The Night Visitors

by Carol Goodman

  Oren already seems to know about the dead kid. “She keeps it that way because she wants him to stay,” he says.

  “Wants who to stay?” I ask, the potato peeler slipping in my hand and nicking my thumb.

  “Caleb.”

  “Did Mattie tell you that?” I ask, pressing a napkin to my thumb to stem the blood flow.

  “No,” Oren says. “Caleb did.”

  My whole body twitches. I grab him by both arms and he yelps. The ice pack balanced on his shoulder slides to the floor with a wet thump. “Don’t you start this again,” I say, keeping my voice low so Mattie won’t hear us.

  “Ow!” he cries, but low, like he doesn’t want Mattie to hear either. “You’re hurting my arm.”

  “Your arm was good enough for peeling potatoes for Mattie,” I spit back. “And we had a deal. You promised that if we left the poltergeist would go away.”

  “Caleb’s not a poltergeist,” he says in that prissy tone he gets when he thinks I’m not smart enough to understand something. “He’s a ghost. That’s different. He wants to tell Mattie something. That’s why Mattie brought us back instead of taking us to the police. She thinks that Caleb will be able to tell her through me.”

  I let him go and lean back, staring at him. “Did she tell you that?”

  Oren stares at me like I’ve lost it. “No,” he snaps. “I told you—”

  “Yeah, yeah, Caleb told you.” I picture Mattie sitting on the floor with Oren at Sanctuary, asking him if he heard voices. I thought she had gotten it into her head that Oren was psycho, but now it occurs to me that she wanted to know because she thinks Oren is some kind of medium who’s going to communicate with her dead brother.

  “Hey, buddy.” I make my voice gentle. “You know it’s all a game, right? You don’t really hear that boy’s voice, do you?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t hear Caleb’s voice.”

  I let out my breath. Oren’s not crazy. He’s a pleaser, Scott told me once. He’s learned to anticipate the needs of adults around him and come up with ways to meet or deflect them. He’s picked up on Mattie’s need to communicate with her dead brother and he’s trying to help her because he’s grateful to her for taking us in. Well, I’m not going to let her take advantage of him.

  “Of course you don’t, buddy.” I hold out my arms and he collapses into them. I feel a swell of protectiveness rise up in me, burning off the chill of the house. We’ll be okay. One more night in this batty old house and we’ll hit the road. Just Oren and me. We don’t need anyone else.

  He murmurs something against my shoulder that I can’t make out. “What’s that, buddy?” I ask, holding him at arm’s length.

  “I said I don’t need to hear Caleb’s voice. He sends me messages.”

  The chill creeps back up my spine. “What kind of messages?” I ask.

  “Like finding Yoda,” he says, “and the marks on the windows.” He points behind me and I turn around. The bottom half of the window is fogged over and there are, indeed, dots drawn in the mist. Who knows how long they’ve been there. Mattie certainly hasn’t cleaned these windows in years.

  “Those look pretty random,” I say, peering closer at the window.

  “They’re not. The same pattern is on all the windows.” He’s pointing to the window over the sink. I get up to look at it more closely. Above the mist I can just make out an old red barn and below, yes, the pattern does look the same. “It means something to Caleb. I haven’t figured it out yet. I think it might be . . .”

  I don’t hear the rest of Oren’s sentence. There’s something moving in the snow—a blurry shape. At first I think it’s a dog or a deer, but then the snow lets up for a moment and I make out the figure of a man. Then it disappears in another gust of snow. Or it’s gone inside the barn.

  “I’ve got to get something from the barn,” I tell Oren hurriedly. “You stay here.”

  I’m up before Oren can stop me. Before I leave the kitchen I slip a carving knife into my coat pocket. No one is taking Oren away from me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mattie

  IT WAS THE first constellation my father taught me. Other kids learned the Big Dipper or Orion; I learned to find Virgo, the Maiden, who looked like a limp rag doll, with a kite-shaped face, sprawled out across the sky.

  That’s the sign we both were born under, my father told me. People call her Virgo now, but the ancients called her Justice.

  I lean forward to reach the constellation globe on the corner of the desk and spin it, my fingers tracing the raised glass bumps that mark the stars. The creak of the chair releases the odor of leather and pipe tobacco, and I can feel the itchy tweed of my father’s jacket sleeve brushing against my bare arm as he guides my hand along the pattern of stars. Follow the arc in Arcturus and speed on to Spica, he’d say. I feel the same little thrill the words gave me then, as if he were launching me into space, just as the maiden Justice flew up to the sky because she grew disgusted with the injustice she saw on Earth. She remains in the sky, my father would say, looking down and judging all that we do. Remember that, mouse, we’re all responsible for our actions. There’s no running away from justice. Then he would touch the scales on the figure of Justice, which would chime together like a clock tolling the hour.

  When I find her constellation on the globe, I trace the pattern from her feet to her head and along her outstretched arms to the ear of grain she grasps in her left hand—the spica that gives the brightest star its name. Then I look down at the pattern in the dust. It is the same configuration. But how can that be? Could the globe, which used to be lit from inside by a bulb that burned out years ago, have cast the pattern onto the desk somehow? Or did I unconsciously draw the pattern when I came in last night? Just because I don’t remember doing it doesn’t mean I didn’t. If I could forget to let Dulcie back in the house I could forget drawing a pattern in the dust. My mother used to forget she’d bought milk and go to the store for another quart. When I came home from graduate school the summer Caleb was ten there’d been four quarts in the refrigerator, all souring. Is that what’s happening to me? My mother was only in her late fifties when it began. I’m fifty-nine.

  And is fearing that any worse than believing the alternative: that Caleb drew the pattern, that he did it as a message to me?

  He knew what the constellation meant as well as I did. He was raised by the same father, who grew even more obsessed with the idea of justice as he aged. Always a severe judge, he’d gotten stricter as he perceived the world growing more chaotic around him. Kids doing drugs, parents not caring—someone has to show these kids that actions have consequences. The sentences he passed became harsher. Kids brought in for shoplifting, fighting in school, or smoking a joint were sent to JD. When I was fourteen and got caught making out with Frank Barnes in the back of his father’s car, I got sent too. What would it look like if I didn’t treat my own daughter the way I treated everyone else? he’d asked, refusing to recuse himself from the case. Frank, sixteen, was also accused of stealing his father’s car and was sent to a boot camp.

  When Caleb started acting up the summer he was ten I heard my father telling him the story of the constellation too and reminding him—as he’d often reminded me—that we can never escape justice. At night I saw Caleb lying in his bed staring up at the constellation on his ceiling. But why would he call for justice now? And more important: What kind of justice can I give him after all these years?

  I get up from the desk abruptly. The gun clanks heavily against my leg, the metal cold through my thin cardigan.

  The only real justice, I once heard my mother say, is seeing the ones responsible dead in the ground. It was the summer before they all died. She and my father had been arguing—they were always fighting that summer. She’d already started losing her mind and it made her snappish and paranoid, especially with my father.

  That’s not justice, Celeste, my father had replied with weary patience, that’s vengeance.

  Is
that what Caleb would want? Vengeance?

  I take the gun out of my cardigan pocket, check again that the safety’s on, and put it in the snugger pocket of my pants, where I can feel it pressing cold against my hipbone. I can’t keep it on me, but I can keep it somewhere closer than this locked room.

  I look down at the pattern in the dust once more. Now that I’ve identified the constellation it’s impossible not to see it, but as Doreen is wont to say, to a hammer everything looks like a nail. Maybe to a judge’s daughter everything looks like a question of justice.

  Or to my mother’s daughter, a question of vengeance.

  I LISTEN FOR Oren and Alice as I go up the stairs. They’re still in the kitchen, talking softly, peeling potatoes. I need to put the gun away before I join them. I have the feeling that Oren’s sure to notice that I have it on me if I go in there with it, and I don’t like the idea of the gun being anywhere near him.

  When I enter my room I pause on the threshold to see if I can feel that Alice has been in there—and then dismiss that idea as ridiculous. As ridiculous as thinking Oren would know I have the gun on me. As ridiculous as the idea that Caleb is leaving me messages written in the dust. You can’t feel that a person’s been in a room. When I look at my night table, though, I’m pretty sure that the framed photograph of Caleb has been moved. I sit down on the edge of my bed and look into his face, the face of a ten-year-old boy who would never see eleven. He hated that school picture. His hair is recently cut and he’s wearing a collared shirt, striped tie, and a jacket that’s too big for him, all purchased at the Delphi Department Store by my mother, who insisted he dress up for picture day even though by the eighties no one did that anymore. He would have felt stupid and embarrassed in clothes that clearly marked him as the late-in-life child of too-old parents. A change-of-life baby, I once heard one of the women in town call him. A mistake, she might as well have said.

  Still, Caleb is smiling. An infectious grin that defies the stupid clothes and the missing front tooth (from a fall two weeks before) and the whispers that he must have heard all his life. This is not the face of a boy who would want vengeance for his death.

  But then, maybe by the time he died, two months after this picture was taken, he wasn’t the same boy.

  I put the picture down and a pill bottle falls to the floor with a rattle. Crap. Of course. I pick it up and look at the label. Valium, prescribed for back spasms. I take it only when the pain is so bad it keeps me up, and I always count them so I don’t forget and take too many. And so I know how many I’ve got in case . . .

  In case of what? Doreen would ask. We both know that suicide risks (People with suicidal thoughts, Doreen would correct me, we don’t name the person for their disease) count their pills. They like to know they’ve got an exit plan.

  Last night I counted fourteen. There are thirteen now.

  Alice.

  I check the other pills on the night table and the ones in the drawer. There are two OxyContin missing from the bottle in the drawer. So I was right to suspect drug use. The only thing that surprises me is the modesty of her drug raid; most addicts wouldn’t have been able to resist pocketing the whole supply.

  I sigh. This is the woman I was going to let Oren go off with. I should call Frank right now . . . only my cell phone is in my coat pocket downstairs, dead. I pull out the charger from the wall and stuff it in my cardigan pocket—and feel the gun in my jeans pocket. Right. That’s why I’m here. I take out the gun and place it in the night table drawer . . . right where Alice found the pills and is likely to come back looking for more. Nope. That’s not the right place for it. But what is? I look around my room—at the dusty piles of books on top of the dressers, at the threadbare flannel nightgown hanging from the bedpost, at the half-rumpled bed—and see it as Alice must have: the abode of an aging spinster. So where would an aging spinster hide a gun?

  In her bed, of course, where no one but her goes. I slide the revolver between mattress and box spring (checking one more time that the safety is on) and smooth down the blankets and quilt over the edge of the bed. If someone comes in the night I’ll be able to reach it quickly. It makes sense to have it up here, I tell myself. Why didn’t I think of that before?

  You know why. My mother’s voice.

  Ignoring it, I get up and leave my room, closing the door behind me. I wish I had a key to lock it, but my father refused to put locks on any doors but his study, and since the house became mine I have lived here alone and so never saw a need.

  I stop in Caleb’s room before going downstairs. I don’t pause. I don’t stand on the threshold, gazing at my dead brother’s room, which is what Alice probably thinks I do. I don’t keep his room the way it was as some kind of memorial for me to sit and wallow in. I keep it this way because I can’t bear to throw out his things. On the morning I wake up and can, I will.

  What I can do now is give away his collection of Star Wars action figures. Oren has given me that much. I take down the metal Star Wars lunch box from the bookshelf and sit on the bed. I pass my hand over its rusty surface, but only because it’s dusty, not because I’m remembering taking Caleb to the Target in Kingston and buying it for him. My mother had bought him a horrid plaid satchel that looked like something a thirty-five-year-old accountant would use.

  Thanks, Matt, he’d said. I’ve already ditched two of those plaid ones.

  I lift my eyes from the lunch box to wipe them and catch a glimpse of scattered prints in the mist on the window. It looks creepily as if someone had pressed his or her hands to the window to get out. I get up, still holding the lunch box, and go to take a closer look.

  It’s the same pattern of spots that’s drawn on the dust on my father’s desk. Virgo, the Maiden—

  Justice.

  A gust of snow hits the pane with the dry rattle of ice pellets. I look up past the misted-over part toward the backyard, which has all been swallowed by the snow. The only landmark I can make out is the barn, the door to which is open.

  Crap. Oren must have left it that way when he got the sled out. I should go close it before the snow drifts inside.

  And that’s when I see a figure making its way across the snow toward the barn. A slim figure in a peacoat. What the hell is Alice doing out there?

  I turn to go and see I’ve still got the lunch box in my hands. I might as well take out the action figures for Oren. I put the box down on the bed and open it.

  The box is empty. All of Caleb’s toys—Luke and Leia, Chewbacca and Han Solo, Darth Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO, and some assorted Wookiees—they’re all gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Alice

  THE MINUTE I step outside I realize this is probably not such a good idea. It’s snowing really hard, and not the soft pretty flakes like before; this is like having buckets of ice pellets thrown in your face. I duck my head down to keep the ice out of my eyes, and when I do look up I see I’m heading right past the barn into the woods.

  I remember one of the foster parents I lived with telling us kids a story about a boy who went out to check on the cows during a blizzard and got lost between the house and the barn. His parents found him frozen to death in a drift not two feet from his own back door. The story was supposed to be about how hard it was in the olden days and how good we had it now. Like we were lucky to have a washing machine to use when it was our turn to do the enormous bags of dirty laundry, which included our foster father’s gross stained boxers. Or we should be thankful we didn’t have to haul coal from the cellar to heat the stove. As if Lisa (that was that foster mother’s name, I remember now) had grown up as a pioneer, when really she came from suburban Long Island and had bought this old broken-down farm because she had some hippie idea of living in a commune. Only she and her alcoholic deadbeat husband (Travis, I recall, Travis and Lisa) couldn’t make a go of it, so they took in foster kids for the state subsidy and cheap labor.

  The story about the frozen boy was also supposed to keep us from running away. It gave the
younger kids nightmares. At night when the branches knocked on the windows the little kids said it was the frozen boy trying to get in.

  And now that could be me. When I turn around to go back to the house I can’t see it. It’s like the storm has blown the house away, leaving me out here to turn into the scary ghost that knocks on the window. Always on the outside trying to get in—

  I bump right into the fucking barn.

  Couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, Davis would say when I tried to throw a ball for Oren. But at least my failed attempts would make him come out and toss the ball around with Oren for a while. For half an hour we were a real family. Father and son, tossing a ball on the front lawn while Mom watches on.

  Stupid. Like that made a family any more than pretending Travis and Lisa were going to be real parents.

  I feel my way around the corner of the barn to the door—and suddenly I remember why I’m out here and it seems like the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. If there’s someone in the barn what am I going to do about it? I feel for the knife in my pocket and grip the handle. If it’s Davis in there do I have the nerve to kill him? When it came down to it back in New Jersey, I froze. I let Oren do it. What kind of mother does that? If I had any true maternal instincts wouldn’t I have protected Oren?

  I bet Mattie would have. She’s got the whole mom thing down, with her pancakes and make-believe games. You can see Oren’s already crazy about her. The way he’s glommed on to her . . . well, it’s the way I glommed on to each new foster parent. Every time, I’d think, Wow! This is going to be the one! I’d fallen especially hard for Lisa because she had the whole earth-mother-granola vibe and talked about our being a family. But then it turned out she just wanted a bunch of kids to do her laundry and haul manure for her “organic” garden.