Music Makers by Kate Wilhelm Page A

forever,” he said. I yanked my hand loose. “Just hear me out,” he said again and I put both clenched hands in my lap, prepared to listen before I lit into him.
    “When I reached puberty,” he said, “I began seeing the staircase again, and I knew I was doing it myself. Dad knew it was happening almost as soon as I did. He . . . he educated me. I had to learn how to use the stairs.”
    I shook my head. “What do you mean, learn how to use the stairs?”
    “They’re real, April,” he said.
    He talked until Jason woke up and went crazy excited when he saw the dog. It was love at first sight, both ways. After he was dressed, he and Spotty went to play ball in the back yard, and Vernon and I sat on the patio where he finished telling me.
    The stairs are real and Jason has no idea where they lead or that he’s responsible for them. He can’t be allowed to go up them or even suspect how real they are. He’ll have to be taught how to use them when he reaches puberty, and Vernon and Dad will be his teachers. The stairs will end up wherever he decides he wants to be, but first he has to know exactly where that is. After he has learned his lessons thoroughly he will no longer need the stairs to go wherever he wants to be.
    At about that point I suddenly craved a long tall gin and anything. Or perhaps straight gin. And I seldom drink anything alcoholic.
    “Vernon,” I said, sitting on a sunny patio in a subdivision near Roanoke, Virginia, watching my child play with his dog, so typically midAmerican, it was right out of Norman Rockwell, “you’re telling me that both you and your father can teleport. And that my son will be able to do it too as soon as he’s old enough.” My words were spaced as if I had already had that long tall glass of straight gin.
    Vernon nodded.
    His biographical sketches always make a big deal of the fact that he was graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and that for the next six years his father took him traveling. Exotic places, cities in just about every country anyone ever heard of, villages that no one ever heard of, places so remote they had never been mentioned in any tourist guide.
    I thought of the articles he had written, the places he had been, and I said, “Those years, you didn’t bother with airplanes? Is that right? You just went there?”
    He nodded again.
    I thought of all the photographs he had accumulated during those years, he had always said. Most of those pictures were digitized, and few of them had negatives, which some publishers wanted more than the prints. “You’re still going to those places, aren’t you? To take pictures with your digital camera.”
    He nodded.
    I began to think about Dad’s stash of wine, which he likes with his dinner every day. I stood up and said, “I’m going to get drunk now.” I went inside to start, and he remained on the patio looking miserable, watching our son play with his new dog.
    I didn’t believe him, I decided, but that was a lie. I hadn’t believed it about Jason, either, until proven. Dad had a big assortment of wine, completely unfamiliar to me, but a five dollar bottle or fifty dollar bottle meant nothing. I opened a red wine and poured a lot into a water glass and took a drink, and then I sat down in the kitchen and the questions began piling up. Where was Dad? Why the dog all at once? Who were those men and what were they after? The list got longer and I began to make notes. In a little while Vernon came in and sat at the table, and I started down the list.
    “He’s in Tennessee,” Vernon said. “He’ll be back soon. We’re going to give the dog the pill. We think it’s a tracking device or something like it, that it embeds itself, the covering dissolves, and it lets them keep track of a person’s whereabouts. About a month ago Dad attended a horse auction that turned out to be by invitation only, with tight security. The owner of the horses is a competitor and he spotted Dad and called