The Night Visitors(39)

“Where’d you find it?” Alice asks.

When he doesn’t answer right away I suggest, as gently as I can, “Maybe you found them in the Star Wars lunch box upstairs. I don’t mind, buddy. I was going to give them to you anyway.”

Oren shakes his head. “That’s not where I found him. He showed up right here in the kitchen to remind me to stir the chili. It was going to burn otherwise, Mattie.”

“Toys don’t just show up out of nowhere,” Alice says, an edge in her voice as if Oren has made this claim before. “Did you go into that boy’s room and take his toys?”

“It really doesn’t matter,” I interject quickly. She has some nerve attacking Oren for stealing when she’s been in my medications. “As I said, I was going to give him all the toys in that lunch box—”

“Why?” Alice asks, wheeling on me. “So Oren could use them to speak to your dead brother?”

I’m so flabbergasted that I don’t know what to say. Where in the world did Alice get that idea? Before I can think of an answer Alice is at me, shoving her face in mine, spit flying from her hard little mouth. “I heard you asking him if he heard voices. What kind of a social worker takes advantage of a child’s fantasy world to feed her own neuroses? That’s sick! I’m going to report you to the Department of Social Services.”

It shouldn’t, but this makes me laugh. It’s a bad habit of mine, laughing when I’m nervous. “Really? Are you going to report yourself at the same time? Are you going to turn yourself and Oren in while you’re at it and watch Oren end up in juvie?”

Alice’s face turns as bright red as the chili Oren is stirring. “Don’t you dare threaten me with that! You fucking—”

“Stop it!” Oren shoves himself in between us. He drops the tin can but holds on to the wooden spoon, and gobs of hot chili fly off and hit Alice in the face. She lets out a horrible shriek and lunges for Oren’s hand, but he backs up, brandishing the spoon like a weapon.

“You little shit!” Alice screams.

His eyes widen and his face goes white. “You . . . you . . .” The words sputter out of his lips. “You are NOT my mother!” Then he flings the spoon at Alice and runs from the kitchen.

Alice is so startled by the blow, which has spread chili across her face and hair, that she stands there frozen for a long moment. Then she turns to me, her face streaked with red sauce, her eyes stricken. “This is your fucking fault,” she spits at me, before she turns and leaves the kitchen, calling Oren’s name as she goes.

I listen to her voice as it travels upstairs. But what I’m hearing is Oren’s words.

You are not my mother.

It’s a thing that kids have screamed at their rightful parents for generations. I said it to my own mother in this very kitchen.

Good. Who’d want a hateful girl like you for a daughter? she’d responded.

But the way Alice looked when he said it has made something click in my head. A lot of things, actually. The way Oren flinched when Alice touched him. The fact that he always calls her Alice. The fact that, now that I think about it, they don’t look all that much alike. Oren has dark, curly hair and brown eyes. Alice is fair with washed-out blue eyes.

I reach into my coat pocket, find my phone, and then take out the charger from my cardigan pocket. I plug the phone into an outlet next to the stove, then pick up the spoon and tin can from the floor. As I’m picking up the tin can I hear something—a murmuring like the sound you hear when you press a conch shell to your ear. Before I can question why I’m doing it, I lift the can and hold it to my ear—

“Matt?”

I drop the can like it’s on fire. There were only two people who ever called me Matt and one of them is dead.

I’m reaching to pick up the can again when my real phone buzzes to life on the counter. I look at it and see that I have a text message on the screen from Doreen:

Called Dept. of Child Welfare. Alice isn’t Oren’s mother. Not even stepmother. She’s the next-door neighbor who babysits. The father

The text is cut off there. I have to swipe it to get the rest of the message, but my hands are too damp and shaking (Was that Caleb’s voice?). I take two steps to reach the mudroom to grab a towel from the top of the dryer . . . and hear something behind me at the back door.

It’s the doorknob turning.

Above the doorknob, in the plate-glass window silhouetted against the static gray of the snow, is a hooded figure.

I reach beneath the pile of towels for the bowie knife. As my hand curls around the handle, the lights go out.





Chapter Nineteen


Alice


I HEAR OREN running up the stairs and follow him, but when I get to the top he’s nowhere to be seen and all the doors in the long hallway are closed. He’s hiding from me. I could be mad but that’s on me. I taught him to play hide-and-seek. It was our first game together when he started hanging around my back porch.

Our porches were next to each other. In the summer I sat out there to smoke after my shift at the diner. Davis would come out and offer me a beer. Oren would play with his toys. Han Solo and Luke and Leia, that was all he talked about. I told him I thought Star Wars was cool, even though I wasn’t really into all that spaceship and lightsaber stuff. But it was nice to have company and Davis—Davis had this slow smile that made you feel like you were something special, and I didn’t have anyone else in my life who made me feel like that. So maybe at first I was nice to the kid because I liked Davis, which is ironic because by the end I was just staying with Davis because of Oren. But back then I wanted to spend some time alone with Davis, so I told Oren that I’d play hide-and-seek with him.