Floating Staircase Read online

  I bolted upright, my heart crashing like a wild animal against the constraint of my ribs.

  In less than ten seconds I was standing at the top of the basement stairs, peering down into that infinite, inky darkness, my hand sweating on the doorknob. “Enough now,” I said, my voice hardly as demonstrative as I would have liked. “This has to stop.”

  I waited for a moment, too afraid to admit to myself that I was waiting—and fearing—some sort of response to rise out of the darkness: a furtive shuffling noise or even a pair of glowing eyes to open at the bottom of the stairwell. But nothing happened.

  Cold, I went to bed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I want to take some of Elijah’s stuff back to his mother,” I said.

  It was a bright January morning, the smell of mesquite in the air. Adam and I were walking the perimeter of the lake, steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee in our hands. Up ahead, Jacob and Madison darted in and out of trees, flinging clumps of muddy snow at each other. Their laughter was like church bells. It was warmer than it had been over the past few weeks, but the ice on the lake still looked thick and permanent. The newly cleared sky brought into sharp relief the chain of mountains at the horizon.

  Adam sipped his coffee, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why?” He looked at the frozen lake and the fence of black pines at the opposite end. His eyes were the color of steel and looked very sober. A contrail of vapor wafted out from between his chapped lips.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I just feel like it’s something I’m supposed to do. For me and maybe for the kid’s mother, too.”

  He hit me with a sharp look.

  I quickly added, “It’s about finding that middle ground, remember? The happy medium that we talked about at Tooey’s bar?”

  “Why are you even telling me this?”

  “Because I’m assuming you know where Veronica Dentman lives now. Or, being a cop, you could at least find out for me.”

  His laughter burst like a firecracker.

  “What? So now I’m an asshole for wanting to do something I feel is right?”

  “We’ve been over this. Veronica Dentman left that stuff behind for a reason. Whether you approve of her decision or not, that quite frankly doesn’t matter. I thought you said you called a junk service to come get that stuff, anyway.”

  “They won’t be around for another week yet,” I said, but that was a lie. This morning I’d called Allegheny Pickup and Removal and cancelled my order. I hadn’t told Jodie, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Adam . . . but after last night and upon reflection of everything else that had been going on since we’d moved to Westlake, I felt having random strangers come to collect and quite possibly destroy all of Elijah’s belongings wasn’t supposed to happen.

  “I think this is a bad idea.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not. I think you’re crossing a line, messing with other people’s lives. That woman lost her son last summer. She knew damn well what she was doing when she left those boxes behind.”

  “Well, see, that’s just it,” I countered. “I don’t think she did. I mean, maybe at the time it was the best way for her to cope, but I think now, after some time has passed, she’d be happy to get her son’s stuff back.”

  “Who are you, Dr. Phil?”

  “I’m being serious. What if she regrets leaving that stuff behind? What if it was all totally reactionary, and now she hates herself for it?”

  “Even if that’s the case, why do you care?”

  Because something in the house wanted me to find that room, I almost said. Something in the house wanted me to find that stuff for a reason.

  We reached a clearing in the woods beside the cusp of the lake. I could see the Steins’ house opposite us beyond the rocky crags and up through the naked gray trees. We sat down on a tree stump that was large enough to accommodate the two of us while Jacob and Madison bounded farther through the field, snow crumbling off their boots and arcing off their heels as they struggled to run.

  Adam offered me a cigarette, which I accepted. He popped one into his mouth, then balled up the empty packet and tossed it into a tin trash can that was conveniently nailed to the bole of a nearby tree.

  I hadn’t answered Adam’s question, and it hung in the air between us like some mutual embarrassment.

  “Listen,” Adam said eventually. “What do you do if you show up to that poor woman’s house, your car loaded with her dead son’s toys, and she breaks down on you? What if she just collapses at your feet, sobbing her eyes out? You think that will make you feel better? You think it’ll be for her benefit?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand perfectly. This isn’t about the fucking Dentman kid at all.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Adam turned away. “Forget it.”

  “No,” I said. “I want you to tell me.”

  “Goddamn it, man. Don’t you see? You’ve come to another classic impasse in your life, and in typical Travis Glasgow fashion you’re willing to do or say whatever you want as long as it makes you feel better for the time being, regardless of anyone else’s feelings.”

  He would have hurt me less if he’d cracked me across the jaw. I think he realized this, too, because his gaze lingered on me a millisecond too long, and before he looked away, I saw his expression begin to soften.

  I tossed the cigarette on the ground and stood.

  “Fuck,” Adam groaned. “I’m sorry. That came out harsher than I’d intended.”

  “It came out, all right.” For some reason my hands started shaking. I stuffed them into my pockets to hide them.

  “Hate me if you want, but I can’t keep my mouth shut if I see you heading for harm.”

  “Fuck all, man. You think you’re this great fucking fortification against all the horrors of this world, that you’re burdened with being some goddamn martyr because you’re my older brother. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not thirteen anymore. I can take care of myself.”

  “Cut it out, will you?” Adam sounded so goddamn calm I wanted to belt him across the cheek. “The world’s not against you. Neither am I. This whole woe-is-me thing ran its course years ago.”

  Something vital snapped inside me. I whirled around. “You’re a piece of shit—you know that? You shut me out when we were younger because of what happened with Kyle, and every time you disagree with me you throw those same stones right back at me. You’re a prick, Adam.”

  He jumped off the tree stump with a fierceness that I would have thought beyond him. I hated myself for flinching and taking an involuntary step back.

  “I never shut you out, and I never blamed you for Kyle’s death,” he said. “I blamed you for the asshole you became after his death.”

  “You had no idea what I went through—”

  “I was a fucking kid, too. You had no idea what I went through.” Those steely eyes were locked on mine, and I hated that I couldn’t look away. I hated that he was the stronger one in that instant and probably for the bulk of our lives. “I lost a brother, too, you dumb fuck.”

  The shaking in my hands had negotiated up my arms. I opened my mouth to say something—anything—but I was only able to offer a weak and uncontrolled grunt. An instant later, Adam doubled, then trebled in my vision.

  “Christ,” Adam said and slung an arm around my neck. He kissed the side of my head.

  “Get off me,” I muttered, but I didn’t mean it.

  “You’re my brother. You’re all I’ve got.”

  “You’ve got Beth,” I countered. Then I nodded toward his kids who were slugging it out in a snowbank, their voices rising to ear-piercing cries. “And you’ve got those two sweethearts.”

  Adam chuckled as Madison fell backward on her ass in the drift. “Hell,” he said, arm still around my neck. “I guess there’s a chance you might even be right.”

  He stopped by the house later that evening with an address sc
rawled on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sometime during the night I was awakened by the sound of bare feet padding along the upstairs hallway. Dazed, I shook myself out of bed, just partially conscious of Jodie’s slumbering body beside mine, and stepped into the hallway, my eyes still fuzzy with sleep. I groped for the light switch, but it had apparently disappeared. Listening, I could hear the sound of the bare feet moving swiftly down the stairs.

  For a long-drawn-out moment, I did not move. I couldn’t tell if I was fully awake, still dreaming, or caught in some abstract stasis of half sleep. My skin felt frozen while my insides were burning up as if with the onset of fever. Like a ghost, I crossed to the second-floor balcony and peered down into the foyer. At first I saw nothing. The longer I stared, I saw what appeared to be a small child standing motionless at the bottom of the staircase against one wall. Without pause, I turned and began moving down the stairs, one hand snaking along the banister in the darkness for support.

  But when I reached the bottom of the stairs, the child had vanished. Moonlight pooled in through the large foyer windows and painted glowing blue panels on the carpet. I stood there, my body shivering yet covered in a tacky film of sweat, unable to decide what I should do next.

  “Elijah . . . ?” It was only a whisper—not even a whisper, as my constricted throat was incapable of creating such a sound as forceful as a whisper at the moment—and the ghost boy did not acknowledge me.

  I thought I heard something behind me. I turned. For a split second I forgot where I was. Oddly serene, I continued down the hallway searching for a boy I knew was not there. Everything appeared dramatically overemphasized—my own breathing, the creaks and pops in the floorboards, the sound of my bare feet transitioning from the sticky hardwood to the carpeted front hall. Beneath my feet the carpet felt overly fibrous, almost sharp. My footsteps shushed along.

  There is clarity here, I thought, not certain as to what it actually meant.

  The hallway emptied out into the living room.

  I thought, Reality is a state of mind, just like dreaming, just like fiction. Everything is fiction. The trick is to grab on to something—to hold on to it for all you’re worth—until you’re able to regain some semblance of normalcy again.

  I thought, Find an anchor.

  This was where I stopped, right there in the center of the living room, cold and alone and not quite sure what the hell I was doing. I could see the bulbous piercing eye of the moon through one of the windows; I could feel the light from the streetlamps needling against my retinas. I thought I heard the basement door open at the other end of the house . . . thought I heard those same small, bare feet taking the steps quickly, two at a time, descending into that freezing, forgotten darkness . . .

  But I did not move.

  I was done chasing ghosts.

  PART THREE:

  THE OCEAN SERENE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Veronica Dentman lived in a nondescript Maryland hamlet that straddled some ambiguous demarcation between Cumberland and the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, where the nightly television news filtered in from a station in Pittsburgh.

  For much of my journey I followed a nameless and undisciplined ribbon of roadway that wound through dense, white-powdered forests and an undulating countryside. I’d spent the morning fueling my body with black coffee and smoked cigarette after cigarette in assembly-line fashion: paltry attempts to calm my jitterbugging nerves. Also, I’d awoken with a throbbing headache and weakness throughout my muscles, which was a sure sign I was coming down with something. Getting out into the wilderness and away from the confines of the house did me some good, but I could feel nervousness roiling around at the center of my guts like a parasite.

  Beside me on the passenger seat was a single cardboard box of items I’d carefully selected from Elijah’s room to return to his mother. Tucked between both seats were several different road maps of western Maryland, a number of which did not even have Veronica’s small town of West Cumberland listed.

  I anticipated the drive to take roughly an hour—not just from what Adam told me, but from the estimated distance between West Cumberland and Westlake on one of the maps—but near the end of my journey, I goofed up on some of the narrower, wooded back roads, confusing and twisting myself around like the dial on a compass, clocking unnecessary time to my travels. I’d heard stories of people even in this day and age getting lost in the woods, never to be seen alive again. Or seen at all, for that matter. Suffice it to say, I was more accustomed to traffic lights and road signs than long tracks of snow-packed dirt roads and evergreens for as far as it was possible to see.

  After about twenty minutes of backtracking, I maneuvered the Honda through the empty, unkempt streets of a forgotten mountain community. It was not at all what I’d expected. While Westlake was tidy and warm and clean and, above all, a little too Norman Rockwell, this place looked like Westlake’s degenerate brother. The houses here—little more than double-wide trailers—were packed together like boxcars at a depot. They were small and pitiful, mismatched in color, with missing shutters and peeling siding. Some had old automobile tires nailed to the roof. Aluminum laundry carousels sprung up out of yards like miniature electrical towers and shone dully in the sun.

  All the houses were fenced in, though not with the white picket style so common in Westlake: these yards were encased in rusted, chain-link prisons, vaguely reminiscent of the wire meshwork found in the windowpanes of mental institutions. Beside one front door stood the remnants of an immense television antenna, like some rib cage picked clean by vultures. Even the snow looked dirty.

  After a few more minutes of hapless navigation, I located Veronica’s street (which was not an easy task since the street sign had been knocked at a right angle and jutted out into the roadway like the arm of a tollbooth). I hooked a right (giving the tollbooth arm a wide berth) and peered through the windshield to catch the first house number I could. This, too, was not an easy task: some of the homes had those wrought iron numbers tacked beside the front door and half shaded beneath a crumbling portico while others had numbers nailed to the wooden mailbox post, the only evidence of their existence in the numeral-shaped discoloration on the wood itself.

  The street dead-ended at the base of a forested foothill. I hadn’t caught sight of Veronica’s address and wondered if perhaps Adam had gotten the wrong number. I dropped the car in reverse and retraced my route just to make sure, all too conscious of the kinks in the blinds and the sets of eyes watching me from darkened windows. Once again I came to the forested dead end and stopped the car. Either Adam had given me the wrong address, or a tornado had relocated Veronica’s house.

  But wait. I leaned over the steering wheel and gazed out the windshield. The glass had fogged up in my exasperation, so I hit the defogger and waited a couple of seconds as the breath blossoms dematerialized on the glass. I’d missed it the first time around but could see it now: a rutted dirt path cleared of snow, running straight up the hillside through the pines.

  I eased off the brake and coasted forward, the low-hanging branches of the pines thwapping against the hood of the car. The forestry was so impenetrable there was hardly any snow on the ground. I followed the road to the top of the hill where a shallow clearing opened up all around me.

  At its center was a modular home, significantly larger than the double-wide trailers that preceded it along the avenue, but it did not look to be in much better shape. Like the rest of the residences of West Cumberland, Veronica’s home looked as if it had been dropped from some great height only to crash firmly down in this yard of dead and frozen weeds, hideously large novelty sunflowers, and dilapidated lawn furniture. There was an old tractor tire near the front of the house posing as a planter for a skeletal, flowerless shrub. A pyramid of wire mesh cages—crab pots or rabbit traps—stood against the left side of the house, stiffened hunks of colorless bait still harnessed within.

  I was breat
hing heavy, fogging up the windows again.

  I shut the car off, grabbed the box from the passenger seat, and got out. Movement off to my right caught my attention, and I jerked my head toward the side of the house where I was somewhat relieved to find an umbrella-shaped clothes wheel shaking in the wind. In the distance, an unfriendly dog was anxious to be heard.

  I mounted the front porch, the boards brittle and gaping with splintered holes hungry to bite at my ankles, and knocked on the frame of the outer screen door.

  Waited. Waited for an eternity. I couldn’t hear any movement inside. Also, there weren’t any cars parked anywhere.

  The front door opened, leaving only the dirty screen door between us. It was Veronica Dentman—I was certain of it—although she looked nothing like I thought she would. She was small, disconcertingly thin, with large dark eyes and choppy black hair. She was maybe thirty-eight, forty at best, but the sallow features and emptiness in her gaze made her look much, much older.

  Those large roving eyes took me in.

  I waited for her to say something, but she only stared at me. “Miss, uh . . . Veronica Dentman?”

  Her eyebrows came together. “Who’re you?” The words came out sharp and quick, almost mashed together. I caught a glimpse of bad teeth.

  “I’m real sorry to disturb you, ma’am. My name’s Travis Glasgow. My wife and I moved into your old house in Westlake.”

  “Was my father’s house.” Her gaze shifted toward the box in my arms. I could see in the slight softening of her features that she knew what was inside. Then she stared at me, her piercing black orbs boring into me through the moss-discolored screen.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. I could think of nothing else to say. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  Veronica pushed the screen door open several inches; the squeal of its hinges sounded like a cat being boiled alive. “Those my boy’s things in that box?”