Yours Until Morning

by Patricia Masar

  It was Emma Sanders who finally jolted June out of her stupor. She came to the house every day after breakfast to sweep out the rooms and air the bedding. Emma made sure June’s icebox was filled with food and it was she who arranged for Ben to be placed temporarily into Mrs. Cranshaw’s capable hands until June felt well enough to care for him.

  October had come and gone. Brown leaves skittered along the sidewalks in town. The sea, a dull pewter, was scabbed with whitecaps.

  “You have to do something, June,” Emma admonished gently, touching her friend on the shoulder, before handing her a cup of coffee, and taking a seat at June’s kitchen table. “Find some activity to keep your mind off things. Otherwise you’ll wither and die yourself. Think of your other children.”

  But June met this suggestion with stony silence. What mindless activity could possibly distract herself from her grief? Would bridge or needlepoint bring her husband and daughter back? Besides, he had more practical considerations to worry than finding a hobby, not that she dared voice these concerns with Emma, such as coming up with a way to support herself and two children now that she was a widow and on her own.

  John didn’t have a life insurance policy. She had no skills to speak of. At times felt she had no other option than to take the children to Boston and throw herself at her mother’s mercy. As awful at it would be to live under her mother’s cold critical gaze June could lodge with her in the city and attend secretarial school at night. Get some kind of job in the meantime and save enough money to one day move herself and the children into a place of their own. But the thought of going through such a tiresome process, of trying to mend the relationship with her estranged mother, exhausted June so much that she just took to her bed again, hoping some other, more plausible plan would present itself.

  “I can’t afford the mortgage on the house,” June said, when Emma tried again to convince her to stay in Lockport.

  Emma bustled around June’s kitchen pouring out more coffee for them and urging June to eat a piece of the apple pie she’d brought from her own kitchen. “You’ve lost weight, June. You’ve got to eat more. If you want, you can sell the house, pay off the mortgage and come live with me and Jimmy.”

  June smiled wanly. “Oh, Emma. You’re very sweet. But Jimmy would never go along with that and where would you put us anyway? Your boys have to share a room as it is.”

  Emma clasped June’s hand. “Don’t go. This is your home. I just hate the thought of you leaving and going back to your mother’s. I know you’re not on good terms with her. You belong here.”

  June rose to her feet and wandered over to the window. Stone cottage was boarded up and the grass had grown to knee height. A few late autumn leaves had blown across the lawn and were caught in the hydrangea bushes. The big blue flower heads of summer were dry now and faded to dull pinkish brown. She couldn’t stay here, not with the sight of Stone cottage rising up every day in reproach for her sins. Besides, she had never truly belonged in Lockport, no matter what Emma said. It was time to go. She turned to face Emma with tired eyes.

  “I can’t stay. How can I stay here when everywhere I turn reminds me of John and Evie? Every time I see a girl from the back with long dark hair it breaks my heart. Pretty soon I’ll start running after every dark-haired girl in town until they lock me up in an institution. It’s better for Claire anyway if we leave. A new town, a fresh start. It will be better for all of us.”

  “Where will you go? Boston?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t know,” June said. “But not Boston.” A thought took shape in her mind and slowly bloomed. “Some place far away.”

  In the middle of the night, lying sleepless in her bed, her skull parched from lack of sleep and heavy thoughts, June came up with a plan that might just possibly save her from dying. She had a married cousin who had gone out to California years ago where she and her husband ran a motel in a town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. She and Mabel had been close as children and still exchanged cards during the holidays. As a jumping off place, a new beginning, it would be easy take Claire and Ben out there to live. Perhaps they would be able to stay in one of the rooms in the motel until she found some kind of job and was back on her feet.

  June got out of bed and crept down to the living room in her nightgown and bare feet. She hauled the atlas out of the bookcase and squinted in the dim light until found the town on the map, a small black dot on the edge of the desert. Once out in California, far away from the sea, from the memories of failed dreams, they could start again. If she saw the ocean ever again it would be too soon. Every time she saw that vast watery plain spreading out toward the horizon, all she could think of was drowning, of Evie’s eyes, wide open in death, seaweed curling around her lovely neck. She knew now, with the certainty of a decision already made, that staying on Lockport was impossible, not when memories of her family would haunt her at every turn.

  She packed only as much as they could carry, including their clothes and a few household items. The rest she would leave behind in Emma’s garden shed, to be sent on later when they were settled. Thanks to Emma’s patient instruction, June had finally learned to drive and she’d bought a second hand car from an elderly man in Hammett Mills who promised her it rode like a dream. With the little money she got from the sale of the house she’d be able to find a modest house or apartment for them to live in once they got settled. Everything would be new and different out West, and June was hopeful that the need to look for work, along with the time-consuming task of setting up a new home would, little by little, distract her from her guilt and her grief.

  Early in the morning on the day of their departure, June climbed the bluffs behind the town for the last time. It was colder now. The last of the autumn leaves were gone, taking with them the great swaths of color that had brightened the shore. Dark red cranberries cloaked the marshes, and flocks of birds rose and settled and rose again as they made their way to warmer lands. The sea was gray and scabbed with whitecaps. The wind gusted and blew June’s hair about her head. She hugged her coat around her body as she stared out at the distant horizon. It was cold at the bottom of the sea. Cold and dark, where no light could ever reach.

  * * *

  They were never found. Not my father or Evie or Paul or Mr. Hutchinson. The only thing that turned up, long after they disappeared, was a vinyl boat cushion, bleached and swollen after weeks in the water. Every morning my mother climbed the path to the top of the bluffs and looked out toward the horizon, waiting for my father and Evie to return.

  When she decided they weren’t coming back, that they had surely drowned, she packed our things and drove us out West to the live in a town on the edge of the Mojave Desert, as far away from a body of water as it was possible to get.

  Out in the desert I asked myself this: how does a man who knew everything about boats, about the winds and the tides, go out onto the sea and not come back? How can someone who has lost a twin, dream her dreams, inhabit her memory, haunt her soul?

  We’ve been living out here for two years and eight months now and for the first time since she vanished, Evie appeared in my dreams. She was wearing the white shorts and yellow blouse she had on the last time I saw her. Her skin was deeply tanned and bright pink flowers were braided in her hair. She said she forgave me for taking her money. That she understood why I’d done it and hoped I’d become a good juggler. But a huge, gnawing guilt had prevented me from ever opening the boxed set I’d bought with the stolen money. It’s still wrapped in cellophane, buried in the back of my closet. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that, now that I have Evie’s blessing, I will open the box and give juggling a try.

  The moon rises and sets, month after month, an enormous yellow disk in the sky, and after all this time of waking to silence, with the taste of brine in my throat, I know this much is true. It was there all along, haunting the scorched synapses in my brain: the dark water, the plunge into the depths of the sea. With each seizure I had seen through a crack in the futur
e, but was unable to recognize it for what it was. I had my last seizure on the morning of the fishing derby. My brain is quiet now; it has nothing to tell me.

  When school gets out for the summer we’re going to take a trip to the coast. My mother has even shown me the route we’ll follow, tracing the thin, yellow highway on the map with her finger. We’re going to drive along this winding road all the way to the edge of the continent where we’ll park the car on top of the cliffs and make our way down to the sea. My mother says we’ll carry a wreath of flowers from our garden and lay it gently on the waves and watch while the blue water sweeps our offering out to the middle of the ocean. A memorial. Not to their deaths, but to their lives, and to the memories we carry with us in our hearts.

  There are days I believe they didn’t drown, that they washed up on some tropical isle and are living the life of castaways on the edge of a turquoise lagoon. Or perhaps the Sabrina Jane was blown clear across to Africa, and they’re stranded on a white crescent of sand, sandwiched between jungle and sea, trying to figure out a way to get home. Sometimes I like to think that, in a parallel universe, they are sailing the globe, like my father always dreamed, charting the course of the old explorers, battling around the Cape of Good Hope and through the Straits of Magellan.

  But other days I think of this: if all the earth’s oceans dried up until the whole spinning globe was a desert, would we see the bones of those who were shipwrecked long ago? These are the things I think about on the bus coming home from school, or lying in bed at night, or sitting on the floor of the living room with Ben, gazing into his eyes.

  He has started to talk now, one word at a time. It isn’t quite language yet, but the words are there, curled up tightly inside his brain, waiting to be born. I hold his face between my hands and whisper, willing him to speak, to utter the one word that will unlock the mystery of his thoughts.

  What would he tell me if he decided to speak? What would any of us say if we could really talk to one another, give voice to the silence and shadow in the echo of our hearts?

  THE END