The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Alice

I HEAR OREN running up the stairs and follow him, but when I get to the top he’s nowhere to be seen and all the doors in the long hallway are closed. He’s hiding from me. I could be mad but that’s on me. I taught him to play hide-and-seek. It was our first game together when he started hanging around my back porch.

Our porches were next to each other. In the summer I sat out there to smoke after my shift at the diner. Davis would come out and offer me a beer. Oren would play with his toys. Han Solo and Luke and Leia, that was all he talked about. I told him I thought Star Wars was cool, even though I wasn’t really into all that spaceship and lightsaber stuff. But it was nice to have company and Davis—Davis had this slow smile that made you feel like you were something special, and I didn’t have anyone else in my life who made me feel like that. So maybe at first I was nice to the kid because I liked Davis, which is ironic because by the end I was just staying with Davis because of Oren. But back then I wanted to spend some time alone with Davis, so I told Oren that I’d play hide-and-seek with him.

“Yeah,” Davis said, winking at me, “you go hide, son. We’ll come looking for you.”

Oren had looked at his father doubtfully, but then he’d turned to me and handed me one of his grimy little toys. A plastic dog with its tail broken off. “This is Chewbacca,” he told me. “He’ll help you look for me. I’ll leave clues that you can follow but you have to count to a hundred before you come looking so I have time to hide good.”

“We’ll give you plenty of time, sport, now . . . scram!” Davis had lunged forward and shouted in a scary growl that made Oren yelp and my heart skip a beat. But then Oren was laughing as he ran and I figured that was just how they played. What did I know about how fathers played with their kids? The foster parents I lived with never had time for that “nonsense”; even Travis and Lisa, who gave us big speeches about being a “family,” always had another chore we had to do when we asked to play games. So I laughed too and started counting, but Davis started calling out random numbers to mess me up and then he pulled out a joint and we sat out there smoking and drinking. When we did get around to going inside and looking for Oren we saw that he’d set up this whole elaborate game for us to find him. He’d left his toys with goofy messages taped to them, like “Look someplace stinky,” which turned out to be in Davis’s Nikes, where we found another toy with another message—“Look someplace sweet,” which meant the sugar bowl.

That’s what he’s done now.

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