The Night Visitors

by Carol Goodman

  She laughs, which seems to surprise her as much as me. “Trust me,” she says, “he’s no chum of mine.” And then, putting her hand on my shoulder, “I didn’t tell him you were here, Alice. I know what it’s like to lose a child. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  She holds my gaze for a long moment and I start to relax. Then something hits the window hard behind me. I jump and swivel around as Mattie powers down the window to reveal Oren, his face red from the cold, his eyes strangely excited. “He’s gone!” he shouts, his voice high and shrill in my ear.

  “Who?” I cry, grabbing his arm. “Did you see someone? Who was it?”

  He winces at my touch—I’ve grabbed the same arm I dislocated before—and looks past me toward Mattie. “Han Solo. He’s gone! Someone’s taken him.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mattie

  OREN INSISTS ON dragging me down the snow-filled path to the place where Han Solo isn’t. There’s the little scooped-out niche where he placed the action figure and it is, indeed, empty. I remember thinking that I should take the toy before we left because I wasn’t planning on bringing Oren and Alice back here. But did I? I surreptitiously check my pockets but find only cough-drop wrappers and balled-up tissues. I search my memory as well but find only a similar assortment of detritus. “Maybe he fell down,” I suggest.

  Oren drops to his knees and sweeps the loose snow. “I already looked,” he says. “Somebody took him.” He looks up at me accusingly.

  “Not me, buddy,” I say, hoping that it’s not a lie.

  “Then it was somebody else,” Oren says, his voice quirking up at the end.

  “Somebody else who did what?” Alice asks. She’s taken her time following us from the car—maybe to collect her thoughts. She’d looked rattled by my question and then she’d jumped like a nervous cat when Oren smacked the window. She’d jumped the way a woman with a history of being hit jumps.

  “Somebody took Han Solo!” Oren cries. “Was it you, Alice?”

  “The action figure Oren left here is gone,” I explain.

  Alice sighs. “I’ve told you not to leave your toys outside.” And then to me, “He’s always leaving them places around the neighborhood.”

  “That’s how you play the game, dummy!” Oren punctuates the sentence by kicking Alice’s leg.

  “What have I said about calling people dummy?” Alice snaps back. I can see how this is going to escalate.

  “Hey,” I say. “We’re all going to be frozen like Han Solo in the ice caves if we stand around here much longer. Why don’t we look for him in the house?”

  “You think he’s inside?” Oren asks, eyeing me slyly, as if he suspects that I’ve hidden him somewhere. And who knows? I think a little hysterically. Maybe I have and I’ve just forgotten because I have early-onset Alzheimer’s like my mother.

  “Well,” I say, “maybe the Rebel Alliance rescued him and he’s in hiding.”

  “Yeah,” Oren says, his face lighting up. He takes Yoda out of his pocket. “Let’s go find him, Yoda, before Darth Vader does.” He runs down the path and up the porch steps, pounding so hard I fear he’s going to crash through the rotting floorboards. How many years has it been since anyone entered this house with that kind of eagerness? When was the last time I felt this lift in my heart?

  I turn to Alice to see if she is sharing my delight in Oren’s enthusiasm, but she looks pale and drawn. “Did you take his toy and hide it?” she asks with an accusatory tone that makes me feel like I’m twelve again and have been caught dressing up the town statue of George Washington (Frank’s plans hadn’t taken into account that people would recognize the clothes we used).

  “No,” I say, “but don’t worry. I think I know where there’s a spare Han Solo.”

  Alice doesn’t look relieved. In fact, she looks sick. “Then who the fuck took it?”

  ALICE STOMPS OFF as soon as we’re inside. I can hear her prowling the perimeter of the ground floor like an angry house cat. I leave her to it and go look for Oren, finding him in the kitchen petting Dulcie and talking softly in her ear. Or rather, Yoda is talking in her ear.

  “Hey, buddy,” I say, taking the milk out of the bag, “before we start your game how ’bout helping me restock our provisions and getting dinner on.”

  Oren holds Yoda to his ear and cocks his head as if listening to the wise green gnome. The gesture is so like Caleb that I pause by the open refrigerator door, the cold lapping at my legs, and hear Caleb’s voice: Better batten down the hatches, Leia, the enemy forces are on their way. All those mock battles Caleb waged . . . why didn’t I stop to wonder what he was really trying to tell me?

  “What does Yoda have to say?” I ask.

  “He says we’re safe for now and we need to keep up our strength. Rey is securing the perimeter so it’s a good time to eat.”

  “Rey? Oh . . .” He means Alice. It must be a character from the new movies, which I haven’t had the heart to see. “Yes, I’ll get the chili started. I like mine with home fries. You could start peeling the potatoes . . . only . . .” I stop, remembering his injured arm.

  “I can do it,” he says, hopping to his feet. “My mom taught me.”

  “That’s not what I was worried about,” I say, getting an ice pack out of the freezer. “I’m thinking about your arm. How’s it feel?”

  “Fine,” he declares, holding it up over his head. “Good as new. Besides, it’s my left arm. I peel with my right.”

  “Okay,” I say warily. Abused children learn to deny their pain. I study Oren’s face for any sign of discomfort but he looks . . . happy. I put the ice pack on his shoulder. “If it starts to hurt, you stop, okay?”

  I help him get positioned with the ice pack draped over his left shoulder, a paper bag on the floor, and a colander on the table for the peeled potatoes. I’d rather he took it easy, but I can see how eager he is to help. “I bet you’re a big help to your mom.”

  “I guess.” He shrugs modestly. “When she was feeling poorly I tried to help out.”

  “Does she feel poorly often?” I ask, sitting beside him and picking up a potato to peel.

  Oren looks at my hands and makes hesitant swipes, dislodging snail-shell curls the size of my fingernail. I suspect he’s never peeled a potato in his life.

  “Yeah, she used to feel bad a lot of the time, especially after she and Dad went out. She’d say she had a headache and needed the blinds down and sometimes she’d throw up.”

  Drinking? I wonder. Or drugs? “Oh my,” I say. “That doesn’t sound fun. Did she go see a doctor?”

  “She went to a hospital,” he says, flailing at the potato with more determination.

  So rehab.

  “Then she came back . . . hey, are you going to use those beans?” He points his peeler to the two cans of pinto beans on the counter. I’ve seen this kind of diversion tactic before. The topic of his mother is off the table.

  “I was going to, unless you don’t like beans,” I say, letting it go.

  “Oh, I like them, I just wanted to use the cans after. We can make a phone. That way we can talk to each other if we get separated.”

  “Good idea, buddy.” I get up and dump the two cans of beans in a big pot. I add canned tomatoes and a pound of frozen chopped meat, thinking through what Oren’s told me. If Alice was away in rehab he must be afraid of her leaving him again. “Don’t worry,” I say as I rinse the two cans. “We won’t get separated. No one’s going anywhere in this storm.”

  Oren looks out the window above the kitchen table. The snow is coming down fast and hard now, the wind blowing gusts that completely obliterate the world outside. Drifts are mounding up along the bottom sills and condensation is creeping across the panes. It feels as if we are slowly being sealed off from the outside world. “I guess no one could get here either,” Oren says.

  “Not unless they had four-wheel drive and a snow plow.”

  “My dad has a pickup truck.”

  So it’s his father he’s worr
ied about, which means he doesn’t know his father is dead. Would it be better if he did? Before I can decide, Alice bursts into the kitchen. “Do you know that half the windows on the first floor don’t lock?”

  “Is that so?” I ask in my calm counselor’s voice. Her pupils are dilated and she’s white as a ghost. Is she high? Did she disappear in town to score a fix? “I bet more than half of them don’t even open. It’s an old house, Alice. Wood swells. Metal rusts. Things break.” Shit happens, I’m tempted to add. “The last thing I’m worried about is locking the windows. We’re in the country. Folks don’t even lock their doors.”

  “Well, folks are stupid,” she retorts.

  “Mattie says no one can get here through the storm,” Oren tells her. “Not unless they have four-wheel drive and a plow.”

  “So I suppose no serial killers or rapists have those?” she snaps back.

  I raise my brows and cut my eyes over to Oren. The kitchen, which had felt warm and cozy a moment ago, suddenly feels cramped and airless. I listen to the furnace roaring below in the basement, the ticking of the water flowing through the old pipes, and the creak of the old house’s joints in the gusting wind. “No one’s coming up that road in this,” I say with more certainty than I feel. The fact is I’m beginning to worry that no one could make it up the hill. What if we need help? What if Alice OD’s? “What we do need to worry about, though, is losing power. I’m going to go check on flashlights and candles and wood for the stove. Why don’t you sit down, Alice, and help Oren peel potatoes. We’d better get dinner on while we’ve still got power.”

  I hand Alice my peeler and she looks at me like she’d like to use it to gouge out my eye. Maybe I should have thought of a different chore for her. But then she sits down and begins swiping at a potato with shaking hands. She’s even worse at it than Oren. I leave them, hoping Alice doesn’t cut herself, and remind myself to check for first-aid supplies.

  I find candles and flashlights in the dining room sideboard along with the first-aid kit. I check the kit for Narcan. I picked up the nasal spray when I did a drug awareness course in Kingston last fall. What have I gotten myself into? I sit down on the one chair without books on it. Seeing Oren with that stupid Yoda really rattled me. I was sure it was the same one Caleb buried thirty-four years ago. It had seemed like a sign—

  Christ, I sound like one of the new age interns! A sign of what? That Oren is somehow in communication with Caleb? Have I brought Oren back here so he can contact Caleb? And what purpose would that serve? What would I say to Caleb after all these years?

  And what would he say to me?

  Of all the stupid reasons for bringing this woman and boy into my home—misguided charity, anger at Frank, making amends, liberal guilt, my problems with authority—this supernatural hoo-ha is the craziest. And the most pathetic.

  It’s time you began thinking clearly and taking responsibility for your actions.

  My father’s voice this time, so clear that I look toward his study door, expecting to find it open and him standing in the doorway. But of course the door is locked. As I told Alice, wood swells, metal rusts, things break. I’ve gleefully let this house rot around me, but I’ve carefully oiled and preserved the lock on my father’s study door. I keep it locked from the outside. To keep people out, I tell myself, but sometimes I wonder if it’s to keep something locked in.

  I listen to the house. The furnace roars, the pipes tick, the joints groan . . . and two voices murmur in the kitchen. I get up, fish the key out of its crystal bowl, and open the study door. I shut it behind me and use the key to lock the door from the inside, then cross to my father’s desk and sit down in his chair. In front of me is the seal of New York pen set with its figures of Justice and Liberty. I reach into one of Justice’s scales and retrieve a small key that I use to open the bottom drawer. Inside, resting on a stack of file folders stamped with the same figures of Justice and Liberty that stand on my father’s desk, is my father’s Winchester revolver, which he inherited from his father.

  I hesitate. Doreen would be appalled to know I even have a gun in the house, let alone that I’m thinking of taking it out of the only locked room. With a child spending the night. But then, if I need it . . .

  I pick up the gun, startling at the coldness of it, and check that the safety’s on and put it in my cardigan pocket. I close the drawer and lock it.

  Before I stand I notice the pattern in the dust on the top of the desk. This morning the mouse tracks looked like a random spattering of stars, but now they’ve become a constellation. A constellation I recognize.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alice

  OREN IS WORKING away at the potatoes like he’s spent his whole childhood doing hard labor. “Hey,” I say, “this is like that old movie we watched where those guys in the army had to peel sacks of potatoes when they did something wrong.”

  “KP duty,” Oren says without looking up. “But Mattie isn’t punishing me; I’m just pitching in, like you said about shoveling the path this morning.”

  “Sure,” I say, annoyed that he’s come to her defense. Why does he like her so much? “I was just worried about your arm. Does it feel okay? I’m sorry about before . . . I was just trying to keep you from running up the drive where that cop could see you.”

  “It’s okay,” he says, shrugging. “It feels fine now. Look, Mattie gave me an ice pack.”

  “And you’re okay about staying here tonight?” I ask, as if we had any choice.

  “Yeah, I like it here. It feels like a family lives here.”

  Like ours didn’t. Like this crazy-ass spinster living in a falling-down old house is more like a family than Davis and me. “Yeah, the Addams family,” I say. I start to hum the theme song to the show, which we watched on Nick at Nite, but Oren glares at me.

  “Don’t do that. Mattie might hear you and she’ll think we’re making fun of her house.”

  I roll my eyes. “Come on. How much can she really care about this house when she keeps it like this? The place is a mess.” I lean forward and lower my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I found mouse poop.”

  Oren wrinkles his nose.

  “Yeah,” I go on, “and stacks of newspapers from, like, the eighties. You know what? I think Mattie might be a hoarder.” This was another show we sometimes watched, but only because Davis liked it. He liked to make fun of the people on the show because he thought they were such sad sacks compared to him.

  Oren shakes his head. “She collects all this stuff to give to people,” he says.

  So that’s why he thinks Mattie is so great. Because she’s a do-gooder. “Yeah? Then why does she keep her dead brother’s room just the way he left it, huh?”

  Oren looks up. I’ve finally gotten his attention, but maybe this wasn’t the best way to get it. I was telling the truth when I told Mattie that Oren has a really active imagination. After watching that scary movie about the crazy dad in the big hotel, Oren was spooked about bathtubs because of one of the scenes. He refused to take a bath for a month, until he smelled so bad Davis started calling him Stinky. I’d convinced him to get in the tub only by agreeing to sit in the bathroom with him, which Davis teased him about mercilessly.

  And then there was the “poltergeist” that started taking things, after we watched that movie. First it was little stuff like some change Davis left on the counter or Davis’s socks or the can opener or the TV remote. They’re here! Oren would say in a creepy, singsongy voice whenever something went missing. At first it made Davis laugh, but then bigger stuff went missing, like bills from Davis’s wallet and a bottle of Jim Beam. That’s when Davis started blaming Oren and threatening to give him a whupping if he didn’t put the stuff back.

  Oren kept up the story even after Davis took a belt to him. It’s the poltergeist, Dad! he cried over and over.

  Then why does it only take my shit? Davis demanded with every swing of his belt.

  The next day the belt was gone. Davis tore the house apart l
ooking for it. I locked Oren and myself in the bathroom. When I asked Oren if he knew where the belt was he looked at me like Han Solo looks at Lando when Lando turns him over to Jabba the Hutt. I told you, it’s the poltergeist. He takes stuff from people he’s mad at.

  I told Oren there was never going to be any peace until he just admitted to Davis that he’d taken the stuff.

  That would make the poltergeist really mad, Oren said, unless . . .

  Unless what, buddy?

  Unless it knows we’re doing it for a good reason, like it’s part of a plan.

  What kind of a plan? I’d asked, feeling the cold from the bathroom tiles travel up my spine.

  A plan to get out of here. To go away. The poltergeist told me that Davis is just going to keep hitting us. It’s just going to get worse.

  We could tell a social worker, I’d said. Scott could help.

  Oren had considered it. He liked Scott. Would they let me stay with you? he asked. When I didn’t answer right away he said, Because I really, really want to stay with you, Alice.

  The ice creeping through my veins melted then. And I really want to stay with you, buddy, I said, and I meant it. We’ll leave. I’ll start saving money tomorrow. We’ll take a bus upstate somewhere. There are shelters that take in women and kids up there. We’ll figure it out.

  You promise?

  I looked down at him, a little boy crouched on the bathroom floor clutching a Luke Skywalker in one hand and a Chewbacca in the other, and realized he was the first person who’d ever really needed me. Yeah, I said, I promise.

  The next day all the lost stuff came back. Loose change, dirty socks, beer bottles, and Davis’s belt, all in a big pile on the living room floor. Not the missing cash, though. I found that in my purse: a roll of bills that added up to $316. I hid the money in a tampon box under the sink and got a Trailways bus schedule that day. I started saving my tips from the diner instead of using them to buy books and toys for Oren. I looked up shelters and domestic abuse services. Ulster County seemed to have the most services and it felt . . . familiar. My adoptive parents had lived up there. I remembered them talking about the orphanage where they got me like it was someplace nearby. And after they died when I was seven, I was placed in a group home not far from where they had lived. Never mind that I didn’t like it then; now it would be a good place for me and Oren. I kept my promise and the poltergeist stayed away.