by Cat Winters
He didn’t respond at first, and I assumed him to be doing as I’d instructed, eating his breakfast posthaste. I lowered my glass to the sink and filled it with water, and I thought nothing of the silence, or of the fact that John might be watching me. The water spilled over the edge of the glass, so I reached for the faucet and turned it off.
“Do you remember when you hit me in the head, Alice?” asked a voice from the table behind me.
I whirled around, my plate still in hand, and the room tilted sideways. John smiled and broke off the crust of his toast.
“Wh-wh-what did you just say?” I asked him, my knees bent.
“You took your shoe and went”—John lifted his right hand and brought it down like a hammer—“whack, whack, whack, whack. Do you remember that”—he grinned again, a dimple marking his left cheek—“Alice?”
My plate slipped from my fingers and broke against the tiles with a crash that brought Bea running into the kitchen.
“Is everyone all right?” Bea skidded to a halt when she saw me clutching the edge of the sink. “Alice?”
I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move. John had resumed chewing his toast and refocused his attention on the crumbs scattered across his plate. He snaked his left pinkie through the mess.
“Alice?” asked Bea. “What happened? Why are you so ghastly white?”
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t do anything. Bea rubbed my aching-cold back and assured me that everything was all right, but even she didn’t know the full story. No one did. No one but Michael had known about the shoe. My family believed we had gotten caught in a blizzard and that Michael heroically left the car to seek help. My parents and Margery even believed that he and I had married in Kansas. I’d told his mother, when I’d telephoned her to break the awful news, that Michael had gone on from Kansas to Nebraska to escape his problems on his own, and I’d followed after to check on him, after the storm blustered northward, but I’d found he’d perished in the blizzard. I penned the same story in a letter to Tillie Simpkin, and she’d written back to thank me for watching out for him. Mr. Harkey had dug up only one single, questionable bone in his garden. He couldn’t add to his show any photographs of a mass grave; no discoveries made by “Mrs. Gunderson Herself!” And yet he and his poor, frazzled wife remained so generous and helped me with all arrangements and police interrogations. A violent dispute between a married couple, was the official report. The deceased abandoned the scene of the fight from a second-story window, banged up his head on the drop down, and subsequently froze to death.
“Please don’t ever call me Alice,” I told John when at last my throat relaxed. “That’s not what you call your mother.”
“I didn’t.”
“I heard you, John.”
“My name’s not John.”
Bea mussed his blond hair. “Finish your breakfast, little monkey. Mama’s waiting.”
“My name’s Michael.”
Bea’s jaw plummeted. Her head whipped my way, and she sent me a look that mimicked my own state of shock.
I fled the room and spent the next ten minutes with my head wedged between my knees, forcing blood to return to my brain.
And now, as I approached my parents’ house that November afternoon, five years to the day after I’d arrived at the Gordon Bay Depot, I thought of all the books my little boy enjoyed—the mysteries, the seaside adventures, the tales of wandering dreamers. His little drawings of ships and seagulls and houses perched on ocean cliffs decorated the walls of our home, as well as Mother and Father’s. I’d never once taken the child to the coast. I used to believe the drawings represented his longing to see where his father had been born.
But . . . now . . .
No, don’t go down that road again, Alice. Don’t assume.
I inhaled a breath that puffed up my chest and opened my parents’ front door.
“Hello!” I called, my voice ringing through the front hall. “I’m here!”
John galloped out from the kitchen in the back and cried out, “Mommy!”
“There’s my darling.” I bundled him up in a hug and smelled chocolate in his hair. “Grandma must have baked you cookies.”
“He insisted upon helping,” said my mother, moseying our way, untying her apron from her waist. “He’s quite the little chef.”
I stood up and took hold of John’s sticky hand. “Has he been a good boy today?”
“Of course,” said Mother, straightening the back of his collar. “He bumped his knee on the kitchen table and had a cry about it, but Grandpa lured a penny out of the knee and made him feel much better. Didn’t he, Mikey?”
I stiffened and inadvertently squeezed down on John’s hand.
“Ow!” he cried. “Mommy! You’re squishing my fingers.”
“I’m sorry.” I slid my hand out of his. “Why did you just call him Mikey, Mother?”
“He insisted that’s his name today.”
“Well, I’m not so sure that I like it. Don’t you remember . . . ?” I gritted my teeth. “His father’s name . . . ?”
“He was only playing, Alice.” She bent down and kissed the child on the top of his golden head. “I’m sure it’s a natural thing to pretend, especially for a boy who’s never met his father.”
My own father jogged downstairs and also said his good-byes. He helped John into all of his outer garments, gave him a pat, and then John and I set off for home, our gloved fingers intertwined, his little feet scrambling to keep up with mine.
“Slow down, Mommy.”
I kept my lips pursed and peered straight ahead at the path of leaves and shedding trees before us. For each one of my footsteps John traveled three.
“You’re going too fast!”
“Do you remember the snow, John?” I asked.
He fell silent.
“Do you remember a hotel in Nebraska?”
John snickered and pointed at the yard that we passed. “There’s a cat sitting in that tire swing over there.”
“John!” I squatted down in front of him and grabbed him by both arms, which frightened him enough to flinch. “Tell me what you remember. Why did you say that thing this morning about a shoe?”
He merely blinked.
“Why are you insisting that your name is Mikey? It’s John Lind O’Daire, not Michael. Your name is John.”
“It is now, Alice.” He cast me a sidelong glance. “But it didn’t used to be.”
His words knocked the breath straight out of me. His eyes—that beguiling O’Daire palette of blues and greens—glinted with a knowing expression.
A moment later, his attention switched back to the tire swing. “Oh, look! The cat’s rocking the swing.”
I stood up but lost my balance. My arms and right foot shot out to save me from collapsing.
John tiptoed into the yard with the cat. “Can you write down a story for me when we get home?”
“Wh-wh-what story?”
“A story about the swinging cat. If I tell it to you, will you write it down?”
I closed my eyes and swallowed. In through the nose, out through the mouth . . .
“Yes, darling, of course.” I rolled back my shoulders, drew more air through my nose, steadied my nerves. “I’m . . . I’m always happy to write down your stories for you.”
John skipped back over to me and retook my hand. “I think I’ll name the cat Jolly.”
“That’s a fine name for a cat.”
“I think so, too.”
“Sh—shall we go home and tell Aunt Bea and Aunt Pearl about Jolly and your day with Grandma and Grandpa? Was it a good one?”
“Yes.” He jumped over a crack in the sidewalk.
“Are you a happy boy?”
Another jump. “Yes.”
“Good. Let’s be quick so we can warm up. I don’t like walking in the wind when it’s so unbearably cold.”
“Me neither.”
“I know, sweet—” I cleared the thickness from my throat. “I know you don’
t like the cold, sweetheart.”
I squeezed his hand and urged him onward, through the leaves and the breeze that shivered against our ears.
Acknowledgments
I’m incredibly thankful for both my agent, Barbara Poelle, and my editor, Lucia Macro, who believed in this book from the moment it was first discussed as a basic idea. Thank you to the rest of the HarperCollins team: Leora Bernstein, Pamela Jaffee, Molly Waxman, Diahann Sturge, Ingrid Dolan, Nancy Fischer, K. Stuckey, and everyone else who played a role in this book’s editing, production, promotion, and overall success.
Thank you to my always-supportive Wednesday morning coffee and writing crew, as well as to longtime writing friends Kim Murphy, Francesca Miller, Susan Adrian, Ara Burklund, The Lucky 13s, SCBWI Oregon, and so many others who have been there for me.
Thank you to the Oregon Historical Society for promptly providing what I needed, even if it was a tiny article in an obscure publication from the 1920s. I also appreciate the input of Dr. Jarret Lovell, a friend and professor of criminal justice who suggested I investigate the history of psychology for my female protagonist’s profession. Thank you to my husband, Adam, a high school math teacher, for looking over the calculations that appear in the novel, and my sister, Carrie, for her enthusiasm and valuable input on the earliest draft. Any mistakes concerning history, psychology, mathematics, and any other academic field discussed in Yesternight are entirely my own.
Thanks also to the countless friends and family who have cheered me on through every single book. Meggie and Ethan: as always, I appreciate your patience, love, and support!
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the author
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Meet Cat Winters
About the book
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The Peculiar Realities behind Yesternight
Reading Group Guide
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Further Reading
About the author
Meet Cat Winters
CAT WINTERS writes books for teens and adults. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, was named a Morris Award finalist and a Bram Stoker Award nominee. Her second novel, The Cure for Dreaming, was named to the Amelia Bloomer Project and the Tiptree Award Long List. Her other books include The Uninvited and The Steep and Thorny Way, and she’s a contributor to the YA horror anthology Slasher Girls & Monster Boys.
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About the book
The Peculiar Realities behind Yesternight
TYPICALLY, my novels take months or even years before they evolve from a handful of basic story ideas that I’ve stored in the back of my mind to an actual, workable book plot. However, I can say for certain that Yesternight came into existence on one specific day: March 25, 2015.
During that morning, I went online and spotted a link to an MSN article titled “10-Year-Old Boy Says He Remembers Past Life as Hollywood Actor.” Intrigued, I clicked the link and learned about an Oklahoma boy named Ryan who, from a young age, told his mother that he once lived as someone else. He experienced nightmares and homesickness for Hollywood.
I clicked another link—one that led to a segment about Ryan on the NBC Nightly News website. A filmed interview with Ryan and his mother gave me chills. Major chills.
With the help of a photograph in a book about old Hollywood, as well as the assistance of Dr. Jim Tucker, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, Ryan and his parents were able to trace his purported past-life memories to a real person named Marty Martyn, a movie extra who become a successful film agent during Hollywood’s Golden Era. Ryan gave dozens of details about his past life that matched up to Marty Martyn’s real life, including information about family members, car colors, and even Marty’s age when he died.
On the same day that I learned about Ryan and Dr. Tucker, my agent, Barbara Poelle, called me about another book proposal that I was working on. I told her, “I think I might be onto something new,” and sent her the link to the video about Ryan. She, too, was astounded.
That afternoon, we emailed my HarperCollins editor, Lucia Macro, and pitched her the idea of a novel about a seven-year-old girl in the 1920s who states that she lived a past life that ended in a tragic death. In the message, I told Lucia that I planned to write the book from the point of view of a young psychologist trying to make a name for herself in her field. At the time, I didn’t know much about the role of women in psychology in the 1920s—or that the psychologist herself would be carrying around her own baggage from the past. However, in less than twenty-four hours, Yesternight grew from a basic idea sparked by a real-life modern child to a rapidly forming plot for a full-fledged historical novel. I’m so grateful that my agent and editor encouraged me to take this concept and run with it.
As with all of my books, Yesternight’s characters, as well as many of its settings, are fictional, but actual people and places served as inspiration. The following is a list of characters and locations from the novel with ties to strange, fascinating, and sometimes horrifying realities.
Alice Lind. In 1967, real-life psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson founded the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies to conduct parapsychological research that included the study of children who claim to remember past lives. Dr. Jim Tucker, the psychiatrist who worked with Ryan, is one of the researchers who carried on Dr. Stevenson’s work after he passed away in 2007.
Instead of creating a modern-day character based on these two pioneering gentlemen, I decided it would be interesting if my fictional past-life researcher was a woman living in an era when entering the fields of psychology and psychiatry proved challenging in itself for females. I wanted the odds to be stacked against my protagonist so I could explore how much a person would be willing to give up for the sake of pursuing a compelling case that defies explanation.
Once I learned that school psychology was a path open to women in the 1920s and that some school psychologists traveled to rural towns to administer intelligence tests, the character of Alice came to life, and her journey toward discovering Janie O’Daire commenced.
Janie O’Daire. Janie’s behaviors when describing her life as Violet Sunday, as well as her reactions during her visit to Violet’s Kansas home, were inspired by Dr. Stevenson’s and Dr. Tucker’s accounts of real-life children who claim to remember past lives, including Ryan from Oklahoma (see the Further Reading section for a list of books by both Dr. Stevenson and Dr. Tucker). Janie is not meant to be one specific child, but a representation of dozens of the children discussed in reincarnation texts. Any mistakes made in my portrayal of such a child are entirely my own.
Michael O’Daire. Michael is an entirely fictional creation, and his role as the owner of a speakeasy can be traced to countless tales of regular people who illegally sold alcohol during the heyday of Prohibition. Full Prohibition came to Oregon in 1916. By the time the Volstead Act went into effect across the entire United States on January 17, 1920, Oregonians already had plenty of practice in finding creative means to procure their liquor, including fetching booze from Canadian ships that parked in international waters off the Oregon coast.
Gordon Bay, Oregon. Gordon Bay is a fictional town, loosely based on the coastal city of Rockaway Beach, Oregon, as well as other towns that turned into tourist stops once the railroads connected the Oregon coast to the inland cities over the mountains.
Hurricane force winds do, indeed, occasionally hit the region during intense storms, and a lady is likely to lose her hat.
Winchester Mystery House. The house that Alice mentions as being a prime example of the “séance frenzy” and America’s “bizarre fascination with sideshows and amusement parks” actually existed in the 1920s . . . and it still operates as a tourist attraction to this day (I’ve visited it twice). Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune, built the elaborate 1
60-room mansion over a period of almost three decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During her lifetime, rumors circulated about her supposed madness, although modern-day books and articles refute that claim. Publications of the era stated that she hired workers to continuously expand the house in order to appease the spirits of all of those killed in the Old West by Winchester rifles.
Sarah Winchester died in September 1922, and in the spring of 1923, the house’s new owners, John and Mayme Brown—a couple with ties to an amusement park in Canada—opened the property for guided tours.
The attraction is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd., San Jose, California. Its website is www.winchestermystery house.com.
Violet Sunday. I decided to make the fictional Violet Sunday of Janie’s past a mathematical genius when I read that children who remember past lives sometimes bring the skills of their former life into their new one. “Mathematical pioneers” is a category of women’s history that doesn’t often receive much attention, but nineteenth-century ladies did, in fact, make their marks on the worlds of mathematics and computing (especially when their families actually allowed them to receive a higher education). Two prime examples are Ada Lovelace and Philippa Fawcett. From 1842 to 1843, Lady Lovelace, daughter of famed poet Lord Byron, created the first algorithm ever to be used on a machine. She is credited with being the world’s first computer programmer. In 1890, Philippa Fawcett became the first woman to take top place in the prestigious Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, shattering long-held beliefs about the inferiority of the female brain.
Cornelia Gunderson. From the beginning, I imagined Alice Lind’s investigation into Janie’s past life leading to grisly discoveries about a serial killer in the Great Plains, simply because several of the most notorious mass murders in United States history occurred in farmhouses in the nation’s heartland.