Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

On a Tuesday, two men in navy-blue coveralls arrived in a truck that said Allegheny Pickup & Removal on its side in bright orange foot-tall letters.

“What’s this?” said the fatter of the two men. “Some sort of secret passageway?”

I watched as they cleared out all of Elijah Dentman’s things—his bookcase, his writing desk, his trunk of toys, his tiny bed. I helped them carry the boxes out and load them into the truck, my personal relief seeming to grow as the room in the basement cleared out.

“Your kid lives down here?” asked the fat man’s partner. When I didn’t answer him, he must have suspected the worst, and both men worked the rest of the hour in deferential silence.

After they’d gone, I spent some time gazing at the hollowed-out room. It felt like I was looking into my own coffin. Jodie briefly appeared beside me. I wondered if she felt like she was staring into her coffin as well. Or maybe she was looking into mine, just as I was. Rubbing my back with one hand, she handed me some hot tea, then felt my forehead to make sure my temperature wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t.

She wanted the room sealed up, but I decided on a better solution: I tore down the walls, those blind panels of Sheetrock. Particularly the one with the sage-green handprint on it. It was backbreaking work, and when I finally finished I was covered in white powder. Jodie laughed and said I looked like a mime.

We did not talk about what happened that day after the cops dropped me off at the house—a day now two weeks gone. While I’m sure the image of her husband straddling the floating staircase, smashing it to pieces with an axe, would be burned in my wife’s memory for a long, long time, she was good about putting it all aside and loving me again. It had been a frightening thing, but I suppose it was also a necessary one; the revelation that day had shaken reality back into me, which was just what I’d needed. I’d needed to know if I had been right or if I had been wrong.

I had been wrong.

After I cleaned the basement, I took my writing notebooks—the ones in which the initial stirrings of Elijah Dentman’s make-believe story still lingered, unfinished—and tucked them away in one of my trunks. I tried, kid, I thought. I was trying so hard that I was searching for something that wasn’t even there. And at that moment I wasn’t sure if, in my soul, I was talking to Elijah Dentman or to my dead brother, Kyle.

Yes, it had been a rib cage. And I had stared at it, fascinated and dumbstruck by my own premonition, because I was right; I was right; I was right, and my work was done, and the writing was done, and the boy was saved. I had saved him. I had championed him, vindicated him.

Adam had clambered out of the lake and up the staircase, nearly losing his balance twice. When he reached me, he threw his arms around me and held me tight against him. I could feel his heavy breathing as he held me, could feel his hot breath against my freezing neck.

“Look,” I’d said, not even bothering to point.

Adam had peered down and did not say a word. He did not say a word for a very, very long time. Finally, he said, “It . . . it looks like . . . is that . . . ?”

“Yes,” I said.

Quieter—in my ear: “How did you know?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It just occurred to me. Just now.”

“But how?”

I turned my head in his direction. Our faces were close. “A ghost. I think a ghost told me.”

Adam appeared confused and scared . . . but somewhat relieved, too.

“I’m not crazy,” I’d told him then.

Adam glanced down the shaft of the hollow staircase. “Look.”

Confused, I saw a second object float to the surface—more bone. But not just bone—another rib cage.

“Adam . . .” My voice was thick, my throat too tight to articulate properly.

We both stood there and watched as countless bones drifted to the surface of the water and bobbed there, carnival prizes in a barrel, eventually crowding the hollow shaft. Among them were skulls. Tiny skulls.

Thinking about all this, I closed the trunk and climbed the stairs where a nice lunch was waiting for me.

Animals. Animal bones. There were even the remnants of a dog collar affixed to one of the larger skeletons, the band black with slime, the little brass nameplate dull in the overcast light. Still, I thought I could make out one word on it— Chamberlain.

“Wait,” Adam said. “What are we looking at?”

“The mass grave for Elijah Dentman’s pets,” I said. Then I collapsed onto the stairs, extremely weak and unable to maintain equilibrium.

With one hand, Adam gripped my shoulder and kept me from toppling into the cold, black waters.

That night Jodie came home. I promised her I was done and was putting it all behind me. Something broke inside her, and she cried in my arms. At first I was terrified, but then, in holding her and in feeling her hitch and sob against my chest, I knew she was okay. She needed to cry and I let her. In that moment, it occurred to me that I hadn’t held my wife in some time.

(Two nights after the incident, a violent thunderstorm accosted the town and thoroughly demolished the weakened structure of the floating staircase. In the morning, all that remained were the bone-colored planks of wood that had washed up along the frost-stiffened reeds in the night.)

I took off several days from writing altogether—partially because I was still out of sorts from the hideous flu I’d caught slashing around in the lake in near-freezing weather, but mostly because I owed that time to Jodie. We made love several nights in a row. We went to the movies together like a couple of high school sweethearts, and I helped her edit a rough draft of her dissertation. Valentine’s Day arrived, and I bought her flowers and chocolate, and she made my favorite meal—baked macaroni—and we watched old Woody Allen movies until the early hours of the morning. In the weeks after my nervous breakdown on the floating staircase, everything was as perfect as pie.

Then Earl telephoned me one rainy afternoon and said, “Boy, you’re a goddamn genius,” and it started all over again.

CHAPTER THIRTY

By the time I arrived at Tooey’s bar, the drizzle had increased to a steady rain, driving craters in the hummocks of graying snow along the shoulders of Main Street.

The day before, Earl had met me at the front door of his trailer where, with near childish jubilance, he handed over a cheese-yellow envelope sealed with packaging tape. Inside the double-wide, I could hear dogs barking.

“I can’t believe it worked,” I said, hefting the weight of the envelope. It had been a long shot; I hadn’t expected it to actually amount to anything.

“I told them I was with the union, that we needed the paperwork for an impending audit. Just like you said to.” The old man grinned like someone who’d just figured out a secret. Had he been just a bit younger, I had no doubt he would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet. “They bought it.”

“Hook, line, and sinker,” I said. “Listen, I know you’re a reporter. Without insulting you, is there any possible way I can—”

He cut me off. “I won’t print a word of this before I hear back from you.”

“Thank you.” I was looking very hard at the envelope he’d given me.

“You know what this means,” Earl said evenly.

“Of course,” I said. We both knew what it meant. “Of course.”

Now I crossed the sawdust floor of Tequila Mockingbird and sat at an empty table toward the rear of the room. My chair faced the door. The jukebox was rolling through a sad country number, visibly making the shoulders of the few assorted patrons at the bar slump. Rain hammered the tin roof and sluiced down the windowpanes. The whole place felt hollowed and bleak, like a grave site that had been violated by vandals. I checked my watch.