The Sleepwalkers (33 page)

Ride, boy! Ride!

Then his father looks up, distracted. It’s hard to see, from his infant’s perspective, as he rides out from behind an armchair: what’s his dad looking at? Might be the fireplace. Might be the Christmas tree. Might be the clock on the mantle.

A hammering sound snaps Caleb’s reverie.

Back in the trailer.

He’s on his feet instantly.

The pounding comes again. He sees the front door rattle on its hinges.

“Christine,” he calls, uncertain of what else to do. “We’ve got company!” He looks around for a weapon. Finally, he runs into the kitchen and grabs a flimsy steak knife off the counter. It doesn’t do much to assuage his fears, but it’s all he can find.

The pounding again.

“Who is it?” he barks.

“Margie from the restaurant. And the sheriff ain’t with me.”

Caleb is so relieved he almost laughs. He reaches out to unlock the door, then stops. Maybe the sheriff is with her. Maybe he has a gun to her head making her pretend she’s alone. Or maybe she was on his side all along.

Caleb sneaks over to the window and peeks out from behind the curtain. He sees Margie, all right, but she’s not alone. A large man is standing next to her. The man’s build is very close to that of the sheriff, although he isn’t wearing the sheriff ’s usual wide-brimmed hat. Caleb moves around as much as he can, but he can’t get a good look at the man’s face.

“Who’s with you?” he yells.

“Man who picked me up and helped me when I was hiding from the sheriff. Says he knows you too,” Margie says. There’s a slight pause. “Says his name is Ron.”

Caleb reaches to unlock the door, then stops again. His first inclination was to trust this Ron guy, but maybe he should rethink that. Look where that got him last time. Ron took him to that creepy quack doctor, and he wound up at the Dream Center.

The House of White Rooms,
he thinks, though he doesn’t know where the phrase came from. Was that what Christine called it?

“Let me talk to Ron,” he says.

“It’s me,” says a man’s voice.

“Why should I trust you?” says Caleb. “You took me to that doctor.”

“I also followed you to where he took you and got arrested trying to help get you out,” says Ron.

That’s certainly what the director wanted me to believe, Caleb thinks.

“Why are you trying to help me?”

“I have a daughter,” he says. “Her name is Keisha. She was abducted a few miles from here, years ago. I been trying to find her ever since.”

“And you think the people who took my friend took her, too. Is that it?”

“I don’t know,” he says, “but it’s the only thing I’ve got to go on.”

Caleb’s hand is on the lock, but he’s still not ready to turn it, not yet.

“Margie,” he says, “why are
you
here?”

There’s silence on the other side of the door, and for a moment he thinks they’ve gone. Then he hears Margie clear her throat.

“I thought maybe we could trust the sheriff, until I saw him shooting at poor Christine. Now I know there’s no one to trust. No one but us. A lotta kids’ve turned up gone. Good kids. There ain’t but a few of us in Hudsonville left to do anything about it, and I reckoned I might be one of them. Besides,” she says, her voice muffled from behind the wood, “they say some folks’ll burn when Judgment comes around and some won’t. Might be too late now, but I’d like to be one of the ones that don’t. If I can help it.”

“It isn’t too late,” Ron says quietly to Margie. “Never think it is.”

Caleb thinks of Bean and Christine’s skepticism about anyone helping the people in Africa. Hundreds of people are missing in Hudsonville, and who’s left to stand for them? Only these five people, out of hundreds. Maybe that’s how it always happens.

He turns the lock and opens the door. Ron smiles amicably.

“How’s the pitching arm, slugger?” Ron says.

Caleb smiles in spite of himself and looks down at the dirty ace bandage on his left arm.

“Fine, as long as I don’t move it or shake it or breathe,” Caleb says.

“Little Billy, you really have grown up so handsome, I declare!” says Margie, and she gives him a big hug.

Caleb is desperate to free himself, because the wide-open door is terrifying him. He makes himself abide the hug, then shoves the door shut and twists it locked.

Ron picks up on his discomfort. “Nobody followed us,” he says, “I made Margie look behind us the whole way.”

“How did you find us?” Caleb asks.

Ron shakes his head, “I don’t know,” he says darkly.

“Someone told him,” Christine says. Caleb hadn’t noticed her come in from the hallway. She’s washed her face, brushed her hair and traded her filthy hospital gown in for jeans and a tank top. To Caleb, she somehow looks both completely normal and fantastically beautiful.

Despite the ominous connotations her statement might hold, she’s smiling.

“What do you mean?” Ron asks. “Nobody told me, really, I just figured . . . I thought . . . I don’t know how I knew,” he concludes finally, frowning.

“Somebody did tell you, whether you knew it or not,” Christine repeats. “Somebody good. My sister.” She looks over at Caleb, who stares back at her.

The witch appears from the hallway on bare, tentative feet, her gray hair dark with moisture and hanging in her face. But she looks better already, Caleb thinks, healthier. The heat of the shower has made her cheeks ruddy, and she wears a timid smile on her face and a white terrycloth robe over her body.

“Margie, you remember my mother,” Christine says.

Margie nods at the witch and flashes a guarded smile.

“And this is—what’s your name?” Christine says.

“Ron.”

“ . . . Ron.”

The witch nods, her eyes trained on the floor. “Welcome, all,” she says. “Make yourselves at home.”

Everybody stands silently for a moment. Here they are, brought together somehow in the most godforsaken town, in the most godforsaken trailer imaginable, five strangers. Margie looks wired and edgy, Mrs. Zikry gazes at the floor, Ron looks from person to person, stoic but expectant. And Caleb suddenly realizes he’s staring at Christine. And Christine is smiling.

“We should all rest while we have the daylight,” she says. “Some of you folks haven’t slept in a while. I know I haven’t. This isn’t the most inviting place to sleep, but if we work together maybe we can clean things up enough to find a place for everybody to get some rest. Sound good?”

Everybody murmurs in assent.

“Who’s hungry?” she continues. “I’ll make some food.”

There are some nods.

“Billy,” she says, “will you help me in the kitchen?”

“Sure,” Caleb says.

“I’ll help out too.” Margie says, “I’m a little whipped right now, but this wouldn’t be the first time I pulled a double shift, I’ll tell you that.”

“Thanks, Margie,” says Christine. “Maybe you can help my mom clean things up so everybody has a place to sleep.”

“I wouldn’t mind at all,” Margie says.

Everybody sets to work. Margie throws the bed sheets in a rusty washing machine on the back porch. Ron digs into a closet and pulls out a vacuum that could use vacuuming itself it’s so dusty. Mrs. Zikry putters around, picking up, tidying up. At first, her pace is slow, but soon she is accomplishing as much as everyone else.

In the kitchen, Christine and Caleb find a frozen lasagna that seems like it might feed everybody, and they put it in the oven and go to work on the massive pile of dirty dishes composting in the sink. Those plates that can’t be salvaged get tossed into a big, black plastic trash bag; the others, Christine washes and Caleb dries.

“You handled your mom pretty well,” Caleb offers.

“I’m used to it,” Christine says. “Since Anna, she’s been like this on and off. The next few days, if she can’t sneak a drink someplace, she’ll be in bed with the DTs.”

“DTs?”

“Delirium tremens. The shakes. Alkies get it when they’re going through withdrawal. It’s a pretty common cycle around this household, unfortunately.”

“I’m sorry,” Caleb says.

“It’s okay,” Christine says with a little smile. “I’m just glad she’s okay. Without me around to keep her off the bottle, I figured . . . When I was locked up in that place, I kept expecting to get a letter or something saying she died. I stopped her from killing herself, like, fifty times. I figured without me there to stop her, she’d go pretty fast. And then I’d be in that place forever. But she’s strong, I guess. She surprised me.”

There’s a long silence.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb says, “about Anna.”

“That was a long time ago,” Christine says.

“No,” Caleb says. “I mean I’m sorry I dared her to go into that place. It was my fault she went in there.”

Christine sets down the plate she’s washing and looks him full in the face.

“Don’t tell me you’ve beat yourself up about that all these years.”

He shrugs.

“That wasn’t your fault. You loved Anna as much as I did.”

Caleb doesn’t say anything.

“Anna forgives you,” she says. “And so do I.”

He looks down at the sink.

She takes a handful of suds and slowly, solemnly places them on his nose—then laughs. He looks over at her, trying to keep some of his dignity, then finally breaks down and laughs with her.

He scoops the suds off his nose and puts them on her head. She just laughs harder.

Caleb is still smiling but suddenly sighs, serious again.

“How did you do it all these years? Knowing your sister was dead, taking care of your mother, seeing other kids disappearing? I feel like my life has been so . . . easy.”

She shrugs. “Everyone does what they have to do. It’s nothing special,” she says.

“Well, I kind of disagree,” says Caleb.

“Are you saying you think I’m special?” Christine says, batting her eyelashes jokingly.

“Maybe.”

“Special Olympics special, or prom-queen special?”

“A little of both.”

Christine gapes in mock shock.

She scoops some suds out of the sink and tosses them at Caleb.

He grabs her from behind and tickles her. She laughs and turns to retaliate, and before either of them know it, their lips and bodies are pressed together tight. They emerge, breathing hard, staring at each other.

Caleb takes a trembling breath and blinks, breaking their eye contact to stare at a can opener on the counter.

“I should have told you, I’m kind of seeing somebody,” he says.

The light in Christine’s eyes goes out, and in that instant Caleb thinks he would give anything in the world to take back the words he just spoke.

Except they’re true. Aren’t they?

Christine just smiles sadly. “Then that kiss’ll have to be enough,” she says, and goes back to washing the dishes.

Caleb picks his half-soggy drying towel up off the counter and they finish their work in a silence that neither of them seems able to break.

Caleb replays Christine’s last words in his mind, over and over.
Then that kiss’ll have to be enough.
It isn’t just the guilt that sets that awful auditory loop in motion, nor is it only regret.

He’s trying to decide if the undertone he heard in her voice was sorrow, or well-concealed malice. After all, she was a sleepwalker too.

Candles are lit on the dinner table, and the fake flowers in the centerpiece almost look real. The trailer has undergone a miraculous transformation in only an hour. The trash, old whiskey bottles, and slowly rotting food have been bagged up and taken out. The carpet, once gray with dust, has been vacuumed and revacuumed. Margie found some incense among Mrs. Zikry’s magic supplies and managed to exorcise the stench that permeated the little place. Now everyone sits around an old, round table. Patches of its laminated surface have peeled away like the skin of a leper, revealing bits of particleboard beneath. Lepers make Ron Bent think of Jesus, and so when they all sit down at the table, staring at the still-bubbling lasagna in the foil pan, the first thing he does is offer to lead the prayer.

“I was a preacher once, in another life,” he says. “Not a very good one, maybe, but good enough to string together a quick blessing, if y’all don’t object.”

Nobody does.

“Let’s all join hands.”

Ron looks around the table before he begins. At the far end, the kids, Caleb and Christine, sit next to one another. They sit close, but neither will look at the other one. It’s a big departure from the way they had behaved together when they stepped into the kitchen an hour ago.
That’s love,
Ron thinks, watching them,
never sane
. He smiles. Next he looks at Margie. Her wary eye is drifting to the witch.

Margie doesn’t trust her. This isn’t Ron being astute—he knows he isn’t much good at being astute—Margie flat out told him as much while they were taking the trash out.

“Not too many people might know it, but she was in that asylum once upon a time, and not because she worked there, I’ll tell you that much. She’s got secrets,” Margie had declared. “They fly around her as plain as a swarm of hornets.”

Maybe so, but right now the “witch” sits very quiet and still, staring at her own lap. Hard to imagine what horrible secrets a woman like that might have. She’s more like a parishioner at his old church than a servant of the devil. Still, you never know about people. . . .