The Stairs

The message had come on Tuesday night at eleven, which was seven in the morning in London, in Swedish.

Will you telephone me tomorrow at twelve, your time? I would like to talk properly. M.

He had read it four times, in the dark, in the light of the snow on Tyler’s screens. It was the word properly. His mother did not use it. She telephoned when she wanted to telephone and talked as long as she wanted to talk, and every conversation she had ever had with him had been, as far as she was concerned, proper, because she had been in it. She had never once in his life made an appointment to talk to him.

He wrote back Yes, and then Is everything all right?, and then deleted the second, and sent the first.

The answer came in under a minute, though it was seven in the morning there.

Good. Twelve. M.

---

At nine Brennan did not ask him anything.

It was visible. Frederick watched it all through the hour, from the aisle two rows from the back, while Brennan walked up and down in front of the bench in the linen jacket and talked about the Preamble, and the three voices, and the winter in Philadelphia when they had argued about the order: the question, whatever it was, that Brennan had put back on its high shelf in the corridor on Monday, and that kept trying to come down. Twice Brennan turned toward the aisle with his mouth open. Twice he shut it, and turned, and said instead, “Mr Whitfield,” and Rhys, in another ironed shirt, answered at length and correctly, and highlighted his own answer afterwards in pink.

“Well done,” said Brennan, the second time, a little hoarsely.

At ten to ten Frederick looked at the clock over the blackboard, and then at it again at eight minutes to, and Rhys, beside him, without lifting his eyes from his notebook, wrote in the margin 12, very small, and underlined it, and Frederick understood that the message from London had been read across the road over the dentist’s, as everything was, and that nobody was going to mention it.

---

The lift had been mended on Tuesday, and since then nobody used the stairs.

He found that out at a quarter to twelve, going up from the lobby, when he passed nobody on the first flight or the second, and came to the landing between the second and third floors, the one with the narrow window and the fin outside it and the line of white light coming through the gap, and stopped, and listened, and heard nothing. Not the corridor above. Not the lobby below. The concrete held the sound away. It was the coolest place in the building that was not Tyler’s half of the room, seventy-nine degrees, as the third person had written on the sign; and it was empty; and it was the only place in Palo Verde Hall where he could be sure of being alone.

He sat down on the third step from the landing, with his back against the wall, and at twelve exactly he rang London.

She answered on the first ring.

“Fredde,” said his mother.

---

They talked in Swedish. They always did, when it was the two of them.

She asked him about everything first. She asked the way she always asked, one thing at a time, and waited for each answer, all of it, before she asked the next. The room. The window.

“Which way does it face?”

“North-west. It’s Tyler’s.”

“Then you will be cooler in the afternoon. North-west is the right way.” He heard her settle against something. “And you have the door.”

“I have the door.”

“Good. People always want the window. The door is better. You can see who comes in.” She paused. “Did the jumper fit?”

“I haven’t tried it on. It’s a hundred and ten degrees.”

“Try it on in October.”

She asked about Tyler, and he told her about Tyler turning round in the Wright to look for him, and she laughed: the rare laugh, the one the room heard, a single low sound down the line from London, so that he closed his eyes on the stairs for a moment to hear it properly. She asked about the butte, and he told her about the frozen bottle on his neck, and the old man in the white cap, and you’ll stop by October, and she was quiet for a moment and then said, “He is wrong. You do not stop things.” She asked about Brennan, and he told her about the pencil.

There was a silence on the line.

“I know why he used a pencil,” said his mother.

“Why?”

“No. You must ask him.” Another silence, a short one. “He would like very much to be asked something he knows the answer to.”

He sat on the stairs and looked at the line of white light on the landing.

“Where are you?” said his mother. “It is very quiet.”

“On the stairs. It’s the only quiet place.”

She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Of course you are,” in a voice he did not understand, and would not understand for another four minutes.

---

“Fredde,” said his mother. “I have to tell you something.”

“Yes.”

“I would like you to listen to all of it before you say anything. If you say something, I will stop, and then I will have to start again, and I do not want to start again.” She paused. “You may say okay. Okay does not count.”

“Okay,” he said.

He said it in English. He did not notice that he had.

“I did not have a cold.”

He held the telephone.

“On the Monday before you flew,” said his mother, “the fifteenth, in the evening, after dinner, we were going up the back stairs to the sitting room. The little stairs, from the first floor. Your father was in front of me, with the stick. And I was tired, and I thought, I will sit down on the stairs for a moment, the way I used to sit on the stairs at Solliden when I was a girl, and nobody will see.” She stopped. He waited. She was choosing the next sentence, the way she chose everything, slowly, from several. “I do not remember sitting down. I remember the stair rods. They are brass. Then I remember your father.”

“Okay.”

“He had got to the top. He turned round, and I was not behind him. I was at the bottom of the flight, on the landing, on the floor.” Another pause. “He shouted. Fredde, I did not know he could still shout like that. I did not know there were any words left in him that loud. The whole of the second floor came.”

“Okay.”

“They took me to the hospital. Not in an ambulance. In a car, by the back gate, so that nobody would see. By then I was awake. By then I was very cross.” He heard, very faintly, something that might have been the beginning of the laugh again, and was not. “And they did all of the tests. I have had a camera put in places that I will not describe to my son on a telephone. And it is my heart.”

“Okay.”

“It is a valve. The one that lets the blood out. It has gone stiff, like an old door. They say it has probably been going stiff for years, and that I did not notice, because I am very good at not noticing things.” She stopped again, longer, and he heard her breathe, and thought that she was looking for a word in English, which she sometimes did in the middle of Swedish when the Swedish word was too exact. “It is a thing they can mend. They do it every day. They take out the old one and put in a new one. Like a washer in a tap. Not now. They would like to watch it. Perhaps in the winter.”

“Okay.”

“I am not allowed to fly. For six weeks. That is why I did not come to Tempe.”

“Okay.”

Her voice had not changed at all. “It was not a cold. I am sorry I said it was a cold. I have never lied to you before about anything that mattered, and I found that I did it very well, and I did not like that.”

“It’s…”

“Okay is allowed,” said his mother. “That is not okay.”

“Okay.”

“Nobody knows. The newspapers do not know. In Stockholm the Court knows four people, and here the Household knows three, and there are the doctors, who have been told that they will report nothing to anybody that I have not agreed to, and they have agreed. And your father. And now you.” The line was very quiet. “I would like you not to tell anybody. Not yet. Not because it is a secret. Because I would like to be the one who decides when it is news. It is the only part of this that I can decide.”

“Okay.”

“I am telling you now, and not before you flew, because if I had told you before you flew, you would not have flown.” She said it quite simply, as a fact, the way she would have said that it was raining on Öland. “And you chose this. You chose it on a hill in Berlin at ten past eight in the morning. Alexander wrote and told me the minute. And I am not going to be the reason that you did not go.”

He sat on the third step from the landing, in Palo Verde Hall, in seventy-nine degrees, with the telephone against his ear, and looked at the step below him, which was concrete, and painted grey, and had a small chip out of the edge of it, and was a stair.

“Okay,” he said.

---

There was a silence on the line from London.

“Fredde,” said his mother, at last, in a different voice, the one she used for being his mother and nothing else. “You have said okay nine times.”

He opened his mouth.

He did not say it. He found it there, ready, the tenth one, and held on to it, and did not let it out.

“I know,” he said, in Swedish.

“In English. Every time.” She was quiet for a moment. “Is there anything else you would like to say? Now you may say anything.”

“Are you frightened?”

She took a long time to answer. He listened to her take it. He could hear, behind her, very faintly, the room in London: a clock ticking, a page turning.

“A little,” said his mother. “Mostly I am bored.” And then, before he could say anything: “I am on the sofa, with my feet up, which your father has made a rule. He made it on the Tuesday, in four words, and it is the longest rule he has made since the aircraft, and nobody in this house has dared to break it, including me. He is in the chair by the fire with the crossword, and he is watching me over the top of it. Every minute. As if I were a train.”

He laughed. He could not help it. He laughed on the stairs, out loud, once, and it went up the stairwell and came back off the concrete, and he heard her hear it, in London, and be glad.

“Should I come?”

“No.”

“I could come at the weekend. I could be there on Saturday.”

“No.” It was the voice that had told a Household it would not be a visitor in her son’s life, and had been obeyed. “If you come, you will sit on a chair beside a sofa in London and watch me be bored, and you will miss the Charter, and your professor will have nobody to ask about pencils.” A pause. “I would like you to be in Tempe. That is what I would like. I have not been allowed to like very much this week. Let me like that.”

He did not answer for a while.

“All right,” he said.

“Good.” He heard her shift on the sofa. “Now go and drink some water. You have been on the stairs for twenty minutes and it is a hundred and ten degrees.”

“It’s seventy-nine on the stairs.”

“Drink some water anyway,” said his mother. “Puss, Fredde.”

“Puss.”

The line went.

---

He sat on the stairs.

He did not know for how long. The line of white light from the narrow window moved across the landing, slowly, the width of a hand. Somewhere above him a door opened and shut, and music came out of it for a moment and stopped. He held the telephone in both hands on his knees and looked at the step below him with the chip out of the edge, and thought about brass stair rods, and a man at the top of a flight with a stick turning round, and the second floor coming.

Footsteps came down from the third floor.

He knew them before he saw them. Nobody else in Palo Verde Hall walked down stairs like that, in a slow heavy shuffle, one step at a time, as though each one had to be agreed to separately. They came round the turn of the flight above, and stopped.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

He was in the sweatshirt, with the hood down, and his telephone in his hand, and his hair flat on one side from the pillow. He looked at Frederick on the third step from the landing, sitting against the wall with the telephone in his lap.

“Hey,” said Frederick.

“The elevator’s mended,” said Tyler, as though Frederick might not know.

“I know.”

Tyler looked at him for a moment longer. It was the look Frederick had seen him give the jumper on Thursday: open, interested, complete, and entirely for whatever was in front of it.

“You okay?” said Tyler.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Tyler considered this. Then he came down the last four steps of the flight, slowly, and sat down on the step above Frederick’s, a little to the side, with his knees up, the way a large person sits on a step that is too small for him, and put his hand in the front pocket of the sweatshirt, and took out a bottle of the blue drink, and held it out.

Frederick took it.

“My mom calls like four times a day,” said Tyler, to the landing. “It’s a lot.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Was it your mom?”

“Yes.”

Tyler nodded at the landing for a while.

“Is she okay?”

“She says so.”

“Okay,” said Tyler, as if that settled it, and in a way that Frederick could not have explained, it did. He sat on the step for a little longer, with his knees up, not saying anything else, looking at the line of light on the landing. Then he stood up, slowly, with a hand on the wall.

“I’m getting tacos,” said Tyler. “You want tacos?”

“No. Thank you.”

“Okay.” Tyler went down past him, one step at a time. At the turn of the flight he stopped and looked back up, at the bottle in Frederick’s hands.

“It’s Glacier Freeze,” said Tyler. “It’s the good one.”

And went on down.

---

At ten that night Mr Luna was at the desk, in the cardigan, with the ball game on the radio, low, and the butterscotch, and the coffee can, and a new page on the clipboard with 10 p.m. 77 at the top of it.

He looked at Frederick over his glasses.

“Call your mother?”

“She called me.”

Mr Luna looked at him for some time.

Then he pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot, and Frederick sat down on it, and Mr Luna went back to his crossword, and neither of them said anything for a long time. On the radio somebody was pitching badly and knew it. The air conditioning breathed out of the grille. Outside the glass doors, in the dark, under the lamps of the arcade, the four palo verdes stood on their gravel with their green bark, doing, all night, what they did instead of leaves.

“Do you call your mother?” said Frederick.

Mr Luna did not look up.

“Every Sunday. Forty years.” He filled in a word. “She’s ninety-one. She’s in Mesa, with my sister.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Nothing.” Mr Luna considered the next clue, and the pen hovered. “The weather. My sister. What she had for lunch. Who died.” He wrote something. “Nothing.”

He looked up, over the glasses.

“That’s the point, son,” said Mr Luna. “You talk about nothing every Sunday for forty years so that when there’s something, you’re already on the phone.”

Frederick sat on the plastic chair and did not say anything for a while.

Mr Luna went back to the crossword. At eleven he looked at the grey box on the wall and wrote 11 p.m. 76, and said, without looking round, “Go to bed, son,” and Frederick went.

---

The room was cold. Tyler kept it cold. The snow was falling on the two screens, and Tyler was on the window bed in the hood with the headphones on, back from his tacos and somewhere in a forest.

Frederick opened the wardrobe.

The jumper was on the shelf at the top, folded square, where he had put it on Thursday, with the card still pinned to the collar. He took it down and unfolded it and took the pin out and put the card on the desk, For October. M., face up. Then he pulled the jumper on over his head.

It fitted. It was heavy, and soft, and it smelled very faintly of something he knew and could not name until he had it on, and then could: the north wing, and her coffee, and the knitting bag that went everywhere with her and was never opened in a meeting. The cuffs came exactly to his wrists. She had measured. She had probably rung somebody at Columbia Palace and asked them to measure an old one.

He lay down on the bed by the door in it, in August, in Arizona, in the cold of Tyler’s air conditioning, and pulled the cover up.

Tyler had taken one side of the headphones off. He was looking across the room, in the light of the snow.

“Is that the one your mom made?”

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at it for exactly as long as it was in front of him.

“It looks good,” said Tyler, and put the headphones back on.