Dark Doorways Read online

  Dark Doorways

  by Kristin Dillman Jones

  Text copyright © 2014 Kristin D. Jones

  All rights reserved

  For all our departed loved ones

  Never enter a dark doorway.

  Mom’s superstitions rang through me, her voice still as clear as the last time I had hugged her. I had stood under many door frames in my life, and this one should have been no different. I should have walked right through, like a normal person.

  But what did she mean by doorway? The door itself? The frame?

  If I breathed in deeply enough, I could smell cinnamon coming from somewhere, the cinnamon she always added to our cardamom tea. Cinnamon with a touch of bitter arguing. Even the arguing I missed.

  So there I stood for a solid five minutes, staring blankly at Eliza’s door, unable to distinguish dark from light.

  “Sarah?” came Eliza’s voice from inside.

  “Uh, Eli?”

  “I didn’t hear the doorbell!” Eliza responded with a confusing glance at both me and the doorway.

  I neglected to tell her that I never rang it, that I had been standing and staring at her door for far too long. That I had no idea why I was there in the first place.

  “Oh, where are my manners? Come in!” Eliza popped the screen door open, her left arm waving me into her home.

  Just do it, I told myself. Right foot forward, then left.

  As my eyes uncomfortably scanned the door frame just inside the screen door, I reminded myself that doors are adiaphorous, neither good nor evil. Plenty of people have dark doors, right? Didn’t my freshman year dorm room have a dark carmine door? Okay, the color of dried blood wasn’t such a great example. Would Mom have considered Eliza’s a dark doorway?

  It wasn’t until after Eliza waved her too-skinny arm in a few more times that I finally put my right foot forward, and it was then that I noticed the dark shadows dancing along the open door. Where could those shadows be coming from? What was their light source? Crap. I never should have come here.

  But as I hesitated in pulling my left foot in behind the right, Eliza grabbed my arm, pulling me into the dark doorway. The same shadows flashed subtly across her eyes.

  “Come on, Sarah. You’ll let the cold in.”

  It was only once I was pulled inside that I could see Eli’s house for what it was, that dark cave where one might expect to find a curmudgeonly old woman in her wedding dress, calling for Pip while plotting Estella’s treachery. Fully expecting to find decaying wedding cake on Eli’s dust-filled tablecloth, I scanned the room for any other hazardous materials, perhaps a dead cat or a jar of chemicals that might eat away at my flesh.

  But my imagination was getting the best of me. Of course none of that was there. It was simply Eli’s living room, a room filled with dusty, antique furniture, a hint of mildew in place of potpourri. She offered me tea and biscuits, which I found were actually biscuits. Perhaps she had never heard the British use of that term.

  What an odd feeling as an adult, to be disappointed by biscuits when you were expecting cookies. I was a child again, hoping for a sugary treat.

  Her hands shook slightly as she handed the saucer to me. “Sugar or milk?”

  “Uh, no. I’m good.”

  It occurred to me that the room shouldn’t have been as dark as it was, that for a room with four windows, there should be more light. What kind of tea was this anyway? It smelled vaguely familiar, but not like any tea I’d ever tasted. Of course I couldn’t rely on sight, since the liquid just looked like a dark puddle in the room’s lighting.

  It was the smell that bothered me. Mom always made the perfect tea, never giving away her secret, though I knew it was cardamom. But this, this mysterious beverage that sat in my lap, I could not place. It might have been a more traditional Chinese tea, maybe an oolong. But this was different, not quite the dirty gym sock scent of an oolong. Something, maybe a rare herb, made me hesitate.

  “Eli?”

  “Yeah?” she called from the kitchen.

  I pondered shouting back or waiting for her return, just as she appeared in the doorway, more biscuits in hand.

  “So what’s in this tea? Is it your own mix?” As I looked up to meet Eli’s eyes, the sinister hint of a glare was just disappearing. But it had to be just my imagination. I knew Eli. She was that sweet girl from the cupcake shop. She was… she was what? Did I really know much more about her? Did she even invite me over at the cupcake shop?

  As Eli took a couple steps toward me, with a strange glow in her eyes that contrasted eerily with the darkness of the room, I couldn’t help feeling trapped.

  The door. Get to the door.

  “Eli, I–” I was sprinting through her front yard and across the street. Glancing back once I felt a safe distance away, I noticed a chill of terror ran through me.

  Where was her house?

  Not only was Eliza’s house not there, but in its place was a playground. Three soccer moms laughed, one tossing her hair back as another thumbed through a text message. Each child ran through the play equipment as if nothing was different, as if they had been there playing the entire time. The little redhead boy tugged on his mommy’s shirt, pleading for a snack, and in getting no response as she laughed with her friend, he turned to me.

  Two brown eyes met mine. Our glances locked on each other for what could only have been a second. His small, innocent finger rose toward me in slow motion, or perhaps it is my memory of the day that occurs in slow motion. Standing and pointing at me, he simply mouthed to me: I know it’s you.

  ***

  Maple Avenue never changed; like Uncle Mel’s ear hair, it was the same year after year. No amount of trimming or landscaping changed the general appearance.

  So my walk home from Eli’s house– or what I thought was her house– involved careful attention to each detail. Yes, O’Toole’s was still there, still pumping out the Guinness like there was no tomorrow. Each child holding a parent’s hand still pulled harder when they neared the ice cream shop. The old oak where I first fell off my bike still stood behind it. Yes, this was still my Maple Avenue where odd little houses don’t just disappear.

  Then there was Mom’s old house, Mr. What’s-his-name’s new house. Something Parker. Receding Hair Line Parker. That was it. Why didn’t his mom think of that name? Perhaps I lingered too long, stared too hard, as Mom’s memory flooded over me. The smell of her cardamom tea. The lace curtains that hung for years in the front windows. The gentle kiss goodnight. Oh Mom.

  Then there he was, Receding Hair Line Parker, glaring out of my mother’s windows as if he never knew me, glaring at me for caring about Mom’s old house.

  Oh Mom.

  My feet found their rhythm again, carrying me back to my tiny apartment. It was the same rhythm of every other person in every other town, always getting somewhere, never just being, but going.

  The funny thing about apartments is that you never really care about anything outside your own door. The paint on the building’s exterior peeled terribly. The front doorbell only sporadically worked. The stairs would probably collapse one of these times. But none of it mattered as long as my roommate had her dishes washed.

  The first thought I had as I turned my key was Eli’s dark doorway. As I surveyed my own, looking for shadows, I wondered, again, what I was doing. What a cryptic thing to remember Mom saying, Never enter a dark doorway.

  “This one’s safe, Mom.”

  Grace must have been out, since her techno music was silent for the moment. Grace the slob. Grace that had no grace. I shouldn’t say that. Grace found her civilized moments whenever her parents visited from South Korea. She mustered the strength to clean the entire apartment and wash her dishes for an entire week. I made a mental
note to ask when they would be visiting again. Maybe that could be my passive-aggressive way of asking her to clean. Such were the games we played.

  Digging through Grace’s trash to find my phone was maybe the low part of my day. Every day. I could be looking up Eli’s number. I could be choking and needing to call 911, I thought bitterly as I tossed aside her pizza box. Resolved not to go downstairs and ask Frat Boy to call my number so I could at least hear it ring, I decided to try the kitchen one more time. Sure enough, under a pop tart wrapper sat my poor phone, protected only by its cheap hard case. Grace. Sweet, lazy Grace.

  Eli. Eliza. What was her last name? Hamm. Hammond. Yes, Hammond.

  I scrolled quickly through the H section, but no Hammond. No Eliza’s in the E section. No new numbers under Recents. Oh my stars! Another thing Mom used to say.

  So maybe it was true. Maybe I had invented the whole thing in my mind. Maple Avenue had always had a playground in the 500 block, a playground that I thought was a house belonging to Eliza Hammond. Sure. The weird little house with the dark doorway couldn’t possibly be there, right?

  Michael. He would know.

  He was listed in my favorites, for easy dialing. He was an emergency contact. There had to be something, I told myself, some reason to justify his presence in five different lists. I certainly couldn’t admit to myself that I wanted him to stop dating the stick-thin undergrads I normally saw him with. So he would notice me. Frumpy me.

  “Michael! It’s Sarah.”

  “Sarah! What’s up?”

  “Uh, you were at the cupcake shop yesterday right? Right before Swanson’s class?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, why?”

  “Do you remember seeing me talking to someone, a lady, my age, kind of short?”

  “Oh, Rebecca?”

  “Eliza?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s her name. Eliza. What was it you called her… Eli? Why are you asking?” Sounds of someone else talking in the background crushed me. Another date.

  “I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “Well, we already knew that.”

  “I won’t keep you. You sound busy. I just wanted to see if you remembered her being there.” I paused to consider my next step. “Oh, and Michael–”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember Eli inviting me over for tea?”

  “Oh, yeah. That was weird, right? I mean, kind of like a little old lady that sits around drinking tea.” His laugh made me weak in the knees, that strong voice of his being vulnerable for just a few seconds.

  Then came the girl in the background again. I could imagine it, her tiny fingers clutching his arm possessively. He’s mine, her thick layer of makeup would scream at me. I would be acerbic and she would just be sexy. Sexy always wins.

  “Yeah, it was weird. Anyway, I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t take these interactions, these chaste exchanges where I was just another friend. It was always Sarah, you’re too funny or Sarah, we need to find you a nice guy. He could even make a bottle of Malbec platonic.

  But he had a point. It hadn’t occurred to me that Eli’s invitation was odd from the beginning. What young adult invites people over for tea? On doilies, nonetheless.

  If Michael remembered Eliza inviting me over, then it happened. It really happened. I entered her dark doorway and stared into her disgusting tea. So why then did I see a playground? Why did that little gremlin– okay he was a little cute– point at me and mouth that he knows it’s me?

  ***

  You always dream differently after Rioja. It’s a strange combination of a Stephanie Meyer story and a Chagall painting, and you wake up like you’re in a cloud.

  That would have been a helpful piece of advice for Mom to have shared. Instead, I’m left with the fleeting memories I have, the ones I grasp onto tightly even as I watch them disintegrating.

  That night, beating myself up after talking with Michael, pummeling my liver with glasses of Rioja, I fell asleep thinking about Eliza’s doorway. I dreamt of the cherished house that Receding Hair Line Parker kept under surveillance. Mom’s house. I was relaxing in the living room, as I usually did, but there he sat, curled up in a corner like a stray mongrel. Or was he actually a dog? Dream logic has such a tenuous connection to reality, like when you’re not sure if you were talking to a dog or a man.

  Parker couldn’t quite jump up on my lap, though whether it was due to illness or age was unclear. The cheek whiskers and pointed snout were perfectly normal features to stare at in a conversation.

  “I miss you. Let me touch you.”

  “You have claws now. Don’t you remember?” The words did little to deter Parker, even as I slid farther away from him on Mom’s old beige couch.

  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 n
ame?” 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?”