“I hoped we were on the right road. I used to come here, as a child, with my father and—” she looked up at him uncertainly, but then she seemed to resolve against equivocating “—and my aunt. It’s the Durdle Door. Surely you have seen it before?”
He shook his head. “But I’ve heard tell of it, of course.”
She clapped her hands and he almost laughed that an old rock could make her so elated, almost childlike.
“I’m jealous that you are seeing it for the first time. It’s one of the most famous landmarks in England. I had wondered if I would ever see it again. But we’re here.”
“We’re here,” he said, not able to keep a smile from creeping onto his face. “It’s not a ruin, though. I thought ruins were your specialty.”
“Ruins and landmarks. Anything, really, that has been there for a long time and that people tell stories about. This is one of my favorites. My first newspaper article was on the Durdle Door. It’s so beautiful. It’s hard to despair when one is near it, is it not?”
Her strange eyes beamed up at him again, still full of light.
“I suppose,” he said, but he met her eye, and he knew that she saw theyesthat he felt.
“Do you know what they say about the Door?”
He groaned internally—his momentary happiness dimming.If you tell me this story,he thought,I won’t be able to stop thinking about you for the next hundred years.
He should tell her he didn’t want to hear it.
And, yet, he wanted to know the story, because it was important to her, and because he knew that whatever she told him would feel like a piece of his history, too.
“No,” he said, finally, his voice hoarse even to his own ears. “I don’t know what they say about the Door.”
“They used to say,” she began, looking out to where the rock hovered above the water. “If you walked through the Durdle Door, at midnight, at the full moon, at high tide, you would step into a different present, where the thing you regretted most had never happened. Your wife or child or husband would come back to life. Your fortune would be restored. You just had to go down into the waters and walk through. If the waves didn’t kill you and the rocks didn’t chew you up, you would walk into the present you wanted, where the past hadn’t happened, or, really, it had happened the way you would have liked.”
He groaned out loud this time.
“Jesus Christ.” He turned away from her and ran his hands through his hair. He looked out onto the sea, choppy and steel gray. Its turbulent movement and grim color seemed to reflect his anguish back at him.
“What?” he heard her say from behind him. “What is wrong?”
He whirled around on her. “Your infernal stories. That is what is wrong.”
“You don’t like mystories?”
“Likethem?” he said, scoffing. He couldn’t imagine anything so mild applying to these tales of hers.
“I don’t understand. You do like them?”
“These stories of yours. This one, and the one you told about the ruins at Tremberley.” He stopped, unable to continue. “They’re…”
“What? They’re what?”
“They’re gutting. They always feel like the story of my goddamned life. Like you know everything that has ever happened to me.”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
He shook his head and looked out again at the Durdle Door. He wondered what present he would wish for if he could walk through it at midnight and survive to tell the tale. He imagined his parents alive, his sister happy and whole, and Catherine, just the girl from over the way, standing by him as something much better than a friend.
“Well, shall we try it?” he said, breaking the train of his own thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Going through the door. Changing everything that has happened. Any present has to be better than this one.”
She laughed.
