Footsteps on the Stairs: A Novel

by C. S. Adler

  I got into bed—my comfort zone. Just hugging a pillow makes me feel loved. At this hour I was still too wide awake to sleep. It was going to be hard to live with a house full of morning-type people. Mother is usually a night person like me, but I could understand how trying to keep up with Larry made her poop out early. I wondered if my father had been an athletic type too. Once she said they used to wrestle together. She’s not much for reminiscences, my mother. All I know about my father is he was killed in a car accident while Mother was still pregnant with me. When she married Larry she let me have the eight-by-ten picture of my father in his army uniform.

  Until Larry moved in, that picture was as close as I’d ever gotten to a male relative. I’d look at it and daydream conversations in which my father tried to convince Mother that I’m a fabulous personality and she ought to appreciate me. When I got really sorry for myself, I’d pretend he wasn’t dead, that he’d come to take me to live with him on the army base, where, of course, I’d become the darling of the regiment or battalion or whatever it was. Occasionally, I even save people’s lives in these daydreams and get known as a heroine. Ever since I learned how to swim, I’ve been mostly saving people from drowning. Tonight I started a really beautiful story about Chip and me getting lost on the Sunfish and finding this lonely island with a lighthouse on it, and who turns out to be living there but Larry. He’s left Mother for some reason that I dozed off before figuring out.

  The footsteps jolted me awake. There still wasn’t any wind. Mice, then? Or rats? But it sounded just like someone creeping up the stairs—soft, soft, and then a heavier tread that couldn’t be anything but a footstep. Anne was asleep. I wanted to wake her to see if she heard it too, but I didn’t have the nerve. Maybe it was Chip. Maybe the poor kid was walking in his sleep and didn’t even know it. Only it didn’t seem as if the footsteps went down—just up. And if Chip was sliding down the banister, I’d hear something. I wanted to get up and go look, but I couldn’t make myself budge. Suppose it wasn’t Chip or animals! So long as the footsteps stayed on the stairs, I felt better off not knowing.

  The footsteps suddenly pounded up fast. Then they stopped. A noise came like a scuffling, but it was too heavy to be little animals. Bears on the stairs. It wasn’t funny. I sat up, just too hyper to lie still. I noticed that Anne was lying there with her eyes open. She swung out of bed without looking my way, walked right over to our door, and opened it. I caught my breath. The noises on the steps stopped.

  Without thinking, I crept up behind her and whispered, “What’s out there?”

  She jumped. “Dodie, you scared me.”

  “Sorry. Do you see anything?”

  “Nothing.” She didn’t look scared at all. She stepped outside onto the landing, and I shadowed her—I’m much braver as someone’s shadow than I am alone. She stood at the top of the stairs looking down. It was dark, but not so dark that you couldn’t tell there was nothing there. Next she walked across the landing and looked into Chip’s room through the open door. I looked over her shoulder. He was sprawled on his back, elbows bent, fists up, sleeping. She tiptoed to his bed and tugged his blanket out from under him and covered him with it. Then she pushed me out of the room and asked me, “Are you playing some kind of trick?”

  “Me? I’m the one who’s scared out of my wits. You’re cool as a cucumber. I didn’t even have the guts to get up and look till you did.”

  She considered. “But you went out of your way to scare me on the boat today.”

  “I did not!”

  “You did. You turned that boat over on purpose.”

  “Honest to God, I didn’t. The wind took it. Sunfish do turn over easily, and besides, how was I to know you were scared of falling in? You didn’t act scared.”

  “I was petrified. If you’d just looked at me, you must have been able to tell.”

  “I swear I couldn’t. All I saw was you looked mad. I just thought you hated me.”

  She turned to face me in our doorway. “You could have a tape recorder hidden somewhere making those footsteps. I know you’re clever, Dodie.”

  “Well, thanks. I am sort of brilliant, but honestly—I swear to God, on my honor—I’m not doing it. Aren’t you ever going to trust me, just because of that silly sheet thing when you got here?”

  She considered. “Then who’s making the noises?”

  “Chip must be right. It’s some kind of animals—probably.”

  “Maybe. Let’s catch them at it.”

  “How?”

  “We could take turns keeping watch.”

  “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because taking turns means me being out here alone in the dark in this spooky house. I’d die of fright. I don’t like the house. I hate the marsh, and I’m scared of the dark even if you’re not. And don’t tell me how babyish that is—I don’t care.”

  “I think the marsh is beautiful, but I agree the house is spooky.… You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “What do you take me for? … Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “No, of course not.… All right, what we can do is, whoever hears the sounds first wakes the other one up, and then we go out to look together. Want to leave the bedroom door open so we can get out quicker?”

  I groaned. “Must we?”

  She shrugged. “It would help.”

  “But suppose they came right in?”

  “A closed door wouldn’t stop them, would it?”

  “I guess not, but I feel safer behind it.”

  Funny how girls who didn’t believe in ghosts understood who “them” was so well. We were talking as if “they” existed after all. I went back to bed, uneasy about the open door, but not so lonely now that I had Anne working with me.

  Chapter 4

  Mother, Anne, and Larry were sunning themselves side by side on beach towels on the ocean beach, toes ten feet above the breaking surf. Chip was building a sand fortress nearby. I was idly dribbling multicolored grains of sand over Larry’s crooked toes while the sun massaged my shoulders.

  “You know, you’ve got funny-looking toes,” I said to Larry.

  “What’s funny about them?”

  “They’re crooked.”

  “Pat, tell your daughter I don’t have crooked toes.”

  “I like your toes,” I said. “All I’m saying is they are crooked.”

  “They’re perfectly normal toes.”

  “But crooked,” I said, tweaking one.

  “Mmmph.”

  “Larry, do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Me either.… I think I’ll bury your legs.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  I gave up puzzling over possible causes of the footsteps, which we hadn’t heard in a few nights, and concentrated on mounding sand over Larry’s feet. With the paper cup I was using it was going to be a long-term project, but I had plenty of both sand and time.

  “Tell me,” Larry said to Anne, who was lying next to him. “How’s your mother’s antiques business going?”

  “Bad.”

  “Yeah? In what way?”

  “Well, you know her friend Midge is really the businesswoman, but Midge is never around anymore. She has all these personal problems. So Mother has to make the business decisions. She keeps stocking up things she likes that nobody wants to buy, and then she sells them too cheap or not at all. Now they’re overstocked and in debt, and the rent on the store’s going up. I don’t think the business is going to last long at this rate.”

  “How come you know so much about it?” Larry asked.

  “Mother talks to me about it. She doesn’t have anyone else she can talk to.”

  “That’s bad, Anne—for you. She leans on you too much. She always did.”

  “I don’t think it’s bad. I like being best friends with my mother.”

  “You’re thirteen years old. You shouldn’t let her steal your childhood from you.”
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  “That’s a mean thing to say, Daddy.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m your father. Who else is going to warn you? Your mother’s a good woman, but she’s taking advantage of you.”

  “My mother doesn’t take advantage of me. She loves me.… Besides she really doesn’t have anybody else to turn to. Midge is so messed up with her son and her divorce and—Daddy, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us when the business stops. All Mother’s money’s gone into it.”

  Even I could hear the worry in her voice.

  “Well, you and Chip can always come live with me,” he said.

  “And what about Mother?”

  “She’ll have to take care of herself, honey.”

  “When you needed help, Mother was there for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She told me that when you were going to college, she worked and supported you instead of going to school herself.”

  “She worked then, yes. We got married when we were in college and one of us had to work. She could have gone to school part time, or she could have waited to have kids until she’d gotten her degree. There were lots of things she could have done.”

  “Mother thought you were going to take care of her. She didn’t think she’d need a career.”

  “Baloney. Your mother’s not some helpless, old-fashioned girl, Anne. She wasn’t brought up when girls were raised to find a man who’d marry them and take care of them the rest of their lives. That went out in the nineteen forties.”

  “But you sort of promised you would take care of her, didn’t you?”

  “What do you mean? You mean I’m still responsible for your mother? She’s a grown woman, and I’m divorced from her, remember? Divorce means I’m not responsible for her anymore.”

  “Then who is?” Anne cried.

  “She’s responsible for herself. She’s got to learn to take care of herself. Sure it’s hard, but she’s got to learn for her own good.”

  “You should have told her that when you married her.”

  “Anne, that’s a nasty thing to say. That’s downright vicious.”

  Now his voice was trembling. I stopped pouring sand and listened, wide-eyed.

  “Larry,” Mother said, “Anne doesn’t understand. After all, she’s living with her mother and that’s the side of it she sees. You can’t expect—”

  “I don’t expect to have my daughter instructing me on my responsibilities.” He was angry. I didn’t know he was capable of getting angry and raising his voice like that.

  “I’ve been plenty generous with my ex-wife. I’ve never missed a child support payment, and I voluntarily lent her money to start her business. Her failures are her own. I resent being made her fall guy. But if Anne wants to jump ship and come live with us, she’s welcome.”

  “I don’t desert the people I love,” Anne said.

  There was a heavy silence while everyone listened to the “like you” that she hadn’t said out loud. Then Larry said, “Come on, Pat. Let’s go for a walk.”

  I heard the slough, slough of feet in sand as he marched off. My mother got up to follow, but before leaving she said, “Anne, you’ve hurt your father’s feelings terribly. You’d better make amends later when he’s cooled down.” Anne didn’t answer. Mother added, “Just friendly advice. You don’t have to listen to me, I know.”

  Then she took off after Larry, and we were left—Anne, Chip, a mean-eyed sea gull, and me. I’d been in the middle of that kind of family conflict with friends before. This time my sympathy wasn’t all for the kid. On the one hand, I did feel sorry for Anne. I could see she didn’t get too much fun out of life stuck with adult problems the way she was. On the other hand, I thought Larry was right. It wasn’t fair of Anne to be giving her father grief because his ex-wife was weak and dependent.

  Anne was squeezed together like a folding chair, with her forehead resting on her neat oval kneecaps. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, “Anne, you’re a real fighter. The way you stood up for your mother was neat.”

  “My father didn’t think so.” She sniffled. She’d begun crying again.

  I looked at Chip, who’d long since stopped patting the damp wall of his fortress. He seemed to be watching the sea gull, which was waiting patiently for a handout from us while pretending to be just standing around looking out to sea. Then suddenly Chip came over and put his arms around his sister.

  “I wish I were grown up,” Anne said. “I wish I could go out and get a job and support Mother and Chip and me.”

  Chip held tight as a little tree frog to her, and she clung to him while she cried. I stood there envious. They had each other to cling to at least.

  Nobody said anything the rest of that afternoon except neutral things like “You better cover up or you’ll get too much sun” and “About ready to start back to the cottage, kids?” Anne was as quiet as Chip. I was pretty quiet for me, too. Larry wasn’t communicating with anybody. Mother acted most like herself, but then nothing shakes her. She gets irritated, but that’s about as extreme a mood as she has.

  I kept waiting for Anne and Larry to have it out, but they both acted as if they didn’t have anything further to say—not even “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time.” A heartfelt “I’m sorry” always makes me feel better. So does just talking about it. Anne’s different, I guess. I bet keeping the lid down on all those emotions was what made her so uptight.

  Since my favorite father figure was looking unhappy, I did my best to cheer him up. I linked arms with him and skipped alongside him in the parking lot on the way to the car. “Hey, Larry,” I said. “Even if your toes are crooked, I think you’re pretty cute.”

  “You’re cute too, Dodie,” he said, but his smile aborted when he looked at Anne. She was giving us one of her raised-eyebrow specials. I guessed she was jealous. After all, he was her father.

  It didn’t surprise me to hear Larry asking Anne if she’d go for a walk with him later that day. They weren’t mad at each other when they came back. Probably they had talked out their quarrel after all.

  Chapter 5

  “Ghost weather” arrived later that week. After days of skies so blue I wanted to swim up into them, we got an afternoon of lumpy, gray clouds. Then the clouds flattened out and it rained—not just on us, but at us. After dinner the wind was whipping that rain so hard the whole cottage shook when it hit. Anne and Chip and I were playing Monopoly in the living room on the rag rug. Mother and Larry were reading. Cozy, all being together like that, and I didn’t even think about the footsteps until I heard them—just a soft padding. Then they faded. I nudged Anne.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  She looked up from her Chance card, raised an eyebrow at me, and listened. “No,” she said.

  “Chip, did you hear anything a minute ago?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Must have been the rain,” I said. I didn’t hear anything now. Chip had both the Boardwalk and Park Place, but everyone kept landing on Connecticut, where I had a hotel. I was getting rich quick.

  Mother yawned. “Let’s turn in, Larry,” she said.

  “How come you two adults can never keep your eyes open?” I teased, not really keen on their leaving us while the house felt as if it was about to fly off with us inside it.

  “It’s because we work so hard,” Larry said.

  “Doing what? You didn’t even jog today.”

  “Come on, Larry,” Mother said. “Dodie’s been trying to keep me up late ever since she was born.”

  “Hey! You said I was such a cute baby,” I protested.

  “Except you never slept.” Mother pulled Larry’s book from his hands and made him get up.

  “But I have to know if it really is a bomb,” he said, referring to the book.

  “It’s a bomb,” Mother said, and dragged him off.

  It occurred to me that probably they weren’t going to bed to sleep. I mean, I’m mature enough to know there’s sex after marriage, and my mother is
a healthy, attractive person—ditto for Larry. Also they’ve been married less than a year. Then I got to wondering what she did all those years when she wasn’t married. She’d gone out. She’d had a lot of male friends, but I’d never thought about what she did with them when I wasn’t around.

  “What’s the matter with you, Dodie?” Chip asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Your face is red.”

  “It’s hot in here,” I lied, and squashed that little mushroom of speculation. What was getting into me, thinking about my mother and sex? Getting my period probably had something to do with it. Mother said getting my period meant I was now a woman. Anne had gotten hers years ago. Did that make her a woman at ten? It made her more mature than me anyway. I wondered if being a woman meant thinking about sex all the time. Not that I hadn’t been thinking plenty already. The school I go to is full of cute boys, and I have my secret crushes—the kind that are so hopeless they’re too embarrassing to confide. I cut out pictures of fat brides whenever I spot one on the social pages. I keep them under my cache of mother’s used lipsticks in my junk drawer with the movie magazines that I’d just as soon Mother didn’t know I save. I get crushes on actors and actresses, too. Mother would think that was silly.

  After our parents were gone, Anne asked me, “Did you really hear the footsteps?”

  “I thought I did. It could have been the rain, though.”

  “The house is awfully creepy tonight.”

  “Can I sleep with you guys?” Chip asked his sister.

  “On what?”

  “On the floor. I’ll bring my pillow.”

  “We could lug his mattress in,” I said.

  “It’s just rain and wind,” Anne said. “Nothing to be scared of.”

  “You said yourself it’s creepy,” I argued. Anne reminded me of my mother just then. People shouldn’t tell other people what to feel.

  “Everywhere is noises,” Chip said.