The Night Visitors(36)

Last night I counted fourteen. There are thirteen now.

Alice.

I check the other pills on the night table and the ones in the drawer. There are two OxyContin missing from the bottle in the drawer. So I was right to suspect drug use. The only thing that surprises me is the modesty of her drug raid; most addicts wouldn’t have been able to resist pocketing the whole supply.

I sigh. This is the woman I was going to let Oren go off with. I should call Frank right now . . . only my cell phone is in my coat pocket downstairs, dead. I pull out the charger from the wall and stuff it in my cardigan pocket—and feel the gun in my jeans pocket. Right. That’s why I’m here. I take out the gun and place it in the night table drawer . . . right where Alice found the pills and is likely to come back looking for more. Nope. That’s not the right place for it. But what is? I look around my room—at the dusty piles of books on top of the dressers, at the threadbare flannel nightgown hanging from the bedpost, at the half-rumpled bed—and see it as Alice must have: the abode of an aging spinster. So where would an aging spinster hide a gun?

In her bed, of course, where no one but her goes. I slide the revolver between mattress and box spring (checking one more time that the safety is on) and smooth down the blankets and quilt over the edge of the bed. If someone comes in the night I’ll be able to reach it quickly. It makes sense to have it up here, I tell myself. Why didn’t I think of that before?

You know why. My mother’s voice.

Ignoring it, I get up and leave my room, closing the door behind me. I wish I had a key to lock it, but my father refused to put locks on any doors but his study, and since the house became mine I have lived here alone and so never saw a need.

I stop in Caleb’s room before going downstairs. I don’t pause. I don’t stand on the threshold, gazing at my dead brother’s room, which is what Alice probably thinks I do. I don’t keep his room the way it was as some kind of memorial for me to sit and wallow in. I keep it this way because I can’t bear to throw out his things. On the morning I wake up and can, I will.

What I can do now is give away his collection of Star Wars action figures. Oren has given me that much. I take down the metal Star Wars lunch box from the bookshelf and sit on the bed. I pass my hand over its rusty surface, but only because it’s dusty, not because I’m remembering taking Caleb to the Target in Kingston and buying it for him. My mother had bought him a horrid plaid satchel that looked like something a thirty-five-year-old accountant would use.

Thanks, Matt, he’d said. I’ve already ditched two of those plaid ones.

I lift my eyes from the lunch box to wipe them and catch a glimpse of scattered prints in the mist on the window. It looks creepily as if someone had pressed his or her hands to the window to get out. I get up, still holding the lunch box, and go to take a closer look.

It’s the same pattern of spots that’s drawn on the dust on my father’s desk. Virgo, the Maiden—

Justice.

A gust of snow hits the pane with the dry rattle of ice pellets. I look up past the misted-over part toward the backyard, which has all been swallowed by the snow. The only landmark I can make out is the barn, the door to which is open.

Crap. Oren must have left it that way when he got the sled out. I should go close it before the snow drifts inside.

And that’s when I see a figure making its way across the snow toward the barn. A slim figure in a peacoat. What the hell is Alice doing out there?

I turn to go and see I’ve still got the lunch box in my hands. I might as well take out the action figures for Oren. I put the box down on the bed and open it.

The box is empty. All of Caleb’s toys—Luke and Leia, Chewbacca and Han Solo, Darth Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO, and some assorted Wookiees—they’re all gone.





Chapter Seventeen


Alice


THE MINUTE I step outside I realize this is probably not such a good idea. It’s snowing really hard, and not the soft pretty flakes like before; this is like having buckets of ice pellets thrown in your face. I duck my head down to keep the ice out of my eyes, and when I do look up I see I’m heading right past the barn into the woods.

I remember one of the foster parents I lived with telling us kids a story about a boy who went out to check on the cows during a blizzard and got lost between the house and the barn. His parents found him frozen to death in a drift not two feet from his own back door. The story was supposed to be about how hard it was in the olden days and how good we had it now. Like we were lucky to have a washing machine to use when it was our turn to do the enormous bags of dirty laundry, which included our foster father’s gross stained boxers. Or we should be thankful we didn’t have to haul coal from the cellar to heat the stove. As if Lisa (that was that foster mother’s name, I remember now) had grown up as a pioneer, when really she came from suburban Long Island and had bought this old broken-down farm because she had some hippie idea of living in a commune. Only she and her alcoholic deadbeat husband (Travis, I recall, Travis and Lisa) couldn’t make a go of it, so they took in foster kids for the state subsidy and cheap labor.

The story about the frozen boy was also supposed to keep us from running away. It gave the younger kids nightmares. At night when the branches knocked on the windows the little kids said it was the frozen boy trying to get in.

And now that could be me. When I turn around to go back to the house I can’t see it. It’s like the storm has blown the house away, leaving me out here to turn into the scary ghost that knocks on the window. Always on the outside trying to get in—