The Ten Thousand Doors of January(94)

He gave me a you’re-not-a-very-good-liar look, but apparently the Larson women hadn’t inspired sufficient loyalty in the townsfolk to keep him from directing me south, past the mill, two miles down. He shrugged. “Doesn’t look like much, these days. But she’s still in there, last we heard.”

Those final two miles were longer than regular miles. They felt stretched and fragile beneath my feet, as if a too-heavy footfall might shatter them and leave me stranded in the nowheresville of the Threshold. Maybe I was just tired of walking. Maybe I was afraid. It’s one thing to read a storybook version of your mother’s life and choose to believe it; it’s quite another to knock on a stranger’s door and say, Hello, I have it on good authority that you’re my great (great?) aunts.

I let my fingers graze Bad’s spine as we walked. Dusk settled over our shoulders like a damp purple blanket. The river—the churn and clank of boat traffic, the shush of water, and the tangy smell of catfish and mud—was slowly beaten back by honeysuckle and cicadas and some bird that cooed the same three syllables in a lilting circle.

It was all so familiar and so foreign. I pictured a young girl in a blue cotton dress running down this same road on cinnamon-stick legs. Then I pictured another girl, white and square-jawed, running before her. Adelaide. Mother.

I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been looking: a narrow dirt drive crowded on either side by briars and untrimmed boughs. Even once I’d followed the track to its end I was uncertain—who would live in such a huddled, bent-backed cabin, half-eaten by ivy and some sort of feral climbing rose? The wooden-shake shingles were green with moss; the barn had collapsed entirely.

But a single ancient mule still stood in the yard in a three-legged doze, and a few chickens roosted in the remains of the barn, clucking sleepily to themselves. A light—dim, mostly obscured by dingy white curtains—still flickered in the kitchen window.

I climbed the sagging front steps and stood unmoving before the front door. Bad sat beside me and leaned against my leg.

It was an old door, nothing but a series of gray planks so time-worn the grain of the wood had weathered into ridges like the whorls of fingerprints. The handle was a strip of oil-dark leather; candlelight peered through the cracks and knotholes like an inquisitive housewife.

It was my mother’s door, and her mother’s door.

I exhaled, raised my hand to knock, and hesitated at the last moment because what if it was all a beautiful lie, a fairy-tale spell that would be broken the moment my hand touched the unyielding reality of that door—what if an old man answered and said “Adelaide who?” Or what if Adelaide herself opened the door and it turned out she’d found her way back into this world after all but never come looking for me?

The door opened before I brought myself to touch it.

A very old, very querulous-looking woman stood on the threshold, glaring up at me with an expression that was (impossibly, dizzyingly) familiar. It was a grandmotherly, young-people-these-days sort of look, as seamed and wrinkled as walnut meat. I had a disorienting sense of having seen it from a much lower vantage point, perhaps as a child—

And then I remembered: the old woman I’d bumped into when I was seven. The woman who’d stared at me with an expression like a lightning-struck tree and asked me just who the hell I was.

I’d run from her then. I did not run now.

Her eyes—red-rimmed, weepy, blurred with blue-white clouds—found mine and widened. Her mouth untwisted. “Adelaide, child, what’d you do to your hair?”

She blinked up at the half-braided mass piled behind my head, circled by a fuzzy reddish halo of escaped hairs. Then she frowned again and refocused on my face, her gaze circling like a compass needle unable to find true north. “No—no, you’re not my Ade…”

“No, ma’am.” My voice came out far too loud, ringing like a struck bell in the soft evening. “No. I’m January Scholar. I think you might be my aunt. Adelaide Larson is—was—my mother.”

The old woman made a single sound—a soft exhalation, as if a blow she’d braced for had finally arrived—and then collapsed and lay on the threshold as motionless and crumpled as a pile of tossed laundry.


The insides of the Larson house matched its outsides: scraggly and poorly tended, with very little evidence of human habitation. Vines crept in around rotten windowsills and jars of preserves gleamed murky gold in the last evening light. Something had nested in the rafters and left white spatters on the floorboards.

The old woman (my aunt?) was birdlike in my arms, hollow-boned and fragile. I propped her in the only piece of furniture that wasn’t covered in fabric scraps or dirty dishes—a rocking chair so ancient there were shiny grooves worn in the floorboards beneath it—and briefly considered doing something drastic and dime-novelish to wake her, like tossing cold water in her face. I let her be.

I rummaged through the kitchen instead, which prompted a lot of skittering and squeaking from its occupants, followed by the unpleasant snap-crunch of Bad’s jaws. I unearthed three eggs, a mold-spotted onion, and four potatoes so wizened and curled they could have been in one of Mr. Locke’s glass cases (Amputated ears, 4 ct., unlikely to be edible). A voice very like Jane’s hissed in my head: Have you ever cooked a single meal yourself?

How hard could it be?

The answer—as you may or may not know depending on your experience with rusted iron skillets, wavering candlelight, and finicky cookstoves that are either lukewarm or the temperature of the sun itself—is: very hard indeed. I chopped and clanged and opened the stove door several hundred times to prod the fire. I experimented with covering and uncovering the pan, which seemed to have no effect whatsoever. I fished out a potato chunk and found it somehow both burnt and undercooked; even Bad hesitated to eat it.