Free Music Makers by Kate Wilhelm Page A

appearing to me at about that age. His father had done the same thing. Not every generation did it, he said that night, sometimes it skipped, but it always returned, possibly as far back as when the ancestors were leaving the trees and opting for houses with indoor plumbing.
    I didn’t believe a word of it. But it came to pass. What a useful phrase, one that should not be discarded or scorned. Jason’s first staircase appeared when he was three, while we were still in a New York apartment.
    I was reading a magazine article and Jason was playing with blocks and a truck that he crashed into the blocks over and over with a cry of, “Whoosh!” I glanced up from the magazine when he became still, and there it was, a fully formed staircase, with a banister. Except for the fact that it ended where the wall met the ceiling, it looked exactly the way a staircase would look in any house with an upstairs.
    I screamed, “Vernon!” and I grabbed Jason and held him against me as hard as I could as I backed away from the apparition all the way to the wall.
    Vernon ran in, looking as frightened as I was. He saw the staircase and said, “We don’t have an upstairs.” The staircase vanished.
    Jason reacted to my terror and began to cry, and I was shaking. After Vernon got us both calmed down again, and Jason resumed his play, Vernon said, “Honey, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just there. All you have to do is say we don’t have an upstairs and it’s gone.”
    He stayed close to us the rest of the afternoon, but we didn’t talk about it until Jason was in bed. “April,” he said earnestly that night, “there’s nothing dangerous about it. He doesn’t have a psychological problem any more than I did, or than Dad did. He’ll outgrow it, exactly the way I did, the way you outgrew Doris.”
    “But it will freak out anyone who suddenly sees a staircase appear,” I said. “And someone will.”
    He shook his head. “It just happens in rooms, in closed-in places, never outside. We’ll move to a warmer place where he can spend more time outside. We’ll home school him until he outgrows it, and avoid house guests for the next few years. Can you cope with that? Is it asking too much?”
    I had no answer, and he put his arms around me and drew me closer to him. “Honey, Dad’s okay, as you well know, and I seem to be okay. No lasting effect, no damage. Just a few somewhat irregular years ahead, and it’s over. Please, April, try to see it that way.”
    I had to admit that he was more than okay. He writes elegant articles for magazines like The National Geographic and Archeology Review . Anthropological discoveries, architectural wonders, basket weaving in Bolivia, dances in Tibet, things like that and they are always well received, as are his photographs. And Dad, his father, is the owner of a prestigious horse breeding farm, his horses prized and ridden by royalty, he boasts. He claimed that he made very little money from it, and Vernon explained that it was true, because he had practically an army of workers on the farm, managers, trainers, farm workers, and so on.
    That night Dad joined us and between them they made it sound very simple, almost commonplace. When the staircase appeared, I could make it disappear by saying we don’t have an upstairs. We should not make an issue of it with Jason, who seemed unaware of it. And Dad would find us a house as soon as possible where Jason could spend a lot of time outside. Also, Dad would spend more time with us, and with three of us no one person would be burdened by being watchful at all times. We especially should not let Jason realize there was anything weird about stairs that appeared and vanished. It was just another part of the mysterious world he found himself in.
    Dad found the house we’re living in now, a few miles from Roanoke, in an affluent subdivision with two sections, A and B. The A section is completed and most of the houses there are occupied. The B section is