Floating Staircase (23 page)

“Jesus,” I croaked, my heart pumping like a piston.

“What's going on here?” She leaned against the cutout in the wall, her arms folded across her chest. Whether it was subconscious or not, she hadn't taken a step into the room.

“What do you mean?” I quickly set one of my notebooks down over the photos.

“This room,” Jodie said. “This stuff. I thought you called someone.”

“I did.”

“And what happened?”

I thought about lying to her.

But before I could think of what to say, she interrupted my train of thought. “You're scaring me. Something's not right with you.”

“Hon . . .”

“Don't shut me down. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like shit.”

“I know. I know. But I'm right on the verge of something here.”

“The verge of something,” she echoed. “It's more like you're obsessed.”

“I'm just trying to figure something out.”

She touched a pair of fingers to her chin. She looked on the brink of tears, and when she spoke again, her voice trembled. “Adam said you've been going around the neighborhood asking people about that boy who died.”

“Adam doesn't get it,” I said, and it was a chore keeping my voice calm. What I wanted to do was call him a son of a bitch who couldn't keep his nose out of my business. “What happened to that boy wasn't an accident. He was killed.”

I didn't like the way Jodie was looking at me—like I was a stranger and she was trying to understand how I got here.

“Adam's worried about you,” she continued as if I hadn't spoken. “So am I.”

“There's nothing to be worried about. I swear it.”

“I'm just afraid you're doing it again . . .”

“Doing what again?”

“What you did after your mom's funeral. The depression that followed, the days you wouldn't get out of bed. Your obsessive behavior. You're becoming that same person again.” Her voice cracked. “You've been sitting in this depressing goddamn coffin of a room down here scribbling stories about dead boys in your notebooks. It's scaring me.”

Somehow I managed to offer her a meager, harmless little smile. “You said it yourself just ten minutes ago—it's the stress. I guess I'm stressed out. You're right.”

She shook her head, her eyes blurry with tears.

“Upstairs, remember? You said I should take a couple days off from writing. Maybe we should get out and do something together—”

Jodie continued to shake her head with mounting vigor. “No,” she whispered. “No, Travis. We had that discussion last night, not ten minutes ago. You've been down here almost a full day.”

The absurdity of this caused me to laugh. In hindsight, that laugh probably frightened her more than it helped to ease any tension, but admittedly I wasn't in the best frame of mind at the time. “What are you talking about?”

“You've been down here since yesterday evening.”

“That's not—” I cut myself off. My mind was spinning like a wheel. Frantically I tried to put the pieces together, to assemble the time and date, but I couldn't. Was it actually possible? “Jodie . . .” I took a step toward her.

She held up both hands and took a step back.

“No. Stop.”

“Babe—”

“Stop it. I want you to stop it. I want you to snap out of it.”

“I'm not—”

“Because you're scaring me.”

I stopped walking, one foot over the threshold of the hidden basement bedchamber. Jodie had backed into the washer and dryer, her hands still up in a heartbreaking defensive posture. She was genuinely, visibly frightened. Her fear of me was unwarranted—I'd never struck her or any other woman in my life—and made me tremble.

“Don't be afraid of me.”

“I'm not afraid
of
you. I'm afraid
for
you.”

“Listen—”

“No. Just stop.” She took a shuddery breath. “Listen to me and don't get angry. I'm going to stay the night with Beth and Adam. I want you to know that I won't come back to this house until this room is cleared out, all that stuff is carried away, and the wall is sealed shut. Am I understood?”

“You're overreacting.”

“Am I under-fucking-stood?”

A chill rippled through me. “Yes,” I rasped.

“Okay.” Jodie went for the stairs and was halfway up when she paused and said, “I love you. But I'm not doing you any good pretending nothing's wrong.”

I listened to her heavy shoes clump up the stairs and tread across the floorboards above my head. There was some rustling around, and then I heard the front door slam. If she was taking any bags with her, they were probably already across the street.

A whole fucking day? I've been down here overnight?
The sheer implausibility of it caused me to laugh again, the sound of which instantly chilled me to the roots of my soul.

Something was moving around behind me in Elijah's room. I turned and saw nothing out of the ordinary at first . . . yet on closer inspection I noticed that two of the colored blocks—a yellow one and a green one—now stood on the writing desk, one standing vertically while the other balanced horizontally atop the first. Together they formed a capital
T
.

When the phone rang upstairs, I literally cried out. I pounded up the stairs and snatched the receiver off the kitchen wall, anticipating Adam's stern and overbearing voice to shout at me. I answered with a steely determination already seeded in my voice.

“Travis? It's Earl Parsons.”

I cleared my throat and apologized for my initial abruptness. “I thought you were someone else. Is everything all right?”

“Right as rain,” he said. He sounded like he was eating something. “I found Althea Coulter.”

I felt a measure of triumph rise up through me. “Fantastic. Please tell me she's still alive.”

“I guess that's a matter of opinion. She's got a permanent room in the Frostburg Medical Center's oncology ward. According to her son, who I spoke with earlier after telling him I was an old friend of his mom's, she's coming down to the wire.”

“Cancer,” I said flatly. “Jesus.” Momentary clarity dawned on me. “I can't go harass a woman dying in a hospital bed.”

“Then don't harass her,” Earl said peaceably enough. “Go visit her, bring her some flowers, make her feel good. Her son says she's pretty lonely, even though he tries to see her as much as possible. It might be good for her.”

I took a deep breath and saw Jodie trembling against the washer and dryer again. “I'm being selfish about this, aren't I?”

“That depends,” said Earl. “Are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for Elijah Dentman?”

“Both,” I said after a very long time.

I jotted down Althea's room number at the Frostburg Med Center on the palm of my hand then thanked Earl for his help. He asked me to keep him in the loop on any further developments, and I promised I would apprise him of all that I'd learn.

“You really think we may have something here, don't you?” he said, and even though he inflected the end of the sentence into a question, I knew he felt just as strongly as I did.

Just as I hung up the phone I noticed something on the kitchen table. I went over to it and stared at two sections torn from a newspaper. I did not have to look closely to know the folded bits of newsprint were the articles about Elijah's alleged drowning that I'd stolen from the public library; they still held the creases where I'd folded them and stuffed them into my pocket. I must have forgotten to take them out of my pants, leaving them there for Jodie to discover when she went through the pockets before dumping my pants in the wash.

Splayed out on the table like evidence in a murder trial, those fragments of newsprint caused something heavy and indescribable to roll over deep down inside me.

F
ortified against the cold in a heavy, fur-lined parka and a pair of wool gloves, I parked in one of the visitor spaces outside the Frostburg Medical Center's broad brick façade. Beside me on the passenger seat, a small leafy plant vibrated to the tune of the car's engine.

From the outside, the building looked like an ancient cathedral, all winding spires and Gothic architecture, the wing safeguarded behind a black cyclone fence crowned with spearheads. There was a long gravel driveway that trickled like an estuary up to the automatic doors beneath a reinforced portico. Its windows were small and barred, insulated with mesh wiring. The brick face was sterile and white, like bone heated in a kiln. A stand of pine trees loomed behind the building, immense and towering and dusted with snow. From where I parked, I could see a large weighted birds' nest nestled above the mezzanine, all sticks and bony branches. Two large falcons stood guard at either end of the mezzanine.

I climbed out of the car. The air was sharp and scented with winter. Craving a smoke, I produced a pack of Marlboros and popped one into my mouth, then chased the tip of it with my lighter, my hand cupped around it to keep out the wind.

The main thoroughfare of the hospital was shaped like a uterus. The carpeting was an institutional shade of brown orange (that specific brown orange only hospitals seem capable of duplicating), and large sodium lights fizzed above my head.

Following the numbered plaques on the walls, I turned down a long, claustrophobic hallway. There was surprisingly little lighting, and the staff was practically nonexistent. There was no receptionist at the bank of desks at the end of the hall, either. This wasn't the section of the hospital someone came to for a routine checkup or for any type of surgical procedure. This was where people came for good when they knew they were never going to leave again. There were no checkout procedures here.

Before locating the room number Earl had given me yesterday evening over the phone, I ditched into a men's restroom and saddled up to the sinks. That morning I'd showered hastily but hadn't shaved or washed my hair. My face was pallid and sunken at the cheeks, where bristling black hairs like spider's legs corkscrewed out from the flesh. Purplish crescents hung beneath my eyes, and my eyes themselves appeared bloodshot and shellacked. In brown corduroys, a thermal knit shirt with a flannel vest, and my ski parka, I looked like a vagrant who had shuffled in off the street.

“I could have at least shaved,” I muttered to my reflection. I turned on the water at one of the sinks, washed my face, and matted down my too-long hair as best I could, pulling the knots out with my fingers.

I was startled when someone exited a stall behind me. The man nodded in quiet recognition, then left without washing his hands. He must have heard me talking to myself and figured it was safer risking potential bathroom-borne disease.

Taking a deep breath, I reexamined myself in the mirror. I thought of Jodie saying,
I was you,
and a burning ember briefly winked into existence at the small of my back.

I was you.

Room 218 was the closed door at the end of the farthest hallway. Carrying the potted plant in both arms, I approached the door, expecting all the while to feel a hand clap me on one shoulder and ask me who I was and what I was doing here. But that never happened.

I summoned a mental picture of Althea Coulter, and what I projected was a weak, elderly woman, her charcoal eyes blazoned with milky cataracts, her lips perpetually twisted into a bitter snarl. Her hands would be like claws—the serrated hooks of a carnivorous bird—and her head would be thick and unmoving and simply there. The room was going to smell of sour breath and medication and the ghostly traces of urine. She would be asleep. And I wouldn't be able to wake her, to ask her even a single question, and even if she was awake, she would be so far gone into a land of her own that the answers she provided (given that she provided any at all) would be of the fuzzy, make-believe, nonsensical variety. I pictured Althea Coulter as an ancient, mummified manikin, whose skin was scorched cloth and whose brain was a ball of string.

What the hell am I doing here?

Pausing outside the door, uncertain if I should knock or simply allow myself entry, I swallowed a hard lump that seemed to stick in the back of my esophagus.

I am standing on the line between fiction and reality.

I opened the door and stepped inside.

The woman in the bed was perhaps sixty, though with her sunken features, cobwebby wisps of hair, and blighted countenance, she looked like she could have been a hundred-year-old mummy rolled out on display.

I entered the room as silently as I could, careful not to let the door catch the latch too loudly as it shut. The room was dark and musty. There was an amalgam of odors clinging hotly to the air, each of them distinct and clinical: the reek of ammonia; the acrid underlying stench of urine; the insipid redolence of Althea Coulter's stale, immobile body beneath the paper-thin hospital bedsheets. There was another smell, too—though more like the hint of a smell rather than a smell itself—and I knew without a doubt that it was the smell of impending death.

She was awake, her frail body propped up on a cushion of pillows. As I moved farther into the room, she turned absently away from the single window beside her bed (it was covered by venetian blinds, impeding any actual view of the outdoors) and acknowledged me with only the subtlest of glances. Then she returned her gaze to the sheathed window.

“Ms. Coulter?” I said. My voice was amplified in the empty room.

She didn't say anything. In the silence, I could hear the labors of her breathing. The cogs were winding down, slowing with time.

I tried again: “How are you feeling?”

“Not hungry,” she practically croaked, her voice strained and tired. The sound was like guitar strings wound too tight.

“Oh,” I said, “I'm not with the hospital.”