Floating Staircase(22)

“I did that.”

I gaped at her.

“I did that,” she repeated. “I found the notebooks in the trash and brought them back to the house. I stuck them all in a box and never told you.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought you were being careless.” Jodie rubbed her face, leaving red streaks on her cheek. “I thought someday you might regret getting rid of them. I didn’t want you to regret it.”

I could say nothing; I could only stare at the notebook cover, the black and white jungle cat print.

“Travis, he was your brother. I didn’t want you to make a mistake and hate yourself for it later.” Gently, she touched my shoulder. “Is that what this is all about? Kyle?”

Hearing her say his name caused a keening steam engine sound to resonate in the center of my head. I tossed the notebook atop a stack of books, though I continued to stare at my hands as if I still held it.

Jodie came up behind me, wrapped her arms around me. She kissed the crook of my neck, and I could feel her heartbeat against my back. Again, I could smell the department store perfume on her. “You’re not angry with me, are you? For doing that?”

I squeezed her hands, which were joined at my waist. “No.”

“I love you, you know. I want to take care of you, look after you.”

“That’s my job,” I said.

“We’ll do it for each other. Okay?”

I squeezed her hands tighter. “Okay.”

“Come on.” She withdrew her arms and moved toward the stairs, her shadow trailing behind her on the wall like the tail of a comet. “Let’s have some dinner. It’s freezing down here, anyhow.”



Jodie knew about Kyle; of course she did. What she knew was that I’d had a younger brother who’d died, simple as that. What she didn’t know was how his death had been my fault. (As far as I was aware, aside from me, the only people alive who knew the truth were Adam and Michael Wren, a Maryland State Police detective . . . provided Detective Wren was still among the living.)

The night I told Jodie about Kyle, we were in bed in my Georgetown apartment, having been engaged for less than a week. We were naked and sweaty and breathing heavy in the afterglow of making love, both of us staring noncommittally at the ceiling that suddenly seemed too close to our faces. The Ocean Serene was going to be published, and I—or rather Alexander Sharpe—had simply and succinctly dedicated it to Kyle. Jodie had read the galleys earlier that evening while I had been at work at the newspaper and asked me who Kyle was.

“My brother,” I told her.

“Is Adam—”

“My younger brother. His name was Kyle. He died when I was thirteen.”

“Oh. Oh, Travis.”

“It’s all right.”

“No,” she said, “it’s not. I didn’t know . . .”

“I didn’t tell you,” I responded.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

No, I didn’t want to talk about it. But I was also committing the rest of my life to this woman, and I understood that such a commitment carried with it certain rights, and Jodie deserved to know about Kyle.

“He was ten,” I heard myself say, and it could have been someone else’s voice issuing through the end of a long, corrugated pipe buried deep beneath the earth. “We were living in Eastport, small boating suburb outside Annapolis and just off the Chesapeake Bay, with lighthouses and a quaint little drawbridge and everything. In hindsight, I guess it looked like a Jean Guichard photo. But it was a good place to grow up.”

Outside, traffic shushed back and forth in the streets like the ebb and flow of the tide. The sparkle of sodium lights twinkled in the raindrops on the windowpanes.

“There was a river behind our house that led into the bay. We used to swim there in the summer.”

I paused, lost in melancholic reflection, and Jodie hugged me tighter. There was a pack of Marlboros on my desk. I got out of bed and snatched them up, along with a book of matches, and went to the window. The stubborn thing was stuck, but I finally pushed it open; a cool midsummer breeze filtered into the stuffy apartment. Half hanging out the window, I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Jodie had been trying desperately to get me to quit smoking and chastised me about it every chance she got. That night, however, she said nothing.

“Kyle drowned in the river that summer,” I said flatly. Somewhere between climbing out of bed for the cigarettes and lighting that first smoke, I had made up my mind not to tell Jodie the specific details of what had happened—what I did and what I didn’t do on the night Kyle died. There was no need, and I didn’t think I could actually tell it, anyway. (I’d told it just once in my lifetime to Detective Wren, and that had been more than enough; I’d never had to speak it aloud since I was thirteen.)

In a small voice, Jodie said, “No.”

I tossed the cigarette butt out the window, then shut it. My body was cold but my face was numb. I realized that I had been crying and my freezing tears were stinging my cheeks. I wiped them away, then padded back to bed and slipped underneath the covers. “That’s all,” I said, as if it had been so simple, so pat.

“Are you okay?”