Floating Staircase (11 page)

I went through all the boxes in this fashion—with a mix of utter disbelief and mounting light-headedness—until I reached the one at the bottom of the stack. Yet it wasn't a box at all but a bright blue plastic container with a red rope handle. I felt a twinge of something crucially significant lock into place, like a dead bolt sliding home, but I wasn't sure what it was at first.

I crouched down before the blue container, which was no bigger than a can of paint, and popped off the lid without the slightest difficulty. They say olfactory sense is the one linked most directly to memory, and I had no doubt this was true. The scents that struck me were of cedar chips and the bedding of hamster cages, of cured wood, and, just faintly, of polyurethane. Inhaling that intermingling aroma ushered me back to an early childhood, much earlier than those horrible days following my brother's death.

Inside the blue container were wooden building blocks of varying colors, shapes, and sizes, a replica of the set I'd had as a child myself. By the time my mother had sold my blocks at a yard sale, they were riddled with gouges and nicks, and most of the colored paint had peeled away. These blocks, however, looked brand-new and practically unused. I picked one up, brought it to my nose, smelled it. The bittersweet scent of childhood.

I recalled Adam's story about Elijah Dentman, and I knew that I was standing in Elijah's bedroom. This was all Elijah's stuff. As horrible as this little dungeon was, he'd slept here, played here, said his bedtime prayers here.

A cold sweat broke out along my neck. My mouth went dry. What kind of parent keeps their kid in a hidden bedroom behind the basement wall? A bedroom with no windows, no natural light?

Without warning, I recalled the Christmas party at Adam's house and my conversation at the buffet table with Ira Stein. Clear as day, I could hear Ira saying,
The Dentmans were a peculiar family, as I'm sure you've heard. Not to speak ill of those poor people and what happened to them, of course.

“You've got to come downstairs and see this,” I said when Jodie got home. It was five thirty, the sky had grown prematurely dark, and I'd spent the entire day going through Elijah Dentman's stuff.

Looking exhausted, Jodie set her books and purse down on the kitchen table. She eyeballed me as if I'd just approached her in a dark alley as she went to the refrigerator and took out a beer. “Don't tell me you found more handprints on the walls.” There was a none-too-subtle condemnation in her voice.

“Better,” I said.

“Did you even shower today? You look brutal.”

“Come on,” I said, already heading down the hallway toward the basement. “Come see.”

She followed me.

“There was a little boy who lived in the house before us,” I said at the foot of the stairs as Jodie plodded tiredly down the risers. “Elijah came here with his mother and uncle when the grandfather got sick.” I deliberately left out the fact that the kid had drowned in the lake behind our house. When she reached the bottom step, I took her wrist and rushed her over to the opening in the basement wall. “You're not going to believe this, but I think I just found the kid's bedroom.”

Together we stood shoulder to shoulder, like a couple waiting to get on the subway, in the doorway to Elijah Dentman's bedroom. I laughed, still amazed by my archeological find, and stepped into the room while negotiating around the boxes I'd placed randomly on the floor after going through them.

Jodie remained in the doorway. There was a look of perfect incomprehension on her face. No, not just incomprehension—
apprehension.
Fleetingly, I conceded that maybe I wrote those scenes in my books right after all.

“Look at this place,” I said. “They kept the poor kid down here like a prisoner.”

Slowly, Jodie brought a hand to her mouth. Her face had gone the color of soured milk.

“It was like unearthing a bomb shelter or a time capsule or something after a nuclear holocaust.”

“How . . . how did you find this?”

“It was right here behind the wall. I pushed on the wall, and it opened like some pharaoh's secret fucking passageway.” I waved her in. “Come here and look at this stuff.”

“No.” She didn't move.

“What?”

“Get out of there. I don't like it.”

“What are you talking about? Isn't this totally fucking bizarre?”

“Yes. It is.”

I tapped my sneaker against the plastic container of wooden blocks. “I even had these same blocks when I was a kid.”

“How nice for you. Please come out.”

I watched her on the other side of the doorway—really, on the other side of the wall—and for all the distance I suddenly felt between us she could have been in an alternate universe. It was just a temporary feeling, though, and once it passed I went to her and rubbed her arms.

Jodie looked at me, but at the same time her eyes were distant and unfocused, as if I were made of smoke and she could see straight through me.

“Hey,” I said, “what's the matter with you?” Then the answer dawned on me, and my goofy grin faded. “You know about Elijah. You're creeped out because you know he died here. That's it, isn't it?”

My words surprised her—she'd known, but she hadn't expected
me
to know. Before I could fully read her face, she turned away. It wasn't forceful enough to betray any sense of emotion, but it caused my hands to drop from her arms just the same.

“Tell me,” I said. “You knew, didn't you?”

“A woman at Adam and Beth's Christmas party told me.” Jodie wandered over to the washer and dryer where she feigned casual interest in the big orange box of detergent on one of the slatted shelves beneath the basement stairs. I wondered if the woman in question had been Nancy Stein. “I asked Beth about it later, and she said it was true.”

“Why did you keep it a secret from me?”

“Didn't
you
keep it a secret from
me?”

“I was trying to protect you. There was no need to tell you about it.”

“And I was trying to protect you, too.” When she faced me I could tell she was fighting tears. “I won't have you chastise me for this. I won't allow it. I remember that night at your brother's house after your mom's funeral. And I've been there for your low points when Kyle's memory haunts you. I hear you talk in your sleep about him. But mostly I know how you are and how you dwell on things, how you torture yourself.” She clenched her beer bottle so tight I feared she would shatter it. “So, yes, I didn't think you knew, and I had no plans to ever tell you. If I had to keep that secret for your own mental health, then I would have taken it to my grave.”

“Christ. I'm hurt you think I'm so weak.”

“Grow the hell up. Don't try and make me feel guilty. I won't.”

Jodie was right. Notwithstanding the sting of betrayal I felt, I understood why she'd kept it from me. Too clearly I could summon the memory of that night after my mother's funeral, the words that were said in anger and the punches that were thrown.

“Okay,” I said at last, closing the distance between us. I hugged her and felt the beer bottle press into my abdomen. “Okay.”

Jodie sighed against my shoulder, and I let her go. I expected her eyes to be moist but they weren't. She just looked incredibly tired.

“I want you to call someone, have them come out and get rid of all that stuff,” she said, nodding in the direction of Elijah's bedroom. “And I don't want to talk about what happened to that boy anymore. It's unsettling but it has nothing to do with us.”

“Right,” I said, massaging her shoulder with one hand. “It has nothing at all to do with us.”

T
he following morning I telephoned a company called Allegheny Pickup and Removal and spoke to a fellow with the unfortunate name of Harry Peters about getting rid of Elijah Dentman's things. It would take ten days for them to fit me into their rotation: a duration Jodie wasn't too thrilled about. Yet if Jodie gave the hidden bedroom and its cache of childlike artifacts more than a passing thought each day, she did a spectacular job not letting it show.

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.

I
t 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.