Then there was the creak of the window opening, and a warm, dew-heavy breeze ruffled my hair. Jane said, mildly, “Let’s go out, eh? It’s a lovely morning.”
It was such a normal, Saturday-morning sort of thing for her to suggest. It was one of our favorite rituals, to go out on the grounds with a basket of biscuits, an armload of paperbacks, and a quilt that smelled permanently grassy from its long service as a picnic blanket. Thinking about it now—the peaceable quiet; the warm, sleepy sound of dragonflies—was like thinking of safe harbor in a storm.
God bless you, Miss Jane Irimu.
I found I was able to sit up, and then stand, and then make all my usual morning motions. It turns out that once you begin, habit and memory keep your body moving in the right directions, like a wound-up clock ticking dutifully through the seconds. I dressed at random: stockings with several holes in the heels, a plain brownish skirt, a peony blouse several inches too short on my wrists. I fended off Bad’s excited nips and dragged a brush through my crackling hair (I had nursed a secret hope that puberty might domesticate my hair, but it had instead inspired it to new and greater heights).
By the time we left the room I’d achieved a false, fragile normalcy. And then I stumbled over the package waiting for me in the hall.
It was a box of such surpassing whiteness and squareness I knew it must have come from one of those exclusive shops in New York with a gold-cursive sign and gleaming glass windows. A note was propped neatly on top:
My dear girl—
Though you may feel indisposed, I request your attendance at tonight’s party. I wish to give you your birthday present.
Several lines were scratched out here. Then:
I am sorry for your loss.
CL
P.S. Do your hair.
Locke hadn’t dictated it to his secretary; that was his own architectural lettering. Seeing it was like feeling his icy eyes pressing me down again—accept it—and the cold black thing seemed to wrap itself more tightly around me.
Jane read the note over my shoulder and her lips went thin and hard as a penny. “Nothing can save you from the Society party, it seems.”
The annual party—which I’d been dreading for a week or two—was tonight. I’d forgotten. I pictured myself weaving through drunken white crowds, pushing past men who laughed too loudly and sloshed their champagne over my shoes, wishing I could wipe the oily feeling of their eyes off my skin. Would everyone know about my father? Would they care? I felt the note tremble in my hand.
Jane snatched it from me and folded it into her skirt pocket. “Never mind. We’ve got hours yet.” And she tucked my hand beneath her elbow and marched us down two flights of stairs, through the kitchens where the cooks were too harried and sweaty to notice us snatching jam and rolls and a kettle of coffee, and out into the pristine lawns of Locke House.
We wandered at first. Through the hedged gardens where the gardeners were busy murdering anything that looked too lively or untamed, along the ruffled lakeshore, where herons hooted their annoyance at Bad and waves tap-tapped at the shore. We wound up in a grassy overlook far enough from the house that no garden shears had denuded it, with the countryside laid before us like a wrinkled green tablecloth.
Jane poured herself coffee and delved immediately into the seventh book in the Tom Swift series (Jane had transitioned from skeptic to addict on the subject of low-grade serial fiction; thus had Samuel’s boyhood vice claimed another victim). I didn’t read anything. I just lay on the quilt and stared at the soft eggshell of the sky and let the sunshine pool and sizzle on my skin. I could almost hear Mr. Locke’s huffing in my ear: Not doing your complexion any favors, girl. My father never seemed to care.
I didn’t want to think about my father. I wanted to think about something, almost anything else. “Do you ever want to leave?” The question leapt out of my mouth before I had time to wonder where it came from.
Jane laid her book spread-eagle on the quilt and considered me. “Leave where?”
“I don’t know, Locke House. Vermont. Everything.”
There was a short silence, during which I realized two things simultaneously. First, that I was so selfish I’d never once asked Jane if she wanted to go home, and second, that there was nothing in the world holding her here now that my father and his weekly allowance were gone. Panic made my breath shallow and quick. Would I lose Jane, too? Would I be entirely alone? How soon?
Jane exhaled carefully. “I miss my home… more than I can say. I think of it every waking moment. But I will not leave you, January.” An unspoken yet seemed to hang specter-like between us, or perhaps it was until. I felt like crying and clinging to her skirts, begging her to stay forever. Or begging to go away with her.
But Jane saved us both from embarrassment by asking lightly, “Do you want to leave?”
I swallowed, tucking my fear away for some future time when I would be strong enough to look directly at it. “Yes,” I answered, and in answering realized it was true. I wanted wide-open horizons and worn shoes and strange constellations spinning above me like midnight riddles. I wanted danger and mystery and adventure. Like my father before me? “Oh, yes.”
It seemed to me I’d always wanted those things, since I was a little girl scribbling stories in her pocket diary, but I’d abandoned such fanciful dreams with my childhood. Except it turned out I hadn’t really abandoned them but merely forgotten them, let them settle to the bottom of me like fallen leaves. And then The Ten Thousand Doors had come along and swirled them into the air again, a riot of impossible dreams.
Jane didn’t say anything.
Well, she hardly needed to: we both knew how unlikely it was that I would ever leave Locke House. Odd-colored young orphan girls didn’t fare well out in the wide world, with no money or prospects, even if they were “perfectly unique specimens.” Mr. Locke was my only shelter and anchor now that my father was gone. Perhaps he would take pity and hire me as a secretary or typist for W. C. Locke & Co., and I would turn dull and mousy and wear thick-lensed spectacles on my nose and have permanent ink stains up both wrists. Perhaps he would let me stay in my little gray room until I grew so old and faded I became a half ghost haunting Locke House, alarming guests.
After a time I heard the regular shush of Jane turning the pages of Tom Swift Among the Diamond Makers. I stared at the sky and tried not to think about the adventures I’d never have or the father I’d never see again or the cold, black thing still wrapped around me, turning the summer sun watery and pale. I tried to think of nothing at all.
I wonder if there has ever been a seventeen-year-old girl who wanted to attend a fancy party less than I did that night.
I stood at the edge of the parlor door for several minutes or possibly a century, nerving myself to step around the corner into the chemical fog of pomade and perfume. Serving staff swept past with glittering trays of champagne flutes and fleshy-looking canapés. They did not pause to offer me anything but merely maneuvered around me as if I were a misplaced vase or an awkward lamp.
I drew a breath, brushed my sweaty palm against Bad’s fur, and slipped into the parlor.
It would be overdramatic of me to claim that the entire room stood still, or that silence reigned the way it did when a princess entered her ballroom in my books, but there was a kind of silent whooshing around me, as if I were escorted by an invisible wind. A few conversations faltered as their participants turned toward me, eyebrows half-raised and lips curling.