Yesternight

by Cat Winters

  “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?

  UP 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 delicious 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.

  CHAPTER 4

  The following morning, a wall of fog pressed against my hotel window. From the world beyond came the rush and the roar of the ocean, as well as the bellow of a fog horn, yet the only sight I could see was a motionless mass of white that did not seem inclined to depart anytime soon.

  Behind me, a soft knock rattled the door. My shoulders flinched, and I dropped the curtain I’d been holding open.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  No one responded. My hands tingled with that debilitating old fear again—the paranoia of being observed through a keyhole by an ogling eye. I took a breath, shook off such nonsense, and opened the door.

  Down on the floor sat a silver tray of food—buttered toast, a hard-boiled egg, sausage patties, and a bowl of fruit, as well as a steaming mug of coffee that smelled divine. I poked my head into the hallway and looked both ways, expecting to hear the patter of retreating footsteps. Not a sound met my ears, but I called out, “Thank you,” and collected the food.

  After shutting the door, I maneuvered the tray onto the dressing table. Again, Miss Simpkin’s warnings about Mr. O’Daire’s role in Janie’s story pestered me:

  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.

  And . . .

  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 lifted my chin and eyed the breakfast before me, along with the pristine white room. The food, the fireplace, the car rides, the O’Daires’ fuss over my safety, the fog boxing me in—everything suddenly seemed suspect. A trap. Perhaps I had insisted upon sweeping Miss Simpkin’s words aside too swiftly, tried too hard to tie my own muddled past to Janie’s experiences, while ignoring the looming possibility of a swindle. Now more than ever, Mr. O’Daire—attractive Mr. O’Daire with his smiling eyes and boyish dimples—struck me as a fellow who had pushed his way through the storm to reach me, not as a compassionate father rescuing his daughter’s savior, but as a con man stalking toward his prey.

  I ate the breakfast with some reluctance, as though the bitter taste of bribery tainted the food.

  Down in the hotel lobby, Mrs. O’Daire brushed ashes from the fireplace grate. Her back faced me, and every time she bent forward, the strings of her apron came a little more untied. Her hand went to her waist, and she stretched with a crack of her spine that made my own vertebrae tingle.

  “Good morning,” I said from behind her, and I descended the last step of the staircase. It would have seemed nonsensical and cowardly to attempt sneaking past her, especially when I carried a small cloth purse, in addition to my briefcase, and it jangled with coins that the children would need to count during the examinations.

  She peeked over her shoulder. “Ah, good morning, Miss Lind. I trust you slept well.”

  “Yes, thank you.” I scanned the lobby, in search of signs of her son. “Would it be all right if I borrowed an umbrella in case the rain starts in again? I’m planning to walk to the schoolhouse this morning.”

  “Oh no—that won’t do at all.” She laid the dustpan against the hearth’s blackened bricks. “Have you seen the weather out there?”

  “Well . . . yes . . .”

  “If I allowed you to step foot out there alone”—she pushed herself to her feet—“I’d worry about you getting lost. Michael is currently in his room down the hall. I’ll go fetch him and let him know you’re ready to go.”

  “Thank you, but I’d prefer to walk. I’ll just follow the road back into town.”

  “Miss Lind!” She put her hands on her hips. “No one will be able to see you out there.”

  “But—”

  “Someone might come up behind you and smack you with his car—kill you right on the spot.”

  “Please, don’t worry about me,” I said with a laugh, even though I feared that very thing might occur. “If you have an umbrella . . .” I glanced toward the hallway, down which Mr. O’Daire apparently lived. “I’d prefer to leave as soon as possible.”

  “Does my son make you nervous?”

  “I . . . I beg your pardon?”

  “I know that Michael . . .” She peeked toward the hallway as well; her voice dropped to a whisper. “I know he told you he’s no longer married. And I know how divorced men sometimes make women uncomfortable . . .”

  “I’d actually prefer to go on my own for the simple reason that I’ll be examining Janie this morning. I’d rather wait to see Mr. O’Daire again after I speak to the child.”

  “Ah.” She closed her mouth. “Still, it’s not worth the risk of getting hit by a car.”

  A door opened down the hall.

  I tightened my grip on my bags. “I appreciate your concern, Mrs. O’Daire—truly I do. But I must be off.”

  IMMEDIATELY, I REGRETTED my decision to walk to the schoolhouse. My pride prohibited me from wheeling around to seek help, and yet I struggled to find my way through that freezing-cold mass of mist that impeded my view of any object farther than five feet ahead. Just in case an automobile roared around the bend, I adhered to the leftmost edge of the road, one foot on dirt, one on pavement, both legs poised to spring out of the way at a moment’s notice. Waves crashed somewhere beyond the haze to my left. I feared I might veer onto a path that would dump me straight over a cliff.

  At one point, a car engine, indeed, puttered up from behind. I sidled into the slick grasses at the side of the road and planned how I would explain to Mr. O’Daire that we needed to remain apart for the sake of the morning’s test.

  Instead of my host’s vehicle, the autobus toting the schoolchildren crawled into view; I could just barely make out three tyke-sized heads in back. The cigar-smoking driver either didn’t see me or avoided me, for he drove the vehicle onward, where the fog swallowed them whole, like an arm disappearing into a sleeve.

  I pressed onward, as well.

  The world smelled of rain and t
he ocean, everything damp and briny and bitter cold. Invisible droplets of moisture pricked at my cheeks like tiny stabs of sewing needles, and the chill in the air again bothered my bones, especially in my fingers, which made me worry about frostbite. My nose and eyes insisted upon running.

  The real possibility of dying out there alone turned my thoughts to Janie O’Daire and her aunt’s inquiry into my opinions on reincarnation. Every Sunday of my young life, my parents had steered me into the corner church, most especially during my unholiest of moments. The concepts of heaven and hell formed my early belief system, but not once did anyone speak of the transmigration of souls from one body to another. Nowadays, admittedly, I wavered between atheism and agnosticism, but the religion of psychology ruled my way of thinking more than any other dogma.

  During my first year of administering intelligence tests, I met a six-year-old girl who claimed to speak to her deceased mother every night, as well as a nine-year-old boy who insisted that his late grandfather lived in his attic. My training in childhood grief allowed me to assist those children with their losses, and not once did I believe that they actually communicated with ghosts. The demon-possessed child I had referred to with Mr. O’Daire—ten-year-old Frankie of Pike, Oregon—proved to be a terribly tragic case of molestation by an uncle. Frankie horrified his teacher and classmates with his violent mutterings and his thirst for cutting other children with scissors, but I allowed his parents to see that church exorcisms were not the solution. The devil was a member of their own family.

  Psychology, in short, explained everything.

  BY THE TIME I lumbered into the town center of Gordon Bay, the fog had lifted. Without freezing or collapsing or losing my fingers, I managed to arrive at the little white schoolhouse, whose bell tower shone in a glimmer of sunlight that muscled its way through the clouds.

  Inside the cloakroom, I found Miss Simpkin arranging a small round table and two chairs, assumingly for me and my examinees.

  “Good morning,” she said with a peek at me from beneath a cluster of red curls that hung over her forehead.