The Night Visitors(43)
“Did you ask Davis to come get you?” Mattie squeezes out the words like toothpaste from a spent tube. “Did you tell him where you are?”
“No! What kind of an idiot do you think I am! Like I’d endanger my boy—”
“I know Oren’s not your son.”
This takes me by surprise—and it hurts too. She says it like she knows every dirty secret I’ve ever had. Like she knows me inside and out. But she doesn’t know the first thing about me.
“You assumed he was my son and I just went along with you. He’s still my boy. I’ve put up with Davis’s shit for two years because I couldn’t stand to leave Oren with him or let Oren end up in the system. I love that kid.”
I brace myself for her to challenge that but she doesn’t. “Where did you call from?”
“The CVS pharmacy phone. I don’t know if it has caller ID—”
“It does,” Mattie says. “Shit. Why didn’t you tell me? We could have told the police.”
“I’d’ve lost Oren. I’ve got no claim to him. And . . . I’ve got a record. Little shit . . . shoplifting, pot . . . but I’d never get custody of him. You know where he’d end up.”
She doesn’t argue with this. Instead she turns on her flashlight and shines it right in my eyes, blinding me. “I know you took drugs from my bedroom.” Her voice is cold and hard. “Have you taken it all?”
I fish out two Oxy from my pocket and hand them over. “I only took one of the Valium to calm down,” I tell her. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”
I don’t mean it as a joke but she laughs. When she lowers the flashlight I can see her face. It’s wet and shiny; she’s cried all through my story without making a sound. “Okay,” she says, wiping her face with her shirtsleeve. “We’re not going to solve anything by standing here jawing. Let’s go up and find Oren and then hunker down. Do you have any idea where he is?”
“I heard him in your brother’s room. I thought he was under the bed but then when I looked he wasn’t there. Though I did find this.” I hand her the R2-D2. She turns it over and reads the sticky note. Even in the weird glow of the flashlight I can tell her face has gone pale. “What?” I ask, for a second more afraid of what the note means to Mattie than the fact that Davis is prowling outside the house.
“I’ll explain on the way up,” she says, stroking the plastic robot with her thumb as if it were a holy relic. “I think I know where Oren is.”
AS I FOLLOW Mattie up the stairs she explains in a hushed whisper something she calls “the game.”
“Caleb loved to play hide-and-seek. It was his favorite game and he didn’t get to play a lot of games. My parents . . . they were old by the time Caleb showed up—a change-of-life baby, some people called him. A mistake, others said.”
“That’s mean,” I say.
“People are mean. I expect you’ve learned that, Alice. Caleb didn’t have many friends. My mother didn’t like for him to bring other kids home—too much mess, she said—or to go to the neighbors’ houses. When I was growing up my father would read to me, teach me about the stars and trees and birds, but by the time Caleb came along he had less patience.” She pauses and I suspect there’s more to the story that she’s leaving out, but I don’t press her. There’s plenty I’d want to leave out of my story too.
“So I played with him. In the summer we would play hide-and-seek for hours out in the fields and woods. He got so good at it that he scared me sometimes, disappearing for hours. I made him agree to a place he’d always come back to if I couldn’t find him in an hour—home base, we called it—and he started leaving clues there. At first they were pretty simple, like ‘I’m with the pips’ for the apple orchard, but after we saw the first Star Wars movie he started mapping out whole adventures for the characters.”
“Oren did that too,” I say. “I think it was easier pretending to be a rebel Jedi hiding from Darth Vader than a scared little boy hiding from his asshole father.”
We’ve reached the door to Caleb’s room. It’s closed, though I don’t remember closing it. Mattie turns to me, the flashlight lighting up her face like a fright mask. Despite the scary shadows on her face her eyes look kinder than they have since I pulled Oren’s arm. “Of course it was. The game got more complicated the summer Caleb was ten. I was away at graduate school. When I came back I knew right away that things were . . . different. My mother, who’d always been a compulsive cleaner, had gotten crazy. She’d mop the kitchen floor and then forget she’d just cleaned it and start all over again. She was always yelling at Caleb not to track in mud, not to make too much noise, not to move things around—”
“Not to move things around?” I ask, thinking of Oren’s poltergeist.
“She was imagining it,” Mattie says with a sigh. “She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I tried to talk to my father about her but he was too busy with his own worries. Some of his past cases were being reviewed by the state . . .” She pauses again and I guess this is something else she’s leaving out. I let her. I’m getting impatient with this story; I want to find Oren.
“And . . . ?” I prompt.