Yesternight (4 page)

“Is Janie the reason you requested me?”

“What did he say?”

“Well . . .” I thought back to our conversation. “He told me that you're Janie's aunt and his ex-wife's sister. And he made it quite clear that something about the child concerns him.”

“Did he say what?”

“No, he said that he'd like for me to speak to her myself before he told me anything more. He wanted to avoid affecting my diagnosis of her.”

“Hmm.” Miss Simpkin took another puff and rocked back in her chair with a squeak of the wooden joints. “I'm surprised he felt that way.”

“To be most honest, I'm not sure if simply talking to Janie, or even testing her using Stanford–Binet, will give me any insight into his worries. I saw her just now.” I nodded toward the cloakroom. “Whatever it is that concerns him about the child isn't something that's overtly apparent.”

Miss Simpkin's eyes moistened. She blinked several times in a row and held the cigarette with trembling fingers.

“Usually,” I continued, “a parent—or a teacher—will speak to a psychologist about a troubled child's disconcerting behaviors before the child is approached. Most children won't simply start talking about their fears, or past tragedies, or whatever it is that's haunting them.”

She nodded. “I suppose that makes sense.” Another smoke.

I kept my gaze fixed upon her and her dependency on that cigarette for comfort, even though she had stopped looking at me.

“Why did you request the assistance of someone like me?” I asked. “What is it about Janie that has you all worried?”

She rubbed her right thumb against her bottom lip. “Her mother doesn't know I requested special help, but other children—other parents—they started coming to us over the summer, saying that Janie frightened them. It seemed wrong to ignore what's happening any longer.”

I scooted forward in my chair and laid my right hand upon her desk. “Please, if there's a concern that needs to be addressed, I want to know as much as possible about Janie. If this concern is showing up in her relationships with her friends or in her schoolwork, then we should definitely make sure Janie is safe and happy.”

“You're right,” she said, her voice cracking. “You're completely right. If this were any other child . . .” She sniffed and parked the cigarette in an ashtray. “Well . . . how should I begin?”

“Take your time.” I folded my hands on the top of my briefcase.

Her lips twitched, as if deciding whether they should smile. “There's something I could show you. It—it definitely demonstrates the mystery of our Janie.” She slid open the desk's bottom drawer and seemed to hold her breath while doing so. “During the week of Halloween, I asked all of the children to write a composition on the theme of ‘The scariest thing that's ever happened to me.'” She rustled out a sheet of wide-ruled paper and laid the page in front of me. Her hand shook against the top edge, giving the paper the appearance of the fluttering wings of an insect caught beneath her fingers. A dying moth. “This is what Janie had to say.”

I picked up the composition and read.

            
The scariest thing that ever happened to me was when I used to be called Violet Sunday and lived in Kansas. I was deep in the water and couldn't swim back up to the surface. My heart hurt. It felt like it was about to blow up. Even though I loved numbers so much, I didn't even feel like counting to figure out how many seconds I was under the water. All of my number happiness left me, and I just
sank and sank until everything went black and I died. I was nineteen. I died, and it hurt.

I swallowed and peeked up at Miss Simpkin, who leaned her hands against her desk.

“Did Janie used to have a different name?” I asked.

“No. She's always been Janie O'Daire.”

“Did she almost drown when she was younger?”

Miss Simpkin shook her head. “No.”

“Are you quite certain?”

“Quite.” She picked up her cigarette and took another puff.

I peered down at the fine display of penmanship—the neat lines, the full, round curves of letters printed in pencil.

            
All of my number happiness left me, and I just sank and sank until everything went black and I died. I was nineteen.

I cleared a heavy feeling from my throat. “Do you know if anyone who might not have been entirely . . .
competent
has ever watched over Janie?”

“You mean other than her father?”

I glanced over my shoulder to the empty space where Mr. O'Daire and I had greeted Janie. I turned back to Miss Simpkin. “You don't believe Mr. O'Daire is a competent father?”

“I don't think he'd ever hurt her, but . . . his current business practices are”—she tapped ash into the tray—“
unsavory
, to say the least.”

I smoothed out the edges of the paper against my briefcase and reread the paragraph once more.

“Janie, she's . . .” Miss Simpkin rested her left elbow on the desk and held her head against her hand. “She's talked about her life as Violet Sunday ever since she was two years old. The story's always been the same. She was born in Kansas and drowned at nineteen. She loved mathematics.”

“She's spoken about mathematics and Kansas since she was two?” I asked.

“In one way or another, yes.”

“Has she ever been to Kansas?”

“She's never left Oregon.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Do you believe she's remembering a previous life? Is that the great mystery everyone's dancing around?”

Miss Simpkin tapped more ash into the tray and rocked her knuckles across her lips. “I often wonder if her father is feeding her that tale and convincing her that she used to be a dead woman from the 1800s.”

“Why do you think he'd do that?”

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “Money, I suppose. Fame. He's not a war veteran, or a respected business owner, or even a married man. He's just the spoiled son of a successful hotel proprietor who inherited his daddy's business.”

I shifted my weight in my seat and strove to remember Mr. O'Daire's mannerisms when he spoke to me about Janie. The drumming of his thumbs against the steering wheel in the rhythm of the rain came to mind. And yet the genuineness of his love and concern for his child had also made an impression on me.

“May I keep this paper?” I asked.

Miss Simpkin squirmed. “I haven't yet shown that particular writing sample to either of her parents. As I said, her mother doesn't
even know about you yet, other than the fact that a person would be arriving to survey the children's ability to learn inside a classroom.”

“I'll keep the composition to myself for now. I simply want to use it for comparison, in case Janie feels like talking to me about this story of hers.”

“All right.” She rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes, as though battling a wicked headache. “At a friend's house, Janie drew a detailed picture of a woman drowning—a macabre illustration that included blue skin and a horrific expression on the woman's face. Her friend's mother asked Janie to stop coming over because of it, and now my sister worries that people are hinting that the child requires institutionalization.”

“I honestly don't believe anything close to an asylum would be necessary. To me”—I lifted the paper—“this is either a case of a child with a rich imagination or the suppressed memory of a trauma that's trying to be understood.”

Miss Simpkin drew another long puff and blew smoke out of the right side of her mouth. “Do you believe in past lives, Miss Lind?”

“No, I don't. I've studied psychology long enough to know that the human mind is a delicate work of art that sometimes plays tricks upon us. It talks us into believing in the extraordinary when ordinary explanations are to blame.”

“What can you do to help Janie?”

“Allow me a little extra time with her during her examination. I'll speak to her and get to the source of this strange story of Miss Sunday from Kansas.” I unfastened the clasp of my briefcase. “The good news is that Janie is a child who is obviously loved and well cared for. That palpable concern for her health and happiness
will make everything much easier for her. I will, however, explore the possibility that her father is talking her into this tale.”

“Thank you. I'd appreciate that.” Miss Simpkin snuffed out the cigarette. “Shall we move on to the subject of those tests, then? I'm going to need to soak my feet in steaming-hot water soon.”

“You and I both,” I said with a smile, and I slid Janie's composition into my briefcase, while the name of her tragic drowning character sang through my head like another skipping-rope chant.

Violet.

Violet Sunday
.

A darling name. A name that most certainly sounded as though it had been plucked from the imagination of a child—and not from the mystical memories of a dead woman.

J
ust as Miss Simpkin and I were concluding a discussion about arranging a quiet space for the examinations, Mr. O'Daire opened the door to the schoolhouse, the green umbrella at his side, his blond hair tamed and combed.

“Did I return too early?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “Your timing was rather perfect, actually.” I packed my notebook full of colors, drawings, and dictation samples into my bag and turned back to Miss Simpkin. “Thank you again for allowing me to chat with you before starting with the students tomorrow.”

“It was a pleasure.” She shook my hand without once looking at Janie's father across the classroom.

I left the warmth of the schoolhouse's potbelly stove and followed Mr. O'Daire back out to his car. The rain had subsided, so we no longer needed to huddle beneath his umbrella. The frigid dampness of the air remained.

Mr. O'Daire opened the passenger-side door for me without a word, but the expectant look in his eyes, the slight lift of his golden-brown eyebrows, seemed a request for my thoughts about Janie.

“I'll speak to you more about your daughter after I examine her tomorrow,” I said, and I climbed into the car.

He leaned his elbow against the top edge of my door. “Did Miss Simpkin say anything about her?”

“Tomorrow, Mr. O'Daire.” I tucked my skirt beneath my legs on the seat. “Today was solely meant for introductions.”

He nodded, with some reluctance, and shut my door.

To my relief, he didn't press the subject any further, although he did once again drum his thumbs against the steering wheel. We didn't see Sam and his threadbare coat either.

“Is that man all right now?” I asked after we passed the barbershop.

“You mean Sam?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know.” Mr. O'Daire's eyes softened; the drumming ceased. “Hopefully, he found shelter.”

“Does he have a home?”

“He sleeps at his folks' house, but they don't know what to do with him. They've been stuck with him like that ever since he came home from France.”

“It's such a shame there's not more psychological help out here on the coast.”

“There's not
any
psychological help in this part of the coast. Aside from you, that is.” He peeked at me with an expression loaded with optimism.

I sincerely hoped I'd be able to live up to that optimism.

“Were you in the war?” I asked.

“I trained at Camp Lewis, but they signed the Armistice right before my division was about to ship overseas. I can stab a sandbag
with a bayonet better than anyone, though, so if you need a sandbag killed, Miss Lind, I'm your man.”

“Sandbags are a common hazard to my profession”—I smiled and tucked a wayward lock of hair behind my ear—“so I'll most certainly keep that in mind.”

He laughed, and his cheeks flushed with color.

I dug my teeth into my bottom lip and scolded myself for sounding so inexcusably flirtatious.

A moment later, my stomach growled, and my attention switched to eating and sleeping, the lack of both being the true hazard of my profession. Mr. O'Daire must have heard the caterwauling from my insides, for as soon as he pulled his automobile to a stop at the curb in front of the hotel, he said, “If you don't feel like trekking back into town for supper, you can eat here. We entertain local townsfolk and fishermen down in the hotel basement every night.”

“Oh?”

“We'll be serving ham sandwiches, along with pretzels and pickles and drinks.” He set the parking brake and extinguished the motor. “It's a large ham tonight, seeing as though it's Armistice Day. I'll have Mom deliver a sandwich to your room if you'd prefer to recover from your travels.”

“Ham and pretzels, you said?”

He nodded.

I refrained from asking aloud,
The type of food served to whet customers' thirst for liquor in a speakeasy, you mean? Nice and salty?

“Would you prefer something else?” he asked.

“No. It sounds lovely. And I think I would prefer to eat in my room.”

He stepped out of the car and rounded the front of the vehicle
while straightening the lapel of his black coat. His ability to earn a living with an empty hotel, the smart threads that he wore in a town crippled by rain and poverty, Miss Simpkin's characterization of his practices as “unsavory”—they all suddenly made sense. My host in Gordon Bay was more than just the concerned parent of a peculiar child. He was the owner of a “blind tiger,” or so people called such establishments that spit in the face of Prohibition. A man who clearly knew how to succeed in the face of adversity.

Might he also prove to be an indispensable collaborator in getting to the root of his daughter's “Violet Sunday” tale, if he's so ambitious and resourceful?
I wondered.
Or is he a handsome roadblock I'll need to steer around in order to solve this problem?

Even worse, is he the problem?

U
P IN MY
hotel room, I situated myself in an armchair and ate my sandwich and pretzels with my feet defrosting in front of the fireplace. Poor Mrs. O'Daire had to leave my doorway with a rejected pickle wrapped in a napkin, for I couldn't stand the smell and taste of cucumbers in any form, pickled or otherwise. I also loathed carrots, green beans, peas, turnips, rutabagas, and radishes, and my persnickety behavior had vexed my mother my entire life, even at our most recent family gathering, just that past summer.

“An infantile aversion to vegetables,” Mother had called it, while my middle sister, Margery, nodded in agreement, shoveling strained peas into the mouth of my six-month-old nephew, Warren. The baby's tongue pushed out an avalanche of rejected green vegetables, and I was forced to cover my mouth with a napkin to conceal my gagging.

Despite the momentary pickle encounter, my private supper in
Gordon Bay proved much more palatable and peaceful than any family dinner in Portland. Rain pinged against the windowpane; the hearth-fire glowed and shimmied with satisfying little pops of the logs. Down below my window, in the blackness of night, waves splattered against the shore, and over the rumpus of the sea, I heard automobiles rumbling to a stop in gravel. I had to wonder if Gordon Bay law enforcers cared at all that Mr. O'Daire and his mother entertained “local townsfolk and fishermen down in the hotel basement.” In all honesty, I craved a glass of wine. Or gin.

Instead, I sipped my tea and licked pretzel salt from my lips.

It's all for the good of your future, Alice,
I told myself yet again, and I sat up a little straighter in the chair.
Something to bolster the old university application. Field experience. Another chance to save children.

My black briefcase caught my eye. It lay slumped against the wall to my left, by the room's door, and although I couldn't actually see the contents, Janie's composition beckoned to me from within. My front teeth crunched into the middle of a pretzel, dusting my sweater with crumbs. I stared the briefcase down, still able to remember the first lines of the child's queer paragraph verbatim.

The scariest thing that ever happened to me was when I used to be called Violet Sunday and lived in Kansas. I was deep in the water and couldn't swim back up to the surface. My heart hurt. It felt like it was about to blow up.

The more I thought about Janie's selection of Kansas, of all the regions in the world, the slower my chewing grew, the deeper my brow creased.

So strange,
I thought.
Kansas. But . . . I wonder . . .

In my own childhood, I had gobbled up L. Frank Baum's deli
cious stories of Dorothy and Princess Ozma . . . and
Kansas
. In fact, I had drawn my own maps of Kansas to mount upon my wall, pored over the Kansas page in the family atlas, and struggled to construct a hot air balloon out of bed sheets so that I might fly away to Dorothy's home state, which I imagined to be a portal to adventures dark and wondrous. Whenever people asked where I was born, I even claimed to be from the prairie, and once again Mother would tut and sigh at my strangeness and say, “The child is obsessed with books.”

I grabbed a notebook out of my briefcase and scribbled down a note to myself:
Ask Janie what books she enjoys reading. Another Oz fanatic, perhaps?

On the following line, I added,
Inquire about fears of the bathtub, the ocean, or other water. Memory suppression highly likely. Does she mean she was nineteen months old, not nineteen years? Why nineteen?

I leaned my elbow against the armrest and rubbed my right index finger across my lips.

Memory suppression,
I wrote again in my notebook, my hands shaking, and I gulped another sip of tea, now lukewarm and bitter from a collection of leaves that must have slipped through the strainer.
If Janie doesn't know what happened, the mother
must
be contacted, despite her fear of the possibility of institutionalization.

I sighed and scratched my forehead.

Sometimes, traumatic memories liked to keep the doors to their chambers wide open so that their victims would never stop hearing, seeing, and sensing the horrors of their past. The memories roared and clawed and sank sharp teeth into a person's brain, and as hard as the sufferer tried, she could never slam the door shut without someone—someone like a trained psychologist—to help.
In fact, shutting the door wasn't even the solution. The memories themselves needed to be weakened. Tamed. Shrunken down to minuscule granules of dust that could no longer clamp down and destroy a person's life.

Other memories, however, preferred to hide behind closed doors with thick metal locks. From behind the wood, they snarled. They growled. They pounded their fists against the barriers and threatened to kick the doors wide open to reveal their monstrous faces when their sufferers least wanted to see them. And yet they remained a frustrating mystery. Unconquerable until viewed and faced.

One of those closed doors existed inside of me.

Something happened to me when I was quite young. Whenever I asked my family about the incident as an adult, they'd lower their eyes and murmur useless phrases such as
It was simply a difficult period for you, Alice.
Or
That was such a long time ago.
Even my oldest sister, Bea, my confidante, refused to discuss it.

When I was four years old, I attacked several neighborhood children. An anger that emerged out of seemingly nowhere swelled inside me. It grew. It purpled. It howled and exploded. I struck my victims with a tree branch thicker than my arms and as heavy as a stepping stone. Not gentle taps, mind you—
merciless beatings of their heads.
Most of the children bled. I marveled at the sight of their shocking red blood that matted their hair and caused them to cry. “Devil Girl” is what their older siblings called me in the aftermath.

    
Alice Lind,

    
Alice Lind,

    
Took a stick and beat her friend.

And yet no one ever explained what had happened to me to instigate such violence. No one would tell me if someone had beaten me and, therefore, inspired my need to beat others. I had come to believe I'd once been kidnapped. I sometimes dreamt of a mountain of a man with a beard like a thicket of tumbleweeds. He'd kick open our front door with the heel of his boot, aim a rifle at my chest, and pull the trigger with a ground-trembling eruption of gunpowder that I tasted on my lips.

Yet no one explained to me what that dream meant, or why such unspeakable violence burned through my blood.

Even sitting there in my Gordon Bay Hotel room with a half-finished sandwich and broken remainders of pretzels waiting by my side, I could feel my stomach tightening over whatever unfathomable tragedy lay buried inside my subconscious.

I will not leave until I'm certain Janie O'Daire is not suffering from a past trauma,
I wrote in my notebook.
I will not.