The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,119

than breathed, a cottony steam that seemed to pool and slosh in my lungs. My arms were wobbly-feeling and shaky after an hour, aching after two, and numb after three. A few of my not-quite-healed scabs split and wept.

I kept going, because the week’s travel had taught me that much: how to keep going even when your hips ache and your dog’s limp has become a three-legged hop; even when all you found for dinner were three unripe apples; even when every stranger and every gust of wind might be your enemy, finally catching up with you.

And yet—here I was. Sweating and aching in the bowels of the Buffalo Laundry Co., but alive, unbound, entirely myself for the first time in my life. And entirely alone. I had a brief vision of olive hands flashing in the night, dark eyes lit with a cigarette glow—and felt a sudden hollowness in my chest, a rawness like the space left behind by a pulled tooth.

No one spoke to me that entire shift except a dark-skinned woman with a half-moon smile and a southern drawl. The smile vanished when she saw me. She raised her chin at me.

“And just what exactly happened to you?” I shrugged. She looked down at my dust-caked skirt, my scarecrow frame. “Been walking a while on an empty stomach, I’d say.”

I nodded.

“Got more walking to do?” I nodded again. She sucked her teeth pensively, dumped another load of clothes into my cart, and left shaking her head.

Big Linda told me I could sleep in the rag pile—“But only for tonight, mind, this isn’t a damn hotel”—and Bad and I slept curled around one another like a pair of birds in a lye-scented nest. We woke to the first-shift bell ringing in the predawn black, and I discovered two things waiting beside our nest: a greasy ham hock with all the fat and gristle still hanging off it for Bad, and an entire pan of corn bread for me.

I worked another half shift, doing rough multiplication in my head, then marched to the front office and told the proprietress that I was very sorry but I had to leave now, and could I please have my payment in the form of a check. She pursed her lips and offered her thoughts on vagrants, layabouts, and girls who didn’t know a good thing when it came to them—but she wrote the check.

In the alley outside I dug the ink pen out of my pillowcase and pressed the check against the brick wall. I added a wobbly zero and a few extra letters, biting my lip. The check fluttered in a sudden wind that wasn’t there, the lettering blurring and curling, and I rested my head against the steam-warmed brick, dizzied. It shouldn’t have worked—the ink was a different color and crammed rather obviously into the blank space, and whoever heard of a laundress with a $40 check rather than a $4 one—but I’d believed it as I wrote it, and so did the bank teller.

By midafternoon I was boarding the New York Central Line, a precious train ticket clutched in my hand with the letters LOUISVILLE, KY. printed in neat red ink.

My pillowcase looked especially stained and grubby beside the gleaming leather suitcases in the luggage rack, like an underdressed party guest hoping to go unnoticed. I felt sort of stained and grubby myself; every other passenger was wearing pressed linen and high-necked gowns, their hats perched at fashionable angles and their shoes gleaming with fresh polish.

A rumbling shudder rolled through the carriage, like a dragon shaking itself from sleep, and the train pulled out of the shade of Buffalo Central and into the lazy sunlight of a summer afternoon. I pressed my forehead against the warming glass and slept.

I dreamed, or maybe just remembered: a different train heading in the same direction, ten years previously. A scrubby town on the Mississippi; a blue Door standing alone in a field; a city that smelled of salt and cedar.

My father’s city. My mother’s city, if she was somehow alive. Could it ever be my city? Assuming I could open the Door again, even though it was nothing now but a pile of ash. Assuming the Society didn’t get me first.

I dozed and woke, interrupted by the roll-and-stop of the train at every station, the porter’s shouted announcements and periodic demands to see my ticket, the thud and shuffle of passengers departing and arriving. None of them sat next to me, but