't want to take Janie anywhere. I just want to free her of these nightmares and ensure she's receiving an education worthy of that brilliant young mind of hers.”

“He showed you the journal?” she asked again, splotchy patches of color now rising in her cheeks and neck. “What else did he tell you about our family's private secrets? Did he tell you about my mother—poor, crazy Mrs. Simpkin, locked up in a loony bin?”

“Mrs. O'Daire . . .”

“Did he?”

I closed my mouth and swallowed.

“Did you sleep in his bed?” she asked.

“What?” I shrank back.

“I know you stayed in his hotel, all alone, just the two of you. Are you sleeping with him?”

“I'm a professional psychologist working with schoolchildren.”

“Did he tell you
his
secrets, or is he only sharing our daughter's problems with the world?”

“Mrs. O'Daire”—I reached out to her left arm, not quite touching her—“please, take a breath. Calm down.”

She smacked my hand away. “He sells booze to rummies in that hotel he inherited from his daddy. He barely does a lick of work. All he wants to do is read his goddamned mystery stories and sleep with anything with tits.”

“I'm not here to discuss your marriage.”