On the morning of the third day Ade woke with a foreboding heaviness in her limbs. Her aunts and grandmother still snored and snuffled around her in a sea of quilts and woman-flesh. Sunrise was reluctant and gray, too slow in coming.
Ade sat tense among her aunts as they dressed, wishing herself out the window and in the hayfield already. Her bones hummed and strained; her feet tap-tapped on the floorboards. The loft was close and humid from their sleeping breath.
“We’re going to town today,” Mama Larson announced, and gestured for her town hat—an enormous white bonnet she’d purchased sometime in the 1850s, which looked and smelled increasingly like a stuffed rabbit. “But you’re staying put, Ade, on account of the heart attack you gave us.”
Ade blinked. Then she nodded meekly, because it seemed polite to maintain the fiction that she would obey.
By the time all the Larson women were truly gone—and it took an eternity of fussing with dresses and stockings, followed by another small eternity in the barn convincing the mules they ought to wear a harness and pull a cart before this was accomplished—Ade was almost shuddering with the urge to be elsewhere. She took a September apple and her aunt Lizzie’s work coat and left at a scurrying almost-run.
There was no one waiting at the old cabin. There was, in fact, no old cabin at which to wait: the field was blank, featureless, empty but for a few sulky-looking crows and a line of fresh iron stakes driven into the earth.
Ade closed her eyes against a sudden disorienting dizziness, stumbling forward. Where the cabin used to stand she found a raw tumble of broken lumber, as if a giant’s hand had reached casually from the sky to topple it.
There was nothing left of the door but a few lichen-splotched splinters.
The lamps were lit in the windows by the time she arrived home. The mules were back in the pasture looking ruffled and sweat-stained, and Ade could hear the self-satisfied cackling of her aunts in the kitchen. The laughter stopped when she opened the door.
The five of them stood gathered around the kitchen table admiring a stack of neat cream-striped shopping boxes. Packing paper seemed to drift around them in crinkling clouds, and each woman was pink-cheeked with some secret exhilaration. Their smiles were strange and girlish.
“Adelaide Lee, where—”
“Why are there survey stakes on our land?” Ade asked. Each of her relatives, she saw, was dressed more grandly than she had been that morning, with a profusion of velvet ribbons and even the foreign humps of bustles beneath rich-colored skirts. In her muddied dress and tangled braid, Ade felt suddenly distant from them all, as if she and her aunts were standing at opposite ends of a very large room.
It was Mama Larson who answered. “We got some luck, finally.” Her hand swept in a queenly gesture at the kitchen table. “That big-city man come by yesterday and offered us good money for the old hayfield. Real good money.” The aunts tittered. “And there wasn’t a reason in the world we shouldn’t take it. He handed over cash—all of it stashed in his pockets!—and I signed over the deed then and there. What’s a overgrown hayfield to us, anyway?” The last phrase sounded like it had been said many times between them in the last day.
Aunt Lizzie stepped forward with a box. “Don’t look so grim, Adelaide. Look, I meant to save it for your birthday, but—” She opened the box to show Ade a long length of periwinkle cotton. “Thought it’d match your eyes.”
Ade found her voice had entirely deserted her. She patted Lizzie’s hand, hoping they might think she was overcome with gratitude, and ran upstairs before her tears could make their treacherous paths down her cheeks.
She crawled animal-like into the sagging center of her rope bed. She felt rubbed raw, as if the grasses in the field had been sharp-edged, cutting away at that childish part of her that believed in adventure and magic.
She had lingered beside the ruins of the cabin all day, knowing the ghost boy would not appear but waiting anyway.
Perhaps there had never been an elsewhere, and she was simply young and lonely and foolish, and had dreamed up a story about a ghost boy and another world to keep herself company. Perhaps there was nothing at all except the rule-bound world of her aunts and grandmother, real as corn bread and dirt and just as dull.
She came very near to believing it. But she found there was something new in her, some wild seed buried in her chest, that could not accept the world as it was.
You see, doors are many things: fissures and cracks, ways between, mysteries and borders. But more than anything else, doors are change.3 When things slip through them, no matter how small or brief, change trails them like porpoises following a ship’s wake. The change had already taken hold of Adelaide Lee, and she could not turn away.
And so that night, lying half-heartbroken and lost in her bed, Ade chose to believe. She believed in something mad and elsewise, in the feel of the boy’s dry lips against hers in the dying light, in the possibility that there were cracked-open places in the world through which strange and wonderful things might seep.
In believing, Ade felt the scattered uncertainties of her youth falling away. She was a hound that finally caught the scent it sought, a lost sailor suddenly handed a compass. If doors were real, then she would seek them out, ten or ten thousand of them, and fall through into ten thousand vast elsewheres.
And one of them, someday, might lead to a city by the sea.
A Door to Anywhere
You know the feeling of waking up in an unfamiliar room and not knowing how you got there? For a minute you’re just drifting, suspended in the timeless unknown, like Alice falling forever down the rabbit hole.
I’d woken almost every morning of my life in that gray little room on the third floor of Locke House. The sun-faded floorboards, the inadequate bookshelf overflowing with stacks of paperbacks, Bad sprawled beside me like a hairy furnace: all of it was as familiar as my own skin. But still—for a single stretched moment, I didn’t know quite where I was.
I didn’t know why there were crusted salt trails down my cheeks. I didn’t know why there was an aching emptiness just beneath my ribs, as if something vital had been cut away from me in the night. I didn’t know why the corner of a book was jabbing into my jaw.
I remembered the book first. An overgrown hayfield. A girl and a ghost. A door that led marvelously elsewhere. And an eerie, echoing sense of familiarity, as if I’d heard the story before and couldn’t recall the ending. How had such a thing ended up in my blue Egyptian chest? And who wrote it in the first place? And why did Ade Larson feel like a friend I’d had as a child and then forgotten?
(I could feel myself leaning desperately toward these pleasant mysteries. As if there were something else hovering just on the edges of my vision, waiting to pounce if I looked directly at it.)
There was a rustling from Jane’s bed across the room. “January? Are you awake?”
Something about her voice, an uncharacteristic hesitance, a fearful softening, made me think: She knows.
And then: Knows what?
And then I remembered. Father is dead. The huge, cold thing sprang from the shadows and ate me whole, and everything went sort of grayish and dullish and faraway-seeming. My tale of adventure and mystery became nothing but a worn leather-bound book again.
I heard Jane rising, stretching, dressing for the day. I had the dim sense that she was going to say something to me, something comforting or consoling, and the thought was like a wire brush on rubbed-raw skin. I screwed my eyes shut and clutched Bad closer.