Floating Staircase

  I stood at the top of the stairs, sweating like a hostage, for what seemed like an eternity. Just as my heartbeat began to regain its normal syncopation, a muted thump followed by a peppering of distant, hollow clacks—pencils falling to the concrete floor?—issued from the basement, causing the sweat to immediately freeze to my flesh. I was about to convince myself that some animal had gotten into the house and was down there scrounging around and raising hell until I saw that the carpeted runner on the stairs held the distinct and undeniable impression of wet footprints.

  Invisible hands closed around my neck. All of a sudden, the simple act of breathing became a monumental task. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and prepared to dial 911 . . . although there was a horrible clenching feeling in the core of my soul that suggested whatever was down here could not be shot by bullets or restrained in handcuffs.

  No, a voice countered in the back of my head. That’s stupid. Quit trying to frighten yourself.

  I descended the steps with excruciating slowness, the risers groaning beneath my weight. At the bottom of the stairwell, I took a deep breath while counting silently to five, then swung around the wall, exposing myself to whatever might be waiting for me.

  The basement was empty. The main room was packed with our orphaned belongings—things we had not yet decided where to put—and the single bulb in the ceiling, which was on, cast shadows in every direction. I stood there holding my breath, waiting to hear another sound in order to pinpoint the exact location of the intruder—a raccoon or possum, surely—but other than the slamming of my own heart, the basement was silent.

  Then something caught my eye: something that should not have been there because I’d thrown it away after we’d moved to England. In fact, my memory of throwing it into the trash behind our flat was so crystal clear I could almost feel the fading warmth of the sun on my shoulders and smell the trees off the back lot.

  Because it’s not here, I thought. Because I threw it away and it no longer exists.

  Nonetheless, I crept over to it, my shadow stretching long and distorted on the far wall. I knelt, still gripping my cell phone, and stared at it.

  You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction, the therapist used to say. Then: What is it you’re always writing in those notebooks?

  What was splayed out before me on the basement floor, like a bullet fired straight out of the past and into the future, was one of those notebooks. It was opened in the middle, and I recognized my childish handwriting on the pages, the ink smeared in places. These were my words about what happened to Kyle, a subconscious coping mechanism from my disheartened youth (something else the therapist had termed).

  I placed one hand on the notebook, as if touching it would shatter the reality of it and send it back in a scatter of fluttering confetti and dazzling disco lights to whatever secondary universe from which it had come. The pages were cold, cold.

  Holding my breath, I turned one page and knew what I would find before I was actually staring at it: a faded Polaroid picture of Adam, Kyle, and me standing at the river’s edge in Eastport, our arms slung around each other, Kyle’s short blondish hair contradictory to Adam’s and my own dark furry mops, all of us squinting at the cameraman—our father—whose shadow darkened Kyle’s image in some hideous rendition of prophecy. I’d taped the photo into the notebook on the afternoon my father had driven Adam back to college while an unmentionable and foreboding silence ran like ice water through our house.

  I closed the notebook but did not immediately stand. Truth was, my legs had surrendered to the strength of my horror; I could no more trust them to hold me up than I could trust the legs of a scarecrow. Instead, I swiped at my eyes with the heel of one hand, the moisture in them temporarily blurring my vision. And when my vision cleared, I happened to be looking across the room at one of the walls of hammered Sheetrock.

  During the first week in the new house and at Jodie’s recommendation, we’d bought a few gallons of semigloss paint and painted the foyer and living room a cool sage color. The whole thing took us the better part of two days, and when we finished, we had about half a gallon left over. I’d hammered the lid back into place, then stashed the paint can in the basement underneath the stairs. The paint can was no longer there; it was on the floor between two pairs of winter skis and an old end table. The lid was on the floor next to the can, the paint-splattered underside facing the ceiling. On the wall, smack in the center of that barren landscape of white Sheetrock, was a tiny, sage-green handprint.

  Later and for the rest of the week, as my mind returned to this very moment over and over again, I would come to understand that I knelt on the floor staring at that handprint for no more than ten or fifteen seconds . . . but at the time it seemed like a full hour ticked by with the hypnotizing lethargy of planetary evolution. I was aware of the fibers in my clothes, the heat suddenly radiating off my flesh, the goose bumps that prickled along the base of my neck. Capering before my eyes were the ghostly vinegar amoebas of broken blood vessels. I felt every crease in the musculature of my beating heart, every strand of fiber and sinew that networked throughout my body.

  I rose and, on unsteady legs, made my way over to the handprint. I brought two fingers up and touched it: the paint was still tacky, not yet completely dry.

  Small: a child’s handprint.

  “Who’s down here?” Somehow I managed these words, though they came out shaky and unimpressive. Then, frightening myself further, I muttered, “Kyle?”

  There came another faint clacking sound from across the room, startling me straight out of my skin, and I whipped around and practically dropped my ass straight into the open paint can. I rolled onto my side as the paint can skidded out from under me. In slow motion I watched it tip on its side and spin in a semicircle across the floor, leaving behind an arc of sage-green paint on the concrete.

  “Christ!” I picked myself off the floor.

  The clacking sound continued until it finally concluded in a deep-belly whump: the furnace kicking on.

  “Jesus Christ.” I forced a nervous laugh, then went to the sink basin against the wall and turned it on. The pipes clanged and rattled before a gush of freezing water the color of copper came spurting out of the faucet. I thrust my hands beneath the icy water, which made me all the more conscious of the sweat that had broke out on my body. Then I grabbed a roll of paper towels and proceeded to clean up the spilled paint on the floor as best I could. I went through pretty much the entire roll of paper towels and only managed to smear the paint in great magnolia blossoms on the concrete.

  Holding the last paper towel, I contemplated wiping the tiny handprint off the wall . . . but in the end, I decided against it. I knew why right away, although it would take me until later that evening to finally admit it: I wanted Jodie to see it and to prove to myself I wasn’t going crazy.

  The shrill of my cell phone startled me so badly I nearly had a heart attack. When I answered it and before I could even say hello, Holly’s high-pitched voice erupted over the line: “Travis, are you okay? Should I call the police?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Yeah,” Jodie said, crouching down. “It’s a handprint.”

  “But whose handprint?” I said. I was standing behind her, hands folded across my chest as if obstinate about the whole situation. She’d come home only two minutes before, her arms laden with shopping bags from Macy’s and smelling of various perfumes from the department store’s perfume counter, when I’d grabbed her wrist and dragged her down the basement stairs while the headlights of Beth’s car were still retreating from our driveway.

  Now, staring at the handprint, Jodie reached out to touch it.

  “Don’t,” I said a bit too loudly.

  Jodie jerked her hand away as if some animal had just snapped at her, then shot me a quizzical stare from over her shoulder.

  “Don’t mess it up. I want it preserved.”

  “Why? Do you think this is Bigfoot’s
handprint?”

  I hurried to her side and crouched down next to her. “You don’t find this strange? Impossibly fucking strange?”

  “That there’s a handprint on our wall?”

  “That it’s a child’s handprint that just happened to appear here,” I specified, drumming a finger against the drywall a safe distance away from the print.

  “So? The Dentmans had a kid. Is it that hard to believe some—”

  “No, you’re not getting it.” Again, I tapped the wall. “This is our paint, the paint we used upstairs. Don’t you recognize the color? You picked it out, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The same paint you spilled all over the floor,” she added with mild condemnation, glancing around the room. “Nice.”

  “Forget about the floor. What about the handprint?”

  “A coincidence?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not? It’s a common color.”

  “There wasn’t a single room in the house painted sage when we moved in, and anyway, I would have noticed this before.”

  “Yeah?” Jodie said, and there was a disquieting tone of condescension in her voice. “Would you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stood, brushing her hands on the thighs of her jeans. “My bags are all over the hallway upstairs. Want to give me a hand?”

  “Are you kidding? What about this?”

  Jodie sighed. Her gaze went from me to the handprint, then back to me again. Finally, she said, “So do you have a theory about it you’d like to share?”

  This caught me off guard. “A theory?”

  “Yes. Where do you think it came from?”

  “I-I don’t know,” I stammered.

  “Then come upstairs and help me with the bags. I’ll get dinner started, and we’ll open a bottle of wine.” She turned to leave.

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing the notebook off the floor where I’d left it. I held it out to her and shook it like a prosecutor proffering evidence to a jury. “Then there’s this.”

  Jodie didn’t say anything; she looked merely resigned as she leaned against the wall and studied the notebook.

  “I threw this out in London when we were trying to make room for all our stuff in the flat. Do you remember?”

  “Travis . . .”

  I ran my thumb through the pages, making a zipping sound. “I told you about my notebooks, the ones I wrote in when I was a kid after Kyle’s death. I threw them all out in London, but now it’s here.”

  “I did that.”

  I gaped at her.

  “I did that,” she repeated. “I found the notebooks in the trash and brought them back to the house. I stuck them all in a box and never told you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought you were being careless.” Jodie rubbed her face, leaving red streaks on her cheek. “I thought someday you might regret getting rid of them. I didn’t want you to regret it.”

  I could say nothing; I could only stare at the notebook cover, the black and white jungle cat print.

  “Travis, he was your brother. I didn’t want you to make a mistake and hate yourself for it later.” Gently, she touched my shoulder. “Is that what this is all about? Kyle?”

  Hearing her say his name caused a keening steam engine sound to resonate in the center of my head. I tossed the notebook atop a stack of books, though I continued to stare at my hands as if I still held it.

  Jodie came up behind me, wrapped her arms around me. She kissed the crook of my neck, and I could feel her heartbeat against my back. Again, I could smell the department store perfume on her. “You’re not angry with me, are you? For doing that?”

  I squeezed her hands, which were joined at my waist. “No.”

  “I love you, you know. I want to take care of you, look after you.”

  “That’s my job,” I said.

  “We’ll do it for each other. Okay?”

  I squeezed her hands tighter. “Okay.”

  “Come on.” She withdrew her arms and moved toward the stairs, her shadow trailing behind her on the wall like the tail of a comet. “Let’s have some dinner. It’s freezing down here, anyhow.”

  Jodie knew about Kyle; of course she did. What she knew was that I’d had a younger brother who’d died, simple as that. What she didn’t know was how his death had been my fault. (As far as I was aware, aside from me, the only people alive who knew the truth were Adam and Michael Wren, a Maryland State Police detective . . . provided Detective Wren was still among the living.)

  The night I told Jodie about Kyle, we were in bed in my Georgetown apartment, having been engaged for less than a week. We were naked and sweaty and breathing heavy in the afterglow of making love, both of us staring noncommittally at the ceiling that suddenly seemed too close to our faces. The Ocean Serene was going to be published, and I—or rather Alexander Sharpe—had simply and succinctly dedicated it to Kyle. Jodie had read the galleys earlier that evening while I had been at work at the newspaper and asked me who Kyle was.

  “My brother,” I told her.

  “Is Adam—”

  “My younger brother. His name was Kyle. He died when I was thirteen.”

  “Oh. Oh, Travis.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s not. I didn’t know . . .”

  “I didn’t tell you,” I responded.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  No, I didn’t want to talk about it. But I was also committing the rest of my life to this woman, and I understood that such a commitment carried with it certain rights, and Jodie deserved to know about Kyle.

  “He was ten,” I heard myself say, and it could have been someone else’s voice issuing through the end of a long, corrugated pipe buried deep beneath the earth. “We were living in Eastport, small boating suburb outside Annapolis and just off the Chesapeake Bay, with lighthouses and a quaint little drawbridge and everything. In hindsight, I guess it looked like a Jean Guichard photo. But it was a good place to grow up.”

  Outside, traffic shushed back and forth in the streets like the ebb and flow of the tide. The sparkle of sodium lights twinkled in the raindrops on the windowpanes.

  “There was a river behind our house that led into the bay. We used to swim there in the summer.”

  I paused, lost in melancholic reflection, and Jodie hugged me tighter. There was a pack of Marlboros on my desk. I got out of bed and snatched them up, along with a book of matches, and went to the window. The stubborn thing was stuck, but I finally pushed it open; a cool midsummer breeze filtered into the stuffy apartment. Half hanging out the window, I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Jodie had been trying desperately to get me to quit smoking and chastised me about it every chance she got. That night, however, she said nothing.

  “Kyle drowned in the river that summer,” I said flatly. Somewhere between climbing out of bed for the cigarettes and lighting that first smoke, I had made up my mind not to tell Jodie the specific details of what had happened—what I did and what I didn’t do on the night Kyle died. There was no need, and I didn’t think I could actually tell it, anyway. (I’d told it just once in my lifetime to Detective Wren, and that had been more than enough; I’d never had to speak it aloud since I was thirteen.)

  In a small voice, Jodie said, “No.”

  I tossed the cigarette butt out the window, then shut it. My body was cold but my face was numb. I realized that I had been crying and my freezing tears were stinging my cheeks. I wiped them away, then padded back to bed and slipped underneath the covers. “That’s all,” I said, as if it had been so simple, so pat.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you never told me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I was hardly listen
ing to her.

  “I’m here, if you ever want to talk about it again.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I’m okay.”

  “Just keep that in mind, baby.”

  “I will.”

  “My baby.”

  “Yes.”

  And that was all I ever said about it to Jodie, who later became my wife.

  Jodie made tacos and Mexican rice for dinner while I set the table, put an Eric Alexander CD on the stereo, and opened a bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle. Even though the handprint on the basement wall still hung over my head like a black aura, I didn’t want my wife to think I was completely out of my mind, so I even lit a couple candles and put on my best face at the dinner table. To my surprise, by the time Jodie was halfway through telling me about her afternoon, the handprint diminished to only a vague and distant throbbing toward the back of my cranium. Another hour and a few more glasses of wine and I convinced myself I could forget all about it.

  “You know, we’ve got that perfectly good office upstairs that we’re currently utilizing as a storage locker,” Jodie said, setting her fork down on her plate and pouring herself another glass of wine. “We could put my laptop up there instead of leaving it on the coffee table in the living room, and you can organize your writing stuff. I’m going to need a quiet place to finish my dissertation, and I’m sure you don’t want to continue writing on the sofa for the rest of your life, anyway.”

  Of course, I hadn’t been getting much writing done on the sofa, either. “Give me the next couple days, and I’ll set it up real nice. Are you teaching tomorrow?”

  “Yes. You should come out to the campus, take a look around. They’ve got a nice library.” She smiled sweetly and innocently, and for one mesmerizing second, I saw her as she had been as a young girl. “You could have lunch with me.”

  “How long is the winter course?”

  “Just a few weeks. But listen,” Jodie said, setting her wineglass on the table, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”

  I raised my eyebrows and said, “Shoot.”