I grab Enzo’s arm before he can wrench open the door. As much as I want to find the kids, I’m suddenly terrified of what’s behind that door.
“Please be careful,” I beg him.
He glances at me for a second, acknowledging my warning. Then he pushes the door the rest of the way open.
It’s a small room, not too much bigger than a closet. There are no windows, giving the room a stiflingly claustrophobic feel. I stare into the small space, dimly lit by a single flickering bulb.
And in the corner of the room are Ada and Nico, crouched on the floor, staring up at us.
“Ada! Nico!” My eyes fill with tears of relief. “What are you guys doing in here? How did you find this room? Your father and I were worried sick!”
The kids scramble to their feet, wearing identical guilty expressions. I’m not even sure which one of them to hug first, but Enzo hugs Ada, so I go for Nico. He stiffens at first, but then he buries his face in my chest. As I cling to him, I take a better look around the small room. It’s about half the size of either of the kids’ bedrooms, and it’s extremely dusty, like nobody has been in here for years. I’m surprised the light still works. In one corner of the room, there’s a little pile of rusty nails. In another corner, there’s a small stack of Nico’s comic books.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Nico says. “I found this clubhouse to play in. I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed.”
Only my son would rip through the new wallpaper of our house to find some dirty, disgusting room filled with tetanus-riddled nails and then make it his clubhouse. And apparently, he’s been sneaking down here several nights a week to do this, based on how often I’ve been hearing that scraping sound, which nearly gave me a heart attack several times over.
“We were calling your names!” I say. “Didn’t you hear us?”
Ada pulls away from Enzo, wiping her eyes. She is crying hard now. And when I touch my own face, I realize that I’m crying too. “We didn’t hear anything!” Ada sobs.
Suzette has stepped into the tiny room, and she is examining the door. “It looks like there’s a very thick layer of insulation here. It would’ve been hard for them to hear anything.”
“We didn’t hear a thing,” Nico confirms.
Suzette is looking all around the room, like she’s appraising it for when the house goes back on the market when we inevitably can’t afford the mortgage. “I had no idea this little room even existed in this house. They must have wallpapered over it when they were renovating.” She lifts her eyes to look at the ceiling. “Maybe they felt it wasn’t stable.”
I flash the children a stern look. “I cannot believe you’ve been hiding in some mystery room in the house that doesn’t even have a stable ceiling.”
“I’m sorry,” Ada sniffles.
Nico doesn’t apologize again, but he drops his eyes.
“All right.” My heart rate seems to have decelerated to something normal. And my blood pressure Well, I’m sure it’s still high because it always is. But at least I don’t quite feel like I’m about to have a stroke anymore. “Let’s all leave this dangerous room under the staircase, please.” I evacuate the kids out of the room first, then Enzo goes, ducking down to avoid hitting the frame of the door, and I follow. Suzette lingers behind, looking around the tiny space. I swear to God, if she suggests we turn this room into some sort of playroom or something else along those lines, I might smack her. I do not like enclosed spaces like
this. I had a bad experience that I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely get over. “I’m sorry,” Ada says again as she wipes her eyes. “We won’t ever go
in there again. I promise.”
She looks really upset. Ada takes everything so hard. “I know you won’t, sweetie.”
Ada is still crying, gulping to try to get it under control. But here’s the weird part: When we came into the room, her eyes looked red and swollen. Like she’d already been crying when we busted into the room.
But why would Ada have been crying?
