“Look at this place,” I said. “They kept the poor kid down here like a prisoner.”
Slowly, Jodie brought a hand to her mouth. Her face had gone the color of soured milk.
“It was like unearthing a bomb shelter or a time capsule or something after a nuclear holocaust.”
“How . . . how did you find this?”
“It was right here behind the wall. I pushed on the wall, and it opened like some pharaoh’s secret fucking passageway.” I waved her in. “Come here and look at this stuff.”
“No.” She didn’t move.
“What?”
“Get out of there. I don’t like it.”
“What are you talking about? Isn’t this totally fucking bizarre?”
“Yes. It is.”
I tapped my sneaker against the plastic container of wooden blocks. “I even had these same blocks when I was a kid.”
“How nice for you. Please come out.”
I watched her on the other side of the doorway—really, on the other side of the wall—and for all the distance I suddenly felt between us she could have been in an alternate universe. It was just a temporary feeling, though, and once it passed I went to her and rubbed her arms.
Jodie looked at me, but at the same time her eyes were distant and unfocused, as if I were made of smoke and she could see straight through me.
“Hey,” I said, “what’s the matter with you?” Then the answer dawned on me, and my goofy grin faded. “You know about Elijah. You’re creeped out because you know he died here. That’s it, isn’t it?”
My words surprised her—she’d known, but she hadn’t expected me to know. Before I could fully read her face, she turned away. It wasn’t forceful enough to betray any sense of emotion, but it caused my hands to drop from her arms just the same.
“Tell me,” I said. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“A woman at Adam and Beth’s Christmas party told me.” Jodie wandered over to the washer and dryer where she feigned casual interest in the big orange box of detergent on one of the slatted shelves beneath the basement stairs. I wondered if the woman in question had been Nancy Stein. “I asked Beth about it later, and she said it was true.”
“Why did you keep it a secret from me?”
“Didn’t you keep it a secret from me?”
“I was trying to protect you. There was no need to tell you about it.”
“And I was trying to protect you, too.” When she faced me I could tell she was fighting tears. “I won’t have you chastise me for this. I won’t allow it. I remember that night at your brother’s house after your mom’s funeral. And I’ve been there for your low points when Kyle’s memory haunts you. I hear you talk in your sleep about him. But mostly I know how you are and how you dwell on things, how you torture yourself.” She clenched her beer bottle so tight I feared she would shatter it. “So, yes, I didn’t think you knew, and I had no plans to ever tell you. If I had to keep that secret for your own mental health, then I would have taken it to my grave.”
“Christ. I’m hurt you think I’m so weak.”
“Grow the hell up. Don’t try and make me feel guilty. I won’t.”
Jodie was right. Notwithstanding the sting of betrayal I felt, I understood why she’d kept it from me. Too clearly I could summon the memory of that night after my mother’s funeral, the words that were said in anger and the punches that were thrown.
“Okay,” I said at last, closing the distance between us. I hugged her and felt the beer bottle press into my abdomen. “Okay.”
Jodie sighed against my shoulder, and I let her go. I expected her eyes to be moist but they weren’t. She just looked incredibly tired.
“I want you to call someone, have them come out and get rid of all that stuff,” she said, nodding in the direction of Elijah’s bedroom. “And I don’t want to talk about what happened to that boy anymore. It’s unsettling but it has nothing to do with us.”
“Right,” I said, massaging her shoulder with one hand. “It has nothing at all to do with us.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The following morning I telephoned a company called Allegheny Pickup and Removal and spoke to a fellow with the unfortunate name of Harry Peters about getting rid of Elijah Dentman’s things. It would take ten days for them to fit me into their rotation: a duration Jodie wasn’t too thrilled about. Yet if Jodie gave the hidden bedroom and its cache of childlike artifacts more than a passing thought each day, she did a spectacular job not letting it show.
I, on the other hand, found myself creeping down into the basement bedroom any chance I could get—and against the promise to my wife that I would do just the opposite—because I felt an inexplicable longing to sift through all Elijah’s things.
The story Adam had told me about Elijah’s accidental death coupled with the discovery of the boy’s tomblike bedroom had caused a previously diminishing spark to reignite in the center of my creative soul. My writer’s block evaporated like clouds of heavy fog retreating out to sea; once again I was able to see the bright lights of that grand city.
I lost all interest in the manuscript I’d been trying to write—the first few chapters of which Holly had already read and loved—and began fleshing out descriptions of a make-believe family (that maybe wasn’t so make-believe) rooted in some disturbing and interpersonal dysfunction. A single mother and her young son come to live with the boy’s uncle and ailing grandfather in the final days before the grandfather passes on. What sort of life did these characters live? What happens to a young boy who’s forced to live in a ten-by-ten room that resembled something out of “The Cask of Amontillado”?
Of course, the similarities between Elijah’s death and my own brother’s were not lost on me. Both had drowned at roughly the same age. Both of their bedrooms had been left eerily undisturbed following their deaths—Elijah’s in the basement of 111 Water-view Court and Kyle’s in our house in Eastport. Since Adam was the eldest, Kyle and I had shared the bedroom. After Kyle’s death, my father moved my stuff out, and I bunked in Adam’s room until that cold December day when my parents, silent and moving as if manipulated by strings, finally packed up all Kyle’s belongings and transferred them to the garage.
(Whatever happened to Kyle’s stuff after that remains a mystery to me; after our father died and our mother went to live with her sister in Ellicott City, Adam and I returned to our childhood home to take care of our father’s estate. I’d expected to find Kyle’s stuff still in the garage—expected to be mercilessly confronted by it like a murderer facing Judgment Day—but was surprised to find it gone. And somehow that was worse than having to see that stuff all over again, because it meant that there had been at least one specific moment in time when my parents had to go through everything in order to get rid of it, and it hurt me to think of the grief it must have caused them.)
Because of these similarities and because I had no idea what Elijah Dentman had looked like, I gave my fictional little boy characteristics very similar to Kyle’s—slight of frame, bright hair, handsome eyes with great fans of lashes, gingery spray of freckles across the saddle of his nose. The only towheaded male in our family: the odd man out. The writing came in a fury and left me drained but excited by the end of each session.
One afternoon while Jodie was out with Beth, I phoned Adam and told him to come over as soon as he could. He showed up on the front porch in his dark blue police uniform, his hat in his hands. The uniform made him look twice as big, the body armor he wore under his shirt giving him the overall rounded appearance of a whiskey barrel.