Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

With fossilized hands, she smoothed out the blankets on her lap. There was an IV attached to one broomstick arm. “I look busy to you?”

I offered her a crooked smile. “No, ma’am.”

Her lower lip quivered as her face folded into a frown. “You say you live where, now?”

“The old Dentman house in Westlake. The one on the lake.”

“The old Dentman house,” she said. In her condition, it was impossible to gauge the tone of her voice.

“You used to tutor the Dentman boy, didn’t you? Elijah Dentman?”

Despite her illness, Althea was no less perceptive; she picked out something unsettling in my question and hung on to it in temporary silence, perhaps going over my question and the reasons for why I’d be here asking such a thing. I listened to her wheezing respiration and did not hurry her. Eventually, she said, “You a friend of the Dentmans?”

“Not really, ma’am. I didn’t even know anything about them until I moved into their house.”

“So why’d you come here? I appreciate the company, Lord knows, but I don’t understand it. All this way to bring me someone else’s plant?”

This made me smile a nervous smile. It made Althea smile, too. She had the yellowed, plastic-looking teeth of a skeleton, a corpse.

My hands, the traitors that they were, had been unraveling a thread from my parka. Suddenly aware of this, I started to unzip my coat but paused halfway. “Would you mind if we talked for just a bit?”

“Only person comes to see me is Michael,” she said wanly, “and he certainly don’t bring me plants. So you’re welcome to stay . . . provided I don’t get too tired on you.”

I took my parka off and draped it over the back of a metal folding chair that stood next to the night-stand. I sat down in the chair, my gaze returning to the framed picture of the handsome young man in the cap and gown. “This is Michael?”

“My son, yes,” Althea said, and this time there was no mistaking the emotion in her voice. “My only baby. He’s a good boy, this one. Got his demons like everyone, sure, but he’s a good one.”

“He’s a handsome kid. Athletic.”

“This here’s his college graduation picture. See that? First in my family to graduate college. On a scholarship. How you gonna like that?”

“Good for him.”

“He just needs to find himself a better job. It’s tough today, kids out of school trying to find jobs.”

“Does he come to see you much?”

“Used to. It gets hard for him. I don’t blame him.”

“My mom died of cancer several years ago. Breast cancer. She hung on for a while. It was rough on her. On my brother and me, too.” This, of course, made me think of her funeral and how Jodie had dragged me out of Adam’s house in a fit.

“Mine’s the stomach,” said Althea. “They been cutting little pieces of me away, a bit here and a bit there, snip-snip, but it really ain’t the pain that’s so bad. It’s the sick. I get really sick in the mornings. Hard to eat food. Sometimes, too, I can’t even sleep at night.”

“There’s nothing more they can do for you?”

“What’s to do? What’s left? Look at these things,” she said, extending her arms with great care. They were as thin and as shapely as the cardboard tubing inside rolls of toilet paper. A network of veins, fat and blue-black, was visible beneath her nearly translucent skin. “Scrawny things. Jab me full of needles, drain me like a sieve.” But her tone wasn’t bitter. In fact, there was almost a sense of humor in it. Then she sighed. “We can put people on the moon and send radio pulses and whatnot into outer space, but we’ve yet to completely explore the mysteries right here on Earth, the mysteries right here inside our own bodies.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “If I’m disturbing you, I’ll go.”

Althea looked like she wanted to wave a hand at me. “Death is the disturbance. People are just passing road signs along the way. But listen to us, sharing cancer stories, trading them like baseball cards. Who wants to talk about cancer?”

“Not me.”

“Me, either.” She looked at me, then the picture of Michael. It was like she was desperate to find some sort of similarity between us, although she would be hard-pressed to find it. “You said you were married, I b’lieve. You got any children?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You wanna stay and chat, you best quit being so damned polite, boy. I ain’t your mamma. It’s insulting.”

“Sorry. I’ll try to be ruder.”

Althea cleared her throat, and it was a rather involved process. Aside from the scratchy, phlegm-filled rattle in her chest, her eyes also watered up, tracing tears down the contours of her face. It was disturbingly easy to make out her skull beneath that thin veil of stretched skin. Finally, after her throat was cleared and she’d wiped away the errant tears with the heels of her hands, she said, “So how come you’re visiting some strange lady you ain’t never met before?”

I’d had a whole song and dance routine prepared, no different than the one I’d performed for Ira and Nancy, as a way of greasing the wheels . . . but looking at this woman, I was suddenly certain she would easily see through such a lie. She can see straight down to the pit of my soul, I thought without a doubt.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I hadn’t known what I was going to say until the words were already out of my mouth. It had been a question I’d been dying to ask someone since moving to Westlake, but until now, I did not think I’d found the person who’d be able to answer it.

“Ghosts?” Althea said, as if she’d misheard me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy.”

“You’re not a police officer, are you?”

“No,” I said, thinking, You a cop? Strohman send you here? “I’m a writer.”

“A writer who wants to ask an old woman about ghosts?”

I smiled warmly and rubbed my hands together between my knees. “Do you know about what happened to Elijah Dentman? That he drowned in the lake behind their house last summer?”

“Read about it in the papers.” She stared at her twisted fingers atop the bedclothes. Her knuckles were like knots in a hangman’s noose.

“I’m bothered by that,” I told her. “I’m bothered by the fact that he died and they never found his body. I’m bothered by what I think was a slipshod investigation by Westlake’s finest. I think something happened to that little boy, and it was not an accident. But I’ve got no way of proving that, so I’ve come here to talk to you.”

“And what is it you think I can tell you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But maybe you know something that you don’t realize is important, something that when added to everything else I’ve uncovered will help complete the puzzle.”

Althea merely looked at me without a change of emotion. If she felt anything—anything at all—on the heels of what I’d just said her face did not betray such emotion. “Be a dear and open those blinds, please,” she said finally, her voice still sedate.

I stood and crossed to the window. There was a plastic length of tubing the width of a pencil hanging vertically from one side. I turned it until the blinds separated, then pushed them all to one side. Outside, there was no bright sunshine, no dazzling blue sky, only a lazy drift of cumulous clouds. Everything looked hollowed out and the color of old monochromatic filmstrips. I could see my car in the parking lot. Above it, the two falcons I’d witnessed nesting in the mezzanine earlier were circling in the air, waiting like buzzards for my Honda to die.

When I turned back around, Althea was looking once again at her son’s photograph on the nightstand. “What do you write?”