The Ten Thousand Doors of January(22)

In believing, Ade felt the scattered uncertainties of her youth falling away. She was a hound that finally caught the scent it sought, a lost sailor suddenly handed a compass. If doors were real, then she would seek them out, ten or ten thousand of them, and fall through into ten thousand vast elsewheres.

And one of them, someday, might lead to a city by the sea.





A Door to Anywhere


You know the feeling of waking up in an unfamiliar room and not knowing how you got there? For a minute you’re just drifting, suspended in the timeless unknown, like Alice falling forever down the rabbit hole.

I’d woken almost every morning of my life in that gray little room on the third floor of Locke House. The sun-faded floorboards, the inadequate bookshelf overflowing with stacks of paperbacks, Bad sprawled beside me like a hairy furnace: all of it was as familiar as my own skin. But still—for a single stretched moment, I didn’t know quite where I was.

I didn’t know why there were crusted salt trails down my cheeks. I didn’t know why there was an aching emptiness just beneath my ribs, as if something vital had been cut away from me in the night. I didn’t know why the corner of a book was jabbing into my jaw.

I remembered the book first. An overgrown hayfield. A girl and a ghost. A door that led marvelously elsewhere. And an eerie, echoing sense of familiarity, as if I’d heard the story before and couldn’t recall the ending. How had such a thing ended up in my blue Egyptian chest? And who wrote it in the first place? And why did Ade Larson feel like a friend I’d had as a child and then forgotten?

(I could feel myself leaning desperately toward these pleasant mysteries. As if there were something else hovering just on the edges of my vision, waiting to pounce if I looked directly at it.)

There was a rustling from Jane’s bed across the room. “January? Are you awake?”

Something about her voice, an uncharacteristic hesitance, a fearful softening, made me think: She knows.

And then: Knows what?

And then I remembered. Father is dead. The huge, cold thing sprang from the shadows and ate me whole, and everything went sort of grayish and dullish and faraway-seeming. My tale of adventure and mystery became nothing but a worn leather-bound book again.

I heard Jane rising, stretching, dressing for the day. I had the dim sense that she was going to say something to me, something comforting or consoling, and the thought was like a wire brush on rubbed-raw skin. I screwed my eyes shut and clutched Bad closer.

Then there was the creak of the window opening, and a warm, dew-heavy breeze ruffled my hair. Jane said, mildly, “Let’s go out, eh? It’s a lovely morning.”

It was such a normal, Saturday-morning sort of thing for her to suggest. It was one of our favorite rituals, to go out on the grounds with a basket of biscuits, an armload of paperbacks, and a quilt that smelled permanently grassy from its long service as a picnic blanket. Thinking about it now—the peaceable quiet; the warm, sleepy sound of dragonflies—was like thinking of safe harbor in a storm.

God bless you, Miss Jane Irimu.

I found I was able to sit up, and then stand, and then make all my usual morning motions. It turns out that once you begin, habit and memory keep your body moving in the right directions, like a wound-up clock ticking dutifully through the seconds. I dressed at random: stockings with several holes in the heels, a plain brownish skirt, a peony blouse several inches too short on my wrists. I fended off Bad’s excited nips and dragged a brush through my crackling hair (I had nursed a secret hope that puberty might domesticate my hair, but it had instead inspired it to new and greater heights).

By the time we left the room I’d achieved a false, fragile normalcy. And then I stumbled over the package waiting for me in the hall.

It was a box of such surpassing whiteness and squareness I knew it must have come from one of those exclusive shops in New York with a gold-cursive sign and gleaming glass windows. A note was propped neatly on top:


My dear girl—

Though you may feel indisposed, I request your attendance at tonight’s party. I wish to give you your birthday present.

Several lines were scratched out here. Then:


I am sorry for your loss.

CL

P.S. Do your hair.

Locke hadn’t dictated it to his secretary; that was his own architectural lettering. Seeing it was like feeling his icy eyes pressing me down again—accept it—and the cold black thing seemed to wrap itself more tightly around me.

Jane read the note over my shoulder and her lips went thin and hard as a penny. “Nothing can save you from the Society party, it seems.”

The annual party—which I’d been dreading for a week or two—was tonight. I’d forgotten. I pictured myself weaving through drunken white crowds, pushing past men who laughed too loudly and sloshed their champagne over my shoes, wishing I could wipe the oily feeling of their eyes off my skin. Would everyone know about my father? Would they care? I felt the note tremble in my hand.

Jane snatched it from me and folded it into her skirt pocket. “Never mind. We’ve got hours yet.” And she tucked my hand beneath her elbow and marched us down two flights of stairs, through the kitchens where the cooks were too harried and sweaty to notice us snatching jam and rolls and a kettle of coffee, and out into the pristine lawns of Locke House.

We wandered at first. Through the hedged gardens where the gardeners were busy murdering anything that looked too lively or untamed, along the ruffled lakeshore, where herons hooted their annoyance at Bad and waves tap-tapped at the shore. We wound up in a grassy overlook far enough from the house that no garden shears had denuded it, with the countryside laid before us like a wrinkled green tablecloth.