Who Carried Me Up the Stairs

The worst page. The one this whole notebook has been walking toward, and the one I keep turning back from. Let me just write it and be done.

It was Marcus.

The boy. Sarah's son, my stepson, the good kid. The one who ran my wedding in a living room, the one I mailed a little money to when he came up short, the one I was kind to, and it shames me now, the one bright uncomplicated thing in that whole poisoned house. Marcus carried my body up two flights of stairs and laid it in a tub I never used and turned the water on over it, so a killing would read like an old fool's accident. So his mother and his sister would not go to prison for what they had done to me.

That's the answer to the tub. That's the impossible fact finally cracked open. A man who feared water and never once bathed in that room does not climb up there dressed and die. No. A dead man gets carried, by somebody young and strong and scared out of his mind, up out of the bedroom where it really happened, up to the one staged spot, and laid down in cold water to muddy the clock and rinse the room and sell the lie to a tired county coroner.

Let me set the scene the way it had to have gone, because I've had a while to run the wire and there's only the one way it fits. The dying happened downstairs, in the bedroom, in the dark, the way I've already put it down. And then there was a while of nothing, of Sarah moving around a dead man's house doing her cold arithmetic, and then she made a phone call, or she didn't even have to, because the boy was in the house or near it. And then Marcus came into that room and saw me. Twenty-some years old and he walks in and there I am on the floor, or half on the bed, whatever the truth of it was, and his mother standing over me not screaming, not calling anybody, just thinking. That's the part that would have told him everything in about one second. She wasn't frightened. She was working.

Then the stairs. Two flights of them, in the quiet, a big soft grown man gone all wrong and heavy the way the dead go, and a kid with his arms shaking, stopping on the landing to get a better hold, cracking my heel or my elbow on the banister spindles, breathing through his teeth so the neighbors wouldn't hear, sweating clean through his shirt. He had to walk me past the pictures on the stairwell wall. He had to lay me in that jetted tub I was always too scared to sit in, arrange me like a man who'd slipped, and reach across the body he'd just hauled up two floors to run the water. And I'll set down what the water was, because a fixer writes what the machine tells him even when the machine is laughing at him: it came out of those two ugly shower heads I'd sweated onto that wall myself, the spite rig, the gag I built to wreck Colleen's hiding place and never once used. The boy didn't have to bring a thing. The stage was pre-plumbed. I ran the line for my own last scene, ugly joints and all, and it waited up there in the wall for years for its one turn to run, and when it finally ran it was to rinse a murder into an accident. That's the kind of joke this machine tells. I hope he was crying, hope it bad. I'd think a little worse of him if he wasn't.

He carried me twice. You understand what I'm telling you? He carried me up those stairs in the dark to hide my murder, and then, a couple of weeks on, in the daylight, in front of everyone, he carried my casket to the grave. The same shoulders, both times. He put on a dark suit and stood at the front left corner of the box with three other men and walked me across the grass slow, and the whole time he was the only living soul on that lawn who knew that this was the second trip, not the first. The stepson who bore me to the tub bore me to the ground.

Now hear me close, because this is the one mercy I've got left to hand out and I intend to hand it straight to him: Marcus did not kill me. He didn't pour the drink or stop the pill or press the pillow. He walked in after, into a nightmare already finished, a scared kid in a house run by a mother who'd just done murder, and she put to him the kind of choice that isn't one at all: help me hide it, or stand there and watch your mother and your sister taken away forever, and he did the loyal, terrible, human thing, and it broke him clean in half. I know it broke him. I've watched what it did to him since. He stopped sleeping right. He got a flinch in him he never used to have, a thing where he goes quiet in the middle of a sentence and you can see the stairs behind his eyes. A boy who wasn't broken by a thing like that wouldn't have done what he did next.

He got out.

And that's the answer to the other question, the one I've been circling this whole notebook: who's next, who's safe. Because a machine like that does not stop while there's a body left within reach, and Marcus knew too much, and Marcus was the last one in that house, and the same arithmetic that ate me and ate Paige would have gotten around to him in its own good time. But Marcus had one thing Paige never got. He had Wren. That odd gentle girl the whole family made sport of, the one who wouldn't eat meat and kept hauling home hurt animals, a bird with a bad wing, a dog nobody wanted, a cat somebody'd left in a box by the road. They laughed at her for it at every holiday. And it turned out that of everybody at that table she was the only one who could look straight at a thing that was suffering and not turn away and not pretend. Wren looked at that household with those same clear eyes and said out loud the thing not one of them would: that his mother was a poison, and the house was a grave with the lights left on. And she took that boy by the hand and walked him out of it and told him not to look back. And he doesn't. He's gone no-contact. He doesn't pick up the calls. And that, turning his back on the very mother he'd carried my body to protect, is the only reason he is still breathing to be ashamed.

His safety is his penance. He saved his own life by cutting off the woman he'd ruined himself to save, and the secret is eating him alive, and the distance and that good strange girl are the only two things standing between Marcus and a tub of his own.

So I forgive him. Whatever a dead man's got left to forgive with, I'm spending the whole of it right here, on the boy. The world would be hard on him if it ever learned what he did, and it would have every right to be, and I find I just haven't got it in me. He was a child in a killing house who did the wrong thing for a reason a decent heart would know on sight, and it cost him everything he had, and he is paying it still, one silent day at a time. I loved that kid. I love him now. He carried me to my grave twice, and I forgive him both trips.

He's the one who got out. Let him stay out. It's the last thing in this world I want, more than the truth, more than any justice a court was never going to hand me anyhow: I want that boy to stay gone, and stay safe, and let that be the one clean thing that ever walked out of that house alive.

There. It's down. The worst page is written, and the dead man survived the writing of it.

Only the finding-out is left. Let me go close the notebook right.