The Night Visitors(28)
“Yes, I heard—” Oren begins.
“Oren has a very active imagination,” I cut in. “He likes to pretend, don’t you, baby?”
“I’m not a baby,” he says, annoyed. Davis used to use that nickname for him.
“Well, he was right about the buses,” Doreen says, putting down her phone. I’m relieved I’ve distracted Oren from telling Mattie about his imaginary friends. All we need now is for her to get it into her head that he’s crazy and try to have him put away. “Trailways has suspended service for the rest of the day and there’s a weather alert for Ulster, Greene, and Delaware Counties. High winds and accumulations up to twenty-four inches.”
“Wow!” Oren says, his eyes lighting up. “That’s a lot of snow to shovel. We’d better get back to your house now, Mattie.”
“We have an arrangement with the Best Western in Kingston,” Doreen says. “We can put you up there for the night.”
“That’ll be a lonely, cold place in a storm, Dory,” Mattie says. “I can keep them one more night.”
Doreen frowns. “Maybe Alice and Oren would like to go down to the food pantry and pick up some supplies,” she says in a pinched voice.
“We could use some more pancake mix,” Oren says, getting up. He tucks the Yoda in his coat pocket and shoulders his backpack. “And chocolate chips.”
Mattie grins at him. “See if you can get us some canned beans and tomatoes. I’ll make you my four-alarm chili for dinner.”
Oren smiles back at her and then turns to me. “Make it three-alarm. Alice doesn’t like it too spicy.” He reaches out to take my hand and something melts in me. He’s excited at the idea of hunkering down for a big storm in a big old house full of good food. This is why we were leaving Davis: so we could take pleasure in ordinary things again without the fear of his tantrums hovering over us.
I take Oren’s hand and squeeze it. “Sure, buddy, let’s stock up. We’ll get on the road tomorrow.”
What choice do we have? I tell myself that if Davis does make it up here, he only knows we were at the CVS. He doesn’t know where Mattie lives. How would he ever find us way out in the woods? I tell myself that and try to believe it.
Chapter Twelve
Mattie
AS SOON AS Alice and Oren go downstairs I turn to Doreen. “I know what you’re going to say. We never take a client home. It’s not good for us and not good for the client and it never ends well. That’s what we teach our volunteers.”
“Oh good, I thought you’d forgotten all the training protocols,” she says sharply. “I thought I had to dig up the manuals.”
“But you and I both know there are exceptions.”
“That’s not fair,” she says, a quaver in her voice. “That was different.”
“It was different because I was pretty sure if I didn’t take you home that night you would have killed yourself,” I say.
Doreen is right. It’s not fair to bring up that night sixteen years ago, when I found Doreen drinking herself to death at the Reservoir Inn out by Route 28. She’d just found out that she’d lost custody of her eleven-year-old son, Gavin, to her ex-husband, Roy, even though Doreen had testified in court that Roy had hit her multiple times (and Gavin once, which was all it took for Doreen to finally leave). The fact that Doreen had two DUIs, no job, and a twelve-year-old misdemeanor for marijuana possession worked against her, and Roy—bank manager and upstanding citizen of Rensselaer, remarried with a stay-at-home mom ten years younger than Doreen—had looked like the more stable parent. Doreen had been given every other weekend visitation and alternating Christmases.
“I told Gavin he’d never have to go back there,” she’d said—or slurred, rather. “How am I supposed to tell him that he has to because Mommy’s a pothead and a drunk?”
I told her she could re-sue for custody, that I would help her. I told her Sanctuary could help her find a job—heck, she could come work for Sanctuary. She’d been volunteering there since she’d landed in the Kingston shelter a year ago. I told her that even if she saw Gavin only every other week she could still be a positive force in his life.
She listened to everything I had to say and thanked me. She went on to thank me for all I’d done for her over the last year and asked me to thank Frank Barnes, who had intervened six months before when Roy showed up to take Gavin back and had testified as a character witness at the custody hearing. She asked me to thank Kate Rubin, who had represented her at the hearing pro bono. She asked me to thank all the volunteers at Sanctuary.
“Shit, Doreen,” I said. “You’re either making your Academy Award acceptance speech or you’re planning to off yourself. Which is it?”
Doreen is fond of saying in our suicide awareness training sessions that this is not the way you’re supposed to ask someone if they’re planning to kill themselves. You’re supposed to reflect back the “invitations” they have provided (I hear that you’re feeling hopeless and you’ve expressed a lot of negative feelings about yourself . . .) and then ask them directly, “Are you thinking about suicide?” You’re not supposed to say, “You’re not thinking about doing anything stupid, are you?” Or make cracks about the Academy Awards. But what I said that night worked. First she nearly fell off her barstool laughing (a testament less to my wit than to how many Jack Daniel’s shots she’d knocked back), and then she started crying, and then she admitted she had a stash of Vicodin from her last root canal back in her rented room and was thinking of washing it down with some vodka.