Yours Until Morning

by Patricia Masar

  June shivered almost as if she could feel the cold, damp air of winter on her hot skin. The fishing hut appeared through the trees and she held her breath. Maybe this time, Richard would be there waiting for her. She looked at her watch. She’d wait two hours, or more, if she had to. She had brought a copy of Ladies Home Journal with her to read till Richard arrived.

  The hut was empty. She lit a cigarette and breathed the smoke deep into her lungs. She opened the magazine and settled down to wait. It was stifling in the small hut and June propped open the door, trying to catch whatever there was of the breeze. She was on her third cigarette and reading a column on helpful household hints, when a shadow darkened the doorway.

  “Richard!” She jumped up and flung her arms around him, pressing her whole body against his. She never wanted to let go. June squeezed him so hard she grew dizzy and her head spun.

  “Hey, take it easy,” Richard said, pulling her gently away. He looked into her face. She could see concern in his eyes—and pity?—no not that, he was just tired after the whole ordeal with Paul and then the fire, but maybe he didn’t even know about that, even if he had heard the sirens. She felt as if she hadn’t seen him for ages. All the strain of the last few days, Claire’s running away, the fire at the cannery, her seizure at the school, all of it tumbled over her in a torrent and she lay limply in Richard’s arms as she recounted all these things in a rush. She wanted him to hold and stroke her, to make all the bad things go away.

  Richard eased her away from him. “Can I have one of those?” He pointed to June’s cigarette.

  She nodded and rummaged in her purse.

  “Let’s sit outside in the shade. It’s too hot in here.”

  June’s elation evaporated. It was hot in the fishing hut, but she wanted to be alone with her lover, to lie down on the faded rug and hold him in her arms, stroke him until he couldn’t stand it anymore, until he groaned and flung himself on her like a man possessed. What else did she have to keep him interested besides the promise of her naked body? There was so little time left.

  But she followed him outside and into the shade of the fishing hut where they sat down awkwardly on the sand.

  “Aren’t you afraid someone will see us?” June said.

  Richard looked away. “It’ll be all right. I can only stay for a few minutes.” He picked up her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry we missed each other on Saturday. Those kids of ours.” He grinned awkwardly.

  In that grin June could see his entire boyhood, the march of years from infancy to puberty, the pampered upbringing, the doting mother. She wanted to pull his head to her chest, and stroke the hair of this man whose boyhood shone so easily in his face, but something in his posture signaled he wasn’t in the mood to be touched.

  “I thought Tibby was going to have a stroke. But they’re big kids, I knew they’d be fine.”

  June was silent. It was easy for Richard to be cavalier. Paul might be delicate, but he didn’t have a neurological disorder, so how could he possibly understand what she was going through?

  “I’m taking Claire to the doctor on Tuesday,” was what she finally said. “It doesn’t seem like her medication is working anymore.”

  “I’m sorry, June.”

  There was real concern in Richard’s voice and for that June was grateful. Maybe he did understand after all. They fell silent, smoking. Richard flicked his ash onto the sand. He’d grown brown in the four weeks he’d been on the Cape. His skin was deeply tanned and the hairs on his arms glinted gold in the sunlight. He’d grown his crew cut out and the sun-bleached locks fell over his forehead. June gazed at him from under her lowered lashes and her heart seized up. All her hopes and dreams were pinned on this man. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. She wanted to pull open the front of his shirt and bury her face in his chest. She reached over and touched the hollow in his collar bone.

  Richard touched her hand and gently pulled it away.

  “June.” He stubbed out his cigarette and leaned over to kiss her lightly on the forehead. “I’m leaving for New York on Sunday afternoon. We have to say good-bye now.”

  June’s face crumpled. She struggled to keep the tears from starting. “We still have the weekend, and we could meet sometimes. In New York, or Boston. Or wherever you like. I can always find an excuse for getting away.” The words tumbled out in a rush, but lodged in her throat to stop her from saying more. Would it matter if she said it a hundred times that she loved him? She supposed she could fling her arms around his waist and beg him to stay. Lose all sense of dignity and grovel at his feet. But it wouldn’t do any good, June could see that now. Richard had made his decision. It was in his face, plain as day.

  He ducked his head, avoiding his gaze. “I’m going out on Benson Sandhurst’s new boat on Saturday for the fishing derby. Didn’t your husband tell you? Sandhurst can’t go on Saturday so he’s asked your husband to represent him in the derby. He’s an old college friend of my older brother. Paul and I have been invited to go along. And Sunday we have to pack and then we have to drive Paul to his school in New Hampshire on Tuesday.” He held her hand and pressed his thumb into her palm. “We’ve enjoyed our time together, haven’t we? But there’s no point in dragging it out.”

  June jumped up and backed away from him. No point in dragging it out! How dare he? Was that all she was to him, a loose end to be tied up, a burden to be cast off? She stared at him crazily, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

  “But it doesn’t have to be over. You could leave your wife! And I could leave John. We could live together in New York. Or anywhere you want. We love each other! How can you just sit there and tell me that it’s over? As if nothing between us had ever happened.”

  June fell onto Richard’s chest, clutching him like a child. She felt a chasm opening inside her, a black hole into which she was being pitched, head first, into darkness. She would not let him do this, use her like some cheap hussy and then toss her away. He was treating her like a drugstore trollop he could soothe with a few kind words and then move on. He’d had his fun and now it was over. Is that so? Well he had another thing coming to him. The tears stopped and rage surged up in June’s chest like a volcano. She sat up and pushed Richard away from her.

  “How dare you treat me like this, like some two-dollar hussy. You think because I allowed you to make love to me in the sand that I’m some kind of tramp with no dignity or self-respect? Well, think again.” June’s face was hot and swollen. Richard looked at her, alarmed.

  “June, sweetheart, don’t say things like that. I respect you. Of course I do. I care for you deeply. But I have a wife, a son. You have a family too. We can’t just up and leave them, like two teenagers swept away by our hormones.”

  She balled her hand into a fist and hit her thigh. An awful thought was ballooning in her mind. He had never loved her. She had never meant anything to him. All along she had been nothing more than a tumble in the grass. A vessel for his lust.

  Richard’s face had closed up. His eyes were hooded and his mouth grim. All roads to his heart were closed. Anyone could see it. Even if they talked for hours, days, weeks, nothing she said would matter. He had pulled away from her, retreated into a space she couldn’t reach.

  It was over.

  Richard stood and pulled June up with him. He put his hands on her shoulders, stared into her face. “You’ll be okay?”

  She stood stiffly in his arms, her face turned away, trying to shut out his words, meaningless drivel to her now. He was talking to her like to a backward child and she hated him. She beat her fists against his chest.

  “You never loved me! You lied so I would sleep with you. You bastard!” She pushed him away and stumbled back along the path through the trees.

  “June!”

  “Go away.” I hope you die. She almost said it aloud, but she bit the words back. She wanted him to pay for what he’d done to her, for trifling with her feelings, playing her like a fool. Only a cad of the blackest kind would
treat her the way he had and she wanted nothing more to do with him. No, even more she wanted him to suffer as she was. Tears fell hot and fast down her cheeks. She tripped on a tree root and catapulted to the ground, scraping her palms and banging her knee.

  “June!” Richard was beside her, helping her up. His face was a taut mask. “I can’t bear to see you this way.”

  “Go away,” June said dully. “Just go. I never want to see you again.” She held her body stiffly erect, trying to resurrect whatever remaining dignity she had left.

  Richard turned away from her, clearly embarrassed by the whole sordid business and anxious to put it behind him. Wasn’t that just like a man to cut and run when things got uncomfortable? He was probably terrified that she would make trouble. With one last look and a squeeze on her shoulder, Richard stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked rapidly down the path through the dunes. She glared after him, daring him to look back. Soon, he was gone, vanished through the trees, and her face crumpled again as another bout of weeping shook her.

  After a while, her tears subsided and she pulled out her cigarettes and shakily lit one. In her compact she checked her face, puffy and swollen from crying. She couldn’t go back home looking like this. A slick of lipstick and a dusting of face powder helped, but the small effort exhausted her. She didn’t know how she was going to face her family or, worse, share a bedroom with John in the coming days and weeks. Not when her heart had been wrenched from her chest like a turnip from the earth. She didn’t have the strength to do the happy wife-and-mother routine anymore.

  Not caring if she ruined her dress, June leaned back against a pine tree. The smell of sap was pungent in the hot air. She smoked deeply, trying to calm herself. What she needed was a drink and the thought of the bottle of vodka hidden at the back of the kitchen cupboard comforted her. She would just sit here and collect herself for a while and then go back home and try to act as if nothing had happened, do her best to hide her hurt and humiliation. Wounded pride, that’s what a broken heart really was, June reasoned. Simple wounded pride, a bruised ego. It wasn’t as if she were the first woman in history to be used and abandoned. Richard didn’t want her and that was that. He had taken his pleasure from her and now it was over. Anger and bitterness rose in her again like a poisonous gas, and again she wished Richard were dead. Or maybe she would kill herself, June thought with a renewed sense of drama. Hurl herself into the sea and sink into the depths like a stone. That would teach him not to trifle with a woman’s heart. He’d have to live with the guilt for the rest of his life.

  Time passed, the sun drifted overhead. Waves of pain rose and fell like the tide. The sky shone a rich blue through the delicate tracery of pine needles, and she breathed in the comforting smell of resin. It would be nice to sit here forever, turned to stone, battered by wind and rain, a petrified shape, curled around her loss. But her sense of responsibility got the better of her at last, and she stood up, brushed off her clothes and examined the scrape on her knee. It was time to go back before the girls started to wonder where she’d gone.

  June took deep breaths of the crystalline air, smoothed her hair away from her face and prepared herself to go back to her life, not as the same person, surely, but a permanently altered woman. Rejected, cast out by the man she loved and had hoped would change her life forever.

  18

  The waning darkness veiled the room shadow. Claire lay on her bed, waiting for dawn. An arm’s length away, in her own bed, Evie was asleep, her feet twitching as she dreamed. Claire could still not believe that in a few hours, Evie would go off with her father and Mr. Hutchinson and Paul on the fancy boat her father had been working on all summer and head out to sea to try for the two hundred dollar prize, while she would be left behind. Just because she and Paul had gone off to Oak Bluffs for the day. Just because she had made the mistake of having a seizure in front of Mrs. Sanders.

  For these things she was being punished. Evie would be spending all day with Paul on the boat. It didn’t matter if she already had a crush on another boy. With her wiggles and smiles and entrancing eyes, Evie would charm Paul to the point where he would forget that he and Claire had ever been friends. He would go off to his posh boarding school in New Hampshire and it would be Evie he thought about while he daydreamed in class. It would be Evie who would receive his letters and snapshots.

  Claire tried counting sheep and then doing number games in her head. She tried to empty her mind with the hope that a new and as yet undiscovered magic square would appear in her head. Didn’t she deserve something good to happen to her? But nothing worked. She was not sleepy. She eased herself out of bed and padded across the floor in her bare feet.

  Downstairs in the kitchen she poured herself a glass of water and tiptoed out the front door to sit on the steps of the front porch and wait for the sun to come up. The air was still, the sky a soft gray the color of doves. It was a perfect day for fishing and she was going to miss it all: the fancy yacht, the prospect of winning the derby, of having her picture on the front page of the newspaper. For years her mother had told her that when she was twelve she would be old enough to go out in the fishing derby. That magic age had finally arrived, but her illness had changed everything. Rather than celebrating the normal rites of passage that should be hers, she was nothing more than a changeling, a circus freak, unfit for the simplest of activities.

  She squeezed her head till the blood pounded beneath her fingertips. Maybe she could go to the library and look up some kind of voodoo spell that would rid her of her disease. Or she could get someone to bore a hole in her head to let out the evil spirits trapped in her brain. She wished someone could take a film of her having a seizure so she would know how bad it looked. It must be pretty bad, though, to have her mother look so grim and stricken. Mrs. Sanders hadn’t looked horrified. She was kind, but then she’d been a nurse once, so she was probably used to seeing all kinds of terrible things. Evie refused to say anything about it.

  Claire finished her glass of water and walked out onto the front lawn. The morning dew cooled her hot feet. If only she could speak to Paul. She had only seen him once since the day they’d gone over to Oak Bluffs, when he’d hurriedly talked to her through the kitchen screen door of Stone cottage, his nose pressed up against the mesh. Just long enough to say that his mother wouldn’t let him see her anymore, before turning away.

  She jumped the low fence that separated their yard from the lane and ran toward Stone cottage, crouching low as she ran, her feet light and quick on the packed dirt. Paul slept under the eaves in the back while his parents had the bigger bedroom in front. She would throw a few pebbles against his window to wake him up, beg him to come outside. She needed to see him one more time before he went away.

  Claire climbed over the fence of Stone cottage and crouched down by the hydrangea bushes. She held her breath and listened. But there was no sound coming from inside the house. Everyone was still asleep. Scraping her fingers along the ground to gather up some small stones, she duck-walked toward the back and stood up cautiously below Paul’s window. The window was open to let in air so she would have to throw the rocks against the screen. She hoped it would be loud enough to wake him. Pulling back her arm she aimed carefully and let the pebbles fly. A few pelted the window and fell back to earth.

  “Paul!” She whispered his name as loud as she dared.

  “Paul!” She threw some more stones against the window. “Paul, wake up! It’s me, Claire.” A face appeared at the window and Claire waved her arms wildly. “Come down, come down.” The face disappeared and claire hoped he would come. Or maybe he was afraid of disobeying his mother. But then he was there, opening the kitchen door, easing the screen door closed which squealed on its hinges just like their own did. Claire winced at the sound. “Shh! They’ll hear you.”

  Paul stepped out onto the grass wearing a white T-shirt and blue striped pajama bottoms. Claire grabbed his hand. “Come over to the side of the house.” She led him around the back
porch, out of sight of the lane and they leaned up against the drain pipe from the gutter, partly shielded by a lilac bush.

  “What’s up?” Paul rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “I wanted to see you,” Claire said. “Before you left. Maybe this’ll be our last chance.”

  Paul nodded. “We’re leaving tomorrow. My father wants to beat the traffic back to New York. And I have to pack for school. They’re driving me up on Tuesday.” Paul looked over Claire’s shoulder. He hopped from one foot to the other, as if he were nervous or cold.

  “I wish I could stay here and go to school with you.”

  Claire ducked her head and smiled. “You’d hate my school. I went to see it the other day. It’s dark and smells like old sneakers.”

  “My school smells like old sneakers too.”

  “Does not. I bet it smells like, like…money.” Claire punched him lightly on the arm. “I wish I was going out on the boat with you today. Have you seen her? She’s a beauty. My dad’s really proud. Maybe your dad and mine will become friends. Maybe you’ll come back here next summer.”

  Paul looked down at his feet and drew patterns in the dirt with his big toe. “Maybe.” He looked over his shoulder. His expression darkened. “I’d better go back in.”

  “I hope you catch a big fish.”

  Paul shrugged. “My dad’s making me go. I don’t like fishing all that much. Or boats. I get seasick. Remember?”