Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “What’s goin’ on?” asked the little boy Randy had once been. “How come Daddy’s home from work so early?”

  He finished with the scarf, hung it on the hall tree by the door, and then pulled down his hood to reveal his face, his bangs a little too long and little too shaggy.

  “Daddy’s got an early Christmas present for you.”

  The little boy stared at the camera for a few moments, and then his face came alive with realization and a smile that could have been seen for miles in the dark. “The race car set came?” And with a speed and agility that is the special province of nine-year-old boys, rocketed past the camera and into the living room, where his shouts of delight filled the air.

  “Turn it off,” said Randy from behind her.

  Cindy turned, smiling, and waved him away. “Oh, get over yourself. Why didn’t you ever tell me you were into racing when you were a kid? God, Randy, you were adorable.”

  He said nothing as he reached down, pulled the remote from her hand, and turned off the DVD player. The screen turned a bright shade of blue when the picture vanished.

  Cindy turned all the way around, kneeling on the sofa so she could better face him. “What did you do that for?”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “I knew that already. Did you make your call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Going to let me in on it now?”

  Randy nodded, came around, and sat down beside her. Cindy readjusted her position and took hold of his hand.

  Randy said, “Just listen to me for a minute, okay? Don’t...don’t say anything or ask any questions, just listen.”

  Feeling anxious—God, his face was so pale—Cindy nodded her agreement.

  Randy hit the remote, returning to the race track scene, then hit the Pause button and pointed to the screen.

  “I called Mom just to make sure,” he said. “The carpeting was light blue, not green like this. But that’s not...not why I called her.

  “Cindy, look at me. How long have you known me? Ten years, right? We’ve been married for six years—and by the way, I’ve loved every minute of it, if I haven’t told you lately. The thing is, have I ever struck you as someone who’s absent-minded or forgetful?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever thought of me as being unstable in any way? The anti-depression medication aside, I mean.”

  “Of course not.”

  He stared at her with an intensity that made Cindy uncomfortable. He hasn’t been taking his meds, she thought. That has to be it.

  He started the DVD once again. “Look at the screen, Cindy. Tell me what you see.”

  “Randy, you’re making me nervous.”

  “Please?”

  “Okay, babe, okay.” She faced the television. I see you and your dad playing with an electric racing car set on the floor of your folks’ old living room.”

  “Look closer.”

  It wasn’t until the little boy on the screen ran over to hug his mother—forcing her to set down the still-running camera—that Cindy realized what was wrong.

  “What the—?”

  “See it now, do you?” asked Randy.

  She did. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen: a small readout giving the time and the date.

  3:42 p.m. 12/16/68.

  “That’s from a video camera,” she said, looking at him. “Did they even have video cameras in 1968?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Randy. “We never owned anything like that when I was a kid. In 1968, Dad was in the middle of a seven-month layoff from the plant. We had a very...inexpensive Christmas that year. It was nice, Mom had been saving money so we’d have a good dinner, but as far as presents went...I got a couple of Aurora monster model kits and some new shoes, that’s it.”

  Cindy looked back at the scene on the television, then to her husband once again. “Okay, maybe I’m a little slow here today, baby, but are you telling me—”

  “—that we didn’t own a home movie camera, video cameras weren’t available to the public, and what you’re looking at”—he pointed to the happy scene unfolding in all its glory—“never happened. Yeah, I wanted an HO race set, but that was out of the question.” He looked back at the screen, and when he spoke again, his voice quavered. “This never happened, Cindy. That’s why I called Mom—I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misremembering things. I wasn’t. The carpeting was light blue, we never owned a home movie camera, and I never got a racing set.”

  He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “The thing is, while I was growing up, I used to pretend that I did get one, y’know? I mean, you do that when you’re a kid, you imagine things that didn’t happen actually did.”

  Cindy nodded. “I did that all the time. I still do.”

  Randy smiled at her, touching her cheek. “When I used to play that scene out in my head, it looked just like that.” He nodded toward the television.

  “Except the carpeting was the right color?” asked Cindy.

  “Bingo.”

  For a minute they both sat watching silently as the scene played out, culminating in Randy beating the pants off his father in the Big Championship Race.

  The scene quickly blacked out and a notice reading End Of Tape appeared in the middle of the screen.

  Randy stopped the DVD player once again and began rummaging around on the coffee table.

  “What’re you looking for?” asked Cindy.

  “The invoice, the list that came with the discs.”

  “I put on my desk. Hang on.” She went into her office and retrieved the paperwork, and came back to find Randy on the floor with all of the discs spread out in front of him (still in their protective sleeves, thank God).

  Holding up the papers, Cindy asked, “What are we looking for?”

  Randy smiled at her. “You know, you probably don’t notice how you always do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “That ‘we’ business. Five minutes ago, this was my problem, then I tell you about it and suddenly it’s our problem. Not ‘me’ but ‘we’.”

  “Don’t be silly, baby—of course it’s our problem. What bothers you, bothers me.”

  He blew her a kiss, then pointed with his thumb at the television. “This is Disc #3. What’s the list say is on it?”

  Cindy found the invoice for #3 and read aloud: “Disc #3. Transfers of home movies, Reels 1—5, labeled ‘Prom’, ‘Cindy’s College Graduation’, ‘First Day on the Job’, ‘Mom and Dad’s 40th Anniversary Party’ and ‘Our Wedding Rehearsal.’” She lowered the paper and stared at her husband. “They mislabeled, that’s all.”

  “Did they?” Randy picked up the remote, pressed Previous, and a moment later the screen showed Cindy, ten years younger and damn near in tears, receive her college diploma. Then he hit the Next button not once but twice, and there was Cindy, laughing and waving at the camera as her mother videotaped her walking into the high school on her first day as the newest History teacher. Randy then hit Previous once, and there was his father, setting up the HO track in the middle of the living room that had the wrong color—

  —both Cindy and Randy started—

  —the living room that now had the correct light-blue color of carpeting.

  Randy’s hand began shaking. “Jesus Christ, honey, what the hell is going on?” He looked at her with an expression of confusion and helplessness that damn near broke her in half.

  This time it was Cindy who turned off the disc, but she also ejected the damned thing and turned off the player. “I don’t know, baby, but don’t...don’t let it get to you like this, okay? Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.” Even to her own ears it sounded like a desperate, empty promise, something to say to Make It All Go Away For Right Now.

  But Randy was having none of it. He pointed to the discs spread out in front of him. “There are eight discs here, Cindy, eight. We were charged for seven.” He picked up the eighth disc; both the protective sleeve and label on the disc were blank.


  “Randy, you need to calm down, baby, okay? I’ll tell you what—let’s get something to eat, let’s go out for a bit, and then we’ll come back and watch all of these from start to finish, okay? Maybe one of us will see something that’ll help us figure out how...how...”

  “...how an imagined memory of something that never happened could wind up on these things?”

  She couldn’t think of anything to say. Just blurting it out like that made it sound absurd.

  “Okay,” she said. “Screw it, then. C’mon, sit down next to me and let’s watch it again. Come on.” She sat on the sofa and patted the spot next to her. “Come on. Let’s do this. You and me.”

  He sat beside her and took hold of her hand, and Cindy started the disc once more.

  They watched Cindy receive her diploma, and then watched as she walked into her first day as a History teacher.

  The race track film was gone.

  Silently, anxiously, they started with the first disc and worked their way through all of the first seven. There was nothing on any of the discs that wasn’t supposed to be.

  Which left only the eighth, unmarked disc.

  “Jesus,” said Randy, looking at it as Cindy slipped it from its sleeve. “Did we imagine it?”

  “Baby, I’ve never believed in ‘shared hallucinations’ or whatever it is they’re called.” She examined the last disc under the light as if she expected to find some kind of ancient sigil hidden in the reflection. Looking up at her husband, she tried to smile and almost made it. “I’m game if you are.”

  Randy silently nodded his head, looking for all the world like a prisoner who’d just been told the hour of his execution was fast approaching.

  Cindy slipped the disc into the player and sat very close to her husband as she hit the Play button.

  The first sequence was the missing race track film, which the two of them watched as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if it were something from the past that Randy had shared with her many times over. At one point, they both even laughed at something Randy’s father said as he was assembling the set.

  Then came the film of Randy getting ready for his first Cub Scout meeting.

  “I don’t remember this,” he said to her, gripping her hand tighter.

  “But you were a Cub Scout, right?”

  “...no...”

  “Oh, God...”

  And they watched. They watched as Randy graduated all the way to Eagle Scout; they watched as Randy was lifted onto the shoulders of his football teammates after he’d tackled the quarterback of the opposing team, preventing the touchdown that would have lost Randy’s team the state championship (he’d never participated in sports, much to his father’s disappointment); they watched as Randy readied himself for his high school prom (to which he did not go because his father had died the previous week); they watched as Randy and his parents moved his belongings into his college dorm room (he’d done this alone); and they watched as Randy’s parents embraced both he and Cindy at their wedding.

  “Looks like it would have been a nice life,” he whispered.

  Cindy looked at him. “What’s wrong with the one you have now?”

  He turned toward her. “Nothing, honey, nothing at all. I love you, you know that, right?”

  “Of course I do.”

  He looked back at the screen. “This is the past I wish I’d’ve had. Look at all this. It’s all so...interesting. So happy and exciting.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the life you’ve had. It’s been a good life—it’s still a good life, baby.”

  He shook his head. “Look at me, Cindy. I’m a dull little man, and I know it, okay? I don’t have any great sports stories to share with the guys I work with, I don’t have any great adventures to impress people with, and I sure as hell aren’t the most exciting man you could’ve picked for a husband.

  “I used to resent the hell out of that, you know? I hated Dad for dying like he did and leaving me to take care of Mom and the house. I started college three years late because I had to get a job at the plant to help pay for everything. God, I resented it! I resented not having that life, the one on the screen. I used to imagine...when I was really angry, I mean really, really angry, I used to imagine that—”

  His words cut off when he looked back at the screen.

  It was a film of a woman giving birth to a child that was obviously dead. The woman insisted on holding the body, and as the camera came in for a close-up, Cindy saw that it was Randy’s mother.

  A moment of blackness, and then came the image of a teenaged Randy, looking a decade older than his years, stabbing his parents in their sleep, their blood spattering the walls with every plunge of the knife.

  Another moment of blackness, and there was Randy, in his twenties but looking much older, tying a naked and severely-beaten woman to a wooden chair. The woman whimpered and screamed and begged him to stop, but Randy ignored her pleas as he turned away and began selecting tools from a table.

  A final moment of blackness, and there was Randy, as he was now, sitting beside Cindy, as she was, the two of them staring at a screen that showed them sitting on a sofa facing a television screen that showed the two of them facing a television screen that showed the two of them facing a television screen...

  Randy sat forward and buried his head in his hands. “God, Cindy, the...thoughts I had when I was that angry. That’s why I started seeing a psychiatrist—remember that I had to cancel our third date because I’d forgotten about the appointment?”

  “I thought you were just trying to let me down easy,” she said. She only now realized that she’d moved away from him, that the last series of images had turned her stomach. How could this Randy, this man she loved, ever harbor thoughts so repulsive and violent?

  Good God, did she know him at all?

  He looked up and saw the expression on her face, saw that she’d moved away from him, and his face went blank. “Just so you know, the girl in the chair was Tammy Wilson, who was the only girlfriend I had during college. She cheated on me with at least three different guys, all of them jocks.” He looked at the screen once more. “I won’t lie to you, Cindy. Thinking about doing that to her...it helped. I’m not proud of those thoughts but I can’t very well deny having them, especially now, can I?

  “And sometimes, honey, when you really disappoint me...I think about doing the same things to you. And it makes me happy. It makes me feel good....”

  She pulled the remote from his hand and turned off the disc, which she then ejected, pulled from the player, and snapped in two.

  “There,” she said to the empty sofa, and then felt herself starting to cry. She quickly got hold of herself, sat down, pulled in a deep breath, and fingered the jagged scar that ran from her left temple to the side of her mouth, a souvenir from her own father—one of many that she carried all over her body.

  Goddammit! She’d almost made it work this time, almost had the perfect husband, the perfect marriage, but Daddy’s influence always had a way of creeping back, one way or another.

  She rubbed at the burn scars around her wrists, scars now faded with age but still pink enough to remind her of the ropes, of the chair, of Daddy’s tool kit.

  She looked at the stack of DVDs with the transferred home movies of families she’d never met and would never know, and decided that she’d start looking for new memories tomorrow. She was always alone in the lab—that was the best place for someone who looked like her, anyway. History teachers with disfigured faces weren’t exactly in demand these days, and never had been.

  There were always dozens, hundreds of home movies people wanted transferred to DVD. So she’d say goodbye to Randy and hope that, tomorrow, she could find some new memories that she could hold on to, ones that Daddy couldn’t sneak in and ruin.

  She turned off the television set and for a few moments just knelt there, staring at the slightly distorted reflection of her face.

  “I’ll miss you, Randy,” she whi
spered. “You were the best one yet.”

  She placed her hand against the screen, imagining that the reflected hand was not hers, but that of a gentle and compassionate man who was reaching out through the glass to take hold of hers and whisper that she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world, and, oh, how he would love her forever....

  Return to Mariabronn

  There you are. I see you at night.

  * * *

  Lorena notices right away that Rudy is out of sorts. He always took a stool right smack in the middle of the counter—“I like being close to the action,” he’d say. “And if there’s no action, I like looking at you and imagining some action.” Why she hasn’t slapped his face after all this time, she can’t say. Maybe it’s because he always blushes like a little boy who’s just told his first dirty joke whenever he tries one of his bad lines on her. There’s something sweet about his attempts at crude trucker humor, and that always makes her smile.

  But tonight Rudy sits at the far end of the counter, near the bathrooms, the worst seat in the diner. He’s been tight-lipped, shaky, and anxious. This is not the same man she’s been serving and flirting with for the past couple of years, and she’s not sure if it’s a good idea to ask him about anything too personal. Still, he looks like he’s about to crack apart. Lorena finishes refilling everyone’s coffee and drifts down to Rudy.

  “I gotta tell you, Rude”—the nickname usually gets a grin out of him, but not tonight—“I didn’t expect to see you with the weather and the roads the way they been. You musta drove like a bat out of hell.”

  Rudy attempts a smile, doesn’t quite make it, and silently pushes his coffee cup toward her. Lorena fills it again. When Rudy reaches for it, she puts her free hand on top of his and squeezes. “What’s up with you tonight, Rude? Usually by this time you’ve propositioned me at least three times. You never know—tonight I might say ‘Yes.’”