The Ten Thousand Doors of January(105)

I slumped against a white-stone wall and dug Mr. Ilvane’s coppery-green compass out of my sack. I held it tight in my palm and thought of my father. The needle whirled westward, pointing straight out into the calm gray sea. I tried again, picturing instead a golden evening seventeen years ago when I’d lain with my mother on a sun-soaked quilt, when I had a home and a future and parents who loved me. The needle hesitated, jittering beneath the glass, and pointed not-quite-north.

I followed it.

I found a dirt track that seemed to align well with my little copper needle and followed it toward the straw-colored sickle of the moon. It was a well-traveled path but steep, and I paused sometimes to let the pain stomp its feet and yell in my ears, before shushing it and continuing on.

More stars emerged, like shimmering loops of writing in the sky. And then the low, shadowed bulk of a house appeared ahead of us. My heart—and I don’t think any heart has ever been so exhausted and wrung-dry in the history of the world—stuttered to life in my chest.

The window lit with flickering light, and two figures stood illuminated: a man, tall but hunched with age, hair sprouting in white tufts around his skull, and an old woman with a kerchief around her hair and arms black to the shoulder with ink.

Neither of them was my father or my mother. Of course. You don’t really know how high your hopes have gotten until you watch them plummeting earthward.

A logical person would have turned around then, returned to the city proper and begged or mimed their way into a warm meal and a place to sleep and some medical attention. They certainly wouldn’t have staggered onward, tears sliding silently down their cheeks. They wouldn’t have stood before the door-that-wasn’t-theirs, a graying, salt-preserved slab of wood with an iron hook for a knob, and raised their good hand to knock.

And when an old woman answered, her seamed face tilted questioningly upward, eyes milky and squinting, they wouldn’t have burst into tear-slurred speech. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, it’s just I was wondering if you know the man who used to live here. Only I’ve come a really long way and I wanted—I wanted to see him. Julian was his name. Yule Ian, I mean—”

I saw the old woman’s mouth press into a thin line, like a sutured wound. She shook her head. “No.” Then, almost angrily, “Who are you, to ask about my Yule, eh? We have not seen him for twenty years, almost.”

I wanted to wail at the moon or curl up on the doorstep and weep like a little lost child. My father had never come home and neither had my mother, and what was broken would never be mended; the old woman’s words were a final, cruel verdict.

They were also, rather mysteriously, in English.

A dangerous, foolish tingling began in my limbs. How did she know a language from my world? Had someone taught her? And had I gone entirely insane, or did she and I share the same cheekbones, perhaps the same tilt to our shoulders—but then the crowd of questions fell silent.

There was someone else in the little stone house on the hillside. Beside me, Bad’s ears stood up straight.

I caught a flash of movement behind the old woman’s lamplit silhouette—a white-gold glimmer in the darkness, like summer wheat—and then there was another woman standing in the doorway.

Now, with the calming benefit of time and familiarity, I can describe her to you easily: a tired, tough-looking woman with yellow hair gone gray at the temples, skin so freckled and burnt it could almost pass for native, and the sort of strong, unbeautiful features novelists call arresting.

But in that moment, standing on the threshold of the home I was born in, with a squeezing in my chest as if someone had reached behind my ribs and seized my heart, I looked at her all out of order. Her hands: thick-fingered, scored and hashed with shiny white scars, with three fingernails missing entirely. Her arms: stringy muscle wrapped in black ink. Her eyes: soft, dreamer’s blue. Her nose, her square jaw, her level brows: all just like mine.

She didn’t recognize me, of course. It was absurd to wish she did, after nearly seventeen years spent on different planets. I wished it anyway.

“Hello, Adelaide.” Should I have called her Mother instead? The word sat heavy and unfamiliar on my tongue. I knew her better as a character from my father’s book, anyway.

Her eyebrows crimped in the uncertain expression of someone who can’t recall your name and doesn’t want to offend—her mouth opened to say something like Pardon me? or Have we met? and I knew it would feel just like being shot again, a burrowing pain that would worsen with time—but then her eyes went wide.

Maybe it was because I’d spoken English, or maybe it was my familiar/foreign clothes that did it, but she began to look at me, really look at me, with an avid, desperate hunger in her face. I saw her eyes performing the same frenzied dance mine had a few moments before—my wild bundle of braided hair, my blood-rusted arm, my eyes, nose, chin—

And then she knew me.

I saw the knowing arrive, wonderful and terrible. In my memory she has two entirely different faces at once, like the god she named me for: On one face is riotous joy, blazing at me like the sun itself. On the other is deepest mourning, the keening, marrow-deep ache of someone who has looked for something too long and found it too late.

She reached her hand toward me, and I saw her mouth move. Jan-u-ary.

Everything wavered, like the final shaky frames of a film reel, and I remembered how achingly, terribly tired I was, how much I hurt, how many steps I’d taken to arrive at this precise place. I had time to think, Hello, Mother, and then I was falling forward into painless darkness.