Floating Staircase(27)

I, on the other hand, found myself creeping down into the basement bedroom any chance I could get—and against the promise to my wife that I would do just the opposite—because I felt an inexplicable longing to sift through all Elijah’s things.

The story Adam had told me about Elijah’s accidental death coupled with the discovery of the boy’s tomblike bedroom had caused a previously diminishing spark to reignite in the center of my creative soul. My writer’s block evaporated like clouds of heavy fog retreating out to sea; once again I was able to see the bright lights of that grand city.

I lost all interest in the manuscript I’d been trying to write—the first few chapters of which Holly had already read and loved—and began fleshing out descriptions of a make-believe family (that maybe wasn’t so make-believe) rooted in some disturbing and interpersonal dysfunction. A single mother and her young son come to live with the boy’s uncle and ailing grandfather in the final days before the grandfather passes on. What sort of life did these characters live? What happens to a young boy who’s forced to live in a ten-by-ten room that resembled something out of “The Cask of Amontillado”?

Of course, the similarities between Elijah’s death and my own brother’s were not lost on me. Both had drowned at roughly the same age. Both of their bedrooms had been left eerily undisturbed following their deaths—Elijah’s in the basement of 111 Water-view Court and Kyle’s in our house in Eastport. Since Adam was the eldest, Kyle and I had shared the bedroom. After Kyle’s death, my father moved my stuff out, and I bunked in Adam’s room until that cold December day when my parents, silent and moving as if manipulated by strings, finally packed up all Kyle’s belongings and transferred them to the garage.

(Whatever happened to Kyle’s stuff after that remains a mystery to me; after our father died and our mother went to live with her sister in Ellicott City, Adam and I returned to our childhood home to take care of our father’s estate. I’d expected to find Kyle’s stuff still in the garage—expected to be mercilessly confronted by it like a murderer facing Judgment Day—but was surprised to find it gone. And somehow that was worse than having to see that stuff all over again, because it meant that there had been at least one specific moment in time when my parents had to go through everything in order to get rid of it, and it hurt me to think of the grief it must have caused them.)

Because of these similarities and because I had no idea what Elijah Dentman had looked like, I gave my fictional little boy characteristics very similar to Kyle’s—slight of frame, bright hair, handsome eyes with great fans of lashes, gingery spray of freckles across the saddle of his nose. The only towheaded male in our family: the odd man out. The writing came in a fury and left me drained but excited by the end of each session.

One afternoon while Jodie was out with Beth, I phoned Adam and told him to come over as soon as he could. He showed up on the front porch in his dark blue police uniform, his hat in his hands. The uniform made him look twice as big, the body armor he wore under his shirt giving him the overall rounded appearance of a whiskey barrel.

“What in the world is so important? You were practically out of breath on the telephone.”

I took him downstairs and showed him the room.

“Holy shit.” Adam stared in awe at what I’d uncovered. “Are you kidding?” Like Jodie, he remained in the doorway, as if an invisible barrier were preventing him from crossing the threshold.



Later that evening, I was overcome by another strong impulse to put words to paper. But I was tired of sitting on the sofa with a notebook on my lap. I located a rolling chair stashed away with various other forgotten relics in the basement and wheeled it into Elijah’s bedroom and right up to the kid’s desk. I adjusted the chair so that it came to an agreeable height, then flipped open my writing notebook and scribbled furiously.

I sketched out caricatures of Tooey Jones, Ira and Nancy Stein, the Christmas party at Adam’s house, and the basement bedroom secreted behind the wall. I wrote detailed passages describing the floating staircase on the lake. And of course I wrote of Elijah Dentman, my central character, my tragic figure, the poor boy held captive in an underground bedroom dungeon. What kind of child was Elijah? What does being trapped in a basement do to a ten-year-old boy? (I thought of the shoe box of dead birds and felt a numbness creep through me like a fever.)

For now, I had overpowered the writer’s block and was sailing into port on a soaring, lightning-colored dirigible, high above the blinking lights and the network of distant industrial causeways. Soaring, soaring.

When I finally put down my pen, my hand was throbbing and there was a sizeable blister on my index finger. What I had in the notebook were wonderful passages and detailed descriptions. What I was missing, though, was a story. I knew too little about the Dentmans to accurately riff off their lives. I kept putting my little boy in a basement dungeon but couldn’t understand how he got there. Who was Elijah? Who were the entire Dentman family?

I needed to find out.





CHAPTER TWELVE

It was only 11:15 in the morning by the time I arrived at the Westlake Public Library, and already there were iron-colored clouds crowded along the horizon promising snow.

The library was a squat, brick structure set at the intersection of Main and Glasshouse Streets and fortified by a fence of spindly, leafless maples. Inside, all was deathly quiet. As had become my custom whenever I found myself in a library, I crossed to the G aisle and located only a single, tattered copy of my novel Silent River among the stacks. It appeared to have been someone’s preowned copy that had been donated to the library, as I found the name G. Kellow printed on the inside of the front cover.