Page 111 of The Staircase in the Woods

Full Circle

It took Owen a moment to realize where he was.

For a while, he just stood there, bracing himself against the wood paneling. Owen had to stoop over, chin to his chest, drool easing out over his lower lip before dangling there in a gooey drip. His head spun like he’d been drinking all night.

It was the simple touch from his finger that pinged his memory radar.

The pad of his index finger found a hole in the wood paneling—a hole that had been filled with something not quite flush against the surface. Something pushed in a little too far.

The memory was full-fledged, then—

Nick, fourteen years old, a bow and arrow in his hand, stoned. He let fly with the arrow—one topped with the barebones target tip, just a pointy metal bit straight off the shaft. It flew right into the wall,thud-d-d-d,and stuck there, waggling. All of them were there, and their jaws dropped because, well, none of them could justshoot a fucking arrow into the fucking walland expect to get away with it. But Nick had been mad, pouty, shouldering his way through every conversation with brute contempt—nobody knew why he was so salty, but he was, and that’s when he, out of nowhere, got the bow and the arrow and shot his own basement wall.

Thing was, Nick probably could’ve gotten away with it, or so they figured. Nick’s dad was famously cool—he waved everything off and was Good Times Guy. He had a high-profile money job somewhere—banking or investments or something. But after hours, he let that all go and was A Cool Dude. Lore joked that he wasWall Street in the streets, Jimmy Buffett in the sheets,but Nick told her that joke sucked becausestreet in the streetssounded dumb. Lore didn’t like to be criticized, though, so she sack-tapped Nick hard with the back of her hand. That, though, was another day—onthisday, the day of the arrow-into-the-wall, Nick did it and seemedimmediatelyfreaked out that he’d done it.

They all told him, relax, your dad won’t care, but he didn’t want to hear boo about it. Said he had to fix it. Like he was in a panic. So, like always, they set to figuring out how to fix his fuckup, and it was Owen who had the idea:

Take a number two pencil.

Stick it into the hole.

Then get a saw and cut it flush against the wall.

The faux-wood grain on the paneling was pretty light. The pencil, he theorized, might just disappear from view. It would look like a “knot” in the “wood.” So that’s what they did. It wasn’t perfect—when they cut through it, it wasn’t pushed forward all the way, so it still sank a little deeper. But even still, for the most part? It worked. Owen felt weirdly like a champion for once, as if he’d had the good idea, not Matty, not Lore. And he remembered that Nick was nicer to him that day. How special that felt. And how stupid he felt remembering it.

That divot was what his finger was finding right now.

Which meant—

This was Nick’s basement.

He lifted his head up, spit slicking his chin.

The shitty couch. The stairs up. The card table mounded high with all kinds of shit: D&D books, fantasy books (The Eye of the Worldin easy view), ashtrays, an Altoids tin full of stems and seeds, a BB gun, a bunch of arcade tokens, a purple Crown Royal bag once for whiskey but now for dice.

Why was Nick’s basement here?

From the corner, off to his left—

A stifled sob.

In that corner, there sat a mushy, cushy recliner—faux-leather Naugahyde; they called it the Slumbering Beast.

There sat Nick.

“Nick,” Owen said, his voice small.

But this wasn’t Current Era Nick.

This was Nick from Back When.

He looked…young, but how old? It was the hair that gave it away. For a year, when he was fifteen, Nick had the faux-hawk thing going on. (A year later, he shaved it all off, though everyone said he looked like a skinhead, which made him immediately grow it back out, because “fuck that neo-Nazi shit.”) It was the faux-hawk Owen was looking at now.

Nick, at fifteen.

He was sitting in the chair. Hands in his lap, staring at his knees.

Softly crying. A bubble of snot in the one side of his nose.