Passage

Seventeen years later, the hole is still there. The little house isn’t ours anymore - the walls have been repainted, the plastic stars have been pried off the bedroom ceilings, and the echoes of little girls’ laughter no longer ring through the rooms - but that hole remains in the wall, a testament to the power of imagination on a rainy day.

It was the third day of rain that week. Deprived of our jungle gym, skates, and wagon rides to the park, we were getting desperate.

“Please,” whined Madeline, age eight. “Just one more episode.”

“No more TV,” insisted our mother. “You’ve watched your hour for the day, it’s TV-free time from now on.”

“TV free time?” I echoed, wide-eyed with feigned innocence. “So we can have free time all day to watch TV?”

“Nice try,” came the smirking reply, and that was that.

Our dad tried a different tactic. “This is the perfect time to practice piano,” he chimed in, brandishing the practice charts he had made in a fervor of musical pedantry.

“I already practiced piano,” chirped Anna, the youngest, coming to our rescue as usual by being unfailingly cute. She had indeed spent a good half hour perched on the piano bench intermittently plunking the keys while she sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with uncanny accuracy for a three-year-old.

I, however, had a different idea. “Sister meeting in the clubhouse,” I whispered, and the three of us darted up the stairs, leaving our bemused parents behind.

The stairs still creak in just the same way. We’re not supposed to be here, but Anna still has her old house key and we couldn’t resist sneaking in for one last look at our little house. She’s the tallest of us now, seventeen years later, and as I follow her up the stairs I can hardly believe so much time has passed since I carried her piggy-back up these steps. Madeline reaches the closet first and opens the door. “How did we ever fit in there?” she chuckles.

The closet is bare and dusty, but in my mind’s eye I can see it as I remember, filled with pillows and blankets, a stray book or two, and the notebooks where we jotted down a secret sister language of our own devising. It was there that the idea of the secret passage was born.

“Here’s what we should do,” I say, fancying myself the ten-year-old executive of our little club. “We’ve always wanted to discover a secret passage in our house, right?” 

They nodded vigorously, two pairs of brown eyes identical to mine gleaming in the darkness of the closet. This was indeed our greatest wish, born out of a favorite storybook of ours featuring a hidden staircase leading to a secret room.

“Well,” I said, “if we can’t find one, why don’t we make one?” This idea was met with general enthusiasm and we grabbed our trusty notebooks to begin sketching and jotting.

Our timing had to be just right. Anna came back from her reconnaissance mission (we always sent her because she was the least likely to be suspected of mischief) and, after climbing back into the clubhouse, gave her full report.

“Mom is washing dishes,” she said, “And Dad is in the basement using the Nordic track.” This was a problem. The proposed location of our secret passage lay directly along the route of these parental danger zones.

“What we need,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect, “is a diversion.”

As it happened, a diversion arrived of its own accord: the doorbell rang. We sat up straight, listening. Sure enough, footsteps could be heard coming up from the basement and leading away from the kitchen toward the front door.

We crept down the stairs and peered around the doorframe. The path was clear. One by one, we slipped around the corner into the family room. The toolbox one of us had gotten for Christmas years before was extracted from its cupboard and we snuck with it into the basement.

“Here,” I said, knocking at different points in the wall with my ear pressed against it as I had seen people do in the movies. “The wall is hollow in this spot - this is the perfect place for our secret passage!” 

Anna hung back, unsure. “Aren’t we going to get in trouble?” she asked.

“Give me that,” said Madeline, grabbing the hammer from my hand and squaring her shoulders. With a hollow thud, the hammer struck the wall and dust littered the floor.

“I can see inside!” she said excitedly.

“We can definitely fit in there,” I declared, confidence restored.

We set to work, hacking away at the small hole we’d made until it had widened substantially. We took turns hammering, trading off when one of us got tired. While we worked, we dreamed aloud about our secret passage. We would use it to sneak between our bedrooms at night when we were supposed to be asleep; we could keep a secret stash of snacks there; it would be the perfect backdrop for any number of make-believe scenarios we would enact. So engrossed in our task, we didn’t notice the sound of footsteps approaching from above.

“It’s still there,” said Anna, running her hand over the jagged opening in the wall.

“Remember the look on Dad’s face?” Madeline grins, revealing two crooked teeth that braces never seemed to be able to fix.

“What were we thinking?” I laugh.

The hole is about six inches in diameter, rough-edged and dusty. It leads precisely nowhere, and was created using a plastic hammer from a toy toolbox. Our parents responded with that half-angry, half-trying not to laugh reaction we are quite familiar with now, as adults ourselves. We giggle, remembering.

“We should go,” Madeline says at last. Reluctantly, we trudge up the stairs and take a last look around our little house, our refuge, our wonderland. We close the door behind us and Anna turns her key in the lock.

As we walk away, I think about that little hole in the wall: the mark we left behind, a tangible record of our presence, our growing, our dreaming. I think maybe the secret passage was there all along: not in the house, but in us - our bond that grants us passage to one another even in the darkness of night. Our passage together into adulthood doesn’t need any forcing or shaping… even with a plastic hammer. The way was made long before.