The Ten Thousand Doors of January(62)

I was breathless, blind, panicked. But there was a fraction of a second—suspended now in my memory like an axis point around which all else turns—when I might have chosen differently. I might have dived back toward the stern, toward Ade. I might have died, or been damned to unravel in the endless in-between, but at least I would have done so with Adelaide at my side.

Instead, I planted my feet and curled myself around you.

I think of this moment often. I do not regret it, January, not even at my darkest and most despairing.

The moment passed. The crushing intensified, until you and I were flattened against the groaning hull, our lungs empty and our skulls aching. My arms were a vise around you and I was no longer sure whether I was protecting you or crushing you—my eyes pressed inward—my teeth ground against one another—

Air. Thin, frost-sharp, smelling of pine and snow. We burst through some unseen barrier and our ship scudded against the ground. We were pitched forward, smashed against the cold earth of another world.

Here my memories grow reeling and confused, blinking in and out like a bad bulb in a projector; I believe my head knocked against some stone or flying timber. I remember you, tensed and screaming in my arms and therefore impossibly, wonderfully alive. I remember staggering upright, spinning back toward the scattered remains of our ship and looking desperately for some flash of white or gold, except my eyes weren’t focusing right and then I was back on my knees. I remember looking for the great timber-frame door Ade told me about and finding nothing but rubble and ash.

I remember shouting her name and receiving no answer.

I remember a figure looming out of the shadows, silhouetted by the dawn.

Something connected with the back of my head and the world fragmented. My nose crashed against pine needles and stone and the ocean-taste of blood filled my mouth.

I remember thinking: I am dying. And I remember feeling a distant, selfish relief, because by then I knew: Ade had not come through the door with us.





The Ivory Door


As a general rule I’m not a person who cries much. When I was younger I cried over everything from sneers to sad endings, and even once over a puddle of tadpoles that dried up in the sun, but at some point I learned the trick of stoicism: you hide. You pull yourself inside your castle walls and crank up the drawbridge and watch everything from the tallest tower.

But I cried then: lying bloody and exhausted in the Zappia family cabin, with Bad beside me and Jane’s voice rolling over us, telling my father’s story.

I cried until my eyes were prickly-feeling and the pillow was soggy with snot. I cried as if I’d been assigned to cry the unshed tears of three people instead of one: my mother, lost in the abyss; my father, lost without her; and me, lost without either of them.

Jane finished reading and didn’t say anything, because what do you say to a grown woman crying herself to sleep? She closed the book gently, as if the pages were flesh that might be bruised, and tucked the pink quilt around me. Then she drew the curtains against the midday sun and sat in a rocking chair with her cold coffee. Her face was so still and smooth-planed I suspected fierce emotions lurking beneath it; she’d learned the trick of stoicism, too.

I fell asleep watching her through hot, puffy eyes, my arm around the rise and fall of Bad’s ribs.

I have dreaming memories of Jane moving around the cabin, leaving once and returning with an armload of firewood for the cooling evening, working at the table on something dark and metal, her face inscrutable. Once I half roused to see the door propped open and Jane and Bad both sitting on the stoop, framed in summer moonlight like a pair of silver statues or guardian spirits. I slept better after that.

I woke fully the following morning, when the sun was drawing the first faint line against the western wall, a bluish-pale light that told me it was far too early for civilized people to be awake. I watched the line turn taffy-pink and listened to the birds begin their hesitant scales and felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, truly safe.

Oh, I know: I grew up in a sprawling country estate, I traveled around the world with first-class tickets, I wore satin and pearls—hardly a perilous childhood. But it was borrowed privilege and I knew it. I’d been Cinderella at the ball, knowing all my finery was illusory, conditional, dependent on how successfully I followed a set of unwritten rules. At the stroke of midnight it would all vanish and leave me exposed for what I truly was: a penniless brown girl with no one to protect her.

But here in this cabin—musty, forgotten, perched on a pine-covered rock a dozen miles away from the nearest town—I felt truly, finally safe.

Jane had evicted Bad from the bed at some point in the night and taken his place beside me, and only the black burr of her hair was now visible. I tried not to disturb her as I climbed over the headboard. I stood for a moment, swaying and sick with tiredness that had nothing to do with how much I’d slept, and then stole a lightly mildewed blanket from the corner. I whispered Bad’s name and we limped together to the front step and sat, watching the morning steam coil off the lake in puffy white curls.

My thoughts drew circles in my skull, returning again and again to the same fragments and trying to fit them together like shards of some broken, precious thing: the Society, the closing Doors, Mr. Locke. My father.

There was still a chapter or so left to read, but it wasn’t hard to fill in the missing years. My father had been stranded in this miserable world with his baby daughter, had found himself employment that permitted travel, and spent seventeen years looking for a way back home—back to her. My mother.