Floating Staircase(32)

He was looking intently at his beer. “Or yourself, I’d imagine.”

“I threw those notebooks away because I thought it would finally put the past to rest.”

“And did it?”

My face felt red and hot, like a glowing ember. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar just to make sure waves of heat weren’t rising off my scalp.

“Did it?” Adam repeated.

“I hate saying it.”

“Why?”

“Because it did. I’m almost disgusted to say it, but I hardly thought about Kyle at all in London. It was like none of it ever happened. I even remember reading in the papers about a little girl who’d drowned in Highgate Ponds, and as I’m reading it I thought, Oh yeah, that happened to Kyle. I forgot.” I rubbed beer-sticky fingers over my eyes. “God, I sound horrendous.”

“You’re just trying to find a middle ground,” Adam said, finishing his beer. “The answer’s not to condemn yourself and live with the grief, but it’s not to totally erase it from your memory, either.” He checked his watch. “We should get going. It’s late.”

I almost grabbed his wrist and asked him the one remaining question that was on my mind—that had been on my mind for many days now: Do you believe in ghosts? But before I could react, the absurdity of it struck me like a hammer, and I decided to keep my inquiry to myself.

After all, everyone knows where dead people go: in the ground.



When I got home that evening, Jodie was already asleep in our bed. The house was freezing, so I covered her up with an extra blanket and kissed the side of her face. She stirred and hummed. One of her hands slipped out from beneath the covers and found my arm. She squeezed it.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Hmmm,” she breathed sleepily. “It’s all right. Are you coming to bed?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you want to hear something funny?”

“Sure,” I said, still whispering. “Just before you came home I got up to go to the bathroom.”

“You’re right,” I said, rubbing the topside of her hand. “That’s a riot.”

“No,” Jodie said. “Listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“I went to the bathroom and turned on the light and had to, you know, squint because the light was so bright and I’d just been asleep. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I was squinting in the light and looking at the mirror, and I saw my reflection. And you know what? I wasn’t me.” Her face, floating on the white mound of her pillow, looked ghostly and pale like the moon. “Do you know who I was?”

“Who?”

“You,” Jodie said. “I was you. Only for a split second. But I was you.”

I bent and kissed her forehead. She felt very warm. “You were dreaming,” I told her.

“No,” she said, “I wasn’t. I was awake. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tucking the blankets in all around her.

Jodie rolled on her side, and I caught the hint of a smile on her lips. “Neither do I,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed. “I guess that’s the beauty of the mystery.”

I kissed her a third time, then slipped into the hallway to examine the thermostat. It still registered sixty-eight degrees, although it felt more like forty-five in the bedroom. I could even see my breath.

“This is f*cking ridiculous.”

A glow caught my attention in the office across the hall from the bedroom. I poked my head in and flipped on the light switch. Jodie had assembled her desk against one wall, on which sat a computer monitor radiating waves of amethystine light, a prehistoric printer, and a collection of jazz CDs. The entire wall behind the desk was covered in framed awards, diplomas, a Who’s Who Among Students in America, an Outstanding Woman of the Year plaque from her undergraduate alma mater. On the floor, like a tiny city in the process of existing, stood towers of psychology textbooks and reams of photocopied papers, charts, and graphs networked with multicolored lightning bolts. I felt like a heel, having neglected cleaning this room out so Jodie had done it herself.

Shivering, I went downstairs. Because of our struggle with the temperamental and unreliable furnace, I’d taken to chopping firewood in the backyard, which we used almost around the clock in the living room fireplace. I grabbed a couple of fresh logs from the front porch and tossed them into the fireplace.

In about five minutes I had a pretty healthy fire going. I retrieved a bottle of Chivas from our sad little liquor cabinet in the main hallway and poured myself a finger into a rocks glass. I sat on the floor with my back against the couch and watched the fire dance in the hearth. The whiskey burned going down and blossomed into comfortable warmth in my toes.

I spent over an hour in front of the hearth watching the fire dwindle and finally die while I revisited my conversation with Adam at Tooey’s bar. I’d freely told him how I’d forgotten about Kyle after the move to London and how miserable I now felt about having been able to do it. That was true. But returning to the States and moving to Westlake—moving into this old house with all its whispers and secrets and cold hands on my chest in the night—had brought everything right back to me. If the little London flat had been a sanctum, I was now in the well, struggling to keep my head above the surface. And what frightened me was that I wasn’t completely sure I was being haunted by my memories of Kyle. What frightened me was the possibility that maybe something else was working at me, chipping away like a stonecutter, breaking me down.