Yesternight

by Cat Winters

  “Good morning.” I lowered my bags with a rattle of the coins. “I see the cloakroom is transforming beautifully into our examination room.”

  “I hope you like it.” She put her hands on her hips and exhaled a breath that jostled the curls. “It’s awfully squished in here though, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve worked in much tighter spaces, I assure you. Ideally, we should be giving these examinations in a private office, but that’s simply not possible in most of the towns that I visit.”

  “If you’re sure it’s all right . . .”

  “It’s just fine.” I removed my coat.

  She scooted the backmost chair farther away from the wall. “Is there a particular order you’d prefer for testing the children?”

  “I usually start with the youngest and work my way up to the oldest.”

  “We have twenty-five students total, although some of them attend only sporadically.”

  “What I can’t finish this week, I’ll finish next week.” I slipped off my gloves.

  Miss Simpkin stood up straight and brushed her palms across the sides of her gray skirt. “Janie isn’t one of the very youngest.”

  I blinked, almost having forgotten little Janie after my anxiousness of getting situated in yet another new schoolhouse. “I beg your pardon?”

  “If you’re especially eager to speak with her . . .” She nodded, as if hoping she need not say anything further.

  “I would like to speak with her as soon as possible, yes.” I hung my coat on one of the curved brass hooks. “But I can wait until I’ve finished with the five- and six-year-olds. I prefer examining the children from youngest to oldest.”

  “I hope Mr. O’Daire isn’t being too charming.” She smiled—or grimaced—as though she’d just swallowed a spoonful of castor oil.

  “I actually haven’t seen Mr. O’Daire since he drove me home yesterday afternoon. I holed myself up in my room for the rest of the day and then walked over here before he could offer to drive me.”

  “Smart girl.”

  Before I could respond, our first pupils pushed their way through the door—two tow-headed boys in overalls, possibly twins, most certainly brothers, both loud and springy and bubbling over with laughter. The type of children who would need a firm dose of coaxing and guidance to keep them seated for a forty- to fifty-minute examination.

  I firmed up my shoulders and shoved aside my growing curiosity over the O’Daires. It was time to turn myself into Mighty Miss Lind, No-Nonsense Test Taker and Wrangler of Children.

  MISS SIMPKIN INTRODUCED ME to the twenty-one children who swarmed inside the schoolhouse that morning, including Janie, who arrived without her father walking her inside.

  “Miss Lind will take each of you, one at a time, to the table and chairs you saw sitting in the cloakroom,” said Miss Simpkin in a voice far more animated and musical than the one she used with me. She even moved her hands about with the grace of an orchestra conductor. “She’ll then give you a test that’s meant to find out what you know and how well you know it. Do your best, but do not be worried. Much of the time it will feel like playing a game.”

  The first child I received back in my makeshift office was a five-year-old boy with chestnut-brown hair and a runny nose that required a bit of plugging with my handkerchief. As my training taught me, I spent the first several minutes establishing rapport with the child, asking him about his pets (a cat named William and a turtle named Slowpoke), his toys (his favorite was a hand car he drove with the push and pull of a handle), and his family (a mother, a father, two older brothers who were at that very school, and Myrtle Ann, a noisy, gassy baby sister). When I asked him, “What is the name of that color?” and pointed to papers mounted on white cardboard, he identified red, yellow, blue, and green without any struggle. When I asked, “Which of these two pictures is the prettiest?” and showed him drawings of two women, he called the more attractive one the “prettiest” and added, “but the ugly one sure looks like Grandma Prudence.”

  I bit my lip to avoid laughing and gave my usual, scripted answers of “fine” and “splendid”—everything coached and uniform and supportive. All responses went into the record booklet provided by the test makers. The boy’s examination took thirty minutes, a standard amount of time for a child of five.

  Next I saw two six-year-olds, a boy I diagnosed as being colorblind and a girl with a lisp who hesitated to speak to me. The boy’s examination took forty-five minutes; the girl’s an hour and a half.

  We stopped for lunch, and then, unable to resist a moment longer, I said to Miss Simpkin, “Please let Janie O’Daire know that she’ll be the first of the seven-year-olds whom I examine.”

  Miss Simpkin nodded, and the girl was fetched; the dice, rolled.

  I sat up straight in my chair and readied myself to enter into the world of “Violet Sunday.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Janie,” I said in a voice that I strove to make as warm and welcoming as the classroom’s little potbelly stove, “please tell me about your family.”

  The child tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear in a manner that struck me as rather grown-up. “Well, I live with Mommy and my aunt Tillie. Miss Simpkin is Aunt Tillie.”

  “So she said!” I folded my hands upon the closed record booklet. “What is it like having an aunt for a schoolteacher?”

  “It’s heaps of fun.”

  “Is it?”

  “Mm hmm.” Janie nodded, and her eyes glowed. Her short hair swung against her cheeks. I heard the backs of her feet knocking against the legs of her chair.

  “Who else is in your family?” I asked.

  “Daddy. And Nana.”

  “Nana? Is that your grandmother?”

  “Mm hmm.” Again, she nodded. “She works with Daddy.”

  “Do your father and grandmother live with you, too?”

  “No.” Her feet banged the chair harder, loud enough to potentially interrupt the students in the classroom. “Daddy lives in the hotel, and Nana lives in another house. Aunt Tillie lives with us.”

  “Ah, I see,” I said. “You have several family members in the area, but not all of them live in the same place. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.” She dropped her gaze to the table and rubbed her lips together. Her feet stilled.

  “Have you ever lived in the hotel with your daddy?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you always lived in the same house here in Gordon Bay?”

  She shook her head and picked at the edge of the table. Her shoulders tensed.

  “Where else have you lived?”

  She didn’t respond.

  I cleared my throat and steered the conversation elsewhere. “What is your favorite subject in school, Janie?”

  “Mathematics,” she said without hesitation, and her eyes—brightening again—returned to mine.

  “You like working with numbers?”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “In a few minutes . . .” I waited for a sudden peal of laughter in the classroom to subside and for Miss Simpkin’s steady voice to rule the schoolhouse once again. “In a few minutes,” I continued, “I am going to ask you to count the value of five coins. Do you think that will be something you’ll enjoy?”

  “Yes.” She scooted up higher in her chair. “It’ll be so easy, but yes.”

  “How long have you enjoyed mathematics?”

  “Since . . . forever.”

  “Forever?” I asked.

  Janie’s strawberry-red lips spread into a coy smile. “Forever.”

  I shivered, in spite of myself. The child’s voice had changed—deepened, matured, even taunted and teased. She stared at me without blinking, as though daring me to ask more.

  Go ahead, she seemed to nudge. Ask me what I mean.

  I gave a little cough into my right hand and chided myself for getting so ridiculously spooked. “And . . . who first taught you arithmetic?” I asked.

  “A teacher.”

  “Miss
Simpkin?”

  Janie shook her head.

  “Your parents?”

  At that she laughed and became a regular child again. “No! Mommy and Daddy aren’t so good with numbers.”

  “Another schoolteacher, then?”

  She averted her eyes from mine and scratched at a chip in the table’s surface. “My first-ever teacher helped me to see my talent for math. His name was Mr. Rook.”

  “Mr. Rook?”

  “He had one of those”—she pushed a finger against her chin—“lines in his chin.”

  “A cleft chin?”

  “Yes.” Janie nodded and removed her finger from her face. “And he carried a pocket watch with an etching of a castle on the back.”

  “Ah, I see. You remember him well, then.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  I crossed my legs beneath the table. “Did he teach here before Miss Simpkin started teaching?”

  “No. Somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  Janie squeezed her lips together and refused to answer.

  I forced myself to refrain from mentioning “Violet Sunday” without Janie bringing us around to the subject herself. A glance at my watch revealed that the five minutes of establishing rapport was dwindling, and yet I couldn’t abandon the conversation.

  “Do you enjoy addition in particular?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s really easy, but I like it.”

  “What’s two plus two?”

  Janie snorted. “Four, of course.”

  “And four plus four?”

  “Eight.”

  “Eight plus eight?”

  Janie rolled her eyes. “Sixteen.”

  “Six—”

  “Thirty-two,” she said before I could even utter “sixteen plus sixteen.”

  “Splendid.” I nodded and smiled, but inwardly I shouted, Holy hell! Why on earth is this astounding girl stuck in a one-room schoolhouse in the middle of Nowhere, Oregon? Many of the seven-year-olds whom I typically interviewed couldn’t even count to thirteen, let alone add beyond two plus two.

  “And how about thirty-two plus seven?” I asked on a whim.

  “Thirty-nine, of course,” said Janie.

  “Of course.” I gulped. “This is, indeed, easy for you, isn’t it? And you’re just . . .” I peeked at the list of the pupils’ names and ages in my record booklet. “You are just seven years old, correct?”

  “That’s right. You can ask me a harder one if you’d like.”

  “All right, then.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Let’s get really tricky, just for the fun of it, but there’s absolutely no pressure to answer correctly, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me”—I wiggled my chin back and forth while bouncing various number combinations around in my brain—“what is two hundred fifty-seven plus forty-eight?”

  Janie peeked up at a corner of the room behind me and closed one eye. “Three hundred five.”

  My jaw dropped at the confidence of her tone. I fumbled around in my briefcase to find a blank piece of paper. While she waited patiently, her hands flat against the table, I scribbled down the equation and added up the columns.

  The answer: Three hundred five.

  I gasped. “How on earth did you calculate the equation so quickly, Janie?”

  “I saw the numbers in my head”—she closed her eyes—“and I used the tens and the ones places to figure things out. I do that with everything—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions . . .”

  “You know how to calculate fractions?”

  “Yes.” She giggled and leaned back in her chair. “That’s pretty easy, too, if you really think about it.”

  My mouth went dry from gaping. I stammered and fussed with my papers, slicing a thumb on a sharp edge of one of the pages, and I managed to sputter up one more equation: “What do you get when you multiply four fifths by seven eighths?”

  Again, Janie peeked up at a corner of the room and squinted with one eye closed. I peeked over my left shoulder, just to make sure that her father wasn’t standing there, an abacus and a slide ruler in hand, mouthing the answers to her.

  “Seven tenths,” said Janie with a nod, and she gave another little tuck of her hair behind her right ear.

  I jotted down the equations and dithered for a moment, forcing myself to remember how to multiply fractions. My brow sweated; my nose itched from all the eraser flakes showering my paper as I rubbed away mistakes.

  The answer that emerged at the end of all my pencil scratches: seven tenths.

  I looked up at Janie, who smiled and resumed swinging her heels against her chair.

  “See?” she asked. “I like numbers.”

  “S-s-splendid,” I said, and with shaking fingers, I opened the record booklet and tried to remember what the devil I was supposed to do with rickety old Stanford–Binet, which didn’t seem at all like a proper test for a child such as Janie O’Daire.

  I maneuvered us through all of the regular sections of the examination—the color identifications, the coin counting, the scrutiny of an illustration, the comparison of two objects from memory. Janie spoke with eloquence, answered all questions with ease, and demonstrated the intelligence of a person at least four to five years older than herself. Her math level was equivalent to that of a person fifteen years old or above.

  Fifteen years old or above!

  “What is your earliest memory, Janie?” I asked before she could leave her chair and skedaddle off to her seat in the classroom.

  She scratched the tip of her freckled nose, and I couldn’t help but wonder if her father had coached her in the answering of this particular question, even if he hadn’t been responsible for her impressive feats of calculation. He was the one who advised me to ask it, after all.

  “How far back can you remember?” I asked again with a tilt of my head. “For most people, memories start around the age of two or three, although some people insist they can remember being babies. I myself—” I bit my tongue and refrained from projecting myself into the situation.

  “I remember being a baby,” said Janie, and she peeked up at me from beneath her golden-red lashes.

  Out in the main section of the schoolhouse, the children applauded a student who must have given an oration or performed some other act of classroom bravery, and for the first time since Janie sat down, I became truly aware of the rest of the school.

  “And . . .” My heart beat to the rhythm of the second hand on my wristwatch. Janie’s patience would soon wear; Miss Simpkin might poke her head around the corner to check on the welfare of her niece. “Is that as far back as your memory goes?”

  “I remember.” Janie licked her lips and turned her eyes toward the window beside us, through which sunlight shone for the first time that day. “Mother tied a creaky wire contraption around her waist—a bustle—and it made her . . .” Janie snickered and covered her mouth with her right hand, her shoulders shaking. “Her backside looked like it was trapped in a birdcage. My sister and I laughed so hard we fell off Mother’s bed.”

  “Oh?” I sat up straight. “You have a sister, then?”

  Janie merely blinked, still gazing out the window. A pinkish-yellowish light glowed across her cheeks and hair.

  “You didn’t mention her when I asked about your family,” I said. “Does she live with you and your mother and aunt?”

  Janie drew both hands into her lap. “I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Very long.”

  “What is her name?”

  Janie sunk her teeth into her lower lip. “Eleanor.”

  “And . . . is Eleanor older than you?”

  She swiveled to her left in her chair and pointed her knees toward the entrance to the classroom.

  “Janie?” I swallowed. “Is Eleanor still alive?”

  I could only see a sliver of Janie’s profile, but I witnessed the downward turn of her mouth, the pursing of her sl
ender red eyebrows.

  “Oh . . . I’m sorry,” I said in a voice a hair above a whisper, assuming the sibling to be deceased.

  “I don’t know if she’s still alive,” said Janie, swallowing. “She’d be an older woman now.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “I’m sorry; I think I might have heard you wrong. Did you just say that your sister would be an older woman?”

  “Probably fifty-three or so.”

  I drew a short breath and strove not to laugh. “Fifty-three?”

  “She would have—” Janie blinked and whipped her head my way with her mouth wide open, as though catching me in the act of eavesdropping on a private conversation. “May I return to my desk now?”

  “Yes.” I froze, startled by her shift in character. “We’re done with the examination. But, Janie, if you—”

  The child shot off her chair and tore around the corner, back to the classroom.

  CHAPTER 6

  I examined two more seven-year-olds that afternoon: a sullen boy with the mental age of four and the little brunette whom I’d mistaken for Janie the day before. Not surprisingly, no one matched the mathematical acrobatics of Janie O’Daire.

  “Most of the children I tested today seem to be operating within average IQ ranges,” I said to Miss Simpkin when we conferred at her desk after the children went home. “The pupil I’m most concerned about is Dale Gage. His IQ is fifty, which is more typical of a child of four, not seven.”

  Miss Simpkin tutted over poor Dale, and we discussed the need for him to be placed on the list of students who would benefit from a class or school designed for subnormal children in the region. Unlike the previous afternoon, Miss Simpkin did not pull a cigarette out of her desk drawer, but she chewed on the end of a pencil as though hungering for a smoke. I discussed the color-blind boy and the girl with a lisp, both of whom demonstrated average mental abilities for their ages and grades, despite their particular impediments. Flames sputtered in the stove next to the desk, and a fresh afternoon rainstorm jackhammered the roof and tossed about the pine branches outside the window.

  “And what about Janie?” asked Miss Simpkin. She bit down on the pencil with a discernible crunch.