And I especially liked that it had the best view of the drive, which meant I could watch Samuel Zappia’s cart come swaying toward the house. He hardly ever left me story papers anymore—the habit had faded between us, like pen pals whose letters get shorter each month—but he always waved. Today I watched his breath rise in a white plume above the cart, saw his head tilt up to the study window. Was that a flash of white teeth?
His red cart had just disappeared toward the kitchen and I was considering and dismissing ways I could contrive to walk casually by in the next half hour, when Miss Wilda rapped her knuckles on the study door. She informed me, in tones of deepest suspicion, that young Mr. Zappia would like to speak to me.
“Oh.” I made a stab at nonchalance. “Whatever for?”
Wilda stalked behind me like a black woolen shadow as I went down to meet him. Samuel was waiting beside his ponies, muttering into their velveteen ears. “Miss Scaller,” he greeted me.
I noticed he’d been spared the misfortunes of most adolescent boys; instead of sprouting several extra elbows and galumphing around like a newborn giraffe, Samuel had grown lither, denser. More handsome.
“Samuel.” I used my most grown-up voice, as if I had never once chased him across the lawn howling for his surrender or fed him magic potions made of pine needles and lake water.
He gave me a weighing sort of look. I tried not to think about my lumpy wool dress, which Wilda especially liked, or the irrepressible way my hair frizzed out of its pins. Wilda gave a threatening cough, like a mummy clearing its throat of grave dust.
Samuel rummaged in the cart for a covered basket. “For you.” His face was perfectly neutral, but a faint crimp at the corner of his mouth might have been the beginnings of a smile. His eyes had a familiar, eager gleam; it was the same look he’d had when he was retelling the plot of a dime novel and was about to get to the really good part where the hero swoops in to save the kidnapped kid at just the right moment. “Take it.”
At this point, you’re thinking this story isn’t really about Doors, but about those more private, altogether more miraculous doors that can open between two hearts. Perhaps it is in the end—I happen to believe every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment, slantwise in the light of dusk—but it wasn’t then.
It wasn’t Samuel who became my dearest friend in the world; it was the animal snuffling and milling its stubby legs in the basket he handed me.
From my rare and Wilda-chaperoned trips into Shelburne, I knew the Zappias lived crammed in an apartment above the grocery in town, in the sort of sprawling, raucous nest that made Mr. Locke whuffle through his mustache and complain about those people. The store was guarded by an enormous, heavy-jawed dog named Bella.
Bella, Samuel explained, had recently produced a litter of burnished bronze puppies. The other Zappia children were busy selling most of them to tourists gullible enough to believe they were a rare African breed of lion-hunting dog, but Samuel had kept one. “The best one. I saved for you. See how he looks at you?” It was true: the puppy in my basket had stopped its squirming to stare up at me with damp, blue-sheened eyes, as if awaiting divine instruction.
I couldn’t have known then what that puppy would become to me, but perhaps some part of me suspected, because my nose was prickling in that dangerous, you-are-about-to-cry way when I looked up at Samuel.
I opened my mouth, but Wilda made her rattly throat sound again. “I think not, boy,” she declared. “You will take that animal right back where it came from.”
Samuel didn’t frown, but the smile-crimp at the corner of his mouth flattened out. Wilda snatched the basket from my clutching hands—the puppy toppled and rolled, legs paddling in midair—and thrust it back to Samuel. “Miss Scaller thanks you for your generosity, I’m sure.” And she steered me back inside and lectured me for several eons about germs, the inappropriateness of large dogs for ladies, and the perils of accepting favors from men of low standing.
My appeal to Mr. Locke after dinner was unsuccessful. “Some flea-bitten thing you took pity on, I suppose?”
“No, sir. You know Bella, the Zappias’ dog? She had a litter, and—”
“A half-breed, then. Those never turn out well, January, and I won’t have some mongrel chewing on the taxidermy.” He waggled his fork at me. “But I’ll tell you what—one of my associates raises very fine dachshunds down in Massachusetts. Perhaps if you apply yourself in your lessons I could be persuaded to reward you with an early Christmas present.” He gave me an indulgent smile, winking beneath Wilda’s pursed lips, and I tried to smile back.
I returned to my ledger copying after dinner feeling sullen and strangely rubbed raw, as if there were invisible chains chafing against my skin. The numbers blurred and prismed as tears pooled in my eyes and I had a sudden, useless desire for my long-lost pocket diary. For that day in the field when I’d written a story and made it come true.
My pen slunk to the margins of the ledger book. I ignored the voice in my head that said it was absurd, hopeless, several steps beyond fanciful—that reminded me words on a page aren’t magic spells—and wrote: Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they became the very best of friends.
There was no silent reshaping of the world this time. There was only a faint sighing, as if the entire room had exhaled. The south window rattled weakly in its frame. A sick sort of exhaustion stole over my limbs, a heaviness, as if each of my bones had been stolen and replaced with lead, and the pen dropped from my hand. I blinked blurring eyes, my breath half-held.
But nothing happened; no puppy materialized. I returned to my copy work.
The following morning I woke abruptly, much earlier than any sane young woman would voluntarily wake up. An insistent plink-plinking rang through my room. Wilda snuffled in her sleep, brows crimping in instinctual disapproval.
I dove for my window in a fumbling mess of nightgown and sheets. Standing on the frosted lawn below, wrapped in the pearly predawn mist, his upturned face crinkled in that almost-smile, was Samuel. One hand held the reins of his gray pony, who was making furtive passes at the lawn, and the other held the round-bottomed basket.
I was out the door and down the back stairs before I’d had time for anything so mundane as conscious thought. Sentences like Wilda will flay you or My God, you’re in your nightgown arrived only after I’d flung open the side door and rushed out to meet him.
Samuel looked down at my bare feet, freezing in the frost, then at my desperate, eager face. He held out the basket for the second time. I scooped out the chilly, sleepy ball of puppy and held him to my chest, where he rooted toward the warmth beneath my arm.
“Thank you, Samuel,” I whispered, which I know now was an utterly insufficient response. But Samuel seemed content. He bowed his head in a chivalrous, Old-World-ish gesture like a knight accepting his lady’s favor, mounted his drooling pony, and disappeared across the misted grounds.
Now, let us clear the air: I am not a stupid girl. I realized the words I’d written in the ledger book were more than ink and cotton. They’d reached out into the world and twisted the shape of it in some invisible and unknowable way that brought Samuel to stand beneath my window. But there was a more rational explanation available to me—that Samuel had seen the longing in my face and decided to hell with that bitter old German woman—and I chose to believe that instead.