I told Caleb I’d come back for him the next summer, when I’d gotten my MSW and could get a job. My mother was carping and shrewish, so consumed by her own anxieties that she had to control everything—and everyone—around her. I knew she squelched every boyish desire in Caleb’s heart, but he had such a big heart I thought it would remain intact. My father was strict, but his punishments were always impartial and cold. No dinner. Extra chores. Time-outs. Carefully calibrated punishments that left you feeling ashamed.
I thought that Caleb could survive them both for another year. At least that’s what I told myself. Really, I wanted that year to myself. I wanted to answer that siren cry of the train whistle calling me to New York City. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Doreen tells me. You wanted what any young woman would want. And you did come back.
I could have come back after college.
And worked at Stewart’s? You wanted a good job so you could take care of him. You were going to take him with you once you graduated.
I hadn’t counted on my father’s own sense of shame.
I feel Alice’s breath on the back of my neck and her hand on my elbow, ready to be led into the darkness. Trusting me. As Oren has. As Caleb did.
And then I see something glowing faintly on the first step. I look closer and see that it’s a plastic Day-Glo star. There’s one on each step going down, a trail to follow. A lifeline, like the one we’d used in Lava to navigate the treacherous terrain of our own home.
It unfreezes me now. Only, as I step forward, I can’t help thinking that a lifeline tossed by a ghost might be anything but.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alice
WALKING DOWN THESE dark stairs feels like the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do. Scarier than the time I ran away from my last foster home and had to sleep in a bus station two nights in a row. Scarier than the stint I did at Pine Crest JD, the nice JD, which wasn’t that bad but still felt like shit.
This is worse because I know Davis is here. I don’t care if Mattie thinks it’s her redneck Stewart’s guy; I know it’s Davis. I can feel him, like a cold draft rising up through the cracks in the floorboards, that prickle I get at the base of my skull when I’m around someone really bad. Cray-dar, one of the girls I met in lockdown called it: creep-radar.
When we go past the boarded-up door that Mattie said leads to her father’s study, I feel like there are a million bugs crawling over my body. It’s not Davis’s face I picture, though, it’s that smug sonofabitch judge from the newspaper story. Mattie’s father. What kind of an asshole sends his own daughter to lockdown? That’s what’s off about this house.
One of the things about my foster mom Lisa was that she was really sensitive. The least noise would make her jump. Do you have to walk so loud? Can you not make the whole house shake? Can you lower your voice? Can you only use the toilet before nine P.M. and after nine A.M.? Do you have to toss and turn and make the bed creak?
Tamara, a big girl from Yonkers, said, She’d like for us to crawl inside the walls and stay there.
The image of us all stuck behind the walls—literally stuck in the walls—haunted me, woke me up in the middle of the night because I’d dreamed I was smothering in plaster. And now it feels like we’re inside the walls of this old house, where the mice crawl and the ghosts dwell. That’s what Oren felt when he stopped on the path outside the house. He felt Caleb’s ghost.
Oren, who always knows things, like what town to buy the bus tickets for, and who can make things disappear, like the poltergeist. Oren’s been talking to dead Caleb and now he’s leading us down these dark stairs to the basement, where it’s cold and damp as a grave. I stumble at the thought, and when I reach out to steady myself I feel cold rough stone and something slithers over my hand. I bat it away and trip down the last few steps, banging off something soft and squishy and landing on my hands and knees on the floor—only it’s not even floor, it’s dirt. I can smell it. It smells like worms. It smells like a grave. Of course, that’s what the ghost wants, to drag us down into its grave. I can feel a scream clawing its way up my throat when a hand clamps over my mouth.
“Alice!” The voice is in my ear, hoarse and rough. It doesn’t sound like Mattie, but then her big capable hands are on my shoulders and she’s shushing me like a mother would hush a scared child, and I just collapse into her and cry as quietly as I can and Mattie sits by me in the dirt with her arms around me until I’m good and done.
“It’s just the basement,” she says, “see?” She turns on the flashlight and moves the light over the dirt floor, rough stone walls, and beams that look like they were hewn out of whole trees. Boxes are stacked in front of the stairs we just came down so that you wouldn’t even know the stairs were there. There’s another long flight that probably goes up to the kitchen and a shorter flight of stone steps leading to slanted doors that look like they came from a movie set in Kansas. Metal shelves with junk and cloudy-looking jars line the far side of the room, and a huge hulking furnace lurks in an alcove that looks like it was carved out of the rock face. I remember Mattie said she replaced the old one after it killed her family, but still, there’s something scary about it. As I stare at it something moves in the shadows behind it. Something boy shaped.
I get up and march over there, shining my flashlight into the alcove. It’s more like a cave than an alcove, and it goes farther back than my flashlight reaches.
“Oren?” I call. “Come out of there right now!”
“Did you see him in there?” Mattie asks, adding her flashlight beam to mine. “There’s a crawl space back there where Caleb got stuck once.”
The last thing I want to hear about right now is Mattie’s dead brother—or anything called a crawl space—but that would be mean to say. I can see Mattie measuring the distance between the wall and the furnace, but the truth is she’s too wide in the beam to clear the narrow space.
“I’ll go,” I say, pushing past her. I flatten myself against the stone wall, imagining centipedes and spiders crawling into my hair, and inch my way past the hulking machine. It’s not really that hot; it must have turned off when the electricity went out. Still, I find I don’t want to touch it. It’s greasy and dirty and somehow just . . . bad.
“Thanks a lot, Oren,” I mutter. I hear a muffled sound that could be giggling—or sobbing. Damn. If Oren’s really gotten himself stuck in here he must be scared shitless. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I say, backtracking. “It’s just a smelly old basement. I’m coming to get you out.”
Once I’m past the furnace I can lift my arm and aim the flashlight into the back of the cave. Past the pipes and wires, toward the bottom of the wall, there’s an opening maybe two feet high. The crawl space Mattie mentioned, only you’d have to be a midget to crawl in there. I shine the flashlight into it and the beam catches the glint of eyes. Big, wide, scared little-boy eyes.