I cried until my eyes were prickly-feeling and the pillow was soggy with snot. I cried as if I’d been assigned to cry the unshed tears of three people instead of one: my mother, lost in the abyss; my father, lost without her; and me, lost without either of them.
Jane finished reading and didn’t say anything, because what do you say to a grown woman crying herself to sleep? She closed the book gently, as if the pages were flesh that might be bruised, and tucked the pink quilt around me. Then she drew the curtains against the midday sun and sat in a rocking chair with her cold coffee. Her face was so still and smooth-planed I suspected fierce emotions lurking beneath it; she’d learned the trick of stoicism, too.
I fell asleep watching her through hot, puffy eyes, my arm around the rise and fall of Bad’s ribs.
I have dreaming memories of Jane moving around the cabin, leaving once and returning with an armload of firewood for the cooling evening, working at the table on something dark and metal, her face inscrutable. Once I half roused to see the door propped open and Jane and Bad both sitting on the stoop, framed in summer moonlight like a pair of silver statues or guardian spirits. I slept better after that.
I woke fully the following morning, when the sun was drawing the first faint line against the western wall, a bluish-pale light that told me it was far too early for civilized people to be awake. I watched the line turn taffy-pink and listened to the birds begin their hesitant scales and felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, truly safe.
Oh, I know: I grew up in a sprawling country estate, I traveled around the world with first-class tickets, I wore satin and pearls—hardly a perilous childhood. But it was borrowed privilege and I knew it. I’d been Cinderella at the ball, knowing all my finery was illusory, conditional, dependent on how successfully I followed a set of unwritten rules. At the stroke of midnight it would all vanish and leave me exposed for what I truly was: a penniless brown girl with no one to protect her.
But here in this cabin—musty, forgotten, perched on a pine-covered rock a dozen miles away from the nearest town—I felt truly, finally safe.
Jane had evicted Bad from the bed at some point in the night and taken his place beside me, and only the black burr of her hair was now visible. I tried not to disturb her as I climbed over the headboard. I stood for a moment, swaying and sick with tiredness that had nothing to do with how much I’d slept, and then stole a lightly mildewed blanket from the corner. I whispered Bad’s name and we limped together to the front step and sat, watching the morning steam coil off the lake in puffy white curls.
My thoughts drew circles in my skull, returning again and again to the same fragments and trying to fit them together like shards of some broken, precious thing: the Society, the closing Doors, Mr. Locke. My father.
There was still a chapter or so left to read, but it wasn’t hard to fill in the missing years. My father had been stranded in this miserable world with his baby daughter, had found himself employment that permitted travel, and spent seventeen years looking for a way back home—back to her. My mother.
But I’d found their Door, hadn’t I? The blue Door in the field, with the silver coin waiting on the other side, which had so briefly opened. And my father had never known, had perhaps died searching for the Door that his own daughter had opened. It was so… stupid. Like one of those tragic plays where everyone dies at the end from a series of preventable poisonings and misunderstandings.
Although perhaps it hadn’t all been preventable or accidental. Someone had been waiting outside that mountaintop Door; someone had closed it. My father’s book was riddled with references to other Doors closing, to some nameless force stalking his footsteps.
I thought of Havemeyer telling me he wished to preserve the world as it was, thought of Locke inviting me into the Society with a grand speech about order and stability. Doors are change, my father had written. But… did I really believe the New England Archaeological Society was a secret organization of malevolent Door-closers? And if they were—had Mr. Locke known? Was he the capital-V Villain of this story?
No. I wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. This was the man who had sheltered my father and me, opened his own house to us. The man who had given me nursemaids and tutors and fancy dresses, the man who had left me seventeen years of gifts in that blue treasure box. And such unusual, thoughtful gifts—dolls from faraway countries, spice-scented scarves, books in languages I couldn’t read—perfectly suited to a lonely girl who dreamed of adventure.
Mr. Locke loved me. I knew he did.
The ammonia-stink of Brattleboro seemed to waft from my skin, a dull reeking. He’d done that. He’d sent me to that place, locked me away where no one could hear me or see me. To protect me, he’d said, but I wasn’t sure I cared about the why.
By the time Jane emerged—eyes narrowed at the sun, hair slightly flattened-looking on one side—my legs were numb and the lake steam had sizzled away. She sat beside me without saying anything.
“Did you know?” I asked, after a silence.
“Did I know what?”
I didn’t bother to answer. She gave a short, resigned sigh. “I knew some of it. Never the whole story. Julian was a private man.” That past tense, slinking through sentences like a snake in the grass, waiting to bite me.
I swallowed. “How did you meet my father, really? Why did he send you here?”
A longer sigh. I imagined I could hear a kind of release in it, like the unlocking of a door. “I met your father in August 1909 in a world of wereleopards and ogres. I very nearly killed him, but the light was fading and my shot went wide.”
Until that moment, I didn’t think people’s jaws actually dropped in real life. Jane looked rather pleased with herself, watching me sidelong. She stood up. “Come inside. Eat. I’ll tell it to you.”
“I found the door the fourth time I ran away from the mission school. It wasn’t easily found: the northern side of Mount Suswa is riddled with caves and the door was hidden down a twisting, narrow tunnel that only a child would think worth exploring. It shone at me through the shadows, tall and yellow-white. Ivory.”
I’d traded my starched and bloodied smock for a spare blouse and skirt from Jane and raked my fingers through my hair (to no discernible effect) and now we sat across from one another at the dusty kitchen table. It felt almost normal, as if we were hidden in one of the attics of Locke House, drinking coffee and discussing the latest issue of The Sweetheart Series: Romantic Adventures for Young Girls of Merit.
Except that it was Jane’s story we were discussing, and she hadn’t started at the beginning. “Why did you run away?”
Her lips pursed slightly. “The same reason everyone does.”
“But didn’t you worry about—I mean, what about your parents?”
“I had no parents.” She hissed a little on the s. I watched her throat move as she swallowed away her anger. “I only had my little sister left, by then. We were born in the highlands on my mother’s farm. I don’t remember much of it: the tilled earth, black as skin; the smell of fermenting millet; the scrape of the shaving blade against my skull. Mucii. Home.” Jane shrugged. “I was eight when the drought came, and the railroad. Our mother took us to the mission school and said she would return with the rain in April. I never saw her again. I like to think she died of some fever in the work camps, because then it is possible to forgive her.” Her voice oozed with the bitterness of abandonment, of waiting and waiting for a parent who never returned; I shivered in recognition.