Floating Staircase(4)

Jacob and Madison, clumsy and bumbling through the snow, bounded to my brother’s side, adjusting gloves, knitted caps, earmuffs that had gone askew.

“My God, they’ve gotten so big,” I said.

“You guys remember your uncle Travis?” Adam asked.

I crouched down, bringing myself to their eye level.

Madison took a hesitant step backward. She had been only a baby the last time I saw her so I held out little hope she’d remember me.

Ten-year-old Jacob scrunched up his face and nodded a couple of times. He was the more brazen of the duo. “I remember. You lived in a different country.”

“England, yes.”

“Do they talk a different language there?”

“They speak the same language as you, old chap,” I said in my best cockney accent, “and I rather think they had it first, wot-wot.”

Jacob laughed.

Madison was emboldened to take a step toward me, smiling at my ridiculous impression or her brother’s willingness to laugh at it.

“Did you bring us anything from England?” Jacob asked.

Madison’s eyes lit up.

“Hey, now,” Adam scolded. “We don’t do that.”

Jacob’s gaze dropped to his boots. Madison’s remained on me, appearing hopeful that she’d reap the rewards of her brother’s question.

I exchanged a look with Adam.

He nodded.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, dipping one hand into the pocket of my parka. I produced two Snickers bars—uneaten rations from our road trip from New York—and, fanning them like a deck of cards, extended them to the kids.

They snatched them up with the speed of light, and Madison had it in her mouth a mere nanosecond after the wrapper was off.

My sister-in-law, Beth, came out of her house and marched down the shoveled driveway toward us. She was a smart, determined woman whose body bore the rearing of her two children with a mature, domestic sophistication. The last time I’d seen her, which had been just before Jodie and I moved to North London, she’d called me a piece of shit and looked ready to claw my eyes out with her fingernails.

“So good to see you, sweetie,” Beth said, gathering Jodie up in a hug. Beth was only slightly older than my wife, but at that very moment she could have passed for Jodie’s mother.

They let each other go, and Beth came over to me. “The famous author.” She kissed the side of my face.

“Hey, Beth.”

“You look good.”

She was lying, of course; I’d grown paler and thinner over the past few months, my eyes having recessed into black pockets and my hair having grown a bit too long to keep tidy. It was writer’s block, keeping me up at nights.

“All right, enough small talk.” Jodie was glowing. “Let’s see this house already.”

“Yeah,” I said, surveying the houses around the cul-de-sac. They all appeared to have cars in the driveways. “Which one is it?”

Adam fished a set of keys from his pocket. “None of these. Come on.”

Adam led us toward a copse of pines. A dirt path cut through the trees and disappeared. We crunched through the snow and headed down the dirt path.

I started laughing, then paused halfway through the woods. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Adam’s eyes glittered. “You should have seen the movers backing the truck up to the house.” He continued walking.

Jodie came up alongside me, brushing her shoulder against mine, and said in a low voice, “If this goddamn place is made out of gingerbread, your brother’s in hot water.”

Then we stepped into the clearing.

It was a white, two-story Gablefront with a wraparound porch and a gray-shingled roof tucked partway behind a veil of spindly trees. It wasn’t a huge house, but it was certainly a world of difference from our claustrophobic North London flat. And even with its obvious cosmetic deficiencies—missing shingles, missing posts in the porch balustrade, wood siding in desperate need of a paint job—it looked like the most perfect house in the known universe.

Adam had sent us pictures over the Internet, but it took being here, standing in front of the house—our house—for it to finally sink in and make it real.

“Well?” Adam said, standing akimbo by the front porch. “Did I do good or what, folks?”

“You did perfect.” Jodie laughed, then threw her arms around me, kissed me. I kissed her back.

Jacob and Madison giggled.

“You did perfect, too, baby,” she said into my ear. I hugged her tighter.

The house sat on three full acres, with a sloping backyard that graduated toward the cusp of a dense pine forest. It was immense, the type of forest in which careless hikers were always getting lost, covering what could have been several hundred acres.

On closer inspection, the house appeared almost human and melancholy in its neglect. The shutters hung at awkward angles from the windows, and the windowpanes were practically opaque with grime. Frozen plants in wire mesh baskets hung from the porch awning, each one so egregiously overgrown that their roots spilled from the bottom of the basket and hung splayed in the air like the tentacles of some prehistoric undersea creature. Veins of leafless ivy, as stiff as pencils in the cold, trailed up the peeling, flaking wood siding, which was mottled and faded, hinting at shapes hidden within the deteriorating wood.