The neighbors on the right had a son named Winston who was, by all counts, perfect. The neighbors on the left had a Great Dane who was also perfect and also named Winston, which was uncomfortable at first but eventually we all got used to it. It was a humorous anecdote, one Jay liked to tell when we hosted dinners out on the back deck. July evenings, years ago, neat blue skies dissolving into white. I remember Jay being charming, our guests laughing, the wine flowing.
“We forgot the law of averages,” I tell my father now. “It should have been obvious. What would happen.”
He flips through handwritten pages in his red leather-bound journal. “Oh yes, I recall. Two of the same on one block. Winchester, like the rifle, except these were beloved creatures.”
“It was Winston.”
“No, no, no. I wouldn’t misremember a name like that.”
He stops on a page and taps it with his finger. Moves his lips and nods.
“Should we have moved?” I ask. “Is that what we did wrong?”
“The thing about it is—”
Outside, the wind gusts. Boughs smack against gutters. The lights flicker. My father turns toward the window and stares past his own reflection, into the winter black. He tells me it’s the kind of storm that uproots trees and takes down power lines, the kind of cold where you hope for snow instead of rain. “Once that dampness gets in your bones, good luck getting any sleep.”
“It didn’t rain today, remember? We got a break.”
He squints into darkness. “It’ll be back.”
We listen to the wind for a while. It’s the kind of thing we do these days. Then he swivels his head so that his left ear points toward me. “That skinny kid we ate dinner with—how does that work? Did you order him off the internet?” He chuckles.
“Dad.”
“No judgment from me. But you’ll want to check on your valuables.”
“It’s not like that.”
He waves off my explanation before I even start. His eyes track my hands like he knows what to look for and he’s noticed it already: the empty spot where my ring should be.
Jay moved out over a year ago, but who’s counting. He left me our empty nest and a baseball bat next to the front door, his way of looking out for me. I wanted to smash the darkness with it, pound my way through to some undiscovered source of light. Instead I spent a month in Hawaii and when I returned told everyone I was thankful for the calm, the minimalism, the clear rumblings of a sea change. My co-worker Joelle gave me a hunk of rhodonite crystal that I could place on my chest whenever I needed emotional balance. She gave me a dream journal with a gorgeous blue cover. Take control of the narrative, nudge your subconscious to a place where you can heal. I set it on my bedside table, a pop of color against the white, uncertain how to use it or really what it was for.
Back then I was reading articles about bleached coral reefs and microplastics, children on the precipice and the foster parents who save them. Every morning, I drank a cup of jasmine tea out on the deck and embraced the evergreen hills in the distance, the imperfect mountain peaks. The point was to be present in the now, but inevitably I found myself lost in some old memory. Morgan in his baby jumper, clapping at the crows. Morgan pressing his hands against the window on the first clear morning after weeks of rain. My mowts, my mowts. Look, mommy.
The point was to empty your mind and try to breathe.
My father moved in at the end of August. We’d put in a wheelchair ramp and carved out a tiny suite for him where Jay’s office and the guest bedroom used to be. I wasn’t sure how it would go, if the two of us would get along. I remembered him as mildly unpleasant during conversations, certain of himself in a way that disallowed discussion. When I asked what was in his red book he told me he was being careful with his past, that memory was flexible. For instance, why did I move out here in the first place? I’d heard the answer dozens of times: there was money to be made on fishing boats, and Seattle’s old Norwegians reminded him of his parents. Ah, but that’s not all the way true. There was a dark-eyed woman who would only see me when it rained. This was before your mother, of course. During my learning years. He tapped the cover of his red book. You forget, sometimes. The clarity in his eyes astonished me.
Before Jay moved out, we’d had the downstairs remodeled into an apartment with a private entrance, a future source of passive income now that both kids were gone. By the time it was finished, Jay was gone too. At Thanksgiving, I invited our daughter Ginnie to stay there for the long weekend, to bring her girlfriend and her dogs and make herself at home, hoping I could lure her back with the promise of discounted rent. But she arrived alone and without luggage and navigated the conversation to avoid her future plans. When I took her downstairs to show off the apartment she stood in the doorway of Morgan’s old room and held her breath. Before I had time to convince her that it was unrecognizable, she was already heading back down the hall toward the exit.
The house that day was oven warm, lit by firelight. My father sat in his chair, pretending to drink a glass of wine, lifting it occasionally for another toast “to family.” He loaded food onto his plate and maneuvered his fork with stubborn dexterity, closed his eyes while he chewed. Next to him, Ginnie’s smile was a bright doorway. She’d turned out kind. Was this my doing or was it the law of averages too?
She put on one of her playlists and we joked about the extreme makeovers we would give each for Christmas. On the phone with her girlfriend, her laughter was broad-shouldered and startling. I’ll be home soon. I slid into the bathroom and warmed my legs on the heated tiles while I worked through some breathing exercises. Then I did a little shopping on my phone. A new duvet cover would help; mornings were when the heart bloomed, after all. Happy flower prints, bright colors. Arriving on Saturday.
When I returned to the living room, Ginnie stood with her bag looped across her body, car keys in her hand.
“But we bought all that stuff for breakfast.”
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“It’s too late to drive. You can sleep in my bed. I’ll go downstairs.”
“I have my own things to deal with, Mom. Sometimes they’re just as cataclysmic as yours.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
When we hugged I smelled dogs and spices and an apartment I’d never seen.
“You’re wearing that ring again,” she said. “Why?”
“Isn’t it better that your dad and I are still friends? No grudges.”
“I’m worried you think the breakup is temporary. Has he told you about his new girlfriend? She already moved in.”
“He’s been vague. That’s fine.”
“Okay, but do you at least know how young she is?”
“I wouldn’t expect your dad to—”
“She doesn’t have kids yet. She’s young enough to have as many as she wants. That’s what I’m trying to say. Sorry to be blunt.”
I was supposed to be devastated by this, but what I thought instead was I would do exactly the same thing.
They called it an atmospheric river. Rain fell for thirty-six hours straight, sending our waterways into a flood state. Four happy new duvet covers sat in their packaging on my bedroom floor. At the boutique grocery store where I worked, customers darted in through the doors and shook their umbrellas onto the already-wet floor.
I’d only gotten the job because Joelle thought being “productive” would balance my warring energies, but the young mothers kept catching me off guard, the kids sweet in their rubber boots and rain jackets, saying thank you mommy please. Low music floated overhead and worked its way into my brain. Whispery voices and tidy guitars handing out life instructions that it was too late for me to follow.
On the conveyor belt at my register, I looked down at a gourmet cookie in a sleeve of cellophane, shaped like an orca and painted in black-and-white frosting. A discontinued item on deep, deep markdown. I held it and stared, remembering the same cookie from when I was a young mother. Morgan’s first day of kindergarten. His five-dollar reward for good behavior, spent foolishly. Orca cookie! Orca cookie! Orca cookie! He’d sat at the kitchen table, taking little bites, swimming it through the air. I’m a polar bear. I’m a polar bear. Orca baby polar bear. Licking the crumbs off the table, running outside with a head full of noise. Stomping, howling, uncapped energy.
The young man at my register wasn’t twenty-one-year-old Morgan, but my heart beat wildly as I took in his young face and searched for a scar above his left eye that wasn’t there. He had a tilting mouth and uncertain eyes and smelled of damp wool. He paid with a mangled twenty-dollar bill and grimy fingernails.
“December,” he said, when I apologized for staring. “Everyone is so desperate but, like, we’re all going through it together.”
Dinner. How did that happen? I kept trying out the word “gesture,” in the way of nice people doing nice things. Maybe I was one of those older women with life experience to offer and judgment to withhold, the kind who helped right the lost youth. Maybe I could move to Taos or Telluride and build a place from scratch, with stunning blue tiles and salvaged wooden beams and things made out of copper. Maybe I would be a well of advice with no bottom, one of those metal dippers that pull up the water clear and cold.
“C.J.” told me he was twenty-three. He lived in a house that was “mostly broken” with a bunch of people he knew “from around.” Evenings and nights, he cleaned offices in high-rise buildings downtown. There was a smartness about him, a way he spoke about the human experience that felt wise and right. The universe just carries us along. We ride it out the best we can.
Yes.
I asked him where he wanted to be, how he was planning to get there, who he would become.
I never asked about his mother, or wondered if someone was missing him.
When we met again, for lunch, I gave him Morgan’s old suit, barely worn. “For job interviews,” I announced, like he’d never considered these words before. I was supposed to be teaching him—what was it, again?—but instead I let him talk about how we were made of mountains and oceans and the people who’d died before us. Our conversation passed like we were reading excerpts from two different books. I checked his eyes for clouds, his brow for sweat, trying to remember what signs to look for. He stared at the ring I intentionally did not leave at home. When I moved my hand in just the right way, the diamond scattered a prism of color across the wall. I waited for C.J. to tell me the suit would make him feel confident, that it would transform him into someone better. In his body language, I searched for “thank you,” decided we would get there eventually.
A dream journal. A book of dreams. How would a person know how to put them into words? While my father slept, I peeked inside his red book.
Back then the snow would start up in November and by January it was so deep you couldn’t remember what was beneath it. It was like a flood that by luck hadn’t happened. If you put on snowshoes you could walk on top of water, try to make sense of the snowmobile tracks crisscrossing the landscape. The local ponds were frozen blue, their edges marked by pink flagging that exploded against the white.
Back then there were cabins with fireplaces dotting the landscape. Out our windows we watched the earth and sky in balance. We were pockets of heat that the snow-floods couldn’t touch. We kids worried about elk on the snowmobile trails, how thin they looked, but my mother told me that nature had systems in place we couldn’t see, that animals had homes just like us, only made out of different materials.
Every year there was an ice harvest, a tradition that persisted long after it was no longer needed. As children we wondered how many blocks of ice would have fish trapped inside. Later we learned that cold-blooded beings could shut themselves down to the point of nearly ceasing to be. We wondered what would happen if the winter never ended, how long a thing could be asleep.
The mother of Winston the boy, our neighbor on the right, was a doctor who won awards and presented at conferences and always knew which pair of shoes worked best with her outfit. Her husband was an outdoorsy type whose job was something to do with tech. Morgan was a few months older than Winston. For a short time they were best friends, but for a longer time they weren’t. Our two families had matching jungle gyms, and sometimes I misremember two boys swinging in unison, looking across at one another and laughing while soaring up past the fence line. But it was Ginnie in the swing. It was Ginnie soaring. Morgan only climbed: too high, too precarious, too impulsive; crashing to the ground with a bloody nose, a rage of tears as he kicked the slide in retaliation.
My mother-in-law called Morgan a coil of energy that needed to be released from time to time. “This is just how some kids are. They need a different kind of love and the right kind of therapist.”
My father reminded me that there used to be a draft; boy children understood that war was in their future, and nobody liked to see the broken ones who came home but still there was a balance to it all, a kind of beauty in the way they valued life. Nowadays kids break from boredom. Their brains are designed to fight. They can’t suppress the urge.
The articles I read convinced me that his explanation didn’t make sense. Articles like What is Happening to Our Boys? And How to Raise the Kind of Man the World Needs. Kids didn’t need to be fixed; it was our behavior that needed to change. It was true; I understood it was. But once you figure this out, then what?
Ginnie would tell me about things she saw at school, which kids Morgan wasn’t hanging out with anymore and which different ones he was. His grades dipped to Cs and Ds. The school called us. Other parents called us. Even when you’re in the trajectory, you see it. Your child always trying to be three years older, welcoming the same chaos you’re fighting to save him from. Still yelling at objects, still punching metal, admiring metal and the ways men have used it to their advantage, looking for people more like him.
We tried discipline, and we tried kindness, but always at the wrong times and in the wrong amounts. Warnings. Ultimatums. Therapists. What about love? Was there enough love? He was eighteen when he kicked down Ginnie’s bedroom door and threatened to kill her. A joke, he insisted later, after Jay told him for the millionth time that he had to shape up or leave. We thought he was an “angry young man” who would eventually find maturity. More discipline. Psychiatric care. When he finally did leave, at nineteen and with no warning, we wondered how much he would sell my stolen engagement ring for, how far he would get with it. We hoped thousands of miles away rather than to the end of some local sidewalk. It’s temporary, we said. One day he’ll find himself.
My father said I needed to learn to be more practical about it. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, don’t blame yourself. It’s the way the brain is wired. These are the ones who would have been excellent fighters and lost their lives in a way that mattered. He tapped the cover of his red leather journal, as if to remind me if its authority.
Five months after Morgan left, Ginnie graduated high school. She and her girlfriend had a van already packed up, a lease already signed, exact plans none of my business but she’d stay in touch. She was my straight-A child, the one who never asked for attention.
“You’ll get over this, Mom. I promise you will.”
“What if he comes back, though? What do I say?”
She nodded. “I get it.”
On a regular day, you could see Puget Sound through our west-facing windows. On a clear day, the snow-capped magnificence beyond. On the in-between days, when the clouds were just beginning to lift, the sun worked out a patchwork of pink light that illuminated the highest peaks.
The fortune of place. This was what they meant by it.
We weren’t exceptionally rich, not by modern standards, but Ginnie reminded me that the ability to compare piles of gold was a special kind of privilege. You didn’t work for years. You don’t really work now. Yes, I knew this. I tried to be understanding and compassionate, but when they said imagine what it’s like to be this person or that person, a lot of the time I just couldn’t.
The replacement engagement ring Jay gave me was obnoxious, an emerald-cut diamond that leapt off my finger and snagged my sweaters. A disengagement ring. Ha. Why not buy the woman I’m leaving the most obvious rock I could find? Say what you will about us, but we always got each other’s jokes. I laughed, let the moment turn funny-sweet, let him remind me that he always took care of me. Just don’t come after me too hard in the divorce, okay?
My friends were confused, supportive, outraged. While Jay was off making babies with Angelica in Port Townsend, there I was in my empty house with only a precious stone for company. For months I’d kept it locked away in a closet, but during the winter it was a source of light and I wanted to flaunt it, be careless with it, be in on the joke. Joelle warned me that a stone could hurt as much as it could heal. It was amicable, I reminded her, a word I focused on to avoid thinking about what else we were missing.
Jay swore on his life that he’d always kept the safe locked and Morgan couldn’t have known the combination. We weren’t that kind of a house. Of course not. History just happens; it’s events that move from the present to the past. But I never told my friends about this piece of family history, or about the present I still inhabited, waiting for a call at night, a stern voice telling me that a handgun registered to my ex-husband had been found, had been used.
It’s the hours you spend imagining what comes next that wreck you the most.
I brought C.J. down to the empty apartment, to the rooms where my children once slept, which smelled now of wood and paint. If Ginnie didn’t want it why not him? Free rent for a while, until he felt stable. Clean sheets. Clean towels. A working toilet. Whatever he needed to thrive.
But then again there were the neighbors to consider, the questions they would ask. There was his overnight job and the hours he would keep. There was the question of whether he really had a job at all. There was who he’d bring home and what I would overhear through the floor and how many copies of the key he’d make. There were his dirt-rimmed fingernails and his dirt-rimmed shirtsleeves. What kind of people had hands like his? Gardeners, gravediggers, graverobbers. Who else?
And there was the apartment itself, how clean it was. How new.
“Why are we here?” C.J. asked.
“I’m sorry. I thought there were some other clothes down here that I could give you.”
Upstairs, he sat on a couch and stared out the window while I made dinner. The clouds were a volatile mix of grays and whites, the same color as the evening itself. My father wheeled himself out of his study and offered up his legendary handshake, and after a few minutes of aimless small talk he rolled up to the table for his nightly appetizer of bread and butter.
“Dad says we’ll all get to the point where meals are the only thing we look forward to,” I offered. “His advice is to make sure you save up enough money so you’ll be able to eat the things you want. At the end.”
C.J.’s eyes flashed from my father to the food, the wide-plank floors, the February sky. He went to the sink and washed his hands, returned to the table and pulled out a chair. A mother, once, had taught him to be polite.
During dinner, the wind whipped up into the beginnings of a storm. Oblivious to the shivering trees outside, my father savored his grilled salmon and his rosemary potatoes and another two slices of bread. I stopped trying to start a conversation and instead watched him eat, admired his joyful concentration as he worked his way through each bit of food before wiping the plate clean with some bread. What a spectacle. What an accomplishment. “Thank you darling,” he said, then turned his chair around and rolled off with a wave.
Later I turned on the gas fireplace and wondered conversationally how bad the storm would be. Gusts up to some surprising number of miles per hour, the power company with emergency crews at the ready. C.J. stood with his hands deep in his pockets, taking in the framed photographs propped up on the mantle. Several of Ginnie, one of my parents, one of the family—back when a person could call us this—dressed up for a wedding. Morgan looking empty, wishing he was anywhere else.
I could at least offer C.J. the apartment for the night. I could at least offer to drive him home.
What I said instead was this: “I don’t see how someone who cleans offices for a living would have dirty hands. Explain that one to me.”
“What?”
“We need some trust here if you want my help.”
He laughed, barely a laugh at all, then touched the silver frame of the family photo. I saw him consider what it might be like. A house like mine. A life like mine. Then a shift, a flash, a slight recoil, a frown.
“Wait. This is your…son?” A hardness in his shoulders, in the line of his jaw.
“That’s Morgan.” I held my breath. “Do you know him?”
“You gave me this guy’s suit? You were—he used to live here?”
“What is it? What did he do?”
C.J. took three steps back and shook his head. “No, I don’t know him.”
“But you just—”
“I got it wrong, okay? It’s wrong. This.”
“But—”
From my father’s study came the clang of the fisherman’s bell he rang when he needed my help.
“Please don’t leave yet.” My voice was almost a whisper. “Let’s talk about this.”
My father is slipping into the shadows more often, although when I sit with him for long enough, I see that this is where he finds the most light. Now I turn on his music and let the harmonies of Norwegian men fill his little room. I lay out his medications, his glass of water.
This house and I have been through so much. Twenty-one years of temperateness. Twenty-one years of temperance. And where are we now?
I ask the question again. “Should we have moved? Was it my fault?”
Whoever my father sees, she isn’t me. He settles a hand on her shoulder and tells her not to worry; he’s decided he can tolerate the rain. He’s decided to stay.
“Tell me about the snow, Dad.”
His eyes leap to life. “Jesus, there was this one winter when we hit a warm stretch and I nearly got killed in an avalanche.” He opens the red book and flips through the pages until he finds the one he’s looking for. His shoulders relax. His chest rises and falls. I can see the snow-swept landscape where our dreams intersect, so near that I almost hear it breathe.
Then one winter all it did was rain. It was February before the temperature finally dropped and everything turned to ice. The air was so cold, it stole your voice. The snowmobiles and ice saws were quiet and there was a line of sparkling white where the pewter sky pressed down onto land. It was these conditions that would inspire a few of the young men to strap spikes to their feet and “light out,” a term that made us think of votive candles and the flame under a whistling teapot. It was boredom that took them. Stubbornness. The glimpse of a future threatened by climate change and the looming extinction of the fearsome creatures who owned the landscape and all its startled souls. To keep the creatures you had to be the creatures, and so the young men went sprinting down the ice-covered roads and across the frozen ponds, roaring into the wild.
My father’s head nods forward, his open mouth whistling out a rusty snore. I slip out of the study and into a dim living room, the lights off except for a single bulb by the front door.
“C.J.?”
The house shudders to confirm its emptiness, but I search anyway, pausing at the counter to consider the leftovers in the Tupperware containers I set out for C.J. to take home. Next to them is a tiny ceramic bowl where I placed my ring before doing the dishes, where C.J. watched me place my ring.
Do I expect the bowl to be empty? Do I hope it will be?
I slide the ring back on my finger and try to remember what the old one looked like, what the house used to look like, before we remodeled it, room by room by room. There was an L-shaped sofa with extra soft cushions. A cabinet filled with boardgames. A little bench by the door where the kids dropped their raincoats after school.
The night darkens further. The wind fades. I crawl into bed and place the rhodonite on my chest. Try forcing the laughter, see if it comes. The neighbors on the right had a son named Winston and the neighbors on the left had a Great Dane who was also named Winston. The duvet is fussy and flowery and all wrong for a place where someone sleeps.
I nudge my phone to life.
How much does it snow in Taos?
How much does it snow in Telluride?
Do polar bears eat orcas?
At what age does a human brain fully mature?
This time I choose bright white sheets and pillowcases, a duvet cover with a wash of gray, a pattern that suggests leaf veins and underground burrows and wing-spread feathers. A duvet rated extra warm. A wood-burning stove.
I look up houses and cabins and snowmachines and photographs of the northern lights. I look up baby parkas and bib overalls and waterproof shearling-lined boots. Little gloves. The fastest sled. Dogs wearing bells. Dogs that love the cold.
This time I will take control of the narrative.
This time I will dream right.
I look up ice cleats and ice axes and the white-blue drapes of frozen waterfalls.
This time for sure. This time.
–
K. L. Anderson is a Seattle-based writer and ecologist. Her first novel was awarded the 2021 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and was published by Leapfrog Press in 2022.
© 2023, K. L. Anderson
Halfway Down the Stairs 