by Sarah Porter
I don’t know what I’m doing, but all at once I’m on the floor too with my arms around her, feeling her heart race and her breath shaking. And she is warm, warm, warm, and very much alive.
“Ksenia,” I say; I can’t seem to lift my voice above a whisper. “Is it really you?”
She leans back a few degrees to look in my eyes, and grazes my cheek in the rapid, nervous way that you’d touch a friendly wolf. “Lexi. I don’t know.”
not a single one of them reaches my voice
Josh laughs, as if that were a joke, or as if he’d give anything to convince himself it was a joke, and lands on the rug next to us, and then for a while we’re all squeezing the air out of one another in a big cuddle puddle. After a moment Ksenia starts laughing too, a little breathlessly, and I follow, crashing into the laughter as if I had tripped on my own relief and bewilderment.
“I watched you die, Ksenia,” I say, and her nearness and vitality make the words hilarious, in an awful, dizzying way. “Right in my arms. I watched you die. And then they took you away and cut you apart!”
“Don’t be sad, Lexi,” Ksenia says, and her words gasp out wildly; she’s still half laughing, but I don’t believe she’s kidding about this either. “It’s better that way. I was never meant to live in the first place.”
“I dumped Xand for saying basically that,” I tell her, and then realize too late how hurtful it must be.
“Is that why? I didn’t want to ask you, Lexi,” Josh says. “But then oh my God did he have it coming! The nerve of that guy!”
“He just wanted to persuade me to get over it,” I explain. “Get on with my life. But I didn’t appreciate him acting like he was some kind of authority on what was best for me.” I realize that I’m wandering onto thin ice, conversationally, and then I’m cracking up afresh at the idea that there could be any ice thinner than discussing Ksenia’s own death with her. But I don’t want to approach anywhere near the reasons that I had, for feeling so haunted—and now it turns out that Xand was right, and I didn’t even need to. “Ksenia, how—I don’t know, how can any of this be happening?”
All at once the two of them seem to have exhausted their laughter, and Ksenia extricates herself from our tangle and scoots back a foot. She shoots a glance at Josh that just screams unspoken significance. “I don’t know,” she says again. “If I died, it wasn’t my idea!”
That’s not what the coroner said, but I decide to keep that to myself.
Josh struggles to his feet. “Do we have any of that amazing strawberry lemonade left, Kezz? Or did you drink it all?”
“I think there’s some,” Ksenia says, and he heads for the kitchen.
“Good,” I say, and I’m about to add, I’m incredibly thirsty, but Ksenia grabs my wrist so hard it hurts and shakes her head, eyes wide.
NO, she mouths at me, silent and emphatic. No, Lexi. Then she lets go and stares down, almost as if she were ashamed.
I hesitate, because it seems so preposterous; Ksenia can’t suppose that Josh would try to poison me, could she? But there’s no mistaking the fear I saw in her eyes, and already Josh is coming back with frosty pink-brimming glasses in each hand, ringing with ice. Why does everything sound like those bells to me? He holds one out to each of us.
“Actually,” I say, “I’m fine for now.”
Josh looks at me reproachfully. “It’s homemade, Lexi! Did I smush all those strawberries for nothing?” I can smell the fruit and the sweetness, somehow brighter than other scents, and Ksenia’s gulping hers like there’s no issue. I almost take the glass, but then I see the warning way that Ksenia is staring at me over the pink fluid lapping at her lips.
“I’m really doing my best to stay off sugar,” I tell him. “Fruit juice is the worst. Don’t be sabotaging my diet with your homemade, Josh.” He pouts. “You drink it.”
“Oh, fine.”
I watch closely while he raises the glass, but he’s clearly swallowing down the contents, so they couldn’t possibly be dosed with anything. When he tips his head back to drink the last of it his eyes close, and I seize the opportunity to mouth What the hell? at Ksenia.
She shakes her head in response, and I suppose this kind of dumb-show signaling isn’t the best way to communicate anything terribly complicated. I feel more intensely by the minute that I need to find a way to speak to her alone, if she can’t come out and say what she means in front of him. Honestly, as snappish as she can be with people she doesn’t care about, she’s never been much good at standing up to Josh, and that has been an ongoing problem.
Josh’s glass thumps down on an end table, and now that I’m calmer I notice the place is a mess, with dishes and books strewn around, and spills left to congeal, and candy wrappers under the furniture. All of which would be out of character for their foster parents, certainly, but what concerns me more is that it’s also odd for Ksenia, who has always been tightly controlled and something of a neat freak, making such a performance of being perfectly responsible that I think if anything it just made the Delbos even more uncomfortable with her. I think they kept waiting for her to behave like a kid.
“So,” Ksenia starts. “Lexi…”
Then she falls silent, and her face conveys confusion and possibly a sluggish kind of panic. I remember what Josh said about memory problems, and I wonder if she’s sick somehow—though in fact she’s looking more beautiful than ever, clear-skinned and shimmering. Crystalline is the description that comes to mind. I might have infinite questions for the two of them, but suddenly asking a single one seems unbearably painful. I stand up and reach out a hand for her.
“Why don’t you show me the new addition?” I say, to say something—and also on the off chance that we can get a few minutes without Josh watching us. Which is what he’s doing right now.
Apparently that was an awkward thing to say, because it provokes a fresh crossfire of meaningful looks. “We haven’t actually been up there yet,” Josh explains. He glances over at the dark mouth of those brand-new stairs; it’s on the kitchen’s back wall, just to the left of the dining table.
“Cool,” I say. “Then we’ll go exploring together. Ksenia? Are you coming?”
And maybe I’m getting out of patience with the situation, because I tug Ksenia over there a shade too assertively—as if I were playing, but not really. Josh comes right behind us. The stairwell is so shadowy that you’d think there wasn’t a single window up there, but I don’t see a light switch, and I decide not to let it bother me. I run up the first three steps.
And then they drop out from under me. My heart plummets, and so does the rest of me. Josh catches me by my armpits right before I hit the floor and helps me back onto my feet.
“Would you like to see the backyard instead?” Ksenia asks, and even in the middle of my shock I’m glad to hear the sardonic rasp back in her voice. Josh laughs.
“See, that’s why we haven’t been up there, Lexi. At first I thought I’d just board it up, but then I decided it was better if I knew what we were dealing with. But neither of us can climb those stairs. They won’t let us.”
“What is going on here?” I say. The stairs look perfectly normal again: dusty, honey-colored wood, with a cheap aluminum handrail on the wall.
There’s a grayish, shineless patch in the center of each stair where the finish has worn through, as if people had been going up and down a lot, for years now. I prod the bottom step with my toe, and it feels solid and as real as anything: a well-defined feature of the material world.
“I’ll show you,” Ksenia says, “if you get out of the way.”
I do, and she moves in. “Hi,” she says. To the staircase, and it reminds me of how Josh introduced me to a bunch of trees earlier. “It’s me, Ksenia Adderley. Kezzer. You can’t pretend you don’t know who I am.” She jumps straight up onto the second step, and it—what? It folds away from her, it recoils into the void, it furls itself out of existence? In any case, it drops her without ceremony, but since she knows to expect it
she lands more or less gracefully, and somehow right beside me. “See? Same thing happens with Josh.”
“Not exactly,” Josh says, sulkily. “It’s meaner with me. At least it lets you down so you don’t hurt yourself! It has to know how much I love you, so it’s totally unfair that it has it in for me!”
I’m listening closely, trying to make sense of a nonsensical conversation. “Are you saying that this staircase—cares about Ksenia, somehow?”
“Maybe it only cares about the real Ksenia,” Ksenia says. “Maybe she’s the one who died, and I’m just nothing.” There’s such a rough, wounded sound in her voice that I stare and almost hug her again, but now there’s a defensive hunch to her posture that discourages me.
“Oh, Kezzer!” Josh says. “That is so completely not true! Of course you’re you!”
“You’re real enough that you’re still my friend,” I tell her firmly. “You’re real enough that I still love you, no matter what. I don’t know what I saw die, but you’re the one that counts for me now, and it means more to me than I can even tell you, Ksenia, to see you alive again.”
The light around us fades a little, gives a quick purplish swoon, and then comes back full strength.
Ksenia turns to hide her face from me, but I can tell she’s crying. “I’m so sorry, Lexi,” she says. “I was a rotten friend. Josh told me how you complained about me.”
Of course he did, just like he told me everything about her. “You weren’t,” I tell her. “I just wanted you to trust me enough to tell me things yourself. I felt like Josh was your official translator, or something.”
And then, impulsively, I climb back onto the bottom step.
It holds me. Josh catches his breath, but Ksenia isn’t looking.
“I know,” she says. “I actually overheard you talking with him a few times. Like when he told you the story of how I got put in foster care, and I was scared shitless you’d be—just repulsed by the whole thing.”
“I didn’t think you cared what I thought,” I say. I go up one more step, waiting for the plunge, but it doesn’t come. Another, and another, and the darkness starts to shuffle softly back around my eyes.
“But how could I have told you something like that, Lexi? That the cops caught me waiting in the car while my mom was off screwing the guy who paid our rent, and then they found her drugs in my sock? With your pretty house, and your perfect family? Your parents actually love each other.”
She delivers the word love venomously—but it’s the kind of venom brewed from envy and longing and heartache, and I don’t blame her at all.
“But you never judged me for any of that,” I tell her. “At least, I thought you didn’t. You never assumed I was too spoiled or prissy to hang out with you. So why would I have judged you for something your mom did?”
Ksenia has never, ever revealed so much of herself to me, and I’d like to comfort her—except right now I know that climbing these stairs is more important, and I can’t begin to guess how I could know such a thing. I feel the scrape of their wood under my shoes, and I climb two more. I’m getting high enough now that I start to feel a kind of trembly anticipation, sensing just how much it will hurt when they let me fall.
“Because you’d know I was shit,” she says. “Coming from a shit background like that, where everybody was always out of their minds, and you couldn’t believe a single fucking thing they said to you. My mom even lied to me about who my dad was.”
“Do you know how much it hurts me to hear you talk that way? What were you, eight? Like Marissa? Listen, I will only ever judge you by the choices you make, here and now, not for things you can’t even help. That’s a promise, Ksenia.”
“Nine, actually,” she says, and finally turns. I hear the whisper of her bare feet and her gasp when she sees me halfway up the staircase.
“I know,” Josh says. “It’s totally crazy.”
“Lexi? Can you see anything?” Her voice jumps with anxiety, but my eyes are so flooded with shadow that I could be climbing into a cloud of black moths, brushed and obscured by their wings. I’m not that far from the kitchen but none of the light below seems to reach me, and my pupils can’t dilate enough to expose anything ahead.
“I can’t. It’s too dark.”
“I feel like I really need to get up there. It’s been driving me crazy that I can’t.”
“Well,” I tell her, “maybe you just haven’t introduced yourself properly.” And I’m hoping she’ll guess what I’m referring to; we had a terrible fight, once, when I tried calling her by a different nickname than Kezzer, a softer name. She almost hit me. It was one of those strange moments where somebody’s rage reveals just how deeply you’ve reached inside their heart: that name mattered. But with all the incomprehensible secrecy that’s going on in this house, I feel like I shouldn’t let Josh know what I’m thinking; it’s private, just between me and Ksenia.
I’m not looking her way, but I swear I can feel her stiffen. Did she understand me? I’ve made it almost two-thirds of the way up now, but I stop with a shudder of foresight, almost positive I know what’s about to come.
“What are you talking about?” Josh asks.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Maybe if Ksenia isn’t doing the trick, she should try giving the stairs an alias. Maybe there’s some kind of hidden code.”
Ksenia snorts: one of those rare flashes where she seems like her old self again. “I am Wilford B. Hogsworthy the fourth,” she informs the stairs. “A gentleman farmer from Lancaster. Gonna let me up now, or what?”
She stomps onto the bottom step, and the entire staircase implodes beneath us. It crumples like memory, it swoons like unconsciousness, and for a tiny sliver of time I’m gripping the handrail and swinging in the abrupt nothingness. Then I drop, and even though I was well forward of Ksenia on the steps I somehow crash down right on top of her in a tangle of limbs. And I am almost positive that the stairs deliberately arranged for her to break my fall, and maybe even take some extra bruises as a consequence.
They didn’t care for her sarcasm, that’s obvious.
“Well, that worked,” Josh says, and helps us to our feet. “But it’s phenomenal that you got so far, Lexi. Kezz, why do you think they let Lexi go up, and not me?”
“Maybe because Lexi is the best friend I’ve ever had, even if I didn’t deserve her,” Ksenia says, surprising the daylights out of me. “Maybe the stairs are smart enough to get that.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Josh look quite so hurt, with his brows up and his mouth draping. “Kezzer! Then what am I?”
“You’re insanely important to me, Josh. You’re my whole world. But you’re—not that.”
It’s a statement that I would consider open to a variety of interpretations, not all of them positive, but it seems to partly mollify Josh. He kisses her fervently on the mouth, and I look away. Has she really stopped thinking of him as her brother? She used to be pretty clear about it.
“Then why don’t the stairs let you go up, Ksenia? I mean, by that reasoning, you wouldn’t be your own friend!”
I think I meant to be funny, as if saying that might defuse the tension, but I’m discovering that words have a way of transforming their meanings when you say them in this house.
I look back at her and her eyes are on mine; whatever Josh thinks, happy is not the right way to describe her now. She looks savage, arctic.
“Jesus, Lexi. Have I ever been?”
Sometimes at moments when everyone has said just a little too much, there’s a special kind of silence that flows in and makes it hard to say anything else. This would be one of those times, because I know how sharply, how seriously, she meant it, and the part about not knowing if she’s real, and the part about not deserving me. She’s alive, certainly, and being alive is mostly allowing her to feel a whole spectrum of suffering.
Josh snaps out of it first. “Lexi, you’re staying for dinner, right? I’ll start cooking. Maybe like a pasta primavera? Is cream sauce cool for
your diet?”
Ksenia bites her lip, but I don’t even need her anxious gaze this time, because there’s enough of a warning in Josh’s voice: unless I am gravely mistaken, his tone was a shade too casual, but with a stealthy eagerness just below the surface. I don’t know why it would be such a big deal to stay and eat with them, but there’s a whisking alarm in my veins, and I don’t have to know.
“I can’t, actually,” I say. “I have to pick up Marissa from her cello lesson.”
Josh puts on one of his looks of wounded innocence. “Lexi, can’t somebody else get her? You haven’t seen us in ages!”
“I know. But my parents both have meetings, and I promised. I can’t just leave Marissa waiting! Anyway, you know, you’re both here again, right? At least for a while? So I’ll just come back and see you soon.” I expended a few too many words for such a simple message, and if Josh has a sharp ear, he’ll know it means my nerves are shaken. But of course I would have more than enough reasons for feeling that way, even if I weren’t suspicious. I mean, those stairs alone would suffice.
He heaves an exaggerated sigh, but Ksenia looks relieved.
I start shifting back into the living room, and they both follow. Am I really not going to find one second to speak to her privately?
“Soon, then. You promise? I know you were upset by, by the way we left, but you forgive us now, right? We seriously just did what we had to do to hold on to each other!”
“I know that,” I say. “You two were in a corner. It was cruel that you had so little choice about your own lives.”
“Lexi,” Ksenia says abruptly, “it’s getting cold out. Why don’t you borrow a sweater?”
I look at her. “Sure. Thank you.” I don’t mention that all her sleeves will hang down past my fingertips.
“Come pick something,” she says, and grabs my hand. I suppose that following us to her room seems just a breath too awkward or too blatant even to Joshua, because he drags along at a short distance behind us. Ksenia yanks me down the half-flight of stairs to the hallway and then into her old room, and Josh comes along far enough to hover on the steps. Ksenia leaves her door wide open, and I’m positive she does it out of calculation, playacting innocence in her turn.