The Night Visitors(45)

“Where to?” She’s not letting anything go.

“To juvenile detention,” I reply, glad it’s too dark to see Alice’s expression. This is not something I often tell people. Doreen once said I should own what happened to me, that I was a survivor of the antiquated juvenile corrections system and that by sharing my story I would empower other survivors.

That was the only time I ever told Doreen to fuck off. No matter how enlightened people think they are (woke, the interns call it), they look at you differently when they know you were in JD. But I don’t have to see how Alice is looking at me. Her voice is awed when she asks, “JD? A judge’s daughter?”

“Yeah, I know, ironic, huh? But my father had this idea that if he went easy on me people would call him a hypocrite. He had a reputation as a judge who was tough on juvenile delinquents. He thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket because parents were too permissive and kids didn’t have to face up to the consequences of their actions. So when I got picked up for making out in a parked car—”

“That’s a crime?”

“‘Public indecency,’ my father decreed.” Slutting around, my mother called it. “He thought he had to treat me the same as any other miscreant. I got sent to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson.”

Alice is silent for a moment. “I’ve never heard of that place,” she says at last.

“They shut it down in 1975, two years after I finished my time there. It . . . It wasn’t a very nice place.” And just like that the black hole we’re sitting in becomes the windowless basement cell used for solitary confinement, Hudson’s preferred method of punishment. I can hear even now the drip, drip, drip from the leaky faucet in the hall and the tread of the guard’s footsteps on the stairs.

“Shit,” Alice says in a tone of commiseration.

“Yeah,” I agree. “When I came home the back stairs were boarded up. My mother said it was because of the new baby—Caleb—that she was afraid of him falling down the stairs, but I knew it was a message to me. There’d be no more sneaking out at night.” It had felt, when I came back, like a piece of me was gone too, like that rebellious girl who would sneak out to meet Frank Barnes down in the hollow had been erased. I had thought I might find her again when I saw Frank, but Frank had been sent straight from boot camp to a military school, and then he joined the army. Although I’d caught glimpses of him on holidays, it was another ten years before I really talked to him again.

“Wow,” Alice says, “what a weird-assed thing to do.”

I almost laugh. Weird-assed, indeed. It’s like we’re two teenagers on a sleepover, cuddled in a closet, telling each other ghost stories. “Yeah, but then Caleb found the sliding door underneath his bed the summer he was ten. The house inside the house, he called it. I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. I’d forgotten about the stairs. But then he took me here and I thought, yeah, this is what he needs: a house inside the house, another place with a different family where he could be a normal little boy without my parents carping at him every minute. It became our place.”

I listen for a moment and hear a step and the creak of casters—my father’s chair being moved. The intruder’s still in the study. Then I turn on the flashlight, aiming it at the ceiling. It’s still here: a night sky and a million stars and tiny spaceships hanging from invisible fishing lines. A galaxy far, far away that I made for Caleb a lifetime ago. I don’t know what I thought would have happened to it—I’ve barely let myself think of it in the decades since Caleb’s death—but it feels like a miracle that it has survived.

I hear a clunk from the study below us. We have to find Oren. I sweep the beam of my flashlight across the landing from the stairs that lead up to the attic to the ones that lead down to the first floor and basement. The light comes to rest on a figure standing on the newel post of the downward stairs. It’s Princess Leia, holding her hands up, as she does in the first movie when she appears as a hologram begging for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi, only here she’s holding a Post-it note. Alice grabs it and shines the flashlight on it.

“You’re our only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” it reads. “Return to Dagobah for more information.”

“Dagobah is the planet Yoda lives on,” Alice says.

“When we were playing in the house, Dagobah meant the basement. There’s a crawl space there that reminded Caleb of the cave Yoda lives in.”

“Can we get to the basement from here?” Alice asks. I notice that she doesn’t question why Oren would know something that Caleb knew. Earlier she accused me of bringing Oren back here so that he could communicate with Caleb, and she wasn’t wrong. But the idea that he is actually doing that now is not something I want to dwell on.

“Maybe. My parents didn’t wall that door up, they just stacked boxes in front of it. I moved them just enough so I could get by when Caleb and I started using the stairs again and I haven’t moved them since.” I sense Alice staring at me, but if she thinks it’s odd that I haven’t touched the boxes in my basement for thirty-four years she refrains from commenting, so I go on. “The stairs go by the study, though, so we’ll have to be really, really quiet. And we’d better turn off our flashlights.”

I turn off my flashlight and Alice follows suit. When we’re plunged into darkness, for a moment I can’t move. Once Caleb found these stairs again I used them regularly to sneak out. At twenty-five, home from graduate school, I shouldn’t have had to sneak out, but my parents never trusted me after I got back from Hudson. It was as if, having consigned me to that hellhole, they blamed me for what happened to me there. I was tainted. And the worst thing was that a part of me agreed with them. When I ran into Frank again—back from military school and two years in the army—I sensed that same whiff of damage in him.