Floating Staircase(21)

I rose and, on unsteady legs, made my way over to the handprint. I brought two fingers up and touched it: the paint was still tacky, not yet completely dry.

Small: a child’s handprint.

“Who’s down here?” Somehow I managed these words, though they came out shaky and unimpressive. Then, frightening myself further, I muttered, “Kyle?”

There came another faint clacking sound from across the room, startling me straight out of my skin, and I whipped around and practically dropped my ass straight into the open paint can. I rolled onto my side as the paint can skidded out from under me. In slow motion I watched it tip on its side and spin in a semicircle across the floor, leaving behind an arc of sage-green paint on the concrete.

“Christ!” I picked myself off the floor.

The clacking sound continued until it finally concluded in a deep-belly whump: the furnace kicking on.

“Jesus Christ.” I forced a nervous laugh, then went to the sink basin against the wall and turned it on. The pipes clanged and rattled before a gush of freezing water the color of copper came spurting out of the faucet. I thrust my hands beneath the icy water, which made me all the more conscious of the sweat that had broke out on my body. Then I grabbed a roll of paper towels and proceeded to clean up the spilled paint on the floor as best I could. I went through pretty much the entire roll of paper towels and only managed to smear the paint in great magnolia blossoms on the concrete.

Holding the last paper towel, I contemplated wiping the tiny handprint off the wall . . . but in the end, I decided against it. I knew why right away, although it would take me until later that evening to finally admit it: I wanted Jodie to see it and to prove to myself I wasn’t going crazy.

The shrill of my cell phone startled me so badly I nearly had a heart attack. When I answered it and before I could even say hello, Holly’s high-pitched voice erupted over the line: “Travis, are you okay? Should I call the police?”





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 f*cking 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.”