The Ten Thousand Doors of January(33)
I found no trace of Ade from Texas to Colorado. She simply appears in the town of Alma a month later, like a diver surfacing, asking about boots and furs and the sorts of gear a woman would need to survive the bitter arctic spring of the Front Range. The local storekeeper remembers watching her leave with irritable pity, certain they’d find her thawing body on the trails come summer.
But instead, the woman returned down Mount Silverheels ten days later, chap-cheeked and grinning in a fortunate way that reminded the storekeeper of miners who have struck gold. She asked him where she could find a sawmill.
He told her, but added, “Pardon me, ma’am, but why would you need lumber?”
“Oh.” Ade laughed, and the storekeeper would later recall it as a madwoman’s full-moon cackle. “To build a boat.”
The spectacle of a lone young woman with no particular carpentry skill building a sailboat in the thin-aired heights of the Rockies did not, of course, go unnoticed. Ade had cobbled together a sort of camp at the base of Silverheels that looked, as one reporter phrased it, “like a shantytown recently visited by a tornado.” Pine planks lay scattered on the frozen ground, bent into tortured arcs. Borrowed tools were jumbled in the careless piles of a person who does not intend to use them more than once. Ade herself presided over the chaos in a smoke-heavy bearskin, swearing cheerily as she worked.
By April the boat had an identifiable shape; a slim, sap-scented rib cage lay in the middle of her camp like some unfortunate sea creature God had forgotten to grant skin or scales.
The first newspapermen appeared shortly thereafter, and the first printed report was a blurred sidebar in the Leadville Daily, unimaginatively titled WOMAN BUILDS BOAT, PUZZLES LOCALS. It generated enough gossip and hilarity that the story leapfrogged into larger papers, printed and reprinted and eventually trotted out in conjunction with the tale of the trappers who found an ocean. More than a month later, after Ade and her boat were long gone from Alma, it even migrated as far as the New York Times, under the much snappier title LADY NOAH OF THE ROCKIES: COLORADO MADWOMAN PREPARED FOR THE FLOOD.
I would give anything—every word in the Written, every star in every world, my own two hands—to unpublish that damned story.
Ade never read any of the articles about her, as far as I am aware. She simply worked on her sailboat, scabbing planks one over the other to make the hull and consulting with a local roofer who bemusedly gave her the tallow-and-spruce-sap recipe to caulk her joints. The canvas sail was a poorly stitched mess that would have appalled any one of her aunts, and it hung stiff from a stubby mast, but by the end of the month Ade was convinced it was the most glorious and seaworthy vessel in the world, or at least above ten thousand feet. She burned its name into the prow in shaky charcoal lines: The Key.
She walked into town that very evening and spent the last of her hoarded cottonseed wages acquiring cured ham and tinned beans, three large canteens, a compass, and the hired help of two young men who were made to understand in broken Spanish that she’d like a boat carried up a mountain. I found one of these gentlemen years later, a Mr. Lucio Martinez, and he confessed to me with bitter weariness that he wished he’d never agreed to the venture. He’d spent the better part of a decade under a cloud of baseless suspicion because he and his friend were the last living persons to have seen the mad white woman and her boat before she disappeared. The local sheriff even interrogated him a year or two after the event itself, insisting that Mr. Martinez draw him a very precise map of where Adelaide was last seen.
Ade could not have known then what miseries poor Mr. Martinez would endure when they parted ways at the peak of Mount Silverheels, and I am not sure by then she would have cared. She was driven by the pure selfishness of a knight nearing the end of their quest, and could no more turn away from her goal than a compass needle could point south.
She waited for Lucio and his friend to crisscross back down the slope, and for the half-moon to paint the pines in soft silver. Then she dragged her haphazard vessel along a deer trail to a low stone building that might once have served as a miners’ church, or perhaps something older and holier.
The doorway was just as she’d found it weeks previously. It took up almost the entirety of its stacked-stone wall, framed in vast timbers gone age-black. A rough hole in the planking was the only handle, and already Ade could swear a soft breeze whistled through it carrying the smell of salt and cedar and long, sun-gilded days.
It was a smell that shouldn’t have been familiar to her, but it was. It was the smell of the ghost boy’s skin as they’d kissed in a late-summer field. It was the smell of elsewhere.
She opened the door and launched her boat into the strange seas of another world.
The Unlocked Door
My eyes, when I opened them, felt as if they’d been plucked from my head, rolled in coarse sand, and crammed clumsily back into my skull. My mouth was gummed and sour, and my skull seemed to have shrunk several sizes overnight. For a few disoriented seconds I forgot the half-dozen glasses of champagne from the party and wondered dizzily if the book had done this to me. As if a story could ferment in my veins, like wine, and leave me drunk.
If any story could have done it, it would have been that one. I’d certainly read better books with more adventure and kissing and less pontificating, but none of them had left me with this fragile, impossible suspicion that maybe, somehow, it was all true. That there were Doors hidden in every shadowed place, waiting to be opened. That a woman might shed her childhood skin, snakelike, and fling herself into the seething unknown.