The Night Gift

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “That scared me.” She was still whispering. “They could have ruined everything. I hope they don’t come back. What if they come back again and next time they discover this room?”

  “Maybe they won’t,” I said comfortingly, answering her out of habit. “They were probably just passing through.” Then I remembered she had Neil to comfort her.

  She said, “I hope so. I brought the pillow. Look. Do you like it? It has a patch of everything I’ve ever sewn in it.”

  “It’s neat,” Claudia said. “Look. I brought an oil lamp.”

  “I brought candles,” I said. And Neil had brought Barbara. I took the candles wearily over to one corner of the room to unpack them. Neil murmured something behind me, and Barbara, answering, made a little echo of a murmur as if their voices belonged together. Claudia came to join me.

  “Where should I put the oil lamp?”

  “I don’t know. We really need a few tables or crates to put things on…” I glanced at her. Her face was back to normal again. As if she read my thoughts, she smiled a little.

  “Your brother is really nice.”

  I said, “Brian?” as if I had ten brothers and wanted to make sure she had the right one. Then I asked curiously, since it was safe to, “What did he whisper that made you laugh, then?”

  “Just something dumb. He just whispered, ‘Claudia, we have to stop meeting like this.’ He’s really nice.”

  I nodded. She just liked him because he could use cataclysm in a sentence. Then I faced the fact. He had been really, unexpectedly, tactful and understanding. I wondered when he had learned how, since he never practiced in front of me. I lined the candles in a row on the windowsill, frowning. Everyone was changing around me; I didn’t know any more what to expect from them. Next thing I knew, Erica would be making her bed every day, and Claudia would be waving her hand wildly to answer questions in class.

  Barbara knelt next to me. She moved a candle an inch on the sill and said softly, “I’m glad you’re feeling better.” She didn’t look at me.

  I said, “I’m okay. We really need things to put things on, because we’re already out of windowsills.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe bricks and boards…” She glanced back irresistably to see what Neil was doing. Three days before, I would have been the one to do that. I folded the grocery bag listlessly. Barbara rolled a candlewick back and forth aimlessly between her fingers. Her face was lowered, half-hidden behind her hair. She said helplessly, “Well. Or crates, we could paint them—”

  “Who put this here?” Neil said suddenly. He was kneeling on the closet floor, looking at something. We got up.

  Claudia, peering over his shoulder, said, “I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t put anything there,” Barbara said. He turned his head as we came up, looking at us, a funny, wondering expression in his eyes.

  “Well,” he said, “whoever was here did find this room.”

  I had an unexpected feeling in me, then, that maybe, somehow, all the confused, half-finished, uncertain things that we were doing might make some sense after all. Whoever had wandered in from the street had come back here into Joe’s room, and had stood among the painted flowers and banners. He had left on the floor beneath the painted ocean, a gift: a little collection of mussel shells, a starfish, a sand dollar, a nautilus shell—all inside a big, perfect, pink and creamy abalone shell.

  Barbara and I made a sort of truce without words for a while. We had to work together, and we had to be polite; but I didn’t want to talk about what had happened, and she sensed it, so we avoided the subject. Everyone at home surprised me by not being surprised at all when Neil dropped by with Barbara; the way he looked at her, touched her lightly, absently, when he spoke telling what he never said. At school, girls watched open-mouthed when Neil met Barbara at her locker in the afternoons, or walked across the street at noon with her to a hamburger stand. Neil’s obliviousness made my head whirl. He treated me as he always had, like a good friend, utterly ignorant of the humiliation I was going through because of him. Brian amazed me even more. I was at his mercy; we both knew it, but he restrained himself.

  So I drifted along, trying not to get hurt anymore by pushing things as far as I could to the back of my head. I was still flunking things, but that, I felt vaguely, was justifiable. I had enough to do just being civilized. Unfortunately, the education system of the State of California didn’t see it that way.

  I walked in the door one afternoon, thinking about some crates I had found and was going to paint for Joe’s room, when my mother said, “Mr. Xanthos just called.” Mr. Xanthos was my counselor, and he had been Brian’s, also, unofficially, until Brian dropped out. “He said your midterm grades are so low that he’s afraid you might have to repeat some of your courses if you don’t shape up. He’s afraid you’re going the same direction as Brian went.”

  I dropped my books on a chair with a sigh. “I’ll study hard for the finals,” I promised, but she said, “No. You’ll study hard now. No more running around in the evenings. I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself for the past few weeks, but obviously it hasn’t been studying. I want you home on school nights, and I want you to study.”

  “Mother—”

  “I don’t want another dropout under my feet all day.”

  “I’m not going to drop out! I just can’t—I just can’t concentrate. Nothing they’re teaching me seems very important. They’re teaching me all the wrong things.”

  She was silent a moment, looking at me. Her voice softened a little. “Well, some things you have to be taught, and other things nobody in the world knows how to teach you.”

  I sat down on the couch beside her and propped my feet on the coffee table. I wished a funny thing then: that I was small enough again to curl up in her lap, even though I was as tall as she was, and even though she didn’t have too many answers.

  I said, “Oh, I know. But please don’t ground me during the week.”

  “Joslyn—”

  “Mom, I’ll study! I swear it! But I’m doing—what we’re doing—I just have something special to do, and it’s very important, really important, and I have to be able to work on that, too. I’ll come home from school and study, I promise, but sometimes I’ll have to go out—I have to.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s something with Barbara and Neil and Claudia—you know them—they wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t right. Especially Neil. You know that. I’ll study—”

  She sighed. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “The last time I promised to study, I did. Remember? And I got an A. I can do it again. I’ll do it again.”

  She was silent again, frowning at me. She reached out absently and brushed the hair away from my face so she could see it. “What are you four doing?”

  I drew a breath. I wanted to tell her, but I knew it would be better to present her with the accomplished fact, rather than have her all upset about trespassing and illegal entry and other things. “It’s not quite finished yet. It’s a very special surprise for someone. It’s something really important. When it’s done, I’d like you to see it. But not now. Can you trust me?”

  She smiled a little, wryly. “I can trust you to worry me grey-haired. All right. But I want to see you every afternoon studying. I’ll tell Erica to keep her friends downstairs while you’re working. I want you to start now.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. What have you got for homework?”

  I sighed. “Oh, there’s a test in English tomorrow on The Merchant of Venice—”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Ah—not all of it. And there’s a quiz in Spanish, but it’s just a little vocabulary test, not like a midterm or anything, and there’s a chapter in history and some science questions. That’s it, I think. Oh, and a page of algebra.”

  “All right. If you finish all that at a reasonable hour, you can go out. But I want to see all your tests from now on. In fact…” She paused and le
t that thought go. I stood up and gathered my books.

  “All right. But I can’t do all this on an empty stomach.”

  I collected some cookies, a glass of milk and a dill pickle and took them upstairs with me. The room was a mess. I couldn’t even find my desk, and I decided, surveying it as I ate the pickle, that I couldn’t possibly study in that environment. So I made my bed and Erica’s, and started unburying the desk. There were books, papers, stuffed animals, pieces for a dress I had cut out but hadn’t made, a scrapbook, a swim fin, campaign buttons, balloons, and colored pencils all over it. I wandered around trying to find places for everything, but all the drawers and the closet shelves were full. When I got to the scrapbook, I opened it because I hadn’t seen it for ages. There on the front page was me in a long flowery dress with Juliet sleeves, standing beside Gilbert Hill. I chewed on a cookie, looking at him. He did look skinny, sort of shrimpy. And I looked strange with my hair all curly. I sat down on the bed and turned a page. There was a ribbon I had won at a relay race on Field Day that year, and a pink garter I had made for a part in some class play when I was a barmaid in a saloon. I turned another page. Then I realized someone was standing in the doorway watching me.

  It was Brian. He had a funny look on his face. He waited while I rechannelled a cookie crumb I had sent down my throat the wrong way out of surprise, then he said briskly, “I’m supposed to help you study.”

  I yelped, “What?”

  He sat down on the bed and looked through my books. “It’s a paying proposition: two bucks an hour, and a bonus if you get A’s. What have you got to do?”

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. Then I raised my voice. “Mother!”

  “Oh, The Merchant of Venice. I had that, too. Have you read it?”

  “Mother!”

  “Have you read it?”

  “I can’t understand all those weird words. Moth—”

  “Quit yelling; she went to the supermarket. What weird words?”

  I said irritably, “We have to memorize some speech that doesn’t make any sense. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained—’ We have to be able to write it line for line, and I don’t even know what it means. I know mercy isn’t strained, it’s not orange juice. It doesn’t make sense.”

  He mulled it over, picking at his thumbnail with his teeth. “Oh. It’s not strained like orange juice; it’s more like muscle strain—”

  “What?”

  “You know, when you’re straining—trying really hard to do something. Being merciful isn’t something you should strain to do—it’s something that comes naturally, droppething like the gentle rain from heaven—”

  “Brian—”

  His voice sharpened. “Shut up and listen. I need a new guitar, and you’re going to get A’s if it kills you.”

  I nearly killed him that first afternoon. He took me page by page for three hours through The Merchant of Venice; he breathed down my neck while I did algebra, pouncing on me when I made mistakes; he hammered Spanish vocabulary and history dates and science terms at me until I was ready to throw things at him. At one point we were both shouting: he asking history questions at the top of his voice, and me yelling dates back at him because I was furious with him, and tired and hungry. And then I heard myself shout 1865, the year the Civil War ended, and it struck me as such a funny thing to be shouting that I just started laughing. Brian caught it, too; he collapsed on Erica’s bed and put the open book over his face. We laughed until we hurt.

  At nine we both came down. I could smell food from the kitchen, and my insides ran together for a moment. Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table having a peaceful cup of spiked coffee. They smiled at us as we came in.

  “How did it go?” Dad said.

  “Ask her anything,” Brian said. There was a note of deep pride in his voice, “Ask her the Quality of Mercy speech, backwards or forwards. Ask her how many years it takes the sun to go around the center of the galaxy once. Ask her to say, ‘I like meatballs,’ in Spanish. Go ahead, tell them.”

  “Me gustan las albóndigas,” I said obediently. “Also, las fried chicken and what kind of pie is that?”

  “Cherry,” my mother said. I staggered over to it.

  “Soy muerto de hunger.”

  “Me, too.” Brian sighed, sinking into a chair. He roused himself to open one reddened eye and glare at me. “Tomorrow you get an A on that English test.”

  I swallowed a mouthful of cherry pie. “I have to go through this every afternoon?” I said incredulously. “He’s a slave driver; all he cares about is money. I’ll die of knowledge just so he can make money off my brains.”

  My mother choked on her coffee. “Don’t worry. That’s one thing nobody ever died of.”

  I made an A on the English test. I knew that even before I finished it, because I went through it amazed that it was so easy. I was dumbfounded. So was Claudia, when I told her after school, putting books in our lockers.

  “How’d you do that?” she demanded.

  “Brian helped me. It was either that or be grounded,” I admitted, and she grinned.

  “That’s so good.”

  “And I only missed two in my Spanish quiz—got my sexes wrong. And in history usually I don’t pay any attention because it’s so dull, and I don’t have the vaguest idea of what’s going on, but today I kept hearing things I knew something about, and my ears just kept listening. It was like getting a hearing aid.”

  “What was?” said Barbara behind me and I turned to answer. Then I looked at her, and I couldn’t answer. Her face went bright with color, so I made my tongue move.

  “Brian—Brian’s been helping me study.”

  “Oh.” She added after a second, “That’s good.” There was something else in her face I couldn’t read.

  There was a little silence; then I said to Claudia because I knew Barbara would go home with Neil, “You coming home now?”

  Her eyes went to Barbara’s face. Then they dropped. “No.”

  “What are you going to—” I stopped. There was a funny look on her face, too, and suddenly I didn’t think I wanted to know what she was going to do. Barbara drew a breath.

  “Joslyn, we’re going to the fabric shop for some pillow stuffing. And—and also I decided to make some curtains for Joe’s room, because the windows are so ugly.”

  “Oh.” I was more surprised than anything else that they hadn’t asked me to come with them. But she wasn’t finished. Her eyes lifted then, holding mine. Her voice was very soft.

  “Also, I have to buy some material for a Junior Prom dress.”

  I stared at her, stunned. The Junior Prom was something vague, distant, that belonged in the future, like learning to drive, or getting wisdom teeth. “You’re going to—But who—” I stopped dead. She swallowed.

  “That day when I was upset about the price of the sea horse, he asked me. Just out of the blue. He—I told him he should ask someone from his own class, but he said—he said—”

  “Oh,” I whispered.

  “I didn’t think you would want to come with me today, so I didn’t—” Her voice shook and she stopped. I remembered then that I had arms and legs, and they could move. I took a step back.

  “Oh. Well. I have to—I have to go home anyway and study, I’m supposed to. So—” I took another step back and bumped into someone. I saw Claudia close her eyes.

  “Hi, Joslyn,” Neil said, steadying me with one hand. “What are you all looking so somber about?”

  All the blood in me rushed into my face. I wanted to shrivel into a leaf and blow away. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be polite, but my tongue felt too big for my mouth and it wouldn’t move. So I gave up helplessly and just walked away down the hall, and my back felt as if a thousand eyes were crawling all over it. My feet walked home without the rest of me knowing what they were doing. I tossed my books on the couch, and went upstairs, wanting to crawl under all my bedcovers and stay in the dark for awhile. But I couldn’t. Brian was lying o
n my bed, waiting.

  I found my voice when it moaned. “Oh, no, please, not now—”

  “Let’s see your English test. Where are your books?”

  “Brian, I can’t—I can’t—”

  He fixed me with an evil eye. “Go get your books.”

  “Brian, please—”

  “What’d you get on your English test?”

  “I flunked it,” I said desperately.

  “You did what?” Then he settled back composedly. “You got an A. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  I snarled at him and went down to get my books. Erica, eating ice cream with her friends in the living room, grinned at me mockingly. I snarled at her and dragged myself back upstairs.

  We finished at a more reasonable hour that day. I had supper, then went to the backyard to paint some crates I had found for Joe’s room. I painted one crate leaf green and the other lemon yellow, colors my mother had left over from when she painted the kitchen. They looked nice when they were done, and I felt a little calmer. It was quiet in the back; the sun had set but the sky was still blue grey with dusk. I sat back on my heels and sniffed. I could smell cool grass, a faint smell of cypress from our yard. The night smells made me restless; I wanted to go somewhere, do something. I thought about calling Claudia, but something inside me winced away from that idea. So I just lay on the swing for a while, thinking about nothing and watching the stars come out. Barbara’s voice coming unexpectedly out of the darkness made me jump.

  “Joslyn?”

  I sat up. She had come around the side of the house; I hadn’t heard the gate. I said, “Watch out for the paint.”

  “Oh.” She dodged the cans and came over to me. She didn’t sit down. I couldn’t see her face very well; it was silhouetted against the bright light from Brian’s room. She said haltingly, “Neil—Neil and I came by to see if there is anything you want taken to the house. He’s got the truck. I made—I finished the curtains.”