Yesternight

by Cat Winters

  I grabbed my black leather briefcase and joined him under the umbrella, which covered the both of us, but only if we tilted our heads two inches apart from each other. I smelled his rich shaving soap—a peppery, gingery aroma—and clutched my briefcase against my left side, doing my best not to look him in the eye at that close of a range. I once ended up in the bed of a fellow graduate student after sharing an umbrella in precisely that manner.

  We hurried up the short staircase and, after Mr. O’Daire tussled with the collapsing mechanism and closed the umbrella, we dove into a cloakroom that housed satchels, lunch pails, and jackets of various sizes and thicknesses. Through the open doorway to the classroom, I spied children sliding out of their seats at the wooden desks and gathering up books. They ranged in age from about five to eighteen—a mustached young man may have even been nineteen—and I moved my head about to try to see past the taller ones in the back and find a girl who may have been seven-year-old Janie O’Daire.

  One girl seemed a likely candidate: a wide-eyed thing with nut-brown hair cut just below her ears. She cradled her books against her chest with her shoulders stooped, and she lined up behind a redheaded girl with posture so impeccable that the brunette disappeared behind her, even though the brunette was taller. The children trooped our way, and I waited for Mr. O’Daire to introduce me to the hunched little urchin.

  “Hello, Daddy,” said the redhead in front of her instead.

  “Hello, Janie.” Mr. O’Daire scooped his arm around the confident-looking child and pulled her out of the line.

  The brunette fetched her coat and lunch pail with the rest of the children.

  “I want to introduce you to Miss Lind,” said Mr. O’Daire, beaming down at his daughter. “She’s a kind lady who will be helping out at your school for the next week or so.”

  From beneath a fringe of bangs cut straight as a paper’s edge, Janie peered at me with eyes more intense in color than both her father’s and her grandmother’s, even though they all shared the same bluish-green hue. It was as if someone had squeezed more paint out of the end of a brush when creating the girl and allowed her to show up a little brighter in the world. A splattering of freckles formed a tidy constellation across her cheeks and turned-up nose.

  “Hello, Janie.” I offered my hand to her. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Janie maneuvered her books beneath her left arm and accepted my handshake. “I’m pleased to meet you, too.” Her bobbed red hair swayed at her chin line.

  Her father kept a hand on her shoulder. “Miss Lind is here to give all of you children a fun test to see what you’re best at.”

  Janie peeked up at him with a grin that showed off a fascinating jumble of teeth—big ones, baby ones, and three missing eyeteeth. “We already know what I’m best at, Daddy.”

  “Well, you can tell her all about that when she tests you.” Mr. O’Daire grabbed a little navy blue coat from a hook. “She’s here specifically to listen to you. Talk to her about anything you want.”

  Janie closed her mouth and nodded.

  A young woman with curls even redder than Janie’s locks sauntered our way, her eyes switching between Mr. O’Daire and me.

  “You must be Miss Lind,” she said.

  “Yes. Are you Miss Simpkin?”

  “I am.” She offered her right hand and spread a powdery layer of chalk against my palm. “I’m so sorry about our weather. I worried the wind might cause our windows to implode, so I’m sure it was quite a shock for you.”

  “I survived,” I said, “thanks to Mr. O’Daire.”

  “Yes, Mr. O’Daire was keen on being the first to meet you.” She dropped her hand to her side.

  Beside me, Mr. O’Daire helped Janie into her coat. “I’m going to gather up some of Janie’s friends,” he said. “I’ll drive them home in case the weather acts up again.”

  “Take Janie straight to her mother after you deliver the others,” said Miss Simpkin.

  “Of course.” His gaze shifted to me. “Do you want to chat with Miss Simpkin for a while? I could come back and fetch you after I get them delivered.”

  “Would that be all right?” I asked the schoolteacher. “I brought the test materials to show you, if you’d care to take a look before I start administering the evaluations tomorrow.”

  “Yes, a chat would be lovely.” She reached out and patted Janie on the head. “Tell your mother I hope she weathered the storm safely. Look after her, all right?”

  “I will.” Janie rose to her toes and kissed her aunt on the cheek.

  Mr. O’Daire escorted the child out of the schoolhouse, but not without a quick glance back at me. I turned away, having nothing yet to offer him about Janie. He closed the door, and I heard their footsteps, as well as those of three other students, galumphing down the stairs outside. The sudden silence of the emptied-out schoolhouse made my ears hum.

  “Please, come in.” Miss Simpkin swiveled on her heel and led me down the aisle between rows of desks with seats attached to the fronts of the desks behind them. The words ARMISTICE DAY dominated the blackboard, and I remembered for the first time that day that I’d arrived on November 11. No rain-drenched Gordon Bay parade appeared to be celebrating the seventh anniversary of the Great War’s end, however. I thought again of poor veteran Sam, teetering on the edge of the sidewalk.

  Miss Simpkin scooted a spare chair in front of her desk, near a wood-burning stove. “Please, have a seat.”

  “Thank you.” I sat down with the briefcase on my lap.

  The schoolteacher circled around to the other side of the desk, her movements brisk yet stiff. From the look of her, I’d say her age was close to mine, mid to late twenties, but her face and figure possessed a roundness and softness that made her seem more womanly, more maternal, than me and all of my sharp angles. The halo of red curls framing her face resembled those of the film star Greta Nissen, whom I had recently seen with my sister Bea in the tolerable comedy Lost: A Wife.

  She plopped down in her chair with a sigh, and all those curls rustled, as if taking a breath themselves. “Do you mind if I have a smoke?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all.”

  “I truly thought we were all going to die today.” She slid open a desk drawer and fetched a red and white box of cigarettes and a silver lighter. “Storms plow through this area all the time, but from the way the wind wailed through this old schoolhouse and rocked us about, I thought for certain the roof would blow off and suck us all out.”

  “I don’t blame you. The wind literally knocked me to the ground as soon as I stepped off the train this afternoon. You should have seen—” I burst out laughing at the memory of my body splayed across the platform and my hat shooting off my head. “Oh, but it was dreadful. Thankfully, Mr. O’Daire showed up and assisted me to his automobile.”

  Miss Simpkin’s eyes lost their pep at the mention of my driver. “Well, I appreciate you coming all this way. I don’t know if the Department of Education told you, but I specifically asked them to send a test administrator familiar with children who are”—she shook a cigarette out of the red box—“perplexing.”

  “Yes, they told me.”

  “You’ve had experience with difficult cases?”

  “I have, indeed. Ample experience.”

  Miss Simpkin gave a flick of the lighter and set a flame to the end of the cigarette. Her eyebrows puckered. She inhaled a deep smoke and then removed the cigarette from her mouth and asked, “What did Mr. O’Daire say about Janie?”

  “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.”

&nb
sp; “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 n
eed 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Just 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.