DOORMAKER
Jamie Thornton
Chapter One
Before Maella’s father left, he made her promise to never, ever open a door.
Maella still didn’t understand why THOSE were his last words to her.
She knew the family rule. She had kept her promise even as her family had broken it again and again.
Her cousin had fixated on a medicine cabinet and opened it to a starry void that sucked him away. A car dashboard had mesmerized her aunt and she’d brushed it open to an angry swarm of wasps—she died from an allergic reaction after swelling up to twice her size. Her uncle had been in a depression while house-sitting for a neighbor, and then he opened the fridge door. A tiger had dragged him into a humid jungle, neither cat nor uncle seen again.
Her older brother had gone through a door before she’d been born.
No one talked about why or what happened next. Only that he disappeared.
She lived with her mother, her grandmother, and her little brother now. They were all who remained of the family, but Maella didn’t dwell on it. Well, she did, but only at night, when the darkness created its own form of privacy, since, after all, there was no door for her bedroom.
The lack of privacy bothered her more than it used to, but on days when her little brother’s noise and her mother’s demands and her grandmother’s guilting became too much, she escaped to the overgrown field behind the house. No one could see her there. It was the closest thing she had to a closed door.
The field backed up to a creek that ran dry most of the year—but not right now in the spring. She sat on a decomposing oak log and faced the door in the field. She always faced the door in the field, even on days like today when the grass had grown tall enough to hide it. The door was a black hole of decay and death and magic and magnetism.
“Maaaaeeeelllllaaaaaa!”
Maella stood on top of the log and waved her hands. “Over here, Claritsa!” She was tall enough to see the stalks of grass shift as Claritsa made her way through the dilapidated field.
Claritsa came crashing onto the flattened space around the log, stirring up lizards and pollen and mold. Her dark, braided hair whipped around her shoulders. Her thick bangs were just a little too long, but she had screamed bloody murder when her mother tried to cut them. “It’s the latest style in Hollywood,” Claritsa had said later to Maella.
Maella’s mouse brown hair clung to her head in tight curls. She’d been born that way. She knew that because her grandmother always brought up this troubling fact when Maella acted rude.
Claritsa stumbled on a clump of crab grass, caught herself, and collapsed on the log. Between gulping breaths she said, “Cheyanne’s got a new bike...it’s red and has a basket on front…and these bars on the back for someone to stand on…she said she would take us around!”
“Let’s go see it!” Maella jumped from the log, squished her shoes in the mud—there had been a light rain the night before—and ran away laughing while Claritsa gasp-yelled for her to wait.
Out of the whole neighborhood, maybe this whole world, only Claritsa knew about her family’s door problem. Maella had long ago gave up on making excuses to her for why she would never open any kind of door. But bicycles were safe, and Cheyanne, even though she was much older, always wanted to play with the two of them. Everyone on the lane knew Cheyanne had brain problems, but her family had no money to name it, or do anything about it, and none of it mattered to Maella anyway.
Maella raced through the grass and heard Claritsa’s steps behind her. Morning dew still clung to the stalks and transferred to their bare legs. Claritsa wore Maella’s worn-out skirt. Maella wore Claritsa’s shabby khaki shorts. Instead of two almost non-existent wardrobes, the girls pooled what they had into a single small one.
They made it to the back end of the field, their holey socks soaked, their legs covered in flicks of mud. People Maella knew didn’t buy things, they bartered or salvaged or did without. She thrilled to the thought of seeing something new, even just a bicycle.
Maella made sure to take a path away from the part of the field where the grass hid the front door. When the gold her family escaped with had run out and the servants had left, her family had moved into this ramshackle house, and her father hired someone to remove all the doors to the cabinets, drawer faces, bedrooms. They put up screen material as a front door. They lived without a fridge. They were poor. Everyone on their country lane said so.
It was her mother who found the front door.
It was like discovering a spot of quicksand, or hearing a rattlers telltale warning, or finding a mountain lion’s den and not knowing if mom and cubs were still inside.
The workman had abandoned the door in the field without telling them. Maybe he’d had no room to haul it away, maybe he’d forgotten to take it, maybe he’d left it out of spite for the money Grandmother begrudgingly paid him from the last fold of damp, crumpled bills she kept tucked into her voluminous bra.
Once the door was laid to rest there, it settled in, besieged Maella’s thoughts at night, taunted her with its solidness, its soiled permanence. The family couldn’t move it. They were new to the neighborhood, known as the strange strangers who trashed all their doors, and they dared not hire someone else to remove it for the odd questions it might bring about. They dared not burn it for fear it might spread and take out the field and grove and house and street.
Her father had tried to destroy it. He used a sledgehammer and yet the door remained solid. He tried a saw next, but her mother feared his fingers lifting the edge of the door—it took so little—and she made him stop. So her father left the door to molder, and made Maella and her little brother promise to never, ever go near it.
Sometimes Maella woke in the middle of the night, so late even the frogs and the crickets and night birds had gone to bed, and pictured the door. Its metal knob a chipped bronze. The wood a discolored, splintering gray. This door should not have been there. This door haunted her. This door had taken her father.
After all his warnings and stories and promises, one day last summer her father opened the door in the field. Like it was nothing. Like it didn’t matter to him what was on the other side. She’d screamed and run for her mother and found her sitting at the cracked metal breakfast table, crying over her eggs and coffee.
“He had to, Maella.” Tears streamed down her red face and between her small breasts and behind her faded cotton dress.
“Why?” Maella demanded. She heard her own voice crack from a mix of emotions she didn’t know how to name. She felt outside herself, like the real Maella wasn’t really standing at the table watching her mother fall apart and feeling her own insides break into pieces.
Her mother shook her head and bowed it. The only sound for a long minute was the drip from the kitchen faucet. “To keep us safe.”
She would not utter another word of explanation.
That evening Maella took a broken golf club to all the windows on the first floor of their two-story house.
Her little brother watched with his fist jammed in his mouth for comfort, and her mother slapped her, but her grandmother folded her to her bosom, and then took in her mother as well. All three of the women cried, and no one talked about fixing the windows because everyone knew there was no money. But her mother did not speak about blame.
They never talked about what happened. Sometimes her mother still cried over her eggs, and this past winter’s cold flowed effortlessly through the screens they hung up to keep out the bugs. It reminded Maella every day that her father had ignored all his promises and gone through a door. She would never forgive him for that, or herself for breaking the windows in a temper. Her grandmother didn’t complain, but though they lived in not-quite the desert, the winter was cold and they used the last of Grandmother’s folded bills to buy extra firewood, and there wouldn’t be money to cool the house once the summer heat waves came.
Maella hated that door in the field, how beautiful flowers had gro
wn up around it, how it lay there rotting. How it taunted her. How no one trusted her enough to explain what really happened when someone stepped through a door.
Claritsa caught up and cut in front, making Maella slip on the wet grass. Maella ran faster to escape the dark turn of her thoughts and followed Claritsa through a grove of trees.
Their favorite path included a bridge of step-stones Maella had positioned so they might cross the creek without getting their feet wet. They galloped across the stones, but then Claritsa froze on the last one.
Maella slammed into the back of her, sprawling them both forward onto the bank and shooting sand into the folds of their skin.
“Claritsa!” Maella said, exasperated.
“Maella.” There was a warning note in Claritsa’s voice.
Maella looked up and into Barth’s glittering stare. Daniel stood just behind him. Jack was on his right. Bartholemeau Hedrick—Barth, not Bart, for short unless you wanted a pounding—had dropped out of high school to help run his father’s prescription drug business. Her mother made her promise to never go near Barth, but dealt some sort of business with him every week. Her mother didn’t trust her enough to say what kind of business, even though Maella KNEW she was ready to understand.
Jack was Barth’s shadow, but Daniel had been nice to Maella on occasion. He had even brought over a baked casserole from his mother after the lane gossiped about her father’s abandonment.
“Well, look at this,” Barth said. He sneered and wiped his nose on his arm.
Claritsa stood up and jerked her skirt down to better cover her legs. Maella stood up next to her.
Barth’s plaid shirt was rolled at the sleeves and hung over a shredded pair of jean shorts. The other two boys matched him for shirts and shorts—Daniel’s a muted green, Jack’s a sickly yellow plaid. The boys looked burnt from too much sun, except they weren’t really boys anymore. Hair covered their legs, muscle roped their arms, their shoulders were broad.
“We’re going to see Cheyanne,” Maella said with a confidence she did not feel. “Let us through, Barth.”
He laughed and shook away dirty blonde hair from his eyes. “That retard? Why bother with her?”
“She’s our friend!” Claritsa said.
Anger flushed Maella’s cheeks. No one got away with making fun of Cheyanne. “Maybe you should look in the mirror sometime. That way you know what a real retard looks like.”
Maella knew it was a stupid comeback as soon as the words left her mouth. She hunched her shoulders and scowled. Claritsa squeezed her hand.
Jack laughed. Daniel shook his head. Bad move.
“Yeah, oh, I’m sooo sorry.” Barth rolled his eyes. “That cut so deep you know. I feel terrible, just terrible. You’ve made me see the error of my ways. And I feel so bad about myself.” Light glinted in his eyes. “You know what would make me feel better, Claritsa? A kiss.” He grabbed Claritsa around the arms and lifted her to his chest.
Claritsa screamed. Maella launched herself at Barth, kicking and clawing. Sand flew into the air. His muscles were like taut ropes and did not budge until Maella sunk her teeth deep into his forearm.
Barth yelped, dropped Claritsa, shook off Maella, and swore. “You’re going to pay for that.”
“They’re just kids, man, we’ve got better things to do,” Daniel said.
This offended Maella more than if the boys had hurled horrible insults. She gritted her teeth. She was not just a kid. She’d gotten her period six months ago and knew Claritsa had started three months before.
“Whose side are you on?” Barth demanded. “She has to pay.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. He crossed his arms, trying to look tough.
Maella couldn’t help herself. “Jack Corder, you look like a clown in that shirt. Is that why you dropped out of school? To join the circus? Though I bet they wouldn’t take you, would they?”
Jack’s meaty hand snaked out and slapped her, sending stars across her eyes. Her mother always warned her to stop running at the mouth, but Grandmother said she was too pig-headed to learn any way but the hard way.
“Stop that!” Claritsa yelled. She dragged Maella backwards into the creek. Maella stumbled over a rock and they both fell. The creek water soaked their clothes and made goosebumps stand up on Maella’s skin.
The boys stood in a line along the water’s far edge, Barth with his arms crossed, Jack huffing and red in the face, Daniel looking disturbed.
“Run?” Claritsa whispered into her ear.
Maella tensed her muscles.
“Come here, girl. You’re gonna take what’s coming to you.” Barth took one step into the water.
“Run!” Maella screamed.
The girls scrambled across the rocks and the water. They made it to the other side and dashed back through the grove of trees. Claritsa pumped her thin legs next to Maella’s.
Maella heard the stomp of shoes behind them.
The boys were following.
If they could make it to the house…Barth was afraid of Grandmother. She would send the boys packing.
Maella felt a push. There was a sickening sense of imbalance and then all of a sudden she was sprawled on the ground. Her hands burned from hitting something sharp in the weeds. She tried to stand, but buckled under the pain from her knee. She felt hot blood well out from it. Her heart beat out of control and a loud wind filled her ears. Claritsa tumbled down a few feet away, a deep scratch on her cheek weeping blood.
Barth came around and cut off their escape route to the house. Maella felt Daniel and Jack move in behind them.
“Haha, look at that,” Barth said.
He pointed at Maella’s chest.
She looked down and saw the water had plastered her pale blue shirt to her skin. Her training bra had been too soiled to wear today. They had to wash everything by bucket because her family didn’t dare own a washer and dryer with lids. Even she could see the dark pokes her nipples made. She wanted to die, just die. She would never live this down, Barth would make sure of it.
“Come here, baby girl,” Barth said, a scary smile on his face. His hands formed a coaxing motion. “Don’t want to catch cold now. Let me help you with that.”
Claritsa huddled against Maella’s back and whimpered. No one could see them, not with the tall grass stalks in the way. When Maella looked to Daniel for help he avoided her eyes. Jack looked like he was enjoying himself. Maella wanted to wring his neck like what Grandmother did to the chickens they ate for holiday dinners.
“Jack, grab Claritsa,” Barth said.
Claritsa made a furious dash away.
Barth grabbed for Maella and caught the edge of her shorts, tripping her to the ground again. She tried to scramble away and felt a hard edge underneath her hands. Splinters of wood shot into her palms.
The door.
Jack dragged Claritsa back, pushed her down next to Maella, and sat on both their legs. The smells of wet mud and broken grass and sweaty skin filled their punched down section of weeds.
Maella had never been this close to the door. She had never dared touch it before.
Barth’s hand slithered along the inside of Maella leg. She flinched and tried to jerk away, but Jack’s oppressive weight kept her frozen in place.
“Hold still, girl,” Barth said. His voice dropped low. “I only want a little feel. It won’t hurt much.” His grip was like iron on her leg and his fingers burned her. She felt her breakfast roil in her belly and tried to force herself to throw up on him but the food wouldn’t come out.
Jack put his hand on Claritsa’s skirt. She cried out.
Something ripped Barth’s hand away from Maella. Daniel barreled into him in a blur of motion and kept going until he took out Jack too.
“What the hell, man?” Jack yelled.
Daniel didn’t stop until all three lay sprawled on the ground.
Barth threw off Daniel’s leg, jumped up, and delivered a savage kick to Daniel’s belly.
Daniel grunted, but
kept Jack pinned beneath him.
“Yo Daniel, you shouldn’t of done that,” Barth said.
“Get gone!” Daniel yelled at Maella and Claritsa.
Barth kicked Daniel again and brushed dirt off his shirt like this was all no big deal.
Maella dragged Claritsa away.
Barth cut off their route.
The girls took backward steps until they stood on top of the door.
If they split up and ran, they might make it to Grandmother. They might make it. She wouldn’t have to break her promise. But even if they did make it, Maella knew they would face Barth again and again. If they ran now, it would confirm she was still just a kid. If they ran to Grandmother and she sent the boys away, Maella would be no better than her little brother—helpless, too young to handle the real world, doors and all.
Even though it made her feel little and weak and young, Maella thought about Grandmother and the safety of her arms and wished for it will all her strength. She looked at Barth and how far away the house was. That sick feeling in her stomach told her they wouldn’t make it in time. She feared what Barth might do, especially with Daniel gasping for air on the ground. She could still feel Barth’s hand on her skin. How wrong it felt, how dirty. She felt something else rise up in her too, an anger that consumed her thoughts and pumped blood in a rush past her ears. She felt reckless and it mixed with her fear and her anger until she couldn’t separate them anymore.
Maella grabbed Claritsa’s hand. “You gotta help me open the door.”
Claritsa tore her tear-streaked gaze away from Barth and focused on Maella. There was a coldness in her that made Maella shiver. She felt glad Claritsa’s anger wasn’t meant for her.
A question rose in Claritsa’s eyes, but then she extinguished it and nodded. Maella wanted to hug her.
Barth took another step, fat hands reaching out.
“Now!” Maella yelled.
The girls sprang off the door. Maella grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Claritsa grabbed the edge of the door and pushed up.
That Moment When: An Anthology of Young Adult Fiction Page 66