My parents died in a car crash when I was fourteen.
Don't feel bad for me or anything. I've made my peace with that years ago. Life with them was never great, but I do miss them. It's just that if they taught me one thing it's to not sit around wallowing in self-pity.
I just wish they hadn't sent me to live with my Aunt Louise.
Anyone have that one family member that's just a little strange, a little cut off from the rest of the family? Aunt Louise was ours. She was also our closest living relative. Dad's family lived on the other side of the continent. Mom's parents were both dead and she was an only child. Aunt Louise, her mother's sister, actually, so my great-aunt, lived just an hour from where we did.
When my folks were alive, we rarely visited Aunt Louise, and to be perfectly honest, I half expected her to refuse to take me in. I was fully prepared to become a ward of the state, or move across the country, as soon as I heard that Children and Family services had contacted her about taking me in.
But she accepted. I'm not sure how willingly, or graciously, because I wasn't privy to the phone conversation where she agreed to take me. I was surprised, though, at how nice she was to me the first three days I was there.
I want to make something clear; while Aunt Louise was cranky, odd, eccentric, uncouth, and several other less-than-flattering adjectives, she wasn't a complete bitch. She had a rather abrupt, even abrasive, way of speaking, but she wasn't cruel. I had never taken the time to really get to know her during my initial fourteen years, but I could tell that she mostly kept to herself and didn't particularly like people, so naturally I assumed that she was a reclusive, curmudgeonly bitch.
Really, what surprised me most when I first moved in, it was how normal everything seemed. At least at first. Aunt Louise cooked, cleaned, watched TV, talked to neighbors on the phone, etc. just like anyone else would, and she told me right away that she had little in the way of expectations from me, or at least, none that my parents wouldn't have; don't stay out too late, let her know if you're going to be late coming home, finish your homework before you watch TV, clean up after yourself, etc.
There was one rule, however, that was strange. And it stood out from the other rules in how strange it was. At first I tried not to worry about it; old people sometimes have peculiarities. I initially thought that was all this was. I was wrong.
She insisted that any time I entered or left a room, I was to shut the door behind me right away. It didn't matter if I was only going to be in that room for a few seconds. If I entered a room, I was expected to immediately shut the door, and the same was true if I left it.
I often forgot this rule in my first week or so there. She never failed to remind me of it. "Shut that damned door!" she would yell, any time I forgot. It never seemed to matter where she was in the house, she could always tell when I had not shut a door just after opening it.
Her house was old, and my understanding is that she was not its first owner. She had lived in it since Mom was a girl. I had no idea how old it was. It could easily have been over a hundred, judging by its design and layout. It had two floors, a basement and a sub-basement. That last floor threw me for a bit of a loop when I discovered it existed. I was washing a load of my clothes when I noticed a door, closed, naturally, in the far wall of the utility room. The basement was unfinished, with mostly dirt flooring and bits and bobs stacked or piled or shelved everywhere. The only room you could really walk through without fear of stepping on something or knocking over a stack or pile was this laundry room, which was also the only tiled floor down there
The door I found in the basement had a board laid across it, easily moveable. It was as if Aunt Louise wanted a border there but not one that she couldn't get past, if need be. My curiosity overtook me the second time I saw it, and I slid the board away from the door and tried it. It was locked.
