Floating Staircase

  Jodie continued to shake her head with mounting vigor. “No,” she whispered. “No, Travis. We had that discussion last night, not ten minutes ago. You’ve been down here almost a full day.”

  The absurdity of this caused me to laugh. In hindsight, that laugh probably frightened her more than it helped to ease any tension, but admittedly I wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the time. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve been down here since yesterday evening.”

  “That’s not—” I cut myself off. My mind was spinning like a wheel. Frantically I tried to put the pieces together, to assemble the time and date, but I couldn’t. Was it actually possible? “Jodie . . .” I took a step toward her.

  She held up both hands and took a step back.

  “No. Stop.”

  “Babe—”

  “Stop it. I want you to stop it. I want you to snap out of it.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Because you’re scaring me.”

  I stopped walking, one foot over the threshold of the hidden basement bedchamber. Jodie had backed into the washer and dryer, her hands still up in a heartbreaking defensive posture. She was genuinely, visibly frightened. Her fear of me was unwarranted—I’d never struck her or any other woman in my life—and made me tremble.

  “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid for you.”

  “Listen—”

  “No. Just stop.” She took a shuddery breath. “Listen to me and don’t get angry. I’m going to stay the night with Beth and Adam. I want you to know that I won’t come back to this house until this room is cleared out, all that stuff is carried away, and the wall is sealed shut. Am I understood?”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “Am I under-fucking-stood?”

  A chill rippled through me. “Yes,” I rasped.

  “Okay.” Jodie went for the stairs and was halfway up when she paused and said, “I love you. But I’m not doing you any good pretending nothing’s wrong.”

  I listened to her heavy shoes clump up the stairs and tread across the floorboards above my head. There was some rustling around, and then I heard the front door slam. If she was taking any bags with her, they were probably already across the street.

  A whole fucking day? I’ve been down here overnight? The sheer implausibility of it caused me to laugh again, the sound of which instantly chilled me to the roots of my soul.

  Something was moving around behind me in Elijah’s room. I turned and saw nothing out of the ordinary at first . . . yet on closer inspection I noticed that two of the colored blocks—a yellow one and a green one—now stood on the writing desk, one standing vertically while the other balanced horizontally atop the first. Together they formed a capital T.

  When the phone rang upstairs, I literally cried out. I pounded up the stairs and snatched the receiver off the kitchen wall, anticipating Adam’s stern and overbearing voice to shout at me. I answered with a steely determination already seeded in my voice.

  “Travis? It’s Earl Parsons.”

  I cleared my throat and apologized for my initial abruptness. “I thought you were someone else. Is everything all right?”

  “Right as rain,” he said. He sounded like he was eating something. “I found Althea Coulter.”

  I felt a measure of triumph rise up through me. “Fantastic. Please tell me she’s still alive.”

  “I guess that’s a matter of opinion. She’s got a permanent room in the Frostburg Medical Center’s oncology ward. According to her son, who I spoke with earlier after telling him I was an old friend of his mom’s, she’s coming down to the wire.”

  “Cancer,” I said flatly. “Jesus.” Momentary clarity dawned on me. “I can’t go harass a woman dying in a hospital bed.”

  “Then don’t harass her,” Earl said peaceably enough. “Go visit her, bring her some flowers, make her feel good. Her son says she’s pretty lonely, even though he tries to see her as much as possible. It might be good for her.”

  I took a deep breath and saw Jodie trembling against the washer and dryer again. “I’m being selfish about this, aren’t I?”

  “That depends,” said Earl. “Are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for Elijah Dentman?”

  “Both,” I said after a very long time.

  I jotted down Althea’s room number at the Frostburg Med Center on the palm of my hand then thanked Earl for his help. He asked me to keep him in the loop on any further developments, and I promised I would apprise him of all that I’d learn.

  “You really think we may have something here, don’t you?” he said, and even though he inflected the end of the sentence into a question, I knew he felt just as strongly as I did.

  Just as I hung up the phone I noticed something on the kitchen table. I went over to it and stared at two sections torn from a newspaper. I did not have to look closely to know the folded bits of newsprint were the articles about Elijah’s alleged drowning that I’d stolen from the public library; they still held the creases where I’d folded them and stuffed them into my pocket. I must have forgotten to take them out of my pants, leaving them there for Jodie to discover when she went through the pockets before dumping my pants in the wash.

  Splayed out on the table like evidence in a murder trial, those fragments of newsprint caused something heavy and indescribable to roll over deep down inside me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Fortified against the cold in a heavy, fur-lined parka and a pair of wool gloves, I parked in one of the visitor spaces outside the Frostburg Medical Center’s broad brick façade. Beside me on the passenger seat, a small leafy plant vibrated to the tune of the car’s engine.

  From the outside, the building looked like an ancient cathedral, all winding spires and Gothic architecture, the wing safeguarded behind a black cyclone fence crowned with spearheads. There was a long gravel driveway that trickled like an estuary up to the automatic doors beneath a reinforced portico. Its windows were small and barred, insulated with mesh wiring. The brick face was sterile and white, like bone heated in a kiln. A stand of pine trees loomed behind the building, immense and towering and dusted with snow. From where I parked, I could see a large weighted birds’ nest nestled above the mezzanine, all sticks and bony branches. Two large falcons stood guard at either end of the mezzanine.

  I climbed out of the car. The air was sharp and scented with winter. Craving a smoke, I produced a pack of Marlboros and popped one into my mouth, then chased the tip of it with my lighter, my hand cupped around it to keep out the wind.

  The main thoroughfare of the hospital was shaped like a uterus. The carpeting was an institutional shade of brown orange (that specific brown orange only hospitals seem capable of duplicating), and large sodium lights fizzed above my head.

  Following the numbered plaques on the walls, I turned down a long, claustrophobic hallway. There was surprisingly little lighting, and the staff was practically nonexistent. There was no receptionist at the bank of desks at the end of the hall, either. This wasn’t the section of the hospital someone came to for a routine checkup or for any type of surgical procedure. This was where people came for good when they knew they were never going to leave again. There were no checkout procedures here.

  Before locating the room number Earl had given me yesterday evening over the phone, I ditched into a men’s restroom and saddled up to the sinks. That morning I’d showered hastily but hadn’t shaved or washed my hair. My face was pallid and sunken at the cheeks, where bristling black hairs like spider’s legs corkscrewed out from the flesh. Purplish crescents hung beneath my eyes, and my eyes themselves appeared bloodshot and shellacked. In brown corduroys, a thermal knit shirt with a flannel vest, and my ski parka, I looked like a vagrant who had shuffled in off the street.

  “I could have at least shaved,” I muttered to my reflection. I turned on the water at one of the sinks, washed my face, and matted down my too-long hair as best I could,
pulling the knots out with my fingers.

  I was startled when someone exited a stall behind me. The man nodded in quiet recognition, then left without washing his hands. He must have heard me talking to myself and figured it was safer risking potential bathroom-borne disease.

  Taking a deep breath, I reexamined myself in the mirror. I thought of Jodie saying, I was you, and a burning ember briefly winked into existence at the small of my back.

  I was you.

  Room 218 was the closed door at the end of the farthest hallway. Carrying the potted plant in both arms, I approached the door, expecting all the while to feel a hand clap me on one shoulder and ask me who I was and what I was doing here. But that never happened.

  I summoned a mental picture of Althea Coulter, and what I projected was a weak, elderly woman, her charcoal eyes blazoned with milky cataracts, her lips perpetually twisted into a bitter snarl. Her hands would be like claws—the serrated hooks of a carnivorous bird—and her head would be thick and unmoving and simply there. The room was going to smell of sour breath and medication and the ghostly traces of urine. She would be asleep. And I wouldn’t be able to wake her, to ask her even a single question, and even if she was awake, she would be so far gone into a land of her own that the answers she provided (given that she provided any at all) would be of the fuzzy, make-believe, nonsensical variety. I pictured Althea Coulter as an ancient, mummified manikin, whose skin was scorched cloth and whose brain was a ball of string.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  Pausing outside the door, uncertain if I should knock or simply allow myself entry, I swallowed a hard lump that seemed to stick in the back of my esophagus.

  I am standing on the line between fiction and reality.

  I opened the door and stepped inside.

  The woman in the bed was perhaps sixty, though with her sunken features, cobwebby wisps of hair, and blighted countenance, she looked like she could have been a hundred-year-old mummy rolled out on display.

  I entered the room as silently as I could, careful not to let the door catch the latch too loudly as it shut. The room was dark and musty. There was an amalgam of odors clinging hotly to the air, each of them distinct and clinical: the reek of ammonia; the acrid underlying stench of urine; the insipid redolence of Althea Coulter’s stale, immobile body beneath the paper-thin hospital bedsheets. There was another smell, too—though more like the hint of a smell rather than a smell itself—and I knew without a doubt that it was the smell of impending death.

  She was awake, her frail body propped up on a cushion of pillows. As I moved farther into the room, she turned absently away from the single window beside her bed (it was covered by venetian blinds, impeding any actual view of the outdoors) and acknowledged me with only the subtlest of glances. Then she returned her gaze to the sheathed window.

  “Ms. Coulter?” I said. My voice was amplified in the empty room.

  She didn’t say anything. In the silence, I could hear the labors of her breathing. The cogs were winding down, slowing with time.

  I tried again: “How are you feeling?”

  “Not hungry,” she practically croaked, her voice strained and tired. The sound was like guitar strings wound too tight.

  “Oh,” I said, “I’m not with the hospital.”

  Like a wooden puppet, her head slowly rotated on her thin neck until her attention settled back on me, this time with greater scrutiny. She was black, but her skin was as pale as ash, her lips white and blistered. I imagined one of the nurses attempting to draw blood from this living scarecrow only to be awarded with a puff of ancient dust as the needle broke through the dying woman’s flesh.

  She didn’t need to speak; the question was in her eyes.

  “My name’s Travis Glasgow. My wife and I just moved to Westlake last month. We’re in the old Dentman house.” I didn’t know where to go from here, and the woman’s urgent stare was unrelenting. I grasped at a straw. “The Steins send their regards. They wanted me to give you this, actually.” I made a gesture as if to extend the flowered plant to her, although I knew she would be unable to physically accept it.

  Something in her face alerted me to the fact that she no longer remembered who the Steins were. At this, I felt a sinking loss drop through my body. This trip, it appeared, was going to be a bust.

  Althea grimaced, scrunching her lips together to start up the motor of speech. When she spoke, her voice was the creaking sound of a coffin lid. “Set it down over here, son, where I can smell the flowers.”

  I walked around the side of the bed and placed the potted plant atop a small nightstand piped with industrial steel. The only other thing on the night-stand was a picture of a handsome young boy in a dark blue cap and gown. I wondered if it was her son Earl had spoken to on the phone.

  “What’d you say your name was again?”

  “Travis Glasgow. I hope I’m not disturbing you, ma’am.”

  With fossilized hands, she smoothed out the blankets on her lap. There was an IV attached to one broomstick arm. “I look busy to you?”

  I offered her a crooked smile. “No, ma’am.”

  Her lower lip quivered as her face folded into a frown. “You say you live where, now?”

  “The old Dentman house in Westlake. The one on the lake.”

  “The old Dentman house,” she said. In her condition, it was impossible to gauge the tone of her voice.

  “You used to tutor the Dentman boy, didn’t you? Elijah Dentman?”

  Despite her illness, Althea was no less perceptive; she picked out something unsettling in my question and hung on to it in temporary silence, perhaps going over my question and the reasons for why I’d be here asking such a thing. I listened to her wheezing respiration and did not hurry her. Eventually, she said, “You a friend of the Dentmans?”

  “Not really, ma’am. I didn’t even know anything about them until I moved into their house.”

  “So why’d you come here? I appreciate the company, Lord knows, but I don’t understand it. All this way to bring me someone else’s plant?”

  This made me smile a nervous smile. It made Althea smile, too. She had the yellowed, plastic-looking teeth of a skeleton, a corpse.

  My hands, the traitors that they were, had been unraveling a thread from my parka. Suddenly aware of this, I started to unzip my coat but paused halfway. “Would you mind if we talked for just a bit?”

  “Only person comes to see me is Michael,” she said wanly, “and he certainly don’t bring me plants. So you’re welcome to stay . . . provided I don’t get too tired on you.”

  I took my parka off and draped it over the back of a metal folding chair that stood next to the night-stand. I sat down in the chair, my gaze returning to the framed picture of the handsome young man in the cap and gown. “This is Michael?”

  “My son, yes,” Althea said, and this time there was no mistaking the emotion in her voice. “My only baby. He’s a good boy, this one. Got his demons like everyone, sure, but he’s a good one.”

  “He’s a handsome kid. Athletic.”

  “This here’s his college graduation picture. See that? First in my family to graduate college. On a scholarship. How you gonna like that?”

  “Good for him.”

  “He just needs to find himself a better job. It’s tough today, kids out of school trying to find jobs.”

  “Does he come to see you much?”

  “Used to. It gets hard for him. I don’t blame him.”

  “My mom died of cancer several years ago. Breast cancer. She hung on for a while. It was rough on her. On my brother and me, too.” This, of course, made me think of her funeral and how Jodie had dragged me out of Adam’s house in a fit.

  “Mine’s the stomach,” said Althea. “They been cutting little pieces of me away, a bit here and a bit there, snip-snip, but it really ain’t the pain that’s so bad. It’s the sick. I get really sick in the mornings. Hard to eat food. Sometimes, too, I can’t even sleep at night.”

/>   “There’s nothing more they can do for you?”

  “What’s to do? What’s left? Look at these things,” she said, extending her arms with great care. They were as thin and as shapely as the cardboard tubing inside rolls of toilet paper. A network of veins, fat and blue-black, was visible beneath her nearly translucent skin. “Scrawny things. Jab me full of needles, drain me like a sieve.” But her tone wasn’t bitter. In fact, there was almost a sense of humor in it. Then she sighed. “We can put people on the moon and send radio pulses and whatnot into outer space, but we’ve yet to completely explore the mysteries right here on Earth, the mysteries right here inside our own bodies.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “If I’m disturbing you, I’ll go.”

  Althea looked like she wanted to wave a hand at me. “Death is the disturbance. People are just passing road signs along the way. But listen to us, sharing cancer stories, trading them like baseball cards. Who wants to talk about cancer?”

  “Not me.”

  “Me, either.” She looked at me, then the picture of Michael. It was like she was desperate to find some sort of similarity between us, although she would be hard-pressed to find it. “You said you were married, I b’lieve. You got any children?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You wanna stay and chat, you best quit being so damned polite, boy. I ain’t your mamma. It’s insulting.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try to be ruder.”

  Althea cleared her throat, and it was a rather involved process. Aside from the scratchy, phlegm-filled rattle in her chest, her eyes also watered up, tracing tears down the contours of her face. It was disturbingly easy to make out her skull beneath that thin veil of stretched skin. Finally, after her throat was cleared and she’d wiped away the errant tears with the heels of her hands, she said, “So how come you’re visiting some strange lady you ain’t never met before?”

  I’d had a whole song and dance routine prepared, no different than the one I’d performed for Ira and Nancy, as a way of greasing the wheels . . . but looking at this woman, I was suddenly certain she would easily see through such a lie. She can see straight down to the pit of my soul, I thought without a doubt.