Floating Staircase (2 page)

“We should stop, Travis,” Jodie said. She was hugging herself in the passenger seat and peering through the icy soup that sluiced across the windshield.

“The shoulder's too narrow. I don't want to risk someone running into us.”

“Can you even
see
anything?”

The windshield wipers were clacking to a steady beat, but the temperature had dropped low enough for ice to bloom in stubborn patches on the windshield. I cranked the defroster, and the old Honda coughed and groaned, then belched fetid hot breath up from the dashboard. With it came the vague aroma of burning gym socks, which caused Jodie to rock back in her seat and moan.

“I hope this isn't an omen,” she said. “A bad sign.”

“I don't believe in omens.”

“That's because you have no sense of irony.”

“Turn the radio on,” I told her.

The snowstorm didn't let up until Charm City was a cold sodium smear in the rearview mirror. Two hours after that, as the car chugged west along an increasingly depopulated highway, the sky opened up and radiated with the clear silver of midday. We motored on through an undulating countryside of snow-covered fields. Houses began to vanish, and telephone poles surrendered to shaggy firs overburdened with fresh snow. The alternative rock station Jodie had found back in Baltimore crackled with the lethargic twang of country music.

Jodie switched off the radio and examined the road map that was splayed out in her lap. “What mountains are those up ahead?”

“Allegheny.”

With only the faint colorless summits rising out of the mist, they resembled the arched backs of brontosauruses.

“Lord. Westlake's not even on the map.” She glanced out the window. “I'll bet there's not another living soul out there for the next twenty, thirty miles.”

Despite the hazardous driving conditions, I stole a glimpse of my wife. Aquiline-featured and mocha-skinned, her springy black hair tucked beneath a jacquard cap, she looked suddenly and alarmingly youthful. Memories of our first winter in North London rushed back to me: how we'd huddled around the wood-burning stove for warmth when we couldn't get the furnace to kick on while watching an atrocious British sitcom on cable. London had been good to us, but we were excited by the prospect of returning to the States—to my home state, in fact—and finally owning our own home.

The past decade of struggling to make ends meet had paid off when my last novel,
Water View,
rocketed in sales and managed to attract a Hollywood option. The film was never made, but the option money put my previous book advances to shame, so we decided to trade in our draughty Kentish Town flat for a single-family home. It hadn't occurred to us to come back to the States until Adam called to say he found us a house in his neighborhood. The previous owners had already moved out and were desperate to sell. At such a bargain, it promised to go quickly. I conferred with Jodie and, blindly putting our trust in my older brother's judgment, we bought the house, sight unseen.

“Are you nervous?” Jodie said.

“About the house?”

“About seeing your brother again.” She rested a hand on my right knee.

“Things are okay between us now,” I said, though for a moment I couldn't help but remember what had happened the last time we'd been together. Except for the clarity of the memory, it could have been a dream, a nightmare.

“We haven't been around family for Christmas in a long time.”

I said nothing, not wanting to be baited into talking about the past.

“I think that you've somehow driven us off the face of the Earth,” Jodie said, blessedly changing the subject.

“It's gotta be—”

“There,” she said. There was an edge of excitement in her voice. “Down there!”

In the valley below, a miniature town seemed to blossom right out of the snow. I could make out the grid of streets and traffic lights like Christmas balls. Brick-fronted two-story buildings and mom-and-pop shops huddled together as if for warmth. The main road wound straight through the quaint downtown section, then continued toward the mountains where clusters of tiny houses bristled like toadstools in the distant fields. The whole town was embraced by a dense pine forest, through which I thought I could see the occasional glitter of water.

Jodie laughed. “Oh, you're shitting me! It's a goddamn model train set.”

“Welcome to Westlake,” I said. “Next stop—Jupiter.”

I took the next exit and eased the Honda down an icy decline. We came to a T in the road, and Jodie read the directions off a slip of paper I'd stowed in the glove compartment. We hung a left and drove straight through the middle of town, digesting the names of all the businesses we passed—Clee Laundromat, Zippy's Auto Supply, Guru Video, Tony's Music Emporium. The two most creative were a hair salon called For the Hairing Impaired and an Old West—style saloon, complete with swinging doors and a hitching post, called Tequila Mockingbird.

Jodie and I groaned in unison.

We turned down Waterview Court and followed it as it narrowed to a single lane, the trees coming in to hug us on either side.

“Did you notice?” Jodie said.

“Notice what?”

“Waterview. It's the name of your last book.”

“Maybe that's another one of your beloved omens,” I said. “A good one this time.”

Waterview dead-ended in a cul-de-sac. Warm little houses encircled the court, their roofs groaning with snow.

“There he is,” I said and hammered two bleats on the car horn.

Adam stood in the center of the cul-de-sac, mummified in a startling red ski jacket, knitted cap, and spaceman boots. He had a rolled-up plastic tube beneath one arm. Behind him, two puffy blots frolicked in the snow—Jacob and Madison, my nephew and niece.

Smiling, I tapped the car horn one last time, then maneuvered the vehicle so I could park alongside the curb. The undercarriage complained as the Honda plowed through a crest of hard snow, and before I had the car in park, Jodie was out the door. She sprinted to Adam, hugged him with one arm around his neck, and administered a swift peck to his left cheek. My brother was very tall, and Jodie came up just past the height of his shoulders.

“Hey, jerk face,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Get your mitts off my wife.”

“Come here,” Adam said, grabbing me into a strong embrace. He smelled of aftershave lotion and firewood, and I was momentarily kicked backward into nostalgic reverie, recalling our father—who had smelled the exact same way—when we were kids growing up in the city. “Man,” he said, breathing into the crook of my neck, “it's good to see you again, Bro.”

We released each other and I took him in. He was well built, with a studious, sophisticated gaze that was capable of being stern without compromising his charm and his innate approachability. He'd put those traits to work to become the policeman he'd always wanted to be when he was a kid. From seemingly out of the blue, I was overcome by a sense of pride that nearly buckled my knees.

“You look good,” I said.

“Kids!” Adam called over his shoulder.

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.

Adam tossed me the house keys. “So, are we gonna stand around here freezing our butts off, or are we gonna check out the new digs?”

I handed the keys to Jodie. “Go ahead. Do the honors.”

Jodie mounted the two steps to the porch, hesitating as they creaked beneath her. There was a porch swing affixed to the underside of the awning by rusted chains, the left chain several inches longer than the right. The wicker seat had been busted out presumably a long time ago, leaving behind a gaping, serrated maw. The electric porch lights on either side of the front door were bristling with birds' nests, and there was bird shit speckled in constellation fashion on the floorboards below. Yet if Jodie noticed any of this, she did not let on.

Jodie slipped the key into the lock as the rest of us gathered on the porch behind her. We waited patiently for her to open the door. Instead, she burst into laughter.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

“It's insane,” she said. “This is our first home.”

The house had a very 1970s feel to it, with ridiculous shag carpeting and wood paneling on the first floor. At any moment I expected a disco ball to drop from the ceiling. There were floor tiles missing in the kitchen, and it looked like the walls were in the process of vomiting up the electrical outlets, for many of them dangled by their guts from the Sheetrock.

The Trans-Atlantic movers had deposited our belongings pretty much wherever they found space, and we maneuvered around them like rats in a maze as we went from room to room.