Read Floating Staircase for Free Online Page B

girls from the liberal arts college. One of whom, I believe, eventually became a lesbian.)
    Somewhere down the line I’d settled into a state of semicomplacence. It turned out those notebooks were filled with dozens of stories I’d written, and once I’d left college and moved out of the Eastport duplex for good, I rewrote a number of them and began to get them published.
    What was it Fitzgerald had once written in a letter? Something about all good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath? Well, this was true. I’d written
The Ocean Serene,
the novel about Kyle, and it was published as well. That was when I was living in Georgetown and dating Jodie and, for the first time in a long time, felt a glimmer of hope for my future. My writing was not only therapeutic; it was
absolution.
I was finally putting old ghosts to rest. (Sleep, old spirit, though I know you still hunger!)
    My relationship with Adam became tolerable, even civil, and we spoke regularly on the telephone. Kyle was an unspoken presence standing in the room with us each time we were together, which was not very often. When Adam married Beth, I was his best man. I visited when both his children were born. Together we laid our father to rest after a brief battle with prostate cancer, and Adam was my best man at my own wedding the following year. Yet all the while that damnable therapist’s voice resonated in my head—
You need to cast an anchor and hold on to something before you can change direction
—and because I’d never cast that proverbial anchor, I eventually struck an iceberg on the night of my mother’s funeral.
    Due to the amount of alcohol I’d consumed that evening, coupled with my own personal desire to wipe as much of the memory of the event out of my head, I am only able to recall bits and pieces of what transpired between Adam and me. What I
do
remember, I only wish I could forget.
    It happened at Adam’s house. We’d both been drinking, though I was the only one drunk. I opened my mouth and made a foolish comment about three-fifths of our family being dead and buried, then turned on Adam without provocation and accused him of blaming me for Kyle’s death. Speechless, Adam could only shake his head. I motored on, bawling while shouting at him. I’d killed our brother after all. I just wanted to hear Adam say he blamed me,
needed
to hear it. Instead, he reached out to embrace me. Yet my addled mind transposed his attempt to hug me as a threat, and I swung a clumsy fist at him, striking him in the eye.
    Jodie and Beth shouted simultaneously. Somewhere in another dimension, a dish fell to the floor and shattered. I swung again, much steadier this time, and even through my drunken stupor felt the solidity of my older brother’s jaw against my knuckles. Then I felt his fist against
my
face, the force of it knocking me to the floor, his hulking shape—our father’s?—looming before me, blurred by my tears.
    Jodie peeled me off the floor while Beth called me a piece of shit and told me to get the hell out of her house. I threw a drinking glass across the room and heard the children in their bedrooms start crying.
    Jodie ushered me out into the cold night, a firm hand against the small of my back. I staggered as if in a fever. She said things into my ear as we headed to the car, although I can recall none of them and I probably wasn’t even listening to her. Similarly, I remember nothing of the drive back to our apartment.
    I spent the next two weeks at the bottom of the world. Overcome by obsession, I thought about Kyle and trembled under the weight of my own guilt. With the dedication of someone newly possessed, I scribbled furious entries in my notebooks and smoked cigarettes like a longshoreman. I quit changing my clothes, which was no longer considered artistic as it had been in college.
    My guilt was a pool in which I was drowning . . . though to suggest I was