And yet that wouldn’t be like your daughters. Not at all. They’re ten-still four months shy of eleven. You really can’t imagine them tiptoeing down these strange stairs in this strange house in the middle of the night to watch a DVD. Besides, the distant murmuring doesn’t sound like typical sitcom fare: It sounds like a woman and a man who are embroiled in a dispute. Arguing about something, and not in a playful, comedic, all-problems-will-be-solved-in-twenty-two-minutes-of-television sort of way.
Your plane always had a low altitude warning system on the altimeter: Whenever you were a mere thousand feet above the earth, even on a normal approach to a normal landing, it would tweet three times. You wish now your brain had a similar warning system, a way of alerting you that you were about to experience another of these… visions. Or, perhaps, visitations. After the accident, you had been warned of the flashbacks and the sleeplessness and the loss of appetite. The nightmares and the guilt. The inability to focus. But no one had told you of the visitations.
Now you climb from beneath the quilt, a little nonplussed by how cold the room is. For a brief moment you wonder if the furnace is out and you will need to relight the pilot. (You see in your mind an image of yourself in your captain’s uniform and wonder: Why is it called a pilot light?) Your feet are bare, and the floor feels a little rough and chilly on them. When you were a child, you had pancake-flat feet. Not an arch to be found. And so from an early age you wore special orthopedic shoes; as a toddler and a small boy, you slept with a steel bar linking your ankles. You had to hop instead of walk when you awoke in the night, and you hopped in your bare feet. There was a wooden floor in the house just like this one. It was the room in your parents’ house that they (and you, eventually) called the playroom. When you were a boy, once a month you would visit your orthopedist in Stamford and strip down to nothing but a pair of white underpants, and the doctor would roll marbles down a long corridor that ended in his practice’s waiting room. While he watched your feet and your ankles and your hips, you would run after those marbles. That corridor had a carpet that was thick but firm. At first you weren’t shy about running in nothing but underpants into that waiting room, chasing after marbles that were white as cue balls and shiny like ice. Eventually, however, the indignity of the practice began to dawn on you and you grew hesitant. Then diffident. Still, the doctor always convinced your mother to persuade you to run, and so there you were, even in the first and second grade, being run like a monkey down a hall until you emerged into a roomful of strangers in nothing but underpants. Your feet never developed perfect arches, but whatever that doctor did was not ineffective. By the time you stopped scampering after marbles, your arches were at least good enough. Oh, you were never going to be a fighter jock, but when you chose to become a commercial pilot, your feet were never an issue.
The discussion below you has grown a little more agitated, and you pause in your pajamas in the frame of your bedroom door. The hallway is lit by the moon through the corridor windows. You ponder the narrow stairs up to Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms and wonder if you should check on the twins before going downstairs: see if they are indeed in their beds, because if they are, then it’s clear that the voices below you are not coming from a DVD.
And so you move slowly and quietly up that thin stairway to the cozy and snug third floor of your house. You press your fingers against the wall for balance because this stairwell is so cramped that there is neither a handrail nor a banister. The girls’ doors are both open, and you peer into each room for a long moment, watching each child sleep in the red glow of her night-light. You have always loved watching your children sleep. Some nights in Pennsylvania-before the crash, when life was filled with only routine and promise-you and your wife would stand in the doorway and watch first Garnet and then Hallie sleep, your souls warmed by the uncomplicated domesticity conveyed by the perfume in a baby shampoo. You would watch the way Garnet’s small hands would be embracing a stuffed teddy bear she had named Scraggles, or the way Hallie would be lying flat on her stomach, her arms burrowed deep beneath her pillow. In the winter, the girls often slept in red and white Lanz nightgowns that matched one of their mother’s. Tonight they are sleeping in pajamas: Garnet’s are patterned with evergreen trees and Hallie’s with Japanese lotus flowers. Now, at three in the morning, you wander as silently as you can into each child’s room, first pulling the comforter back up and over Garnet’s shoulders and then placing the stuffed gray rabbit Hallie named Smokey beside her on her bed. The bunny had fallen to the floor.
Up here, the voices are the same indecipherable buzz they were on the second floor. This strikes you as interesting. You would have expected the sound to be more muffled-perhaps even inaudible-when you are another floor higher. Here you may even have heard what sounded a bit like a laugh: a mean-spirited little chuckle at someone’s expense.
And so you start back down that narrow stairwell and then along the second-floor corridor, passing your and your wife’s bedroom. At the top of the stairs to the first floor, you reach for the flashlight you keep upright beside the trim, but you do not switch it on until you have reached the bottom step because you do not want to risk waking Emily. But when you are on the ground floor, you turn it on and spray the rooms. There in the living room is that wallpaper with the fox that looks like an eel, the image repeated over and over. There in the dining room are the walls of statuesque but sickly sunflowers, as well as the two sawhorses and the piece of plywood on which you drape sheets of wallpaper and then slather them with paste; in this light, with a curtainless vertical window just beyond the sawhorses, the image resembles a guillotine. (You built a plastic one from a modeling kit when you were a boy. It actually came with the pieces for a plastic nobleman with a detachable head. You were meticulous and glued the device and the victim together with the same care you brought to your models of jet airplanes and battleships.) There, in a corner of the hallway, is a stepladder with a gallon of paint on the top step, and for just a fraction of a second you are sure it’s a man.
And, finally, there is the door to the basement, and you find you are nodding to yourself that it is open. The door to the basement is never open. You keep it closed because why would you want the smell of the dirt floor wafting up into the house? Why would you want the heat from the radiators or the woodstove to drift there?
Ah, but it is ajar now. Of course. It has been opened for you. It is open now because that’s where the voices are coming from and whoever is down there wanted to be sure that you heard them.
You see in your mind a book jacket: How to Live in a Haunted House . No, that’s not right: It should be How Not to Live in a Haunted House. But then you decide that this construction is wrong, too. All wrong. Both books sound like real estate guides: The first is a manual for finding a house with a history; the second is a handbook for avoiding one. What you are after is an instruction booklet alive with advice for cohabiting with the dead. What to expect. How to cope with the voices that fill the night and the doors that mysteriously open. How to make sense of a house with bones in its basement. Unfortunately, that title eludes you. It hovers like a wisp just beyond your mind’s reach.
Perhaps that’s because you don’t really believe in ghosts. You tell yourself you are not in a ghost story. These voices have woken no one but you. In all likelihood, a draft opened the basement door. Or you left it open yourself: Either you forgot to close it or you left it like this subconsciously. Your therapist would love that. And this conversation below you is only in your head, another invisible wound from the disaster that marked your last flight.