The Night Visitors

Chapter Thirty-Two Mattie

FRANK IS TURNING back to me when the hook hits him and he falls into my arms. I catch him like I can save him, but I heard that blow to his head and know I can’t. Still, I let him down gently to the ground, where the flashlight lies and shows me his face. There is still a flicker of life in his eyes—and the oddest expression. Not horror. Not surprise. But something I haven’t seen on Frank’s face since the night we got caught in his father’s car. Love.

“Oh, Frank!” I cry. There’s so much I want to tell him, so much I want to explain, but his eyes are already clouding over and his weight settles heavier into my arms. He’s gone.

But what is left is that boy he once was. The hard lines of the man he became fall away. His jaw softens, the scowl lines around his eyes vanish. I’m looking down at the boy who coaxed me into his daddy’s car forty-five years ago.

When he pulled up in the Stewart’s parking lot in his father’s cruiser, I told him he was crazy. Your father is the police chief, Frank Barnes, and this is government property.

Stop being the judge’s daughter for five minutes, Mattie Lane, and get in. It’s too goddamned cold for the hollow tonight.

He was right about that. There’d been a sudden cold snap the way it happened sometimes in the Catskills, banishing summer in one fell swoop. The air smelled like woodsmoke and apples. School would start in a week, and then there’d be no nights at the hollow anymore. I’d be stuck inside with my carping mother and judgmental father and the cold that was between them.

Frank’s smile, though, made me feel warm. I got in the car. Where are we going? I asked as he peeled out of the Stewart’s lot.

A surprise, he told me.

We drove up into the mountains on an old lumber road, one I’d never been on. Frank had to stop and get out to unhook a chain strung across the road. NO TRESPASSING, a sign on it said. STATE LAND.

You’ve just added trespassing to your crimes, young man, I said.

I plan to plead insanity. You’ve driven me crazy, Mattie Lane.

I punched him in the arm and told him that was the corniest thing I’d ever heard. But I couldn’t stop smiling the whole way up that rutted unpaved road. It felt like we were the only two people in the world, alone on that road with the trees arching over us as if they were shielding us from the rest of the world.

And then suddenly the road opened up. Frank braked and we came to a squealing stop just feet away from a sheer drop. In front of us lay a dark expanse like the void of outer space. Then Frank killed the headlights and that void filled with a million stars. It felt like we were in a spaceship gazing out on the far reaches of the universe. It felt like we were the first two people to step foot on the continent. It felt like Frank Barnes had just handed me my own private galaxy.

I knew when I saw it I had to show it to you, Frank said. It’s like—

The best present anyone has ever given me, I said.

Frank didn’t say anything for a minute and when he did his voice was hoarse. I wanted you to remember this . . . in case my father makes good on his threat to send me to military school—

He won’t! I’ll make my dad convince him not to.

But just in case. If we’re apart I want you to look at the stars and think about me. I know how much you love your constellations.

No more than I love you, Frank Barnes. And then I kissed him, before I could feel embarrassed for telling a boy I loved him. Before he could feel awkward and think that he was supposed to say it too.

But I didn’t need to worry. I love you too, Matt, he said.

Somehow we ended up in the backseat. All summer we’d been exploring the fringes of this feeling, the boundaries of skin and clothes and lips. But up here among the stars it didn’t feel like there were any boundaries. He slid his hand under my bra and I unclasped it. I started unbuttoning his shirt and he pulled it over his head, shedding a button on the cracked vinyl seats. But when I touched the metal button on his jeans he stopped me and leaned back.

We don’t have to, he said. You’re two years younger than me. I can wait.

Who said I could? I asked, drawing him back down to me.

I have always felt grateful that Chief Barnes found us after. We were dressed again and climbing back into the front seat. And I’ve never regretted what we did that night. Not even after what it brought down on both of us. How could I regret that Frank was my first? How could I regret Caleb?

The only thing I regret, looking down at the face of that boy, is that I never had the courage to make Frank see that. And now I never will.

I gently close Frank’s eyes. Then I lift my head to call out to Alice and Oren.

There is a boy standing in front of me.

At first I think it’s Oren, but this boy’s hair is light like Caleb’s. But it isn’t Caleb either. This boy is six years older than Caleb will ever be. It’s Frank, aged sixteen, looking exactly as he had that last night, wearing the same Led Zeppelin T-shirt under a flannel shirt that’s missing the button that came off when he tore it over his head.

I cover my mouth with one hand and reach for him with the other. He holds out his hand too, but not for me. A wash of cold moves through me but it’s not a bad cold. This is the cold of the water in the hollow and the first cold snap at the end of the summer. It smells like woodsmoke and apples. I can even see a bit of smoke curling around me, forming into another boy, who reaches for Frank’s hand and then turns to look at me.

Caleb smiles at me and then turns to Frank. They smile at each other, my two lost boys. They turn away from me, then, but Caleb looks over his shoulder one last time and mouths two words.

Bye, Matt.

They walk toward the open barn door, where the snow is swirling around like a million stars. They step into that spinning galaxy and become part of it, their shapes dissolving into shining atoms, each atom a star in a new constellation that someone, looking up into the night sky, might see and make up a story about: a story about a father and son and mistaken identities and missed chances and vengeance so terrible that they were pursued by terrible furies and a goddess had to step in and say, Enough! In the play my father told me about that goddess renamed the furies of vengeance the Kindly Ones. That’s what they’d call that constellation. But I’d call it Forgiveness.