The Blue Room

When Lena turned the key, the house held its breath. It was an old house, the kind that kept its own weather. In the summer, it baked, in the winter it creaked like a ship in ice, and in all other seasons, it smelled faintly of lemon oil, mothballs, and something sweet she could never quite name. She had spent half her childhood here, sticky knees on wide-planked floors, Saturday cartoons echoing in the sitting room, the rattle of her grandmother’s sewing machine from down the hall. And always, at the end of the upstairs corridor, the closed door. The Blue Room.

“Don’t go in there, Len,” Gran would say when she caught me lingering near it, her voice brisk in a way that didn’t match the softness of her hands. “It’s not for you.”

“What’s in it?” Seven-year-old Lena had asked more than once.

“Storage,” was one answer. “Dust,” was another.

Sometimes, on evenings when thunder rolled over the roof like a bowling ball, she would hear something from that door. Not a voice exactly, not a word. Just the strangest impression that there was something in there that knew her name.

Life had a way of moving on regardless. Her parents divorced, her father moved three states away, Gran grew smaller and more translucent until finally, last month, the house called Lana back with a legal envelope and a funeral.

Now it was just Lena and the house. The lemon oil, the ghosts of cartoons, the empty sewing room, and the Blue Room at the end of the hall, unchanged: brass knob dulled by time, keyhole like a sleep-closed eye.

Her lawyer had handed her a ring of labeled keys. Shed, basement, side gate. One unlabeled, old, and thin.

“You’re the sole heir,” he’d said. “Everything in the house is yours.”

Everything. The word had weight. She found the key again that afternoon, after a long day of sorting through other people’s lives. There were stacks of recipes annotated with Gran’s looping script. A shoebox full of foreign coins, each rattling with a trip she barely remembered. Letters from her father that had never been mailed, all beginning the same way: “Ma, I know you think I broke something that can’t be fixed…”

As the late autumn light thinned, she wandered upstairs almost without deciding to. Her feet knew the path. The boards still groaned under the same spot they had when she was eight.

The Blue Room waited, exactly as her childhood memory. The paint on the doorframe, once a bright sky blue, had faded to the color of dishwater. A strip of masking tape near the knob bore the ghost of erased handwriting. She leaned closer and could just make out a few letters, like bones under thin skin: E-V-A.

The name touched something behind her eyes. It was like trying to recall a dream from four nights ago, right there and nowhere. She pressed her palm flat to the door. The wood was cold. The key in her other hand trembled, just slightly.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered. “It’s a room.”

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out, a text from her little brother. How’s the haunted mansion going? Found treasure yet? Lena took a photo of the hallway and sent it, adding, just about to open the room we never talk about. Three dots appeared, then disappeared. Then Seriously? Maybe don’t. Gran was weird about that room.

She stared at the screen. She could turn away. Leave it sealed. Sell the house with the room still shut, a mystery transferred with the title deed. People did that, didn’t they? Left certain drawers unopened. Lived around the hard, closed things.

Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. Instead of answering, she toggled the phone’s flashlight on and slipped it back into her pocket. The key slid into the lock as if it had been waiting all along. There was a scraping clunk, metal on metal that sounded loud in the hush of the empty house. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the bolt gave a reluctant, sodden thunk.

The door opened no more than an inch. A cold draft leaked through, smelling of dust and something floral buried under it, old perfume, dried flowers, the ghost of soap. Lena’s skin pebbled.

“Just a room,” she said again, though her voice came out thinner.

She pushed. The door swung inward with the stiffness of unused joints, the hinges protesting in a long, aching squeal. Her phone’s flashlight cut a white stripe into the darkness, catching a drift of motes that erupted and spun like tiny planets disturbed from orbit.

The first thing she noticed was the wallpaper. Blue, yes, deep and saturated, pattered with white clouds and small silver stars. The kind of pattern an adult might choose for a child’s room and then immediately second-guess, fearing it would overstimulate. It looked as if it had been hung yesterday, no peeling at the corners, no yellowing at the edges. The colors were wrong for this house, wrong for her grandmother, who had preferred beige and floral prints. The sight of it tugged at something buried. She knew this pattern. She knew those cloud shapes.

Her flashlight beam slid over a narrow bed pressed against the far wall. The bedspread was printed with rockets and moons, frozen mid-exploration. A row of stuffed animals sat atop the pillows, their fake fur matted with dust but otherwise untouched, a rabbit with a threadbare ear, a floppy dog, a bear with a red scarf. A small wooden shelf anchored above the headboard held a jumble of trophies and plastic figurines, a plastic horse mid-gallop, a dinosaur with its jaw forever open, and a tiny ballerina poised en pointe.

A chill ran along Lena’s spine. The air felt thick, like water in a pool that hadn’t been stirred. Her gaze snagged on the digital alarm clock on the bedside table, the plug vanished from sight. The display glowed weakly. 12:07. The colon between the numbers blinked on and off, on and off, at a steady heartbeat.

“That’s not possible,” she whispered.

The power cords in this room should be as dead as everything else. Gran had shut this door years ago, along with flipping the breaker for this room. Lena wasn’t sure exactly when. Somewhere between the summers when she and her brother used to race matchbox cars down the hallway and the time she stopped coming altogether, too busy with college and moving and earning rent and forgetting there had ever been a house with too many rooms.

She stepped over the threshold and stopped. The moment the soles of her boots met the carpet, sound changed. The muffled hum of the refrigerator downstairs, the faint tick of the hallway clock, the whisper of traffic from the street, they all cut off, as if she’d walked into a vacuum. The tiny, constant, worn-out whine of her phone against her hip went silent too. The only sound was the soft whir of the digital clock and the faint, impossibly present tick of another clock she couldn’t see.

Behind her, the door swung gently shut. Click. Not slammed. Not pushed. Just…closed, with a quiet, decisive click that made her bones go hollow. Lena turned, grabbed the knob, and gave it a twist. It held, stubborn and unmoved. She laughed once, breathy.

“Okay. Okay, funny house. Very haunted-house of you.”

She tugged harder. The knob didn’t budge. No rattle of a loose mechanism, no give. Just a cool certainty under her hand. She pressed her forehead to the cool wood and breathed, concentrating on the simple rhythm of inhale, exhale. Panic would not help. Panicking, alone, in a sealed room in an empty house, there was a short story in that somewhere, and she quite disliked the idea of starring in it.

“Lena.”

The voice was small, close, and unmistakably inside the room. She went very still. The wallpaper waited. The clock blinked. The stuffed animals stared with button eyes.

“Lena,” the voice said again, from just behind her left shoulder.

She turned slowly. The room was exactly as it had been when she first looked. Bed, shelf, toys. A small desk under the window, its surface littered with crayons and notebooks and a half-finished drawing of a comet. The curtains were drawn tight, banding the winding with a strip of faded navy. The dust hung in the beams of her flashlight. No one.

Her skin felt two sizes too small. “Who’s there?” she asked, because that was what you said, even when there was nowhere for “there” to be.

A soft thud drew her eye to the bedside table. A paperback had slipped from the edge, landing on the carpet facedown. It lay there, spine unbroken, pages slightly yellowed but otherwise fresh. Not warped, not eaten, not chewed at by time. As if someone had just set it there and forgotten it for a minute. Lena took a step closer. The room seemed to hum, a pressure building at the base of her skull. She bent and picked up the book. The cover showed a spaceship swooping between two planets, its exhaust trailing comic-book flame. The title was rendered in bold yellow letters: THE TWO OF US AGAINST THE STARS.

Her throat tightened. On the inside of the front cover, in purple marker, someone had written: Property of Lena &…The second name had been scribbled over, hard enough to tear the page. Her fingers traced the groove, the furrows pressed into paper by a furious, small hand. For a moment, the room doubled, she could almost see another layer superimposed over the present, books scattered, crayons rolling, someone laughing, laughing… Her own laugh, higher. Another laugh, that echoed it perfectly. She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, the overlay was gone.

“Lena.” The voice whispered, sad and hopeful at once. It was coming from the bed. She turned. The stuffed animals were no longer in a neat row. They lay toppled, some on their sides, some facedown, as if someone had risen too quickly and knocked them askew. The pillow had a deep hollow in the middle, and the blanket bore the impression of a pair of small legs that had just swung over the side. Her knees shook; she sat down at the desk instead of falling.

The notebook on top was open. Her own childish handwriting marched across the page in thick, determined lines. The letters bulged and leaned, glitter pen glistening even now.

Today me and Eva built a spaceship, it read. It is made of a box, but it flies because we say it does. Gran said no flying in the hall, but we flew anyway. Eva said if we go too far, we can use the Blue Room door to come home.

Her breath crashed out of her. The pressure in her skull spilled downward, blooming into a headache. Eva. Her mind presented her with nothing. A blank where the memory should be. She could read the name, say it, taste the shape of it, but there was no accompanying face. No context. No “oh right, my cousin” or “my neighbor” or “that girl from school.” Just a word with gravity. She flipped through the notebook with clumsy fingers.

Page after page, the same two names. Lena and Eva built a fort. Lena and Eva got in trouble for drawing on the walls. Lena and Eva are going to Mars. In the margin of one of the pages was a doodle, two stick figures holding hands under a star. Both had the same hair. The same freckles, crudely rendered. The same smile. She found a photo tucked deeper inside the notebook, as if hidden. It was a Polaroid, the color washed out, the white frame curled at the edges. A child sat on the Blue Room bed, grinning. The wallpaper behind them was vivid. The stuffed rabbit sat in their lap.

Lena recognized her own face. Same cowlick, same missing front tooth, same birthmark tucked under the left eye. But the bed was wide. There was space for another. And there, next to her, the photo went wrong. The outline of another body had been clumsily cut out, leaving a lopsided blank oval. Whoever had removed it hadn’t cared about finesse. They had hacked. The scissors had gone so deep they’d nicked Lena’s smaller shoulder.

On the back of the photo, in Gran’s tidy hand: Last night in the Blue Room. 1998. Lena’s vision blurred. A headache roared up from behind her eyes, a tidal surge of something too large to name. She remembered 1998 as the year her father left. She remembered Gran crying behind the laundry room door. She remembered, suddenly, a cardboard box turned on its side and declared a spaceship. She remembered crawling inside with another warm shape pressed against her arm, both of them serious as astronauts.

“Count with me,” a small voice had said, and the count had begun: “Ten, nine, eight…”

The headache became unbearable. She pressed her fists into her temples. The room shifted. When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t sitting at the desk anymore. She was standing in the hallway, the carpet rough under her bare feet. Her hands were smaller. The tops of the baseboards loomed higher. Her heart thudded against a much smaller ribcage. At the end of the hallway, the Blue Room door was open. Light poured out, warm and yellow. She heard voices, one her own, younger, bubbling, and another that matched hers note for note.

“We shouldn’t,” the other voice said through a giggle. “Gran said- “

“Just for a minute,” her younger self replied. “We’ll be quick.”

Lena tried to move, to shout, to change the scene. Her adult mind understood that she was not here. Not really. This was something the room was showing her…no, something the room was letting her remember. Two little girls raced past her from behind, their shoulders brushing through her like mist. They were identical. Same brown hair in lopsided braids. Same constellation of freckles. Same chipped blue nail polish on their thumbs.

“Come on!” one cried, tugging the other toward the Blue Room. “We can fly out the window. We’ll land on the moon!”

“Lena, wait!” The other protested, laughing even as she followed. “It’s raining!”

“It’s space rain.” Young Lena declared.

The adult Lena felt her chest clench with a grief so sharp it made her breath hitch, though this was all a memory. She followed, helpless, as the girls raced into the Blue Room. The clock on the bedside table read 12:06. Inside, the bed was a mountain. The window was wider, lower. Rain streaked the glass, making the streetlights outside blur into jellyfish.

“Don’t open it all the way,” the second girl, Eva, said. “Gran said the old houses get slippery.”

“I know,” said younger Lena, rolling her eyes so hard her whole head turned with it. “We’ll just crack it.”

She wrestled with the latch, a small, determined furrow between her brows. The window gave with a squeal and a sudden gust of cold air. Rain misted in, kissing their cheeks. They climbed onto the bed with the solemn deliberation of pioneers. Lena stood on the mattress, arms out like wings.

“Ready?” She said.

Eva grinned. “Ready.”

They jumped. The room exploded. Not in fire, not in debris, but in sound. In motion. In screams. The bed skidded on the wet wood where the curtain’s edge had soaked through. The mattress slid. A small foot missed the edge. Fingers clawed at air. Someone yelped. Then a crack. A terrible, clean crack that seemed to split the air, followed by silence so absolute it rang. The memory lurched. The edges blurred. Adult Lena tried to step forward, but her feet were rooted.

“No…” She whispered, even though it had already happened, even though the flow of time in this scene was as set as ink. “No, no, no…”

Gran’s footsteps thundered up the stairs. The scene jumped. No longer the moment of falling, but the aftermath, flashing red lights painting the walls, strangers in uniforms filling the hallway, radio chatter, and the crackle of static. Gran sat on the floor outside the Blue Room, her nightgown bunched, her white hair standing in wild tufts. She rocked, hands clasped so tightly around a small object that her knuckles glowed. On the wall opposite, Lena’s father stood, his face gray and wet. He held his car keys so hard the metal bit his palm.

“You can’t do this to her.” He was saying hoarsely. “You can’t just pretend she never existed. Lena will grow up twisted. She’ll know something’s missing.”

“There’s too much loss already,” Gran replied, her voice raw but firm. “She’s seven, Mark. Seven. She watched her sister die, watched them take her away. Do you want her to carry that image forever? Do you want her to have that kind of weight at seven?”

“She should remember,” he insisted.

“And what good has remembering ever done us?” Gran’s laugh was a short, broken thing. “You remember your father going, your mother’s pills, and look where it’s landed you. You’re leaving again. You can’t handle it. You think she can?”

He flinched.

“I won’t let the last of my girl’s break,” Gran said. “I spoke to the doctor. There are…ways. Hypnotherapy. Segmentation. We can…guide her memory. The doctor says kids are fluid. We’ll say it was a dream. We’ll lock the room. We’ll make new routines. In time…”

“That’s not healing,” he snapped. “That’s…carving out a piece of her and leaving a hole.”

“If that’s what it takes for her to be able to live,” Gran said quietly, “then we’ll live around it.”

Adult Lena watched herself, small and shock-still in the doorway of the bathroom down the hall, a towel clutched in white-knuckled fists. No one had seen her slip out of the room during the chaos. No one saw her now, listening.

“Where’s Eva?” Her younger voice whispered into the damp terrycloth.

“Safe,” someone shushed from nowhere, from everywhere. “Sleeping. Dreaming. Gone.”

She watched herself shut down, inch by inch. Watched those hours and days fragment, watched her mind tuck them away, fold them tight, shove them into a room, and slam the door. The scene dissolved like smoke. Lena gasped. She was back in the Blue Room, adult-sized, knees on the carpet, notebook pages scattered around her. The window was shut tight. The bed was neat. The impression on the pillow had deepened. The clock on the bedside table glowed. 12:07.

“Lena.”

This time, she turned to the bed without fear. The fear was burned away, replaced by something else. A tenderness so fierce it hurt worse than any ache. A girl sat on the bed. She looked about seven. Her braids were the same lopsided mess as the ones in the hallway memory, though her hair held no scent of rain now. She swung her legs off the edge, bare feet hovering above the carpet. Her skin had the pale, faintly luminous quality of something reflected in a lake at night. Her face was the mirror of Lena’s childhood photos, down to the birthmark under the eye.

“You remember me,” the girl said.

Lena’s throat closed. “I do. I- “The words jammed. “You’re…”

“Eva,” the girl supplied. “You used to call me second star, remember? Because you said you were the first.” She smiled, and Lena felt a thousand nights of whispered conversations fall into place. “I’ve been here a long time.”

Lena sat on the carpet and folded her legs under her like she was seven again, too. Her jeans pulled at the knees. The air around Eva was cool.

“Why here?” Lena asked. “Why stay? You…you could have gone. Moved on. Or whatever it is you’re supposed to do.”

Eva’s gaze drifted to the closed door. “They shut me in with the room,” She said simply. “Every time they told you I was a dream, the door got heavier. Every year you didn’t think of me, the key got harder to find. It was lonely at first. But then…”

“But then?” Lena prompted when she didn’t continue.

“Time got…strange,” Eva finished. “I’m not sure how long it’s been, exactly. Long enough to learn every groan of the house, every pattern in the wallpaper. Long enough to hear you walk past the door, sometimes, and want to knock until my hands disappeared.”

Lena’s eyes burned. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know. I didn’t choose to forget you, I- “

“I know.” Eva’s smile was small and perfect. “You were seven, too. You did what they told you. You survived. That’s what big sisters do.”

Big sister. The words landed like a blessing and a curse all at once.

“I don’t know what to do,” Lena admitted. The tear that fell onto the carpet felt hot and enormous. “I can’t give you those years back. I can’t change what they did. I can’t- “

“You can come in,” Eva said. “You did. That’s…new.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, chin resting on them. “The room isn’t just a room, Lena. It’s a…place you put things. Gran put me here. You put me here. But you came back. You unlocked the door. That means the room doesn’t have to stay what it was.”

Lena looked around, at the untouched toys, the preserved bed, the half-drawn comet, the clock that refused to move.

“What should it be?” She asked.

Eva considered. For a moment, she looked very young again, eyes sliding toward the window. “Do you remember the spaceship?” She asked.

“I do now.” Lena hugged herself. “We were going to fly to the moon. We were going to come back if it got too scary.”

“It did get scary,” Eva said. “But you came back, eventually.” She nodded toward the window. “Maybe the room doesn’t have to be the place where everything stops. Maybe it can be the place where you start again.”

“That sounds like a fortune cookie,” Lena said, a watery laugh escaping her. “Or a therapy ad.”

Eva grinned. “I’ve been stuck with motivational posters on the inside of your skull for twenty-seven years. The material’s limited.”

They laughed together. The sound felt strange and familiar all at once, an echo reconnecting with its source.

Lena wiped at her eyes. “If I leave,” she said carefully, “what happens to you?”

Eva tilted her head. “What do you want to happen?”

“I want you to be free,” Lena said. “I want you to stop being a secret. I want…God, I want you to have lived. But I can’t give you that. So maybe I want you to rest. To not be alone in a room no one goes into.”

Eva nodded slowly, as if cataloging the wishes and lining them up. “Then open the window,” she said.

Lena’s heart stuttered. “That’s how you- “

“That’s how I left the first time,” Eva agreed. “And you closed it, remember? In your head. You shut it and didn’t look at it again. But if you open it now, all the way, maybe I can go somewhere that isn’t here. Or maybe I can just…be everywhere. In your stories, in your stupid choices, in the way you double-knot your laces even when you’re in heels.”

Lena swallowed a sound that wanted to be a sob. “Will I see you again?” She whispered.

“Every time you look at the stars,” Eva said with theatrical solemnity, then smirked. “Or, you know, every time you trip over nothing and blame gravity instead of your own two left feet. I’ll be around.”

Something inside Lena, something that had been clamped shut since she was seven, shifted. The hinge creaked. The door inside her chest opened a crack wider. She stood. Her legs were unsteady but certain. The window latch was stiff with decades of disuse. She placed both palms on it. They shook.

“I’m scared,” she admitted.

“In ten,” Eva murmured, as if reminding her of the rules of a game they’d played a thousand times. “We always jump on ten.”

Lena heard herself count, voice trembling but gaining strength with each number. “One…two…three…” The latch jerked, then gave. “Four…five…six…” The window rose an inch. Cold air knifed in, sharp and clean. It smelled of wet leaves and distant chimney smoke and the metallic ting of oncoming rain. “Seven…eight…”

She pushed harder. The frame scraped, then slid up with a reluctant, wrenching sigh. The curtains billowed. Dust exploded out in one last protest.

“Nine…”

She looked back. Eva sat on the bed, hair fluttering around her face in the new breeze. Her edges were already softer, the hard lines of her outline fraying into light.

“Jump?” Lena asked, tearful and smiling at once.

“Jump,” Eva said.

“Ten,” they said together.

Lena shoved the window all the way open. Cold air roared in, filling the room, slamming into the walls that hadn’t tasted weather in years. The digital clock on the bedside table went wild, numbers flickering through impossible configurations before sputtering out entirely. The wallpaper’s colors brightened in an instant, then faded gently to something more fitting their age. The smell of stale dust was replaced with the crispness of November. Wind coursed over Lena’s skin, under her clothes, through her hair. It made her eyes water. When she blinked, the tears felt clean. On the bed, Eva laughed, a clear, bright sound that wasn’t sad at all. It filled the room, reached into the corners, brushed the ceiling, then stretched thinner and thinner until it was indistinguishable from the wind itself.

For one heartbeat, Lena saw her sister everywhere, in the pattern of the stars on the wallpaper, in the curve of the stuffed rabbit’s worn ear, in the smudges of crayon on the desk. Then the light that shaped her thinned and rose, poured itself out the window in a stream of soft white. The room exhaled. The sensation of pressure, the vacuum, the held-breath quality, vanished. Downstairs, she heard the hum of the refrigerator resume, the tick of the hallway clock, a car passing on the street. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, reconnected to the world. She stood there for a long time, hands still on the window frame, letting the cold bite her fingers. Eventually, her phone buzzed again. She pulled it out with numb hands. Her brother’s text glowed on the screen. So?? Did you open it?

She looked around the room. It no longer felt like a tomb. It felt like a room that had been left alone too long and was, at last, catching up. The bedspread had sagged, losing some of its unnatural crispness. The stuffed animals slumped like they’d finally allowed themselves to relax. The digital clock face was dark. On the desk, the notebook lay open to a fresh page. In careful, childlike script that wasn’t hers, but was, somehow, also, someone had written: We did it. -E

Lena smiled through the ache, thumb hovering over her phone screen. Yeah, she typed. I opened it. How was it? He shot back. She thought of the room as it had been, a vault for a single, terrible moment. A place where time had been commanded to sit and stay. She thought of what it could be now. A sewing room again, maybe. A guest room. A writing room. A place where future kids could draw on the walls and be scolded and loved and laughed with, all at once. A place where the past was acknowledged but not imprisoned.

It was a lot, she wrote. But good. I’ll tell you about it. All of it. She hit send. Then she turned to the Blue Room, this room had not been entered in decades and yet had never really been empty.

“Okay,” she said quietly, to the walls, to the dust, to the echo of a laugh. “Let’s start over.”

She pulled the curtains wide, letting the day spill in, and stepped fully into the room, not as a trespasser in a sealed vault, but as someone coming home.

-End-