Floating Staircase (26 page)

Sitting down in the chair, I folded my hands between my legs and leaned closer to her. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”

“Earlier you mentioned ghosts.”

“Yes. I asked if you believed in them.”

“Did I give you an answer?”

“No.”

“Would you like to hear one?”

Feeling that she was toying with me, I couldn't help but grin. I said, “If it suits you.”

Jangling like a newborn colt, the old woman raised her arms and flattened out her wrinkled bed-sheets. She sucked in a shallow breath as her eyes began to tighten with what I believed to be deeper scrutiny of my character. But as she began to speak again, I realized she was going back to her youth, retracing those fading footprints down the path of her own childhood.

“In the summer of my sixth year,” she began, “my mother took odd jobs throughout the county. You see, my father had run off the previous summer with some woman he'd met down at Orville's drugstore—this was in Louisiana, where I grew up—and my mother wasn't going to let her only child starve because of him. He left her with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the ramshackle little tar paper hovel over in Cameron. We'd needed a car soon after he'd left, and I remember going with my mother to the used auto dealer off Best Street where, for one hundred and seventy-five dollars, she bought an old Chrysler the color of a house fire and about as reliable as the man my mother cursed the whole drive back to Cameron.

“The jobs my mother took consisted of housekeeping services for a rotation of regulars in the upper-class section of the city—great big gabled mansions with white columns and gardens so rich and thick you could actually get lost in ‘em. She hit each house on her rotation once a week, and since I was too young to be left on my own and because there was no sense in payin' a babysitter more than my mamma was probably making cleaning those big houses, she dragged me along with her.

“Mostly, I would sit in the living room on some expensive couch, my hands firmly in my lap while I watched the television for hours. My mamma wouldn't even let me have a drink or a snack or anything like that, for fear I'd spill it on the couch. Other times I would sit and draw pictures at the kitchen table and leave them for the homeowners. You might think these home owners saw us as help and nothing more, and for the most part you'd be right, but it would be a lie to say I didn't go into some of those homes to find my artwork on their refrigerators, just as if I was their own child.”

Her eyes twinkled with the memory, and I could tell it was a very important one to her.

“My favorite house belonged to the Mayhews, a handsome couple who had three older children away at college. The house was a beautiful bit of architecture—it certainly took my mamma all day to clean—but the best part was the sloping green lawn and surrounding gardens that dipped toward a lush palmetto grove that separated the Mayhews' backyard from the house directly behind them.

“One afternoon I was out playing in the palmetto grove when I saw a little girl, perhaps just slightly older than me, through the trees in the other yard. She was a skinny, pale-faced little thing with eyes like hen's eggs and very delicate features. Even at my young age, I recognized an intimate fragility in her. She wore a head scarf of floral design over what appeared to have been a bald scalp. When she waved at me, I giggled and waved back. Then she took off across the yard and into the grove where she hid behind the palmetto stalks. We played hide-and-seek all afternoon until my mamma called me from the back porch that it was time to go home.

“During one of our drives to the Mayhew home one morning, my mamma asked me what I did playing in that grove all day, and I told her about the little girl. I told her about the head scarf, too, and how she looked like she might be bald under there. My mother said the little girl was probably ill and I should be careful not to get her too wound up when we played together. ‘What's her name?' my mamma wanted to know, and it occurred to me that I'd never asked her name. In fact, we hardly ever spoke with each other—we'd only hide in the narrow boles of the trees or behind large fans of palmetto leaves, and we would certainly laugh, but we'd never exchanged names.

“So mamma planted a seed. That afternoon, when the little girl came running through the trees to find me hiding beneath a moss-covered log, I said, very prim and proper, ‘Hello. My name is Allie Coulter. What's your name?' That's how my mamma always told me to speak to folks for whom she worked. And even though my mamma didn't work for this girl's family, they were neighbors to the Mayhews, so I figured that was good enough.

“The girl did not answer me. Her smile faded, and then she just turned and ran back through the trees. I watched her go, I suppose, or maybe I called out to her—as vivid as this whole memory is for me, I've lost many of the details over the years—but she just kept going.

“That night when I told my mamma what happened, she said maybe the little girl was scared of me because I was new to her—which I later came to learn was my mother's way of saying I was black and the other girl was white and maybe our differences were becoming apparent to one another. But back then I had no concept of that.

“The following week, I was playing in the palmettos again. The girl with the head scarf appeared through the trees, watching me with those big, sad-looking eyes. I waved to her and she turned and ran—not away from me this time, but just as she always ran when we played, with a big smile on her thin face, her knotted knees pumping like pistons. We played our games all afternoon, and I never once asked her name again.”

Something behind Althea's eyes grew cloudy, like splotches of ink spilling into a glass of water. “One night on the drive home after leaving the Mayhew place, my mamma said she asked about the little girl. ‘Mr. Mayhew said the family who lives there used to have a little girl, but she died of leukemia several years ago,' she told me. This was so many years ago—decades and decades—but my memory is that my mamma was scared something terrible on that drive home. I remember her knuckles as white as pearls on the steering wheel and her skin was darker than mine. ‘You're to stay in the house from now on when we go out there,' my mamma said. ‘If that little girl wants to play with you, let her come find you and knock on the door.'

“I cried about it that night—not because I understood what my mother had told me but merely out of sorrow that I would no longer be allowed to run with the little girl through the palmetto grove. And next week when we went back, I stayed inside and sat by the windows that looked out into the yard, waiting—and hoping—for the little girl to knock on the door and set me free. But she never came. And I never saw her again.”

There was an unease not unlike seasickness that trembled through me in tiny waves.

“As I've said,” Althea said, her voice hoarse now from too much talk, “my memory is faulty, going back so far into my childhood, but I can recall with certainty that the little girl always wore the same clothes. And there were times during our play, when she would hide and I would seek her out, that I was never able to find her. I recall one time in particular when I gave up and went to the porch, feeling small and miserable. I caught a glimpse of that floral head scarf—I know I did!—and chased it down through the trees . . . but again, when I'd reached the spot, the girl was gone.”

“Is it possible you were playing with a different girl? That the girl with leukemia had simply been someone else?”

“Of course,” Althea rasped. I poured her another glass of water, but she didn't drink it immediately. “Anything's possible. But that's not what I believe.”

“If she was a ghost,” I said, “why were you able to see her?”

“Perhaps that is the bigger mystery.” Two skeletal hands wrapped around the plastic cup, she sipped noisily before setting it down on the nightstand. “I like to think that maybe she realized how lonely I was that summer. How much I needed a friend.” She smiled weakly. Horrifically, hers was the face of a jack-o'-lantern gone to rot. “Ghosts are no different than anything else in this grand universe. Why shouldn't they exist? Are they not the spirit, the part that gives the body life? So that spirit must reside somewhere after the person has died. Every schoolchild is taught the old scientific adage—that matter cannot be created or destroyed, correct?”

“Okay, sure.” It was something I'd been taught as early as sixth grade, and I remembered our frumpy old science teacher, with the electrical tape on his loafers and his comical toupee, boiling water in a glass beaker over a Bunsen burner.

“It's true. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. So why should the soul be exempt from such laws of the universe?” Then Althea said something that I would carry with me for many, many years—something so profoundly simplistic that its clarity resonated through me like the clang of a bell. She said, “Nature does not know extinction. It knows only change. Metamorphosis. It knows that when life is snuffed out and the soul vacates the body, it must, by definition, go somewhere. And if you don't believe in God or a god or in heaven and hell, then where do souls go?”

“Here,” I said, and it was like she had drawn the word right out of me. I hadn't even paused to think.

“They stay right here with us.”

“As ghosts,” she said.

“As ghosts,” I repeated, smiling in spite of myself.

Returning the smile, Althea shut her eyes and let her head ease all the way into her pillow. I could tell she was in pain, but I could also tell she was trying to hide her discomfort from me. Finally, just when I thought she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened and she sought me out, as if she'd forgotten where I'd been sitting.

“I'm going to leave now,” I told her, getting up and grabbing my parka. “You're tired.”

Her watery eyes fluttered shut.

“Are you in pain?” I whispered.

“Always in pain . . .”

“Do you want me to get a nurse?”

“To do what? Tell me I'm dying? I already know that.”

Pulling on my coat, I headed to the door. “I appreciate your time, Althea. I wish we could have met under different circumstances.”

“Make me a promise,” she said from the bed, her voice no stronger than the rustling of tissue paper.

“Anything,” I told her and waited for her to speak again. But the next thing I heard was the labored grinding of her respiration as she faded off into unconsciousness.

S
everal miles outside of Frostburg, the setting sun torched the land below, casting trails of golden light across the frozen hillsides. Small black birds sat on power lines like semicolons. In the fading afterglow of my meeting with Althea, my mind returned to the events of the past two months at 111 Waterview Court—the mystery I had begun to unravel, which revolved around my gradual understanding that David had murdered his nephew, as well as the more inexplicable events that had plagued me since that first night in the house when I'd heard bare feet padding down the hallway.

Althea's story of the ghost girl did not so much frighten me as it caused a hot serpent of misunderstanding to coil at the base of my guts. Was I misinterpreting those nightly sounds, the handprint on the basement wall, the strange splotches of water on the concrete floor that too closely resembled a child's footprint? We have been taught by popular culture that ghosts are restless beasts, hungry for vindication and revenge on those who have wronged them. But was this all just nonsense? I couldn't help but replay Althea's words over and over in my head—
I like to think that maybe she realized how lonely I was that summer. How much I needed a friend.
If that was true, was I missing something with this whole Elijah-David scenario?

Inevitably, my mind returned to Jodie.
I was you.
My interest in the Dentmans had frightened her badly enough to send her across the street to my brother's house. I hated myself for it.

Can't I just forget the whole thing? Can't I throw in the towel on this murder-mystery fiasco? Call the haulers to come get Elijah's stuff out of the basement and burn my goddamn writing notebooks? Can't I just shake this thing and let Jodie and me move on with our lives?

But I didn't think I could do it. Moreover, I didn't think I was supposed to do it.

When I reached the outskirts of Westlake, I eased behind a small queue of cars at a traffic light. Leaning over, I popped open the glove compartment and rooted around until I found a pen and a curl of paper, which was actually an old Office Depot receipt. On the back of the receipt I wrote,
It has been said that nature does not know extinction,
knowing that it would make the perfect opening line for my
Floating Staircase
novel if I ever actually finished it.

The light changed, and the driver behind me laid on the horn.

Nervous and jittery, I felt like a bullet shot from a gun. I was on the verge of revealing some great and hidden truth—I knew this without question, though I had no concept of how I knew—and I floored the accelerator the rest of the way home.

The house was a dark shell. Warmer temperatures had caused the snow to start its retreat, and I could see the grayish lawn at the edge of our property. I drove up the gravel driveway as evergreens rushed in on either side of the car. Some small part of me was holding out hope that Jodie would be home, but the realistic part of me knew that wouldn't be the case. She was hard-headed; she would stick to her guns.

Climbing out of the car, I stood staring at the house as if it had just appeared in front of me out of thin air. The front porch slouched under the weight of melting snow. The windows looked pebbly with grit.

I am not willing to lose my marriage over this bullshit,
I thought. I'd already decided that I would call the junk haulers tomorrow to get Elijah's stuff out of our basement. Then I would go over to Adam's house and see Jodie.