Flinging the blankets off of me, I pause as I stare down at the dark blue comforter my mother must have put on my bed when I was in the bathroom, cleaning up for bed. I’m sure it was her way of making amends for what happened, but it didn’t work. Acknowledging my hatred of a stupid color of a blanket doesn’t make up for the knowledge that I officially cannot trust either one of my parents.
Jumping out of bed, I pull open my bottom dresser drawer and yank out the one pair of jeans I own that I found in the back of my closet yesterday when I tore my room apart. Grabbing the pair of scissors sitting in a plastic cup on top of the dresser, I quickly shear off the stiff material from the upper thigh down. I pull the newly cut jean shorts up my legs and under my nightgown, immediately loving the way they feel. With the scissors still in my hand, I take them to the waist of my tank top gown, cutting an uneven line around my body until the bottom lacy half of it flutters to the floor at my feet. Slamming the scissors down on the dresser, I pull the rubber band out of the end of my hair and roughly scrub my hands through my scalp, untangling the braid my mother put in yesterday morning.
When I’m finished, I look at myself in the mirror and finally smile at the reflection staring back at me. The top of the nightgown that is now a tank top is made of flimsy cotton material and if you look hard enough, you can clearly see my breasts through it. The now tiny jean shorts make my bare legs look a mile long, and my thick black hair hanging in loose waves down my back makes me look wild and older than my eighteen years. Turning away from my reflection, I pad softly across my hardwood floor, quietly open my door, and listen for any sounds of my parents. As much as I want to continue pestering and arguing with them until one of them finally breaks and admits something truthful to me, I’m more concerned about my dream and figuring out all of the events surrounding what happened that night.
When I hear nothing but silence upstairs, I move through the living room and down to the first floor. At the bottom, I walk around the banister and head in the opposite direction of the front door. When I get to the back of the stairs, I walk to the door hidden against the wall underneath them. Glancing quickly around me to make sure I’m alone, I take a few seconds to stand here quietly and listen for the sounds of someone approaching. When I hear nothing but the ticking of the old grandfather clock at the opposite end of the hall in the artifact museum, I move forward and stare at the door that leads to the basement—the first stop on the tour of the prison. It’s the one that equally excites and scares people at the same time. Basements in old buildings are always scary, but a basement in an old prison where solitary confinement was located and lots of unspeakable acts were inflicted upon prisoners, some fatally, is chilling.
I know the basement is mostly empty, and the temperature drops a few degrees as soon as one gets to the bottom of the steps. It’s pretty common for that to happen in a room located underground, but there’s something different about the air down there. It’s even colder than it should be and every once in a while, visitors walk through an extra frigid pocket of air that can never be explained since the basement has no windows. I feel like some part of me has never liked the basement just like that same part of me supposedly never liked going into the cell blocks, like my father said. Then there’s the other part, the one screaming to get out, the one who feels freer with her hair down and out of a stuffy dress, who wants to go down there, who feels something pulling her in that direction, just like in the cell block.
My father lost his temper when the men came to work in the basement. I remember so clearly the need to laugh at how resolute he was that no one goes down in the basement. There’s got to be a reason why I dreamt about hearing that conversation. There’s got to be a reason why I itch with excitement to open this door and go down those stairs, why my body practically hums with eager energy, knowing that what lies beyond this door could be the answer to all the secrets I can’t figure out and that no one wants to tell me. Having that dream reminded me of the several times I heard my father arguing with Ike and a few of the other men about the hole in the basement. It’s located in a separate room at the far end and while it gives the tours an additional creepy factor when visitors hear about what happened down in that hole in the 1800’s, it’s also a danger. Located directly over a natural spring, every time it rains the hole fills with water, and my father was growing concerned that keeping it intact was too much of a liability. Why, all of a sudden, was he so adamant that no one goes down there? Why, after weeks and months of complaining about having it filled in, did he suddenly change his mind?