An Ordinary Life

Sophie decided she liked the house before she'd even chosen her room.

It was a strange feeling — not what she usually felt about new places. New places usually scared her a little at first, like the first day at a pool or the first lesson with a teacher she didn't know, and only later, with time, became her own. With the house on Aldergate Street it happened the other way around: it felt familiar from the first minute, as if she'd already been there before, in a dream, or in some other, forgotten life.

She chose a room on the second floor, the third door from the stairs — not the biggest, but with a window that looked out on the old chestnut tree in the yard and a sliver of the neighbor's roof. Her parents had offered her a bigger room, the one closer to their bedroom, but Sophie stubbornly chose this one, though she couldn't have explained why. She just walked in and felt: mine.

The first week at the new school went by in a blur, the way things always do when too much new happens at once. New faces, new rules, a new math teacher who wrote with his left hand and constantly smeared chalk across the board. Sophie handled it the way she always did — staying quiet, watching, waiting for the new to stop being new. By Friday she'd already learned her deskmates' names and found a girl named Clara she could eat lunch with at the same table without feeling awkward.

The house, over that same time, was also gradually stopping being new — boxes got unpacked, things found their places, the kitchen started smelling like food instead of dust. Sophie hung the drawings she'd brought from the old place on her walls, plus one new one she'd made here: the house as she saw it from the street, with the chestnut tree beside it and a cloud over the roof.

It was while hanging that last drawing that she first noticed the print.

It was a Saturday morning, about two weeks after the move. Sophie had climbed onto the windowsill to press a stubborn thumbtack more firmly into the corner of the drawing, and out of the corner of her eye she saw something she hadn't noticed before — though it was strange not to have noticed it earlier, since it had been right in front of her every single night when she pulled the curtain closed.

On the inside of the window, where the glass had been painted white — Sophie had never really thought about it, just assumed the previous owners had done it for some reason and her parents hadn't gotten around to repainting yet — there was the print of a child's hand. Not drawn. Not stuck on. It looked as if someone had pressed a hand against the glass from inside the room, back when the paint was still fresh and soft, and the paint had taken the shape of the fingers, sinking around them, hardening with the print frozen inside it.

Sophie pressed her own hand against the glass next to it, just out of curiosity. Her hand turned out bigger. Not by much, but noticeably.

She stood there for a minute or two, studying the print, and felt something strange — not fear, but something more like recognition, the way you might feel seeing a photograph of someone you'd been told about but never shown a face for. Then she heard her mother calling her down for lunch, climbed off the sill, and decided not to think about it anymore.

She didn't tell her parents. Not because she was scared — at that point, that first Saturday, there was nothing yet to be scared of — but because the print felt like something personal. Her own small discovery, her secret, belonging only to her and the room. Children sometimes do this: they find something strange and decide to keep it to themselves, not because they're hiding it, but because sharing would mean letting someone else into a world that had only just become their own.

***

The habit didn't start right away.

At first Sophie just glanced at the print now and then before bed — the way you'd look at an interesting pattern in the wallpaper, or a crack in the ceiling that had accidentally become a decoration in the room. Then she started greeting it silently at bedtime — not seriously, more like a game, the kind children invent to make the dark feel less empty.

And then, one evening — Sophie could never later remember exactly which one, as if memory had deliberately blurred that particular line — she moved the chair to the window for the first time.

The chair belonged at the desk, where it was supposed to be. But that evening Sophie took it, turned it so its back faced the room, and set it directly in front of the window, so she could sit facing the painted-over glass and the print in the middle of it. She couldn't have explained why, if anyone had asked — it just felt right. The chair simply had to stand that way.

She started sitting there before bed, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes longer than she'd meant to. She'd look at the white glass, at the small handprint in the middle of it, and wait — for what, exactly, she didn't understand herself, but the feeling of waiting was so strong and so natural that it never occurred to her to question it. As if part of her knew the answer before the question was even asked.

Once, sitting like that, she said quietly into the dark of the room:

"Hi."

No one answered her, of course. The glass stayed glass, the print stayed a print. But Sophie didn't feel foolish, the way she would have felt talking to herself in any other situation. It seemed to her — briefly, at the very edge of what could be felt — that the silence outside the window had become a little more attentive.

One evening her mother caught her at it — sitting on the chair by the window in the dark, without the light on, though it was already late.

"Sophie? Why aren't you asleep?"

"Just sitting," Sophie answered, and it was true, though not the whole truth. "Mom, why is the window painted over?"

Elena hesitated for a second before answering — Sophie noticed it, though she didn't attach any importance to it then.

"I don't know, sweetheart. Probably the previous owners didn't want the sun coming in here. We can repaint it if you want."

Something inside Sophie — quick, sharp, almost instinctive — flinched at those words.

"No," she said too quickly. "Don't. I like it this way."

Her mother looked at her a beat longer than the conversation required, but didn't push. She tucked Sophie in as usual, kissed her forehead, switched off the hallway light. And the chair stayed by the window all night — for the first time since Sophie had started this habit, no one moved it back before morning.

Sophie didn't know — and wouldn't find out for many more weeks — that her mother, that same night, had found a second identical print in the guest room at the other end of the hallway. That the number of prints in the house had already started to grow, slowly, one a week, each one smaller than the last. And that the reason she was drawn to the window at night — a reason she explained to herself as simply habit, simply a game — was far older than she was, and far more persistent than any childhood fantasy.

That night, lying in bed without the chair by the window, since her mother had eventually carried it back to the desk after all, Sophie couldn't fall asleep right away for the first time in a long while. She lay looking at the ceiling, thinking about the fourth door at the end of the hallway — the locked one, the one her parents called storage and that she tried not to let her eyes linger on for more than a couple of seconds.

She couldn't say where the thought came from, but she was certain: someone was behind that door. And that someone knew her name.