It wasn’t until we arrived back in Vermont a week later that I realized I was wrong.
Locke House was an immense red stone castle perched at the edge of Lake Champlain, topped with a forest of chimneys and copper-roofed towers. Its innards were wood-paneled and labyrinthine, bristling with the strange and rare and valuable; a Boston Herald columnist had once described it as “architecturally fanciful, more reminiscent of Ivanhoe than a modern man’s abode.” It was rumored that a mad Scotsman had commissioned it in the 1790s, spent a week living in it, and then vanished forevermore. Mr. Locke bought it at auction in the 1880s and began filling it with the world’s wonders.
Father and I were stuffed into two rooms on the third story: a tidy, square office for him, with a big desk and a single window, and a gray, musty-smelling room with two narrow beds for me and my nursemaid. The newest one was a German immigrant named Miss Wilda, who wore heavy black woolen gowns and an expression that said she hadn’t seen much of the twentieth century yet but heartily disapproved of it thus far. She liked hymns and freshly folded laundry, and detested fuss, mess, and cheek. We were natural enemies.
Upon our return, Wilda and Mr. Locke had a hurried conversation in the hall. Her eyes glittered at me like overshined coat buttons.
“Mr. Locke tells me you’ve been overstimulated lately, nearly hysterical, little dove.” Miss Wilda often called me little dove; she was a believer in the power of suggestion.
“No, ma’am.”
“Ah, poor dear. We’ll have you right as the rain in no time at all.”
The cure for overstimulation was a calm, structured environment without distraction; my room was therefore summarily stripped of everything colorful or whimsical or dear. The curtains were drawn and the bookshelf cleared of anything more exciting than A Child’s Illustrated Bible. My favorite pink-and-gold bedspread—Father had sent it to me from Bangalore the previous year—was exchanged for starched white sheets. Samuel was forbidden to visit.
Miss Wilda’s key slid and thunked in the keyhole, and I was alone.
At first I imagined myself a prisoner of war resisting the redcoats or rebels and practiced my expression of stoic resistance. But by the second day the silence was like two thumbs pressing against my eardrums and my legs shuddered and shook with the desire to run and keep running, back to that cedar-spiraled field, through the ashes of the blue Door to some other world.
On the third day, my room became a cell, which became a cage, which became a coffin, and I discovered the very deepest fear that swam through my heart like eels in undersea caves: to be locked away, trapped and alone.
Something in the center of me cracked. I tore at the curtains with clawed nails, I ripped the knobs from dresser drawers, I beat my small fists against the locked door, and then I sat on the floor and wept great hiccuping rivers of tears until Miss Wilda returned with a syrupy spoonful of something that took me away from myself for a while. My muscles turned to oiled, languorous rivers and my head bobbed loosely along the surface. The creep of shadows across the rugs became a terrible drama so absorbing there wasn’t room for anything else in my head until I fell asleep.
When I woke, Mr. Locke was sitting at the side of my bed reading a newspaper. “Morning, my dear. And how are you feeling?”
I swallowed sour spit. “Better, sir.”
“I’m glad.” He folded his paper with architectural precision. “Listen to me very carefully, January. You are a girl of very great potential—immense, even!—but you’ve got to learn to behave yourself. From now on there will be no more fanciful nonsense, or running off, or doors that lead places they shouldn’t.”
His expression as he surveyed me made me think of old-timey illustrations of God: severely paternal, bestowing the kind of love that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy. His eyes were stones, pressing down. “You are going to mind your place and be a good girl.”
I wanted desperately to be worthy of Mr. Locke’s love. “Yes, sir,” I whispered. And I was.
My father didn’t return until November, looking as creased and tired as his luggage. His arrival followed its usual pattern: the wagon crunched its way up the drive and stopped before the stone majesty of Locke House. Mr. Locke went out to offer congratulatory backslapping and I waited in the front hall with Miss Wilda, dressed in a jumper so starched I felt like a turtle in an overlarge shell.
The door opened and he stood silhouetted, looking very dark and foreign in the pale November light. He paused on the threshold because this was generally the moment fifty pounds of excited young girl rocketed into his kneecaps.
But I didn’t move. For the first time in my life, I didn’t run to him. The silhouette’s shoulders sagged.
It seems cruel to you, doesn’t it? A sullen child punishing her father for his absence. But I assure you my intentions at the time were thoroughly muddled; there was just something about the shape of him in the doorway that made me dizzy with anger. Maybe because he smelled like jungles and steamships and adventures, like shadowed caves and unseen wonders, and my world was so ferociously mundane. Or maybe just because I’d been locked away and he hadn’t been there to open the door.
He took three hesitant steps and crouched before me in the foyer. He looked older than I remembered, the stubble on his chin shining dull silver instead of black, as if every day he spent away from me were three days in his world. The sadness was the same as it always was, though, like a veil drawn over his eyes.
He rested a hand on my shoulder, black snakes of tattoos twisting around his wrists. “January, is something wrong?”
The familiar sound of my name in his mouth, his strange-but-not-strange accent, almost undid me. I wanted to tell him the truth—I stumbled over something grand and wild, something that rips a hole in the shape of the world. I wrote something and it was true—but I’d learned better. I was a good girl now.
“Everything is fine, sir,” I answered, and watched the cool grown-up-ness of my voice hit my father like a slap.
I didn’t speak to him over the dinner table that evening, and I didn’t sneak into his room that night to beg stories from him (and he was a champion storyteller, let me tell you; he always said ninety-nine percent of his job was following the stories and seeing where they led).
But I was done with that fanciful nonsense. No more doors or Doors, no more dreams of silver seas and whitewashed cities. No more stories. I imagined this was just one of those lessons implicit in the process of growing up, which everyone learns eventually.
I’ll tell you a secret, though: I still had that silver coin with the portrait of the strange queen on it. I kept it in a tiny pocket sewed in my underskirt, flesh-warm against my waist, and when I held it I could smell the sea.
It was my most precious possession for ten years. Until I turned seventeen, and found The Ten Thousand Doors.
The Leather-Bound Door
