The Night Visitors(2)

I told you no shel— I began, but the woman cut me off.

At Kingston you’ll get a bus to Delphi. Someone will meet you there, someone you can trust. Her name’s Mattie—she’s in her fifties, has short silvery hair, and she’ll probably be wearing something purple. She’ll take you to a safe house, a place no one knows about but us.

I looked down at Oren and he nodded.

Okay, I said. We’ll be there on the next bus.

I hung up and knelt down to tell Oren where we were going, but he was already handing something to me: two tickets for the next bus for Kingston and two for Delphi, New York. Look, he said, the town’s got the same name as the place in the book.

That was two hours and two buses ago. The last bus has taken us through steadily falling snow into mountains that loom on either side of the road. Oren had watched the swirling snow as if it were speaking to him. As if he were the one leading us here.

It’s just a coincidence, I tell myself, about the name. Lots of these little upstate towns have names like that: Athens, Utica, Troy. Names that make you think of palm trees and marble, not crappy little crossroads with one 7-Eleven and a tattoo parlor.

I was relieved when Oren fell asleep. Not just because I was tired of his questions, but because I was afraid of what I might ask him—

How did you know where we were going? And how the hell did you get those tickets?

—and what I might do to get the answer out of him.





Chapter Two


Mattie


I WAKE UP to the sound of a train whistle blowing. Such a lonesome sound, my mother used to say. I’ve never thought so. To me it always sounded like the siren call of faraway places. I used to lie in bed imagining where those tracks led. Out of these mountains, along the river, down to the city. Someday I’d answer that call and leave this place.

It takes me a moment to realize that it’s my phone ringing that has woken me. And then another few moments to realize that I’m not that girl plotting her escape. I’m a woman on the wrong side of fifty, back where she started, with no way out but one.

The phone’s plugged in on my nightstand. One of my young college interns showed me how to set it so only certain people can get through.

But what if someone who needs me has lost their phone and is calling from a phone booth? I asked.

She blinked at me like I was a relic of the last century and asked, Do they even have those anymore?

You ought to get out more, Doreen always tells me. Come down to the city with me.

It must be Doreen on the phone. She’s the only one on the list of “favorites,” aside from Sanctuary’s number, that I’d programmed into the phone. When the college girl saw that puny list she hadn’t been able to hide the pity in her eyes.

I reach for the phone, past pill bottles, paperbacks, and teacups—all my strategies to coax sleep—and manage to knock it over for my pains. I hear Dulcie stir, the vibration of the impact waking her. “It’s okay, girl,” I croon even though she can’t hear me. “It’s just Doreen riled up about something.”

I swing my legs around onto the floor, the floorboards cold on my bare feet, and lean down to find the phone. The screen is lit up with Doreen’s face (the college intern showed me how to do that too, taking a picture from Doreen’s Facebook page of her protesting at the Women’s March in January). Her mouth is open, midshout, which is kind of a joke because Doreen almost never shouts. She has the calmest voice of anyone I know. She could talk anyone down, the volunteers say. That’s why she always takes the hotline for the midnight to six A.M. shift, those hours when the worst things happen. Men stumble home drunk from bars and women lock their guns away. Teenagers overdose and girls find themselves out on the road without a safe ride home—or take the wrong one. Which one of those terrible things has happened to make Doreen call me in the middle of the night?

I draw my finger across the screen to answer. “Hi, Doreen.”

“Oh thank God, Mattie,” she says in a breathless rush as if she’d been running. Doreen always sounds like that. She ran away from her abusive ex seventeen years ago, after he slammed her son’s head up against the dining room wall, and sometimes I think she’s still running. “I thought you’d let your phone die again.”

“No, I just knocked it over. What is it? A bad call?”

Sometimes Doreen will call me because she’s upset by a call. I don’t mind. No one should have to sit alone in the night with the things we have to hear.

“A domestic violence case. Left home,” she says, and my heart sinks. I let out a sigh and feel a pressure against my leg. Dulcie has picked up on my distress and come over to lean against me.

“With a child?” I ask, hoping the answer is no.

“A ten-year-old boy. She was in the Newburgh bus station. I offered the Kingston shelter but she said no. She said it had to be a place no one could find her.”

“Oh,” I say, reaching down to stroke Dulcie’s soft head.

“I checked availability at St. Alban’s and Sister Martine said they could take her,” Doreen says, “but someone needs to pick her up at the bus station and take her there.”

The sisters at St. Alban’s are one of our best links on the domestic violence underground railroad. Their convent is on the river, gated, and guarded by a Mother Superior who would face down a dozen angry husbands come searching for their wayward women. It’s a chilly place to wash up after you’ve left your home in the night, though: the nuns in their long black habits, the bare cells, the crucifixes on the walls. I think of that ten-year-old boy, of what he’ll feel like in that cold gray place—