Chapter 10: The Ladder

I pulled my brother inside and shut the door.

He stood dripping on the mat. He didn't take off his shoes.

"I took the bus as far as Ballard," Kit said. "Then I walked."

"In this?"

"I didn't have my phone. They check it."

I took a towel from the hook and put it around his shoulders.

He let me.

"Sit," I said.

He sat on the floor with his back against the radiator. I sat across from him on the drafting stool.

For a minute neither of us spoke.

Then Kit lifted his right hand and rapped his knuckles on the floorboard.

Three knocks. A pause. Three more.

"You tapped that on television," I said.

"You saw."

"I saw it, and I couldn't place it."

"The attic," Kit said.

It hit me then.

I was thirteen. Kit was six. Our father had come home from a launch party with a bottle in each pocket.

He'd climbed the ladder to the attic where we hid when he was like that.

Not to hurt us. Just to shout, for hours, into the dark.

Kit would whisper into my ear.

"The ladder's loose, Em."

It meant: stay up here. Don't go down. Don't let him see you.

And when it was safe, he'd knock on the floor of the attic three times, pause, and three more, and that meant: it's me, I'm still here.

"You were six," I said.

"I never forgot."

"I did."

"That's why I said it." His teeth were chattering. "I thought if I put it in the call, you'd know. I thought you'd hear it and not come."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"The ladder's loose," I said. "That was a warning."

"Yes."

"You weren't asking me to come get you."

"I was begging you not to." His eyes filled. "Em, I was begging you not to."

The words went through me slowly.

I had never once asked what a six-year-old's whisper meant.

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