Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Do what?”

  She nodded at the gates. “Take me in there and show me the boxes.”

  “You said you wanted to see them.”

  “And you said that the place depressed you.”

  “No, I said that the room was big, cold, and depressing.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Technically, no, because—”

  “Shut. Up. You’d really take me in there and show it to me, even if it makes you sad?”

  I said nothing. There seemed to be no point.

  “I’m gonna hold your hand for a minute,” said Melissa.

  She did, and for a few seconds I was aware of her being somewhere within one of my memories of the storage room. This wasn’t anything like this morning or with her mother at the funeral home; this time, I felt…comforted. Less alone.

  She let go of my hand and gave a mock shiver. “Yeech, you’re right. That is one depressing place, dude. Seriously.”

  “Told you.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You mean besides that one?”

  She giggled. “Don’t be a smarty-pants. It makes me want to smack you.”

  “And your question…?”

  Her face became very serious, very adult-looking. “Why do you do this? How did you get this job? What do you do for money? I mean, jeez, it’s not like somebody pays you for this, do they?”

  “That’s four questions.”

  She huffed. “What? You gotta be somewhere in, like, ten minutes or something? Okay, it’s four questions, big deal. Will you tell me, please?”

  By now I’d backed out and was heading to the apartment. I decided to take a few small detours. If I was going to tell her about this, it was going to be in the car, not the apartment. I had never spoken about this while in the apartment, and I never would. Something about Rebecca’s presence made talking about it seem distasteful, as if I would be dishonoring my wife’s memory. Or the memory of the wife I thought I’d known.

  Melissa cleared her throat—dramatically, of course. “Well…?”

  “Promise not to interrupt me with a bunch of questions?”

  She mimed zipping her mouth closed.

  “I’m serious, Melissa. I’ve never told anyone about this, and I don’t want you making jokes.”

  She raised her hand, unzipped her mouth, and said: “I’d never make fun of you. Not about something like this. I promise.”

  I flashed my most dazzling Constipated Smile. “Okay. If something isn’t clear, then you can interrupt me. Deal?” I held out my hand.

  “Deal,” she replied, and we shook on it.

  “Okay, I’m going to answer your questions in reverse order, if that’s all right.”

  “Just so long as you answer them.”

  “I don’t get paid for doing this. I live on my savings, the early-retirement benefits package from my job, and Rebecca’s insurance money.”

  Melissa held up her hand. “Okay, I don’t, like, mean to bring up something sad, but if Rebecca killed herself, the insurance company wouldn’t pay.”

  I grinned and wagged a finger at her. “Oh, no, no, no—that’s a myth that a lot of insurance companies do everything they can to keep alive. The truth is, there are several companies who will pay on a life insurance policy when the person commits suicide. They wait a year, and they pay only the face-value of the policy, but they do pay. Suicide is considered a result of undiagnosed mental illness. You’d be surprised at how many companies quietly do this.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “Do you know what I did for twenty-two years before Rebecca died and I took early retirement?”

  Melissa shook her head.

  “I sold life-insurance.”

  “Oh. My. God! That is so funny! That is, like, the goofiest thing I’ve heard all week! Is it okay that I think that’s goofy?”

  I nodded. “I’ve come to see a certain irony in it.” I gave her a look.

  “I know what ‘irony’ means,” she said. “My teachers told Mommy I was ‘gifted.’”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “Yeah, well…what’cha gonna do? Hey—how old are you, anyway?”

  “I’ll turn forty-seven next month.”

  “Oh, man. Your birthday’s coming up? Dude, I could so make you the best birthday cake.”

  “I stopped celebrating my birthday a long time ago—oh, no you don’t, Melissa. No arguments.”

  She sighed, pouting. “Okay, you were saying…?”

  “Rebecca didn’t have her policy through my company. My ex-company is one that won’t pay out on a suicide.”

  “Well that sucks.”

  From the mouths of babes.

  “Does that answer your questions about my financial state?”

  “So you got enough money to live on for the rest of your life?”

  “If I’m careful. The apartment is paid for. Rebecca and I made some good investments. I’m not rich, Melissa, but I’m okay.”

  “Cool beans.” She turned toward me a little more and folded her arms across her chest. “So…how did you get this job, and why you?”

  “I don’t think of it as a ‘job,’ Melissa. It’s more like…”

  “Like what?”

  My throat tightened a little. I coughed. “Could we go back to that one later?”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled into the underground parking garage and had to dig out the card-key, then drove over to my assigned parking space near the elevators. I turned off the ignition, removed the keys, and sat looking at them in my hand.

  “What is it?” asked Melissa. “C’mon, Neal, you were going real good there.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why wasn’t your dad at your funeral? You’ve never even mentioned him.”

  “My daddy’s dead. He died before I was born. He had a big party with some of his friends right after he and Mommy found out she was pregnant. He was drunk and got in a wreck. He hit a tree. There wasn’t anybody else in the car with him, though, so that was lucky.” She looked down at her hands. “I only know him from, like, pictures and video tapes and what Mommy said about him. It’s not the same, y’know? It sounded like he might’ve been really cool, kinda like you.”

  “You think I’m cool?”

  A shrug. “Don’t let it go to your head, though. You’d have been a pretty cool dad, I think.”

  For a moment we just looked at one another. Then she scooted closer to me and put my arm around her shoulder. “Is this okay?”

  “This is good. I like this.”

  “Me, too.”

  No jolts, no visions, no sudden rush of sensations; just me with my arm around her shoulders, and she with her head resting against my chest. It was nice.

  “Three weeks after Rebecca’s funeral,” I said to her, “I came back to the apartment and found her sleeping in the guest room, just like you saw her. That’s where I’d…found her body. She’d taken a bunch of prescription tranquilizers, crushed them up and mixed them in with a bowl of oatmeal so she wouldn’t vomit. She’d been gathering the pills for months and I had no idea.

  “At first I didn’t know what to think—I mean, I’d watched the coffin with her body lowered into the ground, yet here she was, back in the guest room. The rotting part—if that’s what it is, rotting—that didn’t start for almost three months. But that night, when she first re-appeared, I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was breathing, I could see her chest rise and fall, I could hear the air going in and out of her lungs, it was like she was just taking a nap. I just figured that I’d been holding it all in, you know? The grief. I’d been holding it in and I’d simply…snapped. Gone a little crazy. So I pulled out a bottle of booze and got good and tanked, then went back into the room. She was still there. I decided that I was going to wake her up. So I stomped over to the bed and reached out and gave her arm a good shake. And that’s when…you remember what happened with us this
morning, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Something like that happened with Rebecca. It wasn’t as strong as what happened this morning, but it was bad enough. I had a single flash of what had been in her mind during her last moments, and it…it was awful, Melissa. She was so lonely, and I never knew. She felt like I was a stranger to her, had been for years.” Even now, hearing myself say it aloud, I still couldn’t quite grasp it.

  “I mean, people like to think that when someone they love dies, that that person is thinking about them, about those they’re leaving behind, right at the end.” I shook my head. “Rebecca wasn’t thinking about me at all. I wasn’t even a distant thought. I had pretty much ceased to exist for her.”

  Melissa reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  But I couldn’t stop, not now. “But then something fell out of her hand.” I lifted up the car keys. “A key wrapped in a piece of paper. It was a note, in her handwriting. It had an address on it, and a number, and the words, ‘Look in your other wallet.’

  “That’s where I found the card-key to the storage facility. The other key was for the padlock on the unit door, Number 23.”

  “That’s where you keep the boxes.”

  I nodded. “But that night, when I went to the place, there was only one box. It was filled with things of Rebecca’s I never knew she had. Children’s books, stuffed toy animals, a shadowbox of antique sewing thimbles, a watercolor pad filled with these gorgeous paintings she’d done—hell, I never knew she liked to paint. Fifteen years we’d been married, and I had no idea. There were notebooks of poetry she’d written, programs from theatrical productions she’d done in high school and college, it was just…these precious keepsakes from someone I never knew.

  “But the worst of it were the letters. She’d been having…I can’t call it an ‘affair’ because the two of them never…uh…they didn’t…”

  “Have sex. It’s okay to say something like that to me.”

  I couldn’t look at her, I was too embarrassed. “They’d been high-school sweethearts and had met again about ten years or so after she and I were married. They talked on the phone a lot, met for lunch, but made sure they were never alone together. He was married, as well, with a bunch of kids, but the letters…my God, Melissa, he loved her so much, and she loved him. She told him things she never told me. She had both his letters and hers—he’d sent hers back when he finally broke it off. It had just gotten too…I don’t know…too painful for both of them. I sat in that damned room all night reading them, and by the time I finished the last one, I knew that I’d been the runner-up for her all along. I was the consolation prize for not getting the man she was meant to have been with.

  “I wanted her back right then. I still do. I could have been a better man, the kind of man who deserved to be her husband. If I hadn’t been so busy making sure we had all of our ducks in a row, everything paid for, always keeping track of the money, the investments, all that pointless bullshit…then maybe I would have noticed how lonely she was. I loved her just as much as he did, but I was never good at showing it, expressing it with words like I should have. ‘You’re a very cautious man, Neal.’ That’s what she used to say to me. ‘Cautious.’” I pulled in a deep breath, squeezed Melissa’s shoulder, and pushed out the rest of it.

  “After that night, I kept checking on her, and I kept finding new pieces of paper, with names on them and the addresses of the hospital, or nursing homes, or the hospice. It didn’t take me very long to figure out what I was supposed to do. The first few were kind of tough. I had to dig through the dumpsters in order to find the boxes. But after I began figuring things out, the boxes…they weren’t so hard to find. They would be on top of all the garbage, or sometimes even setting beside the Dumpsters. I even know the schedules now. The hospital disposes of unclaimed personal effects every Tuesday night; the nursing home on 21st Street gets rid of them on Thursday; the retirement center puts their unclaimed boxes out on Friday; and the hospice—”

  “Sunday night,” said Melissa.

  “Sunday night.”

  “So you’ve been doing this for three years, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Must get lonely.”

  I thought of her on the playground, laughing with friends I couldn’t see. “It does sometimes. Even when I’ve got visitors like you and Lenny and all the rest. I even tried to stop doing it once, but that’s when Rebecca started to…deteriorate. There, I said it. I keep hoping that if I get to peoples’ effects right away that it will stop the process, that she’ll start getting better. But then I remember…she’s dead. There’s no ‘getting better’ from that.”

  “So why do you think you’re the one doing this?”

  I looked at her this time. “I don’t know for sure, but I hope…I hope that if I do enough, then she’ll forgive me for not being there for her, for being such a bad person, for being so distant and unthinking and…and…”

  “Cautious?”

  I nodded. “Cautious.”

  “Maybe it’s kind of like what the priests make you do after confession, Say an ‘Our Father’ or ‘Hail Mary’ or an Act of Contrition.”

  “Penance.”

  “Sounds like that to me. Mommy always used to say, ‘If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be—’”

  We were both startled by the sound of someone banging on the driver’s-side window. I actually shrieked, which made Melissa giggle afterward.

  “You ever going to get out of that damn car?” shouted Lenny. “I got something to show you.” I opened the door but Lenny was blocking my escape.

  “Got me a new toy today!” He held up what could only have been a digital camera, and a fairly expensive one, at that. “Some smartass yuppie-type left this at the library. I always wanted one of these, so I figured, what the fuck—oops, pardon the language, little lady.”

  Melissa grinned. “That’s okay. I’ve heard worse.”

  We climbed out of the car. Lenny removed his hat and offered his hand. “My name’s—”

  “Your name is Lenny Kessler. Hi. I’m Melissa.” She grabbed his hand and gave it a solid shake.

  “Well, now, it’s real pleasure to meet you, Melissa. I guess old Neal here’s mentioned me, am I right? Tell me I’m right.”

  “You’re right. Where’s your lady-friend from this morning?”

  “My lady—? Oh, you mean Theresa? The woman in the dress?”

  “Uh-huh. I saw you two talking. I watched from the window. She’s pretty.”

  “Pretty full of herself, but yeah, she’s a looker. I’m afraid she and I didn’t exactly hit it off.” He looked at me. “Pity. I’d’ve given a year’s pay for her to’ve unleashed the hounds and give me a look at those bazooba-wobblies under that designer dress.”

  Melissa giggled. “You’re funny.”

  “Glad someone here thinks so.” Lenny winked at her, then faced me. “So you were about to ask me why I was at the library in the first place?”

  I sighed. “Lenny, it’s already been a long day and it isn’t even six yet.”

  “I see you’re still your usual bucket of chuckles. That’s all right, I’ll tell you on the way up to your place. By the way, I hope you’ve still some of the good hooch left. I’m a bit parched.”

  The three of us headed toward the elevators. I pushed the UP button and waited.

  “I was looking through this book at the library,” said Lenny, “all about brain science and what the writers called the ‘biology of belief,’ right? They said that all our brains contain what they called a ‘God area,’ a place where the spiritual and the biological come together during moments of euphoria. And that got me to thinking about you and that ‘your cells remember you’ horseshit, so I—”

  I held up a hand, silencing him. “You still have your wallet on you, Lenny?”

  “Always.” He pulled it from his back pants pocket. “Not much money in there, though.”

  “Gimme.”
I took it from his hand, opened it, and thumbed through its contents until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out the card, read it, saw Lenny’s signature, and laughed.

  “What?” said Lenny. “You find a naked picture of me or something? Sorry if you feel inadequate at the sight of it, but—”

  “You were an organ and tissue donor, Lenny.”

  He pulled the card and wallet from my hands. “Yeah, so wha—? Oh, wait a minute…”

  “I don’t know what they took and what they didn’t, but according to that card, you agreed to donate your corneas. The rest of you could have been a godawful mess, Lenny, but corneas are among the first things they take from a donor.”

  He stared at the card, then looked at me. “So you were right? I mean, the cells in my corneas—?”

  “Are still active somewhere in the sockets of some lucky person.”

  “Well, hell, don’t that beat all?”

  The elevator arrived and its doors opened. It was empty.

  “I want to ask a favor of you two,” I said, stepping in and holding the door open. “Would you two mind just popping on up to the apartment and letting my ride up by myself? It’s nothing personal, but I just…need a minute or two by myself.”

  “You’re not gonna sneak out or something like that, are you?” asked Melissa.

  “Where would I go?”

  She nodded. “Good point.” She grabbed Lenny’s hand. “Okay, Mr. Gloomy Gus—we’ll see you upstairs.”

  The doors closed. I pushed the button to my floor, waited a few seconds until I felt the elevator start moving, and then my legs gave out and I dropped ass-first onto the floor, burying my face in my hands and crying. Goddammit!

  Three years. Three years it had taken me to get the walls built, to train myself not to feel anything, and in the course of two days Melissa had bulldozed right through them, and everything I’d been trying to avoid thinking about, confronting, admitting to myself, all of it followed right behind her, blasting into me like the heat from a furnace.

  There should be a way to scrape the guilt and regret and sadness from the places in you where it builds up like plaque on your connective tissue, making it almost impossible for you to get out of bed and face the day because it hurts too much to even move; there should be a tool that you can carry for those times when a little undetected piece of that plaque breaks loose and begins moving toward your core, a tool that can enter the flesh without spilling blood or scarring tissue and simply scour it away, cut it out, and leave you in a safe oblivion where nothing touches you, nothing moves you, nothing matters.