The Ten Thousand Doors of January(106)
I cannot be sure, but I thought I felt someone catch me as I fell. I thought I felt strong, wind-scoured arms wrap around me as if they would never let me go again, felt the thrum of someone else’s heartbeat against my cheek—felt the jangled, broken thing in the center of me fit itself back together and begin, perhaps, to mend.
And now: I sit at this yellow-wood desk with a pen in my hand and a stack of cotton pages lying in wait, so clean and perfect that every word is a sin, a footstep in fresh-fallen snow. An old, unmarked compass sits on the windowsill, still pointing stubbornly out to sea. Tin-cut stars dangle above me, flashing and twisting in the amber sun slanting through the window. I watch little trails of light dance over the pearled scars on my arm, the neat bandaging at my shoulder, the cushions carefully piled around my hip. It still hurts, a burrowing, spine-deep heat that never quite fades; the doctor—Vert Bonemender, I think they called him—said it always would.
Seems fair, somehow. I think maybe if you write open a Door between worlds and consign your guardian-jailer to the eternal blackness of the Threshold, you shouldn’t get to feel precisely the way you did before.
And anyway, Bad and I will match. I can see him now, scrubbing his back against the stony hillside in that ecstatic way of dogs that makes you think maybe you should give it a try. He looks sleek and bronze again, without those jaggedy stitches and lumps all over him, but one leg still doesn’t seem to straighten all the way.
Beyond him, I see the sea. Dove-gray, gold-tipped in the sunlight. Adelaide had this room added to the stone house on the hillside years ago; I don’t think it’s an accident that the windows face the sea, so she can keep her eyes always on the horizon, watching, searching, hoping.
It is the sixteenth day I’ve been here. My father hasn’t come.
I convinced Ade (Ade is still easier to say than Mother; she doesn’t correct me, but sometimes I see her flinch, as if her name is a stone I’ve thrown at her) not to load up her boat and sail out into the blue looking for him, mapless and rudderless, but it was a near thing. I reminded her that neither of us knew where his Door came through to the Written, that all sorts of perils might have befallen him in between, that she would feel really stupid if she sailed away from Nin just as Father was sailing toward it. So she stays, but her whole body has become another compass needle leaning seaward.
“It’s not so different, really,” she told me on the third day. We were in the stone dimness of her bedroom, in the soft, breathing hours before dawn. I was propped on pillows, too fevered and pain-racked to sleep, and she sat on the floor with her back against the bed and Bad’s head in her lap. She hadn’t moved in three days, as far as I could tell; every time I opened my eyes I saw the square line of her shoulders, the white-streaked tangle of her hair.
“Before, I was always searching for him, questing after him. Now I’m waiting for him.” Her voice was tired.
“So you… you did try.” I licked my cracked lips. “To find us.” I made an effort to keep the bitterness and hurt out of my voice, the Where have you been all these years and the We needed you—yes, I know it isn’t fair to blame my mother for being stuck in another world my entire life, but hearts aren’t chessboards and they don’t play by the rules—but she heard it anyway.
The firm line of her shoulders flinched, then curved inward. She pressed her palms against her eyes. “Child, I have tried to find you every single damn day for seventeen years.”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, actually.
After a moment, she went on. “When that door closed—when that son of a bitch closed it, according to you—I was left stranded on that little scrap of rock for… days and days. I don’t know how long, t’tell the truth. No food, a little water I found floating in the wreckage. My breasts hurting, then leaking, then drying up, and I couldn’t get to you, couldn’t find my baby—” I heard her swallow. “The sun got at me after a while, and I started to think maybe I could burrow through the stone and find my way through to you. If I tried hard enough. I guess that’s how they found me: crazy as a loon, clawing at solid rock, crying.”
She curled her hands to her chest, hiding her missing fingernails. That newly mended thing in my chest ached.
“It was a couple of fisherfolk from the City of Plumm who’d seen us sail away, and got worried when we didn’t come back. They took me in, fed me, put up with a lot of swearing and screaming. Kept a rope tied around my middle, I guess, so’s I wouldn’t dive back into the sea. I don’t… remember too much of that time.”
But she’d gotten better, eventually, or at least better enough to lay plans. She bought passage back to the City of Nin, told Yule Ian’s parents what happened—“I told the whole truth, like a fool, but they just figured their son and grandbaby got lost at sea and set about mourning”—earned, begged, and stole sufficient funds to outfit The Key, and sailed off in search of another way home.
The first years were lean and frantic. There are still stories told about the mad widow who turned white with grief, who endlessly sails the seas in search of her lost love. She haunts out-of-the-way places—ocean caves and abandoned mines and forgotten ruins—calling out for her baby girl.
She stumbled through dozens of Doors. She saw winged cats that spoke in riddles, sea dragons with mother-of-pearl scales, green cities that floated high in the clouds, men and women made of granite and alabaster. But she never found the only Door she wanted. She wasn’t even sure such a Door existed, or that she would find her husband and daughter on the other side of it. (“I thought maybe you got lost in the in-between—thought maybe I should go diving in after you, sometimes.”)