“You didn’t come back!” the kid wailed. “Why didn’t you come back?” And then she just stood there and sobbed even harder.
“Katherine?” I said. She stood there and cried, and then she dropped the club on the floor. It was in fact a flashlight, not a club, and another crazy beam of light careened through the room and caught the wall with the sunset painting, then me in the face. But by this time I was out of the bed and across the floor. I scooped Katherine up and held her against my chest.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, while my heart tried to find something approximating a normal rhythm. “How did you get here?”
“Everybody’s mad all the time,” she told me. “And Jennifer won’t get out of bed.”
Working as best I could on the shreds of information the unhappy girl choked out between sobs, I picked up the flashlight and walked out toward the front of the apartment. “You said you would come get us,” Katherine accused me. “You said we could see your apartment.”
“So now, because you are so brave and impatient, you get to see it,” I said cheerfully, flicking on the lights as I passed through rooms and hallways. “You are right. I was just too busy and I didn’t come back and I promised I would, so now I will show you everything. Did you tell your mom where you were going?” I assumed the answer would be no, and I was already trying to figure out what on earth I was going to tell Mrs. White when I presented her errant daughter to her in the middle of the night.
“How come there’s no furniture?” asked Katherine, looking around. “How come the secret room has all the furniture but there’s none out here?” I stopped and looked at her.
“How do you know about the secret room, Katherine?” She looked back at me while I figured it out. “Is that how you got in?” I was standing in the great room now, and I could see, in the moonlight, that all my locks were securely fastened. “You came in through the secret room, through the trapdoor!” I exclaimed, like this was the smartest thing I had ever heard, giving her a little poke. She giggled, finally relaxing. “How did you get the trapdoor open?” I asked.
“We carved a hole in it,” she said. “Do you want to see?”
“I do. I think I would like to see that, a lot.”
So I turned around and carried Katherine back to the far end of the apartment, where the door to the lost room stood ajar, which was not how I had left it.
“Did you open the door?” I asked her.
“I had a flashlight,” she said, as if this explained everything.
“Didn’t the ghost scare you? Sometimes she’s really loud.”
“That’s not a ghost, that’s a person,” Katherine told me. “She lives in Mrs. Westmoreland’s apartment.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Jennifer figured it out when she was trying to make the hole.”
The kid was a font of information. She led me into the secret room, past the plundered cardboard boxes, and over to the far wall, where a cupboard had been jammed open, barely. With so many boxes stacked in front of it, I hadn’t noticed that cupboard.
“Look,” said Katherine. It’s just steps.” And sure enough, it was exactly as Louise had suspected that night not so long ago. The narrowest of stairways rose and turned within the wall itself.
“Wow,” I said. “That is amazing. So you guys worked the plug out?”
“Jennifer did it.”
“And how did you get this one open?”
“I just pushed it.”
“Did Jennifer help you?”
“Jennifer’s in bed. Can you come talk to her?”
“Well, it’s kind of late,” I reminded her.
“She’s really sad,” Katherine said again, her eyes wide. “She keeps getting yelled at.”
“Why?” I asked. This was not sounding so good.
“Because she won’t get out of bed. Never. You have to come now.”
“All right, all right,” I agreed. “You have to go back to bed anyway.”
Now that I realized how the kid had gotten there, the need to get her back without anyone realizing she’d been gone seemed pretty paramount. I most certainly did not want her mother, or her notoriously reactive father, to stick her or his head into Katherine’s room and find her gone into a hole in the wall that led directly to my apartment. Obviously I was not the one who had cracked open the crawl space, but to someone who was inclined to look at it that way, this whole situation might look like I was the one doing the breaking and entering into the Whites’ apartment. I looked up the stairwell and then back at Katherine, formulating the shred of a plan.
“Listen,” I said. “Don’t tell anybody about this, okay? For right now this has to be a secret, and if your mommy finds out about it we’re both going to be in big trouble.”
“Why?” said Katherine.
“I don’t know, kid, that’s just the way it is sometimes. We’ve got to get you back up there and plug the hole up and then think about this.”
The ancient red brick stairs built into the wall were curled, claustrophobic, and vertical; I had to grab on to each step above with my hands, and I could hear and feel small living things moving around. Some of them, frankly, were not so small. I remembered from some grade-school history class that people in New York in the nineteenth century didn’t have enough milk, so many of them died young, and those who survived were really short, which is doubtless how those Victorian workmen managed to fit into this horrifying space. They also lived in tiny, dark tenements, so climbing up terrifyingly claustrophobic hidden staircases must have seemed normal to them. Or maybe it’s just that being poor in any century sucks, and if you have no money you have to do impossible things to survive. Anyway, climbing up that walled-in crawl space certainly seemed impossible, and by the time I tumbled through the hole in the wall onto the floor of Katherine’s closet I was having trouble breathing.
“That’s kind of scary,” I admitted. When I glanced back at the thin snap of the stairwell as it wound its narrow way up the inside of the building, I saw the shape of an enormous rat slowly disappearing above us. “WHOA,” I said, then tried too late to lower my voice. “Wow. Whoa, there’s, that’s scary.”
“You said that twice,” Katherine noted.
“That’s because it’s really actually pretty fucking scary,” I said. “How does this work?” I looked at the wooden slab that Jennifer had somehow crowbarred out of the wall.
Before I could stop her, Katherine pushed it back in to show me. “It just sticks in the wall,” she said. “See?”
“And how did you get it out?”
“Well. You put your fingers here,” she explained, demonstrating with seven-year-old confidence. “And then you just pull it.” She pulled. Nothing happened.
“That’s how you do it?” I asked.
“It’s stuck,” she said.
“It can’t be stuck, Katherine. You just did it ten minutes ago. How can it be stuck?” I gave it a try myself, and of course the plug was stuck. On one side, several gouge marks revealed where Jennifer had located its weak spot and managed to pry it out, but because Katherine had pushed it back at an angle, the handhold was now apparently useless. “Oh, boy,” I said, trying not to panic.
“You just pull it,” Katherine said, yawning. Which I did, about twenty times, twenty different ways. Nothing happened.
“Come on, Katherine, you have to show me how,” I repeated hopelessly.
“You push it,” she said this time, lying on the floor.
“Don’t go to sleep—I’m not kidding, I have to go home, you have to show me how to open it. Katherine, open it. Open it.” If she didn’t get the thing open, I realized, I was stuck there for good. I could sneak out the front door and take the elevator down to my own apartment, but it was locked from the inside, as I well knew. I needed to get back down the way I had come up.
“Come on, Katherine, you’ve got to open it for me. Katherine,” I hissed, shaking her shoulder. She looked at me, dopey with sleep. “Je
nnifer knows how to do it.” She yawned. “She’s the one who figured it out.”
I had known where Jennifer’s bedroom was when I babysat for the Whites, but in the middle of the night and with only the occasional night-light at floor level as my guide, getting back there wasn’t the simplest trick to navigate. I took two wrong turns, one of which landed me in the psychotically pink bedroom of the middle-school monsters, who were sacked out and snoring. The other wrong turn brought me perilously close to barging in on Mr. and Mrs. White themselves, but as I was about to carefully turn the knob on their bedroom door, I heard someone moving around, and then Mrs. White asked some sort of question and Mr. White answered. A light went on, and I nearly cursed aloud, but instead I just took a quick step backward and gave thanks to the crazy genius who invented wall-to-wall carpet. The Whites continued to mumble back and forth as I looked around, got my bearings, and turned back one more time, finally locating Jennifer’s bedroom at the far end of the next hallway.
Her room was both adorable and disturbing. Like Katherine’s, it was painted a glowing yellow and there were stuffed animals everywhere, but in the middle of the room was an enormous bed with a white canopy, and the carpet was a dark and terrifying red.
I crept silently across the blood red sea and knelt down next to the bed. Jennifer, quite frankly, looked like a sleeping princess. “Hey, Jennifer,” I whispered. “Wake up. Wake up.” She didn’t move, so I reached over and touched her shoulder. “Jennifer.”
“I’m awake,” she announced, completely annoyed. I was so startled that I jumped a little and almost tipped over.
“Well, why didn’t you say something?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?” she replied, with the authority of somebody who knows she has the better question. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Katherine opened the door to the crawl space and came down into my apartment,” I told her. Jennifer turned her head and smiled but still didn’t move. “When did you figure out how to open it?”
“A while ago,” she said, seemingly losing interest all of a sudden. “I was going to tell you about it. But then you never came back.”
“Well, I’m here now, and I closed it, but I can’t get it open again, you have to show me how to do it.”
“Why?”
“So I can get home!” I whispered. “Why do I have to explain this? What’s going to happen if your parents find me hanging out in your apartment in the middle of the night?”
“They’ll be pissed off,” she mused, barely interested in the question.
“Well, that’s not so good for me,” I said. “Come on, help me get home, please.”
She looked at me, and a little spark came into her eyes. “You were on television—everybody’s mad at you,” she informed me. “You’re in trouble.”
“What else is new.” I sighed. “I’m not kidding, Jennifer, you have to help me. Now, right now.”
“We’re all in trouble,” she observed, and looked up at the ceiling.
That’s when this improbable situation started to make some sense. She was just so nonreactive, as if neighbors routinely showed up at her bedside in the middle of the night. There was definitely a disconnect between event and reaction. And she had the peculiar nocturnal coherence of the chronic nonsleeper. “Katherine says you won’t get out of bed,” I noted. She continued to stare at the ceiling.
“I get out of bed. I go to school. I come home, and I get back in bed.”
“Your mom lets you do that?”
“My mom,” she stated, with an evil, sardonic edge. “My mom?”
I wanted to pick her up and carry her home with me, but I knew that would not be an effective choice of action. “Jennifer,” I said. I let my hand creep up onto the covers and find her fingertips. “Sweetheart, you’re depressed. You need help.”
“What do you know,” she said.
A door opened and closed somewhere in the apartment. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see the hall light flip on, then shadows rippled across the floor where the light spilled in under the door. The doorknob started to turn. “Shit,” I whispered, and rolled under the bed just as the door swung open.
“Hey, are you awake?” the hideous Louise asked. When Jennifer didn’t answer, she asked again. “Jennifer,” she insisted. “Are you awake?”
“If I don’t answer, why would you ask again?” Jennifer said, reasonably. “Are you trying to wake me up?”
“I asked again because I knew you were awake,” Louise observed, unimpressed by Jennifer’s logic.
“Then why did you ask?”
“I heard voices. Who are you talking to?” Louise’s question was fluted with suspicion. All I could see from my hiding place was the tail end of a frilly pink-and-white-striped nightgown and her bare feet, which made their way into the room and stopped, then turned and moved out of my field of vision again. I heard a door swing open.
“What are you doing; are you looking in my closet?” Jennifer asked. I was pretty nervous down there under the bed, but honestly it felt better to hear her yell at her sister than to watch her lie there like she couldn’t bear to sit up and breathe.
“I heard voices, Jennifer; I know what I heard. There’s someone in here with you.” The feet were back in sight and the hem of the nightgown started to lower, as good old Louise, who was starting to seem like the teenage-girl version of the Stasi, was in fact bending over to look under the bed.
“Get out of here, you freak!” Jennifer snarled suddenly. Her feet appeared by the side of the bed as she inserted herself between me and certain discovery, actually shoving her older sister aside.
“Hey!” Louise snapped. “You are, you’re hiding something!”
“You are not the boss of me, Louise!” Jennifer informed her. “MOM!” Okay, this was a little further than I wanted Jennifer to go to protect me, but I was hardly calling the shots at this point. Besides, Mrs. White appeared in the room so quickly that it seemed likely she had heard the argument and was already on her way to check it out, so I don’t know that Jennifer put anything in motion that would not have happened anyway.
“What is going on in here! It’s the middle of the night!” Mrs. White announced.
“I heard her talking to someone,” Louise started.
“She is crazy! I was just in here sleeping!” Jennifer snapped.
“I heard someone, there’s someone in here with her,” the persistent Louise repeated, but the illogical nature of her statement undid her.
“That is ridiculous,” Mrs. White hissed. “Go back to your room, Louise! And both of you go back to sleep this minute! Honestly. Your father is going to be really angry if he has to come in here, and then we’ll all have to deal with it. Go to bed.” Her feet stayed in the doorway while she waited for Louise to sullenly drag herself back to her room, and then the door swung shut behind them both. After an excruciatingly long moment of silence, Jennifer’s blond hair swung down over the edge of the bed, and I saw her forehead and then her eyes and then the rest of her face make an appearance. She held her finger to her upside-down mouth.
Why is it that taking care of someone else makes you feel better? The listless despair had evaporated, and she was a different person; her eyes were alert with the delight of keeping my presence a secret, and then the prospect of getting me home without being discovered by the wearisome Louise was suddenly a fantastic adventure to be had. We waited in alert silence for a full fifteen minutes before she crept out into the hallway, passed by Louise’s closed door, passed back again, waited to see if she was awake and reactive, and, when she proved not to be, waved to me in the half light of the hallway to follow her. She led me with assurance through the maze of hallways to the back room of the sleeping apartment, where Katherine lay asleep on the floor, just as I had left her. While Jennifer closed the door, I picked Katherine up and put her back in her bed.
“So how do you get this thing open?” I whispered, tipping my head at that blasted piece of
wood stuck in the wall.
“It’s really not very hard,” she said with a trace of her former arrogance. And sure enough, she squeezed her fingers into the side of it and yanked. It popped out as if she had ordered it to. The entire operation took maybe six seconds.
“Wow, that is pretty easy,” I exclaimed.
We both looked at the hidden staircase. I could hear the rats scrambling to stay out of the light.
“She wasn’t supposed to try it without me,” Jennifer noted, glancing back at the sleeping Katherine. “The little louse. So it does open into your place?” She leaned forward and tried to see into the darkness. The barest flicker of light seemed to touch the edge of that terrifying staircase from somewhere deep in my apartment, but that was all.
“There’s a storage room down there,” I explained. “Bill and my mom had shoved stuff in front of the door to the room.”
“So they like hid things in the room?”
“There’s a bunch of stuff in it,” I admitted, “stuff from a while ago, like they needed to put it someplace, so they piled it all back there, and pulled a big cupboard in front of the door and then forgot about it.”
“Like treasure?”
“Well, most of it’s junk.”
“But not all of it?”
I wish I could say that I was honest with this helpful and lovely young girl. I was not. “It’s just a bunch of boxes, Jennifer, just a lot of, you know, stuff people don’t want anymore.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I was the one who found the door—you wouldn’t even know it was there if it wasn’t for me. Why didn’t you just—call me or something?” She looked at me with such a simple sense of disappointment and betrayal that it took a moment to catch up.
“I couldn’t just phone you,” I explained. “Your mom would think it was weird.”
“So? You don’t mind people thinking you’re weird. Everyone think’s you’re weird. So what?”
“Come on, I have to go home, it’s the middle of the night, and I can’t get caught here! It’s like I’m breaking and entering. I could get arrested for this.”
Twelve Rooms with a View Page 26