The Ten Thousand Doors of January(108)

Oh, Father. You’re home.


And now: I curl in the belly of The Key, writing by the silver-tongued light of the full, foreign moon. The wood smells of cloves and tannin and juniper wine. It smells of sunsets on strange horizons, of nameless constellations and spinning compass needles and the forgotten borderlands at the edge of the world. It can’t be entirely coincidental that my mother’s ship smells just like my father’s book.

Well, I suppose it’s not my mother’s ship anymore, is it? She gave it to Bad and me. “It deserves a good last run, I figure,” she’d said, and smiled in a crookedy, sad sort of way. My father’s arm had tightened around her shoulders and the smile had righted itself like a gull pulling up from a dive, soaring sunward.

They’d both looked so young as I sailed away from them.

They’d wanted me to stay, of course, but I couldn’t. Partly—and you’re forbidden from ever telling them this—it’s because standing beside my parents is not dissimilar from standing beside an open blast furnace. When I turn away from them my cheeks feel raw and sunburnt, and my eyes sting as though I’ve been staring directly at the sun.

It’s been like that since the moment my father stepped off his ship. Bad and I were still making our slow, limping way down the stone streets, sweat-sticky in the afternoon heat; my mother was already on the pier, bare feet slap-slap-slapping over the boards, hair running like a pennant behind her. A dark figure stumbled toward her wearing a familiar shapeless coat, his arms upraised and his hands wrapped in rough bandaging. They moved as if drawn together by physical law, like two stars hurtling toward collision—and then my father staggered to a halt.

He was feet away from my mother. He leaned toward her, raised one rag-wrapped hand to hover above the curve of her cheek, but did not touch her.

I’d stopped moving, watching them from a hundred yards away, hissing go-go-go under my breath.

But my father was for some reason resisting the thing that had kept him in desperate motion for seventeen years, that’d dragged him through ten thousand worlds and finally brought him here, standing in the City of Nin in 1911 by my reckoning, or 6938 by his, looking into his true love’s summer-sky eyes. It was as if his own heart had split in two and gone to war against itself.

He curled his hand away from my mother’s face. His head bowed forward and his lips moved. I couldn’t hear the words, but later my mother told me what he said: I left her. I left our daughter behind.

I watched my mother’s spine straighten, her head tilt to one side. Yes, she told him. And if you thought you could come crawling back to me without our baby girl and everything would be all right—son, you got another think coming.

His head fell further, his poor, burnt hands hanging hopeless at his sides.

Then my mother smiled, and I could almost feel the blazing pride of it from where I stood. Luckily for you, she said, our kid took matters into her own hands.

He didn’t understand, of course. But it was at that moment that Bad came limping into view. I saw my father see him, saw him freeze, like a man who has just encountered a mathematical impossibility and is struggling to understand how two plus two is suddenly five. Then he looked up, up—his face lit with luminous, wild hope—

He saw me.

And then he collapsed onto the pier, weeping. My mother knelt beside him, circled his heaving shoulders with the same strong, sunburnt arms she’d wrapped around me that first night, and pressed her forehead against his.

Probably it was only in my head that a silent thunderclap rolled out over the waves, that everyone in the streets of the City of Nin paused in their work and stood, looking toward the shore, and felt their hearts thrum in their chests. Probably.

But it’s my story to tell, now, isn’t it?

I’ve gotten sort of good at storytelling, I think. When I finally told my father my own story, he watched me with such intensity he must’ve forgotten to blink, because tears kept creeping down the side of his nose and dripping, silently, onto the floor.

He didn’t say anything when I finished, but only reached out to trace the words carved into my arm. His face, which was still thin and hungry-looking despite days of my mother’s awful cooking, was racked with guilt.

“Stop that,” I ordered him.

He blinked at me. “Stop—?”

“I won, see. I escaped Brattleboro and Havemeyer and Ilvane, I survived Mr. Locke—” My father interrupted with expletives in several languages, and some rather violent-sounding hopes for Locke’s eternal afterlife. “Hush, that’s not the point. The point is that I was scared and hurt and alone sometimes, but in the end I won. I’m… free. And if that’s the price for being free, I’ll pay it.” I paused, feeling a little dramatic. “And I’d like to go on paying it.”

My father stared into my face for several inscrutable seconds, then looked past me to my mother. Something annoyingly telepathic slipped between them, and then he said, softly, “I shouldn’t be proud, because I did not raise you—but I am.” The mended thing in my chest purred.

They didn’t try too hard to stop me from leaving, after that. Well, they had their concerns (my father and grandmother begged me to stay and apprentice to a real word-worker, on the grounds that I’d done impossible, powerful things with my words and ought to be properly instructed; I argued that it’s much easier to break the rules of reality when you don’t know exactly what they are, and anyway I was through with studies and lessons), but they didn’t try to lock me up. Instead, they gave me everything I needed to do what I was going to do. Even though it was dangerous, and scary, and perhaps a little mad.