The Ten Thousand Doors of January(59)
“As you might have surmised, Mr. Locke called me down to his office to inform me that my services would no longer be needed. I became… agitated, and was escorted from the grounds by that damned eerie valet of his, without even packing my things. I came back that night, of course, but you were already gone. A failure for which I am”—her nostrils flared—“deeply sorry.”
She gave her shoulders a shake. “Well. Brattleboro is a white institution, I’m told. I was not permitted to visit you. So I went to the Zappia boy, figuring Italian is close enough to white, but his visitation was also denied. Apparently he delivered my package by more, ah, efficient means.” Her smile reappeared and widened enough to show the slim gap between her teeth. “Quite a devoted friend, isn’t he?”
I didn’t find it necessary to respond to that. She continued, primly. “And a very nice young man. He gave me this address, a place to think and plan, a place to sleep, since I was no longer welcome at Locke House.”
“I’m sorry.” My voice was small, feeble-sounding in my ears.
Jane snorted. “I’m not. I have despised that house and its owner since the moment I arrived. I tolerated it solely on the basis of a bargain your father and I struck. He asked me to protect you, in exchange for… something I wanted very badly.” Her expression turned inward, burning with a kind of bottomless, bleak rage that made my breath catch. She swallowed it away. “Which he is no longer in a position to provide.”
I wrapped my arm tighter around Bad and made my voice as even and neutral as I could. “So you’ll be leaving now. Going home.”
I saw her eyes widen. “Now? And leave you sick and injured, hunted by gods-only-know-what? Julian might’ve broken the terms of our deal, but you and I have an entirely separate arrangement.” I blinked at her, stupidly. Jane’s expression softened as much as I’d ever seen it. “I am your friend, January. I will not abandon you.”
“Oh.” Neither of us spoke for a time. I let myself fall back into a sweaty half doze; Jane prodded the cookstove to life and reheated her coffee. She returned to the edge of the bed, scooting Bad’s hind end aside and perching beside me. She held The Ten Thousand Doors—ruffled-looking, smeared with rust-red stains—on her knees, one thumb stroking the cover.
“You should sleep.”
But I found I couldn’t, quite. Questions buzzed and hummed in my ears, gnatlike: What had my father promised Jane? How had they met, really, and what was the book to her? And why had my father come to this gray, dull world at all?
I fidgeted beneath the quilt until Bad sighed at me. “Would—do you think you could read to me? I just finished the fourth chapter.”
Jane’s gap-toothed grin flashed at me. “Of course.”
She opened the book and began to read.
Chapter Five
On Loss
Heaven—Hell
No one really remembers their own origins. Most of us possess a kind of hazy mythology about our early childhood, a set of stories told and retold by our parents, interwoven with our blurred baby memories. They tell us about the time we nearly died crawling down the stairs after the family cat; the way we used to smile in our sleep during thunderstorms; our first words and steps and birthday cakes. They tell us a hundred different stories, which are all the same story: We love you, and have always loved you.
But Yule Ian never told his daughter those stories. (You will permit me the continued cowardice of third-person narration, I hope; it is foolish, but I find it lessens the pain.) What, then, does she remember?
Not those first few nights when her parents watched the rise and fall of her rib cage with a kind of terrified elation. Nor the hot, raised feeling of fresh tattoos spiraling beneath their skin, spelling out new words (mother, father, family). Nor the way they sometimes looked at one another in the predawn glow, after hours of pacing and rocking and singing nonsense songs in half a dozen languages, with all their emotions written raw on their faces—a kind of stunned exhaustion, a slight hysteria, an unspeakable longing to simply lie down—and knew themselves to be the most profoundly lucky souls in ten thousand worlds.
She is unlikely to recall the evening her father climbed back up to the little stone house and found her sleeping beside her mother on the hillside. She was openmouthed, naked except for the cotton cloth tied around her waist, a faint breeze brushing through her curls. Ade was curled around her, a golden-white curve like a lioness or a nautilus, nestled into her milk-sweet breath. It was nearly the end of summer and the evening shadows were creeping toward the two of them on chill tiptoes—but hadn’t reached them yet. The two of them were still shining, untouched, whole.
Yule stood on the hillside watching them, feeling an exultant, vaulting joy edged with melancholy, as if he were already mourning its loss. As if he knew he could not live in heaven forever.
It hurts me to speak of such things now. Even now as I write this—cowering in my tent in the foothills outside Ulaanbaatar, alone but for the scratching of my pen and the ice-rimed howling of wolves—I am grinding my teeth against waves of pain, an ache that settles in my limbs and poisons my marrow.
Do you recall the time you asked me about your name, and I said your mother liked it? You left annoyed, dissatisfied, the line of your jaw so precisely like hers I could hardly breathe. I tried to return to my work but couldn’t. I crawled into bed, racked and shuddering, thinking of the shape of your mother’s mouth when she said your name: January.