The Night Visitors

Chapter Thirty-Five Alice

AT FIRST I think they’ve all forgotten me. A social worker comes and takes Oren, and I’m put in an ugly room with uncomfortable plastic chairs, dreary paint, and a stale odor of burned coffee and sweat. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life in rooms like this one, waiting for one hearing or another, waiting to find out where I’ll be moved next, like I’m a piece on a playing board. Not even an interesting piece, like the hat or dog in Monopoly, but one of those broken chips you use when the original pieces get lost. I’m not one of the original pieces that come with the game.

Then a young Latina woman comes in and brings a whole different climate with her. The click of her heels on the linoleum seems to wake up the room and her smart red suit overcomes the dreary paint job. She takes my hand in both of hers and tells me her name is Anita Esteban and that Mattie’s told her all about me and she’s going to take care of everything.

“Where’s Oren?” I ask.

“Child Welfare is placing him in a temporary residence.” Her phone buzzes and she holds one finger up, looks down at the screen, then smiles. “Okay, this is good news, just give me a second.” She goes out again, talking fast into her phone, leaving me with the dreary paint and stale air, and I feel deflated. Oren’s already been swept up by the system. I’m not his mother. I have no claim on him. I’ve got a record. We’re just two pieces caught in the cogs of a machine, being moved farther and farther apart—

But then Anita Esteban comes back in smiling. “Good news. Oren’s been placed at Horizon House, which is an at-risk youth center run at St. Alban’s—”

“The convent?” I say sharply. “He won’t like that. He was scared by that building.”

“Hmm,” Anita says. “It can look a little daunting from the outside, but it’s a good place. The best part is that in the other wing of the building they run a women’s shelter, and I got you in there. That is, if you want it. You could see Oren—”

“Yes,” I say, “that’s perfect. But what about Mattie?”

“She had to run out because of an emergency with her friend, but she sent me to take care of you.” Anita smiles at me. “Don’t worry. Mattie saved my life. That’s what she does. There are hundreds of people in this county who owe their lives to her. We’re all going to help her and you and the boy. Okay?” She takes both my hands and looks into my eyes. “The first thing I’m going to do is get you in a better room. This place stinks. You okay with that?”

I nod because my throat is closed up and I’m afraid I’ll start bawling if I speak. I feel like I’ve just gotten a Get Out of Jail Free card and landed on the big ladder that takes you to the top in Chutes and Ladders. I feel like I’m part of the game.

IN THE DAYS that follow, Mattie marshals an army of lawyers and social workers on Oren’s and my behalf. She does all this even though her friend Doreen is in the hospital recovering from a failed suicide attempt. She does all this even though her own case is looking difficult. No one seems to mind that it’s the week before Christmas or that everyone is still digging out from the blizzard. Whoever Mattie calls shows up to help. A man from DSS visits to help me fill out paperwork for Section 8 housing. Alana, the volunteer I was so mean to, brings a basketful of clothes for me. An old woman from Saugerties shows up to alter them for me. While she sews she tells me her story.

“My husband was mean as dirt and hit me and our kids regularly. I blamed it on the work he did—he was a guard at a juvenile detention center—and I blamed it on myself for not knowing how to stop him. Then he got fired because he raped a girl at the facility where he worked. I was grateful when he went to prison—and I was grateful when he killed himself two years in. But then I found out that we wouldn’t get his pension. I’d like to say things got better, but the next ten years were a struggle. I drank. I hit my kids. I would have lost them, but this social worker showed up at my hearing and recommended me for a counseling group at Sanctuary. I thought I’d just go along with it to get my kids back . . . but then I started hearing the stories of other women who’d been through the things I’d been through and worse. I told the group one day that my dream was to open a quilt shop. The next day I found all these sewing supplies on my doorstep and Mattie Lane called to say that the Rotary Club was going to give me a business loan to open a quilt shop. It changed my life. It wasn’t just the handout that did it, it was . . .” Her voice falters.

“Someone believing in you,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. Then she put down her needle and thread and leaned forward. “You’re not on your own here, Alice. There are people here who believe in you.”

Only after she left did I put it all together. A guard who raped a teenager at a juvenile detention center. Mattie. Mattie had found the wife of her rapist and had helped her put her life back together.

And that old woman was right; I wasn’t on my own at St. Alban’s and it’s not a bad place. The nuns are kind and quiet. The other women are kind and loud. We have our own common room and kitchen. We cook dinner together and watch movies and talk late into the night. It’s what I imagine college must be like.

The best part is that I see Oren every day. He looks well fed and happy. He’s also got new clothes, including a brand-new Star Wars sweatshirt that I suspect Mattie got for him.

Mattie comes every night. She brings bags of groceries, toiletries, and clothes—not just for me but for all the women and children at St. Alban’s. All the nuns and volunteers know her, and she gets to break whatever rules she wants, like getting Oren permission to come over to the women’s wing to watch movies at night. She brings all the DVDs of the Star Wars movies and we have a marathon.

Mattie tells me that Doreen has a friend at Children’s Court working on my petition for custody. It may take a while but they think they will prevail in the end.

“Is Doreen okay?” I ask.

Mattie nods, her face tightening. “She will be. It helps her to have your case to work on.” Then she tells me her plans for me. She’s got a friend who runs a B and B in Mount Tremper, on the outskirts of Delphi, who needs a housekeeper. The job comes with a cottage out back. It’s not much, but it’s a place that Social Services will deem suitable for Oren to live. She’s got another friend at Ulster Community College who can talk to me about going back to school. She’s even got a friend (Well, Wayne actually, she says, blushing) who has an old car I can use.

Anita Esteban was right. Mattie has hundreds of friends and she’s calling on them all for my sake.

“What about your case?” I ask.

She sighs and I think it’s going to be bad news. “When the police searched Frank’s house and computer they found evidence that he’s been taking money from Pine Crest for delivering young people to a judge in Albany who always sends them to Pine Crest. That kind of backs up my story, so Anita’s hopeful I won’t be charged.”

“You don’t sound happy about that,” I say.

She turns to me, her violet eyes shining in the reflection of the television set. “How could I have not seen what had happened to Frank?”

It takes me a second to realize she’s really asking. That she wants my opinion. I look at her, at this woman who has spent a lifetime helping the most powerless and helpless people, who has built a safety net wide enough to catch me and Oren in our most vulnerable moment, and I know what to say. “You see the best in people, Mattie. You see what they once were and could be again if only someone would give them a chance. Look at what you’ve seen in me.”

Mattie smiles, transforming her face into that beautiful teenager in the Polaroid photograph. She puts her arm around me. “Oh, that was easy, Alice. With you I see a woman who got stuck in a bad situation to save a little boy. I see a mother who loves her son. I’d have to be a lot older and blinder not to see that.”

Then she wipes a tear away and turns back to the set, her arm still around me.

That night when I’m putting Oren to bed (another privilege Mattie has sweet-talked the nuns into giving me), he says to me, “I was wrong about this being a bad place. The bad things that happened here were a long time ago. Everyone here now is really nice. Mattie’s friend Wayne said he’s going to bring his telescope one night. They’re both coming tomorrow to take us to the Cookie Walk. We’re going to carry lanterns and walk through the village and eat as many cookies as we want. You’ll come, won’t you?”

I tell him I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I don’t ask him about the bad things that happened here a long time ago or how he knows about them. Instead I go the next day at four o’clock—the best time to catch her, Mattie has told me—to Sister Martine to ask her instead.

“I guess you could say that bad things did happen here,” she tells me. We’re in her office having tea and “biscuits,” which turn out to be cookies. “St. Alban’s ran a home for ‘wayward girls,’ as they were called then, from the 1890s through the 1970s. I came here in the 1960s and the first thing I did was read all the files. It was hair-raising, let me tell you; the maternal and infant mortality rate was five times the contemporary national average. It was clear no one cared very much about those girls and their babies. ‘It is perhaps a blessing,’ one of my predecessors had written, ‘that the poor doves go so quickly to their maker, considering what lives lie ahead of them.’”

“Wow,” I say, “that’s cold.”

“As the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno,” Sister Martine responds. “I tried to improve conditions. I enlisted local doctors and health care advocates, wrote many an angry letter to the bishop. But perhaps what helped the most was just changing attitudes toward out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Once it was no longer considered a shameful secret, something to be hidden away, many girls could stay in their own homes rather than come to a place like this. And then, of course, there was Roe v. Wade and girls had other options.”

Sister Martine must see the shock on my face—a nun remarking favorably on abortion?—because she smiles. “I’m not saying it’s the best option, but it certainly did decrease our numbers. So much so that the diocese threatened to shut us down. I pointed out, though, that there were many other ways to help women and children. And of course there were still girls—and women—who needed a safe place to come and have their babies.”

“Mattie,” I say. “She had Caleb here.”

Sister Martine places her hands together in a prayer position and then interlaces her fingers as if she is holding something inside them. “I can’t discuss any of my girls.”

“I understand,” I say, “only, I wondered . . .”

“Yes?” she prods when I hesitate. She opens her hands, palms up, and I have the feeling that I could spill whatever secret I wanted into those hands and it would be protected forever, the weight of it taken off my shoulders.

“I understand you can’t give out anyone else’s record, but what about a person’s own record? The thing is . . . I think I was born here. My adoptive parents lived up here in Ellenville, so I wondered if I have a file and . . . would I be able to see it.”

Sister Martine leans toward me, elbows on her desk, face grave. “Well,” she says, “as you may know, New York is a closed-records state, which is one of the reasons that if you were indeed born here I would not have been able to keep track of you.”

I nod. “When my adoptive parents died I ended up in the foster system. I always thought—”

“That if your birth mother had known she would have come to rescue you?”

“Yes,” I say, embarrassed that she’s guessed my secret fantasy. I look up and see from the look of compassion on her face that she’s guessed my other one. “It’s not Mattie, is it? I’d hoped . . . when I learned she’d had a baby . . .” I stop, unable to go on, all the longing to belong to someone rising up, cutting off the air in my lungs.

“That you were her baby?” Sister Martine says so gently it sounds like a prayer.

I nod, unable to speak.

Sister Martine gets up, comes around the desk, and perches on the edge of it. She takes my hand. “Do you think Mattie Lane could love you and that boy any more than she already does if you were?”

I shake my head, letting loose a couple of tears. “No, but . . .”

“But nothing.” Sister Martine clucks her tongue. “If you want to find your birth parents, I will help you. Mattie will help you. She and I found her own daughter a few years back. She’s happily settled in Buffalo with a family of her own. She’s never looked for her birth mother. She doesn’t need me, Mattie said when I asked if she wanted to make contact. But you do. And if you ask me, you’re the daughter Mattie needs. Just as Oren needs you to be his mother.”

I nod and dry my eyes. Sister Martine gives me a tissue and a glass of water. Then she reminds me that our friends are gathering on the hill to go into town for the Cookie Walk. I get up to go and find myself embraced in Sister Martine’s strong, bony grip. “Go on,” she says. “I’ll be right behind you.”

It occurs to me that Sister Martine needs a few minutes alone to collect herself. What must it feel like to watch a baby she handed over to the world sit in front of her all grown up? Does she wonder what she could have done differently to make my life easier? Will Mattie?

When I get outside I see it’s almost dark, the sky a lovely clear violet, like Mattie’s eyes. I see her standing on the hill with Oren and Wayne and Doreen. They’re all holding lanterns; as I watch, Mattie starts lighting them. Atefeh, the woman from Stewart’s, is there too, with her two kids. When all the lanterns are lit they make a pattern, like a constellation, against the sky. But it feels incomplete.

A few nights ago, when I was putting Oren to bed, he told me something he had read about in a book that Wayne gave him. He said that hundreds of years ago an astronomer had thought there might be stars we couldn’t see. He’d been watching the way stars moved and thought there was an unseen force pulling them into one orbit or another. The astronomer called that force dark stars.

Watching the group, I picture the people who have made them the way they are: Mattie’s parents, Frank, Davis, Wayne’s dumbass brother-in-law, Doreen’s son, Atefeh’s brother and husband. I picture the people who have shaped my life: my birth parents, my adoptive parents, Travis and Lisa, Davis, Mattie, Sister Martine. All the dark stars have brought us to this particular moment and this particular pattern. We may not see them, but they’re always here with us, pulling us out of orbit and bringing us back in.

Oren and Mattie lift their heads at the same moment and, seeing me, grin and wave as if pulled by the same force. I feel its tug too, and move forward to join them.