Ade’s eyes widened and her fingers splayed helplessly over her own stomach, as if warding him away. “Doesn’t seem like I have much choice, does it.”12 But there was no bitterness or regret in her voice, only that chill fear. “But men do, don’t they. Lord knows my father wasn’t—he didn’t—what will you do?”
And Yule realized then what should have been obvious: it wasn’t the baby Ade was frightened of, but him. It was such an enormous relief that Yule laughed, a great shout of joy that scattered the birds perched above them and made Ade bite her cheek with sudden hope.
Yule tossed his blankets aside and crawled to her. He took her hands—scarred and burnt, blunt-nailed and beautiful—in his. “Here’s what I will do, if you will let me: I will take you back to Nin and marry you, and find someplace to make a home for us. And the three of us—or four of us? Or six?—wait till you meet my brothers and sisters—will spend our winters in Nin and our summers sailing, and I will love you and our child more than any man has loved anything. I will never leave either of you as long as I live.”
He watched the fear in her face vanish. It was replaced by some burning, luminous thing that made Yule think of sea divers standing at the edges of cliffs or word-workers staring at the blank page. “Yes,” she said, and their whole lives lay in that single word.
If only Yule had been a better man, he might have kept his promise—to his daughter, if not to his wife.
Yule’s own mother tattooed their wedding vows on their arms. She worked with her white-knotted hair pulled back beneath a kerchief and her needles up-and-downing in the same rhythm Yule knew from childhood. It still seemed to him a kind of magic to see words emerging in the blood-and-ink trail of the needle like dawn following some old god’s chariot. For Ade the ritual lacked the weight of tradition, but she still caught her breath at the strange beauty of dark lines twisting up her forearm, and when she pressed her arm against Yule’s so their red-black wounds touched, and spoke the inked words out loud, she still felt something tectonic shifting beneath her feet.
The traditional Signing of the Blessings followed their vows. Yule’s parents—wearing bemused, affable expressions that indicated they didn’t quite understand how their son came to be married to a milk-pale foreigner with nothing to her name but the world’s ugliest boat, but were happy for him anyway—hosted the gathering, and all Yule’s cousins and stoop-backed aunties and university fellows came crowding in to have their prayers for the newlyweds recorded in the family book. They lingered to eat and drink themselves into a traditional stupor, and Ade spent her third night in the City of Nin crammed into Yule’s childhood bed, watching his cut-tin stars twirl overhead.
It took another week for Yule to wrangle a new arrangement between himself and the university. He announced that he had finished with his researches in the field and needed time and quiet to compile his thoughts, and would also like a stipend large enough to support a wife and child. They balked; he insisted. In the end, and after much muttering about his expected future contributions to the university’s reputation, the master required him to teach three times a week in the City square and provided him enough pay to afford a small stone house on the high northern hillside of the island.
The house was a tired, settling sort of structure, half-buried in the hill behind it, which emitted a strong smell of goats on warm afternoons. It had only two rooms, a blackened oven occupied by several generations of mice, and a bed of straw-stuffed canvas. The mason who chiseled their names into the stone mantel thought privately it was a grim, lean home for a young family, but to Yule and Ade it was the most beautiful building ever to claim four walls and a rooftop. This is the mad Midas touch of true love, which transforms everything it touches to gold.
Winter crept over Nin stealthily, like a great white cat made of chill mists and sharp-edged winds. Ade was entirely unimpressed by it, and laughed at Yule as he wrapped woolen cloths around his chest and shivered by the bread oven. She went on long walks through the hills, dressed only in her summer things, and returned with wind-scoured cheeks.
“Won’t you take something warmer?” Yule pleaded one morning. “For his sake?” He snaked an arm around the gentle slope of her belly.
She laughed at him, pulling away. “Her sake, I think you mean.”
“Mm. Well, perhaps you’d wear—this?” he said, and pulled from behind his back a brownish, rough-looking canvas coat, as foreign to his world as it was familiar in hers.
She fell still. “You kept it? All these years?”
“Of course.” He whispered it into the salt-smelling tangle of hair at the back of her neck, and her walk that morning was somewhat delayed.
Spring in Nin was a season of saturation. Warm rains turned every trail to mud and every stone to moss. Their neat-folded clothes molded in their stacks and bread grew stale almost before it cooled. Ade spent more time down in the City with Yule, swaying up and down rain-slicked streets and practicing her abysmal Amarican on every passing citizen, or working with Yule’s father to scrub small, shelled creatures off the keels of his fishing boats. She took care of The Key, too, adjusting and rebuilding under Yule’s father’s direction until it sat a little more jauntily at the dock, its mast thinner and taller and its hull well sealed. She liked to watch it rocking in the waves and feel her baby rolling beneath her ribs. One day she’ll be yours, Ade told her, one day you and The Key will sail off into the sunset.
In midsummer, in the sun-bleached month Ade called July, Yule returned to their home to find Ade swearing and bent over, pearled sweat slicking her skin.
“Is it—he’s coming?”
“… She,” Ade panted, and she looked at Yule with the expression of a young soldier charging into her first battle. Yule gripped her hands, their tattoos twining like paired snakes up their wrists, and made the same desperate, silent prayers that every father makes in that moment: that his wife would live, that his child would be whole and healthy, that he would hold them both in his arms before dawn.
And, in the world’s most often-repeated and transcendent miracle, his prayers were granted.
Their daughter was born just before sunrise. She had skin the color of cedarwood and eyes like wheat.
They named her for an old, half-forgotten god from Ade’s own world, whom Yule had studied once in an ancient text preserved in Nin’s archives. He was a strange god, depicted in the faded manuscript with two faces staring both backward and forward. He presided not over one particular domain but over the places between—past and present, here and there, endings and beginnings—over doorways, in short.
But Ade thought Janus sounded too much like Jane, and she’d be damned if any daughter of hers would be named Jane. They named her after the god’s own month instead: January.
Oh my sweet daughter, my perfect January, I would beg for your forgiveness, but I lack the courage.
All I can ask for is your belief. Believe in doors and worlds and the Written. Believe most of all in our love for you—even if the only evidence we’ve left you is contained in the book you now hold.
The Door of Blood and Silver
When I was a child, breakfast was twenty minutes of absolute silence seated across from Miss Wilda, who believed that conversation interfered with digestion and that jam and butter were only for holidays. After her departure I joined Mr. Locke for breakfast at his enormous polished dining table, where I did my best to impress him with my good posture and ladylike silence. Then Jane arrived and breakfasts became stolen coffee in a forgotten sitting room or jumbled attic room, where everything smelled of dust and sunlight and Bad could disperse fine bronze hairs on the armchairs without rebuke.
At Brattleboro, breakfast was the splat of porridge ladled into tin bowls, the pale filtering of light from high windows, the click of the attendants’ heels down the aisles.
Good behavior had granted me the right to join the murmuring flock of women who ate in the dining hall. I was seated that morning beside a mismatched pair of white women: one of them was old, narrow, and pursed-looking, with her hair drawn into a bun so severe it tugged her eyebrows into little arches; the other was young and wide, with moist gray eyes and chapped lips.
Both of them stared as I sat down. It was a familiar stare: a mistrustful, what-exactly-are-you stare that felt like a knife blade pressed to my flesh.
