Floating Staircase(13)

“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.