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I come back, spinning, searching the room with my eyes. No one is here but me.
I try telling myself there must be a reasonable explanation for the door closing, such as that the heat kicked on, air from the vent inching the cage door closed. It doesn’t make me feel any less afraid.
I think again about the man from the hospital. Conceivably he could have watched me leave. He could have followed me home. He could have come into the building, slipping in behind another tenant.
I push the cage door back open, feeling desperate to find the scrapbooks and leave. When I do, I scoop them into my arms, relieved. I inch the cage door closed and replace the lock. I move to the other side of the room to pull the string to turn the light back off. Darkness falls over the basement, rendering me practically blind. I shuffle to the steps, feeling with my hands, worse off than before because my eyes have adapted to the light.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I’m thrown by the closed door at the top of the steps.
I left it open. I know I did.
I stand there in a state of suspended animation, looking up at the door. It couldn’t have closed on its own because it was held open with the door wedge. Someone would have had to move the wedge and deliberately close the door, which doesn’t mean their intent was malicious or unkind. Maybe they didn’t know anyone was downstairs and they thought the door was left open by mistake. They were trying to help.
I jog up the steps. When I get to the top, I reach for the knob and try opening the door, but it doesn’t budge.
I try again, with more force this time. “Hello?” I call out, pounding a palm on the door.
I press an ear to the door. I try to listen, though my pulse beats hard, blood rushing through my ears. I can’t decide if there is someone on the other side of the door or not. I’m not so sure but that I don’t hear footsteps or the faint click of the latch sliding into place on another door.
“Hello?” I say again. “Is someone there?”
I knock. I wrap my hands around the knob and jerk at it, feeling frantic and desperate, wishing again that I hadn’t left my phone upstairs. The world around me is nearly black, the only light a sliver of it coming from under the door.
It takes time, but eventually I hear another noise in the foyer, something closer and more distinct, and it takes a second but I place it: it’s the jiggling of a key in the little recessed, aluminum mailbox slots that line the foyer wall.
I knock on the basement door again and this time, from the other side, the knob mercifully turns. The basement door swings open like nothing, and I brace myself for who I might find on the other side.
Mr. Hilman, the elderly neighbor from the first floor, stands in the foyer looking wide-eyed and confused.
“What are you doing down there?” he asks. “In the dark?”
“I... I went down to get something from storage. When I tried to come back up, the door was stuck. The light switch isn’t working,” I say, toggling it up and down to show him. “The bulb must have gone out.” My voice shakes as I say it. I feel stupid, but also scared.
“Because this,” he says, “was lodged under the door.” In his hand, he holds up the door wedge, which is more than just a wooden block, but something modern and grippy, and I can’t make sense of it, how it came to be on the other side of the door from where I left it. “That’s why you couldn’t open it. How long were you down there?”
“Just a few minutes,” I say, feeling short of breath. “I don’t know how that happened. I... I don’t know what I would have done if you didn’t get home when you did.” Sienna would have come for me eventually. If enough time passed, she would have gotten worried or impatient and come looking for me. I wouldn’t have been down there all night.
I thank him again. I let myself into the stairwell and start to climb. My breathing is still heavy. My heart pounds as I make my way up the last flight of stairs to my apartment alone. When I get to my front door, I slip the key into the lock. I’ve been gone much longer than I intended. Not just a few minutes, but more like fifteen or twenty. I turn the door handle and open the door. Sienna is on the sofa still, wrapped in a blanket, her feet kicked up on the coffee table, doing homework on her laptop. She has no idea how long I’ve been gone.
But then, she looks at me, gazing slowly sideways. I don’t know if it’s the heavy breathing or the whiteness of my skin that gives me away, but her face changes and she asks, “What happened?” as I close and lock the apartment door and then carry the scrapbooks to her, leaning forward to set them on the coffee table beside her bare feet.
“Nothing,” I say, lying because I don’t want her to worry and because I keep telling myself that maybe nothing did happen, maybe it was just the landlord, the mailman with a late delivery or another neighbor. Maybe someone came in through the front door, saw the basement door open and thought they were being good Samaritans by closing it. “I’m just tired. Hungry. It was a long, crazy day and it’s catching up with me. There are the scrapbooks. Take whatever you need. I have to get something to eat.” I keep walking to the kitchen, where I’ll be out of view, because I don’t want Sienna to see me like this. I don’t want her to worry. I don’t want her to think something is wrong.
I don’t go for food right away; instead, I lean against the countertop, trying to get control of my breath.
Later, after I’ve settled down, Sienna asks me to look through the pictures with her. She and I snuggle together under the blanket on the sofa. We flip through the pages of the scrapbook, and Sienna asks questions like what Ben and I would have named her if she was a boy and if it was hard for us to get pregnant with her. The second strikes me as a strange question to ask, but Sienna says that Nico’s mom and dad had trouble getting pregnant with him. “Isaac,” I say, and then, careful with my words, “No. As with most everything about you, it was a breeze. You made it too easy.”
“I like this one,” she says, pointing to a picture of her and me together. In it, she’s about two weeks old, sound asleep in a pink one-piece against my chest while I sit, reclined in a chair, my head turned, smiling sleepily for the camera, which is to my left. Sienna’s scalp is smooth, with tiny, ultrafine blond hairs that get caught in a beam of light coming from a window across the room. Her mouth is open like a baby robin’s and her eyes are closed. She’s peaceful and asleep. We both look so content.
“Me too,” I say, as Sienna rests her head on my shoulder and I turn the page.
I try to lose myself in the moment, to forget about what happened before.
But the one thought that keeps nagging at me is that, even if the landlord or another neighbor closed the basement door, thinking someone left it open by mistake, why would they put the door wedge under it?
I can’t shake the thought that someone tried to trap me downstairs.
Eight
