My family and I live in the Midwest, in a quintessential American suburb. Nice houses, big backyards, friendly neighbors, kids riding bicycles and playing outside, well, you get the picture. I have two kids, and they play with the other kids on the block. I know the families in all the houses around mine. We’re not friends, but we’re friendly. We chitchat from time to time, or at least we say hi when we see each other. All the houses except for one.
The house to the right of mine is a mystery. Windows and shades are always closed, its owners never seem to walk out of the house, they never go in the backyard, they don’t sit in the porch, they don’t barbecue, nothing. Furthermore, both of their cars have very dark tinted windows and they usually leave straight from the garage, so you never know who’s inside. When they come, they open the garage with the remote control, drive inside and close the door behind them before exiting the vehicle. I know there is a couple living there, because I got a package by mistake, and it was for the woman (her name is Tiffany), and I see the guy taking out the trashcan from time to time, but that’s it. I never saw any kids entering or exiting the house, or visits, friends or family, ever, in more than five years living here.
Only very recently, they did some construction work, but they were never seen, only contractors would come and go. During this construction, they did a very modest garage sale, but only the guy was there, sitting inside the garage. One of the block’s kids asked him bluntly “Why are you always inside?”, and the guy said “That might change”. That was about the only interaction anybody had with the guy since I lived here. The lady was nowhere to be seen during the garage sale.
Of course, we speculate about them. We joked saying he killed his wife and was doing some remodeling to hide the crime. We also thought they may be suffering from depression. During the garage sale, there was a girl’s bed on sale, so we thought that maybe they had lost a daughter, so they were depressed and remained always locked inside. Anyhow, it’s been five years of wondering what goes on in there.
Finally today, we had a glimpse of their life. It happened when my wife and I decided to do something we never do. After dinner, instead of watching some TV or going to bed, we decided to have some fresh air in the backyard. It was dark and it was about to rain. We got two garden chairs and sat in the back of the house. Interestingly, there was a window with the shades open in the back of neighbors’ house. They probably thought nobody could see them from the backyard, at 10 pm. Or they forgot to pull the shades. Anyhow, we could see their dinner table, but they couldn’t see us observing them in the dark from afar.
We saw the woman at the table, the husband, and to our total surprise, two young girls, aged around 8-10, sitting at the table, coming and going, like a normal family may do on a Friday night. The big surprise is that nobody ever knew there were children in there. I asked neighbors about these people over the years, and they all were intrigued about them. But we never, ever, saw children in these five years. They clearly don’t go to school (because they don’t take the bus with the rest of the kids), they don’t play outside, they don’t even ride a bicycle or even go for a walk. It’s like these two girls have been locked in there for at least five years. They may leave in one of the cars with tinted windows from time to time, but it’s like they never, ever, dare to step out of the house.
I guess they may be homeschooled and they may be a perfectly normal family. But it does strike as extremely odd that these kids would never, in all these years, see the light of day or step outside of the house, like every normal kid does, especially in a suburb like this. What do you all think?