Dark Doorways (2 page)

The two young men in the armchairs
surprised me. Where they there the entire time? The one turning toward me
revealed his scratches– or
gashes
would be a better word.
Wounds
maybe. Parker saw this as well, recalling how
he
could harm mortals,
recalling that I had guardians to help me fight him off.

The door opened.
The door
,
the door that I remember Mom painting white every other spring.

Parker scampered through it
instinctively, leaving me abandoned and hollowed. Did I actually feel something
for this, this… what? Receding Hair Line or Whatever-his-name-was Parker? This…
wolf?

But that door, always the
door. Mom’s door was never dark. It shouldn’t have been so dark.

“Sarah?” Grace’s quiet voice
had no place in this world. “
Sarah
!”

“Huh?” It took a few moments
for the haze to clear away enough, for me to see that she was waking me,
not
in fact entering the Rioja dream.

“Aren’t you going to class?
Michael just called to see if you’d meet him for coffee first.”

“Michael? Coffee?” I still
saw flashes of a canine-man pleading for my affection.

“Are you okay?”

“Grace, I think I need to
talk to someone.”

***

Tequila and eggnog should
never share the intimacy of the same glass. This I learned the hard way last
Christmas. But coffee and eggnog, that was a different story. Eggnog lattes
with Michael, now
that
was something.

Michael and I met for coffee
at Cup-quakes, not because either of us particularly liked their cupcakes. It
happened to be next door to our building, almost sharing a wall and always
sharing a puke-stained campus sidewalk on Sunday mornings. Not that Michael and
I shared a building. We lived quite separately. But we spent every academic
moment there, in
our building
. Never mind that five years from now there
would be an entirely different crew of graduate students calling it
their
building
. Ellen Hall. Dark and dreary but for the name. I always wondered
who the Ellen was. It was easy to sit through Swanson’s lectures and imagine an
elegant lady: intellectual, fascinating, gorgeous. She was everything I wasn’t.
At least, everything I wasn’t in Michael’s eyes.

“Uhg. The Swanson lecture.
Just think. By this time next year, we’ll be taking our prelims.”

“No more Swanson!” Michael
sipped his coffee like a true academic, a scarf neatly tucked into his wool
coat with
The New Yorker
under his arm.

I probably stared too long,
wishing I was the one in those arms. We sat at the tiny table, that compressed
space where I was far too aware of how close his leg was to mine.

“I broke it off with
Madison.”

“You were dating a Midwestern
college town?”

“Ha ha. I know, you never
liked her.”

“I don’t particularly like
most of the twelve-year-olds you date, no.” My feelings wore through me,
seeping out of my skin like sweat, summer in New Orleans.

“Hey. Not fair. Actually, it
probably
was
the age. She wanted to go clubbing every night. I’m just
not–”

“Twelve?”

“I was going to say
a
partier
.” The light punch on my arm could have been a kiss for all I knew.
Any touch from him was a welcomed one, even as unpracticed as I was at this.

“Did I ever tell you know how
I got my name?”
Change the subject. Don’t look into his eyes.

“No! Tell me!”

“Don’t act so sarcastically
excited.”

“No, really. I wanna know
now.” Michael’s smile had already bewitched me, and his slide two inches closer
only made it that much more painful.

“You know that song,
Que
Será, Será
? You know, ‘
que será, será, whatever will be, will be.’
”

“No. I don’t know it. But
please, keep embarrassing yourself in public.”

“Very funny. Anyway, when my
mom heard that song, she thought they were just saying K. Sarah. You know, like
the letter K and the girl’s name Sarah? Yeah, so, anyway she really liked that
song, and now, technically, my namesake is a future tense verb in Spanish.”

“You really miss her, don’t
you, Será?”

“I… ha, funny. Don’t
pronounce it that way.”

The moment of silence was
enough to feel the tears well up, the same ones I’d been crying for a year.

 “I started missing her
years ago when she first got sick. She wasn’t herself at all that final year.”
My gaze fell on a mom walking with her little girl across the street. The sweet
little blonde ringlets bounced as she jumped over sidewalk cracks, as if the
joy in her popped out of every curl. Not every little girl moves back home to
take care of her sick mom. Not every little girl gives up her first choice grad
school to watch her mother wither away.

“You were a good daughter.
She told me once.”

“What? You talked to my mom?”

“It was when we were walking
to class once, and we stopped by her house for just a minute. You were off in
the kitchen or something. Anyway, she was saying that she was so proud of you
and your accomplishments. She said that you sacrificed a lot for her. That you
were accepted to MIT.”

“Yeah, well.
Que
será,
será.”

“You know that girl out
there?”

My eyes followed Michael’s
out to the street, for once not concerned about how platonically he looked at
me.

“Crap. Again?”

“Again? She stares and points
at you regularly?”

“No. But this little
red-headed boy did it yesterday too.”

“And you’re not creeped out a
little?”

“I’m creeped out a lot!” I
allowed myself to touch him, my hand falling on his forearm. Because I was
scared. Because I needed someone. “Can I tell you something?”

“What? Something more than
creepy kids pointing at you?”

“Michael, have you ever been
through a dark doorway?”

***

My arm wrapped into his like
a pretzel, just as I had imagined so many times, my coat’s brown wool fusing
into his black. This had become our regular promenade, this short jaunt from my
apartment building to campus.

Our morning compotations at
the cupcake shop had metamorphosed into dinners at my small kitchen table,
friendship into something more. So he walked me to class, escorted me like a
gentleman.

And through all of this romantic
sweeping, I never realized that it was New Year’s Eve.

“So shall we go out to a
restaurant? That little pub you like?” Michael’s smile as he talked to me had a
way of distracting me from whatever it was he was saying. I’m pretty sure that
I just smiled back.

It started with my question,
when I began asking him about dark doorways. He was the one person I could
confide in, the one person Mom trusted enough outside of family. But I never
received an answer; his kiss was response enough. And now, now that I got to be
the one on his arm, the issues of dark doorways and little kids pointing at me
mattered very little.

“Come on,
Será
, what
are you thinking? You have that far-off look again.”

“I’m just happy. Can’t I be
content that we’re, you know,
together
?”

“Well, at least this explains
why you hated my previous girlfriends so much.”

“What? Hated? No.
That’s
too strong a word.
Disapproved
maybe.”

“Madison you definitely
disliked.
Strongly
disliked.”

“Because she was twelve,
and–”

“Eighteen.”

“And she blew bubbles with
her gum as she spoke. She was named after a town in Wisconsin. She wore sweat
pants with words across the butt. Plus, you couldn’t have an intelligent
conversation with her. Admit it.”

“I’m not sure what the best
response in here.” Again, his grin captivated me. I could forgive his Madisons
with that sparkle.

We approached our building
and halted, warned to continue with caution.

“It is usually this dark?
Maybe a storm is coming.” Ellen Hall had a particularly bleak shadow cast
across it that morning, one that might have concerned me two weeks ago, before
this bliss.

“We never decided what we’re
doing tonight. We can’t study for prelims
all
night. Or are you afraid
of 2013?”

“Oh, I’m very much a
triskaidekaphile.”

“Is that a word?”

“It is now. A lover of the
number 13. Triskaidekaphile.”

“So, Ms. Triskaidekaphile,
how do you want to bring in the new thirteen?”

“We should do something
exciting, right?”
Last year was the hard one
, I told myself.
You got
through last year without your mom. Have some fun this year.

A pamphlet materialized out
of Michael’s pocket as he held the door open for me. He had always opened doors
for me, even the dark ones. I couldn’t quite remember which dark doorways we
had entered together; this was the first time I noticed Ellen Hall being one of
them.

“Here’s what I have in mind.”
The pamphlet, which held tickets inside, showed a boat floating lazily through
downtown Chicago.

“A cruise?”

“A mini-cruise. More like a
touristy boat tour. But there’s an open bar, and you spend the night, so you
don’t have to drive home afterward. What do you say?”

“Was this planned for
Madison?”

“No, she was too–”

“Too young to drink. Right.”

“This was for you. Only you.”

There was something in
Michael’s eyes, something that I couldn’t quite name. The words were there, the
smile was there, but his eyes... Algid. Lifeless. No, that was unfair.

“I’d love to Michael. Let’s
study for a few hours then go pack.”

Those hazel eyes that looked
at me so platonically just weeks ago now glanced away from me toward the bowels
of Ellen Hall. It was nothing, surely. My hard soles clanked down the marble
floors in perfect rhythm. Like clicks on a typewriter. Why then did Michael’s
make no clamor at all? He stared straight ahead, focused, determined. Yes, that’s
what it was. He was just very focused on his studies.

Mom trusted him, right? He
would never lead me into a dark doorway.

So there I was on New Year’s
Eve, clomping down the halls of the linguistics building, my silent hero next
to me. Ridiculous. That was the word I was thinking. Who, after all, shows up
on campus–
to study
– on New Year’s Eve? People with pain.
People who have lost someone.

The only light in the edifice
came from Swanson’s door, shining down the hallway like the beam of a rescue
boat. Only I wasn’t drowning, not with my quiet companion. “Michael?”

His freakishly silent
footsteps were eluding me as I stood in the glow of Swanson’s office. Somehow I
didn’t feel like pursuing him in the darkness. The light felt too much like
her
.
Like Mom.

The light cut through the
darkness like her voice cutting through decades of memories.

“Sarah! Come in! It’s getting
dark!”

“Can I play just five more
minutes? I promise I’ll put my bike away.”

“Sarah Rose! There won’t be
any light left! Come in now and we’ll read a book together. You get to choose
it.”

Oh Mom.

Her fingernails were pink
that night. It was a translucent shade that made you stare really hard at it to
even tell what color it was, or if it even was a color. Like she was wearing no
polish at all. Like her nails were naturally shiny. That was what I stared at
while she read me some Roald Dahl book. We read them all, and so I have no idea
which one it was that night. I only remember the fantastical dreams I would
have until dawn.

But I never realized how
shrouded in light my memory of that night was. The entire house was aglow, from
Mom’s lace doilies to the cheap carpet that never came clean. Soft light from
some unknown source landed on Mom’s face as she read to me about flying
children, or whatever the story was that night. At least that is how I
remembered it as I stood just inches from Swanson’s door.

“Sarah?”

I must have been shocked out
of my reverie, hearing Swanson mumble something about not meaning to startle
me. An angel stared back at me from behind his legs, an ethereal being with
light falling around her just like… just like Mom.

“Sorry, Dr. Swanson. I was
just coming in to study for prelims a little. I didn’t mean to linger in front
of your office. You haven’t seen Michael, have you?”

“No, not at all. Though I
would be surprised to see him keep up with you.”