The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty-One Alice

MATTIE DOESN’T SAY anything right away and it’s too dark to see her face. I can picture it, though, the same sour disapproval I’ve seen in a dozen caseworkers, foster parents, and teachers over the years. People who put their trust in me and were then disappointed when I wasn’t able to live up to the pretty picture they’d made in their heads. The young teachers and social workers were the worst. They’d get the idea that they were reaching the poor foster kid and then you’d make one little mistake—missing curfew, lifting a lip gloss from Walmart, punching the dickwad who called you white trash—and their pretty picture of themselves as your savior blew up in their faces. It wasn’t you they were mad at; it was themselves for being stupid enough to trust you.

When Mattie does speak, her voice is flat with rage. “You told me Davis was dead.”

“No,” I point out, “you told me that he was dead.”

“They found a body at his house.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t Davis, it was Scott.”

“Who is Scott?”

“Oren’s caseworker,” I say, “and a nice guy. I called him to tell him not to worry about us.” Yes, I’m leaving out the idea of running away with Scott. Mattie doesn’t have to know all my business. “When I called Scott’s cell phone, Davis picked up. So I figure Scott must have gone by to check on us and Davis killed him. That must be the body the cops found.”

Mattie doesn’t say anything right away. She must be deciding whether she believes me. It’s creepy standing here talking in the dark, like being in a confessional. One of my foster parents, Maria Tomaselli, was Catholic and took us kids to church every Sunday trying to convert us. I hid in the confessional one week and wrote some comments about the Virgin Mary and Jesus in Sharpie on the walls. Maria gave up trying to convert me after that; she’d made up her mind I was going to hell.

“Did you ask Davis to come get you?” Mattie squeezes out the words like toothpaste from a spent tube. “Did you tell him where you are?”

“No! What kind of an idiot do you think I am! Like I’d endanger my boy—”

“I know Oren’s not your son.”

This takes me by surprise—and it hurts too. She says it like she knows every dirty secret I’ve ever had. Like she knows me inside and out. But she doesn’t know the first thing about me.

“You assumed he was my son and I just went along with you. He’s still my boy. I’ve put up with Davis’s shit for two years because I couldn’t stand to leave Oren with him or let Oren end up in the system. I love that kid.”

I brace myself for her to challenge that but she doesn’t. “Where did you call from?”

“The CVS pharmacy phone. I don’t know if it has caller ID—”

“It does,” Mattie says. “Shit. Why didn’t you tell me? We could have told the police.”

“I’d’ve lost Oren. I’ve got no claim to him. And . . . I’ve got a record. Little shit . . . shoplifting, pot . . . but I’d never get custody of him. You know where he’d end up.”

She doesn’t argue with this. Instead she turns on her flashlight and shines it right in my eyes, blinding me. “I know you took drugs from my bedroom.” Her voice is cold and hard. “Have you taken it all?”

I fish out two Oxy from my pocket and hand them over. “I only took one of the Valium to calm down,” I tell her. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

I don’t mean it as a joke but she laughs. When she lowers the flashlight I can see her face. It’s wet and shiny; she’s cried all through my story without making a sound. “Okay,” she says, wiping her face with her shirtsleeve. “We’re not going to solve anything by standing here jawing. Let’s go up and find Oren and then hunker down. Do you have any idea where he is?”

“I heard him in your brother’s room. I thought he was under the bed but then when I looked he wasn’t there. Though I did find this.” I hand her the R2-D2. She turns it over and reads the sticky note. Even in the weird glow of the flashlight I can tell her face has gone pale. “What?” I ask, for a second more afraid of what the note means to Mattie than the fact that Davis is prowling outside the house.

“I’ll explain on the way up,” she says, stroking the plastic robot with her thumb as if it were a holy relic. “I think I know where Oren is.”

AS I FOLLOW Mattie up the stairs she explains in a hushed whisper something she calls “the game.”

“Caleb loved to play hide-and-seek. It was his favorite game and he didn’t get to play a lot of games. My parents . . . they were old by the time Caleb showed up—a change-of-life baby, some people called him. A mistake, others said.”

“That’s mean,” I say.

“People are mean. I expect you’ve learned that, Alice. Caleb didn’t have many friends. My mother didn’t like for him to bring other kids home—too much mess, she said—or to go to the neighbors’ houses. When I was growing up my father would read to me, teach me about the stars and trees and birds, but by the time Caleb came along he had less patience.” She pauses and I suspect there’s more to the story that she’s leaving out, but I don’t press her. There’s plenty I’d want to leave out of my story too.

“So I played with him. In the summer we would play hide-and-seek for hours out in the fields and woods. He got so good at it that he scared me sometimes, disappearing for hours. I made him agree to a place he’d always come back to if I couldn’t find him in an hour—home base, we called it—and he started leaving clues there. At first they were pretty simple, like ‘I’m with the pips’ for the apple orchard, but after we saw the first Star Wars movie he started mapping out whole adventures for the characters.”

“Oren did that too,” I say. “I think it was easier pretending to be a rebel Jedi hiding from Darth Vader than a scared little boy hiding from his asshole father.”

We’ve reached the door to Caleb’s room. It’s closed, though I don’t remember closing it. Mattie turns to me, the flashlight lighting up her face like a fright mask. Despite the scary shadows on her face her eyes look kinder than they have since I pulled Oren’s arm. “Of course it was. The game got more complicated the summer Caleb was ten. I was away at graduate school. When I came back I knew right away that things were . . . different. My mother, who’d always been a compulsive cleaner, had gotten crazy. She’d mop the kitchen floor and then forget she’d just cleaned it and start all over again. She was always yelling at Caleb not to track in mud, not to make too much noise, not to move things around—”

“Not to move things around?” I ask, thinking of Oren’s poltergeist.

“She was imagining it,” Mattie says with a sigh. “She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I tried to talk to my father about her but he was too busy with his own worries. Some of his past cases were being reviewed by the state . . .” She pauses again and I guess this is something else she’s leaving out. I let her. I’m getting impatient with this story; I want to find Oren.

“And . . . ?” I prompt.

“So he was holed up in his study poring over his files all day and late into the night. He told me my mother was just high-strung and Caleb was just going through a phase. The thing is not to coddle the boy.”

Mattie’s voice lowers on this last part and I shiver. It doesn’t even sound like her. It sounds like some hard-ass judge.

“I tried to keep Caleb busy and out of their way. The third Star Wars movie had just come out.” Her voice softens. “I took him to see it three times. Each time we came back the game became more complicated—there was a whole plot having to do with Han Solo on Endor with the Ewoks . . . well, you can imagine. That’s when he hid Yoda down in the hollow behind Stewart’s.”

It takes me half a second to realize what she’s saying and then I feel as cold as if we were still standing in that frozen hollow. “Like the one Oren found? You think it was the same Yoda? But how . . . ?”

“I don’t know,” Mattie says. “Maybe it’s just that two boys in the same situation think the same.” She sounds unsure but goes on. “Caleb was straying farther and farther from home. I was afraid that he was going to run away. We started playing in the house more. That’s when he found the house inside the house.”

“That’s what Oren wrote in his note. What does it mean?”

Instead of answering me Mattie opens the door. Even though the electricity’s out, the room has a muted glow: a Milky Way of plastic glow-in-the-dark stars across the ceiling, walls, and even the floor, hundreds of them. Mattie walks into the center of the room, her face tilted up to the ceiling, turning around in a slow circle as if she’s as weirded out by the spectacle as I am. I kneel and check under the bed, just in case, but Oren’s not there. When I get up I find Mattie running her hand along a pattern of stars on the wall.

“That’s the same pattern that’s on all the windows,” I say. “Does it mean something?”

“It’s the constellation Virgo,” she says, her voice small and far away.

“Was that Caleb’s zodiac sign?”

“No,” Mattie says, “it stands for Justice. It’s a story from mythology that my father liked to tell.” She’s still tracing the pattern of stars with her fingertips. Then she looks down at her feet. There are stars there too, but the pattern is interrupted by an old rag rug. She picks it up and flings it aside. There’s the pattern again, pointing toward the floor under the bed.

“Wow, Caleb really went to town with these stick-on stars,” I say, just to be saying something. It creeps me out that the stars point under the bed.

Mattie shakes her head. “These ones on the floor weren’t here before.”

“But then who . . . ,” I begin, but then I stop at a sound from downstairs. Mattie hears it too. Breaking glass.

“Come on.” Mattie pushes me to the floor and begins scrambling under the bed. It’s crazy; we’ll never both fit under there. There’s got to be a better place to hide.

“Where the hell are we going?” I demand as Mattie pushes me against the far wall under the bed.

“To the house inside the house,” she says as the wall gives way and I begin to fall.