Neither of them was my father or my mother. Of course. You don’t really know how high your hopes have gotten until you watch them plummeting earthward.
A logical person would have turned around then, returned to the city proper and begged or mimed their way into a warm meal and a place to sleep and some medical attention. They certainly wouldn’t have staggered onward, tears sliding silently down their cheeks. They wouldn’t have stood before the door-that-wasn’t-theirs, a graying, salt-preserved slab of wood with an iron hook for a knob, and raised their good hand to knock.
And when an old woman answered, her seamed face tilted questioningly upward, eyes milky and squinting, they wouldn’t have burst into tear-slurred speech. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, it’s just I was wondering if you know the man who used to live here. Only I’ve come a really long way and I wanted—I wanted to see him. Julian was his name. Yule Ian, I mean—”
I saw the old woman’s mouth press into a thin line, like a sutured wound. She shook her head. “No.” Then, almost angrily, “Who are you, to ask about my Yule, eh? We have not seen him for twenty years, almost.”
I wanted to wail at the moon or curl up on the doorstep and weep like a little lost child. My father had never come home and neither had my mother, and what was broken would never be mended; the old woman’s words were a final, cruel verdict.
They were also, rather mysteriously, in English.
A dangerous, foolish tingling began in my limbs. How did she know a language from my world? Had someone taught her? And had I gone entirely insane, or did she and I share the same cheekbones, perhaps the same tilt to our shoulders—but then the crowd of questions fell silent.
There was someone else in the little stone house on the hillside. Beside me, Bad’s ears stood up straight.
I caught a flash of movement behind the old woman’s lamplit silhouette—a white-gold glimmer in the darkness, like summer wheat—and then there was another woman standing in the doorway.
Now, with the calming benefit of time and familiarity, I can describe her to you easily: a tired, tough-looking woman with yellow hair gone gray at the temples, skin so freckled and burnt it could almost pass for native, and the sort of strong, unbeautiful features novelists call arresting.
But in that moment, standing on the threshold of the home I was born in, with a squeezing in my chest as if someone had reached behind my ribs and seized my heart, I looked at her all out of order. Her hands: thick-fingered, scored and hashed with shiny white scars, with three fingernails missing entirely. Her arms: stringy muscle wrapped in black ink. Her eyes: soft, dreamer’s blue. Her nose, her square jaw, her level brows: all just like mine.
She didn’t recognize me, of course. It was absurd to wish she did, after nearly seventeen years spent on different planets. I wished it anyway.
“Hello, Adelaide.” Should I have called her Mother instead? The word sat heavy and unfamiliar on my tongue. I knew her better as a character from my father’s book, anyway.
Her eyebrows crimped in the uncertain expression of someone who can’t recall your name and doesn’t want to offend—her mouth opened to say something like Pardon me? or Have we met? and I knew it would feel just like being shot again, a burrowing pain that would worsen with time—but then her eyes went wide.
Maybe it was because I’d spoken English, or maybe it was my familiar/foreign clothes that did it, but she began to look at me, really look at me, with an avid, desperate hunger in her face. I saw her eyes performing the same frenzied dance mine had a few moments before—my wild bundle of braided hair, my blood-rusted arm, my eyes, nose, chin—
And then she knew me.
I saw the knowing arrive, wonderful and terrible. In my memory she has two entirely different faces at once, like the god she named me for: On one face is riotous joy, blazing at me like the sun itself. On the other is deepest mourning, the keening, marrow-deep ache of someone who has looked for something too long and found it too late.
She reached her hand toward me, and I saw her mouth move. Jan-u-ary.
Everything wavered, like the final shaky frames of a film reel, and I remembered how achingly, terribly tired I was, how much I hurt, how many steps I’d taken to arrive at this precise place. I had time to think, Hello, Mother, and then I was falling forward into painless darkness.
I cannot be sure, but I thought I felt someone catch me as I fell. I thought I felt strong, wind-scoured arms wrap around me as if they would never let me go again, felt the thrum of someone else’s heartbeat against my cheek—felt the jangled, broken thing in the center of me fit itself back together and begin, perhaps, to mend.
And now: I sit at this yellow-wood desk with a pen in my hand and a stack of cotton pages lying in wait, so clean and perfect that every word is a sin, a footstep in fresh-fallen snow. An old, unmarked compass sits on the windowsill, still pointing stubbornly out to sea. Tin-cut stars dangle above me, flashing and twisting in the amber sun slanting through the window. I watch little trails of light dance over the pearled scars on my arm, the neat bandaging at my shoulder, the cushions carefully piled around my hip. It still hurts, a burrowing, spine-deep heat that never quite fades; the doctor—Vert Bonemender, I think they called him—said it always would.
Seems fair, somehow. I think maybe if you write open a Door between worlds and consign your guardian-jailer to the eternal blackness of the Threshold, you shouldn’t get to feel precisely the way you did before.
And anyway, Bad and I will match. I can see him now, scrubbing his back against the stony hillside in that ecstatic way of dogs that makes you think maybe you should give it a try. He looks sleek and bronze again, without those jaggedy stitches and lumps all over him, but one leg still doesn’t seem to straighten all the way.
Beyond him, I see the sea. Dove-gray, gold-tipped in the sunlight. Adelaide had this room added to the stone house on the hillside years ago; I don’t think it’s an accident that the windows face the sea, so she can keep her eyes always on the horizon, watching, searching, hoping.
It is the sixteenth day I’ve been here. My father hasn’t come.
I convinced Ade (Ade is still easier to say than Mother; she doesn’t correct me, but sometimes I see her flinch, as if her name is a stone I’ve thrown at her) not to load up her boat and sail out into the blue looking for him, mapless and rudderless, but it was a near thing. I reminded her that neither of us knew where his Door came through to the Written, that all sorts of perils might have befallen him in between, that she would feel really stupid if she sailed away from Nin just as Father was sailing toward it. So she stays, but her whole body has become another compass needle leaning seaward.
“It’s not so different, really,” she told me on the third day. We were in the stone dimness of her bedroom, in the soft, breathing hours before dawn. I was propped on pillows, too fevered and pain-racked to sleep, and she sat on the floor with her back against the bed and Bad’s head in her lap. She hadn’t moved in three days, as far as I could tell; every time I opened my eyes I saw the square line of her shoulders, the white-streaked tangle of her hair.
“Before, I was always searching for him, questing after him. Now I’m waiting for him.” Her voice was tired.
“So you… you did try.” I licked my cracked lips. “To find us.” I made an effort to keep the bitterness and hurt out of my voice, the Where have you been all these years and the We needed you—yes, I know it isn’t fair to blame my mother for being stuck in another world my entire life, but hearts aren’t chessboards and they don’t play by the rules—but she heard it anyway.