The Night Visitors

Chapter Eighteen Mattie

I DON’T STOP until I reach the back door. Why that newspaper, out of all the trash out there? (My archives, my father called them.) I didn’t even read the local papers after my family died. But they came to the house anyway—the judge subscribed to four daily papers—and at some point after I’d let them stack up on the front porch, one of the well-meaning church ladies who came by to straighten up after the tragedy must have decided they belonged in the old barn with the other junk.

Unless Alice was snooping around trying to find out more about me. To blackmail me or commit identity theft. One of our volunteers, a sweet man getting his MSW in Albany, gave his credit card to a woman to buy groceries. Big surprise, he had more than a thousand dollars in fraudulent charges on his next statement. What had seemed to bother him the most was the frivolous nature of the charges—an Xbox at Best Buy, a case of beer from the Beverage Barn—as if the poor didn’t want the same things everyone else did.

I turn to watch Alice making her way across the snow, bare head bowed, arms wrapped around her skinny chest, face pinched and intent. Her hair is plastered against her head and without its soft fall around her face she looks much older than I first took her for. Early thirties, Frank had said. More like mid-thirties, I’d say now. She’s not the poor teenage mother I’d first taken her for and sympathized with. How much else about her have I missed?

She looks up when she reaches the shelter of the porch, and there’s so much anger and resentment in her eyes that I flinch. I’ve seen that look before in abused women, that look that doesn’t just expect the next blow but says, I know I deserve it. But I’ve never gotten used to it, or liked how it made me feel, that little split-second flicker of Maybe you do.

Most of the people who come before my bench have done something to get themselves there, my father used to say. You’re not doing them any favors by feeling sorry for them and not holding them accountable.

“What?” Alice demands like a surly teenager. “What are you waiting for?”

“You,” I say. “I wanted to make sure you made it.”

“You should have gone right in to check on Oren. He doesn’t like being alone.” She pushes past me into the mudroom and then stops, listening to something. I close the door behind me and listen too. It’s Oren, talking, but to whom?

Alice rushes into the kitchen and I follow, my hand on the knife. When I reach the kitchen, though, I see that except for Dulcie, who’s sleeping under the table, Oren is alone. He’s standing at the stove stirring the chili with one hand and holding one of the empty tin cans to his ear with the other. A six-inch-tall shaggy figure stands on the counter.

“Who are you talking to?” Alice demands.

Oren rolls his eyes and holds up the empty tin can. “I’m listening to orders from the rebel base and relaying them to Chewbacca, of course. Who were you talking to out in the barn?”

Alice blanches like he’s caught her at something. Was there someone out there? Maybe an accomplice I don’t know about? “No one. There was no one out there. Hey, didn’t you lose your Chewbacca?”

“This is one of Caleb’s,” Oren answers. Hearing Caleb’s name drop so casually out of his mouth gives me a chill.

“Where’d you find it?” Alice asks.

When he doesn’t answer right away I suggest, as gently as I can, “Maybe you found them in the Star Wars lunch box upstairs. I don’t mind, buddy. I was going to give them to you anyway.”

Oren shakes his head. “That’s not where I found him. He showed up right here in the kitchen to remind me to stir the chili. It was going to burn otherwise, Mattie.”

“Toys don’t just show up out of nowhere,” Alice says, an edge in her voice as if Oren has made this claim before. “Did you go into that boy’s room and take his toys?”

“It really doesn’t matter,” I interject quickly. She has some nerve attacking Oren for stealing when she’s been in my medications. “As I said, I was going to give him all the toys in that lunch box—”

“Why?” Alice asks, wheeling on me. “So Oren could use them to speak to your dead brother?”

I’m so flabbergasted that I don’t know what to say. Where in the world did Alice get that idea? Before I can think of an answer Alice is at me, shoving her face in mine, spit flying from her hard little mouth. “I heard you asking him if he heard voices. What kind of a social worker takes advantage of a child’s fantasy world to feed her own neuroses? That’s sick! I’m going to report you to the Department of Social Services.”

It shouldn’t, but this makes me laugh. It’s a bad habit of mine, laughing when I’m nervous. “Really? Are you going to report yourself at the same time? Are you going to turn yourself and Oren in while you’re at it and watch Oren end up in juvie?”

Alice’s face turns as bright red as the chili Oren is stirring. “Don’t you dare threaten me with that! You fucking—”

“Stop it!” Oren shoves himself in between us. He drops the tin can but holds on to the wooden spoon, and gobs of hot chili fly off and hit Alice in the face. She lets out a horrible shriek and lunges for Oren’s hand, but he backs up, brandishing the spoon like a weapon.

“You little shit!” Alice screams.

His eyes widen and his face goes white. “You . . . you . . .” The words sputter out of his lips. “You are NOT my mother!” Then he flings the spoon at Alice and runs from the kitchen.

Alice is so startled by the blow, which has spread chili across her face and hair, that she stands there frozen for a long moment. Then she turns to me, her face streaked with red sauce, her eyes stricken. “This is your fucking fault,” she spits at me, before she turns and leaves the kitchen, calling Oren’s name as she goes.

I listen to her voice as it travels upstairs. But what I’m hearing is Oren’s words.

You are not my mother.

It’s a thing that kids have screamed at their rightful parents for generations. I said it to my own mother in this very kitchen.

Good. Who’d want a hateful girl like you for a daughter? she’d responded.

But the way Alice looked when he said it has made something click in my head. A lot of things, actually. The way Oren flinched when Alice touched him. The fact that he always calls her Alice. The fact that, now that I think about it, they don’t look all that much alike. Oren has dark, curly hair and brown eyes. Alice is fair with washed-out blue eyes.

I reach into my coat pocket, find my phone, and then take out the charger from my cardigan pocket. I plug the phone into an outlet next to the stove, then pick up the spoon and tin can from the floor. As I’m picking up the tin can I hear something—a murmuring like the sound you hear when you press a conch shell to your ear. Before I can question why I’m doing it, I lift the can and hold it to my ear—

“Matt?”

I drop the can like it’s on fire. There were only two people who ever called me Matt and one of them is dead.

I’m reaching to pick up the can again when my real phone buzzes to life on the counter. I look at it and see that I have a text message on the screen from Doreen:

Called Dept. of Child Welfare. Alice isn’t Oren’s mother. Not even stepmother. She’s the next-door neighbor who babysits. The father

The text is cut off there. I have to swipe it to get the rest of the message, but my hands are too damp and shaking (Was that Caleb’s voice?). I take two steps to reach the mudroom to grab a towel from the top of the dryer . . . and hear something behind me at the back door.

It’s the doorknob turning.

Above the doorknob, in the plate-glass window silhouetted against the static gray of the snow, is a hooded figure.

I reach beneath the pile of towels for the bowie knife. As my hand curls around the handle, the lights go out.