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.
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.”
“Thank you, Aunt Lizzie.”
I was two steps up the stairs when Lizzie said, “Tomorrow maybe you can tell me how a colored girl-child with a mess of scars and a mean-lookin’ dog ended up on my doorstep. And what took you so damned long.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I fell asleep in my mother’s bed, with Bad pressed against
my side and the smell of dust in my nose and that shadowy question still looming, unspoken, in my skull.
I had that nightmare about the blue Door and the hands reaching for me, except this time the hands weren’t white and spidery, but thick-fingered and familiar: Mr. Locke’s hands, reaching toward my throat.
I woke with Bad’s nose snuffling beneath my chin and greenish sunlight filtering through the vine-eaten window. I lay for a while, stroking Bad’s ears and letting my heart thud itself quiet. The room around me was like an exhibit in a grubby museum. A stiff-bristled brush lay on the dresser with a few wiry white hairs still snarled around it; a framed daguerreotype of a chinless Rebel soldier sat propped on a dresser; a series of children’s treasures (a chunk of fool’s gold, a broken compass, a rock studded with dull white fossils, a moldy satin ribbon) perched in a neat line on the windowsill.
My mother’s whole world, until she ran away to find others. This was what she’d been sailing toward before she died, this shabby house that smelled of old woman and bacon fat. Her home.
Did I have a home to sail back to? I thought of Locke House—not the stupid, sumptuous parlors crowded with stolen treasures, but my favorite lumpy armchair. The little round window where I could watch storms coming across the lake. The way the stairwell always smelled of beeswax and orange oil.
I did have a home. I just couldn’t go back to it. Like mother, like daughter.
Lizzie’s breakfast appeared to be nothing but ferociously bitter coffee, boiled and strained through a black-stained scrap of cloth. I’d never tried drinking cyanide, but I imagined the sensation of hot liquid burning through your stomach lining is similar.
“Let’s hear it, then,” Lizzie said, and made a harassed, get-on-with-it gesture.
So I told her how an in-between girl ended up on her doorstep twenty-something years after her niece vanished.
I didn’t tell the truth—because then my only remaining relative would think I was insane, and I’d developed something of an allergy to people thinking I was insane—but I tried to make sure all the important bits were true. My father was a foreigner (“Bah,” muttered Lizzie) who met my mother by pure chance when he was passing through Ninley. They found one another again after years of searching, got legally married (“Well, thank God for that”) and lived on my father’s wages as a professor of history (skeptical silence). They were journeying back to Kentucky when there was a terrible accident and my mother was killed (that hit-in-the-chest sound again), and my father and I were more or less adopted by a wealthy patron (more skeptical silence). My father spent the last decade and a half conducting research all over the world; he never remarried (a noise of grudging approval).
“And I grew up in Locke House, in Vermont. I had everything any girl could want.” Except family or freedom, but who’s counting? “I traveled everywhere with my, uh, foster father. I even came here once, I don’t know if you remember.”
Lizzie squinted at me, then gave a little huh of recognition. “Ah! Didn’t think you were real. Used to be I’d see Adelaide all over the place, but it always turned out to be some girl with a yellow braid, or a man in an old coat. She used to wear my coat around, ugliest thing you ever saw… Well. When was that? How’d you end up here?”
“It was 1901. I’d come with my foster father to…”
The number 1901 echoed weirdly as I said it.
Lizzie had said last night that her mysterious property buyer reappeared in 1901, and wasn’t it rather strange that we were both in Ninley in the same year? Perhaps we were even here at the same time. Perhaps our paths had crossed at the Grand Riverfront Hotel—could it have been that governor with the skull collection? I tried to remember how my father’s book had described him: clipped mustache, expensive suit, cold eyes. Eyes the color of moons or coins…
My thoughts slowed, as if they were slogging through hip-deep syrup.
The question—that formless black ghost that had been haunting me all night—came suddenly into focus. And I knew as it did so that it was something I desperately didn’t want to ask.
“Sorry, but—you know the man who bought your back acres? What was his name, did you say?”
Lizzie blinked at me. “What? Well, we never got his first name, and isn’t that an odd thing, to sell your land without knowing a fellow’s Christian name. But he had a queer way about him, and those eyes…” She shivered, just a little, and I pictured a pair of glacial eyes pressing against her skin.
“But it says his company name right on the contract: W. C. Locke & Co.”
It’s hard to remember precisely how I reacted.
Maybe I screamed. Maybe I gasped and covered my mouth with my hands. Maybe I fell backward in my chair into deep, cold water and kept falling down and down, a final glittering stream of bubbles escaping back toward the surface—
Maybe I cleared my throat and asked my aunt Lizzie to repeat herself, please.
Mr. Locke. It had been Mr. Locke who had met my fifteen-year-old mother after Sunday church, who had interrogated her about ghost boys and cabin doors, who had purchased the Larson women’s back acres and closed their Door.
Are you really surprised? The voice in my head was tart and grown-up sounding. It made, I supposed, a fair point: I’d already known Mr. Locke was a liar and a thief and a villain. I knew he was a Society member and therefore dedicated to the destruction of Doors; I knew he had recruited my father with all the callous self-interest of a rich man purchasing a racehorse, and had profited from his torment for seventeen years; I knew his love for me was conditional and fragile, abandoned as easily as selling an artifact at auction.
But I hadn’t known, or permitted myself to know, that he was so cruel. Cruel enough to knowingly close my father’s Door not once but twice—
Or maybe he didn’t know the blue Door was anything special. Perhaps he never connected it to the strange, tattooed fellow he found years later. (This, I recognize now, was a desperate, absurd hope, as if I could somehow discover a clue that would redeem Mr. Locke and make him again the distant-but-beloved almost-father-figure of my childhood.)
I dumped out the contents of my reeking, stained pillowcase, ignoring Lizzie’s squawked “Not on my kitchen table, child!” I seized the leather-bound book, my father’s book, the book that had sent me on this mad, wandering trail back to my own beginnings. It shook slightly in my hands.
I turned to the final chapter, the part where Mr. Locke miraculously shows up to rescue my grieving father. And there it was: 1881. A girl named Adelaide Lee Larson. Surely Locke had recognized the name and date. A trapped, panicky feeling rose in my throat, like a small child who has run out of excuses.
He knew. Locke knew.
When he met my father in 1895 he already knew all about the Larsons and their back acres and the Door in the field. He’d been the one to close it, after all. But he hadn’t said a word to my poor, foolish father. Not even—and this time I felt myself actually gasp, and heard Lizzie’s tongue cluck in irritation—not even when he found the Door open again in 1901.
If Mr. Locke had loved my father and me at all, he would have left my blue Door standing and sent him a telegram within the hour: Come home Julian STOP Found your damn door. My father would’ve skimmed across the Atlantic like a skipped stone. He would’ve burst into Locke House and I would’ve run into his arms and he would’ve whispered into my hair, January, my love, we’re going home.
But Mr. Locke hadn’t done any of those things. Instead, he’d burned the blue Door to ash, locked me in my room, and left my father stranded for ten more years.
Oh, Father. You thought of yourself as a knight under the generous patronage of some wealthy baron or prince, didn’t you? When really you were a bridled horse running beneath the whip.
The book was still in my hands. My thumbs were pressed bloodless-white against the pages. A suffocating heat gathered in my throat—a final, terrible betrayal, a swelling rage—and some distant part of me was almost frightened by the sheer im
mensity of it.
But I didn’t have time for rage, because I’d just remembered the letter I mailed to Mr. Locke. I’m going home, I’d told him. I had imagined, when I wrote it, that Mr. Locke would assume I was headed for the Door Ilvane had destroyed in Japan, or even the Door the Society had closed in Colorado. I’d thought he didn’t know about this first Door, except as a passing reference in my father’s story, closed decades before.
Oh, hell.
“I have to go. Right now.” I was already standing, already reeling toward the door with Bad scrabbling to catch up. “Which way to that old hayfield? Never mind, I’ll find it—it was on the river, wasn’t it?” I rummaged freely through Lizzie’s things as I spoke, tugging out drawers wedged tight in the summer heat, looking for—yes. A few faded pages of newsprint. I jammed them back into my pillowcase with everything else: Ilvane’s greenish compass, my silver coin-knife, my father’s book, Samuel’s pen. It would have to be enough.
“Hold up, girl, you’re half-dressed—” I was three quarters dressed, at least—I just wasn’t wearing shoes and my blouse was buttoned sideways. “What do you want with that place, anyhow?”
I turned back to face her. She looked so shrunken and fragile in her rocking chair, like something plucked from its shell and slowly fossilizing. Her eyes on me were red-rimmed and anxious.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. I knew what it felt like to be always alone, always waiting for someone to come home. “But I have to go. I might already be too late. I’ll come back to visit, though, I swear.”
The lines around her mouth twisted into a bitter, hurting sort of smile. It was the smile of someone who has heard promises before, and knows better than to believe them. I knew what that was like, too.
Without thinking I crossed back to the rocking chair and kissed my aunt Lizzie on the forehead. It was like kissing a page in an ancient book, musty-smelling and dry.
She huffed a half laugh. “Lord, but you are just like your mother.” Then she sniffed. “I’ll be here when you come back.”
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 30