The Night Visitors

Chapter Thirty Mattie

AS I TURN back to Frank I am praying that I will find that the last few minutes have been a product of my clearly deteriorating mind. Frank, my childhood best friend and first sweetheart, upstanding citizen and protector of justice in the village of Delphi, has not just blown out the brains of an unarmed, restrained man, and therefore it is also not true that his father murdered my family and he helped cover it up.

But as I turn I am also taking the second knife out of my pocket.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, my mother used to say.

When did you ever hope for anything good? my father, weary of her eternal pessimism, would quip back.

In this case the pessimists have it. Frank is aiming the gun at me, a sad but firm set to his face. I throw the knife at his right arm, a trick he taught me, and his shot goes wide, striking the sideboard as I run into the dining room. I slam the door behind me and am reaching for the key in my pocket when a second bullet rips through the door. I turn the lock, pocket the key, and run. Behind me I hear the rattle of the doorknob and then a thud as Frank throws himself at the door. Good luck with that, I think. My father had that door made from a four-inch-thick slab of oak, cut from a tree that had been planted before the Revolutionary War, and fitted with tempered steel hinges. He was a man who liked his privacy, my father.

A shot blows a hole in the lock, followed by a splintering thud. I run out into the foyer and see the open door, snow swirling in, footsteps in the snow on the porch. Alice and Oren have fled to the barn. I have an overwhelming urge to follow them—as I tried to follow Caleb that night—

When Frank hit me over the head. That’s what blacked me out, not a graze from my father’s bullet. Frank had been here. He knew what his father was planning. He’d known as we argued at the hollow.

Another blow to the door sends me up the stairs to get the gun from my bedroom. As I run up I remember the argument we’d had that night. It had started when he accused me of avoiding him all that Christmas break. He was right; I had been avoiding him. But not for the reason he thought.

It’s your parents, isn’t it? They disapprove of me.

Again, there was truth in that. My mother disapproved simply because the Barnes family was not in the same class as the Lanes. The Barnes men are graspers, my father had said one night at dinner, and my mother had chimed in, That Hank Barnes is always hanging on to your coattails, Matthew.

Because they were colluding on taking kickbacks from Pine Crest? Or because Hank Barnes was making sure my father didn’t suspect he was?

“Forgive me, but justice must be served.”

That wasn’t my father’s suicide note; it was part of a letter he’d sent to Hank Barnes.

What does it matter? I think as I reach my room. Either way, the end result was Caleb’s death. He looks back at me now from the photograph on the night table. When he was born, Sister Martine put him in my arms. She told me I didn’t have to go along with what my parents were planning.

What else can I do? I asked her. I’d have to give him up to strangers otherwise.

She had nodded and then said, Your father thinks he is doing the right thing, the just thing, raising your son as his own, and he may be right. But justice isn’t the same as love.

I told her I knew that.

Then she showed me Caleb’s birth certificate and where she’d written in my name. No matter what, she told me, you’re his mother. Don’t ever forget that.

I told her I never would.

When she asked me if she should write down a name for the father, I told her no. She thought it was because I didn’t want to put my rapist’s name down. I let her believe that.

I slide my hand under the mattress and pull out the gun, just as I hear a violent crash from downstairs. I freeze, listening for footsteps, then take the safety off and walk carefully across the floor, avoiding the loose floorboards. Too bad I don’t avoid Dulcie’s paw. She whines as I crush it beneath my foot and I crouch quickly down to soothe her. Did Frank hear? Downstairs I hear his footsteps halt at the bottom of the stairs.

“Mattie,” he calls, his voice soft and tentative. I haven’t heard him say my name like that for thirty-four years. It’s how he said my name that night we met at the hollow.

Mattie, he’d said when he saw me come down the path, his face lit up in the moonlight, you came. In that moment he looked like the boy he’d been before, and all I’d wanted was that boy back again. That summer, the summer Caleb was ten, we’d both been in Delphi for the first time since we were both sent away, and for a little while it was like we were fourteen and sixteen again. We’d spent the hot days swimming in the hollow and playing games in the woods with Caleb. Caleb had brought out the boy in Frank again, the boy who’d coaxed and sweet-talked me into the back of his father’s car. I’d gladly given myself to him when I was fourteen and again when I was twenty-five. I could tell that boy about Caleb. I could tell him we could raise Caleb with Caleb’s little sister.

I knew the baby I was carrying was a girl. I’d known since two weeks before Christmas, but I’d been afraid to see Frank because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Keep the baby? Give it up the way I’d given up Caleb, only worse, to strangers? I didn’t even know if that would be worse than watching Caleb grow up under my mother’s critical harping and my father’s hard sense of justice. He was even harder on Caleb than he’d been on me. Maybe because he was a boy, or because he thought he was the child of a rapist. Would he have been easier on him if he’d known I was already pregnant when I was raped? That Caleb was Frank’s? Maybe. But he wouldn’t have been easier on Frank.

Maybe, though, it would have made a difference to Frank. Maybe he would have grown up differently if he’d known Caleb was his.

The night I went to meet Frank at the hollow I thought I could fix things. He’d called me and asked me to meet him. That had to mean he still cared. And when I saw that lit-up look on his face, and heard the soft way he said my name, I was ready to tell him everything. Frank had already taken his police exam and been hired as a deputy by the town. I would have my MSW in the spring and I knew that I could get a job at the youth center in Kingston where I’d interned. We could manage. And if my parents fought me on Caleb I had that birth certificate. I’d fight them until he was mine. I would never leave him again.

It may have been that determination that Frank saw on my face as I came into the moonlit hollow. He might have read it as defiance and Frank never did well with defiance. It awoke something contrary within him. I could see his face harden against me.

I didn’t think you were coming, he said.

Of course I came, I should have said, I love you.

But I have always had a streak of the contrary myself. (You’d argue that the sky was gray on a sunlit day, my mother would say. My little lawyer, my father would call me with pride—until I argued with him.)

I said I would, I told Frank instead. Did you think I’d break my word?

You’ve been avoiding me since you got home from college. It’s your father, isn’t it? I know he disapproves of me.

I’m not a child anymore, I said, irked that he thought I was that weak-willed. I don’t have to do what he says. I’m getting my MSW in the spring.

I only meant that I could get a job and support myself—and our child—but my going away to college and then graduate school had been a sore point. Two years at Ulster Community had been good enough for him.

I suppose you’ve found a new boyfriend there. A college boy—

That’s right, Frank. He gave me his letter sweater and everything. Honest to God, I’m sick of the attitude around here that anything that doesn’t come from this godforsaken backwater is suspect. God forbid anyone take advantage of New York City—

Then why don’t you go back there?

I will. Maybe I’ll go right now—

As I turned to go he reached out for me, but I could already feel tears stinging my eyes and I didn’t want him to see me cry. If he did I would end up telling him I was pregnant. And then he would “do the right thing” and it was suddenly clear to me that we weren’t right for each other. We couldn’t go five minutes without bickering. We’d end up like my parents, fighting like cats and dogs every day of our lives. What good would that do Caleb? What chance would it give the baby I was carrying?

I wrenched my arm out of his grip and ran out of the hollow. I ran all the way home, through the woods so I wouldn’t meet him on the road. I saw his truck pass by, looking for me—

To stop me from coming back while his father killed my family, I realize now. When he didn’t find me, he must have driven ahead to warn his father. Maybe he really did plan to save Caleb and me, but when it came to a choice between my knowing what his father was doing and saving Caleb, he hit me over the head. How could he have been sure he wouldn’t kill me?

Clearly he’s ready to kill me now. But he hasn’t come up the stairs yet. I listen for his footsteps, back braced against the wall, gun gripped in both hands. But I don’t hear any footsteps at all. All I hear is the wind.

Coming from the open front door. He’s not coming after me; he’s gone after Alice and Oren in the barn.