The Night Visitors(25)
“Your doctor is right,” I say. “But there was no telling my mother that. She liked things that she could control, things she could shape. Fastening those straps made her feel like she had Caleb in her control.”
“She sounds like a piece of work.”
The path is narrow, so we’re walking single file (Indian file, I grew up calling it, but Doreen has informed me the term is no longer politically correct) and Alice can’t see the grin on my face. A piece of work doesn’t begin to cover it. “She had her own bad history,” I say, and then I think that this might be a way to draw Alice out. “It’s not uncommon for victims of abuse to become abusers. It’s the only model they know—”
“Why would Oren come down here?” Alice cuts in. Clearly she doesn’t want to hear the cycle-of-abuse speech. “How would he know this path is here?”
“Maybe he saw another kid going down here,” I say, even though it’s clear that Oren’s are the only footprints in the snow. “This is kind of a local kids’ hangout. In summer it’s a swimming hole; during the year teenagers come here to smoke and make out.” I can hear my voice waver on the last part and I’m glad Alice can’t see my face. This isn’t just the place where I’d find Caleb; it was also the place that Frank and I used to meet.
“In this weather? Jeez, I thought it was bad in the group homes but at least we had a rec lounge.”
I’m surprised Alice offers this clue into her upbringing. Maybe she does want to talk about the cycle of abuse. I should follow it, draw her out, but we’ve come to the bottom of the hollow. The pool is frozen over, a perfect circle of ice surrounded by low overhanging pine and fir branches. I’ve been thinking about Caleb so much that I can almost picture him here. I can see him crouched by the edge of the pool, hiding one of his toys in the roots of an old hemlock.
What are you doing here, buddy? I’d asked, squatting down beside him in the dirt.
Luke is hiding from the stormtroopers, he’d said. He’d placed the little action figure of Luke in a hollow that had been scooped out between the roots. There was a green Yoda already there. We’d just seen the third Star Wars movie and I’d bought the action figures for him at a garage sale. They were secondhand, the paint chipped on Luke’s tunic and one of Yoda’s ears broken off.
Well, I’m here to report that the coast is clear and it’s safe to return to the ship.
I still remember how he’d looked up at me, his face full of trust . . . and then I’m remembering another face. Frank’s. The last night we met here. Instead of trust, though, he’d looked at me as if he knew I was lying to him. Which I was.
“Could he have fallen through the ice?” Alice says, shaking my arm.
“There aren’t any cracks in the ice,” I say, staring at the frozen pond. Though the snow is disturbed below my feet: flaked with moss and soil as if someone has been digging here. I step over the place in the snow where the roots of the tree are showing, remembering Caleb’s trusting face looking up at me. Let’s take Luke and Yoda home, buddy.
Just Luke, Caleb had answered. Yoda lives here. We have to leave him here in case Luke needs to come back for help.
I’d meant to come back later and rescue Yoda before some other kid took him, but I’d had a fight with my father that night and gone back to the city without finding Yoda or even saying goodbye to Caleb. He’d been so angry when my mother told him I was leaving that he’d run away the next morning before I left.
Okay, I’d shouted into the woods around our house, have it your way.
I shake my head of the memory and am glad to see a clue to the present-day missing child’s whereabouts. “Look—I see footprints going back up on the other side.” I walk briskly up the slope, ignoring Alice’s wheezing behind me. She’s a smoker, I guess, although I haven’t seen her light up since she’s been here. She must try not to smoke around Oren. I give her credit for that, but it’s got to be hard going without, especially given all the tension she’s under right now. She probably snuck off to have a smoke while I was in Stewart’s.
When we get to the top of the hollow we’re in the cemetery. I check the Lane family mausoleum with its niche where Caleb liked to hide. I pause only a moment beside the statue of the woman with the bowed head that marks Caleb’s grave, but Alice notices the name on the stone anyway. “Crap, is that your brother? He was only—”
“Ten,” I say.
“How did he die?” she asks, her voice hushed. As usual when people ask me how Caleb died, I can hear beneath the shock and pity a hint of prurient curiosity. How could you have been so unlucky and stupid to lose a ten-year-old boy? Tell me so I can be sure I never make the same mistake.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” I reply. “There was a leak while they were all asleep—my mother and father and Caleb. I was out . . .”
“That’s awful,” she says, and then, maybe realizing she and Oren are staying in the same house where it happened, “What causes . . . ?”
“A faulty furnace,” I reply, turning to her with my mouth stretched into a rictus grin. “But don’t worry. I had the furnace replaced afterward.”
I leave her gaping at Caleb’s grave and head across the cemetery toward Main Street, where I dodge a snow plow with obnoxious fake antlers on its hood. I climb the sagging, rotten steps of Sanctuary. When my father’s law offices were in this building he used to sit out here on the wide, elegant porch drinking bourbon and smoking cigars with his cronies—Hank Barnes, Frank’s father and the town chief of police before him; Maynard Clay, who owned most of the land in the county; Sam Abbott, the county medical examiner; Carl Shapiro, district circuit judge in Albany—and jawing about the sorry state of the world and kids today and permissive parents. All of those men are dead now, but I can still catch a whiff of bourbon and cigars and hear the old men’s querulous smug voices.