The Night Gift Read online

  THE NIGHT GIFT

  What does it mean to give love, and to receive it? No one can answer. For the answer can only be lived. And sometimes the living takes sharp and unexpected turns.

  It seemed so simple to Barbara, Joslyn and Claudia—the idea that they would make beautiful a room in an old abandoned house for Joe Takaota. He was Barbara’s brother, and he had tried to take his life because, he said, “It’s so ugly.” If they could give him a beautiful place, now that he was coming home from the hospital, maybe he would be all right. They worked on it at night, and soon each found the room invading her life in ways she had not expected.

  For Joslyn the room meant the loss of her first love, a love she had never really had. And the problems the room raised in Joslyn’s life brought about a new understanding of her family, and especially of her brother Brian, a school dropout.

  For Barbara the room became not simply a gift to a brother she loved, but the unexpected step to a very different kind of love.

  And for Claudia, born with a harelip and looking forward to yet another operation on her face, it brought the realization that her value did not lie simply in her face, that she could be loved for something more.

  The room did not solve anyone’s problems, least of all Joe’s. But it opened many lives to other people’s lives in good ways. It was a gift made by night and received in the dark places of more than one spirit.

  OTHER BOOKS BY PATRICIA A. MC KILLIP

  The House on Parchment Street

  The Throme of the Erril of Sherill

  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A. The night gift.

  Summary: As they work to create a beautiful room

  for the brother of one of them who had attempted

  suicide, three friends find their lives

  deeply affected by their project.

  I. McKillip, Kathy. II. Title.

  PZ7.M19864Ni [Fic] 75-28446

  ISBN 0-689-30508-7

  Copyright© 1976 by Patricia A. McKillip

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  McClelland & Stewart, Ltd.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  by The Book Press

  Brattleboro, Vermont

  Designed by Suzanne Haldane

  First Edition

  For my cousins,

  whose voices I borrowed.

  Thanks again.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  We went to the library from Barbara’s house: Claudia Gill and Barbara Takaota and I. Briar Avenue was an old street; you could tell by the sidewalk, which didn’t lay flat anymore but bumped up and down in the air. In front of the deserted house, two slabs of cement, pushed up by a tree root, made an upside-down V, so first you walked up one side and then down the other, which is not what you expect to do on a sidewalk, especially in high Swedish clogs. But I always liked the sidewalk and the rambly, untrimmed hedges and the little old houses on Briar Avenue that were so different from houses in an ordinary neighborhood. Barbara was quiet; I didn’t know then what she wanted to tell us. Claudia was talking about an operation she was going to have for her face. I was listening to her out of the corner of my mind, and watching some Mexican kids riding tricycles on the bumpy sidewalk. They were all little and round, and I was trying to remember the first time I had ridden on a tricycle.

  “Let’s go to the park after the library,” Barbara said suddenly, breaking into Claudia’s voice, but Claudia didn’t mind since she was only half-listening to herself anyway.

  “Okay.” I was supposed to go straight home from the library to do a report on The Scarlet Letter, which was due the next day. But the late sun was sitting on the hills winking between the walnut branches, and the air was so still not even the walnut leaves were moving, so I couldn’t worry about The Scarlet Letter. Claudia took the words out of my mind, which startled me.

  “The…Scarlet…Letter,” she said softly. She was born with a cleft palate, and every once in awhile she got very depressed about her face, which the doctors still hadn’t finished. Her upper lip was flat and pulled up towards her nose, and you could see more of the underside of her nose than you would ordinarily expect. Her voice sounded hollow, and honked a little sometimes like a goose’s voice, so in her classes at school she never said anything. She did her talking with us. “Scarlet. I love that word. In Gone with the Wind the heroine’s name was Scarlett O’Hara. I wish they had named me Scarlett instead of Claudia. Claudia sounds like a mud pie.”

  “It does not,” I said.

  “It sounds like clod and dough, which is a mud pie.”

  That made me giggle. It was a good evening to laugh in, with blackbirds and sea gulls wandering around in the sky, and people you couldn’t see making little splashes of sound in the air, and Neil Brown just locking his ten-speed at the library door. I glanced at Barbara to see if she had seen him, but she was frowning at the sidewalk.

  “I like Claudia.”

  “I don’t like it,” Claudia said, “because it belongs to me.”

  So I glanced at her to see if she were going to be depressed, but she was just stating a fact. Neil had gone inside the library. Barbara was still walking slowly, with her fingers under her arms. Usually she walked as though she were trying to get a little ahead of herself, with her long black hair flying out behind her. I knew something was on her mind, but I couldn’t guess what. Usually I knew exactly what she was thinking.

  We reached the library, a bright, rather noisy, one-floor building about as old as the town. The tables were crowded with kids doing homework. At one of the tables on the adult side of the library I saw Neil. He had just sat down and was opening his notebook, Barbara had gone to the children’s section because she had promised to get the twins some picture books. So I went over to talk to Neil, with Claudia following behind me like a shadow.

  “Hello,” I said cheerfully. He blinked up at me, his eyes full of whatever he was reading. Then he smiled.

  “Hi, Joslyn.” He saw Claudia behind me and nodded. “Claudia.”

  “Hi,” Claudia whispered, and without looking at her, I knew her face was bright red. Neil was two grades ahead of us, vice-president of the junior class; he made the honor roll every semester and played on the basketball team even though he was a little short. But he had seen her enough at my house to know her name. He put his pen down politely, and I said, “What are you doing?”

  “Political science. Cramming for a test tomorrow. You come to study?”

  I moved to look over his shoulder at his notes. They were incomprehensible. “No, I have to check out The Scarlet Letter because I left my copy at school. I have to make an oral report on it tomorrow about Hester, whoever she is.”

  “You haven’t read it yet?”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  His brows crooked, peaking over his eyes. “Joslyn, you shouldn’t let things slide like that. That’s a rough book.”

  “Well, I have all night.”

  “You and Brian.” He smiled again, even though he was still frowning a little. “Is your brother going to be home tonight?”

  I nodded. Neil had shaggy, ivory-colored hair, and light, vivid eyes that made me think, while I was looking at him, of snow and skiing and fiords, so I didn’t really hear his question. I said after a moment, “What?”

  “What’s Brian doing tonight?”

  “Oh. I
don’t know. I never know what he’s going to do. Drop by and see.”

  “I will, thanks.” His eyes strayed to his notebook, and I straightened.

  “Well, I’d better go. Good luck on your test.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you, Joslyn. Bye, Claudia.” I heard a page in his notebook rattle as I turned. He was the nicest person I knew except for Barbara. I had liked him ever since he’d come home with my brother the first day of their freshman year; he’d been like a second, much more cheerful, older brother. Then one day I’d looked at him and realized, with a funny feeling in my stomach as though a fish had jumped in it, that the last thing I wanted was another brother.

  We joined Barbara and she said, “Did you find it?”

  “What?”

  “The Scarlet Letter.”

  “Oh. No. Just a moment.”

  She went to check out her books, and I went to look under Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter wasn’t there, which shook me a little until I realized that if it wasn’t there, I didn’t have to do my report.

  Claudia said nervously, “Joslyn, you have to do it—you’re flunking English.”

  “Well, how can I do the report if I can’t find the book?” I asked reasonably.

  “Well, you have to do it.”

  “Well, I can’t.” We went to the main desk, where Barbara, looking at my empty hands, came out of her thoughts.

  “Did you check the paperbacks and the sorting shelf?”

  So I checked and found it on the paperback rack. It was not a very thick book, and that cheered me. I checked it out, and we left. Passing the window, I saw Neil inside, twirling his pencil in his hair, his lips moving. From a distance he looked thin, but up close I could see the tension of hard muscle in his arms and neck. I felt hollow for a moment, looking at him. Then we passed the window.

  We stopped at Barbara’s house to drop off the books, then went down two blocks to the park. It was a small park bounded on three sides by houses and on the fourth by a thick hedge and chain link fence that hid the freeway. Standing in the middle of it, I always felt as if I were in the center of the world, because the sky fit the trees circling it like a lid.

  We lay down on one of the little hills that looked like burial mounds at the side nearest the freeway. We were surrounded by sound. The traffic honked and sped and screeched on the freeway. A baseball game was in progress at one corner of the park; we could hear the hollow conk of the bats, and people whistling and shouting. College students thwacked tennis balls on the courts near us; kids were playing on the swings and slides; now and then their high voices flashed to us. But if I looked up at the huge circle of sky, it seemed to drown the noise. The sun was still hovering over the hills, and the shadows of young pine stretched taut as rubber bands across the grass. My clogs slid off, and I put The Scarlet Letter under my head. Even Claudia, on one side of me, was quiet. Then Barbara, lying on her stomach with her face on her arms, said softly to no one, “My brother is coming home.”

  I turned my head to look at her. She rested her chin on her hands and stared at the car-flicks in the hedge. Her face was quiet, faraway; usually it was never still for long.

  “When?” Claudia asked.

  “Next month.”

  “Is he better?”

  “I guess so, or they wouldn’t let him come home. I’m not sure if he’s staying.”

  Joe Takaota was my brother’s age. Last fall, just after school started, he had been standing in front of a window in his room, just looking out at the rain. Mrs. Takaota had asked him if he had any dirty laundry. For a moment he hadn’t said anything. Then he said, “It’s so ugly,” and pushed his hands through the glass. Since then he had been in a hospital, and Barbara had only seen him once. She rolled over then, onto her back, her arms outstretched, and looked at the sky. Her face looked more familiar.

  “I wish…” she said softly. “I wish…”

  “What?”

  “I wish I knew why he did it.” She never talked about him very much. “I wish I could make a place for him, just for him, where he could go when he was depressed, that was so beautiful, that just being in it would make him happy. Just standing in it would make him forget ugly things, like when you stand in a forest, or by the sea, only even more beautiful than that…” Her hands, above her head, had closed into fists.

  “Where would you make it?” I asked. “How?”

  Her hands opened. She looked at me, her face opening in a smile. “I don’t know. What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  She rolled to her feet. “I have to go help with dinner.”

  We walked back slowly. I thought of Joe Takaota, small-boned and dark like Barbara, with his straight hair falling over his face. The year they started high school, he and my brother had been together a lot. But after that they had grown apart.

  Claudia, bumping against me as she walked, said, “This is my favorite time—twilight.”

  “It’s not twilight until after the sun sets,” I argued, but she ignored that.

  “Twilight,” she whispered. “Twilight. It sounds like an echo.”

  We followed Barbara into her kitchen. Her mother was making spaghetti, and the twins were sitting on the kitchen floor with all the books Barbara had gotten for them. They were in first grade, and they looked like a pair of Geisha dolls. Mrs. Takaota gave us a smile through the steam from the spaghetti. She taught fifth grade in the school where the twins went. The twins, Sara and Kim, got up and came over to us. Claudia ducked behind me a little. She was shy of them because they would stare at her face and they were apt to say anything. But they had only come over to investigate my clogs. Sara stood on my feet and grabbed for my hands.

  “You’re too tall,” she commented. She stuck her face against my stomach and measured herself against me with one hand. “I come up to here on you.”

  “Sara, get off Joslyn’s feet,” Mrs. Takaota said. “Go help Barbara set the table.”

  I walked a few steps with Sara on my feet. Kim hung beside me, wanting a turn, so I gave her one while Mrs. Takaota talked to Claudia, and Barbara sat at the table reading one of the twins’ library books. Mr. Takaota was dead, so Mrs. Takaota had to work, which left Barbara having to take care of the twins and help with housework a lot. She finished the book and got down to business.

  “Sara, Kim, get the books off the floor and take them to your room. Then go get washed. Mom, I need a dollar to buy some music.”

  “Get one out of my purse,” Mrs. Takaota said absently, listening to Claudia. She was one of the rare people Claudia talked to besides us.

  “They’re going to straighten my nose,” Claudia said. “And do something to the roof of my mouth. I hope it’s the last one.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Mrs. Takaota said, dumping spaghetti sauce on the spaghetti. “Do you girls want some dinner?”

  I thought of The Scarlet Letter and sighed. “I’d better not. Thanks anyway. I have to do homework.”

  Barbara, rattling silverware onto the table, looked at me and grinned. “You’d better have it done, Joslyn. You know what Mr. Frank will say.”

  “I know. I know. It’s not just reading a book that’s important, it’s the principles behind it. Discipline. Mental Exercise. Appreciation of Art. Things I may not comprehend now, but later I will be grateful for having—having—”

  “Nurtured,” Claudia said.

  “Ah, yes. Nurtured. Blah.”

  “Even so,” Barbara said, “you don’t want to flunk out of freshman English, so you’d better read it.”

  “I will,” I promised. “Come on, Claudia. Good-bye, Mrs. Takaota. Bye, Barbara.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I dropped Claudia off at her house on the next block, then walked across the park and up the freeway overpass. I stopped at the top a moment to watch the cars. The sun had gone down and the hills to the east were blurring into the sky. Beneath me the freeway ran like a river with a swift current of work traffic. On Barbara and Claudia�
�s side of the freeway, the city was Campbell, but where I lived it turned into San Jose. Campbell melted into San Jose, and San Jose spilled over into Santa Clara and Cupertino and Los Altos, which merged into Palo Alto and Stanford, and so on, north up the freeway, cities running into cities until they all ran into San Francisco, which was stopped by the ocean. If you looked down from the hills on a clear night, you could see the lights sprawled like a galaxy of stars in the darkness from the mountains at one end to the bay at the other. In the darkness it was beautiful. But during the day, sometimes all you could see was a motionless, yellow mess of air.

  I thought of Joe Takaota on the way home until I saw Neil Brown’s bicycle locked to our mailbox. I went in. He and my brother were sitting in the living room listening to a record. Brian had his guitar; he was trying to play along with the music. He had no shirt on and he was smoking, two things that annoyed our mother. He had dropped out of school on his birthday, but he and Neil were still good friends.

  “Hello again,” I said. Neil gave me a nod and a smile, but Brian, cross-legged on the floor, shook the light hair out of his eyes and glowered at me.

  “You,” he said, “are an unmitigated pest.”

  I made a mental note to ask Claudia what unmitigated meant. “Now what?” I said, sighing resignedly.

  “What? What, indeed. You broke my ‘Fair, Far Days’ album.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did, too.”

  “I did not.”

  “People’s Exhibit Number One.” He picked up a record jacket and shook it. About fifteen pieces of record fell out. I stared at it, fascinated. Brian blew a cloud of smoke up at me. “Prosecution rests. You owe me seven dollars.”

  “I do not! I did not!”

  “I found it in your room. All sixty pieces of it.”

  “All I did was play it. I didn’t drop it, or step on it, or—” Then I stopped. I had listened to a song that morning, then I had put it back in the jacket and sat down on Erica’s bed to put my socks on. I must have left it on the bed, half-hidden in the sheets, for Erica to bounce down on. Thinking of that made me giggle, even though I was upset. Brian held out his hand.