I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with Nico for our entire lives.
The weekend after the funeral—the second funeral, our father’s, early in June of the year I turned twelve—the movers were roaming around the house, boxing up my little life, carrying out my stash of comic books and my baseball glove and my twin bed, all my worldly store lifted out to the truck in one trip. I realized with a start that I hadn’t seen my baby sister for hours. I flipped out, charged through the house in a panic, ducking past the movers, throwing open the doors of the dusty empty closets, charging down to the basement.
Out on the streets of Concord I clomped through patches of mud from the midsummer rain, up and down side streets, calling her name. I found Nico at last in White Park, giggling, hiding under the slide, getting sunburnt in a light summer dress, scratching her name in the dirt with a stick. I glowered and crossed my skinny arms. I was infuriated, already a roil of emotions from the move, the grief. Nico, age six, reached up and patted my cheek. “You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen?” Hopping up, taking my big hand between her two little ones. “You did, huh?”
And now here I am in Rotary, Ohio, less than a week to go, bent forward at the waist with my fingers twitching, pacing like a lunatic in a circle around Cortez the thief, staring at his broad back where he’s hunched over a trap door trying to figure how to lift it.
The secret door in the floor of the garage is a surprise, except it’s not a surprise. This is one of the things people are doing, people all over the world, digging holes or finding holes and climbing down inside them. The United States Army, according to rumor, has created vast networks of lead-lined bunkers for the evacuation of top brass and key executive branch officials, a reinforced underground universe extending from beneath the Pentagon all the way across Arlington. The city of West Marlborough, Texas, embarked on a three-month “all-city dig” to create a massive safe space for all city residents beneath a local high-school ball field.
The relevant experts, in general, have been politely skeptical of such enterprises—of all the governments, the neighborhoods, the millions of private citizens digging into their Cold War–style redoubts. As if one could ever dig deep enough to withstand the blast. As if you could take enough groceries down there with you to survive when the sun disappears and the animals all die.
“Son of a bitch,” mutters Cortez. He’s using my magnifying glass, peering, tapping the smooth stone floor with his big knuckles.
“What?” I say, and then erupt in a coughing fit, overcome by excitement, anxiety, exhaustion, dust. I don’t know what. My throat burns. I’m standing right behind him, peering over his shoulder, shifting on my feet. Time is passing while we stand here, minutes are rushing past like stars flying by at light speed in a science-fiction serial. I check the time on my Casio. It’s 9:45 already. Can that be right?
“Cortez,” I say. “Can you open the door or not?”
“It’s not a door,” he says, sweating, pushing his thick black hair out of his eyes. “That’s the problem.”
“What do you mean, it’s not a door?” I’m speaking too rapidly, too loudly. My words jangle back at me. I feel like I’m going crazy, just a little bit. “You said it was a door.”
“Mea culpa. A door has a handle.” He jabs his finger at the floor. “This is a lid. A cover. There is an opening in the ground here, probably for a staircase, and somebody covered it over.”
Cortez points to four places on the floor where he claims to see the ghostly remnants of post holes, the foundations of a stair rail. But even more telling, he says, are the four panels of the concrete itself: two dark and two light, laid more recently than all the others.
“That’s the lid,” he says. “Those four pieces are one piece. They had a hand mixer, they poured a slab, they stamped and stained it to match the pattern of the floor and cut the edges to fit, and then they lowered it in.” He hands me back my magnifying glass. “You see where it’s cut?”
I can’t, though. I can’t see any of this. I just see a floor. Cortez stands and cracks his back, turning all the way this way, then all the way the other. “The pattern was hand-corrected along the edges. The rest is machine-sawed. This here is done by hand. See?”
I squint at the floor; I open my eyes as wide as they can go. I’m so tired. Cortez sighs with weary amusement and then hustles over to the big garage door.
“Here,” he says, and pops the lock and flies it open. “You see that?”
And the room is suddenly alive with tiny particles, all around, millions of tiny pieces dancing in the empty air.
“Dust.”
“Yes indeedy. Concrete is just tiny stones packed very tight. Someone uses a chop saw or a walk-behind to correct the edges of a lid, for example, and it makes a lot of dust. Like this.”