Dark Doorways

by Kristin Jones

  Hers was a countenance of beauty mixed with malice, a beauty that only frightened me more. Those sharp green eyes pierced out at us from behind her suddenly gorgeous brunette mane. She apparently took better care of herself on the boat.

  “Sarah. Michael. So nice to have you with us. I trust you’re enjoying yourselves. Sarah, how’s that knee?”

  ***

  Dreams can fool you, trick you into thinking they actually happened. Swanson once had me read a book by Daniel Everett, a fellow linguist, on the Pirahã people. Apparently, they believe that their dreams are an extended reality, that whatever one dreams actually happens. I was beginning to wonder if they had been on to something.

  Watching our bodies drift along the Chicago River and Eliza expand toward us– that felt like a dream. Finding Mom in her kitchen, making me my favorite vegetarian tortilla soup– that felt real.

  Mom looked just how I remembered her, beaming her vibrant smile before the chemo treatments started. Her arms and legs were so strong, graceful even. Every inch of her glowed, from her thick, dark hair to her fair skin. The most amazing feature was that she was simply there. My mom.

  “You’re enjoying your classes?”

  “I am. I’m done with my coursework though. Swanson has me working on this indigenous language program for my fellowship.”

  She cupped her hands around my face, adoring me like she always did. “My daughter, in a Ph.D. program and on fellowship. I’m so proud.”

  Pride. She was finally proud of me.

  “Mom, why didn’t you tell me Swanson was my father?”

  She turned back to her slow cooker, pretending that it needed tending, as if I did not understand how these things worked.

  Still facing away from me– because who wants to look someone in the eye for a sperm donor conversation?– she was able to talk while stirring. “I think just a bit more garlic.”

  “Mom.”

  “Sarah, I don’t know. I think I just didn’t want him giving you special treatment or anything.”

  “But you knew the whole time? All those times you drove by his house? Your dream house? You knew it was my biological father who lived there?”

  “I didn’t find out until you were already away at college. That was just a coincidence.” Mom finally turned back toward me, reaching for my hand, trying to calm me like mothers do.

  “That’s an awfully big coincidence. Your dream house just happened to be my father’s house?” I was gesturing widely with my right arm, the arm she wasn’t holding.

  “It wasn’t really my dream house, Sarah.”

  “What? You would go on and on about it! You imagined how they decorated, where they’d put the Christmas tree–”

  “Sarah,” she interrupted. Two hands massaged my own, but it wasn’t calming. “That house was my safety. I went there to protect us, to escape.”

  “From what?”

  Mom’s hands began to slip away from mine just as her silhouette dissolved in front of me.

  “Mom! What were you running away from?”

  She was gone. The tortilla soup was gone. Her soft jasmine scent was gone. It all drifted away from me elegantly, as if my heart wasn’t ripping out of my chest.

  “Mom!” I found myself shouting, hoping to transport her back. I found myself talking into thin air, hoping some small part of her might hear me. “There’s so much more I wanted to say.”

  I drifted in and out of consciousness, still wondering which was the dream and which was reality. There was a haze as I blinked my eyes open, a struggle to get everything back into focus. I still wasn’t sure where I was. It certainly wasn’t our boxcar with a view of the river.

  It was Eliza’s vile face that greeted me.

  “Sarah, you’re joining us again. And how is your mom’s tortilla soup?”

  ***

  The map hid itself in my back right pocket, unable to endure Eliza’s presence. So there I sat in a room with no light, folded up into a corner and staring at a gorgonized Michael. Whether he had actually been turned to stone or not was difficult to tell in the darkness; his silence was not a good sign. The ropes tying my wrists to some pipe behind me were meant to prevent movement, but I was sure I had lost all strength to move anyway.

  “Comfortable?” Her voice shot across the room, piercing me like a bullet. Without being able to see her, I could only imagine that she was sitting contentedly with that nefarious smile directed at me.

  “Eliza,” I began. The words came out with more effort than I thought I would need. The boat was taking everything, watching me wither away. “Why?”

  “So Será wants to know why she’s here.”

  “It’s Sarah.”

  Her cackle fell on my ears too harshly, making me wince like a trapped animal. It was odd, really, why it was that moment that I pictured PETA freeing animals and wondered if their services extended to human life.

  “Or were you asking why I invited you into that house, why Parker lives in your mom’s house, why your mother was terrified of dark doorways?”

  “Leave my mom out of this.”

  The cackle returned, echoing off the walls as I tried to tuck my head into my body more.

  “Schadenfreude.”

  “Excuse me?” she responded, sounding surprised for the first time since I’d met her.

  “You’re evil. Vile. You enjoy seeing others’ misery.”

  “Now wait right there, Missy. I’m doing a service here. This boat doesn’t take anyone anywhere they don’t want to go.”

  “Ha!” The laugh burst out of me as I felt the map fluttering in my pocket. “So explain why we’ve been forced onto this boat and why you’re now holding us prisoner.”

  “Fine. I’ll let you go.”

  With that, the ropes fell off my hands just as the room opened up to bright sunlight pouring in, both events happening concurrently as if she could manipulate it all at will. I had no energy to stand, so I slumped in the corner, squinting into the new light.

  A silhouette formed in the light, a woman’s figure. Eliza had disappeared: lingering, but out of sight. This woman’s figure mesmerized me, being a possible lifeline out of this place.

  “Sarah.”

  “Mom?”

  “Look at you. What a good daughter, coming to visit me.”

  The droplets falling from my eyes were easy to wipe away, but the feeling of making Mom proud was not so easy to discard.

  “And you brought your friend, Michael?”

  Michael. Turning toward him and expecting the worst, I found a confused, blinking wanderer, lost. You would have thought he had just woken up from oral surgery, still not seeing the world clearly after the anesthesia. Eliza had done a number on him.

  “Mom, I’m not sure what this is. I mean, how are you here? And this of all places?”

  She helped me up, allowed me to lean on her like she always did.

  “Oh Sarah, we have so much time. Let’s just enjoy this moment.” She extended her arms to embrace me, and I knew then that it was really her. It was her tight hug that always lasted a few seconds too long and made me feel slightly suffocated. Her soft jasmine relaxed me as I collapsed onto her frame.

  I let the pain of the last two years come out, crying for the time I had lost with her. I let myself forget about the boat and Eliza, enjoying my mom again. We fell into our old patterns easily, laughing and nudging as if she had just made her disgusting spinach pasta again.

  “Let’s take Michael to that boxcar,” I offered. “We can talk more there.” Why I had been tied up, why my dead mother was walking with me, arms linked, or why I still had no energy never troubled me. I just wanted my mom.

  “Yes. Let’s enjoy this.”

  ***

  It was Mom at her best, her brightest, how she was before the chemo. Her eyes were vibrant like when I was little. Her hands were filled out, enough to give her a good grip as she held my hand. I wanted to soak in every bit of her, inhale her like oxygen.

  With my
arm laced around her mid section, as if she could slip away from me at any moment if I didn’t hold her tight, I sauntered happily to the boxcar seats with my mother. My mother!

  It didn’t bother me that Michael was nearly comatose, barely able to walk. He’ll get better, I told myself. Mom is here, and that’s what matters.

  “Let’s get Michael sitting down first. He’s in kind of bad shape, huh?” Sweet, dear Mom. Always thinking of others. Always mothering others.

  She began helping him, the way mothers do. She could have been a nurse, the way she cared so much about his wellbeing, the way she was a crutch for him. But all I could do was stare, immobile and dumbstruck. My mom!

  Mom helped Michael lay down on the seat facing ours, propping his head up with her sweater as a pillow. “He should be okay if he gets a little sleep.” She looked up to smile at me, as relieved as I was to finally have a few moments to ourselves.

  The walls of the boat were precariously fluid, as if the boat itself was becoming the liquid of the river. The crack in the pleather wavered like a wind sock. And still, all I saw was Mom, beautiful Katherine H. Faro in the flesh.

  “Mom, I–” A thousand questions raced through my mind, some related to her, some just things I wanted to share because I hadn’t seen her in so long. I needed advice on Michael and where that relationship was headed. I needed to know if my haircut was too short, if I had too many credit cards, if I could wait until after grad school to have kids. “I–”

  “Sarah, there’s something you need to know.”

  “Like why you’re here? Ha!” The laugh that came out of me was meant as part of our repartee, but exposed how truly nervous I felt. Moving down the corridor to the boxcar had reminded me of where we were, and I soon began to distrust my own senses.

  I could smell her, feel her, hear her, see her. But this was my mother, the same mother I buried in Lakeside Cemetery, just a mile from her home.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Sarah. Michael either.” Her face, entirely downcast now, revealed a tremendous sadness that I was unprepared to experience while I had her in my presence. This should have been glorious, reuniting with my mother.

  “Mom, I want to be wherever you are. I’ve missed you so much. I... I need my mom.”

  Just as I tried to reach over to clasp her hand, I noticed a beautiful maroon bridge outside the small window, perched innocently on the raised edges of the Chicago River. Which number it was, somewhere after four, and hopefully not yet to seven, was unclear. We had lost count somewhere between our abduction and Mom’s return.

  Standing just outside that bridge and waving was little Gabi, my angelic sister Gabi, with Swanson next to her. He was absorbed in a phone conversation and ignored her as she jumped up and down in excitement, still waving eagerly toward the boat. She knew, I thought. She knew this entire time that I would be on this boat.

  “She’s beautiful, that little girl.”

  “She’s my sister, Mom. She’s Swanson’s little girl.”

  Mom’s gentle hand found its way to her heart, admiring Gabi in all her purity. “She lives in that house then?”

  “Oh, Swanson’s house? Well, yeah, but he shares custody, so only like half the time.”

  It seemed natural for Mom to nod, to connect all these convoluted parts of my life as if it was all so ordinary. We could have been talking about the weather, the fog.

  “You should be there with them.”

  “No... no! I want to be with you, even if it’s on this boat.”

  “Sarah, you don’t understand.”

  “So tell me!”

  My mother’s eyes moved toward the doorway, where the corridor and the boxcar seats met. The darkness of the corridor seeped into our little compartment despite the brightness left behind the lifting fog.

  “Mom? Are you going to tell me? Are you going to explain why you always said never enter a dark doorway?” I could have added the mysterious trips to Swanson’s house when I was little, or the odd glances from Parker whenever I walked by his house, or the fact that Mom was even able to have a conversation with me at that moment. But one thing at a time.

  Outside the window, Gabi continued to wave her chubby arm at me. It was the right amount of chubby, the way little girls’ arms should look. It took effort to focus on Mom, when just minutes ago I couldn’t pull my eyes off of her. It bothered me, the way Gabi stole my attention, when these moments with Mom were so precious. It was awfully ballsy of her to try to catch my eye when I was with my mom.

  “You’re going to have to make a choice, Sarah. You can’t have both, me and them. This boat doesn’t make return trips.”

  I was beginning to see things clearly, just as she began to fade.

  “Sarah! We’re passing under the bridge! You need to get off now!”

  She was being her typical self, that caregiver who only thought of others. All I could do was stare at her, wondering how I ever forgot that she had so many gray strands already. My memory of her had dyed them back to their original dark brown.

  I slowly raised my eyes to look out the window, only to confirm that we were indeed nearing the bridge. Gabi ran along the river’s edge, Swanson chasing her this time. She was shouting something to me, crying even. I would never know what she was trying to say to me that day, but the message was pretty clear.

  “Mom, you have to explain this to me. The boat is… fading. I can’t just leave you here.”

  “Sarah, Dear, I’ve already left you.”

  The words hit like a bag of bricks, knocking me back into the pleather seats like I was already defeated. “Then how am I seeing you, talking to you? I mean, I can hug you.”

  She wrapped an arm around my shoulder, pulling me closer so I could rest my head on her shoulder. I had forgotten what a bony shoulder it was, and how disappointing it was when the fashion world stopped loving shoulder pads. Still, the comfort of her closeness was enough to help me close my eyes. I might have been able to make that moment last forever if she hadn’t kept pushing.

  “Do you remember that summer when you fell off your bike and got hurt?”

  “When I had to get stitches on my shin?” I laughed and looked up at my mom, so thrilled to be sharing my childhood with her again. “You were so mad that you had to take me to the hospital.”

  She ran her fingers through my hair, the mane that she had so carefully groomed and trimmed for over a decade of her life. I could have let her braid my hair more often when I was a teenager. I could have done a good many things differently.

  “No! I was mad that you were being so fearless with your bike after I kept asking you to be more careful. You were always so adventurous, dangerously so.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yeah. I remember you always made new friends with such ease. It scared me the way you’d walk up to complete strangers and want to be their friend. What was that little girl’s name who always had you over for tea?”

  My blood turned cold as I bolted up straight in the seat. “I never went to anyone’s house for tea.”

  “Sure you did! You were really little though, maybe three or four. You just don’t remember. She lived over on Maple Street. What was her name?”

  “Eliza?” I whispered.

  “Oh, so you do remember!”

  “Mom,” I hissed. “Eliza? Are you kidding me? Eliza? Creepy Eliza who runs this boat?”

  “Wha–” Mom’s confusion was getting me nowhere. Perhaps Eliza hadn’t introduced herself yet.

  “Okay, so dark doorways. Eliza’s house had one. Parker’s house, your old house, had one. The university. The boat. But how are they connected? Mom, this doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve got to know more than you’re letting on.”

  When Mom’s confusion turned to frowning, I knew there was something she had been hiding. Somehow, in the midst of the boat’s continued dismantling, or liquifying you could call it, she finally decided to talk openly.

  It began as a whisper, her voice sharing these secrets. “I didn
’t know Eliza was one of them. I never would have let you play there.”

  “One of who, Mom?”

  “They steal light. They take light and distort it into something repulsive.”

  “Uh, darkness?”

  “Worse.”

  Her eyes wondered toward the corridor, to where the mysteries of the boat could have consumed us any moment.

  “It looks like darkness, but it’s them. It’s them just taking away all the light.”

  “Mom, you’re not making sense.”

  “Darkness belongs here; it’s part of life. But them, those things–” She halted abruptly and shifted her gaze out the window. “We don’t have time. That bridge? It’s the last one, number seven. You need to get off. Now!”

  “Then I’m taking you with me.”

  Gabi’s little treasure map that had remained silent all this time finally began to flutter and work its way out of my pocket. Much like the night it broke all the jade glass, it went straight for the boxcar’s glass window.

  “Genius.”

  “What?” Mom was still staring at the map, unsure of where it came from.

  “Just watch,” I assured her.

  Sure enough, the map hit the glass repeatedly until a small crack formed. Soon, the crack spread, weblike, and I knew it would collapse any second.

  “Michael, wake up!” I was shaking him by this point, though it didn’t do much good. So I resorted to shouting. “Michael!”

  Watching him wake slowly, his face peeling off the cheap pleather, I began to slap his cheeks to accelerate the process. He’d hate me for it later, I knew, but we were running out of time. The bridge was a block away.

  “Michael, we have to get Mom out of here. Come on!”

  The window finally succumbed, shattering around our feet, shattering like so many things in life seem to do.

  “You first,” she insisted.

  “Mom, no.”

  “Yes. You first, then I’ll push Michael out.”

  “No, we’ll push Michael out, then I’ll hold on to you while I squeeze through. I’m not letting go of you.”