Yesternight

by Cat Winters

  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!

  DOWN 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.”

  “Everyone hates me for betraying him, but he’s the one who screwed a nurse at his training camp during the war—while I was raising our baby daughter here at home. Did he tell you that, Madame Psychologist? Did he tell you that our curiosity over Janie’s stories was the only thing that kept this marriage together for as long as it did?”

  I rubbed my arms, now as cold as the air outside. “No. I didn’t hear those details.”

  She put her hands on her hips and turned her face away. Her throat rippled with a swallow.

  “I want to help you,” I said. “I imagine it’s been a terrible strain for you, wondering about your daughter’s well-being in the middle of your marital troubles.”

  A tear rolled down her left cheek. “I know it’s not sane for a child to write across her walls that way. I know, it’s not . . .” She closed her eyes. “Tillie and I paint over the numbers, but she keeps writing them, over and over. She says she’s working on a geometric proof that she’s been trying to create for years. She says the number eight keeps getting in the way.”

  My neck chilled. Nothing I had ever learned in any of my courses could explain why a child of seven would do such a thing.

  “Have you ever brought in a mathematician to look at her equations?” I asked. “A professor, perhaps?”

  “I don’t want experts of any sort seeing what she’s like,” she said, her voice deepening, sharpening, like the blade of a knife. She opened her eyes. “Whether she’s a genius, or insane, or a reincarnated woman from the last century—I don’t care what she is—someone will want to take her away from me and study her. Or Michael will put her on display as a freak of nature.”

  “If he hasn’t done so by now . . .”

  “He hasn’t done so because he’s lazy. He’s been waiting for someone like you to show up and do the work for him.”

  “I assure you, I don’t want to put Janie on display. I want to help her.”

  She shook her head. “I simply don’t believe you. I can smell the ambition rolling off of you, Miss Lind. You’re drenched in it, from that chic Colleen Moore hairstyle to your fine city clothes.”

  “Please . . .” I took a breath. “How can I be of help? What can I do to put you at ease?”

  “You can leave this house.” Her eyes locked upon mine. “First thing tomorrow morning.”

  “But—”

  “That’s my final word.”

  I nodded. “Yes, of course. If that’s what you truly wish.”

  “It is.” She turned and left the room.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mrs. O’Daire is unwilling to help, I penned in my notes the following morning before repacking my bags. The child writes complex mathematical equations all over her bedroom walls. She claims she is working on a geometric proof. SHE IS SEVEN YEARS OLD!!! I am still no closer to decoding the enigma of Violet Sunday.

  It was Saturday, which meant no school and ample time to decide where to lodge before embarking upon my final week in Gordon Bay. I trekked to the post office with my luggage and my black briefcase, the latter of which now contained an envelope addressed to the postmaster of Friendly, Kansas. The cream-colored paper slid from my gloved fingers into the left hand of the Gordon Bay postmaster, and all I could think of were the numbers and symbols scattered across Janie’s yellow walls.

  The postmaster tossed my envelope into a bag of outgoing mail.

  The next phase of my investigation commenced.

  Back outside, an eastbound wind blew the taste of sea salt across my lips and tossed hair into my eyes. Oh, how I missed my poor wool cloche! I even turned toward the north and scanned the train tracks down the way, wondering where my hat and Mr. O’Daire’s fedora had traveled off
to, envisioning them shacked up together in one of the hedges by the sand.

  Oddly enough, I heard Mr. O’Daire’s voice behind me just then.

  “That’s not a sight I wanted to see again,” he said.

  I shifted his way, confused, a bit offended if he was referring to the sight of me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You, traveling around with your suitcases, I mean.” He strode closer, a smile inching across his face, his hands stuffed inside the pockets of his black coat with its turned-up collar that made him look like a dapper young police detective. “Please don’t tell me you slept on another floor last night.”

  “No, I didn’t. I—” I shut my mouth and waited for him to venture closer to avoid shouting out the details of my sleeping arrangements.

  He came to a stop in front of me, his feet spread apart. “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “I stayed with your daughter and former wife.”

  A flicker of apprehension glinted in his eyes. “Did . . . did Tillie invite you to stay with them, after all?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . .” He scratched at his cheek. “Did that go well?”

  I lifted my bags in response.

  He winced. “Rebecca kicked you out?”

  “She did, but”—I lowered the bags—“I stayed long enough to witness something that I would very much like to speak to you about.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s not discuss it out here in the open.” I gestured down the road with an elbow. “I’d prefer to speak elsewhere.”

  “All right, then.” He pulled an envelope from his left coat pocket. “Let me just slip into the post office for a moment and send off this bill.”

  “Certainly.” My gaze dropped to the address on his envelope, verifying that he, indeed, intended to send the correspondence to a local bank, and not an individual in Kansas. “I’ll wait here with my bags.”

  “You and your bags are returning to the hotel, Miss Alice Lind.” He backed toward the post office door, pointing at me with the bill. “Let’s end this nomadic lifestyle right here and now and treat you like a respected member of our community.”

  He pushed open the door and strolled inside.

  I rested my bags on the sidewalk and kept a watch on the road and sidewalks, fearful of Rebecca catching me standing there, waiting for her former husband.

  Did you sleep in his bed? she had had the gall to ask me with her curlers shaking in her hair. Are you sleeping with him?

  Seagulls cried out overhead, soaring eastward, escaping another storm brewing over the Pacific. However, no human beings—Rebecca O’Daire or otherwise—appeared.

  Mr. O’Daire soon rejoined me and picked up my bags. “I hope you don’t mind walking to the hotel this time around. I decided to get some exercise this morning.”

  “You really don’t need to host me.”

  “Let’s make this the last-ever conversation about your lodging situation, shall we?” He sauntered toward his hotel to the south. “How much longer are you working in Gordon Bay?”

  I grabbed my briefcase by its handle and caught up to him. “I should be finished by the end of next week.”

  “Then you’re to stay in the Gordon Bay Hotel until that point. Not another word about it.”

  “Well . . . thank you.”

  He smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  Across the street, a portly fellow in a white cook’s coat moseyed out of a restaurant that had been closed the night before. “Good morning, Mr. O’Daire,” he called, lifting a broom in the air in lieu of waving with a hand. “Fine weather we’re having this morning.”

  “Morning, Gus,” said Mr. O’Daire. “Another storm’s on its way. I wouldn’t spend too much time sweeping up leaves, if I were you.”

  I marveled at the fact that everyone in small towns genuinely did all know each other, as I’d always heard.

  A middle-aged couple in a black Buick cruised our way, and, naturally, Mr. O’Daire waved at them, too, and called out, “Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Pruitt.”

  “Good morning,” they called back, and they ogled me with curiosity.

  “I haven’t seen your friend Sam around in the past day or so,” I said, ignoring the couples’ questioning eyebrows.

  “Hopefully, that means he’s seeking shelter in the house of his mother. Hopefully, he’s not dead.”

  I frowned. “That’s awfully blunt.”

  “It’s the truth.” Mr. O’Daire led me across the street. “Poor old Sam seems doomed.”

  “Psychotherapy would benefit him. Memories of war are far too traumatic for a person to endure on his own.”

  “I’m curious, why did you go into the field of psychology?”

  “Just”—I took great care not to trip on the curb on the next stretch of sidewalk—“a personal interest in the field.”

  “Do you know someone like Sam or my mother-in-law?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Is that your ‘personal interest’? You’re close to a lunatic?”

  “Oh, don’t call them that. I don’t like when ugly words get applied to people who are suffering.”

  “You do know one, then?”

  I didn’t respond. The only “lunatic” that I personally knew, of course, was myself.

  He added, “I have a feeling you’re about to grill me with questions of a far more personal nature than that, Miss Lind.”

  My silence continued.

  “After staying with my ex-wife, I’m sure you know all about my flaws and sins.”

  “Let’s continue to wait until we get farther past town before speaking of delicate subjects,” I said. “I’m not fond of eavesdroppers.”

  A few feet ahead of us, the red awning of a bicycle rental shop rippled with a wind that whistled across the rooftops. I pulled my coat tighter around myself and, again, strands of my hair flapped against my cheeks. To our right, the sky squirmed with menacing black clouds that looked like they didn’t give a damn about anyone stepping out for exercise.

  Another minute or so later we reached the section of the road that ran through open grasslands, away from the buildings of town. I felt it time to bring up Janie and her bedroom walls.

  “Have you seen Janie’s room lately?” I asked.

  “No. Rebecca doesn’t allow me into the house anymore.”

  “She doesn’t?”

  He readjusted his grip on my bags. “Driving Janie home from school now and then is about the best I can do.”

  “That’s the only time you see her?”

  “Oh, I’m willing to bet that Rebecca told you all about her fears of me kidnapping Janie and rushing her off to the circus. She’s gotten it into her head that I’m planning to somehow make millions off of our child.”

  “What would you do if the reincarnation story proved to be genuine?”

  He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I’d be flabbergasted, I suppose. I’d hope, for Janie’s sake, that somehow a chance to visit Kansas would become a real possibility.”

  “Have you ever tried, on a whim, writing to the postmaster of Friendly, even when you didn’t know whether the town existed?”

  “I have.”

  I raised my brows. “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “And what happened?”

  “No one ever responded.”

  “And yet you still believe that such a family exists out there?”

  “Of course. No one living with Janie can’t not believe in the Sundays. Not even her mother . . . no matter how much she balks at the idea nowadays.”

  I thought again of Janie’s bedroom. “When you still lived with Janie and Mrs. O’Daire, how did Janie decorate her bedroom walls?”

  His pace slowed. “Why do you ask?”

  “Please tell me, what did you see in her room?”

  He stopped walking altogether, and his face sobered. His shoulders tensed. “She wrote . . . numbers all over her walls.”

  “What types of num
bers?”

  “I don’t know what they were. They didn’t make sense. That part worried her mother to no end, even when she was still openly speaking of Janie’s past life.”

  The clouds prowled closer, blocking the sun from view, casting us both in shadow. I realized I’d been squinting and relaxed the muscles around my eyes. “Why did that part in particular worry her?”

  “It seemed too much like insanity to her. On the one hand, I agreed—it, indeed, resembled a crazy person’s room. On the other, I felt it looked to be the realm of a genius. Did you see it?”

  “I did.”

  “And how do you explain that away with regular psychology? How on earth can anything other than reincarnation be at work when a seven-year-old girl is working to create proofs?”

  I switched my briefcase to my left hand. “She could very well be a child prodigy.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” he said, “but it wouldn’t explain how Janie became aware of all of those complex mathematical symbols to begin with. Even prodigies need to be shown that sort of thing before trying out proofs, I would think.”

  “Has anyone given her advanced books on mathematics?”

  “Her aunt has, but not until after Janie started writing the proofs.”

  “Are you absolutely certain it was after?” I asked.

  “Quite. Primarily, Tillie wanted to show Rebecca and me the books so we could try to comprehend what the devil Janie was writing.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know how to explain it, then.” I shook out my right arm, which tingled from carrying the case. “It simply doesn’t make sense. Many children Janie’s age in these schoolhouses can’t even count to thirteen.”

  “Say that again,” he said, leaning his right ear toward me.

  “Say what again?”

  His eyes brightened. “Did you just say, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know how to explain it’ . . . as in, ‘I don’t know how to explain it in terms of psychology?’”

  “Well . . . I . . .”

  He raised his chin and smiled. “You believe.”

  “No. No, I’m not saying—”

  “Yes, you are.” He stood up tall. “You’re coming around to the possibility that Janie experienced a past life.”