The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,27
admiring a stack of neat cream-striped shopping boxes. Packing paper seemed to drift around them in crinkling clouds, and each woman was pink-cheeked with some secret exhilaration. Their smiles were strange and girlish.
“Adelaide Lee, where—”
“Why are there survey stakes on our land?” Ade asked. Each of her relatives, she saw, was dressed more grandly than she had been that morning, with a profusion of velvet ribbons and even the foreign humps of bustles beneath rich-colored skirts. In her muddied dress and tangled braid, Ade felt suddenly distant from them all, as if she and her aunts were standing at opposite ends of a very large room.
It was Mama Larson who answered. “We got some luck, finally.” Her hand swept in a queenly gesture at the kitchen table. “That big-city man come by yesterday and offered us good money for the old hayfield. Real good money.” The aunts tittered. “And there wasn’t a reason in the world we shouldn’t take it. He handed over cash—all of it stashed in his pockets!—and I signed over the deed then and there. What’s a overgrown hayfield to us, anyway?” The last phrase sounded like it had been said many times between them in the last day.
Aunt Lizzie stepped forward with a box. “Don’t look so grim, Adelaide. Look, I meant to save it for your birthday, but—” She opened the box to show Ade a long length of periwinkle cotton. “Thought it’d match your eyes.”
Ade found her voice had entirely deserted her. She patted Lizzie’s hand, hoping they might think she was overcome with gratitude, and ran upstairs before her tears could make their treacherous paths down her cheeks.
She crawled animal-like into the sagging center of her rope bed. She felt rubbed raw, as if the grasses in the field had been sharp-edged, cutting away at that childish part of her that believed in adventure and magic.
She had lingered beside the ruins of the cabin all day, knowing the ghost boy would not appear but waiting anyway.
Perhaps there had never been an elsewhere, and she was simply young and lonely and foolish, and had dreamed up a story about a ghost boy and another world to keep herself company. Perhaps there was nothing at all except the rule-bound world of her aunts and grandmother, real as corn bread and dirt and just as dull.
She came very near to believing it. But she found there was something new in her, some wild seed buried in her chest, that could not accept the world as it was.
You see, doors are many things: fissures and cracks, ways between, mysteries and borders. But more than anything else, doors are change.3 When things slip through them, no matter how small or brief, change trails them like porpoises following a ship’s wake. The change had already taken hold of Adelaide Lee, and she could not turn away.
And so that night, lying half-heartbroken and lost in her bed, Ade chose to believe. She believed in something mad and elsewise, in the feel of the boy’s dry lips against hers in the dying light, in the possibility that there were cracked-open places in the world through which strange and wonderful things might seep.
In believing, Ade felt the scattered uncertainties of her youth falling away. She was a hound that finally caught the scent it sought, a lost sailor suddenly handed a compass. If doors were real, then she would seek them out, ten or ten thousand of them, and fall through into ten thousand vast elsewheres.
And one of them, someday, might lead to a city by the sea.
A Door to Anywhere
You know the feeling of waking up in an unfamiliar room and not knowing how you got there? For a minute you’re just drifting, suspended in the timeless unknown, like Alice falling forever down the rabbit hole.
I’d woken almost every morning of my life in that gray little room on the third floor of Locke House. The sun-faded floorboards, the inadequate bookshelf overflowing with stacks of paperbacks, Bad sprawled beside me like a hairy furnace: all of it was as familiar as my own skin. But still—for a single stretched moment, I didn’t know quite where I was.
I didn’t know why there were crusted salt trails down my cheeks. I didn’t know why there was an aching emptiness just beneath my ribs, as if something vital had been cut away from me in the night. I didn’t know why the corner of a book was jabbing into my jaw.