I hadn’t spoken in so long my voice creaked a little, like a disused hinge. “I always used to dream about a life like that. Roaming around, free.”
My mother blew a sad huff of laughter out her nose. “A natural-born wanderer, like I always said.” She stroked Bad’s head, scratching his favorite under-the-chin spot. He became a furry bronze puddle in her lap, pawing weakly at the air. “But take it from me: freedom isn’t worth a single solitary shit if it isn’t shared. I’ve spent so much time wishing we’d never sailed through that door, January. But at my ugliest, most selfish moments—I wished it had been me standing in the prow, with you. At least Julian had you.” Her voice was so soft I could hardly hear it, choked with seventeen years of vicious pain.
I thought of my father. Of how rarely I saw him, and how his face had the same hollowed-out tiredness my mother’s did, and how his eyes skimmed across my face as if it might hurt if he looked too long. “I… Yes, he had me. But I wasn’t enough.” Odd—that used to make me so angry, but now the anger had gone all runny and soft, like melting wax.
A ragged, furious gasp from my mother. “You damn well should have been! Was he—did he—” I knew she was going to ask, Was he a good father? and I found I didn’t want to answer; it seemed needlessly cruel.
“Would I have been enough for you?” I asked instead. “Would you have stopped looking for Father?”
I heard her breath catch, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. “Here.” I wallowed around in my cushions and quilts, found the warm leather cover of The Ten Thousand Doors. “I think you ought to read this. So you can”—forgive him—“understand him.”
She took it.
I still catch her rereading passages, running her fingers over the printed words like they were miracles or magic charms, her lips moving in something very much like prayer. I think it helps. Well, not helps, exactly—I think it hurts like hell to reread the narrative of her life, with all its broken promises and lost chances, to read about the man my father became and the choices he made.
But she keeps reading it. It’s a kind of proof, I suppose, that he still lives and still loves her, that he’s striving to find his way back to her. That what was shattered will be made whole again.
So now there are two of us staring seaward. Waiting. Hoping. Watching ships crest the curve of the horizon, reading the black swirls of blessings stitched into their sails. My mother translates them for me, sometimes: To many fat fish. To mutually profitable dealings. To safe travels and strong currents.
Sometimes my grandparents sit with us and watch, too. We don’t do a lot of talking, probably because we’re busy being mutually stunned at one another’s existence, but I like the feel of them sitting near me. Tilsa, my grandmother, often holds my hand, as if she isn’t quite convinced I’m real.
Sometimes, when it’s just the two of us, my mother and I talk. I told her about Locke House and the Society and the asylum, about Father and Jane and rather a lot about you. I told her about Aunt Lizzie living alone on the Larson farm. (“Lord, I’d like to see her,” my mother sighed. I reminded her that the Door was open and she could skip through it any day of the week, and her eyes went wide. But she didn’t leave; she kept staring toward the horizon.)
We’re mostly quiet now. She mends ripped canvas, rereads my father’s book, stands on the hillside with the salt-sweet wind drying the tear tracks on her face.
I write. I wait. I think of you.
There is a sail rising on the horizon now, like a sharp-toothed moon. Its blessings are crooked and rough-looking, as if sewn in a wild hurry by someone unskilled with needle and thread.
It’s only as the ship grows larger that I realize: I don’t need these blessings translated. I can read them myself, in plainest English: To home. To true love. To Adelaide.
I can see—can I? Am I imagining it?—the sun-silhouetted figure of a single sailor standing in the prow. He leans toward the city, toward the stone house on the hillside, toward his heart’s desire.
Oh, Father. You’re home.
And now: I curl in the belly of The Key, writing by the silver-tongued light of the full, foreign moon. The wood smells of cloves and tannin and juniper wine. It smells of sunsets on strange horizons, of nameless constellations and spinning compass needles and the forgotten borderlands at the edge of the world. It can’t be entirely coincidental that my mother’s ship smells just like my father’s book.
Well, I suppose it’s not my mother’s ship anymore, is it? She gave it to Bad and me. “It deserves a good last run, I figure,” she’d said, and smiled in a crookedy, sad sort of way. My father’s arm had tightened around her shoulders and the smile had righted itself like a gull pulling up from a dive, soaring sunward.
They’d both looked so young as I sailed away from them.
They’d wanted me to stay, of course, but I couldn’t. Partly—and you’re forbidden from ever telling them this—it’s because standing beside my parents is not dissimilar from standing beside an open blast furnace. When I turn away from them my cheeks feel raw and sunburnt, and my eyes sting as though I’ve been staring directly at the sun.
It’s been like that since the moment my father stepped off his ship. Bad and I were still making our slow, limping way down the stone streets, sweat-sticky in the afternoon heat; my mother was already on the pier, bare feet slap-slap-slapping over the boards, hair running like a pennant behind her. A dark figure stumbled toward her wearing a familiar shapeless coat, his arms upraised and his hands wrapped in rough bandaging. They moved as if drawn together by physical law, like two stars hurtling toward collision—and then my father staggered to a halt.
He was feet away from my mother. He leaned toward her, raised one rag-wrapped hand to hover above the curve of her cheek, but did not touch her.
I’d stopped moving, watching them from a hundred yards away, hissing go-go-go under my breath.
But my father was for some reason resisting the thing that had kept him in desperate motion for seventeen years, that’d dragged him through ten thousand worlds and finally brought him here, standing in the City of Nin in 1911 by my reckoning, or 6938 by his, looking into his true love’s summer-sky eyes. It was as if his own heart had split in two and gone to war against itself.
He curled his hand away from my mother’s face. His head bowed forward and his lips moved. I couldn’t hear the words, but later my mother told me what he said: I left her. I left our daughter behind.
I watched my mother’s spine straighten, her head tilt to one side. Yes, she told him. And if you thought you could come crawling back to me without our baby girl and everything would be all right—son, you got another think coming.
His head fell further, his poor, burnt hands hanging hopeless at his sides.
Then my mother smiled, and I could almost feel the blazing pride of it from where I stood. Luckily for you, she said, our kid took matters into her own hands.
