Floating Staircase(20)

“Do you want me to call—”

“I’ll call you back,” I said and hung up. The cell phone was a sweaty block in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket, then opened the basement door. There was a light on down there, one I was positive I hadn’t turned on. And Jodie had not been in the basement at all as far as I could tell. “Hey,” I called, trying my damnedest to sound threatening and failing miserably. “I know you’re there. Come on up and we’ll talk. No need to call the police.”

I stood at the top of the stairs, sweating like a hostage, for what seemed like an eternity. Just as my heartbeat began to regain its normal syncopation, a muted thump followed by a peppering of distant, hollow clacks—pencils falling to the concrete floor?—issued from the basement, causing the sweat to immediately freeze to my flesh. I was about to convince myself that some animal had gotten into the house and was down there scrounging around and raising hell until I saw that the carpeted runner on the stairs held the distinct and undeniable impression of wet footprints.

Invisible hands closed around my neck. All of a sudden, the simple act of breathing became a monumental task. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and prepared to dial 911 . . . although there was a horrible clenching feeling in the core of my soul that suggested whatever was down here could not be shot by bullets or restrained in handcuffs.

No, a voice countered in the back of my head. That’s stupid. Quit trying to frighten yourself.

I descended the steps with excruciating slowness, the risers groaning beneath my weight. At the bottom of the stairwell, I took a deep breath while counting silently to five, then swung around the wall, exposing myself to whatever might be waiting for me.

The basement was empty. The main room was packed with our orphaned belongings—things we had not yet decided where to put—and the single bulb in the ceiling, which was on, cast shadows in every direction. I stood there holding my breath, waiting to hear another sound in order to pinpoint the exact location of the intruder—a raccoon or possum, surely—but other than the slamming of my own heart, the basement was silent.

Then something caught my eye: something that should not have been there because I’d thrown it away after we’d moved to England. In fact, my memory of throwing it into the trash behind our flat was so crystal clear I could almost feel the fading warmth of the sun on my shoulders and smell the trees off the back lot.

Because it’s not here, I thought. Because I threw it away and it no longer exists.

Nonetheless, I crept over to it, my shadow stretching long and distorted on the far wall. I knelt, still gripping my cell phone, and stared at it.

You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction, the therapist used to say. Then: What is it you’re always writing in those notebooks?

What was splayed out before me on the basement floor, like a bullet fired straight out of the past and into the future, was one of those notebooks. It was opened in the middle, and I recognized my childish handwriting on the pages, the ink smeared in places. These were my words about what happened to Kyle, a subconscious coping mechanism from my disheartened youth (something else the therapist had termed).

I placed one hand on the notebook, as if touching it would shatter the reality of it and send it back in a scatter of fluttering confetti and dazzling disco lights to whatever secondary universe from which it had come. The pages were cold, cold.

Holding my breath, I turned one page and knew what I would find before I was actually staring at it: a faded Polaroid picture of Adam, Kyle, and me standing at the river’s edge in Eastport, our arms slung around each other, Kyle’s short blondish hair contradictory to Adam’s and my own dark furry mops, all of us squinting at the cameraman—our father—whose shadow darkened Kyle’s image in some hideous rendition of prophecy. I’d taped the photo into the notebook on the afternoon my father had driven Adam back to college while an unmentionable and foreboding silence ran like ice water through our house.

I closed the notebook but did not immediately stand. Truth was, my legs had surrendered to the strength of my horror; I could no more trust them to hold me up than I could trust the legs of a scarecrow. Instead, I swiped at my eyes with the heel of one hand, the moisture in them temporarily blurring my vision. And when my vision cleared, I happened to be looking across the room at one of the walls of hammered Sheetrock.

During the first week in the new house and at Jodie’s recommendation, we’d bought a few gallons of semigloss paint and painted the foyer and living room a cool sage color. The whole thing took us the better part of two days, and when we finished, we had about half a gallon left over. I’d hammered the lid back into place, then stashed the paint can in the basement underneath the stairs. The paint can was no longer there; it was on the floor between two pairs of winter skis and an old end table. The lid was on the floor next to the can, the paint-splattered underside facing the ceiling. On the wall, smack in the center of that barren landscape of white Sheetrock, was a tiny, sage-green handprint.

Later and for the rest of the week, as my mind returned to this very moment over and over again, I would come to understand that I knelt on the floor staring at that handprint for no more than ten or fifteen seconds . . . but at the time it seemed like a full hour ticked by with the hypnotizing lethargy of planetary evolution. I was aware of the fibers in my clothes, the heat suddenly radiating off my flesh, the goose bumps that prickled along the base of my neck. Capering before my eyes were the ghostly vinegar amoebas of broken blood vessels. I felt every crease in the musculature of my beating heart, every strand of fiber and sinew that networked throughout my body.