Floating Staircase (6 page)

“Noon.”

“Why'd you let me sleep so late?”

“I tried waking you about an hour ago, but you wouldn't have any of it.” She disappeared into the bedroom closet only to return a moment later, her arms laden in clothes that had yet to find a home. She dumped them on the edge of the bed. “I'd like you to move that desk into the spare room.” Unsure where to put the desk, the movers had left it in the hallway upstairs. “Also, go through some of the boxes in the basement, if you have time. I feel completely unsettled.”

I sighed. “That's because we are unsettled.”

“Help me out here, will you?” She selected a blouse from the pile and carried it over to the bevel glass beside the bedroom door. I watched her peel away her shirt and slip into the blouse. Her dark hair was pulled back with a barrette, and she was wearing makeup.

“Where are you going?”

“To the college to see about transferring those outstanding credits.”

This had been Jodie's only hesitation about moving from North London back to the States. She'd been on course to receive her doctorate in psychology by the end of the upcoming spring semester and was on the verge of completing her doctoral thesis; the last thing she wanted to do was lose credits in the move.

“There shouldn't be a problem, but I wanted to make sure, just in case. I don't think I have the patience to make up any course work. I'll sooner quit the program.” She tucked her blouse into a pair of nice black slacks, then examined her reflection in the glass.

“You're not going to quit.”

“Maybe I'll take up bartending. Or stripping.”

“Cut it out. You'll be fine.”

Adjusting the top button of her blouse, Jodie came over and planted a kiss squarely on my forehead. “Don't forget those boxes. And the desk.”

“I won't.”

“See you later, alligator,” she said and left.

Somewhat awkwardly, I negotiated Jodie's desk down the hall and into the spare room we'd decided to turn into an office. There were more boxes hoarded against the walls here, too, and the closet was already overflowing with Jodie's clothes. I moved a few of the boxes out of the way, then dragged the desk along the carpet where I finally set it beneath the single window that looked out upon the side yard. Through the window I spotted the appliqué of black tamarack pines running down the slope of the property to the lake.

Then I noticed a small, rectangular perforation in the Sheetrock at the base of one wall, only slightly bigger than a doggy door. I would have missed it completely had I not moved boxes out of the way to make room for the desk. I knelt down and realized it was actually a little door, no different than the cubbyholes we'd had in our North London flat, which we'd utilized for storage. The cubbyholes had been hinged on one side and stayed closed by a magnetic latch on the inside of the door.

I pushed against the door and felt the magnetic latch give. A second later, a bracket of darkness appeared in the wall as the door opened. A breath of freezing air issued out of the opening, causing shivers to cascade down the length of my spine. Poor insulation.

I opened the door all the way and looked inside. The squared-off compartment was no bigger than the inside of a washing machine, the flooring unfinished wood boards, the struts in the walls covered by opaque plastic through which tufts of pink insulation burst like stuffing in an old couch.

I managed to make out a few items on the floor. One was undeniably a baseball. A tattered Scrooge McDuck comic book. Several Matchbox cars (and just seeing these jabbed me with a cold spear, for I was suddenly thinking of the Matchbox cars I'd found under Kyle's bed after his funeral and how my father, in his grief, had beat me with his belt before going off to sob in his study). There was a cardboard shoe box back there, too, covered in a fine coat of dust.

This had been some little kid's secret hideout,
I thought, reaching in and sliding the shoe box toward me. I picked it up, leaving a distinct handprint in the dust on the lid, and set it in my lap. The box felt very light, though not empty. I opened the lid and, with lightning quick reflexes, shoved the box off my lap while simultaneously scooting backward on the carpet.

The box tumbled over on its side, and two of the things inside bounced out.

The shoe box was full of dead birds, their eyes the color of marble and twisted, skeletal claws frozen in the air. Catching my breath, I leaned forward and studied the birds that had rolled out of the box. They were frozen stiff, their brown-gray feathers glistening with pixels of frost. Some of their beaks were partially opened.

I reached for a wad of packing paper and scooped the dead birds up with it, setting them back in the box among the others. Each one was as weightless as a Christmas ball. The shoe box was like a mass grave. There were about nine birds squeezed in there. What kind of child—

Of course, I was accosted by a vision from my own youth, hiding out behind the shed with a frog trapped in my hands and the nest of baby birds I'd swatted out of the shrub behind the garage. How I squeezed each one until sticky yellow fluid bubbled out of their rectums and their tiny beaks opened wide. I felt sick to my stomach.

“Fuck this.” I replaced the lid on the shoe box, closed the cubbyhole door, and took the shoe box to the kitchen where I slid it into a garbage bag. Then I took the bag out to the yard and dumped it in one of the trash cans.

The basement was a schizophrenic jumble of chairs, boxes, and randomly discarded objects that no longer fulfilled their purpose. It appeared that the previous owners, the Dentmans, had hastily erected Sheetrock walls to section the basement off into various rooms, transforming what had once been a wide, yawning expanse of low-ceilinged open space into a honeycomb of secret pockets, mazelike walls, and right angles.

I located a flashlight in my toolbox and took it around with me, casting the beam into each little room—one of which was no bigger than a tiny closet—as I went around. My original notion was that the Dentmans, or whoever had put up these walls, had intended to finish the basement. But on closer inspection it became obvious that the layout was atypical. There were six of the makeshift rooms in all, the Sheetrock old and gouged in places, nailed directly against the studding of the house. None of the rooms had their own electrical outlets, which suggested very poor planning, and two of them had a panel of Sheetrock as the ceiling instead of the open beams and tufts of pink insulation like the rest of the basement. In one of these rooms I bent down and focused the flashlight on a wall where chunks of the drywall had fallen away. The cement floor was coated in a powdery white film. I felt the gouges in the wall.

“Bizarre,” I mumbled, moving back into the open area to address the boxes stacked in the center of the room. Yet I paused just outside the doorway to the tiny makeshift room, my flashlight beam reflecting off a series of small puddles on the concrete floor. I hadn't noticed them before, but they were quite evident now. I flicked the flashlight's beam toward the ceiling where a network of copper pipes ran in every direction. It occurred to me that if there was a leaky pipe somewhere, I didn't even know where to find the goddamn water shutoff.

But the pipes looked dry. To make sure, I ran one hand along them, my palm coming away caked in bluish-gray dust but dry as bone. I dipped my fingers into one of the puddles. Ice-cold water. Casting the beam farther along the concrete floor, the puddles seemed to suggest a vague alternating pattern.

Footprints. Wet footprints.

The puddles negotiated the length of the basement, then ended directly in front of one of the slabs of Sheetrock nailed to the wall. Vanished into nothingness.

I was tweaked temporarily as the world around slipped a notch. Too easily I could recall my childhood fear of Kyle slinking back from the grave to claim my soul, dripping foul black water in the hallway of the little duplex we had all happily lived in together. In my head, the sounds of his feet on the hardwood floor were the empty soulless beats of a vampire's heart.

I shocked myself by uttering, “Kyle?” The instant the word left my mouth, I felt my blood run cold and my body begin to quake. Surely I was scaring myself for no good reason. Surely I was creating something out of nothing.

Just water . . . just puddles of water
. . .

I grabbed a towel from the laundry room and mopped up the wet footprints, all the while trying to convince myself they weren't footprints at all. One was even crescent shaped and bore the suggestion of five splayed toes . . . yet I still managed to talk myself out of it.

I spent the better part of the afternoon unpacking countless boxes and transporting the items to various locales throughout the house, as well as dumping a good number of things by the curb for bulk pickup, until sometime later I heard the front door slam upstairs. Jodie entered the house and tramped across the floorboards above my head. Aiming the flashlight at my wristwatch, I saw it was ten after two. I was suddenly hungry for lunch and wondered if Jodie might be interested in accompanying me into town to check out the local scenery and grab a bite. Anyway, I was exhausted and didn't want to spend any more time in this lousy dungeon mausoleum.

I clumped up the narrow staircase and crossed the kitchen where a pot of coffee was overpercolating on the stove, coughing steam into the air and spitting gouts of black sludge onto the stove top.

“Goddamn it.”

Grabbing a dish towel from the kitchen counter and wrapping it around my hand, I yanked the coffeepot from the stove and shut off the burner. The pot still burped and bucked in my grasp. I set the pot in the sink and wiped the stove top with the dish towel.

Upstairs, Jodie thumped her foot down twice to get my attention.

“I know. I know. The coffee's burning. I got it.” I cleaned up the remaining residue with the dish towel, then wrung it out over the sink.

Two minutes later, searching the second-floor landing, I could not find Jodie. I checked the bedrooms, the bathroom. They were empty. Yet I knew I had heard her. Back downstairs I went to the front door and found it locked. I called her name but she didn't answer. Momentarily, I stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up into the well of risers climbing to the second floor, until I realized I was alone.

Later, in the lazily falling snow, I wandered outside and trekked down the snowy slope of the backyard to retrace my steps from last night's bizarre little escapade. Despite the evidence of the wet pajama bottoms and a pair of frozen Nikes left by the front door, I could almost convince myself all that had happened by the lake had been a dream. Yet the footprints in the snow leading around the side of the house, down the sloping embankment, and through the trees toward the water was proof beyond refute. Hugging myself in my parka, I hiked to the foot of the lake where the frozen surface was accumulating a dusting of fresh snow.

I paused here and fished a pack of Marlboros from my jacket pocket while looking out at the floating staircase protruding through the ice. Though still enormous, the daylight betrayed its mystery, exposing it for the joined bits of rotting wood, nails, and splintered planks that it was. More careful of my footing than I had been last night, I got as close to it as I could—close enough to examine the graying skin of the staircase, the weathered and warped planks, the bone-like suggestion of the thing. I didn't realize it right away, but the preliminary stirrings of a story were yawning and stretching in the far recesses of my brain as I stood there, my hands stuffed into my pockets, a Marlboro smoldering between my lips.

I turned north along the lake and followed its perimeter until the slope of the land became too treacherous. I stared down at the lake from a plateau perhaps fifteen yards above the frozen water, the ground below covered with twiggy undergrowth and sharp, biting rocks that rose out of the snow. The trees were all barren, their branches providing sturdy handholds that I held on to before I lost my footing and spilled over the edge. Those sharp rocks below would tear me to pieces like crocodiles awaiting a careless gazelle.

From this vantage I could make out the entire circumference of the lake. It was larger than I'd originally thought, the view from my house impeded peripherally by tall pines bookending the perimeter of my property. From here, the view opened up and was even more spectacular; I could only imagine what it looked like in the summer, with all the trees in full bloom, the sun burning a brownish-red smear on the horizon, the sky crowded with scudding cumuli and heavy with birds. The odd wooden staircase looked like the tower of a submarine breaking up through the ice.

There was only one other house here along the lake, directly at my back and seen through the spindly, interwoven arms of the naked tree branches. It was a cabin-style home with a stone chimney, like something you'd see on the bottle of maple syrup. It had an elaborate wraparound porch, which overlooked the lake: a view, I was certain, that was probably better than ours. A flag of smoke twisted lazily up from the stone chimney, stark against the faded gray of the afternoon sky. A fence of pines ran from one side of the house to the highest point of the incline, the trees resembling people standing shoulder to shoulder, their limbs twitching in the wind.

When Jodie came home later that evening, she found me on the living room sofa writing in a string-bound notebook.

“How'd it go at the college?”

“Compared to the professorate in North London, these guys are like extras from
The Andy Griffith Show.”

“It can't be that bad.”

“I'm exaggerating but not much. The head of the department wore a goddamn bolo tie.”

“What about the credits?”

She leaned over the arm of the sofa and pressed her cold nose against my temple. “I'm happy to report that they all transferred over. I'm a happy girl tonight, Mr. Glasgow. You better take advantage of me while you can.”