—and what I might do to get the answer out of him.
Chapter Two
Mattie
I WAKE UP to the sound of a train whistle blowing. Such a lonesome sound, my mother used to say. I’ve never thought so. To me it always sounded like the siren call of faraway places. I used to lie in bed imagining where those tracks led. Out of these mountains, along the river, down to the city. Someday I’d answer that call and leave this place.
It takes me a moment to realize that it’s my phone ringing that has woken me. And then another few moments to realize that I’m not that girl plotting her escape. I’m a woman on the wrong side of fifty, back where she started, with no way out but one.
The phone’s plugged in on my nightstand. One of my young college interns showed me how to set it so only certain people can get through.
But what if someone who needs me has lost their phone and is calling from a phone booth? I asked.
She blinked at me like I was a relic of the last century and asked, Do they even have those anymore?
You ought to get out more, Doreen always tells me. Come down to the city with me.
It must be Doreen on the phone. She’s the only one on the list of “favorites,” aside from Sanctuary’s number, that I’d programmed into the phone. When the college girl saw that puny list she hadn’t been able to hide the pity in her eyes.
I reach for the phone, past pill bottles, paperbacks, and teacups—all my strategies to coax sleep—and manage to knock it over for my pains. I hear Dulcie stir, the vibration of the impact waking her. “It’s okay, girl,” I croon even though she can’t hear me. “It’s just Doreen riled up about something.”
I swing my legs around onto the floor, the floorboards cold on my bare feet, and lean down to find the phone. The screen is lit up with Doreen’s face (the college intern showed me how to do that too, taking a picture from Doreen’s Facebook page of her protesting at the Women’s March in January). Her mouth is open, midshout, which is kind of a joke because Doreen almost never shouts. She has the calmest voice of anyone I know. She could talk anyone down, the volunteers say. That’s why she always takes the hotline for the midnight to six A.M. shift, those hours when the worst things happen. Men stumble home drunk from bars and women lock their guns away. Teenagers overdose and girls find themselves out on the road without a safe ride home—or take the wrong one. Which one of those terrible things has happened to make Doreen call me in the middle of the night?
I draw my finger across the screen to answer. “Hi, Doreen.”
“Oh thank God, Mattie,” she says in a breathless rush as if she’d been running. Doreen always sounds like that. She ran away from her abusive ex seventeen years ago, after he slammed her son’s head up against the dining room wall, and sometimes I think she’s still running. “I thought you’d let your phone die again.”
“No, I just knocked it over. What is it? A bad call?”
Sometimes Doreen will call me because she’s upset by a call. I don’t mind. No one should have to sit alone in the night with the things we have to hear.
“A domestic violence case. Left home,” she says, and my heart sinks. I let out a sigh and feel a pressure against my leg. Dulcie has picked up on my distress and come over to lean against me.
“With a child?” I ask, hoping the answer is no.
“A ten-year-old boy. She was in the Newburgh bus station. I offered the Kingston shelter but she said no. She said it had to be a place no one could find her.”
“Oh,” I say, reaching down to stroke Dulcie’s soft head.
“I checked availability at St. Alban’s and Sister Martine said they could take her,” Doreen says, “but someone needs to pick her up at the bus station and take her there.”
The sisters at St. Alban’s are one of our best links on the domestic violence underground railroad. Their convent is on the river, gated, and guarded by a Mother Superior who would face down a dozen angry husbands come searching for their wayward women. It’s a chilly place to wash up after you’ve left your home in the night, though: the nuns in their long black habits, the bare cells, the crucifixes on the walls. I think of that ten-year-old boy, of what he’ll feel like in that cold gray place—
“I could call Frank,” she says. I hear the hesitation in her voice. Has the woman told her something that makes Doreen think that it might not be a good idea to call our local chief of police—or has she just sensed that there might be some reason to keep the law out of it for now? Or maybe she’s just uneasy saying Frank’s name to me. Doreen has a theory that Frank Barnes has a crush on me. I’ve tried to tell her how wrong she is about that, but Doreen doesn’t buy it.
“I’ll pick them up and take them,” I say, already getting up and reaching for the light switch. The weight against my leg slides away as the light floods the room. Doreen is saying something to me, something about the woman that had troubled her or something that the woman had reminded her of, but I don’t catch it. I’m staring at the dog bed at the foot of the bed. I’d moved it there a couple of weeks ago because I kept tripping over Dulcie on my way to the bathroom. She’s lying there now. Fast asleep.
THERE’S NO TIME to dwell on the phantom pressure on my leg. Diabetic nerve pain? Menopausal hot flash? The early-onset Alzheimer’s that felled my mother by my age? More important, the woman and the boy will be arriving at the bus station in an hour. It’s only a fifteen-minute drive from the house, but that’s assuming the car starts and there’s no ice to scrape off the windows and the roads are plowed. While I’m pulling on leggings and jeans, thermal top and sweater, I go to the window to look out. The view of my backyard is a gray-and-white blur of ominous lumps and dark encroaching forest. I can’t tell if the snow in the yard is fresh or if the gray in the air is fog or falling snow. There’s no back porch light to catch the falling flakes. You should fix that, I hear my mother’s voice saying. You’re letting the place go to seed.
You should mind your own business, I tell her right back. She’s been dead for thirty-four years. When will her voice get out of my head?
Dulcie is up and shambling by my side by the time we reach the top of the stairs. One of these days we’re going to topple ass-over-teakettle together down the steep slippery wooden steps and one of us will wind up in rehab. I’m not laying any bets on who’ll survive the fall.
Downstairs, Dulcie heads straight for the back door to be let out as if it’s morning. I don’t like letting her out in the dark; the snow is deep out there and there are coyotes in the woods, but I don’t have time to walk her, so unless I want to come home to a puddle, I’d better.
“Stay close,” I tell her, as if she could still hear me, or would listen if she could. I step out with her and feel the sting of icy rain on my face. Crap. That won’t make for easy driving.
I turn on the kettle and get out two thermoses from the drying rack. There’s nothing but tea in my pantry and that won’t do for mother or son. There’s a box of donations in the trunk of my car, though, that I think had some hot chocolate in it. I should get the car started anyway.
I go out the front door and nearly slide right off the porch. I’ll have to salt that. Avoiding the broken third step on the way down is tricky (one of these days that will be the end of you, I hear my mother helpfully point out) and the ground below is white with newly fallen snow. There’s a good six inches on the car, all of it covered with a glaze of ice. The scraper’s in the trunk, which is also sealed by ice. I use my fist to break through the ice over the front door and dig through six inches of powder to find another coating of ice over the door handle. As if the weather gods had decided to layer their efforts to thwart me.