Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

I nodded, shaken by the power of her insight. “Did you ask anything more of Elijah that afternoon?”

“I certainly did. You see, I had already started down the path, and my curiosity had bested me.” Althea raised one hand and gripped my wrist, and I imagined I could feel the cancer boiling her blood beneath her flesh. “Sometimes when you follow something, you eventually end up chasing it.”

I thought, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

“I asked him again if he’d been sick,” she continued, “and once again he only stared at me without answering. So I approached it from a different avenue, asking him if he’d gotten in trouble in the last couple of days.” She lowered her voice, as if the Dentmans were actually in the next room and she didn’t want them to overhear our conversation. “If you coach children and tell them how to answer certain questions, they will typically answer those questions exactly in the way they’d been coached. But if you address them from different angles—angles they hadn’t been prepared for—you’ll find the answers you’re looking for.”

“What answers did you find?” I said, my voice as equally hushed.

“He said his uncle had yelled at him about the animals. He’d gotten in trouble about the animals.”

“What animals?”

“The dead ones,” Althea said. Her voice caused a muscle to jump in my right eyelid. “He told me about his pets—how he collected them when he found them in the woods and brought them back to the house. He told me about the rabbit and the squirrel—he’d found them both out in the yard that spring—but he said he’d gotten yelled at for the dog. ‘Because it was too big and I couldn’t hide it,’ he said.”

“The dog . . . ,” I said, my voice trailing off.

“I had no idea what the poor child was talking about, and I told him so. That was when he got up from the table and very calmly asked me if I wanted to see some of his pets. Elijah said he’d kept some hidden, and his uncle hadn’t been able to find them. I said okay, and he left and went upstairs for a time. I sat by myself at the kitchen table, and I could feel the cancer moving around in my stomach like something alive. The boy’s mother never sat in on any of our sessions, but she was always hovering somewhere close by, like a ghost, and I could sometimes hear her through the walls.

“When Elijah came back, he was clutching an old shoe box to his chest. I asked him if his pets were inside, and he nodded and set the box on the table. I asked him if I could open it, and he nodded again. Are you beginning to understand what it was like talking to that child?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought of Discovery Channel specials I’d seen on feral children growing up in condemned buildings in Europe and in the forests of South America, raised by wild dogs.

“So I opened the shoe box—”

“And saw birds,” I finished. There was almost an audible snap as one of the puzzle pieces fell into place. “Dead birds.”

Althea stared at me as if I’d just professed some secret of the universe. Then her chalky eyes narrowed, and her thin, bloodless lips pressed tightly together. For one hideous, depressing moment, I could actually hear her heart thudding behind the shallow wall of her chest.

“You know about the birds,” she said, and she was not asking me a question but merely stating fact. If she was curious as to how I knew, she never asked. “In the end, he replaced the lid of the shoe box and climbed back up in the kitchen chair. I asked him if he knew the birds were dead, and he didn’t say anything. I asked him how he found them, and he told me he would sometimes go off into the woods and find them at the foot of the trees, hidden under the brush and half buried in the dirt.”

“In other words, you wanted to know if he was killing them,” I suggested. I couldn’t stop thinking of that time I’d squeezed the baby birds and the frog that popped in my hand like some windup toy. In all my therapy sessions after Kyle’s death, I’d never spoken of that incident to the therapist. Distantly, I wondered what she would have said.

“Yes,” Althea said, “but he wasn’t killing them. He only found them that way, same as he’d found a rabbit one time and the squirrel.”

“You mentioned a dog, too.”

“Elijah said he found it buried in the woods by the lake. When he brought it to the house, he said his uncle yelled at him and told him to drag it back down to the woods and leave it there. ‘Is that when you got in trouble?’ I asked him. Elijah didn’t nod or shake his head—didn’t say anything, either, of course—so I asked him one last time if he’d really been sick the past two days. The child finally said, ‘I went away.’ Course, I asked him what he meant, but he only repeated the phrase—he’d gone away.”

“Gone where?” I said.

“That’s exactly what I asked him. ‘Where’d you go?’ Elijah didn’t say, just kept repeatin’ it—’I went away.’ I asked him who took him away. Again, he didn’t answer. He was scared—that much was evident—and I knew that if I continued down this path I might lose him and that he’d shut whatever door I’d managed to temporarily pry open. But as I’ve said, sometimes when you start out following something, you end up chasing it. So now I was chasing it. I leaned over the table and rested my hand on top of his. Even this simple gesture was risky; he never liked no one to touch him, not even his mamma, and I knew there was a good chance I’d send him running off into the next room. But I was desperate to reach out to him.”

“Did Elijah run away?”

“No.” Spittle had dried to white globs at the corners of Althea’s mouth. “I asked him flatly if anyone had hurt him—his mamma or uncle or anyone. Elijah just looked at me for a long time. I remember I could hear the wall clock in the silence, the minutes climbing and multiplying. Then the boy slid his hand out from beneath mine and held it against his chest, rubbing it with his other hand, as if I’d burned him. ‘Uncle David was mad,’ he said. ‘I went away.’

“I opened my mouth to speak just as a shadow loomed over us—the boy’s mother stood in the kitchen doorway, looking like the ghost of a woman who’d been thrown off an old pirate ship. There were black circles around her eyes and that scar along the side of her face.” Althea raised one thin arm, the elbow like a knot in the trunk of a tree, and mimed where Veronica’s scar had been down the side of her own face. “It looked bright red against her pale skin. She’d damn near given me a stroke sneaking up on me like that.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me she thought her boy might still be feeling a bit under the weather and it was probably best for me to finish up with the lessons before I caught whatever illness he had. ‘Ma’am,’ I told her, ‘I don’t think there’s a thing in the known world this little boy can give me be worse than what I already got.’ But she said, ‘Go on now,’ and floated out of the room.

“By that point, I’d already made up my mind to go to the board and tell them what had happened. And that look the boy’s mamma had given me . . . well, it just chilled me straight to the bone and made me sicker than any chemotherapy I’d ever had. So I packed up my things and left the house.

“The following week, my stomach had gotten so bad that I called myself out sick. When it didn’t look like I was going to feel any better, I called out for good. I never went back to that house again.”

Without a doubt, Althea Coulter was a tough old woman who wasn’t easily spooked, yet I wondered just how much of a role her stomach cancer actually played in her reluctance to return to the Dentman house, or if it had served as a convenient excuse.