“Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Alice?” she says, all sweet and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth.
I shouldn’t say anything, but I want to wipe the smug right off her face.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m glad the bastard’s dead.”
Chapter Six
Mattie
ALICE TELLS THE story against a sound track of metal scraping against ice. We can see Oren laboring with the shovel outside the window, a diminutive figure in a red parka, peaked blue hat, and too-big snow boots. We both keep our eyes on him as she talks, as if we’re afraid he might vanish if we don’t.
“I was really young when I met Davis,” she begins. I’ve listened to hundreds of these stories over the years and they always begin the same. I met a man. He seemed so nice. He treated me so special. “He seemed so grown-up, and it felt cool that a man that age would pay attention to me. I never knew my father.”
She pauses, takes a sip of coffee. I picture myself standing on the threshold of my father’s study waiting for that imperious Come!
“So I guess I had daddy issues.” She laughs. I smile. Say nothing. Wait. “And Davis was cool. He’s a musician—or at least he was until I got pregnant with Oren and he had to take a day job. I guess that’s when things started going bad—not that I regret having Oren for a second; he’s the best thing in my life, you know . . . or maybe you don’t. Do you have kids?”
I’m familiar enough with this tactic of deflecting attention not to answer the question. “I can see how you feel about Oren. He’s a great kid.”
Most mothers, you tell them their kids are great, they beam right back at you. But Alice seems to shrink into herself a little more and hunch over her coffee cup, as if she resents my pointing this out. There’s something off about these two. Him calling her Alice, for instance. Not that plenty of kids, especially only children, don’t try out their parents’ first names, but there was the way she looked up at me when he said it, like she was wondering what I made of it. I can sense that same hesitation now, like she’s checking out what I think of each thing she says, whether I’m buying it. Well, I’m not going to give her that. I stay quiet, and after a moment’s pause she goes on. “He’s so smart it’s scary sometimes. Davis says he gets it from him, but he’s way smarter than Davis. And Davis knows it. It started making him . . . jealous. Isn’t that weird? A parent being jealous of his own child.”
“Depends on the parent,” I say, trying not to be drawn in. My mother quips back, Depends on the child.
“Well, I thought it was weird. It made him really hard on Oren. He was always prodding him, trying to prove he was better—than his own kid! When I objected he’d say I was too soft on him, that he’d grow up a sissy. Then when Oren would come to my defense Davis would say I’d poisoned Oren against him.”
“Come to your defense how?” I ask, not willing to let that slide past.
“When Davis hit me.” She holds up her chin as if I’m going to challenge her. “Oren would try to stop him.” She pulls up her shirtsleeve and shows me a line of white ridges on her forearm. Burn marks. “He started punishing me when Oren was at school. I tried not to let Oren see them but there’s not much that gets past him. He stopped going to school—and he liked school. He’d pretend to be sick, and when Davis made him go anyway he’d sneak back. Aren’t you going to ask me why I didn’t leave?”
“I imagine it’s because you had no place to go,” I say.
All the muscles in Alice’s face harden as if I’d struck her. She’s trying not to cry, I realize. “No, I didn’t,” she says defiantly. “I grew up in the foster system, so I don’t have anyone. But even if I did, Davis said he’d kill me if I tried to leave him.”
No matter how often I have heard some variation on this threat, I am still amazed by the possessiveness of the abuser who tells a woman ten times a day that she’s worthless but still won’t let her go. Amazed, but not surprised. Nor am I surprised to learn that Alice grew up in foster care. She has the wariness I’ve seen in dozens of kids in the system, as if the ground beneath their feet’s not steady. Which it usually isn’t. If we had more time I’d ask her about that, but we have only as long as it will take Oren to finish shoveling and he’s already gotten to the driveway and started on the path to the barn. So instead I ask, “What happened yesterday?”
She hastily wipes her face, although no tear has fallen. As she speaks her voice rises in pitch, but whether because she’s nervous or lying I can’t tell. “I tried to leave. Davis was going into the city for some gig. He was supposed to be out of the house all day, but he came home because he’d forgotten something. Oren and I were all packed to go. He . . . tried to strangle me . . .” She touches her hand to the marks on her throat. “. . . and Oren got in between us . . . and . . . something snapped. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I picked up a knife and stabbed him. I—I didn’t even know if he was dead. I just grabbed Oren’s hand and we ran. We waited in the bus station for the next bus . . . well, you know the rest.”
Do I? I wonder. She’s rushed through the story. Maybe because it’s too painful to talk about, but I think there’s something else. “Where’d you get the knife?”
“What? What does that matter?”
“The police will ask you, so I’m asking you now.”
She turns white at the mention of the police. “I grabbed it off the kitchen counter. I’d been using it to cut up some apples earlier.”
I let her sit with that for a minute. Then I get up, go into the mudroom, and retrieve the bowie knife from under the blankets. I bring it back into the kitchen and lay it down on the kitchen table in front of her. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally pare my apples with a hunting knife.”
“Where’d you get that?” she asks in a hushed whisper. As if she’s afraid that Oren will hear her.
“It was in Oren’s sweatshirt pocket. It had blood on it.”
She stares at it for a long moment and then looks up at me. “It doesn’t now.”
“No,” I concede. “It slipped into the washer. No blood, no fingerprints. Nothing to prove who was holding that knife. But it wasn’t you, was it? It was Oren who stabbed his father.”
She glares at me with such anger and hatred that I’m sure I must be wrong. This is someone who could kill a man; not that sweet boy outside. Or maybe I just want to be wrong. I want to take it all back—why must you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong?—but she’s nodding now, wiping away a tear.
“He did it to protect me,” she says. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police and tell them that? Or at least call 911?”
“And let them take Oren? You know they would, even if I told them he was protecting me. They’d put him in juvenile detention. Can you imagine that sweet, smart boy in one of those places?” She says it like she knows what she’s talking about. Like maybe she spent some time in one herself. She wouldn’t be the first foster kid to end up in detention. “It would ruin his life.”
I can’t say I disagree with her, but I make myself ask, “And what kind of life are you going to have on the run?”
She shakes her head and begins to cry. “If you’re going to call the police just give us a head start and we’ll clear out.”
And go where? I wonder, picturing Alice and Oren thumbing a ride on the road, taking a lift from who knows who. “No,” I say. “I can help you. Give me a day and I’ll make arrangements. I can find a place that will be safe for you and Oren.” She’s crying harder, so I add, “You can trust me.” But she knows that. We both know I made up my mind to help them when I tossed that knife in the washer.