The Night Visitors(10)

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 Tshirts 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.