The Night Visitors(35)

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.