Yours Until Morning

by Patricia Masar

“Just stare at the horizon if you feel sick, that keeps you from throwing up.”

  Paul nodded.

  “Will you write to me?” Claire wished she had something to give him, some keepsake to remember her by, but she hadn’t thought to bring anything with her. Something from one of her collections would have been good. Maybe there was still time. Paul would love to have one of her Indian arrowheads. She was sure of it.

  “Okay.” He disappeared around the side of the house. Claire heard the screen door open and close. She held her breath, but there were no other sounds. She was cold now and shivered in her thin nightgown. A feeling of autumn was in the air, even the pumpkins in the fields were turning orange. School would start in five days. She stared at the place where Paul had disappeared around the house, hoping to make him reappear. She had wanted to tell him something else, something to help him remember her in the long months ahead, but she couldn’t recall now what it was.

  Evie was awake. She had pulled the bed sheet up to her chin and was lying perfectly still, staring up at the ceiling. Claire tiptoed into the room.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Just out.” Claire slid back into bed. She was tired now and finally felt like sleeping. She wanted to sleep the whole day away and wake up at night in time for dinner, so as not to be conscious of missing anything. If she stayed awake, she’d be tracking the boat all day in her mind, wondering where they were, what kind of fish they were catching, what Evie and Paul were talking about. With her eyes closed, trying to sink into the darkness of sleep, she had a seizure, right then, one of the small ones, but powerful enough to suck her into the swirling blackness. She couldn’t breathe and the light disappeared, the darkness closed in over her head and she sank through the blackness like a stone.

  Only seconds had gone by. Claire opened her eyes. It was over. She was awake in her bed and Evie was talking to her.

  “I said, What did you think of the school?”

  Claire tried to talk, but her mouth felt funny, dry as cotton and hinged together like a marionette. “I didn’t like it. Too dark. And it smelled.”

  Evie rolled over on her side. “But we’ll be with the older kids, that’ll be good won’t it? No more hanging out with the babies.”

  “Not for me. If I get sick like I did the other day, all the kids will treat me like a freak.” Evie was silent. Claire counted to ten. “What did I look like?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Tell me. I won’t get mad.”

  Evie let out a noisy sigh. “You looked like a fish, okay? Like when daddy hits them on the head to knock them out. It was like you couldn’t breathe.”

  They could hear their parents moving about in the bedroom across the hall.

  “Did I look…awful?”

  Evie was silent. “I guess I’d better get ready now.”

  Claire stayed in bed. She closed her eyes and touched her lids gently with her fingertips. “Hey, Evie?”

  “It’s Billy Ellison, isn’t it, the boy you like.”

  Evie was silent for a moment. “Yes.”

  “He’s sixteen.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t change how I feel.”

  Claire listened as Evie dressed and combed her hair, but she kept her eyes closed and shook her head when Evie asked if she was going down for breakfast. In bed was where she was planning to stay, for the whole day if she could help it, like a corpse under a shroud. How else could she make her mother feel bad about not letting her go.

  But her mother had no patience for any nonsense today. June pulled the sheet back and hurried Claire into her clothes. Next to her bowl of cereal were three little white pills. Normally she only took two.

  Claire looked at her mother. “There’re three pills here.”

  June was busy at the sink, scrubbing the pan she’d used to fry the eggs. “I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take an extra one, at least until we see the doctor on Tuesday. An extra one might help, don’t you think?”

  Claire held the pills in her hand. They seemed too innocent and insubstantial to control whatever it was in her brain that turned her into a twitching fish. She didn’t think her mother knew what she was talking about and had a mind to throw the pills across the room. But she didn’t. She stuck one in the pocket of her blouse and swallowed the other two like normal. She didn’t care what her mother said about taking the other one. She wasn’t a doctor.

  “You’d better hurry if you want to see them off,” June said, drying her hands on a dish towel. The boats pull out at nine sharp.”

  Claire stared into the depths of her cereal bowl. The last thing she wanted to do was look her mother in the eye. “I’m not going.”

  June slung the dish towel over her shoulder. “Suit yourself. But if you’re not coming down to the harbor with me and Ben, you’ll have to stay in the house. No getting in the tub and no running off on your own. Till school starts, you’re grounded.”

  Claire did not look up and June sighed. Having reached an impasse, Claire was not about to give in.

  “Don’t make me feel guilty about this, Claire. You know why you’re being punished.”

  She gave her mother the darkest look she could muster. “Daddy would’ve let me go.”

  “Your father and I were in perfect agreement about not letting you go out with the others for the fishing derby. It’s not a tragedy, Claire. There’ll be another time. Besides in a few years you’ll look back and wonder why you thought all this was so important. You’ll be interested in boys and makeup and parties. Lockport’s fishing derby won’t seem like the be all and end all then. You’ll see.”

  “Paul didn’t get punished.”

  “Yes he did. He got a good whack on his behind and he had to wash the dishes for a week.” This was news to Claire. “How do you know that?”

  June blushed. “I just know.” She turned away and headed up the stairs. “I won’t be gone more than an hour. I’ll wait to see the boats off and then I’ll come right back. You can help me take the rugs out into the yard later on so we can beat the dust off.”

  Claire carried her cereal bowl to the sink and rinsed it under the tap. She sat in a chair on the back porch, waiting for her mother to leave the house with Ben. There was no way she was going down to the harbor to watch the boats pull out. No way did she want to be standing on the docks while Evie preened and pranced in front of Paul, waving gaily to poor Claire because she was a freak, a misfit that needed to be kept hidden from public view. If she kept having more seizures, perhaps her parents would be forced to lock her in the attic. The fact that the house didn’t have an attic was small comfort. There was always the asylum, where she could live out her days as a raving madwoman. Only her mathematical genius would remain intact and people would come from all over the world to consult her. Her picture would be in the paper. She’d be famous. A freak, but famous all the same.

  When she heard the kitchen door slam, Claire counted to ten before getting up from the chair and going into the house. It had been a long time since she’d been in the house alone, and it felt strange to walk through the silent downstairs and into the living room to the front door. She counted the exact number of steps, then walked backward, feeling her way with her hands stuck out behind her.

  The summer was almost officially over. School started on Wednesday. Normally she’d be excited about starting a new school year. She liked doing homework and learning new things. But this year all she felt was fear. What would it be like to navigate those dark halls on her own without Evie? To sit in strange classrooms among kids she didn’t know. All her life she’d only known one school, the Woodrow Wilson grammar school in Lockport where she and Evie had sat at desks side by side since the first grade. They had been a team them, passing notes to each other in the coded language they had devised at some point in their babyhood when they’d shared a crib. Curled up against each other like inverted commas, as they had while in their mother’
s belly. They hadn’t used that private language in years and now Claire wondered if it had ever really existed.

  Upstairs in the bedroom, she stared out the dormer window at the dunes, hoping to see some movement, a person or even a dog to break up the landscape. She picked up the objects on her dresser, one at a time and put them down again, rocks and shells she’d collected from the beach, her brush and comb, a solitary button. In the middle of Evie’s dresser was the cigar box with the money in it she’d earned helping Mrs. Anson. Claire gazed at it for a moment, at the little blue violets that Evie had painted around the edge with a wavering hand and then she reached out and lifted the lid. Some dollar bills neatly held together with a paper clip. Claire couldn’t see how many. At least a dozen, and the bills were weighted down with a pile of coins, shiny nickels and dimes and plenty of quarters.

  Did Evie even know how much money was in there? Would she miss them if Claire took a few coins from the pile and squirreled them away in her pocket? She sucked in her breath and reached into the box. Quickly she plucked four quarters from the heap of coins and transferred them to the pocket of her shorts. She’d seen a juggling set in the window of the five and dime and longed to buy it. If she practiced hard all winter, her talents as a master juggler would be something to impress Paul with next summer. If she ever got good enough, maybe she could even run away and join the circus.

  Guilt streaked through her chest, as Claire jingled the coins in her pocket. She didn’t want to think about getting caught, it was too awful to contemplate. Stealing someone else’s property was the worst thing anyone could do. Hadn’t she been taught that all her life?

  In the kitchen she filled a glass of water from the tap and added ice from the metal trays in the freezer. Even though it was September, it was still as hot as August, now that the sun had cleared away the morning mist. There was no breeze to rattle the leaves on the trees or blow through the dune grass. Claire looked out the kitchen window at Stone cottage. She wondered if Mrs. Hutchinson was in there, packing to leave tomorrow, or if she’d gone down to the docks to wave to her husband and son.

  It was a few minutes before nine. The boats would be slipping their moorings now, chugging out of the harbor, all to the fanfare of a brass band. There’d be music and flag waving. Some of the boats would be decorated with colorful flags or streamers. And then the day would quiet down. The hot dog vendors would hawk their wares. Children would eat big clouds of cotton candy. Everyone would eventually go home for lunch, only to return in mid-afternoon to wait for the boats. The derby hopefuls had to be past the checkpoint and in the harbor by four o’clock sharp or they’d be disqualified. Claire knew that many boats took that risk, staying out as long as possible, in the hopes of catching that final big one, only to get to the checkpoint a few minutes after four and lose out on the prize. This year the grand prize was two hundred dollars. The second prize was a set of lawn chairs, donated by Murray’s hardware store and third prize was a little table top barbecue grill. The prizes had been announced in the paper last week in a two-page spread about the derby. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money. Claire thought about what she would buy with that kind of money. A pair of ice skates to use on the frozen ponds in winter. A set of encyclopedias like Paul had, all bound in leather and embossed in gold. A bicycle with a banana seat. A trip to the moon.

  Nine fifteen. All the boats would be out of the harbor by now. Claire had read the list of participants in the paper. There were forty-eight boats in all. A lot of competition. But she was still keeping her fingers crossed for her father. She wished he was out on his own boat, the Evening Star. It was a lucky boat, even though he’d never won the derby before. Maybe this year would be different, out on that rich man’s fancy craft, and her father would come home like a fairy-tale prince with the two hundred dollars clutched in his fist. Her mother would get the new washing machine she was always talking about, along with a new dress and a pair of high-heeled satin shoes. With riches such as these, they could all live happily ever after.

  19

  The sky was a penetrating blue and the air as bright as cellophane, clear enough to see all the way to the lighthouse at Hobben’s Point. June would rather be anywhere else than down at the harbor to see the boats off. She did not want to see her husband and the man who had spurned her standing together on the deck of the boat, waving good-bye as they pulled away from their mooring. But she would be there for Evie’s sake, knowing it would look strange if she wasn’t at the harbor to see her daughter off. On a fancy yacht at that. Besides, Mr. Sandhurst was a wealthy man. Maybe sometime in the future he would be an important person to know and June wanted to make the most of the connection. Not for herself, of course. But for Evie’s sake. And for Claire’s. Everything she did now would be for her children.

  Sad as she was, June was not so grief stricken that she hadn’t taken care with her appearance. No matter what was going on in her heart, she still wanted to look her best. Maybe Richard would be sorry when he saw how pretty she looked. All was not completely lost. Even now he could change his mind. This is what went through her mind as she folded a bright pink scarf into a narrow band and tied it around her hair. It made a pretty contrast to the white sundress Richard liked and her open-toed sandals allowed her painted toes to peek through. It was the last day of the summer when women could still get away with wearing white before switching over to the more muted tones of autumn and she wanted to get as much mileage out of the sundress as possible. She knew it was Richard’s favorite. Even if he didn’t change his mind at the last minute, he might look at her and be overwhelmed by sadness and regret. Perhaps that token amount of revenge would be sweet enough.

  She pushed Ben in his stroller along the side of the road, humming to herself to distract her mind from darker thoughts. It was still warm, but the oppressive heat of August had vanished in the last few days, and there was an unmistakable feeling of change in the air. Soon the nights would grow cooler, and the mornings crisp, the long Indian summer creating a brief reprieve before the real cold weather set in. Maybe now with the girls growing up and needing her less, she would have time to take up a hobby. She could do something else besides her one bridge evening a week. Learn some sort of skill, like Emma and her dressmaking, something that might bring in a little money so she wouldn’t have to depend on John for every dime. She wasn’t sure what that might be, but she could probably come up with something if she gave it a little thought.

  She was getting close to town now and could hear the brass band. It was twenty minutes to nine, so she picked up her pace as she approached the harbor. John had given her the slip number where Sandhurst’s boat was moored and she fished the scrap of paper out of her pocket. They’d only just slid the boat down the rollers yesterday afternoon and June hadn’t seen it yet. Last night John had come home with a big grin on his face. “She floats,” he said and hugged her tight. Sandhurst said he’d send a check for the bonus money right after the holiday weekend. John still hadn’t told her how much it was going to be, wanting to surprise her. Maybe he was going to come home with a Maytag washer tied to the back of his truck, the one she’d been hankering after for years. Wouldn’t that make her life a whole lot easier, no more lugging heavy washtubs of wet clothes and getting her fingers pinched by the wringer. Just the thought of it lifted her spirits.

  A great crowd of people were milling around down by the docks, all craning their necks to admire the boats. The owners had gone all out to make the day a festive one, decorating their craft with colorful flags and banners, some wearing silly hats and brightly colored shirts. As they drew closer to the docks, Ben struggled against the straps of the stroller, his signal that he wanted to get out and walk.

  “Not now, Bennie,” June said. “We need to find Evie and your dad.”

  She couldn’t see Sandhurst’s boat this far back in the crowd, so she forced her way through the mass of people. “Excuse me, please. I’m trying to get to my husband.” The crowd parted to let her th
rough, but her words were drowned out as the brass band swung into a rousing rendition of When the Saints Come Marching in.

  June was afraid she would miss them pulling out, but then she saw John, standing on the deck of a magnificent yacht, all gleaming wood and shining brass and fresh white paint. She raised her hand and waved. “John! Here we are.”

  Evie emerged from the cabin and stood next to her father. She spotted her mother and waved. “Mom! We’re over here.”

  June moved through the crowd and onto the dock.

  “There you are,” John called. “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  Richard Hutchinson was sitting in a deck chair. When he saw her he stood up and nodded in her direction. “Hello, Mrs. Kerrigan. It’s nice to see you again.”

  “I didn’t know you two had met,” John said looking at them both.

  June looked away. Her cheeks flushed. She fumbled in her handbag and slipped on a pair of oversized sunglasses. “We bumped into each other in town once, didn’t we Mr. Hutchinson?” June’s voice was hard and bright.

  Richard smiled faintly and avoided her gaze.

  “Well,” John rubbed his hands briskly together. “Do you want to come aboard for the grand tour? She’s a beauty, isn’t she? I can’t believe Sandhurst’s letting me take her out. It’s a privilege to be able to captain a craft like this.”

  Evie leaned against her father. She was wearing a yellow blouse tied up at the waist and a pair of white shorts. Her skin was brown from the sun and her long dark hair hung loose down her back.

  “Where’s Claire?”

  “She didn’t want to come.”

  John turned to his wife. “I wish you’d have let her come out with us. I feel bad that she’s missing out on all this.”

  June ignored this and bent down to release Ben from the stroller. She lifted him over the transom and into John’s arms. The last thing she wanted was to have a drawn out discussion about Claire with Richard Hutchinson standing two feet away.