The Ten Thousand Doors of January(107)

Eventually she took up small-time trading to pay her way around the Written. She earned a reputation as a sailor willing to go very far for very little money or sometimes just for the price of a good story or two, who was sometimes delayed for days or weeks but who often showed up with strange and wondrous goods to sell. She never made much money because she refused to run regular routes to the same places, as any sane trader would, but she didn’t go hungry.

And she kept looking. Even after she knew her daughter would be ten, twelve, fifteen—an absolute stranger to her; even after Yule’s parents suggested, gently, that she might have another child if she remarried soon. Even after she’d forgotten the precise shape of Yule Ian’s hands around his pen, the way he hunched over his work, or the way his shoulders shook when he laughed (had I ever seen him laugh like that?).

“I come back here a few times a year, between jobs, sleep in my own house, remember how to set still. Visit Julian’s folks, who moved out here when Tilsa gave up her ink shop. But mostly I just… keep moving.”

The sun had risen by then, and a line of lemony light crept across the floor. I felt like something recently taken apart, scrubbed clean, and reassembled, except nothing was quite where it used to be. There was still some bitterness floating around in there, and quite a bit of hurt, but there was also something feather-light and glimmering—forgiveness, maybe, or compassion.

I hadn’t spoken in so long my voice creaked a little, like a disused hinge. “I always used to dream about a life like that. Roaming around, free.”

My mother blew a sad huff of laughter out her nose. “A natural-born wanderer, like I always said.” She stroked Bad’s head, scratching his favorite under-the-chin spot. He became a furry bronze puddle in her lap, pawing weakly at the air. “But take it from me: freedom isn’t worth a single solitary shit if it isn’t shared. I’ve spent so much time wishing we’d never sailed through that door, January. But at my ugliest, most selfish moments—I wished it had been me standing in the prow, with you. At least Julian had you.” Her voice was so soft I could hardly hear it, choked with seventeen years of vicious pain.

I thought of my father. Of how rarely I saw him, and how his face had the same hollowed-out tiredness my mother’s did, and how his eyes skimmed across my face as if it might hurt if he looked too long. “I… Yes, he had me. But I wasn’t enough.” Odd—that used to make me so angry, but now the anger had gone all runny and soft, like melting wax.

A ragged, furious gasp from my mother. “You damn well should have been! Was he—did he—” I knew she was going to ask, Was he a good father? and I found I didn’t want to answer; it seemed needlessly cruel.

“Would I have been enough for you?” I asked instead. “Would you have stopped looking for Father?”

I heard her breath catch, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. “Here.” I wallowed around in my cushions and quilts, found the warm leather cover of The Ten Thousand Doors. “I think you ought to read this. So you can”—forgive him—“understand him.”

She took it.

I still catch her rereading passages, running her fingers over the printed words like they were miracles or magic charms, her lips moving in something very much like prayer. I think it helps. Well, not helps, exactly—I think it hurts like hell to reread the narrative of her life, with all its broken promises and lost chances, to read about the man my father became and the choices he made.

But she keeps reading it. It’s a kind of proof, I suppose, that he still lives and still loves her, that he’s striving to find his way back to her. That what was shattered will be made whole again.

So now there are two of us staring seaward. Waiting. Hoping. Watching ships crest the curve of the horizon, reading the black swirls of blessings stitched into their sails. My mother translates them for me, sometimes: To many fat fish. To mutually profitable dealings. To safe travels and strong currents.

Sometimes my grandparents sit with us and watch, too. We don’t do a lot of talking, probably because we’re busy being mutually stunned at one another’s existence, but I like the feel of them sitting near me. Tilsa, my grandmother, often holds my hand, as if she isn’t quite convinced I’m real.

Sometimes, when it’s just the two of us, my mother and I talk. I told her about Locke House and the Society and the asylum, about Father and Jane and rather a lot about you. I told her about Aunt Lizzie living alone on the Larson farm. (“Lord, I’d like to see her,” my mother sighed. I reminded her that the Door was open and she could skip through it any day of the week, and her eyes went wide. But she didn’t leave; she kept staring toward the horizon.)

We’re mostly quiet now. She mends ripped canvas, rereads my father’s book, stands on the hillside with the salt-sweet wind drying the tear tracks on her face.

I write. I wait. I think of you.

There is a sail rising on the horizon now, like a sharp-toothed moon. Its blessings are crooked and rough-looking, as if sewn in a wild hurry by someone unskilled with needle and thread.

It’s only as the ship grows larger that I realize: I don’t need these blessings translated. I can read them myself, in plainest English: To home. To true love. To Adelaide.

I can see—can I? Am I imagining it?—the sun-silhouetted figure of a single sailor standing in the prow. He leans toward the city, toward the stone house on the hillside, toward his heart’s desire.