Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

“A flat,” I told her.

“Out here?”

There were mountains and forest all around us. We hadn’t passed another vehicle for half an hour.

I said, “There’s a spare in the trunk.”

Pulling off to the side of the road, I popped the trunk and spent the next twenty minutes unloading our belongings so I could lift the panel and retrieve the spare. (The clothing we’d crammed in there had been so tightly packed that they retained their cubed forms even as I set them on the side of the road.)

Jodie walked the length of the highway while I jacked the Honda and replaced the tire. The Midwestern heat was fierce, even at this elevation, and by the time I’d finished, my shirt clung to my torso by a sticky wallpapering of perspiration.

Finished, I waved to Jodie’s silhouette along the highway. Her image was distorted behind the curtain of heat waves rising off the pavement. For a second, she disappeared altogether.

We decided to stop for the night at the first motor lodge we saw.

“I’ll make some phone calls and find a new tire in the morning,” I promised.

There was a family-run restaurant, The Apple Dumpling Diner, across the highway from the motor lodge. It sat before a backdrop of fir-studded mountains. We ate there that evening. I ordered their best bottle of wine, which turned out to be a nine-dollar bottle of Cartlidge & Browne pinot noir. The food was home-style, and everything on the table was fried. For dessert, we shared a bowl of pecan ice cream and a carafe of coffee.

“You’re thinking of something,” Jodie said halfway through dessert. “What is it?”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“Travis, what is it?”

“I just want to look at you.”

“That’s sweet.” She lifted my hand off the table, cradled it in hers. “But what is it?”

I looked past her and through the wall of windows on the highway side of the diner. Dusk having fallen all around the countryside, our little motor lodge was just a dark smear highlighted by pinpoints of sodium light across the highway.

“There was something in that house,” I said. “I think maybe you felt it, too. That’s what started this whole thing.”

“You’re talking about ghosts,” Jodie said.

“It sounds ridiculous.”

“No.” She rubbed my hand. “No.”

“Then . . .” My voice trailed off. I was thinking of how Dentman had thanked me that night at the ‘Bird. But it was really Elijah—or some part of Elijah that had been left behind—that had set everything in motion.

“Honey, tell me.”

I almost told her what was bothering me. But in the end I just summoned a smile and said, “This is crazy. I can’t believe we’re talking about ghosts.”

“Forget about ghosts. It’s all in the past now.”

“Yes,” I said. Because I couldn’t possibly explain the empty hole that Elijah’s ghost had unwittingly opened up in me. How one ghost could come back while another remained elusive, adamant that I should forever suffer . . .

“Are you okay?”

It was all I could do not to cave in on myself. “How could I possibly be any better?”

I slept soundly for the first part of that evening. In the middle of the night, though, I awoke to a dream where I was drowning in the center of the ocean, struggling to keep afloat. Each time my head broke through the surface of the stormy, gray sea, I could make out a floating wooden dock just barely out of my reach. So I swam to it, swallowing and choking on water, my body growing numb. But when I came back up for air and to reassess my location, the floating dock appeared farther and farther away.

Unable to sleep, I snuck out into the night and smoked cigarettes until my head groaned from the nicotine.

Early the next morning, even before Jodie was out of bed, I drove to the nearest town to have the tire repaired. I waited in a small, shoe box—shaped room, where country music was piped in through plastic wall-mounted speakers. There was a little television set with rabbit ears resting on a folding chair, the volume turned all the way down, the vertical hold in desperate need of adjustment. A box of stale donuts stood open atop a magazine rack. I sat by myself in the room for forty minutes until my name was called, and I paid for my new tire at the register.

Driving back, the sun directly in my eyes, I detoured through a twist of wooded roadway. In a good mood, I attempted to locate an alternative rock station on the radio, but after several minutes fooling with the dial, I abandoned my quest. Up ahead, the road narrowed to a single paved lane. I slowed the car. Like something staged, two female deer strode out into the middle of the road. I eased to a stop and sat, both hands gripping the steering wheel, watching. They seemed to acknowledge me with their wet, ink-black eyes, then bounded off into the veil of gray stone firs on the other side of the highway.

I was just about to take my foot off the brake when I caught more movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and winced through the heavy foliage. It was like trying to discriminate between the shadows.

I pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road and got out. The air was perfumed by the earthly scent of the wilderness that surrounded me. My boots becoming entangled in spools of vines, I walked along the reedy shoulder to the suggestion of a part in the trees. I peered through the part and saw what looked like a trampled path of weeds and underbrush.

I crossed through the trees and walked the path.

Soon I was standing on the crest of an enormous precipice overlooking a blanket of green fields, Technicolor in its greenness, and they appeared to go on forever. There was a stream that wound through the valley passing directly below me, bisecting the field into perfect halves. The banks of this stream were well manicured and flanked by great bursts of colorful flowers. Some were colors I’d never seen before, and my brain had some difficulty processing them at first.

Carefully, I scaled down the side of the precipice and into the valley. The stream wove through the flowers just inches from my feet. The surface was as smooth as glass; the flowers crowding its banks were reflected as if in a mirror. Something made me touch the water. A single extended index finger barely touching the surface sent a widening ripple of rings across the surface. The flowers’ reflections trembled and fell apart.

I stood and followed the stream through the valley. It wasn’t until I’d traveled halfway across the field that I realized I was not alone. The sensation was overwhelming and undeniable, yet I felt oddly at peace. Giddy, almost. And as I continued across the field, the morning sun at my back, I thought I glimpsed on a few occasions more than my own shadow in the grass in front of me.

Before I knew it I was standing at the other end of the field, an intimidating wall of pine trees blocking my passage. The stream continued on, winding through the forest, those colorful plumes of flowers like lights on an airport runway in the shade beneath the trees. Hunching down, I entered the woods, creeping under the low-hanging branches. The sun was immediately blotted from the sky. I could feel the forest breathe me in.

The woods were dense, but I noticed sunlight through the branches up ahead: another clearing. As I advanced in that direction, I also could see the reflection of the sky on the ground, and I realized that I was looking at a lake. For whatever reason, this caused me to hasten my pace. I hurried along and finally broke out into fresh daylight on the other side. Before me, spread out like a smear of smoked black glass, was an immense body of water, so magnificent that I could barely make out the trees across the way on the other side of the reach.

I stood there by the edge of the water for some time, letting the sun warm my back and shoulders. Cream-colored water lilies drifted across the surface of the lake, cartwheeling lazily over the reflection of my own face.