The Ten Thousand Doors of January(95)

It was all a very effective distraction. I hardly had room for thoughts like: My mother must’ve stood right here; or, I wonder if she’s still alive, somehow, and if my father found her; or, I wish one of them had taught me how to cook. I barely even thought about the blue Door, now so near I imagined I could hear its ashes whispering and lamenting to themselves.

“Can’t decide if you’re trying to burn the house down or make dinner.”

I dropped the poker I’d been holding, lunged for the swinging stove door, burned myself, and spun to face the old woman. She was still slumped in the rocking chair, but her eyes were candlelit slits. She wheezed at me.

I swallowed. “Uh. Making dinner, ma’am—”

“That’s Great-Aunt Lizzie, to you.”

“Yes. Great-Aunt Lizzie. Would you like some potatoes and eggs? That’s what those crispy brown flakes are, between the potatoes. I think maybe salt would help.” I scraped the food onto two tin plates and scooped water out of a barrel on the counter. It tasted green and cedary.

We ate in silence, except for the crackling of burnt food between our teeth. I couldn’t think of anything to say, or I could think of a hundred things to say and couldn’t choose between them.

“I always thought she’d come home, someday.” Aunt Lizzie spoke long after Bad had finished licking our plates, and the windows had faded from indigo to black velvet. “I waited.”

I thought of all the various truths I could tell her about the fate of her niece—shipwrecked, sundered, stranded in an alien world—and settled on the kindest and simplest one. “She died when I was very young, in a terrible accident. I don’t know much about her, really.” Lizzie didn’t answer. I added, “But I know she wanted to come home. She was trying to get here, she just… never quite made it.”

There was another of those huffs of air, as if she’d been struck in the chest, and Lizzie said, “Oh.”

Then she began to cry, very suddenly and very loudly. I didn’t say anything, but ooched my chair closer to hers and placed a hand on her heaving back.

When the sobs had receded to stuttering, snot-thick breaths, I said, “I was wondering if you—if you could tell me about her. My mother.”

She was quiet again for so long I thought I’d offended her in some inscrutable way, but then she creaked to her feet, fished a brown glass jug out from the pantry, and poured me a greasy glass of something that smelled and tasted like lantern oil. She shuffled back to her rocking chair with the bottle and resettled herself.

Then she began to speak.

I won’t tell you everything she told me, for two reasons: first, because there’s a good chance you’d die of boredom. She told me stories about my mother’s first steps and the time she climbed into the barn loft and jumped out because she thought she could fly; about her hatred of sweet potatoes and her love of fresh honeycomb; about the perfect June evenings the Larson women spent watching her cartwheel and careen through the yard.

Second, because they are each precious and painful to me in some secret way I can’t explain, and I’m not ready to show them to anyone else yet. I want to hold them for a while in the quiet undercurrents of myself, until their edges are worn smooth as river stones.

Maybe I’ll tell you about them, someday.

“She used to love the back acres, and that rotten old cabin, before we sold ’em. I’ll tell you: that’s something I regret.”

“What, selling the hayfield?”

Lizzie nodded and took a contemplative sip of the lantern-oil liquor. (Mine remained untouched; the fumes alone were enough to singe my eyebrows.) “The money was nice, I won’t lie, but that big-city man was no good. Never did a thing with the property, either, just plowed over the cabin and let the place rot. Ade stopped going out thataways, afterward. Always seemed like we’d done her wrong somehow.”

I considered telling her that she’d sold her property to some shadowy Society member and closed the doorway between two lovestruck children, consigning them both to lives of endless wandering. “At least you don’t have any neighbors,” I offered, lamely.

She scoffed. “Well, he never did nothing with it, but he still comes around every ten-year or so. Says he’s checking up on his investment, bah. You know back in—what, ’02, ’01?—he had the nerve to come knocking on my door and ask if I’d seen any suspicious characters around. Said there’d been some kind of activity on his property. I told him no, sir and added that a man who could afford fancy gold watches and hair dyes—because let me tell you he hadn’t aged a day since we signed the contract—could afford to build a damned fence, if he was so worried, and not go hassling old women.” She took another gulp from the brown glass bottle and muttered herself into silence, complaining about rich folk, young folk, nosy folk, Yankees, and foreigners.

I’d stopped listening. Something in her story was bothering me, prickling in the tired depths of my brain like a burr caught in cotton. A question was forming, rising to the surface—

“To hell with all of ’em, I say,” Lizzie concluded. She screwed the cap back onto her vile brown bottle. “Time we got to bed, child. You can have the upstairs; I do my sleeping right here.” A pause, while the bitter lines framing Lizzie’s mouth softened. “Take the bed under the window, on the north side, won’t you. We always meant to get rid of the damn thing, once we understood she wasn’t coming back, but somehow we never did.”