Floating Staircase(31)

I felt him staring at me, but I wouldn’t look at him. I was still thinking of those Matchbox cars, and the safest place to look was my beer.

“You went and wrote a bunch of books about him,” he said finally.

“One book,” I said. “Just one book. And anyway, Alexander Sharpe wrote that one, not me.”

I could see Adam’s reflection smirking in the mirror behind the bar. He squeezed my shoulder. As if I were an accordion, I felt the wind wheeze out of me. “Little brother, I hate to break it to you, but you’ve written four novels, each one about someone who drowns or almost drowns or an apparition rising out of a lake. You mean to tell me you’ve been blind to what you’ve been doing this whole time?”

His words shook me to my core. This had never occurred to me in the slightest. But just hearing him say it enforced the truth of it, and suddenly, like a great explosion just over the horizon, I could see it. Even the goddamn titles professed a similar theme that had eluded me until this very moment: The Ocean Serene, Silent River, Drowning Pool, and Water View. Not to mention the title I’d scrawled on the cover sheet of the manuscript pages I’d sent to Holly before leaving London—Blood Lake.

Fuck, had it been so obvious to everyone else? Was I truly that blind? I bit my lower lip and refrained from admitting to Adam that the tentative title I’d given my most recent work—the outline for the story about Elijah Dentman and the dysfunctional family who’d lived in my house before me—was Floating Staircase.

“So you’re saying you became a cop because of what happened to Kyle?” I said, anxious to change the subject. My voice shook the slightest bit, but I didn’t think my brother, who’d had twice as many beers as I had, noticed.

Adam rolled one big shoulder. “Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, I’d be surprised to think Kyle’s death had nothing to do with it. That’s like saying we’re unaffected by all that goes on around us, all that happens to us. Our kid brother died; of course it had a significant impact on both our lives.”

I wanted to ask him if he ever woke up in a pool of sweat, gasping for air and feeling like invisible ghost hands were dragging him down to a watery grave. I wanted to ask him if he’d ever sat up in bed in the middle of the night because he thought he heard footsteps in the hallway—footsteps that conveniently fell silent the moment you held your breath and waited for them, waited for them, waited for them. These were all the things that had tormented me as a child . . . but lately they’d resurfaced, coming back to haunt me like an old ghost, and I wondered what powers my new house held. What ghosts haunted those hallways?

The thought sent chills down my spine.

“Anyway,” Adam went on, “from a professional investigator’s point of view—that would be me, by the way—I’d say you jumped to some conclusions pretty quickly with that room you found in your basement.”

“Yeah? What conclusions would those be?”

“For starters, you assume that room you found had been Elijah’s bedroom just because you found his bed and all his stuff in it.”

“And that’s a poor assumption?”

“It’s a fair assessment, but that doesn’t make it fact. You’ve got to eliminate all other avenues before coming to one solid conclusion. One other avenue being that Veronica and the kid’s uncle, David Dentman, moved all that stuff down there after the kid died. Just like Mom and Dad moved Kyle’s stuff out into the garage.” He rubbed his thumb around the rim of his pint glass. “And you guys don’t have a garage.”

“Shit,” I said. For the second time in less than five minutes, Adam was easily poking holes in my sense of reality. And the bastard was drunker than I was. “I guess you got a point. I hadn’t thought of that.” There was a rapidly deflating balloon in my stomach. The excitement I’d felt in writing about the make-believe Dentman family seemed to blacken and shrivel, and I feared the fog of writer’s block would roll back in and cover up the city.

“Still . . .” Adam’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Well,” he said and proceeded with what I perceived to be, even in his inebriated state, careful steps, “it’s just that even if that wasn’t the kid’s bedroom, one question still remains.”

“What’s that?”

“What was that room used for in the first place?”

I let this sink in. Maybe we both did, because Adam didn’t say anything for several drawn-out seconds.

“Fellas,” Tooey said, sweeping past the bar and winking at us like a conspirator. “We doin’ okay?”

I raised a hand at him. “Doing fine, thanks.”

Behind us, someone brought up a Johnny Cash tune on the jukebox.

“I want to confess something,” I said after too much silence had passed between us. I told Adam about how I’d thrown away my old notebooks, the ones with my early writings about Kyle, after we moved to London. “I didn’t fully understand why at the time, but I think I do now.” I waited for Adam to say something, to at least ask why I had finally come to this realization, but he didn’t say a word. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “It was because I felt horrible about what happened between us after Mom’s funeral. I acted poorly, and it wasn’t fair to you or Beth. Or even Jodie.”