Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  I knew he wasn’t talking about Elijah. After a moment, I said, “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Adam said.

  “For what?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not quite sure.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “I love you, Bro.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  Five minutes later, in my underwear and socks, I slipped beneath the fresh sheets on my brother’s pull-out couch. I was careful not to wake Jodie, but as I eased my head onto the pillow and listened for the sound of her breathing, I could tell she was awake.

  “Hey, you,” I said.

  “You know we can’t stay,” she whispered, her back in my direction.

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to miss him.”

  For one insane moment, I thought she was talking about Elijah Dentman, my obsession with him.

  As if reading my mind and finding the need to clarify for me, she added, “Adam.” I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

  “It’s too bad. You both had the chance to be close again.”

  To my own surprise, I had to fight back tears. “Jodie?” I said. Distant.

  “What is it?”

  “I need to tell you something.” Like a fading star, my voice wavered. “It’s about Kyle. About what really happened.”

  She pulled closer to me. I could feel her warmth. “Good,” she said. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Perhaps the only event of any significance during our last remaining days in Westlake, Maryland, occurred two nights before Jodie and I were scheduled to drive out to California where we had a nice little apartment waiting for us just outside San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. I’d spent the last month packing our belongings and stowing much of them at a personal storage facility in town. Since the day Elijah’s body had been extricated from the wall, Jodie had refused to return to the house, not even for a minute. I couldn’t blame her. So we sustained at Adam and Beth’s house for the remainder of that month while I scrambled to secure a new life for Jodie and me somewhere far, far away from Westlake, the house on the lake, and the tragic memory of the Dentmans.

  Utilizing my remaining college contacts, I got in touch with an old acquaintance. He was a screenwriter in Los Angeles and, for the better part of our phone conversation, confessed to me that he was jealous to the point of clinical depression of his pseudonym’s success. Nevertheless, the conversation proved profitable: he knew of an apartment that had recently gone up for rent, and the owner of the complex owed a friend of a friend of a friend. The prospect of leaving the cold winters behind for the West Coast pleased Jodie, which meant it pleased me, too.

  Two days before our scheduled cross-country drive, I sat at the bar at Tequila Mockingbird for the final time while I waited for Adam to meet me after his shift. I had a map spread out before me, and I was tracing possible routes with different color markers. The plan wasn’t to rush things. It was to use that time to strengthen what had weakened between Jodie and me over the past couple of months.

  “Here,” Tooey said, setting a fresh pint in front of me. “On the house.”

  “This actually looks good,” I commented, picking up the glass and examining it in the light. “I think you may have mastered the recipe.” I took a sip. “Wow. It’s great.”

  “Thanks. It’s Sam Adams.” Leaning over the bar, he peered down at the map. “California, huh?”

  “I can hardly believe it myself. I’ve never even seen the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Fell in love with a woman from California once.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Name was Charlie. Funny name for a chick—Charlie.”

  “What happened?”

  “She lost her mind.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. She was convinced time was changing.”

  “Times are changing,” I informed him. “Didn’t Bob Dylan tell you?”

  “Not times, Travis. Time.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “She became convinced that each day was getting shorter by thirty seconds. That in two days, it would be a minute earlier than it was two days before at the exact same time. If you can wrap your head around that.”

  I whistled.

  “She seemed very concerned about it,” Tooey said. Then he leaned closer to me, like a conspirator. He was staring at something over my shoulder. “Have you noticed our friend there at the back of the room?”

  I started to turn my head.

  “Don’t make it obvious,” he warned, then slipped farther down the bar.

  Taking a long swallow of my beer, I casually rotated around on the barstool.

  David Dentman sat alone at one corner of the barroom, perched buzzard-like over a pitcher of beer. He wore a red and black flannel shirt, the sleeves cuffed to the elbows. The skin of his face seemed to be dripping off his skull and into his beer, and there was a bristling sheen of beard at his jaw. Sensing my eyes on him, he glanced up and stared me down.

  Discomfited, I turned away.

  My mind returned to that evening in the cemetery—the way he’d looked standing over his nephew’s grave. Now, despite all that had been revealed, I found that my impression of the man remained unchanged. Something about him was innately wrong.

  “Glasgow.” Dentman’s baritone voice punctured me like an icy quill. “Travis Glasgow. Glasgow the writer.”

  I swiveled around on the stool. “David,” I said, nodding. We could have been old acquaintances. And in a way, I guess we were.

  “Come here,” he said. “Sit down. Have a beer with me.”

  “I’m waiting for someone, thanks.”

  “Be a sport, Hemingway.” His gaze was shackled to mine. I couldn’t turn away. Haunted, he was a shape without substance: a hollowed husk.

  Also, he was grinning at me.

  It took a fair amount of willpower to get off my stool and cross over to his table. It was the perilous trek around the ridge of a great mountain. A few lumberjacks shooting pool paused to watch me while on the jukebox someone was attesting to the fact that his gal was red hot.

  As if by design, a single chair stood empty across from him at the opposite end of the table. Without a word, I pulled the chair out and dumped myself into it.

  “That’s the spirit,” he said humorlessly.

  “I’m buying this round.”

  Dentman eyeballed me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. “Your face healed up okay.”

  “No worse than it was before.” When I realized I was rubbing my cheek, I quickly dropped my hand. “Anyway, I’ll consider it a going away present.”

  “Shots,” Dentman said. “Bourbon.”

  I motioned Tooey over to the table. He’d been watching me since I sat down. “Bring us a bottle of your nastiest, angriest bourbon.”

  In under a minute, Tooey returned with two shot glasses and a dark carafe shrouded in dust. He unscrewed the cap, then set the bottle and the glasses on the table. “I brought glasses. Unless you two want to drink this shit out of an ashtray?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’re good.”

  When he walked away, he did so with the uneasy gait of someone who feared he might get shot in the back.

  Dentman squeezed the bottle. I expected it to shatter. He filled both shot glasses, spilling much, then picked up his glass, scrutinized it. “Here’s to world peace.”

  Together we downed the shots. It tasted like piss spiked with lighter fluid. I felt my insides tremble.

  “I’m sorry for what happened,” I said once the sinister aftertaste had faded.

  “Ain’t for you to be sorry about.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” I said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family. But I still don’t trust you.”

  “That’s good,” Dentman said, “because there’s still a part of me that wants to smack your face around to the back of your head.”

  “Well, shit,” I said.
“We should have toasted to friendship.”

  To my astonishment, Dentman laughed. It was a low, drilling, lawn mower sound, much like the engine of his pickup, but it was a laugh just the same. After the laughter died, he said, “I suppose I owe you a bit of gratitude.”

  “How’s that?”

  He made a clicking sound at the back of his throat. “My sister, she needs me. She needs me to look after her. She isn’t well.”

  I wondered if he had any idea I’d been watching his testimony through the two-way mirror.

  “Our mother died when we were very young,” Dentman said. “Car accident. I guess I don’t remember her much.” Very sober, he looked straight at me—through me, I would have bet. “My father was a bad man.” Slowly, he shook his massive head, as if trying to shake the memories loose. “What was your father like?”

  My father had been warm and understanding, given to periodic bouts of capriciousness and whimsy when the spirit struck. Before Kyle died, he had been a good father—so I suddenly hated myself for my inability to summon any memory of him other than the day when he beat me black and blue with his belt.

  “Just a regular guy,” I said.

  “Our father,” he said, and it was as if he were about to recite a prayer, “was crazy before he ever went crazy. This crazy man would tie his children to trees out in the yard when they were little. If you broke a dish, you would have to kneel on the pieces. You leave the stovetop dirty, you felt just what those hot burners could do. Hold your hand. Hold it. Keep it there until you learn your lesson.” He thrust his chin at me. “You ever learn your lesson when you were a kid?”

  “No. Not like that.”

  “He made me do things that no grown person—especially no father—should ever make a child do. He did worse things to Veronica. Things he couldn’t do to me.”

  This summoned images so brutal and horrific in my head, I could feel a physical illness breaking out in my stomach and spilling like poison through the conduits of my veins. The horrible things Veronica suffered in that house . . .

  “See,” Dentman went on, unflustered, “I left him once I was old enough. But then I came back for Veronica. I couldn’t let him . . . let him at her like that anymore. I had to go back. That room in the basement? The one hidden behind the wall? He built that room for her. She was terrified of it, but he’d lock her down there every night.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And sometimes he would be down there with her,” he added. “In the dark.”

  “Stop,” I heard myself say distantly and ineffectually, like the yowl of a lost cat somewhere in the woods.

  “One day I came back for her and we both left. Together. Fuck, she was a mess.” Dentman sounded instantly disgusted with the whole thing yet strangely rehearsed at the same time. “She hit some roadblocks and spent time in the hospital. Then, of course, she fell in with people who didn’t know how delicate she was. That’s how she got Elijah.” There was a curious combination of offhandedness and affection in his voice. It took me a moment to understand that maybe in a confused and intricate way he had loved the boy.

  Dentman poured two more shots. He knocked his back before I even picked up my glass.

  “When she heard he was sick, she said we needed to go back. She said it was her duty as a daughter to take care of him in his final days.” His eyes glittered like jewels. I watched him with more intensity than I had ever watched anything in my life. “Can you believe that? After all he’d done to her?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He glanced at my shot glass. I had my fingers on it but hadn’t moved it from its spot on the table. “Drink it,” he told me.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Drink it or I’ll push that shot glass through your forehead.”

  It burned like acid going down my throat. I felt it trigger my gag reflex, and I thought I was going to vomit.

  “Look at you,” Dentman growled, pleased with himself.

  My eyes blurry with tears, I slammed the shot glass on the table.

  “I hate you but I need to thank you, too.” He stared at his hands. Palms up, fingers only slightly curled, they looked like a pair of undiscovered sea creatures tossed on the deck of a ship. “I hate you because she’s going to go away for a little while. Doctors want to make sure she’s stable, that she’s okay. You stirred up a lot of emotion in her. You did some damage to my little sister.”

  On a gale of laughter, the pub’s door swung open.

  I cocked my head to see if Adam had arrived. I recognized the men who entered—they were two of Tooey’s regulars—but my brother was not among them. When I turned back around, Dentman had poured a couple more shots. “Jesus, I can’t . . .”

  “Drink it. We’re doing this thing, aren’t we?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Drink,” he said.

  My hand shaking, I downed the shot. Dentman doubled, trebled, grew fuzzy around the edges. I watched in detachment as one of his reddened hands curled into an enormous fist. A man was at his most dangerous when he had nothing left to lose.

  “David,” I managed after too much uncomfortable silence.

  “You’re a pretty fucking good writer,” he said in a calm, steady voice. He slipped two fingers into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt and pinched out a folded sheet of paper. I thought it might have been torn from a newspaper, but when he unfolded it and laid it on the table, I could tell it was a single page torn from a book. “It’s my favorite passage,” he said.

  He’d highlighted the text in the middle of the page. Just one line. Nothing more.

  Because he is my brother, I will suffer a thousand deaths to vindicate his.

  Wordlessly, I pushed the torn sheet of paper across the table to him.

  Dentman picked it up, folded it neatly into squares, and pushed it back into his shirt pocket. “I spent many nights wondering just what had happened.” His eyes distant, he was midway between reality and some outlying recollection. “Did Veronica remember what she did to Elijah, or had her mind wiped the memory clean? Had all those horrible things our father had done to her finally caused her to snap? I’m not stupid. They say that kind of abuse is hereditary, that it’s passed down the way alcoholism is passed down. I went to sleep every night believing my sister had done something horrible to her boy.”

  Returning to the present, he looked directly at me. “She’s my sister. So thank you for showing me my sister’s not a monster, that our father hadn’t completely ruined her. Thank you for clearing that much up for me.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me. Something you’re leaving out.”

  I thought I saw the hint of a smile play at the corner of his lips. “See, you’re a good writer. But you’re not a great writer. To be a great writer, you got to upend every little stone and look underneath each one, almost like a detective would. You got to examine all the possibilities. No matter how much you want to force characters to behave one way, you got to let them do what comes natural.”

  “That’s pretty fucking astute.”

  “You remember the cemetery? You called me a murderer. And I told you I didn’t kill my nephew.” He picked up the bottle of bourbon and poured two more shots. “What I’m saying, Glasgow, is maybe we’re both right.”

  We stared at each other for a long, long time. At first I didn’t understand what he meant . . . and when it finally dawned on me, it didn’t strike me all at once like an epiphany but rather it gradually trickled in, filling all the recesses and crevices and gouges of my brain like black water into a pair of drowning lungs.

  David Dentman eased back in his seat. Sweat dampened his brow. He lifted his shot glass and examined it as if it might be the last drink he’d ever take.

  “To fathers,” he toasted.

  When Adam arrived at the bar, I was still at Dentman’s table, although Dentman had left some time ago. Adam came up behind me, dropping a hand on my shoulder.

  Startled, I jumpe
d out of my seat, nearly knocking the half-empty bottle of cruddy bourbon to the floor, where presumably it would have eaten through the floorboards.

  “Who walked on your grave?” Adam said.

  “Forget it.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said, summoning a smile. “Sit down. Have a drink with your little brother before he leaves you for sunny California.”

  Adam sat, picking up the bottle and pulling a face. “What is this stuff?”

  I pushed an empty shot glass in his direction. On the jukebox, a Springsteen song came on, harmonica wailing. “Just drink.”

  We spent the night in approximate silence, thinking so much but never needing to speak a word of it.

  Like brothers.

  EPILOGUE/PROLOGUE:

  WE WERE A SPECK ON THE LANDSCAPE OF THE WORLD

  We were a speck on the landscape of the world. Can you see us? A glittering scuttle across this charted topography, reflecting great bursts of silvery sunlight and emitting exhaust, trundling the curves and slaloms and straightaways as if we were the only significant thing for miles and miles. And perhaps we were. Our little Honda trekked along, burdened with the weight of our escape, low enough to the ground to scrape the undercarriage on certain passes.

  Look closer and you would see us—me behind the wheel, sunglasses on, my hair freshly cropped, my face newly shaved. I was Tom Cruise, Tom Sawyer. Beside me, Jodie played Tom Petty and Sheryl Crow and Better Than Ezra on the radio, sunglasses also on, her body looking smooth and taut and untouched, smelling clean and of soap. The days were long and sunny, marred not by a single passing cloud. Nights were cool and pleasant. The land hugging us was fresh and new, all of it, and it made us feel fresh and new as well. Everything—everything—was fresh and new.

  Occasionally, I would glance at the rearview mirror, my memory still holding strong to the last image of my brother’s family watching as we pulled out of the cul-de-sac and out of Westlake forever, waving good-bye, heartfelt and heartbroken yet hopeful of the prospects of all that awaited us. We’d embraced. Be good, little brother. Now we drove in some remote county of some remote state with the little rural town of Westlake nothing more than a fleeting, dreamlike memory, and once I thought I could actually still see them framed in the rectangle of reflective glass, waving.