Floating Staircase

CHAPTER TWO

We hit flurries coming out of New York, but by the time we crossed into Maryland, the world had vanished beneath a blanket of white. Baltimore was a muddy blur. Industrial ramparts and graffiti-laden billboards seemed overcome by a deathly gray fatigue. Bone-colored smokestacks rose like medieval prison towers, the tops of which were eradicated by the blizzard, and cars began pulling off onto the shoulder in a flare of hesitant red taillights and emergency flashers.

“We should stop, Travis,” Jodie said. She was hugging herself in the passenger seat and peering through the icy soup that sluiced across the windshield.

“The shoulder’s too narrow. I don’t want to risk someone running into us.”

“Can you even see anything?”

The windshield wipers were clacking to a steady beat, but the temperature had dropped low enough for ice to bloom in stubborn patches on the windshield. I cranked the defroster, and the old Honda coughed and groaned, then belched fetid hot breath up from the dashboard. With it came the vague aroma of burning gym socks, which caused Jodie to rock back in her seat and moan.

“I hope this isn’t an omen,” she said. “A bad sign.”

“I don’t believe in omens.”

“That’s because you have no sense of irony.”

“Turn the radio on,” I told her.

The snowstorm didn’t let up until Charm City was a cold sodium smear in the rearview mirror. Two hours after that, as the car chugged west along an increasingly depopulated highway, the sky opened up and radiated with the clear silver of midday. We motored on through an undulating countryside of snow-covered fields. Houses began to vanish, and telephone poles surrendered to shaggy firs overburdened with fresh snow. The alternative rock station Jodie had found back in Baltimore crackled with the lethargic twang of country music.

Jodie switched off the radio and examined the road map that was splayed out in her lap. “What mountains are those up ahead?”

“Allegheny.”

With only the faint colorless summits rising out of the mist, they resembled the arched backs of brontosauruses.

“Lord. Westlake’s not even on the map.” She glanced out the window. “I’ll bet there’s not another living soul out there for the next twenty, thirty miles.”

Despite the hazardous driving conditions, I stole a glimpse of my wife. Aquiline-featured and mocha-skinned, her springy black hair tucked beneath a jacquard cap, she looked suddenly and alarmingly youthful. Memories of our first winter in North London rushed back to me: how we’d huddled around the wood-burning stove for warmth when we couldn’t get the furnace to kick on while watching an atrocious British sitcom on cable. London had been good to us, but we were excited by the prospect of returning to the States—to my home state, in fact—and finally owning our own home.

The past decade of struggling to make ends meet had paid off when my last novel, Water View, rocketed in sales and managed to attract a Hollywood option. The film was never made, but the option money put my previous book advances to shame, so we decided to trade in our draughty Kentish Town flat for a single-family home. It hadn’t occurred to us to come back to the States until Adam called to say he found us a house in his neighborhood. The previous owners had already moved out and were desperate to sell. At such a bargain, it promised to go quickly. I conferred with Jodie and, blindly putting our trust in my older brother’s judgment, we bought the house, sight unseen.

“Are you nervous?” Jodie said.

“About the house?”

“About seeing your brother again.” She rested a hand on my right knee.

“Things are okay between us now,” I said, though for a moment I couldn’t help but remember what had happened the last time we’d been together. Except for the clarity of the memory, it could have been a dream, a nightmare.

“We haven’t been around family for Christmas in a long time.”

I said nothing, not wanting to be baited into talking about the past.

“I think that you’ve somehow driven us off the face of the Earth,” Jodie said, blessedly changing the subject.

“It’s gotta be—”

“There,” she said. There was an edge of excitement in her voice. “Down there!”

In the valley below, a miniature town seemed to blossom right out of the snow. I could make out the grid of streets and traffic lights like Christmas balls. Brick-fronted two-story buildings and mom-and-pop shops huddled together as if for warmth. The main road wound straight through the quaint downtown section, then continued toward the mountains where clusters of tiny houses bristled like toadstools in the distant fields. The whole town was embraced by a dense pine forest, through which I thought I could see the occasional glitter of water.

Jodie laughed. “Oh, you’re shitting me! It’s a goddamn model train set.”

“Welcome to Westlake,” I said. “Next stop—Jupiter.”

I took the next exit and eased the Honda down an icy decline. We came to a T in the road, and Jodie read the directions off a slip of paper I’d stowed in the glove compartment. We hung a left and drove straight through the middle of town, digesting the names of all the businesses we passed—Clee Laundromat, Zippy’s Auto Supply, Guru Video, Tony’s Music Emporium. The two most creative were a hair salon called For the Hairing Impaired and an Old West—style saloon, complete with swinging doors and a hitching post, called Tequila Mockingbird.

Jodie and I groaned in unison.

We turned down Waterview Court and followed it as it narrowed to a single lane, the trees coming in to hug us on either side.

“Did you notice?” Jodie said.

“Notice what?”

“Waterview. It’s the name of your last book.”

“Maybe that’s another one of your beloved omens,” I said. “A good one this time.”

Waterview dead-ended in a cul-de-sac. Warm little houses encircled the court, their roofs groaning with snow.

“There he is,” I said and hammered two bleats on the car horn.

Adam stood in the center of the cul-de-sac, mummified in a startling red ski jacket, knitted cap, and spaceman boots. He had a rolled-up plastic tube beneath one arm. Behind him, two puffy blots frolicked in the snow—Jacob and Madison, my nephew and niece.

Smiling, I tapped the car horn one last time, then maneuvered the vehicle so I could park alongside the curb. The undercarriage complained as the Honda plowed through a crest of hard snow, and before I had the car in park, Jodie was out the door. She sprinted to Adam, hugged him with one arm around his neck, and administered a swift peck to his left cheek. My brother was very tall, and Jodie came up just past the height of his shoulders.

“Hey, jerk face,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Get your mitts off my wife.”

“Come here,” Adam said, grabbing me into a strong embrace. He smelled of aftershave lotion and firewood, and I was momentarily kicked backward into nostalgic reverie, recalling our father—who had smelled the exact same way—when we were kids growing up in the city. “Man,” he said, breathing into the crook of my neck, “it’s good to see you again, Bro.”

We released each other and I took him in. He was well built, with a studious, sophisticated gaze that was capable of being stern without compromising his charm and his innate approachability. He’d put those traits to work to become the policeman he’d always wanted to be when he was a kid. From seemingly out of the blue, I was overcome by a sense of pride that nearly buckled my knees.

“You look good,” I said.

“Kids!” Adam called over his shoulder.

Jacob and Madison, clumsy and bumbling through the snow, bounded to my brother’s side, adjusting gloves, knitted caps, earmuffs that had gone askew.

“My God, they’ve gotten so big,” I said.

“You guys remember your uncle Travis?” Adam asked.

I crouched down, bringing myself to their eye level.

Madison took a hesitant step backward. She had been only a baby the last time I saw her so I held out little hope she’d remember me.

Ten-year-old Jacob scrunched up his face and nodded a couple of times. He was the more brazen of the duo. “I remember. You lived in a different country.”

“England, yes.”

“Do they talk a different language there?”

“They speak the same language as you, old chap,” I said in my best cockney accent, “and I rather think they had it first, wot-wot.”

Jacob laughed.

Madison was emboldened to take a step toward me, smiling at my ridiculous impression or her brother’s willingness to laugh at it.

“Did you bring us anything from England?” Jacob asked.

Madison’s eyes lit up.

“Hey, now,” Adam scolded. “We don’t do that.”

Jacob’s gaze dropped to his boots. Madison’s remained on me, appearing hopeful that she’d reap the rewards of her brother’s question.

I exchanged a look with Adam.

He nodded.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, dipping one hand into the pocket of my parka. I produced two Snickers bars—uneaten rations from our road trip from New York—and, fanning them like a deck of cards, extended them to the kids.

They snatched them up with the speed of light, and Madison had it in her mouth a mere nanosecond after the wrapper was off.

My sister-in-law, Beth, came out of her house and marched down the shoveled driveway toward us. She was a smart, determined woman whose body bore the rearing of her two children with a mature, domestic sophistication. The last time I’d seen her, which had been just before Jodie and I moved to North London, she’d called me a piece of shit and looked ready to claw my eyes out with her fingernails.

“So good to see you, sweetie,” Beth said, gathering Jodie up in a hug. Beth was only slightly older than my wife, but at that very moment she could have passed for Jodie’s mother.

They let each other go, and Beth came over to me. “The famous author.” She kissed the side of my face.

“Hey, Beth.”

“You look good.”

She was lying, of course; I’d grown paler and thinner over the past few months, my eyes having recessed into black pockets and my hair having grown a bit too long to keep tidy. It was writer’s block, keeping me up at nights.

“All right, enough small talk.” Jodie was glowing. “Let’s see this house already.”

“Yeah,” I said, surveying the houses around the cul-de-sac. They all appeared to have cars in the driveways. “Which one is it?”

Adam fished a set of keys from his pocket. “None of these. Come on.”

Adam led us toward a copse of pines. A dirt path cut through the trees and disappeared. We crunched through the snow and headed down the dirt path.

I started laughing, then paused halfway through the woods. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Adam’s eyes glittered. “You should have seen the movers backing the truck up to the house.” He continued walking.

Jodie came up alongside me, brushing her shoulder against mine, and said in a low voice, “If this goddamn place is made out of gingerbread, your brother’s in hot water.”

Then we stepped into the clearing.

It was a white, two-story Gablefront with a wraparound porch and a gray-shingled roof tucked partway behind a veil of spindly trees. It wasn’t a huge house, but it was certainly a world of difference from our claustrophobic North London flat. And even with its obvious cosmetic deficiencies—missing shingles, missing posts in the porch balustrade, wood siding in desperate need of a paint job—it looked like the most perfect house in the known universe.

Adam had sent us pictures over the Internet, but it took being here, standing in front of the house—our house—for it to finally sink in and make it real.

“Well?” Adam said, standing akimbo by the front porch. “Did I do good or what, folks?”

“You did perfect.” Jodie laughed, then threw her arms around me, kissed me. I kissed her back.

Jacob and Madison giggled.

“You did perfect, too, baby,” she said into my ear. I hugged her tighter.

The house sat on three full acres, with a sloping backyard that graduated toward the cusp of a dense pine forest. It was immense, the type of forest in which careless hikers were always getting lost, covering what could have been several hundred acres.

On closer inspection, the house appeared almost human and melancholy in its neglect. The shutters hung at awkward angles from the windows, and the windowpanes were practically opaque with grime. Frozen plants in wire mesh baskets hung from the porch awning, each one so egregiously overgrown that their roots spilled from the bottom of the basket and hung splayed in the air like the tentacles of some prehistoric undersea creature. Veins of leafless ivy, as stiff as pencils in the cold, trailed up the peeling, flaking wood siding, which was mottled and faded, hinting at shapes hidden within the deteriorating wood.

Adam tossed me the house keys. “So, are we gonna stand around here freezing our butts off, or are we gonna check out the new digs?”

I handed the keys to Jodie. “Go ahead. Do the honors.”

Jodie mounted the two steps to the porch, hesitating as they creaked beneath her. There was a porch swing affixed to the underside of the awning by rusted chains, the left chain several inches longer than the right. The wicker seat had been busted out presumably a long time ago, leaving behind a gaping, serrated maw. The electric porch lights on either side of the front door were bristling with birds’ nests, and there was bird shit speckled in constellation fashion on the floorboards below. Yet if Jodie noticed any of this, she did not let on.

Jodie slipped the key into the lock as the rest of us gathered on the porch behind her. We waited patiently for her to open the door. Instead, she burst into laughter.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s insane,” she said. “This is our first home.”

The house had a very 1970s feel to it, with ridiculous shag carpeting and wood paneling on the first floor. At any moment I expected a disco ball to drop from the ceiling. There were floor tiles missing in the kitchen, and it looked like the walls were in the process of vomiting up the electrical outlets, for many of them dangled by their guts from the Sheetrock.

The Trans-Atlantic movers had deposited our belongings pretty much wherever they found space, and we maneuvered around them like rats in a maze as we went from room to room.

Jodie gripped my hand and squeezed it. “This is great.”

“It needs some work.”

Upstairs, there were two bedrooms—a master and a spare—as well as a third room that would make a perfect office for my writing and Jodie’s work on her doctoral dissertation. A second full bathroom was up here as well. With some disdain, I scrutinized the chipped shower tiles and the sink that could have been dripping since Eisenhower was in office.

“Travis,” Jodie called from down the hall. “Come look. You won’t believe this.”

She was in the master bedroom at the end of the hall. The movers had propped our mattress at an angle against one wall and left our dresser in the middle of the room. Boxes of clothes crept up another wall.

“Look,” Jodie said. She was gazing out of the wall of windows that faced the backyard.

I came up behind her and peered over her shoulder. Beyond the white smoothness of the lawn and seen through a network of barren tree limbs, a frozen lake glittered in the midday sun. On the far side of the lake, tremendous lodgepole pines studded the landscape, their needles powdered in a dusting of white. It was a breathtaking, picturesque view, marred only by the curious item toward the center of the lake—a large, dark, indescribable structure rising straight up from the ice.

“Did you know there was a lake back here?”

“No,” I said. “Adam never said anything.”

“Jesus, this is gorgeous. I can’t believe it’s ours.”

“It’s ours.” I kissed her neck and wrapped my arms around her. “What do you suppose that thing is out there? Sitting on the ice?”

“I have no idea,” Jodie said, “but I don’t think it’s sitting on the ice.”

“No?”

“Look at the base. The ice is chipped away, and you can see the water.”

“Strange,” I said.

Suddenly, we were both startled by a high-pitched wail, followed by the quick patter of small feet on the hardwood floor. It wasn’t the type of frustrated cry typical of agitated young children; there was fear in this shriek, possibly pain.

I rushed out onto the upstairs landing and glanced down in time to see Madison running into her mother’s arms in the foyer. Beth scooped up the little girl and hugged her tight.

“What happened?” I said, coming partway down the stairs.

Beth shook her head: she didn’t know. She smoothed back Madison’s hair while the girl clung to her like a monkey.

Adam appeared beside them and asked Madison what was wrong, but she did not answer. Her crying quickly subsiding, she seemed content to bury her face in Beth’s shoulder.

Adam looked at me. “What happened?” The amount of accusation in his tone rendered me speechless. “What’d you do?”

It wasn’t until Jacob came up behind me on the stairs that I realized to whom Adam had been directing his questions.

“What happened?” Adam repeated.

Jacob shrugged. The kid looked miserable. “Maddy got scared.”

“Scared of what?”

Again: the slight roll of tiny shoulders. “Something scared her. Wasn’t me. I promise.”

Adam sighed and ran his fingers through his tight, curly hair. “Get down here, Jacob.”

Expressionlessly, the boy bounded down the stairs.

I followed, stuffing my hands into my pockets. I paused beside Beth and rubbed Madison’s head.

She squirmed and swung her legs, causing Beth to grunt when she struck her in the belly. “Cut it out now,” Beth muttered into her daughter’s hair.

“You never said anything about a lake out back,” I said to Adam.

“Didn’t I?”

“And the basement? Where is it?”

“In the attic. Where else?”

“Ha. Don’t quit your day job.” I strolled past him down the hallway toward the one door I hadn’t yet opened.

Adam called after me: “The movers put all your boxes marked storage down there.”

“Thanks.” I opened the door on a set of rickety wooden stairs that sank deep into a concrete cellar. Somewhere down there a light burned, casting a tallow illumination on the exposed cinder block walls. I descended the stairs halfway until I saw an exposed bulb in the center of the low ceiling, hanging from several inches of wire. Its pull cord swayed like a hypnotist’s pocket watch.

A number of boxes were stacked at the foot of the stairs. I stepped over them and tugged on the pull cord, which broke off in my hand and sent the bulb swinging, casting alternating shadows around the room.

“Goddamn it.”

Standing on my toes, I reached up and steadied the light but couldn’t slip the cord back into place to shut it off. In the end, I padded my fingers on my tongue, then gave the bulb a half turn. The light went out.

We spent the rest of the daylight hours moving boxes from room to room, putting pieces of furniture together, scrubbing the bathrooms and the kitchen, and overall warming up to our new surroundings.

By the time night had fallen, we were all hungry and exhausted. The kids began to fuss, and Beth herded them home, insisting that we join them for dinner.

Their house had a closed-in porch, heated in the winter, where we charged through a meal of roast pork, some string bean and bread crumb concoction, mashed potatoes, and corn bread. For dessert, Beth set out an apple pie and ice cream, eliciting cheers from the children, and Jodie poured the coffee while Adam hunted around his basement for a bottle of port that was bent on remaining elusive. My brother finally returned from the basement empty-handed and defeated, then cut himself a giant slice of pie to make up for his efforts.

Beth talked about my last novel, Water View, and how she’d introduced my work to the neighborhood book club. “You’ll meet most of them next week. We’re having some people from the community over for a little Christmas party. It’ll be a great opportunity for you two to meet your new neighbors.”

“Please, Beth,” I said. “Don’t go wearing yourself out on our account.”

“My book club was going to meet anyway. I’ll just invite a few more people over, have them bring some desserts. It’ll be fun.”

“It’s a nice town,” Adam said. “Quiet, friendly.”

“Did you know the people who used to live in our house?” Jodie asked.

“The Dentmans,” Adam said. “We knew them a little, I guess.”

“We didn’t know them at all,” Beth corrected. “They were weird. Kept to themselves.”

Adam shrugged. “Desiring privacy doesn’t make you weird, hon.”

Beth flapped a hand at her husband, then turned to Jodie. “Don’t listen to him. They were weird.”

“Well, the house was a steal,” I said.

“Property isn’t very expensive out here,” Adam said, his mouth full of pie. “It’s like a well-kept secret from the rest of the state. Those mooks in Baltimore don’t know what they’re missing.”

“Mooks,” Madison parroted, giggling.

“And,” he went on, “it’s the perfect place to raise a family.”

“Yes, Adam,” Jodie piped up. “Please explain that to my husband. He seems to be ignorant of the whole biological clock phenomenon.”

I groaned and leaned back in my chair. “A week ago we were stuffed in a two-room flat with no central heating. We had to chase homeless people off our front steps every morning. You wanted to introduce kids to that?”

“Look around. We’re not there anymore.”

“Hey,” Beth said, lifting her glass of wine. “I want to make a toast. I’m so happy you guys moved out here.” She glanced at me, too obvious not to notice. Anyway, I think she wanted me to notice. “To new beginnings.”

“New beginnings,” Adam repeated.

We drank.