The Night Visitors

Chapter Six Mattie

ALICE TELLS THE story against a sound track of metal scraping against ice. We can see Oren laboring with the shovel outside the window, a diminutive figure in a red parka, peaked blue hat, and too-big snow boots. We both keep our eyes on him as she talks, as if we’re afraid he might vanish if we don’t.

“I was really young when I met Davis,” she begins. I’ve listened to hundreds of these stories over the years and they always begin the same. I met a man. He seemed so nice. He treated me so special. “He seemed so grown-up, and it felt cool that a man that age would pay attention to me. I never knew my father.”

She pauses, takes a sip of coffee. I picture myself standing on the threshold of my father’s study waiting for that imperious Come!

“So I guess I had daddy issues.” She laughs. I smile. Say nothing. Wait. “And Davis was cool. He’s a musician—or at least he was until I got pregnant with Oren and he had to take a day job. I guess that’s when things started going bad—not that I regret having Oren for a second; he’s the best thing in my life, you know . . . or maybe you don’t. Do you have kids?”

I’m familiar enough with this tactic of deflecting attention not to answer the question. “I can see how you feel about Oren. He’s a great kid.”

Most mothers, you tell them their kids are great, they beam right back at you. But Alice seems to shrink into herself a little more and hunch over her coffee cup, as if she resents my pointing this out. There’s something off about these two. Him calling her Alice, for instance. Not that plenty of kids, especially only children, don’t try out their parents’ first names, but there was the way she looked up at me when he said it, like she was wondering what I made of it. I can sense that same hesitation now, like she’s checking out what I think of each thing she says, whether I’m buying it. Well, I’m not going to give her that. I stay quiet, and after a moment’s pause she goes on. “He’s so smart it’s scary sometimes. Davis says he gets it from him, but he’s way smarter than Davis. And Davis knows it. It started making him . . . jealous. Isn’t that weird? A parent being jealous of his own child.”

“Depends on the parent,” I say, trying not to be drawn in. My mother quips back, Depends on the child.

“Well, I thought it was weird. It made him really hard on Oren. He was always prodding him, trying to prove he was better—than his own kid! When I objected he’d say I was too soft on him, that he’d grow up a sissy. Then when Oren would come to my defense Davis would say I’d poisoned Oren against him.”

“Come to your defense how?” I ask, not willing to let that slide past.

“When Davis hit me.” She holds up her chin as if I’m going to challenge her. “Oren would try to stop him.” She pulls up her shirtsleeve and shows me a line of white ridges on her forearm. Burn marks. “He started punishing me when Oren was at school. I tried not to let Oren see them but there’s not much that gets past him. He stopped going to school—and he liked school. He’d pretend to be sick, and when Davis made him go anyway he’d sneak back. Aren’t you going to ask me why I didn’t leave?”

“I imagine it’s because you had no place to go,” I say.

All the muscles in Alice’s face harden as if I’d struck her. She’s trying not to cry, I realize. “No, I didn’t,” she says defiantly. “I grew up in the foster system, so I don’t have anyone. But even if I did, Davis said he’d kill me if I tried to leave him.”

No matter how often I have heard some variation on this threat, I am still amazed by the possessiveness of the abuser who tells a woman ten times a day that she’s worthless but still won’t let her go. Amazed, but not surprised. Nor am I surprised to learn that Alice grew up in foster care. She has the wariness I’ve seen in dozens of kids in the system, as if the ground beneath their feet’s not steady. Which it usually isn’t. If we had more time I’d ask her about that, but we have only as long as it will take Oren to finish shoveling and he’s already gotten to the driveway and started on the path to the barn. So instead I ask, “What happened yesterday?”

She hastily wipes her face, although no tear has fallen. As she speaks her voice rises in pitch, but whether because she’s nervous or lying I can’t tell. “I tried to leave. Davis was going into the city for some gig. He was supposed to be out of the house all day, but he came home because he’d forgotten something. Oren and I were all packed to go. He . . . tried to strangle me . . .” She touches her hand to the marks on her throat. “. . . and Oren got in between us . . . and . . . something snapped. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I picked up a knife and stabbed him. I—I didn’t even know if he was dead. I just grabbed Oren’s hand and we ran. We waited in the bus station for the next bus . . . well, you know the rest.”

Do I? I wonder. She’s rushed through the story. Maybe because it’s too painful to talk about, but I think there’s something else. “Where’d you get the knife?”

“What? What does that matter?”

“The police will ask you, so I’m asking you now.”

She turns white at the mention of the police. “I grabbed it off the kitchen counter. I’d been using it to cut up some apples earlier.”

I let her sit with that for a minute. Then I get up, go into the mudroom, and retrieve the bowie knife from under the blankets. I bring it back into the kitchen and lay it down on the kitchen table in front of her. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally pare my apples with a hunting knife.”

“Where’d you get that?” she asks in a hushed whisper. As if she’s afraid that Oren will hear her.

“It was in Oren’s sweatshirt pocket. It had blood on it.”

She stares at it for a long moment and then looks up at me. “It doesn’t now.”

“No,” I concede. “It slipped into the washer. No blood, no fingerprints. Nothing to prove who was holding that knife. But it wasn’t you, was it? It was Oren who stabbed his father.”

She glares at me with such anger and hatred that I’m sure I must be wrong. This is someone who could kill a man; not that sweet boy outside. Or maybe I just want to be wrong. I want to take it all back—why must you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong?—but she’s nodding now, wiping away a tear.

“He did it to protect me,” she says. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police and tell them that? Or at least call 911?”

“And let them take Oren? You know they would, even if I told them he was protecting me. They’d put him in juvenile detention. Can you imagine that sweet, smart boy in one of those places?” She says it like she knows what she’s talking about. Like maybe she spent some time in one herself. She wouldn’t be the first foster kid to end up in detention. “It would ruin his life.”

I can’t say I disagree with her, but I make myself ask, “And what kind of life are you going to have on the run?”

She shakes her head and begins to cry. “If you’re going to call the police just give us a head start and we’ll clear out.”

And go where? I wonder, picturing Alice and Oren thumbing a ride on the road, taking a lift from who knows who. “No,” I say. “I can help you. Give me a day and I’ll make arrangements. I can find a place that will be safe for you and Oren.” She’s crying harder, so I add, “You can trust me.” But she knows that. We both know I made up my mind to help them when I tossed that knife in the washer.

THE FACT IS I’ve helped people who were wanted by the law before. Parents who were defying court-ordered custody arrangements that they believed put their children at risk, women who had struck out against violent partners, teenagers who had run away from abusive parents. Doreen and I had an agreement that when these cases came up I would handle them without involving Sanctuary, so that we wouldn’t give the local police department an excuse to shut us down. I’m going to need help, though, finding a safe place for Alice and Oren. They can’t stay long at St. Alban’s—but there is someone at St. Alban’s who can help.

I take Alice into the parlor and tell her to choose from the piles of clothing whatever she and Oren need. She doesn’t ask me where we’re going, for which I’m grateful. The boy won’t be so easy. I go outside and find him crouched on the newly shoveled path. He’s carved a straight-edged tunnel from the porch steps to the driveway, and then from the driveway to the barn, piling the snow in neat walls on either side. Now he’s scooping a shallow niche out of the snow wall. He takes something out of his pocket and places it inside the niche. When I step closer I see it’s a plastic action figure of Han Solo.

“Ah,” I say, “Han Solo frozen in carbonite ice in Cloud City. Are you sure you want to leave him there?”

He nods and stands up. “Luke and Leia and Chewbacca are on the way to rescue him.”

“And R2-D2 and C-3PO, don’t forget,” I say, reminding myself to grab the figure before we leave. “You did a good job on the path.”

He shrugs, trying not to look too pleased. “It was easy. Can we go sledding now?”

I’m about to tell him no, we’ve got more important things to do, but then I think of all the promises he’s seen broken. “Absolutely. I know a great hill. Go pick out a sled. There are a couple in the barn.” I point across the yard to the barn and watch him tear up the newly shoveled path. Does he know his father is dead? Does he even remember stabbing him? I hope the moment has been absorbed into some fantastical story of bravery and valor, of heroes and villains. He saved the princess from the evil Darth Vader. Maybe in his version he also saves Darth Vader.

WHEN OREN SEES the extra pack his mother’s carrying he looks once at me and then away. He’s silent for the drive into town, staring out the window at the snow-covered pines and then Main Street, where people are out shoveling their sidewalks. Delphi almost looks cheerful and bright with everything trimmed in new-fallen snow. Even the shabby Sanctuary office looks pretty nice. Doreen’s put up some Christmas lights and cleaned up the donation piles on the porch, something she usually does when she’s anxious. Last night’s call must have brought up some ugly stuff for her; I’ll stop there on my way back to visit with her and tell her that I’ve sent mother and son safely on their way. I won’t tell her about the knife or the dead man in Ridgewood. She thinks they came from Newburgh, so if she hears the story on the news hopefully she won’t connect it to them.

It’s another fifteen miles to St. Alban’s. When we pass through the black iron gates Oren sits up straighter, craning his neck to read the sign, then glares at me. “I thought you said you wouldn’t take us to the convent,” he says.

“You won’t have to stay here long. Sister Martine is going to find you a safe place to go,” I say. “She has the best resources,” I add in a lower voice to Alice, but she’s looking out the window, her face closed.

“They’ve also got the best sledding hill,” I say in a high, artificial voice that makes me cringe. “See?”

We’ve made the turn and can now see the convent, an imposing brick building that looks like a hospital—or a juvenile detention institution. Which it was: during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth it was St. Alban’s Home for Wayward Girls and Fallen Women, where girls pregnant out of wedlock or deemed “promiscuous” were sent. Sister Martine will still take in pregnant teenagers, but now St. Alban’s is also a shelter for victims of domestic violence and their families and a temporary residence for at-risk youth.

I roll down the window to let in the shouts of children sledding down the long hill to the river, hoping that the sound will banish the austerity of the building. Oren is watching the children with equal parts wariness and longing. Then he looks toward the convent and seems to freeze. “I don’t want to go in there.”

“You don’t have to,” I say quickly. “You can go sledding. Your mom and I will just have a quick talk with Sister Martine.”

Alice looks toward me. “I don’t want to leave Oren by himself,” she says.

I sigh. The whole point of coming here was for Sister Martine to meet Alice and Oren. She will be more likely to help if she sees them. Especially Oren. No one could resist those large brown eyes, the quick, smart spark of him. A spark that has gone out at the sight of the convent and the thought of being separated from his mother.

“How about this,” I say. “You two go sledding and I’ll go in and have a talk with Sister Martine. Then we’ll both come out to talk to you.”

Oren’s eyes flick from me to Alice, waiting for what she says, but Alice looks back at him and asks, “How does that sound, buddy?”

“Only if you go on the sled with me.”

Alice groans. “Okay, but just the one time. I’ll get soaked.”

“Twice,” Oren demands.

I see the hint of a smile on Alice’s face as she concedes. What a relief it must be to be tussling over minor rights and favors after what they’ve been through.

“That’s settled then,” I say, feeling like a weight’s been lifted from my shoulders. But then I look back at the massive building and feel every brick of it settle squarely on my chest. For a moment I’d forgotten that I still had to go inside.

OREN’S EXCITED TO show Alice the sled he’s picked out. To my surprise he didn’t pick one of the bright plastic sleds I bought a couple of years ago for Atefeh’s kids. He’d gone to the back of the barn and dug out Caleb’s old Flexible Flyer—an antique even when Caleb used it; it had been mine first. It still has the nick in the wooden crosspiece from when Caleb and I crashed into an apple tree sledding at Hanson’s Orchard. I still have the scar on my right forearm, which I’d thrown over Caleb’s face to protect him from the impact.

You could have gotten the boy killed, my mother had scolded when we came back. The sled had vanished into the back of the barn. I’m surprised Oren was able to find it and a little alarmed that he’d gone exploring so far back in the barn. There are dangerous things in there—mowing scythes, old tractor parts, ice picks, pulleys, and hooks. What had I been thinking, to let him go in alone? I really am losing it, I think as I wiggle the crosspiece to see that it still moves the rails. They creak but still work. They are remarkably free of rust.

“Cool,” Oren says when I show him how to steer with the rope attached to the crosspiece. Alice is looking at the sled more dubiously.

“Have fun,” I say. “And be careful. That sled goes pretty fast.”

Oren is already running toward the hill, dragging the sled behind him. It bumps over the snow-covered lawn, and for a moment I see the shadow of another boy riding on the sled, me pulling it, laughing at Caleb’s cries to go faster. I blink and brace myself against the car at the sudden wash of vertigo.

“Are you all right?” Alice asks.

“Just tired,” I say. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. You go and have fun. I’ll talk to Sister Martine and we’ll come out to see you in a bit. Maybe by then Oren won’t mind coming inside to warm up.”

Alice shakes her head and looks toward the convent. “Once he’s decided a place is bad there’s no getting him to change his mind.”

“I understand,” I say. I watch Alice follow Oren. I do understand. I too once promised myself that I would never set foot inside St. Alban’s again.

IT’S NOT THAT St. Alban’s is a bad place; only that it’s a place people come to when nowhere else will have them. The very stones have absorbed the fear and sadness of the last resort, though the building itself is quite beautiful. I step through the wide oak doors and into the shadowed vestibule, where the marble floor is splashed with blue, red, and green lozenges of light. The air smells of incense and lemon wax. Someone is playing a piano somewhere.

Although it’s warmer in here, my skin has broken out into gooseflesh and I have to remind myself that I’m a grown woman (a grown-ass woman, as Doreen is fond of saying) with a home, not a scared girl with no place else to go. I stamp my feet to shake the snow from my boots—or maybe to announce my entrance. Either way, the noise fails to wake up the nun napping in the glass-fronted booth by the door. She’s probably deaf. Many of the old ones are. And they’re all old; not many young recruits these days. I wonder how long Sister Martine will be able to keep St. Alban’s going. I imagine the diocese is keeping its eye on this riverfront property.

As I walk past the drowsing nun I feel like Psyche sneaking past drugged Cerberus. It’s the boy, I think as I walk the long hall to Sister Martine’s office, who’s put me in mind of mythology—all those stories my father read to me and I read to Caleb. It would have been fun to look at the stars with Oren and talk about the heroes and their adventures, but we won’t do that now. Once I explain the situation, Sister Martine will want them to leave immediately. She will know a safe place to send them; by tomorrow they’ll be across the border in Canada. I stop in the middle of the hallway, swamped by an overwhelming sense of loss. Don’t be selfish, I hear my mother say, you know the right thing to do.

Do I? I wonder as I force my feet the rest of the way down the hall. I knock on the door before I can change my mind.

“Come!” a gruff voice calls from inside. For a moment I picture my father behind the door and I can’t move, but then I hear a querulous voice add, “Or don’t! It’s all the same to me.”

I adjust my lapel so my pink I STAND WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD button is visible and open the door. Sister Martine looks up from the stack of folders on her desk, blue eyes peering over reading glasses that have slipped to the end of her long aquiline nose. She looks like a bird of prey scanning the horizon for lunch. But when she sees it’s me, her face fans into a multitude of fine lines, like an origami flower unfolding.

“Mattea,” she croons, making of my full name a song. “It’s been too long.”

She begins to stand up but I hurry closer to stop her. The walker she’s been using since she broke her hip last year sits in the corner as if it’s been sent there for being bad. Sister Martine braces herself against the desk with one hand, knuckles down, and reaches for me with the other. She squeezes my shoulder with surprising strength and then stands straight to look me in the eye. It startles me to realize we’re the same height; I always picture her towering above me.

“You look tired,” she says. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“You should talk,” I counter, taking in the bruised-looking skin under her eyes and the thermos of coffee and towering stack of folders on the desk. One night, when I was staying here, I tried to slip out. I had to go past Sister Martine’s office, which I didn’t think was a problem since it was three A.M. As I crept past I saw a light and looked in. She was at her desk, stockinged feet up, wimple discarded, hard at work. That was decades ago, but I’m pretty sure she keeps the same hours now. “Tell me you haven’t been up all night,” I add.

“Only time I can get some work done without interruption.” She pats the stack of files. “I have to keep up with all my children.”

Brown folders and blue folders; I’m familiar with the system. Each brown folder represents an unwed mother who came to St. Alban’s to wait out her pregnancy. Each blue folder represents a baby born here. Sometimes a woman has two folders: a brown and a blue one. These are the women who were born here and then show up years later to have their own baby. That’s often the only way I find out what happened to the children who left from here, Sister Martine told me once.

She pats my cheek as if I were one of her children (which, in a way, I am) and looks into my face. I feel split open by her gaze. To avert it I tap the pin on my lapel. “Look what you get when you donate to Planned Parenthood these days.”

She screws up her face into a scowl, then flips up the collar of her habit to reveal an identical pink pin. “No kidding.”

I burst out laughing, the first time I’ve really laughed since I don’t know when. Sister Martine could always make me laugh. When she caught me trying to run away that night she told me to go ahead. What? she’d asked in a perfect Jewish inflection. I should worry you’re going to get knocked up?

“Did you contribute in your own name?” I ask.

“Of course not. I contributed in the name of our new vice president and gave his address. But I helped myself to a pin when I drove one of my girls over to the center in Poughkeepsie.”

“You drove a girl to Planned Parenthood?” I can’t disguise the surprise in my voice. I know Sister Martine has unusual views for a nun, but taking a girl for an abortion would probably get her excommunicated. “For . . . ?”

“An STD test and to be fitted for a diaphragm. But please don’t tell Doreen. The last time she tweeted about me and I got in trouble with the archbishop.”

“I bet,” I say, grinning back at her. I notice that her hand on my shoulder is trembling and help her back into her chair, pulling another chair close. I asked her once years ago how she could remain with the church when she disagreed with its position on birth control and abortion. She told me that her beliefs were between her and God and that they were both content that she was in the place she could do the most good. And what more could I pray for, she’d asked, other than world peace, an end to hunger, and a new water boiler for the convent, than to find the place where I can do the most good?

When I’ve got her settled I sit back in my own chair and see she’s studying me. “You’ve brought someone for me, haven’t you?”

I lift my chin toward the window behind her, which faces the river and the long hill that slopes down to its banks. Right now it also affords a view of children sledding and pummeling one another with snowballs, and a troop of nuns and pregnant teenagers snowshoeing. I spot Alice pulling Oren on the Flexible Flyer to the rim of the hill.

“The woman in the peacoat with the boy in red—Alice and Oren. They came in on the bus last night. He’s got bruises on his arms; she has marks on her throat.”

“They could go to Mulberry House in Kingston,” she says, smiling as Alice gives Oren a push and then jumps on the back of the sled. We can hear their high, excited whoops as they careen down the hill. “It’s a safe place.”

By “safe place” she means that the location is kept secret. Even most of our volunteers don’t know where it is.

“Men have found it before,” I say.

Sister Martine doesn’t argue with that. Over the years children have told their fathers where they are. Women have told their sisters-in-law, who have told their brothers. Men have come to the shelter and demanded to be let in. And because the men have come, the police have come too.

“Are you afraid that the man who hurt them will find them?” she asks.

I shake my head. Then I tell her about the knife, the blood, and the news of the dead man in Ridgewood. She listens to it all with no sign of shock or judgment. Doreen might be the best at talking people down, but Sister Martine is the best listener I’ve ever met. I’ve told her things I’ve never told anyone else.

“Do you believe it was the boy who stabbed his father?” she asks when I finish.

“I don’t know,” I say. “If I asked the boy I think he would tell me.”

“But you don’t want to ask the boy.” She looks back out the window where Oren is pulling his sled up the hill, laughing as Alice throws a snowball at him. “Because whichever one did it, the end result will be that one of them gets sent away. Still, I worry that if we hide them, they will have to live with that guilt between them forever.”

“The guilt of killing an abusive man?” I ask.

“The guilt of killing a parent,” she replies, turning now to me. “No one should have to live with that.”

I avoid her eyes and look out the window myself. “They’ll have each other. Isn’t that what matters most?”

When I look back at Sister Martine she holds my gaze for a long moment. It’s hard keeping my eyes level with that blue stare, as blinding as the light reflecting off the snow. But I do, and after a long pause she gives one curt nod. “I’ll make a few calls, set up a place up north. Bring them to me tomorrow.”

I’m about to tell her that they’ve got their stuff and can stay here tonight; she above anyone will understand why I can’t have the boy a second night. But before I can, I see something that freezes the words in my throat. A police car has pulled into the driveway.