Floating Staircase(12)

Jodie and Beth shouted simultaneously. Somewhere in another dimension, a dish fell to the floor and shattered. I swung again, much steadier this time, and even through my drunken stupor felt the solidity of my older brother’s jaw against my knuckles. Then I felt his fist against my face, the force of it knocking me to the floor, his hulking shape—our father’s?—looming before me, blurred by my tears.

Jodie peeled me off the floor while Beth called me a piece of shit and told me to get the hell out of her house. I threw a drinking glass across the room and heard the children in their bedrooms start crying.

Jodie ushered me out into the cold night, a firm hand against the small of my back. I staggered as if in a fever. She said things into my ear as we headed to the car, although I can recall none of them and I probably wasn’t even listening to her. Similarly, I remember nothing of the drive back to our apartment.

I spent the next two weeks at the bottom of the world. Overcome by obsession, I thought about Kyle and trembled under the weight of my own guilt. With the dedication of someone newly possessed, I scribbled furious entries in my notebooks and smoked cigarettes like a longshoreman. I quit changing my clothes, which was no longer considered artistic as it had been in college.

My guilt was a pool in which I was drowning . . . though to suggest I was drowning elicits visuals of flailing arms and shouts of help. That was not me. I drowned in my grief with grotesque acceptance, like the captain of a ship who sinks with obligation to the ocean floor, tethered through sacrifice and commitment to the ship that drags him down. Something suggestive of fever claimed me—I let it claim me—and I spent several days in bed, muddy-eyed and swaying back and forth, at least spiritually, like a cattail in the wind. I feared Jodie would leave me. She didn’t, but my depression seemed to weaken her, too. Two weeks later, by the time I returned to some semblance of normalcy, there was an unspoken fatigue that had run its course through both of us like some strain of illness undiagnosed.

I would not speak with Adam again until much, much later, well after Jodie and I had moved across the Atlantic to North London.

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.





CHAPTER SIX

I was vaguely aware of a sudden sweeping sound followed by the sharp knife of bright daylight stabbing me through the eyelids. I groaned and rolled over onto Jodie’s side of the bed, which was cold in her absence.

“Explain to me,” came Jodie’s voice from some ethereal vortex, “how this happened . . .”

Some stupid, delinquent part of me was not in the bed in our new house but instead suspended in midair over a glistening lake, night having fallen all around me, the moonlight sparking like bursts of electric current on the black waters. Trapped in a freeze-frame, I held my breath while waiting for the icy plunge that would never come. Jodie’s voice was the disembodied voice of God, shocking me into consciousness.

Weakly, I opened one eye and winced at the daylight pouring in through the part in the curtains. Jodie stood at the foot of the bed holding my pajama pants.

“Morning,” I growled.

“You must have some brilliant explanation for this, I’m sure.” She shook the pajama pants in both hands. “They’re soaking wet. The hallway carpet is wet, too. What gives?”

“Must have been a wet dream.” I dropped my bare feet onto the floor, my naked flesh prickling at the chill in the air.

“Hysterical. Your sneakers are half frozen by the front door, too,” she said, balling the pajama pants up and stuffing them into the laundry hamper. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you raced the Iditarod before coming to bed last night.”

All at once I remembered creeping out of the house and going down to the frozen lake. Had it not been for the soaking wet pajama bottoms, I would have written it off as a vivid dream. Now, in the sobriety of daylight, I realized just how careless I’d been last night. “What time is it?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“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.