Oren had considered it. He liked Scott. Would they let me stay with you? he asked. When I didn’t answer right away he said, Because I really, really want to stay with you, Alice.
The ice creeping through my veins melted then. And I really want to stay with you, buddy, I said, and I meant it. We’ll leave. I’ll start saving money tomorrow. We’ll take a bus upstate somewhere. There are shelters that take in women and kids up there. We’ll figure it out.
You promise?
I looked down at him, a little boy crouched on the bathroom floor clutching a Luke Skywalker in one hand and a Chewbacca in the other, and realized he was the first person who’d ever really needed me. Yeah, I said, I promise.
The next day all the lost stuff came back. Loose change, dirty socks, beer bottles, and Davis’s belt, all in a big pile on the living room floor. Not the missing cash, though. I found that in my purse: a roll of bills that added up to $316. I hid the money in a tampon box under the sink and got a Trailways bus schedule that day. I started saving my tips from the diner instead of using them to buy books and toys for Oren. I looked up shelters and domestic abuse services. Ulster County seemed to have the most services and it felt . . . familiar. My adoptive parents had lived up there. I remembered them talking about the orphanage where they got me like it was someplace nearby. And after they died when I was seven, I was placed in a group home not far from where they had lived. Never mind that I didn’t like it then; now it would be a good place for me and Oren. I kept my promise and the poltergeist stayed away.
Oren already seems to know about the dead kid. “She keeps it that way because she wants him to stay,” he says.
“Wants who to stay?” I ask, the potato peeler slipping in my hand and nicking my thumb.
“Caleb.”
“Did Mattie tell you that?” I ask, pressing a napkin to my thumb to stem the blood flow.
“No,” Oren says. “Caleb did.”
My whole body twitches. I grab him by both arms and he yelps. The ice pack balanced on his shoulder slides to the floor with a wet thump. “Don’t you start this again,” I say, keeping my voice low so Mattie won’t hear us.
“Ow!” he cries, but low, like he doesn’t want Mattie to hear either. “You’re hurting my arm.”
“Your arm was good enough for peeling potatoes for Mattie,” I spit back. “And we had a deal. You promised that if we left the poltergeist would go away.”
“Caleb’s not a poltergeist,” he says in that prissy tone he gets when he thinks I’m not smart enough to understand something. “He’s a ghost. That’s different. He wants to tell Mattie something. That’s why Mattie brought us back instead of taking us to the police. She thinks that Caleb will be able to tell her through me.”
I let him go and lean back, staring at him. “Did she tell you that?”
Oren stares at me like I’ve lost it. “No,” he snaps. “I told you—”
“Yeah, yeah, Caleb told you.” I picture Mattie sitting on the floor with Oren at Sanctuary, asking him if he heard voices. I thought she had gotten it into her head that Oren was psycho, but now it occurs to me that she wanted to know because she thinks Oren is some kind of medium who’s going to communicate with her dead brother.
“Hey, buddy.” I make my voice gentle. “You know it’s all a game, right? You don’t really hear that boy’s voice, do you?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t hear Caleb’s voice.”
I let out my breath. Oren’s not crazy. He’s a pleaser, Scott told me once. He’s learned to anticipate the needs of adults around him and come up with ways to meet or deflect them. He’s picked up on Mattie’s need to communicate with her dead brother and he’s trying to help her because he’s grateful to her for taking us in. Well, I’m not going to let her take advantage of him.
“Of course you don’t, buddy.” I hold out my arms and he collapses into them. I feel a swell of protectiveness rise up in me, burning off the chill of the house. We’ll be okay. One more night in this batty old house and we’ll hit the road. Just Oren and me. We don’t need anyone else.
He murmurs something against my shoulder that I can’t make out. “What’s that, buddy?” I ask, holding him at arm’s length.
“I said I don’t need to hear Caleb’s voice. He sends me messages.”
The chill creeps back up my spine. “What kind of messages?” I ask.
“Like finding Yoda,” he says, “and the marks on the windows.” He points behind me and I turn around. The bottom half of the window is fogged over and there are, indeed, dots drawn in the mist. Who knows how long they’ve been there. Mattie certainly hasn’t cleaned these windows in years.
“Those look pretty random,” I say, peering closer at the window.
“They’re not. The same pattern is on all the windows.” He’s pointing to the window over the sink. I get up to look at it more closely. Above the mist I can just make out an old red barn and below, yes, the pattern does look the same. “It means something to Caleb. I haven’t figured it out yet. I think it might be . . .”
I don’t hear the rest of Oren’s sentence. There’s something moving in the snow—a blurry shape. At first I think it’s a dog or a deer, but then the snow lets up for a moment and I make out the figure of a man. Then it disappears in another gust of snow. Or it’s gone inside the barn.
“I’ve got to get something from the barn,” I tell Oren hurriedly. “You stay here.”
I’m up before Oren can stop me. Before I leave the kitchen I slip a carving knife into my coat pocket. No one is taking Oren away from me.
Chapter Sixteen
Mattie
IT WAS THE first constellation my father taught me. Other kids learned the Big Dipper or Orion; I learned to find Virgo, the Maiden, who looked like a limp rag doll, with a kite-shaped face, sprawled out across the sky.
That’s the sign we both were born under, my father told me. People call her Virgo now, but the ancients called her Justice.
I lean forward to reach the constellation globe on the corner of the desk and spin it, my fingers tracing the raised glass bumps that mark the stars. The creak of the chair releases the odor of leather and pipe tobacco, and I can feel the itchy tweed of my father’s jacket sleeve brushing against my bare arm as he guides my hand along the pattern of stars. Follow the arc in Arcturus and speed on to Spica, he’d say. I feel the same little thrill the words gave me then, as if he were launching me into space, just as the maiden Justice flew up to the sky because she grew disgusted with the injustice she saw on Earth. She remains in the sky, my father would say, looking down and judging all that we do. Remember that, mouse, we’re all responsible for our actions. There’s no running away from justice. Then he would touch the scales on the figure of Justice, which would chime together like a clock tolling the hour.
When I find her constellation on the globe, I trace the pattern from her feet to her head and along her outstretched arms to the ear of grain she grasps in her left hand—the spica that gives the brightest star its name. Then I look down at the pattern in the dust. It is the same configuration. But how can that be? Could the globe, which used to be lit from inside by a bulb that burned out years ago, have cast the pattern onto the desk somehow? Or did I unconsciously draw the pattern when I came in last night? Just because I don’t remember doing it doesn’t mean I didn’t. If I could forget to let Dulcie back in the house I could forget drawing a pattern in the dust. My mother used to forget she’d bought milk and go to the store for another quart. When I came home from graduate school the summer Caleb was ten there’d been four quarts in the refrigerator, all souring. Is that what’s happening to me? My mother was only in her late fifties when it began. I’m fifty-nine.