Floating Staircase

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 listening 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.”

“They’ve got a full-time slot opening up this spring, and I was thinking about applying for it.”

“Teaching?”

“I know it sounds crazy, and I know I didn’t just sit through six years of graduate school to end up back in the classroom . . .”

“But what about your post doc? What about the clinical work you wanted to do?”

“I know. I know,” she said, laughing, and rested her chin on her hand. “I’ve really enjoyed teaching. I like the kids. I like the students.”

I sensed the conversation sway dangerously close to our one area of incongruity—Jodie’s desire to have children. I felt a momentary flare of contempt for her, as if this were some passive-aggressive attempt at bringing up that old subject—I like the kids. But that feeling was just a spark quickly eclipsed by the look of genuine contentment on my wife’s face. Her eyes gleamed like jewels in the candlelight.

“Well,” I said, “if that’s what you want to do . . .”

“You mean you wouldn’t have a problem with it?”

“Why would I have a problem with it?”

“Well, I mean, after all the schooling . . .”

“You should do what you want. If you change your mind down the road, you can always go back to clinical work. Do you think you have a shot at getting the position?”

“I do,” she said nearly breathless. “I really do.”

“Hell,” I said. “Then go for it.”

We made love again that night and it was very nice, although it lacked the unconstrained sense of lust displayed by our previous coupling on the living room sofa the first week in the house.

“What is it?” Jodie asked me immediately afterward.

“What do you mean?”

“You seemed distracted.”

“It sounded like you enjoyed yourself,” I said.

“Is it the notebooks? That I took them out of the trash in London?”

“No.” To my own ears, my voice sounded very far away.

“Then what is it? There’s something.” She rubbed my chest. “I can tell.”

Kissing her forehead, I folded her up in my arms and hugged her.

“You’re not going to say anything, are you?” she asked after a while.

I said nothing more and eventually fell into a dreamless half sleep while Jodie got up and showered before coming back to bed.

Sometime during predawn, I was awoken by what felt like a cold hand touching my chest. I jerked upright in bed, a shriek caught midway up my throat. Jodie slept soundly beside me; I was surprised my start hadn’t woken her. Across the room and through the part in the curtains, I could see the three-quarter moon cleaving through the inky darkness of space and the pearl-colored luminescence of the frozen lake below.

I pawed sleepily at my face while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a needling sense of urgency directing me to get up, get up, get up. I peeled back the blankets and stepped onto the ice-cold hardwood floor. A shiver shot like a bolt of lightning through my body, and I felt my testicles, those two wrinkled cowards, shrivel to the size of dried figs. I pulled on my pajama bottoms and crept out into the hallway, still unaccustomed to the placement of the squeaky floorboards; I winced inwardly each time one creaked, afraid I’d wake up Jodie. But she was snoring steadily and lost in her own dreamland, and I made it to the carpeted section of the landing without incident.

As I’d done on that first night in the house, I peered over the railing to the foyer below. The boxes were no longer there, and moonlight poured in through the front windows unimpeded. I stood without moving, my hands balled into sweaty fists, and listened to the silence of the house all around me. Listened, listened. What was I waiting for? I had no clue. What had awoken me? I did not know.

In the basement, I fumbled for the cord of the ceiling light, and after floundering around in the dark like a mime semaphoring to a fleet of jetliners, I finally felt it wisp against my face. I pulled the light on and my retinas burned. Wincing, I stood in the center of the basement until my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I glanced around for any pools of water on the floor. There were none.

My gaze fell on the handprint across the room. Some fearful, overly sensitized part of my soul was convinced it would be gone—or worse that I’d find more of them now, dozens more, covering every section of the wall—but it was there. That lone child’s handprint.

Of course, I was still troubled by its presence . . . but something else from earlier that evening was needling at me now, too. Something important that I’d missed, though just barely. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I returned to bed accompanied by the uneasy feeling that I had overlooked something, then spent much of the following morning in a similar state. With Jodie at school, I attempted to get some writing done but found, not surprisingly, that my mind refused to focus. Soon I was drinking too much coffee while wandering around the house, watching a light snowfall through the upstairs dormer windows.

By noon, I’d checked on the handprint three times. Nothing had changed except that in the daytime it seemed less ominous. In fact, by one thirty I was beginning to convince myself that maybe Jodie was right—that perhaps this handprint had been here all along. The open paint can? I’d probably just left it there when I’d finished using it and hadn’t placed it under the stairs as I thought I had. It was a child’s handprint after all. And we had no children.

I decided to clean up the room that would become our office. There were still stacks of boxes in here, some of them nearly to the ceiling. I grabbed one and almost fell backward at the weightlessness of it: the thing was empty. I drummed my fingers along the side as I carried it and a number of other empty boxes out to the trash.

Some latch finally caught in the recesses of my lizard brain, and I suddenly realized what I’d been struggling to decipher about the handprint on the wall downstairs. Strangely, it had nothing to do with the handprint and everything to do with the wall. Because the drumming on the empty boxes made the same sound as my finger tapping against the drywall last night.

Hollow.

I rapped a set of knuckles along the drywall in the basement. Sure enough, it sounded hollow, as if there was nothing on the other side of the wall. I moved down the length of the wall, still knocking, until I heard the difference in the sound where the drywall had been hung directly over beams or cinder block.

Fueled by curiosity and an unanchored surge of emotion, I cleared junk from the hollow wall until the whole section was exposed. I traced the seams of the drywall, which hadn’t been taped up, while I calculated approximate square footage in my head: the basement was smaller than the ground floor, though I found no reason why this should be. By all accounts, the basement should have approximated the perimeter of the ground floor. Of course, that didn’t mean—

Sliding down the seam between two sheets of drywall, I discovered a tiny hiccup. I looked closely at it, practically pressing my nose against the wall. It was a hinge. Farther down the seam was a second hinge . . . and toward the bottom I located a third.

It wasn’t a wall at all.

It was a door.

But there was no doorknob, no handle, no way of opening it. I went to the opposite seam and attempted to cram my fingers between the two sections of dry-wall in order to pry it open, but it was impossible. Perhaps the door had been sealed shut long ago?

A door to where? Another room?

I hadn’t a clue.

Then I heard my old therapist’s voice saying, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out, while I thought of the storage cubbyholes we’d had in our North London flat: little hinged doors in the walls that were held closed by magnets.

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

I pressed a palm flat against the “wall” and pushed slightly. I felt it give perhaps half an inch . . . then unlatch itself from the wall as it eased open on squealing hinges. The door opened only three or four inches, revealing a vertical crack of darkness.

I didn’t realize just how excited I was until I reached out to pull the door open farther and saw how badly my hand was shaking. In the back of my throat, a weak little laugh escaped.

I opened the door.