by Ronald Malfi
Fuck it, I thought and went outside, a cigarette already between my lips.
The front porch creaked and grew restless under my weight. I sucked down a lungful of smoke and felt my eyes grow wet in the bitter cold. Across the front yard, the naked trees seemed to undulate almost imperceptibly like living things. Beyond the trees, the moon was a luminescent skull behind black wisps of clouds.
I heard the snapping of twigs and the crunch of frost and dead leaves before I saw a figure emerge from the woods several yards down the winding dirt path that emptied out onto Waterview Court. The figure was carrying something as he—for the figure was undeniably male—made his way in my direction.
It was Adam.
“Freeze,” I called out.
He stopped and peered through the darkness before spotting me mixed in with the late night shadows on the porch. A cloud of vapor trailed up from his silhouette. “Jesus. The hell are you doing out here?”
“Hiding.”
“Want company?” He held up what must have been the bottle of port he’d been hunting for earlier.
“Depends. Who you got in mind?”
Adam took a swig from the bottle and wedged his free hand into the hip pocket of his dungarees. He leaned against the porch railing. It groaned but held him. “I hope you guys like the place.”
“What’s not to like?”
“I hope I didn’t start anything with that talk of raising a family,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
“Is it a sore subject?”
“It is what it is.”
Adam took another swig of wine. He refused to join me on the porch and did not look at me as he wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“What’s on your mind? I know you didn’t just come over here to make sure I got home safe.”
He lowered and shook his head. He was smiling but there was nothing humorous about it.
Again, I was temporarily taken aback by Adam’s resemblance to our father. This ignited a memory of our old man’s Chrysler pulling into the driveway of our tiny duplex in Eastport, a Christmas tree strapped to the car’s roof. This had been when Kyle was still alive and we still decorated a real tree. The memory was sudden and fierce and nearly brought tears to my eyes.
“I guess I’m just hoping this was a good idea,” Adam said, calling me out of my reverie. “You guys moving out here and everything. You and me living across the street from each other, I mean.” He tapped his wedding ring against the wine bottle. “Do we need to talk about things? You and me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Because last time we saw each other, things didn’t end well.”
I looked out over the yard. Beneath the moonlight the snow radiated like something not of this world. “Forget about it. We were both drunk.”
“It bothered me for a long time.”
“It’s in the past.”
“You really feel that way? Don’t shut me down if you don’t really feel that way.”
For an instant I searched deep within myself only to discover I didn’t know how to feel. Yet fearing that my silence would condemn me, I quickly said, “Of course.”
“We’ve already missed out on too much time. And for no good reason.”
“Now we can make up for it,” I told him.
He nodded once perfunctorily. “Good. I’d like that. I really would.”
“So it’s settled. No hard feelings. The past is history. Water under the bridge. Whatever other cliché I can’t think of at the moment.”
Adam chuckled and took another drink from the bottle. “I should probably get back. Unless you want to get shitfaced on the rest of this port with me?”
“No, thanks.”
“Wanna get shitfaced by yourself, then? I’ll leave you the bottle.”
I smiled. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Adam heaved himself off the railing. “Fair enough.” He raked a set of long fingers down the side of his unshaven neck. The sound was like sandpaper. It occurred to me that some of his courage to speak his mind was in that bottle. “You know where I live. Don’t be a stranger.”
“It’s good to see you again,” I said, watching him plod through the snow toward the trees.
Without looking back at me, he raised a hand in response.
I watched him go for as long as the dark allowed it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Startled, I awoke.
Where am I?
My heart fluttering in my chest, the tightening grip of panic rising up through the trunk of my body, it took several drawn-out seconds for me to remember where I was. We were no longer in the crooked little flat in North London; we were in our new bedroom in our new house in Westlake, Maryland.
Just a dream . . . a bad dream . . .
Beside me, Jodie slept soundly. Her feet and legs, warm to the touch, were pushed against my own legs beneath the sheets. I watched her for a moment, my eyesight acclimating to the lightlessness of our bedroom.
There was someone else in the room with us.
This realization dawned on me not as lucid thought but in the rising of the hairs on the nape of my neck as I sat up. It was a purely instinctual awareness, tethered to some sort of primal foreknowledge, and I had no rational explanation for feeling it. Nonetheless, I was suddenly certain of a strange and unseen presence.
I stared across the room at the open doorway. It was too dark to see anything for sure. If I gazed into space long enough, I could convince myself of anything.
Quietly, I peeled away the covers and climbed out of bed. In the darkness, the house was even more alien to me. I found my way along the upstairs hallway, one hand dragging along the wall, until I came to the winding stairwell. Around me, the house creaked in the wind. I peered over the railing. Ghostly rectangles of moonlight shimmered on the carpet. Somewhere in the belly of the house, a clock loudly counted out the seconds.
My breath caught in my throat as my gaze fell upon a small figure in the farthest corner of the downstairs foyer—a blacker blur among the darkness. I studied the contours of a head, a cheek, the slope of a neck. Yet the longer I stared at the figure, the less discernible it became, like when you look directly at a distant star as opposed to catching it peripherally. After another dozen or so heartbeats, the shape was one of many among unpacked boxes and displaced furniture.
Downstairs, I pulled my parka on over my undershirt and pajama pants, then climbed into the sneakers I’d left by the front door. One hand was already digging around inside the parka to locate my cigarettes and a lighter.
When I stepped out into the night, I was accosted without mercy by the cold, making me suddenly and completely aware of every single molecule that fabricated my body. Even from within my parka, my arms broke out in gooseflesh. Shivering, I could feel my testicles retreat up into my abdomen. I lit the cigarette with shaking hands and sucked hard, savoring it.
I studied Adam’s footprints in the pearl-colored snow while my mind slipped back to our conversation from earlier. It was something I didn’t feel like revisiting now. I meandered around the side of the house and came to stand beside an outcrop of trees, the bitter wind temporarily blocked by the angle of the house. The yard looked expansive, surreal, untouched. Before me, spread out like a stain on the snow, my shadow loomed enormous. The purity of the territory.
I thought I saw a figure move in the darkness a few yards ahead of me: it passed briefly from the sanctuary of the trees and across the lawn, its form silhouetted for a moment against the backdrop of the moonlit lake. I froze, watching for several seconds, anticipating the figure’s return. But when it refused to reappear, I began doubting my own eyes, just as I had back in the house.
I headed to the backyard. Most of the trees here were firs, doing their best to blot out the moon with their heavy winter cloaks, but farther back and in studded rows stood tall oaks, now leafless and skeletal. From my vantage, I could make out a glitter of moonlight on the frozen surface of the lake.
; I continued on through the stand of trees toward the water. The wind was relentless, biting into every available square inch of flesh, and I hugged myself to keep warm. Tears froze against the sides of my face and burned down the swells of my cheeks. Closer to the edge of the lake, as the embankment sloped gradually down toward the water, the snow thinned out. Stepping on it, I broke through a frozen layer of crust, and my sneaker sank several inches. A moment after that, ice water permeated my sneaker and shocked my foot.
“Shit.”
My sneaker made a squelching, sucking sound as I liberated it from the freezing slush. I leaned against a tree for support while doing my best to wring out the leg of my pajama pants. My toes were already growing numb. Directly ahead of me, the lake opened up like a tabletop, the frozen surface nearly reflective. That odd structure rose straight through the ice, the color of milk in the moonlight. From this new perspective I could see just how large it was. And it was certainly not a rock nor a crest of stone. It was man-made.
The structure was only twenty yards from the shore, and I needed a better look at it. Against my better judgment, I advanced through the thinning snow and stepped onto the frozen lake. Cautious, I treaded lightly, testing the strength of the ice beneath my feet. For a split second I was plagued by images of drowning in black water, trapped beneath the ice and struggling for breath as my lungs cramped up. I imagined thrusting upward through the water, seconds away from unconsciousness, slamming my head against the underside of the frozen lake, desperate to break through and liberate myself from inevitable death.
But the ice felt sturdy beneath my weight. I inched forward, sliding more than walking, too guarded to actually lift my feet from the ice.
As I closed the distance, the monstrosity took shape: perhaps ten feet high, four feet wide, immense, structurally sound, constructed of faded boards of wood. It was layered—beveled—on one side.
It was a staircase.
Confounded, I paused just a few feet from it.
A staircase rising straight out of the lake.
Made of planks of wood, weather soured and spotty with frost-whitened mildew, it looked like the same type of wood used to build the deck of a house. It was not resting on the ice but rising up through it, just as Jodie had observed from the bedroom window earlier that day. The ice around its base had melted, leaving an open moat of sludgy dark water perhaps four or five inches wide surrounding the entire structure.
I took a step forward, and that was when my foot broke through the ice.
My breath seized, and I heard my foot splash into the water. Instantly, my leg, straight up to mid-thigh, went numb. And I went forward and down, unable to prevent the fall. My heart lurched. Instinct thrust my hands out, and I managed to catch the side of the protruding staircase, preventing myself from falling farther through the ice. Holding on to the side of the staircase, I caught my breath before extricating my soaked, anesthetized leg from the lake and hoisted myself up and on my feet.
The cold night air immediately froze the water on my leg, the flimsy material of my pajama pants clinging to me like a second skin. A freezing burn traced up my thigh toward my groin, and once again my testicles performed their disappearing act. My whole body trembled.
Stupidly, I lost my balance and fell in an arc down onto my left side. I hit hard, rattling the teeth in my head. I heard something crack; I couldn’t tell if it was the ice beneath my weight or the bones within my flesh. The nub of my cigarette went flying, and I watched the ember cartwheel through the air in slow motion. I felt ice water seep against my ribs, my arm. Like a dream, the ground shifted beneath me: the ice had cracked and was breaking apart.
I uttered a train wreck of curses and quickly rolled onto my back, retreating from the widening fault in the ice. Even as I rolled, I heard the ice splitting; the sound was like the crackling of a fire.
I continued to roll away from the breaking ice until some internal sense told me I could stop. So I stopped. My eyes were closed, though I couldn’t remember closing them. My breath whistled through the narrow stovepipe of my throat.
Then, for whatever reason, I burst out laughing.
I’m a goddamn moron.
Rolling onto my side, I crawled, still trembling with a case of the giggles, toward the embankment. Once I was close enough, I grabbed a tree branch that extended over the lake. Finally secure in my footing, I hauled myself up and crossed from the frozen lake onto solid ground. Despite being the only living soul in the vicinity, I felt like an imbecile.
A tree limb snapped behind a veil of trees in front of me.
I froze. Again, I thought I saw something move beyond the intertwining branches, but I couldn’t be sure. “Hello?” I called. My voice shook. “Someone there? I could use some help if there is.”
No one answered. No one moved.
I kept my gaze trained on the spot between the trees, but I could see nothing. A deer, perhaps? Some forest critter creeping through the underbrush? Whatever it was, I was freezing my ass off out here trying to figure it out.
Shivering, my entire body slowly being consumed by the numbness originating from my deadened left leg, I took a deep breath and made my way up the snowy embankment toward the house.
CHAPTER FIVE
It has been said that nature does not know extinction—that once you’ve existed, all parts of you, whether they’ve dispersed or remained together, will always be. Thick dust may hide the relics of human history, but it cannot erase the memory.
Picture a large, square conference room, with teal carpeting and alabaster acoustical tiles in the ceiling. Look around. You will notice that the mahogany benches are dull beneath the heated spotlights and crowded with suburban onlookers. At one end of the room are two large double doors with tapered brass levers, newly shined.
A cluster of people, solemn and reposed in what they so ignorantly consider their most formal attire, stands against the back wall, shuffling uncomfortably from right foot to left foot. The men with their hair awkwardly parted and grease matted to their scalps, the women with half-moon impressions on their palms where their nails have been digging in. Their hairstyles are outdated, and their inability to recognize this fact only reaffirms their small-town-ness. These are my mother’s people from small towns across America, unified in the big city, my father’s city, at last for this occasion.
At the other end of the room subsists a large podium-like assembly, modular and archipelagic in construct, cordovan-stained, teak, and recently shellacked. There are many people seated on the benches and standing at the back of the room, wedged together as if for warmth, but for the sake of this retelling, there exist only four individuals that we should concern ourselves with: the middle-aged father with the vacuous stare and wrinkles in his suit like the creases in a worry; the mother who cannot seem to focus on anything, anything at all, despite her constant stare. Then there are this duo’s two remaining adolescent sons, particularly the thirteen-year-old mope with the sticking-out-too-far ears and the restless hands.
The boy, this thirteen-year-old, stares at his father’s eyes. The boy’s mouth goes dry, and he is only vaguely aware that he has unraveled the thread binding the little black plastic button on his blazer and that he is now squeezing the button hard between his right thumb and forefinger. Just before he brings this button to his mouth, his hand spasms and the button drops to the carpeted floor.
It occurs to him that he is the only one at the entire funeral service who knows he has dropped this button. Something in that knowledge comforts the boy, as if he has found some safe and hidden haven far away from everyone else—even his father, his mother, his older brother, the cold body of his younger brother, the baby of the family, in the casket at the front of the room. And when he looks over the sea of stoic, hardened, country faces, he feels only slightly less afraid.
Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.
In the months following Kyle’s death, I grew sullen and withdrawn. At first there wasn’t anything specia
l about my grief to separate me from Adam or my parents, and even if there had been, no one else in my family was in any frame of mind to notice. It wasn’t that my mother and father became more and more despondent or unavailable since Kyle’s death; it was simply that the both of them, always well-meaning and kind, could not regain the sense of energy and dedication that had defined them as parents prior to this horrible tragedy. There was something lost to them, and they knew not how to get it back.
The little duplex in Eastport closed in on itself like something dark and hibernating or like a corpse withdrawing into a grave. A troubled canyon had formed between the remaining members of the Glasgow family, the distance too great to fill by the time we became aware of its presence.
My mother, who’d been a generous and soulful woman with no further understanding of a life beyond matrimonial domestication than the generations before her, took up religion. She’d drag me to St. Nonnatus every Sunday where we’d sit in a pew that smelled of Pine-Sol and listen to the priest expatiate from the pulpit on the glory of God. This churchgoing lasted just over a year. If it did my mother any good, I couldn’t say. I know it didn’t do me any good, although I’m not quite sure if it was ever meant to. I took this to be some sort of penance for my role in Kyle’s death, but I never said anything about it to my mother.
My father, who’d always been an intimidating physical presence, seemed to grow smaller day by day, some vital bone or organ now broken within him. He reminded me more and more of those rusted old cars on concrete blocks, colorless weeds growing all around him. He became an alcoholic after Kyle’s death and maintained that ungodly and self-deprecating profession until prostate cancer punched his card many years later.
In those final years my memories of the man who had once been athletic, even-tempered, stern but compassionate, an overall good father and husband was even worse than the image of the old car on blocks. He was an indistinct and shapeless imitation of a man slouched in a recliner before the television set, a bottle of Dewar’s on the end table beside his chair, the medicated look of an asylum inmate on his face.