Yours Until Morning Page 2

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  Claire crouched on a wooden crate in a corner of the boatyard, trying to blend into the shadows where the arc lights didn’t reach. The sea air blew in through the open doors, rippling the sawdust. The boatyard was right down on the waterfront, on the far side of the harbor from the center of town, and close enough to the sea that she could hear the waves sucking and slurping on the rocks. Her father had promised that later, during lunch, he would take her out to the end of the jetty where they would bait a few hooks and toss some lines into the water, in the hope of pulling up something for dinner. But now he was focused on his work, his eyes intent, his forehead creased with concentration.

  Evie was over at Mrs. Anson’s, who was expecting a baby and needed help with the housework, and Claire still hadn’t met anyone new to hang around with. She’d seen the Hutchinson boy only once, sitting in a wicker chair on the front porch of Stone cottage. He looked up and smiled at her and she was about to wave him over when his mother called from inside the house and he disappeared through the front door like a wounded rabbit. Mama’s boy, Claire thought, disgustedly. Mrs. Hutchinson probably wouldn’t let him out of her sight. Maybe being from the city made her afraid of open spaces. She probably hated the shifting dunes, the wind howling through the beach grass, the vast dome of the sky.

  Her father and Jack performed their intricate dance around the boat. They were re-planking the hull now, a laborious process of steaming and bending the wood against the boat’s ribs. The air was filled with the voices of the two men, the hiss of steam, the scent of wood shavings. Claire picked up a piece of curled wood and breathed in its hot scent. She tucked the shaving into her hair and picked up another and then another until her head crinkled with curly wood shavings. Neither Jack nor her father looked her way. She sighed and shook her head like a dog, sending the shavings into the dark corners of the building. She thought about the Hutchinson boy, wondering if he would ever be allowed to come out of the house.

  At noon, John lay down his tools and motioned to Claire. He grabbed two fishing rods and handed her the plastic bucket that held their lunch, bologna sandwiches June had made that morning, carrot sticks and hard boiled eggs with little foil packets of salt and pepper. Outside, the air was hot, but a slight breeze rippled the surface of the water. The harbor curved off to the right, tapering into a spit of land crowded with gray cottages and to the left was the jetty, a long pile of boulders and concrete meant to protect the harbor from storms.

  They walked out toward the end, side by side, not talking and Claire was happy not to have to think of anything to say. She liked her father’s silences almost as much as his conversation. Sometimes he would tease and tell stories and when he was truly happy, he would sing songs he’d learned as a boy or musical numbers from Broadway shows. He had a clear baritone voice and he always said his biggest regret was that he’d never learned to play the fiddle, that when he was old and retired, he would take it up, so that he could fill the house with music during the long winter nights.

  At the end of the jetty they sat down on the warm concrete. John baited the hooks with sardines, attached a lead sinker to the end of each line and cast them out into the water.

  “Let’s see if anything’s biting today,” he said. “We’ll surprise your mother with fish for dinner.”

  Claire opened up the lunch bucket and pulled out the sandwiches. So far, nothing had gone right this summer, but she was happy, at least, to be alone with her father.

  “What do you think of Mr. Sandhurst’s boat. Ain’t she a beauty?” John asked between bites of his sandwich. “Solid oak and teak everything and the best brass fittings they make. Ordered ‘em from England out of a catalog.” John beamed at his daughter. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

  Claire shrugged, suddenly shy in front of her father’s clear-eyed gaze. She could feel her cheeks grow hot and she pulled the brim of her sun hat down over her ears.

  “It’s been kind of rough on you, hasn’t it, kiddo, these last months with your mother being so over-protective. She means well, Claire. She doesn’t want to see you get hurt.”

  Claire looked down at the toes of her sneakers. This was the first time her father had spoken directly to her about her illness.

  “Do you think it’s ‘cause I like math that I got sick?”

  He looked at Claire, his face grave. “I don’t think so. I don’t believe all that stuff about school tiring out your brain. I know your mother thinks so, but if you like math you should keep at it. Don’t tell her I said so, though. It’ll be our little secret.” He winked at her and Claire felt immensely relieved. For the first time in a long time she felt she had an ally.

  She drummed her sneakers against the side of the jetty. “Do you think I’ll grow out of it?”

  “That’s what the doctors say. I guess they know best. The hard thing is to be patient. You got that from me, wanting everything to happen all at once. It’s the curse in my life. If I can give you any advice at all it’s that you shouldn’t be so anxious for things to change. It’s best to take it slow and let things happen in their own time.”

  Claire held herself very still, thinking about what her father said. She had never thought of him as being impatient. She had watched him at his work many times, transfixed by the infinite care he took with each of the boats he built or repaired, his face transformed into a study of concentration as he molded a piece of wood in his hands, or applied coat after coat of varnish, completely absorbed by the process of constructing something that would float, an elegant craft that would ride the waves with grace and weather the fiercest storms. That he had admitted to a character flaw, confessed it cheerfully in between bites of his bologna sandwich, made Claire feel as if they shared a secret and that something even stronger than blood bound them together.

  The reel on one of the fishing rods began to spin out. John dropped his sandwich and grabbed the rod. He leaped to his feet and pulled sharply up on the rod to set the hook. With a practiced motion he started to reel in the line, slow and steady. When he felt confident he had the fish, he turned to Claire. “Want to help pull him in?” He passed the rod to his daughter and steadied her hand as she wound the reel, fighting the pull of the fish. She could feel its panic as it cut and dove in its attempts to get away. Her cheeks flushed and her arms ached. It was a fighter and she felt ashamed to be taking its life.

  “Hey, look at that,” John said when it thrashed to the surface and frantically whacked its tail on the water. “A striped bass.”

  He pulled the struggling fish onto the jetty. Claire closed her eyes while he smacked its head against the rocks. With his pocket knife, he swiftly gutted the fish and flung the innards into the water. The whirling gulls shrieked and dove, squabbling over the mess. They swooped high over the water, before folding their wings and falling like stones into the sea to snatch at the bloody entrails.

  John dropped the fish into the empty bucket and covered it with a towel soaked in sea water. “Guess we’d better get this back to your mother. It’ll start to stink in this heat. Come on. I’ll run you and Mr. Bass home.”

  Claire carried the fish. It was heavy and the bucket bumped against her legs. Translucent scales, bright as coins, shimmered on her hands and thighs.

  They pulled up next to the house and Claire lugged the bucket into the kitchen, anxious to show her mother the fish they’d caught. From the living room came the murmur and flutter of women’s voices. John took the bucket and set it on the counter.

  “June,” he called, raising his voice. “I’ve brought Claire back. We’ve got a striped bass for you. Claire reeled it in all by herself.” He turned and winked at her.

  June hurried into the kitchen and stared at them in anguish. “Look at the two of you. You’re covered in fish scales. And you’ve got grease on your face,” she said to John. “Mrs. Hutchinson is here.” Her voice was hushed voice, her eyes frantic. “Oh, this is terrible. She can’t see you like this.”

  “Mr
s. Kerrigan? I’m afraid I have to be going now.” Mrs. Hutchinson appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was dressed in one of her boxy suits, dusty rose with a pink and gray paisley scarf at her throat. She clutched an expensive-looking white leather pocket book under her arm.

  June flushed. “Mrs. Hutchinson, this is my husband, John, and my daughter, Claire. Normally they don’t. . . well it seems they’ve been doing a bit of fishing and. . .”

  “I see I’ve come at an inconvenient time,” Mrs. Hutchinson murmured, looking down at her watch, “but since I was on my way over to Hammett Mills to do some shopping it seemed like a good time to introduce myself.” She nodded at John. “Thank you for the coffee Mrs. Kerrigan, but I really must be on my way.”

  June followed her down the hall to the front door. “When your husband’s down you both must come over for cocktails. I’m sure we have a great deal in common.”

  Claire could hear the querulous note in her mother’s voice, pleading and anxious, but she couldn’t hear Mrs. Hutchinson’s answer and when June came back into the kitchen, she shrank from the look on her face.

  “Oh, how awful.” There were tears of frustration in June’s eyes. “She just showed up at the door. On my cleaning day! My hair was tied up in a kerchief. I had this old dress on.” She slapped her thighs and collapsed in a chair. “And you both, coming in like that, covered in fish scales. Lord knows what she thinks of us now.”

  “You look fine,” John said. “Anyway, it’s not like you to put on airs for the summer people. You never dressed up for Meg Denning.”

  “Oh, Meg.” June waved her arm in front of her face. “Well of course not. She was different.”

  John frowned. “You’ll get nothing but disappointment from trying to impress people.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to try to make new friends.”

  He shrugged. “Not if you have to pretend you’re someone that you’re not.” I’ve got to get back to the boatyard. Jack’s been talking some nonsense about quitting and heading down to Florida to work with a bigger outfit. I’m turning blue in the face trying to talk him out of it. All I need now is for Jack to up and quit. Not when we’re working under the gun.” He tugged on Claire’s ponytail. “Be good and help your mother, now.”

  June sat dejectedly at the kitchen table, while Claire filled the bucket with ice to keep the fish cold until dinner. “Where’s Evie?”

  “Still at Mrs. Anson’s. She’s having lunch over there today.”

  “Don’t you want to look at the fish? It’s a striped bass.”

  June peered into the bucket at the lifeless fish and sighed. “I think you should go up and take a bath, Claire. I’ve never seen you this dirty. And after that I want you to lie down and rest. You’re getting too old to be hanging around the boatyard, listening to the men and their rough talk. It’s no place for a growing girl.”

  Claire stayed a long time in the bath. She hooked her legs together, pretending to be a mermaid, tilting her head back in the water so her hair fanned out behind her. Numbers tumbled in her head from a great height, like a waterfall, so many colors and scents that it seemed for a moment that she was wandering in a secret garden on the other side of the world. Claire hoped that one day she’d be able to invent a magic square of her own. She would win prizes and become famous. If only someday the numbers in her mind would arrange themselves in a logical way and reveal to her a new magic square. Then imagine how her life would be. It would make her illness all worthwhile.

  She could no longer remember what things had been like before she got sick. A wall had come down on that Saturday afternoon last October when she was out picking apples in a neighbor’s orchard with her father. A wall so solid and high she could no longer pass through it. There was the Claire she had been before that day and the new Claire that emerged from the chrysalis of the seizure, and from that day onward she passed through the days like a butterfly blown ashore from a foreign land. What she remembers is climbing the ladder and reaching up through the leaves for the bright red fruit, plucking the apples from the branches and tossing them down to her father. Her mother had promised to bake some pies later that day if they brought enough apples home. It was a glorious afternoon, the sky a clear crystalline blue, her father home again on Saturdays now that the charter season was finished. Claire remembers looking up into the tree and counting the apples, an eternity of red globes against the green of the leaves, counting and counting until something strange happened in her head and she smelled the sea and the taste of copper filled her mouth. The next thing she knew she was on the ground, flat on her back, staring up at the sky, her father crouched down next to her, a shocked look on his face.

  She reached up and squeezed her head with her hands, ran her fingers along the ridges of her skull and tested the soft places near her temples. Maybe she had been dropped on her head as a baby. Maybe it was the math after all. Or trying to count all the apples in the orchard on that fall afternoon. Maybe all those numbers and all the counting had overloaded her brain. She sank under the water and held her breath, counting slowly, trying out the circuits in her head. One one thousand, two one thousand, hoping to expand the capacity of her lungs, to train her brain not to panic, fighting the desire to suck in air. The water lapped at her knees and she pressed her body deeper into the tub. She wondered what it would feel like to drown. To have the dark water of the sea close in over her head, to spin down into the depths like a stone.

  Nothing happened. Claire opened her eyes. She was not tired at all and sleep was out of the question, even though she was supposed to lie down after her bath. She tried to do math problems in her head to exercise her brain, but she couldn’t even concentrate on that. Numbers had a way of crowding into her head like a flock of birds and Claire would try to corral them into some kind of logical order. But ever since she’d had her first seizure, they’d taken on a new dimension and were much harder to control. Numbers had colors now. Four was vermilion. Two was yellow. Six was cornflower blue and smelled like the sea. She’d never told anyone this. Not Evie, certainly not her mother. It was her secret, until she died.

  She got up off the bed and dragged a chair over to the closet and stood on it, straining to reach the top shelf where she kept her box of secret things. It was just an old shoebox, but it contained the only things in her life that were truly hers. Claire pulled it down and sat cross-legged on the bed. She kept her collections in here, owl pellets and seashells and blue jay feathers and the tiny skulls of birds, delicate as eggshells. There was a small notebook in the box and she took it out and riffled through its pages. It was mostly filled up with math problems she had made up for herself. If a train is traveling at 126 miles an hour toward another train moving at 97 miles an hour and they are 85 miles apart. . .how many minutes will elapse before the two trains collide. Claire skipped over these. On a page in the back she’d copied down some text from the encyclopedia in the library. When she’d first gotten sick and had turned the strange word over and over in her mind, epilepsy, she’d gone down to the library to look it up, copying the whole passage in the notebook in her best handwriting.

  She read through it, skipping over the boring parts about electrical impulses in the brain, and down to the part she liked best. In the Middle Ages it was believed that people suffering from epilepsy had special powers. It was thought that epileptics could predict the future, or even cause catastrophes such as earthquakes and eclipses. Claire traced the words with her fingers. Special powers. The ability to predict the future. There had been nothing in the encyclopedia about numbers having colors and odors, but perhaps she was a unique case. She closed the notebook and slid the box back onto the top shelf of the closet.

  After dinner, Claire went in search of Evie who was lying on the divan on the back porch, her head propped up on a pillow, reading a magazine. Claire studied her sister’s profile. Something about the slope of her forehead and the set of her ears, the dark hair rolling back in waves from the hairline, reminded Claire of certain
movie actresses. Lately people had been talking about Evie becoming a beauty. They discussed it in the same way they talked about the Ellison boy becoming a doctor, as if being a beauty were a profession, something Evie could do with her life.

  “What did you do at Mrs. Anson’s today?”

  “The same stuff I always do. I made pie crust for a peach pie and helped her hang the laundry on the line. Then I swept the living room and the front hall. It’s all the same stuff I do here, except Mrs. Anson’s nicer about it than Mom is, she kept thanking me over and over again, saying what a big help I was, and she paid me right away. A dollar and five cents.”

  Evie had put the money in an old cigar box she had painted white with little purple violets around the border.

  “What are you going to spend it on?”

  Evie shrugged. “Nothing yet. I’m going to save it for now. Wait for something special.”

  “Do you want to catch fireflies?” Claire said. “I’ve already got a jar ready.” She’d punched some holes in the lid of a mayonnaise jar and added a few strands of grass, a small twig and a couple of leaves.

  “I don’t feel like it,” Evie said. She was engrossed in her movie magazine. “You go.”

  Claire felt dejected. Lately, it seemed that Evie didn’t want to do anything fun, all she did was read her movie magazines and moon about some boy she liked. She opened the screen door and went outside. The air was hot and still. Over on the edge of the yard close to the shrubbery, little points of light flickered and dimmed. She crept up to them, her jar poised for capture. When she’d imprisoned five of them, she closed up the jar and sat with it on the back steps, watching the insects flash in their mysterious code. First one and then the other flickered on and off and then a whole series of flashes started up. Claire was entranced, trying hard to imagine what they were saying to one another. The first stars appeared in the evening sky as the fireflies continued to flash, bright and dark, unconcerned in their glass prison, as if Claire hadn’t disturbed them at all.