The Night Visitors

Chapter Four Mattie

BETWEEN THEM THEY eat half a dozen eggs and a dozen pancakes. It’s a good thing I picked up milk and eggs and butter at Stewart’s. Had I already been thinking of bringing them back here? Doreen will give me a talking-to, but it’s just for this one night. I’ll take them to St. Alban’s tomorrow.

I load the pancakes with bananas, nuts, and chocolate chips and slather them with butter and maple syrup. The boy drinks a quart of milk and Alice finishes the thermos of coffee. I don’t ask them any questions other than “More maple syrup?” and “Another glass of milk?” I’d meant it when I told Alice she didn’t have to sing for their supper.

When the boy’s eyes start to droop I hustle them both upstairs. I put them in the yellow room at the front of the house, my mother’s old sewing room, though years ago I gave all the sewing stuff to a woman from Saugerties whose husband was serving a sentence for sexual assault. She’d used the supplies—along with a loan from the Delphi Rotary Club—to start a quilt shop and alterations business. She also runs quilting workshops at the domestic violence shelter where women use scraps of their old clothes to make “New Beginning” quilts. Even if our lives have been torn apart, she likes to say, we can still use the pieces to make something beautiful.

The only furniture left in the sewing room is the daybed where my mother used to take her afternoon naps. It’s a trundle, so Alice and Oren can both sleep on it, but there’s also a large walk-in closet with a futon. I point out the sleeping options, give them an armful of blankets and towels, and let them sort out who sleeps where.

The boy chooses the closet. Victims of abuse, I read in one of our training manuals, sometimes like to be in rooms that have only one access point. He tucks his backpack into the far corner, lays his head down, and is instantly asleep.

Alice kneels down to take off his shoes and coat. Beneath the coat he’s wearing a Star Wars sweatshirt. Alice wrinkles her nose. “In case you’re revising your opinion of my parenting skills, I’ll have you know he’s refused to take off this sweatshirt since we got it two months ago.”

“My brother, Caleb, wore a Luke Skywalker T-shirt for three months straight after we saw the first movie. Here, give it to me and I’ll wash it. I’ll have it back to you before he wakes up in the morning.”

She peels it off him and passes it to me, making a face, but I’m looking at Oren’s arms. There’s a bruise on his right forearm and one on his left biceps. She sees me looking, tilts up her chin, which is when I notice the marks on her throat. I could ask her about the abuse, but I sense that she’s too tired to talk tonight so instead I say, “There’s a clean nightgown if you’d like me to wash your clothes too,” but she shakes her head. I imagine she’s used to sleeping in her clothes. A nightgown makes you vulnerable. Before I go I turn on the night-light even though the overhead’s still on. It casts a pattern of stars on the ceiling. I noticed the book of Greek myths sticking out of the backpack. I could tell Oren the stories of the constellations—

But they’ll be gone tomorrow.

The convent will be the best place for them. The boy’s going to need counseling. I saw the way he twitched when Alice touched him. And Alice will need job training. She looks like she’s in her late twenties, so she would have been a teenager when she had Oren. I’m betting a teenage pregnancy followed by dropping out, a relationship with an older man, maybe a drug dealer, maybe a pimp . . . She wouldn’t have had time for school. At least there aren’t any track marks that I can see. I could get her into a vocational training program at Ulster Community College, far from the crime and drugs of Newburgh.

Downstairs, the kitchen looks like Boston after the Great Molasses Flood, but the smell of butter and maple syrup makes it worth it. I notice that Alice’s peacoat has slipped off the kitchen chair. When I pick it up a piece of paper flutters out of the pocket. I bend down to pick it up. It’s a bus ticket. I start to jam it back in her pocket when I notice the departure city stamped on it. It isn’t Newburgh, as she told Doreen, it’s Ridgewood, New Jersey. Well, Alice wouldn’t be the first woman to come to Sanctuary who didn’t tell the whole truth about where she came from. I’m a little surprised, though: Ridgewood is an affluent suburb. But it’s none of my business. I tuck the ticket stub back in Alice’s pocket.

I carry Oren’s sweatshirt to the washing machine in the mudroom and turn on the machine. I add soap powder and throw in the towel I used to rub down Dulcie before—and check to make sure I haven’t left her out again, but she’s sleeping soundly in her dog bed. What will it be next, I wonder, forgetting to pay the bills? Wandering in my nightie down Main Street? Leaving the gas on? Even the decision to bring Alice and Oren back here is probably a sign that my judgment is slipping. And really, how can I think I’m fit to watch after an abused woman and child when I can’t take care of my beloved old dog?

I pick up the sweatshirt and hold it to my face, inhaling its boy smell, as if it will smell of Caleb. It’s just a coincidence that this boy is the same age that Caleb was when he died. Just a coincidence that they both love Star Wars. Just a coincidence that I felt that weight against my leg earlier tonight when I got the call—

I shiver, remembering that phantom pressure, so like the feeling of Caleb leaning against me on the couch when we watched Saturday morning cartoons or whenever my father yelled at him.

You’ll never learn to stand on your own two feet if you’re always running to your sister.

The shiver turns into full-out shaking. It’s one thing to hear my mother’s voice, another to hear my father’s. I usually do a better job of drowning it out.

I stuff the sweatshirt into the half-full washer . . . and something clangs against the metal drum. I’m reluctant to search the boy’s pockets but it could be some piece of electronics that will get destroyed in the wash. I reach my hand in and grasp cold metal. When I pull my hand out I see that I’m holding a six-inch bowie hunting knife stained with blood.

I put the knife down on top of the dryer carefully, as if it’s a gun that might go off. The sweatshirt has already been sucked down under the churning soapy water. If there’s blood on it it’s too late to save it as—

What? Evidence?

Evidence of what?

Evidence of something that sweet ten-year-old boy did?

Or of something his mother did that he’s protecting her from?

The situation is worse than Doreen or I thought. The question is what to do about it. I could confront Alice with the knife and try to convince her to go to the police and file an assault charge. Anything she or Oren did would most likely be considered self-defense. Oren’s father would be put away in jail and they would be free to live their lives.

Until he got out. I’ve seen convicted offenders of abuse serve as little as six months on aggravated assault charges. And what if Alice and Oren can’t plead self-defense? What if Alice, tired of being hit and bullied, struck out first? It wouldn’t be the first time a woman took a proactive stand against abuse and got convicted of assault. She could end up in jail and Oren could end up in his father’s custody or foster care. And if it was Oren who stabbed his father . . . he could end up in juvenile detention and I know all too well what that can do to a kid.

All of these possibilities swirl through my head with the same murky force of the washer cycle, which has stalled because the tub is now half full and the lid is still open. I think about that boy upstairs—the first boy who’s slept in this house since Caleb—and know what I have to do. I drop the knife into the water and close the lid.

THERE’S LITTLE CHANCE of sleep after that. I tackle the kitchen, cleaning up the pancake mess and moving on to the next layer of grime that’s built up. Then I make up muffins for the morning. As the smell of baking wafts through the house, stirring memories, I sweep the downstairs, the fancy parlor that’s now full of stacks of old clothes. I always take the donation bags home to wash the clothes and sort them by size and gender (although Doreen says that’s very heteronormative of me). I find some jeans and T-shirts that I think will fit Oren and packages of unopened underwear and socks for both of them. I buy them at the dollar store in a wide variety of sizes. No one wants to wear hand-me-down underwear.

I keep the book donations in the dining room. Boxes of unsorted books on the Chippendale chairs and piles of sorted books on the long, polished mahogany table: romance novels with lurid covers, mystery novels with shadowy figures, dog-eared sci-fi novels with rockets and three-eyed aliens, horror novels with screaming faces. Doreen accuses me of reading all the books first and it’s true that I do keep a pile for myself, but I also keep an eye out for books that we can sell to an antiquarian bookseller I know over in Hobart. I also like to monitor the distribution to our network of centers so the group foster homes get the good children’s books, Horizon gets the good young adult, and the shelters have a wide selection of genres.

I remember seeing a book on constellations that I bet Oren will like, but it’s not in the stacks of books on the table or in the boxes waiting for distribution. That’s when I remember. It’s not a donated book; it’s a book my father owned.

The door to my father’s study is at the end of the dining room and it’s the only door in the house that locks. It’s an old-fashioned lock that can be bolted from either side with a key that I keep in a Waterford bowl on the sideboard. I take it out now and turn it in the lock, the tumble of metal cylinders echoing in the pit of my stomach, the creak of the door feeble as my own step on the threshold.

Well? Are you coming in or not, mouse? my father would say when I hesitated in the doorway.

The taste of dust hits the back of my mouth like a hand reaching down my throat and I cough. There’s only one lamp in the room, the heavy brass banker’s lamp with the green glass shade. It’s been so long since I’ve been in here that the bulb could well have burned out. I have to venture several feet in darkness from the wedge of light at the door to the lamp.

Caleb loved to play a game called Lava in which you pretended the floor was a boiling pit of magma that would instantly melt your flesh down to the bones. You had to navigate through the house by stepping from one piece of furniture to another. That’s what it feels like to step from the wedge of light into darkness, like my flesh will turn to jelly, but I do it, reaching out to find the lamp . . .

Something cool brushes against my outstretched hand.

The one escape clause in Lava was the lifeline. You could toss a rope (we used the gold silk cord from one of my mother’s bathrobes) to a stranded partner and he or she could walk it like a tightrope across the perilous lava field. That’s what this feels like, even though I know it’s just a draft of cold air from the uninsulated windows that need to be recaulked.

I step across the dark expanse and reach for the lamp. My hand brushes against something and I hear a clear musical chime that reverberates in my chest. It’s only the scales, I tell myself as I work my hand down from the smooth glass shade to the hard brass knob that turns the light on. The bulb crackles and flickers, threatens to go out, then steadies weakly into a pool of pale green light.

I haven’t been in this room in months. Dust lies everywhere, like pond scum, coating the thick leather blotter, the desk, the glass-fronted bookcases, the cracked leather chair. I trail my finger in it as I come around the desk, tracing a spiral pattern like some Celtic charm against ghosts. I use my sleeve to wipe off the seat of the chair and sit down, the old leather creaking, and then I reach across the desk to still the glass scales that hang from the bronze statuette of Justice that sits at the center of my father’s desk. She’s part of a pen set representing the state seal of New York that was given to my father by the New York State Bar Association on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his judgeship. There’s a plaque between her and another figure, Liberty: Liberty and Justice, my father would say when I sat in his lap and played with the scales, you can’t have one without the other. Which confused me sometimes, because so often my father’s brand of justice involved revoking some bit of liberty.

I turn away from the figures on the desk to look at the tall glass-fronted bookcase. My eyes immediately go to the seam in the wall behind the case where there was once a door, but I make myself focus on the case, trailing my hand over the dust-coated glass doors until I come to the fifth shelf from the floor. I rap the glass twice, giving any mice fair warning, and pull the glass door up.

The books are dustless behind the glass, their tooled leather spines as cool and clean as dried bones. I find what I’m looking for on the far right of the shelf, a tall slim book bound in blue the color of a summer night’s sky with silver lettering the color of starlight. An Astral Mythology: A Child’s Guide to the Night Sky. It’s an 1890 first edition of a translation of the third century B.C. writer Eratosthenes. According to my antiquarian friend in Hobart it’s worth several thousand dollars. I could have the roof fixed with the proceeds. Or replace the windows. Or buy a new boiler for Sanctuary.

It will be perfect for the boy.

I get up to go, reaching for the lamp, and notice a pattern in the dust—a random splatter of dots that might be the footprints of mice or a new constellation in the night sky. It’s all how you look at it, my father would say. Some people look up at the night sky and see random scatter, others read stories in the chaos. That’s what I do when I adjudicate a case. I make sense out of chaos.

I turn the light off before I can start reading stories in the dust and walk quickly out of the office, locking the door behind me. I go back into the kitchen and lay the book on the table, then take the muffins out of the oven and put them to cool on a metal rack beside the book. I can hear the thump of the washing machine finishing its cycle, so I go into the mudroom, pull out the sweatshirt and towel, put them in the dryer, and then fish out the knife. It shines clean and cold in the first rays of dawn coming in through the window. I slide it under a pile of blankets stacked on the dryer.

Dulcie stirs and stands by the door. I let her out and step outside for a moment. The storm has passed and the sky is lightening in the east, an orange glow that reflects off the newly fallen snow. There’s nothing better than a clear morning after a snowstorm, and I am filled with an unaccustomed sense of hope, of things beginning. I’ll tell the boy I found his knife and ask him if I can keep it. For safekeeping, I’ll say. I’ll tell him that whatever he and his mother did to get away is their business. The only thing that matters is that they’ve gotten away.

I go back inside. Feed Dulcie. Put on the kettle. Turn on the radio. While the water is boiling I hear the muffled voice of the news announcer. One of the reasons I love this NPR station is that the newscasters speak in such subdued murmurs I can usually tune them out, but this morning a word snags my attention. Ridgewood. The town on Alice’s bus ticket.

As I listen, sunlight swells over the window ledge above the kitchen sink, staining the pitted porcelain and scarred wooden counter a lurid blood orange. A body’s been found in Ridgewood, New Jersey. A man in his thirties, stabbed to death in his home.