The Night Visitors

Chapter Twelve Mattie

AS SOON AS Alice and Oren go downstairs I turn to Doreen. “I know what you’re going to say. We never take a client home. It’s not good for us and not good for the client and it never ends well. That’s what we teach our volunteers.”

“Oh good, I thought you’d forgotten all the training protocols,” she says sharply. “I thought I had to dig up the manuals.”

“But you and I both know there are exceptions.”

“That’s not fair,” she says, a quaver in her voice. “That was different.”

“It was different because I was pretty sure if I didn’t take you home that night you would have killed yourself,” I say.

Doreen is right. It’s not fair to bring up that night sixteen years ago, when I found Doreen drinking herself to death at the Reservoir Inn out by Route 28. She’d just found out that she’d lost custody of her eleven-year-old son, Gavin, to her ex-husband, Roy, even though Doreen had testified in court that Roy had hit her multiple times (and Gavin once, which was all it took for Doreen to finally leave). The fact that Doreen had two DUIs, no job, and a twelve-year-old misdemeanor for marijuana possession worked against her, and Roy—bank manager and upstanding citizen of Rensselaer, remarried with a stay-at-home mom ten years younger than Doreen—had looked like the more stable parent. Doreen had been given every other weekend visitation and alternating Christmases.

“I told Gavin he’d never have to go back there,” she’d said—or slurred, rather. “How am I supposed to tell him that he has to because Mommy’s a pothead and a drunk?”

I told her she could re-sue for custody, that I would help her. I told her Sanctuary could help her find a job—heck, she could come work for Sanctuary. She’d been volunteering there since she’d landed in the Kingston shelter a year ago. I told her that even if she saw Gavin only every other week she could still be a positive force in his life.

She listened to everything I had to say and thanked me. She went on to thank me for all I’d done for her over the last year and asked me to thank Frank Barnes, who had intervened six months before when Roy showed up to take Gavin back and had testified as a character witness at the custody hearing. She asked me to thank Kate Rubin, who had represented her at the hearing pro bono. She asked me to thank all the volunteers at Sanctuary.

“Shit, Doreen,” I said. “You’re either making your Academy Award acceptance speech or you’re planning to off yourself. Which is it?”

Doreen is fond of saying in our suicide awareness training sessions that this is not the way you’re supposed to ask someone if they’re planning to kill themselves. You’re supposed to reflect back the “invitations” they have provided (I hear that you’re feeling hopeless and you’ve expressed a lot of negative feelings about yourself . . .) and then ask them directly, “Are you thinking about suicide?” You’re not supposed to say, “You’re not thinking about doing anything stupid, are you?” Or make cracks about the Academy Awards. But what I said that night worked. First she nearly fell off her barstool laughing (a testament less to my wit than to how many Jack Daniel’s shots she’d knocked back), and then she started crying, and then she admitted she had a stash of Vicodin from her last root canal back in her rented room and was thinking of washing it down with some vodka.

Protocol would have suggested I keep her talking and then, if I still thought she was a suicide risk, call one of the suicide intervention services available in the county. Instead I drove her home to my place and we sat up the rest of the night eating popcorn and talking. I told her about the year I spent in JD when I was fourteen and I told her about Caleb. I told her the truth about what happened the night my family died. She was the first—and last—person I ever told the whole story. Sometime around dawn, when we were both falling asleep on the big couch in the parlor, I asked her if she was still thinking of killing herself, and she said, “No, I think you’re a bigger suicide risk than I am. I’ll stick around as long as you need me.” We made a pact then that if either of us was ever thinking about killing herself she’d tell the other first.

“Are you telling me,” I ask her now, “that it was a mistake to take you home that night?”

“No,” she admits. “You saved my life. But I worry about this woman and boy—”

“There’s nothing wrong with the boy,” I snap.

“Noooo—” She draws out the word. “He’s a sweetheart. Smart as a whip. He reminds me of Gavin . . .”

Her voice trails off and I see that there are tears in her eyes. Of course, I think, Oren’s brought it all back up for her. The way her son changed in the following years. The problems in school, the drugs, rehab, juvenile detention, and then rehab again. She hasn’t heard from him in over a year.

“You wouldn’t want Alice to lose him,” I say. “You wouldn’t want Oren to end up in JD.”

It’s not fair to use the threat of JD, a threat my parents held over my—and later Caleb’s—head all my life. It’s not fair but I can see right away that it works. She shakes her head. “No, no, of course not. But let me call Frank. You’ll all be in danger if the father comes looking for them.”

“He won’t,” I say quickly, relieved that Doreen hasn’t heard about the dead man in New Jersey—or if she has she hasn’t connected him to Alice and Oren. “He doesn’t know where they are.”

Doreen looks skeptical. “You know how many times we’ve had a woman call her ex and tell them exactly where they are.”

“She doesn’t have a cell phone,” I say. “And it’s only for one night. Where else are they going to go?” I look out the window and see that it has begun to snow. Heavy feathery flakes fill the air with silver light. When I look back at Doreen I see that silver light showing up every line and shadow on her face. I wonder when she last slept. “You should take the night off,” I add. “Let Alana and the Bard student man the phones.”

“I could come back with you,” Doreen offers.

I don’t want her there, I realize. I want Oren to myself. I want him to tell me about that voice he heard, the one that told him where to find Yoda.

“I think you should go home and get some sleep,” I say. “We’ll talk in the morning. Okay?”

Doreen nods, her eyes on the falling snow. “Sure,” she says, “just . . .”

“I know,” I say, already turning away, anxious to beat the storm back to the house. “I’ll be careful.”

I pick up my poncho from the floor. When I turn back Doreen is still standing at the window, a dark silhouette against the swirling snow, looking as insubstantial and spectral as the ghost I’m seeking.