Floating Staircase Read online

  The only exception was the one wall comprised not of smoked bricks but of a giant assembly of mahogany shelving on which sat hundreds—perhaps thousands—of leather-bound books. Spines cracking and flaking, many of the embossed titles worn illegible, the books occupied every possible slat and crevice of the wall-length shelves. Some were wedged horizontally while others were driven vertically between neighboring volumes and evidently pounded into place with a forcefulness that made retrieving them about as difficult as extracting nails bare-handed from a length of wood. Framed reproductions of various panels from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience hung on the walls, the colors behind the glass sharp and brilliant and completely out of place in the midst of this dreary rural pub.

  “What are you talking about?” Adam said. “I told you the whole story.”

  “No. You told me he drowned. You never said his body was never found.”

  He flicked at the foamy head of his beer with one finger and looked suddenly bored. “Okay, yeah. We never found him.”

  “How is that possible? It’s a self-contained lake.”

  “A very big, very deep lake.” Adam sighed and rubbed his face. “No one actually saw the kid fall in, so we had no real time of death. The only thing we had to go by was Nancy Stein’s statement about hearing what sounded like a scream. By the time we showed up on scene, that scream took place over two hours ago. Do you know what happens to a body that’s gone underwater for two hours?”

  “Hey,” I said, holding up both hands in mock surrender, “I’m not criticizing.”

  My brother’s eyes narrowed. “What have you been doing, anyway? Asking around about this stuff?”

  “I went to the library and looked at some old newspaper articles.”

  “For what reason?”

  I tried to appear cavalier. I didn’t want him to know I was writing a book. “Curiosity, I guess.”

  “Yeah, right.” The tone of his voice said he didn’t believe me.

  “Were you there that day? Part of the search?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It was horrible. It made me sick.” Adam placed both his palms down flat on the bar top. “Out here, the biggest things we got going on are the occasional vandals on Main Street and the rowdy bunch of teenagers who decide it’ll be funny to take a dump on the steps of the post office.”

  “So you guys weren’t prepared for an investigation into what happened to Elijah?”

  “We’re good cops, if that’s what you’re insinuating. We know how to do our jobs, and we do them well.” He looked hard at his beer. “We lost a guy over in Iraq. Left the force on a whim, said it was some calling and he had to answer. Fuck.” He stared off into the dimness of the bar. “We’re a good police force is what I’m getting at.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “Fuck,” he said again and finished half his beer in one swallow, then ordered another round.

  “Who interviewed Nancy Stein?”

  “My partner,” Adam said. “Douglas Cordova. You met him at the Christmas party, remember?”

  I did vaguely: giant barrel-chested guy with a pleasant, almost childlike face. “Sure,” I said. “Were the Dentmans ever suspects?”

  “Not officially.”

  “But you guys had some question about them?”

  “No. But when a kid disappears . . .”

  “You look to the parents first,” I finished for him. “Or in this case, the mother and the uncle.”

  “It’s not unusual to search and search and never find a body,” Adam said.

  I thought, Yeah, if they happen to drown in the Atlantic fucking Ocean. I got the distinct impression that he was trying to convince himself, not me. “And what about the kid’s bedroom I found hidden in the basement? It’s the single creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Sure is.” Noncommittal. I’d lost him somewhere along the way.

  “But let’s forget about the room for a second. Veronica Dentman left all that stuff behind on purpose, packed away back there and hidden like a dirty secret.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Adam said.

  “Children’s books, baseball hats, woolen knit gloves, sneakers, clothes, toys . . .”

  “Everybody deals with death in their own way. For Veronica Dentman, maybe that was the only way she could deal with it—to get out quick and leave everything behind.”

  “Just seems a bit callous and insensitive. Strange.”

  Adam groaned. “What about Mom and Dad?”

  I sipped some beer and said, “What about them? They had their little period after Kyle died, but they didn’t erase his memory. There were still pictures in the house, still some of his things around. It took them almost a full year before they cleared out his bedroom, for Christ’s sake.” And thinking of this caused the vivid memory to rise through the murk again: finding Matchbox cars under Kyle’s bed after his death. I blinked repeatedly and had to clear my throat with another sip of beer.

  “That’s exactly my point,” said Adam. “Everyone deals with it in their own way. Mom and Dad dealt with it in their own solitary ways. Fuck, I became a cop because maybe I felt some subconscious drive to help those who can’t help themselves.”

  I felt him staring at me, but I wouldn’t look at him. I was still thinking of those Matchbox cars, and the safest place to look was my beer.

  “You went and wrote a bunch of books about him,” he said finally.

  “One book,” I said. “Just one book. And anyway, Alexander Sharpe wrote that one, not me.”

  I could see Adam’s reflection smirking in the mirror behind the bar. He squeezed my shoulder. As if I were an accordion, I felt the wind wheeze out of me. “Little brother, I hate to break it to you, but you’ve written four novels, each one about someone who drowns or almost drowns or an apparition rising out of a lake. You mean to tell me you’ve been blind to what you’ve been doing this whole time?”

  His words shook me to my core. This had never occurred to me in the slightest. But just hearing him say it enforced the truth of it, and suddenly, like a great explosion just over the horizon, I could see it. Even the goddamn titles professed a similar theme that had eluded me until this very moment: The Ocean Serene, Silent River, Drowning Pool, and Water View. Not to mention the title I’d scrawled on the cover sheet of the manuscript pages I’d sent to Holly before leaving London—Blood Lake.

  Fuck, had it been so obvious to everyone else? Was I truly that blind? I bit my lower lip and refrained from admitting to Adam that the tentative title I’d given my most recent work—the outline for the story about Elijah Dentman and the dysfunctional family who’d lived in my house before me—was Floating Staircase.

  “So you’re saying you became a cop because of what happened to Kyle?” I said, anxious to change the subject. My voice shook the slightest bit, but I didn’t think my brother, who’d had twice as many beers as I had, noticed.

  Adam rolled one big shoulder. “Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, I’d be surprised to think Kyle’s death had nothing to do with it. That’s like saying we’re unaffected by all that goes on around us, all that happens to us. Our kid brother died; of course it had a significant impact on both our lives.”

  I wanted to ask him if he ever woke up in a pool of sweat, gasping for air and feeling like invisible ghost hands were dragging him down to a watery grave. I wanted to ask him if he’d ever sat up in bed in the middle of the night because he thought he heard footsteps in the hallway—footsteps that conveniently fell silent the moment you held your breath and waited for them, waited for them, waited for them. These were all the things that had tormented me as a child . . . but lately they’d resurfaced, coming back to haunt me like an old ghost, and I wondered what powers my new house held. What ghosts haunted those hallways?

  The thought sent chills down my spine.

  “Anyway,” Adam went on, “from a professional investigator’s point of view—that would be me, by
the way—I’d say you jumped to some conclusions pretty quickly with that room you found in your basement.”

  “Yeah? What conclusions would those be?”

  “For starters, you assume that room you found had been Elijah’s bedroom just because you found his bed and all his stuff in it.”

  “And that’s a poor assumption?”

  “It’s a fair assessment, but that doesn’t make it fact. You’ve got to eliminate all other avenues before coming to one solid conclusion. One other avenue being that Veronica and the kid’s uncle, David Dentman, moved all that stuff down there after the kid died. Just like Mom and Dad moved Kyle’s stuff out into the garage.” He rubbed his thumb around the rim of his pint glass. “And you guys don’t have a garage.”

  “Shit,” I said. For the second time in less than five minutes, Adam was easily poking holes in my sense of reality. And the bastard was drunker than I was. “I guess you got a point. I hadn’t thought of that.” There was a rapidly deflating balloon in my stomach. The excitement I’d felt in writing about the make-believe Dentman family seemed to blacken and shrivel, and I feared the fog of writer’s block would roll back in and cover up the city.

  “Still . . .” Adam’s voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Well,” he said and proceeded with what I perceived to be, even in his inebriated state, careful steps, “it’s just that even if that wasn’t the kid’s bedroom, one question still remains.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What was that room used for in the first place?”

  I let this sink in. Maybe we both did, because Adam didn’t say anything for several drawn-out seconds.

  “Fellas,” Tooey said, sweeping past the bar and winking at us like a conspirator. “We doin’ okay?”

  I raised a hand at him. “Doing fine, thanks.”

  Behind us, someone brought up a Johnny Cash tune on the jukebox.

  “I want to confess something,” I said after too much silence had passed between us. I told Adam about how I’d thrown away my old notebooks, the ones with my early writings about Kyle, after we moved to London. “I didn’t fully understand why at the time, but I think I do now.” I waited for Adam to say something, to at least ask why I had finally come to this realization, but he didn’t say a word. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “It was because I felt horrible about what happened between us after Mom’s funeral. I acted poorly, and it wasn’t fair to you or Beth. Or even Jodie.”

  He was looking intently at his beer. “Or yourself, I’d imagine.”

  “I threw those notebooks away because I thought it would finally put the past to rest.”

  “And did it?”

  My face felt red and hot, like a glowing ember. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar just to make sure waves of heat weren’t rising off my scalp.

  “Did it?” Adam repeated.

  “I hate saying it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it did. I’m almost disgusted to say it, but I hardly thought about Kyle at all in London. It was like none of it ever happened. I even remember reading in the papers about a little girl who’d drowned in Highgate Ponds, and as I’m reading it I thought, Oh yeah, that happened to Kyle. I forgot.” I rubbed beer-sticky fingers over my eyes. “God, I sound horrendous.”

  “You’re just trying to find a middle ground,” Adam said, finishing his beer. “The answer’s not to condemn yourself and live with the grief, but it’s not to totally erase it from your memory, either.” He checked his watch. “We should get going. It’s late.”

  I almost grabbed his wrist and asked him the one remaining question that was on my mind—that had been on my mind for many days now: Do you believe in ghosts? But before I could react, the absurdity of it struck me like a hammer, and I decided to keep my inquiry to myself.

  After all, everyone knows where dead people go: in the ground.

  When I got home that evening, Jodie was already asleep in our bed. The house was freezing, so I covered her up with an extra blanket and kissed the side of her face. She stirred and hummed. One of her hands slipped out from beneath the covers and found my arm. She squeezed it.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Hmmm,” she breathed sleepily. “It’s all right. Are you coming to bed?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you want to hear something funny?”

  “Sure,” I said, still whispering. “Just before you came home I got up to go to the bathroom.”

  “You’re right,” I said, rubbing the topside of her hand. “That’s a riot.”

  “No,” Jodie said. “Listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I went to the bathroom and turned on the light and had to, you know, squint because the light was so bright and I’d just been asleep. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So I was squinting in the light and looking at the mirror, and I saw my reflection. And you know what? I wasn’t me.” Her face, floating on the white mound of her pillow, looked ghostly and pale like the moon. “Do you know who I was?”

  “Who?”

  “You,” Jodie said. “I was you. Only for a split second. But I was you.”

  I bent and kissed her forehead. She felt very warm. “You were dreaming,” I told her.

  “No,” she said, “I wasn’t. I was awake. What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, tucking the blankets in all around her.

  Jodie rolled on her side, and I caught the hint of a smile on her lips. “Neither do I,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed. “I guess that’s the beauty of the mystery.”

  I kissed her a third time, then slipped into the hallway to examine the thermostat. It still registered sixty-eight degrees, although it felt more like forty-five in the bedroom. I could even see my breath.

  “This is fucking ridiculous.”

  A glow caught my attention in the office across the hall from the bedroom. I poked my head in and flipped on the light switch. Jodie had assembled her desk against one wall, on which sat a computer monitor radiating waves of amethystine light, a prehistoric printer, and a collection of jazz CDs. The entire wall behind the desk was covered in framed awards, diplomas, a Who’s Who Among Students in America, an Outstanding Woman of the Year plaque from her undergraduate alma mater. On the floor, like a tiny city in the process of existing, stood towers of psychology textbooks and reams of photocopied papers, charts, and graphs networked with multicolored lightning bolts. I felt like a heel, having neglected cleaning this room out so Jodie had done it herself.

  Shivering, I went downstairs. Because of our struggle with the temperamental and unreliable furnace, I’d taken to chopping firewood in the backyard, which we used almost around the clock in the living room fireplace. I grabbed a couple of fresh logs from the front porch and tossed them into the fireplace.

  In about five minutes I had a pretty healthy fire going. I retrieved a bottle of Chivas from our sad little liquor cabinet in the main hallway and poured myself a finger into a rocks glass. I sat on the floor with my back against the couch and watched the fire dance in the hearth. The whiskey burned going down and blossomed into comfortable warmth in my toes.

  I spent over an hour in front of the hearth watching the fire dwindle and finally die while I revisited my conversation with Adam at Tooey’s bar. I’d freely told him how I’d forgotten about Kyle after the move to London and how miserable I now felt about having been able to do it. That was true. But returning to the States and moving to Westlake—moving into this old house with all its whispers and secrets and cold hands on my chest in the night—had brought everything right back to me. If the little London flat had been a sanctum, I was now in the well, struggling to keep my head above the surface. And what frightened me was that I wasn’t completely sure I was being haunted by my memories of Kyle. What frightened me was the possibility that maybe somethi
ng else was working at me, chipping away like a stonecutter, breaking me down.

  I thought of Elijah Dentman and how they’d never recovered his body from that silent, dark water. Which meant he was still down there somewhere: a whitish, bloated corpse whose skin had been picked over by fish and whose eyes had sunken into the recesses of his skull. In my mind’s eye I saw blackened fingertips from which the bones poked through and greenish hair waving like kelp off the dome of a gleaming skull in the silt.

  Fuck, I thought.

  I got up and headed to the liquor cabinet where I replaced the bottle of Chivas, then turned for the stairs.

  Something metallic clanked and reverberated in the belly of the house, like someone deliberately striking a wrench to a frozen metal pipe.

  I stopped halfway up the stairs, my pulse suddenly picking up tempo.

  There issued a second clanking noise, this one startlingly crisp and issuing straight up one of the heat vents. A distant whistle followed, and it reminded me of how a fire engine sounds when it’s still just a bit too far away. Then the sound slowly scaled louder and louder until it became a steady, resonant hum.

  I crept down the stairs and got on my hands and knees in the foyer, putting my face very close to the floor vent. I could feel no heat coming up, although it certainly sounded like the furnace had just kicked on. That peculiar, continual humming . . .

  It sounded like a voice.

  Some fundamental part of my soul responsible for animal insight fired a flare up and over the bow. I pushed one ear against the vent and listened more closely—an indefinite rheeee sound behind which I could just barely make out faint whispering—then the furnace shuddered and died. The winding down of its mechanics was like the fading laughter in a crowded auditorium. My ear still pressed to the metal grate, I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until now. I exhaled in a trembling wheeze, and a moment later, I thought I heard someone on the other side of the heating vent breathe back.