The Ten Thousand Doors of January(93)

I left.

Out in the genteel bustle of the station I pressed my shoulder faux-casually against the bathroom door and fished Samuel’s pen out of my pillowcase-sack. I held it tight for a moment, feeling an echo of remembered warmth, then dug the tip into the peeling paint of the door.

The door locks, and there is no key.

The words were scratched deeply into the paint, jittering along the wood grain. The dull scrape of metal on metal sounded through the door, a permanent sort of clunk, and I gave a little gasp at the sudden weight of exhaustion pulling at my limbs. I leaned my forehead against the wood, eyes closed, and raised the pen again.

The door is forgotten, I wrote.

And then I was blinking up from the floor, knees aching where I’d fallen. I lay there for a while, unmoving, wondering if the stationmaster would come investigate the poor vagrant girl collapsed on his floor, or if I might just sleep for an hour or so. My eyes ached; my throat was stiff with dried blood.

But—it had worked. The bathroom door had become vague and blurred, something too mundane for my eyes to linger on. No one else in the little station seemed to see the door at all.

I vented a small, tired ha, and wondered how long it would last. Long enough to run, I supposed. Providing I could stand up.

I dragged myself to a bench on the platform and waited with my red-inked ticket clutched in one hand. I boarded the next train south.

I sat, watching the country turn rich and wet, the hills rising and diving like great emerald whales, and thought: I’m coming, Father.





My Mother’s Door


The last three hundred miles reeled past as if I were wearing a pair of those magical boots that take you seven leagues forward with every step. I remember them only as a series of jarring thuds.

Thud. I am stepping off the train into the sweating sprawl of Union Train Station in Louisville. Even the sky is busy, a crisscrossed mess of electric lines and church spires and shimmery waves of heat. Bad presses close to my knees, hating it.

Thud. I’m standing in a dusty lot outside the station begging for a ride from a truck with BLUE GRASS BREWING printed on the side in black block letters. The driver tells me to go back where I came from; his friend makes obscene kissing sounds.

Thud. Bad and I are swaying westward in a creaking wagon piled head-high with earthy, green-smelling hemp stalks. A solemn black man and his solemn young daughter sit on the bench up front. Their clothes have that calicoed, mismatched look that only happens when fabric has been patched and repatched until almost nothing original remains, and they look at me with worried, warning eyes.

Thud. Ninley, finally.

It had both changed and not changed in the last decade. So had the world, I supposed.

It was still scrubby and reluctant-looking, and the townsfolk still glared in aggrieved half squints, but the streets had been paved. Automobiles putted up and down them, alongside newly rich men in three-piece suits with embarrassingly large pocket watches. The river was crowded with chugging steamers and flatboats. Some sort of mill—a hulking, ugly thing—now brooded on the shore. Steam and smoke hung above us, transformed into oily pink clouds by the setting sun. Progress and Prosperity, as Mr. Locke would say.

I’d been driven and hunted on the journey here, but now that I’d arrived I found myself strangely reluctant to take the last few steps. I bought myself a sack of peanuts at Junior’s River Supply with the last of my laundry money and found a tobacco-slimed bench to sit on. Bad perched like a bronze sentinel at my feet.

A shift bell rang, and I watched thin-faced women scurrying in and out of the mill, their fingers curled into callused claws at their sides. I watched the bent black backs of men loading coal onto docked steamers, and the rainbow sheen of oil on the river’s surface.

Eventually a sweaty little man in a stained apron emerged from the cookhouse to tell me the bench was for paying customers, and to imply heavily that I should leave Ninley before nightfall if I knew what was good for me. It would never have happened if Mr. Locke had been with me.

But then, if Mr. Locke had been with me, I probably wouldn’t have lingered insolently on the bench, staring at the man with my hand on the back of Bad’s buzzing skull. I wouldn’t have stood and stepped slightly too close to him, and savored the way he shriveled like something left on the windowsill too long. I certainly wouldn’t have curled my lip and said, “I was leaving anyway. Sir.”

The little man scurried back to his kitchen and I sauntered back toward the center of town. I caught a wavery glimpse of myself in a plate-glass window—mud-caked, oversized boots, sweat drawing damp lines through road dust at my temples, pinkish-white scars scrolling haphazardly from wrist to shoulder—and it occurred to me that my seven-year-old self—that dear temerarious girl—would’ve been rather taken with my seventeen-year-old self.

Perhaps the manager at the Grand Riverfront Hotel recognized me, too, because he didn’t immediately order my vagabondish self thrown out of his establishment. Or maybe Bad made people hesitate to throw me anywhere.

“Good evening. I’m trying to find the, uh, Larson family farm. South of here, I think?”

His eyes widened at the name, but he hesitated, as if debating the morality of directing a creature like me toward an innocent family. “What’s your business?” he compromised.

“They’re… family. On my mother’s side.”