But Samuel wasn’t with me that day in the field. So I pulled out my little pocket diary and wrote a story instead.
When I was seven, that diary was the most precious thing I had ever owned, although whether I technically owned it is legally questionable. I hadn’t bought it, and no one had given it to me—I’d found it. I was playing in the Pharaoh Room just before I turned seven, opening and closing all the urns and trying on the jewelry, and I happened to open a pretty blue treasure chest (Box with vaulted lid, decorated with ivory, ebony, blue faience, Egypt; originally matched pair). And in the bottom of the chest was this diary: leather the color of burnt butter, creamy cotton pages as blank and inviting as fresh snow.
It seemed likely that Mr. Locke had left it for me to find, a secret gift he was too gruff to give directly, so I took it without hesitation. I wrote in it whenever I was lonely or lost-feeling, or when my father was away and Mr. Locke was busy and the nursemaid was being horrible. I wrote a lot.
Mostly I wrote stories like the ones I read in Samuel’s copies of The Argosy, about brave little boys with blond hair and names like Jack or Dick or Buddy. I spent a lot of time thinking of bloodcurdling titles and copying them out with extra-swirly lines (“The Mystery of the Skeleton Key”; “The Golden Dagger Society”; “The Flying Orphan Girl”), and no time at all worrying about plot. That afternoon, sitting in that lonely field beside the Door that didn’t lead anywhere, I wanted to write a different kind of story. A true kind of story, something I could crawl into if only I believed it hard enough.
Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door. It was a magic Door that’s why it has a capital D. She opened the Door.
For a single second—a stretched-out slice of time that began on the sinuous curve of the S and ended when my pencil made its final swirl around the period—I believed it. Not in the half-pretending way that children believe in Santa Claus or fairies, but in the marrow-deep way you believe in gravity or rain.
Something in the world shifted. I know that’s a shit description, pardon my unladylike language, but I don’t know how else to say it. It was like an earthquake that didn’t disturb a single blade of grass, an eclipse that didn’t cast a single shadow, a vast but invisible change. A sudden breeze plucked the edge of the diary. It smelled of salt and warm stone and a dozen faraway scents that did not belong in a scrubby field beside the Mississippi.
I tucked my diary back in my skirts and stood. My legs shivered beneath me like birch trees in the wind, shaking with exhaustion, but I ignored them because the Door seemed to be murmuring in a soft, clattering language made of wood rot and peeling paint. I reached toward it again, hesitated, and then—
I opened the Door, and stepped through.
I wasn’t anywhere at all. An echoing in-betweenness pressed against my eardrums, as if I’d swum to the bottom of a vast lake. My reaching hand disappeared into the emptiness; my boot swung in an arc that never ended.
I call that in-between place the threshold now (Threshold, the line of the T splitting two empty spaces). Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt. You can’t fear the in-between.
My foot landed on the other side of the door. The cedar and sunlight smell was replaced by a coppery taste in my mouth. I opened my eyes.
It was a world made of salt water and stone. I stood on a high bluff surrounded on all sides by an endless silver sea. Far below me, cupped by the curving shore of the island like a pebble in a palm, was a city.
At least, I supposed it was a city. It didn’t have any of the usual trappings of one: no streetcars hummed and buzzed through it, and no haze of coal smoke curtained above it. Instead, there were whitewashed stone buildings arranged in artful spirals, dotted with open windows like black eyes. A few towers raised their heads above the crowd and the masts of small ships made a tiny forest along the coast.
I was crying again. Without theater or flair, just—crying, as if there were something I badly wanted and couldn’t have. As my father did sometimes when he thought he was alone.
“January! January!” My name sounded like it was coming from a cheap gramophone several miles away, but I recognized Mr. Locke’s voice echoing after me through the doorway. I didn’t know how he’d found me, but I knew I was in trouble.
Oh, I can’t tell you how much I didn’t want to go back. How the sea smelled so full of promise, how the coiling streets in the city below seemed to make a kind of script. If it hadn’t been Mr. Locke calling me—the man who let me ride in fancy train cars and bought me nice linen dresses, the man who patted my arm when my father disappointed me and left pocket diaries for me to find—I might have stayed.
But I turned back to the Door. It looked different on this side, a tumbled-down arch of weathered basalt, without even the dignity of wooden planks to serve as a door. A gray curtain fluttered in the opening instead. I drew it aside.
Just before I stepped back through the arch, a glint of silver shimmered at my feet: a round coin lay half-buried in the soil, stamped with several words in a foreign language and the profile of a crowned woman. It felt warm in my palm. I slipped it into my dress pocket.
This time the threshold passed over me like the brief shadow of a bird’s wing. The dry smell of grass and sun returned.
“Janua—oh, there you are.” Mr. Locke stood in his shirtsleeves and vest, huffing a little, his mustache bristling like the tail of a recently offended cat. “Where were you? Been out here shouting myself hoarse, had to interrupt my meeting with Alexander—what’s this?” He was staring at the blue-flecked Door, his face gone slack.
“Nothing, sir.”
His eyes snapped away from the Door and onto me, ice-sharp. “January. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”
I should’ve lied. It would have saved so much heartache. But you have to understand: when Mr. Locke looks at you in this particular way of his, with his moon-pale eyes, you mostly end up doing what he wants you to. I suspect it’s the reason W. C. Locke & Co. is so profitable.
I swallowed. “I—I was just playing and I went through this door, see, and it leads to someplace else. There was a white city by the sea.” If I’d been older, I might’ve said: It smelled of salt and age and adventure. It smelled like another world, and I want to return right this minute and walk those strange streets. Instead, I added articulately, “I liked it.”
“Tell the truth.” His eyes pressed me flat.
“I am, I swear!”
He stared for another long moment. I watched the muscles of his jaw roll and unroll. “And where did this door come from? Did you—did you build it? Stick it together out of this rubbish?” He gestured and I noticed the overgrown pile of rotted lumber behind the Door, the scattered bones of a house.
“No, sir. I just found it. And wrote a story about it.”
“A story?” I could see him stumbling over each unlikely twist in our conversation and hating it; he liked to be in control of any given exchange.
I fumbled for my pocket diary and pressed it into his hands. “Look right there, see? I wrote a little story, and then the door was, was sort of open. It’s true, I swear it’s true.”