Floating Staircase Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    In the months following Kyle’s death, I grew sullen and withdrawn.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 special 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