This was one of Mag’s favorite things. Even more favorite than scooping up a sneaky drip of melting cherry ice cream with her tongue just before it made the cone soggy. Even more favorite than the shooting star sound of her jacket zipper going up fast, and the train track sound of it coming down slow. Mag fiddled with that zipper enough to know the sweet harmony of it. It punctuated her day better than an exclamation mark or semi-colon ever could. “Mag, remember to return your library books at school today? ZIP!” (up, pop!) and “Mag, did you feed Harold? Ziiiiiiimmm,” (down, phew).

But even the dialogue of Mag’s zipper could not compare to the back stairs at her Grandma’s house. They were her absolute favorite thing – Mag knew it was indeed a thing and not a place, those back stairs. She could play with them like she would a toy…up down, up up down, down up! And Mag could keep this thing aside and not share them. Her secret diary. 

It was a secret too! Mag found them one day when she was running from the stale kitchen to the starchy laundry room. There was a back door just there with a screen so tempting because you got to slam through it and hear the creeeeak-snap-crack! of it blinking back at you. It was so tempting in fact that Mag almost would never have found these stairs. Aside from the main wide carpet covered stairs that led to the second landing, the stairs so grand they held the heartbeat of the house on them – the precious grandfather clock that chimed at odd times of the day marking tradition rather than time, the back stairs were the entrance to the housekeeper’s room, which remained and had remained vacant for as long as Mag had known.

Oh, but to have an actual housekeeper’s room! Complete with a tiny kitchen and blue floral wallpaper so that such a person could stand and cook canned soup and flip through that day’s already read paper, Saltine crumbs scattering her flattened uniform when her day’s work was done. Mag pretended that she was that housekeeper every so often, imagining always carrying a silver tray in her hands and an obedient smile on her lips.

Yet it happened, despite the crocodile mouth front stairs with their hand carved pillars and the back laundry room’s bull whip screen door, Mag discovered it! A creeping question leading to wide eyed discovery. A new place in a house where she had been so often, and had already found every small corner to hide in. Something new in something known! One step of blue carpet, followed by another and another. So narrow and short she wouldn’t be able to share it with Harold. No, the only part of Harold that would see this would be his blond fuzzy dog hairs always stuck on her jacket. Without a housekeeper to mash the carpet daily with her hasty footsteps, the space lay undisturbed, a perfect spot for thoughts and dream. And Mag had plenty of those.

Today, Mag had no particular contribution to make, only a donation. Here I am, she thinks. Here! Just me.

Echoes from the nearby kitchen sweep upward to Mag, smoking syllables into her ears like smoke up through the sticks of a teepee. Her mother and grandmother were talking to each other, skipping humming sounds telling Mag that the conversation is of a story telling nature, (“and then!” “ah huh, really?”), so she is free to continue her rituals. First, she runs all the way up the stairs as fast as her legs will let her, each time gaining a small second for her record. Next, she scoots down, letting her dress trail and flip behind, her wagging cloth tail.

And then up again but only half way, to the stair where the square in the wall is located. If she sits atop that particular stair, the square on the wall is like a window Mag can look through but it was more like a framed picture without a face. It is the only secret unanswered here, that square. Something is behind it. Mag knows this because she has a square like that in the ceiling at home where her Dad puts old magazines and broken lamps he can’t bare to throw away.
This square is much smaller, but it is the same. What is there? Mag considers this for at least one hour, or however long it takes for her to sing all the verses of The Rainbow Connection her mother taught her. The square box remains locked, Mag’s imagination remains unlocked.

The voices downstairs have stopped skipping. They are rolling on the floor now, deeper longer sounds as if there is more to cover. Mag scoots down another two steps, folding her knees into a ledge for her chin.

“I don’t know, Megan? Why would I know?” her grandmother’s voice announces.

“Because you do. Just like I know about Mag,” her mother calmly counters.

Upon hearing her name among the conversation, Mag teeters forward slightly, poking her tiny nose out farther as if she could smell the motherly drift. “Well I don’t. I don’t know unless you tell me,” came the wilted sky high sound of her grandmother. A pause. And then came the warm fresh folding sound of her mother.

“Mag tells me, and I tell you.”

“I mean in words.”

“I mean in anything but words.”

To this, Mag hadn’t a clean understanding of what it was that her mother knew about her and this was at once both calming and nerve-racking, like taking your first sip of steamy hot chocolate before knowing it won’t burn your tongue. Often, Mag thought of her mother as she thought of her Favorite Thing; all at once devoted to her, belonging to her and knowing her, except there is also a mystery unsolved and an answer not yet a formed question and a cooling sigh of what happened before and what will come next. Mag wished it was her mother she carried on her instead of Harold’s dog hair. If she could carry her mother with her as easy, Mag could carry golden certainty.

As the kitchen had grown silent, Mag flipped over and bear crawled upward, staring through the light blue carpet ropes eastward that contrasted against the dark blue ropes moving westward and she ran an open palm over them, back and forth manipulating their direction, pretending to have magic that could sweep the grasses of the earth. Mag felt the presence of the square window above her, she considered her private questions and lifted her magical hand toward it. Closing her eyes, in prayer or possible spell she placed the palm on the square.

And it moved.

Mag took one slow breath and opened her eyes. It had moved! She pushed harder, gentler, barely allowing herself to blink. Just like in her ceiling at home, the patch was coming away, moving in and falling down and away. She moved her fingertips along the side, shoving the panel to the side and feeling her mouth move into a slow open “O!” of amazement.

Inside, a small olive green book lay, grown grayish from the sheet wall crumbles. Delicately lifting and inspecting the book, it fit along her flatted hand, but no longer than that. It had a black indentation of an iris. As one would blow the empty pestles of a dandelion weed, Mag opened the front binding.
MEGAN, it read in faded red crayon. But each letter square and wobbly and unpracticed so it wasn’t her mother’s, couldn’t be. Or could it?

“Mag!” Megan called from the kitchen. “You coming with us on the walk right? You love the path this time of day.”

“Coming mama!”

Mag put the book back in the square and shimmied the cover up tight, carrying with her what she needed already. Rolling down the steps like a rubber ball, Mag vaguely wondered how her mother knew where to find her inside her secrets.