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There is a Doorway

My first memory about the door isn’t really a memory. My mother leans over my crib and her curls fall like unspooling yarn. I reach for a hunk of hair and she pulls back. Listen, she says, mouth moving and the words coming out stilted like an old movie—that’s what makes me think it wasn’t real. Her crooning tone, like you might use for a bedtime story in, doesn’t match the words.

You can’t go through the doorway, she says, that’s the first rule—the only rule, in truth. You’ll have to be careful, because you’ll know the door, but you won’t always know it. Her gaze hardens at this point, the point where the memory is all goo and haze, it’ll try to trick you.

She kisses my forehead and her hair tickles my cheeks. Be smart. Be good. Be brave. She holds my shoulder so hard it hurts. Don’t go through the doorway.

One: I am six years old and unhappy at my own birthday party. My father and his friend Gary have hired a pony and fake cowboy and a caterer. I am more of a dragon kid than a horse kid but I got a pony. Noise fills the house like an expanding balloon: pop-y music and chattering adults and screaming kids who mostly came for the pony. There is enough noise to fill up your sinuses like a head cold and if I stayed outside a second longer, I was going to bite.

I sprint into the house and up the stairs, skirts performing flippery in all directions, and bang my knees on the stairs hard enough to see stars. I scramble the rest of the way up like a dog, looking for my dad or Gary and one of the nicer-looking caterers who used to be friends with my mom. There is a doorway. It is pink, like my bedroom, and the knob is golden. Pink, pink, pink against the white walls and half-sized, just big enough for hobbits or fairies or kids—a place adults would only hit their heads.

I wipe away the pinpricks of tears and am at the door before I remember myself. This part, this stands out: the flush of my chubby child’s hand against the gold. A voice comes from the other side and that is the first thing that stops me.

I press my ear to the door and close my eyes. The voices on the other side cease, like they know, and the wood is warm, sunbaked like a long summer day. Her voice comes to me.

The door will be warm, she says, but not hot.

I open my eyes, peaking down, and long white tendrils creep out from under the gap. I leap back, blinking rapidly, and turn on my heels to go find Gary or my dad or one of the nicest caterers.

Two: Ten years old and I am searching for a bathroom. My palms are sweaty, gripping a pack of stick-on earrings in one hand and passing rows of cubies. I’ll be late for Mrs. Henderson’s class, but today is the day is the day. It has to be. My dad bought me a collection of stick-on earrings covered in butterflies and gems and smiley faces. He smiled so wide: these were the ones, right? I feigned indifference, already paranoid at this age, and his face fell and my heart with it. Sure. Thanks, I say, and shove them into the secret compartment of my backpack.

When I was seven, a girl in my class had her ears pierced and they got horribly infected. The green-black pus-y memory stopped me in your tracks every time before I could get mine. She whimpers, in those memories, like they might fall off.

But stick-ons wouldn’t hurt. Who would notice? I didn’t want my dad to see me put them on, though. I didn’t want the other girls to see me. I want to arrive, already made-up, already done.

I flick down the lower school hallways, sojourning to the girl’s bathroom by the library. Heart in my throat, I push past the library and practically throw myself at the grubby bathroom door. It sticks. I push and push and my throat tightens. They might've finally shut down the broken-down bathroom on this level. I turn, ready to stomp to the other end of the school again. And there is a door.

Squeezed between the cubbies and bright turquoise, it’s not even trying to hide. The edges have swirling accents and the handle is pure glass. I glare at the door, because I know enough then. I am already late to class and it’s not even trying to hide and I cross the way. I draw close enough to smell the wood-y scent and brush my fingertips against the warm-bread surface. Wind whips against the door from the other side and carries the scent of pine trees and snow. I had never seen snow. I wonder if there’s a mirror on the other side I could use. Or a nicer bathroom.

A shadow moves under the doorway—a bulky, shuffling gate that crosses toward me. And my coward’s heart is good for one thing: I run.

Three: Of all the grades, seventh is the most like a story book, a fairy tale. Midnight clangs and everyone transforms like a magic trick. Some of the boys you were friends with grow hair and height and tempers. Some of the girls are cursed to weeping and blood. Some of your friends grow into towers you can’t climb.

Terra is like this. My friend, I always had friends from one club or sport or activity or another, just none with doorways, but she must have been seeing something I was sure.

I couldn’t really understand Terra since she wasn’t quiet like me, but prone to outside thoughts. You always knew where you stood with Terra. She told you how she felt about the smelly art teacher and bratty classmates and how unfair lunch periods were to the younger students. It was a relief to always know—or, it used to be. We got bigger and stranger and more cursed and maybe you didn’t want to know anymore. People stopped sitting with us at lunch.

Everyone was invited to the last sleepover of the year held by Bethany Brown. Bethany was a proper kind of a girl that was raised with enough wealth to make minor royalty sneeze and enough propriety to make it count. She had a pauper’s heart though, generous if not cold. Maybe it was the large birthmark across her face that curved like a wave. Fairy tales are like that too: when you are given a wave across your two-toned face, you invite everyone to sleepovers.

We are early, like always, and my dad ferries me down an endless driveway. He shields his eyes from the sun and drives with a sense of duty that is common in my family. My grandma and aunts and cousins attended everything from carnivals to baby showers to waterparks with a grim determination, sparklers and ice cream cones in hand. I clutch my sleepover bag in hand and muscle through my own trepidation. There is a doorway.

Before I even reach the house, there it is. It is a simple door, brown and battered at the very bottom and splintering. The only way I know it is the door is because it stands in the middle of Bethany’s vast yard, all by itself. I am seasick, windswept, and I want to toss myself over my dad’s lap. Wait! This is no good. No one makes sense anymore. There is a door. I need to go home.

But we reached the front of the house, which is more of a manor, and my family would never miss a baby shower, however painfully pink and cheerful. Besides, the door is gone by the time I look back.

I jerk my gaze ahead, at the brilliant white doors of the manor, and right my clothes. I have my own fairy tale to account for: motherless girl, cursed with lack, and I have to be just the right amount of whimsical or sweet or okay.

“This place gets bigger every year,” my dad jokes, shepherding me to the front of the manor and looking ill. Has he seen it? We had never spoken about the door. But there was a lot we didn’t talk about. A few years ago Gary moved into the guest room even though we didn’t have a guest room. Five years and we were happy. That summer, Gary moved out again, kissing me on the forehead like I thought my mom did when she left.

Gary was the one that signed me up for everything: girl scouts and rafting and after school dance classes. I missed him, I missed him, I missed him and I couldn’t ask why he left.

We wait. The door, there is a door, sits at the corner of my vision all by itself. Bethany’s mom answers without Bethany, standing so tall she could be a minor god.

“Stuart, don’t you look so smart. Oh, Darlene, just like your dad, aren’t you? So sweet.” She’s probably referring to my oxford shoes and my round glasses which match his, but I haven’t minded that I am so much like my dad. He’s a professor of math and logic at the university and I would rather be a daughter of math and logic than doors.

My mom was a caterer for weddings and banquets and anything fancy enough to have name brands. She was well-put together, people said, so on top of things it made you self-conscious. My father was a lot like me in that he was easy to invite to things, well-liked and grimly prepared to attend any evening. He had a year where all his colleagues got married and he went to enough weddings to fall in love with the caterer. It was a wonderful story.

"Come in, come in, you're the first ones." She steps aside, a bit like a Greek goddess to the land of marble stairs and velvet curtains.

I say goodbye to my dad, one tight squeeze, and then take my oxfords off at the door despite the fact the journey to Bethany’s party has just begun. We go up and then sideways and then down a little ways and up again and Bethany gives me a hug at the door to her bedroom. I liked that everyone grew a little quieter by this age and I put my paltry present with the others.

It’s a nice party. We split off into groups and come back together for cake and ice cream and games. Terra is there but she likes games more than I do. I sit with the girls reading magazines and filling out quizzes about their love lives. There’s a round of fortune telling that I enjoy more than anything else. “You’re going to marry well,” I tell Olivia, reading her palm, “but it will end poorly before the year is up.”

She frowns at this and I shrug. “And you’ll own fifty cats and live in a shack.” They laugh and that’s enough.

Terra comes over about halfway through the night and I smile at her. I like Terra like you like a glass of cold water in the heat. She kicks her legs up and the other girls settle a little farther away. “Let’s go get snacks,” one of the girls says to me before I open my mouth and Terra crosses her arms over her chest like she doesn’t want to talk.

We open presents Bethany seems utterly bored by. Terra doesn’t join us. We put our pajamas on and curl each other’s hair and Terra doesn’t join us. I ask Honey, her real name and a very knowing girl, if something happened. She shrugs. “She lost one of the games,” she says and her eyes have grown sharp, nostrils flaring. “I can’t believe she’s still throwing tantrums.” I go to Terra all by myself and I ask her about Mr. Sanchez’s class—a favorite topic of anyone who struggles in school.

Terra makes a face and explodes into one of her rants and I kind of like listening for as long as I can listen. I leave her to go find my sleeping bag around midnight. It’s late and I’m tired and distractable. There are more girls and more rooms, it’s a Bethany party after all, and Mandy is talking about a crush from summer camp that started writing her love letters. This was my favorite kind of talk—fortunes and secrets and future-talk.

It must be past midnight when I get back. The talk of crushes had circled around to me and I didn’t have anything to contribute except that it sounded nice. I leave, go back to the den, clutch my sleeping bag to my chest and nearly step into a puddle. I let out a squeak. I’m in the den room and there’s a puddle where Terra used to be and Olivia is laughing with Honey and maybe she isn’t so knowing.

“Where is Terra?” I ask, trying to smother how alarmed I am. Honey shakes her head and I hear it: crying, close to wailing. “What happened?”

“An accident,” Olivia says, sharp-eyed. I throw my sleeping bag to the floor and go to the stairs. If I was braver maybe I would have yelled at Olivia and Honey or told someone else. I enter a long narrow space and the crying carries through the hallway, piercing and miserable.

“Terra?” I call. “I’m sure they didn’t mean it.” I wish, later, I’d said something else. The hallway is unlit, sloping upward, and I bump into a sidetable that nearly falls over. Crying, so miserable it fills me up too, carries through the space and I have to force myself toward the noise. “Are you there?” I knock on the first door and my knuckles come away warm. “Don’t do that!” I scold the door, angry.

I keep my eyes on it so it doesn’t move, a plain brown door, and go to the next one over. Wailing comes from the other side and I draw a deep breath. The door always disappears quickly, especially when someone else was there too. “Terra?” I knock and the door knocks back.

My heart jams in my throat. Wind whips against the door from the other side and I don’t scold it this time. I keep walking, hairs on my arm standing on end. Pitiful weeping drenches the air and I go from door to door, pressing my ear to each one. Someone is crying on the other side. I feel like crying myself. I had never seen so many before. Did I already walk through, somehow? Is this what was on the other side of the doorway? More doorways, forever.

Long, white tendrils peak out from under one of them, reaching.

“Darlene?” It’s Bethany, which is kind of her, but the other girl looks cross. “This wing isn’t set-up for the party.”

I take deep breaths and the room rights itself. “I’m looking for Terra.”

“Well, she isn’t up here.” Bethany shoos me with both hands, but I cock my head to the side. The other girl studies me. “What is it?”

“Do you hear that?” I say and the crying is so fine and thin and hard against the ear.

We find Terra eventually, down in the kitchen breaking glasses one by one, and the other girls begin to talk. Mostly about Terra, then about Darlene up near the attic, listening to voices.

Four: I apply to five colleges on the east coast and one down the street. I don't accept any of the ones with different area codes. Despite myself, I go to my father’s college. It would save on gas, wouldn’t it? He asks me if I am excited and I shrug. “I don’t know what I’m going to study,” I reply, like a mantra, and it’s true.

I’d go to my father’s college but I wasn’t going to study math. Or computers. Or history. Or theatre, god help me. I was going to go to college and attend everything and meet no one and see doorways.

I am leaving, I am always leaving things, and my bag tugs at my shoulder. I played tennis all throughout high school and it gave me a bad shoulder. It’s late and the library will be closing in just an hour. The study group is three girls and two boys and we spread out across a long wooden table covered in crumbs despite the fact there’s no food allowed.

I stop to rub my shoulder and one of the boys jumps up.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” Craig, or something, asks, all sparkle in his eyes.,

I shake my head. “I’ll be fine.”

“It’s no trouble, really. Plus, it’s dark out.”

I wave a hand through the air. Truthfully, I wanted to study more. I had a test the next day but the study group had strayed so far from basic chemistry problems that I might as well be on my own.

“I don’t want you—” Craig, or something, continues, but I smile and retreat with a few pleasantries.

“I wasn’t planning on going to the dorms anyway, I wouldn’t want to keep you,” I say, making up my plans on the spot. “My dad’s house is close.” I fast-walk toward the elevators, waving and smiling. Irritation flares in my core. The study door swung open followed by Craig’s mild, shuffling steps.

I duck behind one of the stacks of books and into a spare room. He meant well, I knew, but I was emptied-out. I got that way sometimes, with the barest self inside myself, and college had been pushing that. I was tired of signing up for things. My father wasn’t even there to ask how they went.

The spare study room was like our last one: one long wooden table, a white board, and padded square seats. I cross the room to the window and stare out, pretending to be watching the moon. The only difference between this room and the last is that the lights are off and you have a view of the manmade lake in the center of the quad.

I watch the moon over the water and don’t know what happens to Craig, maybe he keeps looking for me, maybe he goes home. I wait until he must decide to do something else and feel myself aging in place.

When I turn, my breath catches in my throat. There are two doorways. One plain, practical door is one the left and the other one the right. They look exactly the same, a light-brown wood with a square window in the center. I knew this would happen one day, of course. It wasn’t even the first time. But I didn’t know this room—I hadn’t memorized the layout, the exits, the original.

I wipe my palms on my jeans and go to the doors. Both the windows show the same scene: empty library stacks and rows of study rooms. I lift my hand up to touch the front of the door and then stop myself. I hadn’t closed the door all the way when I came in. A tiny crack between me and the other side, and if I touched the door, would that count as going through? I take a step back.

Each door is slightly ajar, showing the same scene of plain white walls and thin carpets on the other side. I close my eyes and listen to the stillness. Sometimes, I let my mind wander to what was on the other side of these doorways. Snow, I thought, and wind. Other people, other places.

But my mother would have told me if it was someplace worth visiting, right? Someplace you could come back from. When I open my eyes, I know which doorway is the real one. Pay attention to the shadows, I hear my mother say, if there is something to see. And the shadows on the room on the left don’t seem to overlap.

I’ll go home tonight, I think, to my dad’s house, and I’ll sleep in our hammock in the backyard. Sometimes I do that, when the weather is nice, and sleep somewhere without doors.

I look up and a face stares back at me from the other side. I force myself to stay put. She is smiling with all of her teeth and her eyes crinkle at the corner. And it’s me. I am on the other side, smiling, plain and pale and bespeckled. She smiles so wide it looks like it hurts and me, the me on this side, gulps down one breath after the next. I go for the right door, diving for the knob and nearly trip over my own feet . The last thing I see is the whites of her eyes, and the fog of her breath pushed up against the glass.

Five: My boss is not a bad person. Maybe she didn’t get to learn a lot of emotional regulation growing up. Maybe she needs a hug. I stand in front of her desk and hum the Star Trek theme in my head—not out loud, of course, she wouldn’t like that.

“Fucking incompetants, can’t find the right side of their butt cheeks from the left . . .” She faces the wall, the back of her tall bun reaching for the ceiling, and I feel the burn of my resignation letter in my back pocket. I had carried it on you for the last two weeks, waiting for the right time to hand it over. “Fucking lunatics.”

I turned down two university research grants for this, I think. But the private sector had muscle behind it. Something other than my father’s desk and my father’s students and round glasses which I also still wore. I didn’t study math, and I had to tell myself chemistry was altogether different. And this was supposed to be a good pharmacy company, a different kind. We were supposed to help people—maybe one that could have helped my mother.

“And you,” my boss snaps, turning like a military general to her troops, “where were those emails? The communication you said you were so good at when things were falling off the ugly end of bad?” I purse my lips and Mrs. Cambrie's eyes narrow. “Nothing? No explanation for where my emails went? No begging for mercy?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She waves a hand in the air. “Get out of my sight. I don’t want to see you for the next few days.”

My heart drops. I recognized that look. And I hadn’t even gotten the chance to give her my resignation letter. I go over the numbers in my head and maybe there wouldn’t be a company to come back to.

Fuck you, I think over and over again in my head and the words sour on the end of my tongue. Fuck you! I turn, and exit the room. There might be another company to go to, I think with all my credentials build-up. Hell, there might be a grant still available from the university.

I am walking, I am walking, I am walking. There was somewhere to go after this, I think. My breath catches and catches again and a pain surges through my bad shoulder like I’m struck by lightning. I nearly dropped to the floor but I have to at least get out of the damn building. I manage to soldier my way to the elevators, it’s the weekend and we’re nearly empty.

“You okay?” The building is nearly empty. “Hey, you, are you okay? You dropped something.” One of the interns, too young to know any better, is at the other end of the hallway. She has the young, pinched face of a bunny rabbit, and holds my bag, my jacket, one shoe in her hand. I hadn’t even noticed taking them off.

“I’m fine.” The elevator dings and I walk out of my other shoe. I hunch into myself, the door closes and the pain on my left side feels like a heart attack. Clutching my chest, I let my breaths come out as sharp and painful as they please. I’m tired of making them better.

The elevator dings and I know what’s on the other side. I know how the metal doors will slide open, and the shadows on the other side won’t overlap. “Please,” I say and close my eyes. “Enough.”

The doors blessedly close and open on another empty office space. I drop to the floor and feel the cold wind blow on my face. I watch the numbers on the elevator go up and down. Eleventy, says one of the numbers, zero says the other, and purple is at the end. The zero is perfectly round, and I think of my father and then Gary. Gary stopped by a few more times over the years. The last time was when I graduated college and he toasted me with tears in his eyes. I was so flustered by this that I had to leave the room.

Later, alone, just the two of us for once, I was so flustered I asked him where he had been. He apologized to me about the way he left. Why did you do it then? I said and Gary’s mouth turned into a squiggly line.

“I loved you both.” I didn't like how he said this. “But it wasn’t working. Not with everything your father wasn’t,” he gulped, “well, it wasn’t working.”

My father came back in then, and we stopped talking about anything that circled around “love” and I left knowing what I wanted for once in my life. The private sector had might behind it, something beyond my father’s shrinking. Maybe we’d find her, I think, maybe I’d make a drug that helped her stay. My mother suffered, they said, and she was so well put-together until she wasn’t.

The elevator door dings and music plays, soft and lyrical and I smell snow in the air. I still hadn’t seen snow—I had barely left California. We get to the bottom level of the elevator and the doors slide open. The air smells musty with the dank of the garage. Dark and cool, I can make out the last few cars in the lot. Someone sits in their black shiny corolla and I recognize the sheer height of her bun. My boss sits in her car, unmoving, looking straight ahead and I can only imagine what she tells herself when she’s alone.

The shadows are normal on this level. The metal of the door is cool.

I let the doors close, I stand, and push the button for the first floor. I don’t own a car. I get out on the first floor and the front desk person tells me to have a nice Saturday. I smile at him and there is a door in the middle of the lobby, standing all by itself. The door is golden and red like a hotel door at the best place you’ve ever stayed. It opens, so easily, hot against my palm, and I walk through.

Snow lands on my cheeks and I walk through the door. Shadows pool at my heels and I walk through the door. I begin to laugh, a raucous joy building in my center and spilling out. I smile and smile and go through the next door. Wind scrapes against my cheeks, spraying me with snow and dirt and I walk through the door. I don’t know where I am. I am not anywhere. Mold grows under my fingernails. Tears stream down my face. White roots grow from my knuckles and trail behind me in dirty clumps. I go through the doorway. I make it to a pink, pink door, half my size, and crawl through the tunnel.

There's a crib. She’s awake, what a beautiful thing, and her hair curls soft on her small head. I kiss her forehead, smiling and speaking in my unused voice. “Don’t go through the doorway.”

FIN

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