A Thousand Doors

by J. T. Ellison

  I smile. “You’re going to ruin her for all men, you know that, right? No one else will ever be good enough.”

  He flashes me a grin. “That’s the goal. Make it so she never wants to leave.”

  “No, that’s not the goal. The goal is to raise three human beings who are happier, healthier, and more emotionally mature than their mother.”

  Sam laughs, then freezes. His smile sticks to his face. “What did you just say?”

  “I said that’s not the goal. I said that our kids are supposed to be better than us.”

  He shakes his head. That’s not the answer he was looking for, of course it wasn’t. He slams the truck door and stalks across the yard, pulling me to my feet with one smooth tug. “Three?”

  I nod. Sam would love nothing more than to fill this old house with kids. Looks like he’s going to get his wish.

  “Since when?” His arm encircles my back, and I catch a whiff of shampoo and coffee.

  “Since seven weeks, five days.” I shrug. “Give or take.”

  Somewhere behind him, Ford starts to cry, and Hartley soothes him with promises of pancakes with extra blueberries I don’t have time to whip up, what with fish coming and school waiting and all of us hopelessly late. But my husband bends me over an arm and kisses me like we’ve got all day.

  ————

  It’s well past nine by the time I swing my battered 4Runner into the Peachtree Academy lot. Hartley leans forward in her booster seat, craning her neck to see out the window, her little shoulders falling at the empty asphalt. The carpool line is long gone, the teachers already disappeared inside.

  “We’re late, Mommy. Again.” Hartley is my clock keeper, mostly because I never keep an eye on the clock. She wriggles out of her seat belt and springs onto the floor of the back seat, reaching for her backpack. “Ooh, Miss Sally is going to be so mad.”

  Miss Sally is just going to have to chill, I think, but I hold my tongue. We’re only a few minutes late, and besides, Hartley is four. What’s she going to miss—calculus?

  I unhook my phone from the charger and drop it in my bag. “Unbuckle your brother,” I say while my daughter whines for me to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.

  I open the door and she flies out, her little feet churning up the grass. I unhook Ford from his car seat and lift him out of the car. ”Don’t forget his backpack,” Hartley screams over her shoulder, and I reach back in for his bag. I was totally going to forget his backpack.

  Peachtree Academy is a one-story stone-and-stucco building squatting in the middle of a pristine lawn, a place that is exactly as pretentious as its name. Crimson gables. Stained-glass windows. Shrubs that are always in bloom. At four grand per child, it’s more than Sam and I can afford, but his parents foot the bill. I fought them on it for a while—despite its scholarly ambitions, this place is just a glorified day care—but I’m no match for Sam’s father, a hotshot criminal attorney. It wasn’t long before his sweet-talking wore me down.

  The hallway is quiet when we push through the door, only Miss Kristen behind the receptionist’s desk, the preschool version of a bouncer. “Hartley just flew by here,” she says, pointing down the hallway toward her classroom. “I already signed y’all in.”

  I smile my gratitude. “You’re a star, thanks. I owe you one.” Actually, I owe a lot more than one. We’re late at least once a week, and unlike Miss Sally, Kristen has never given me shit for it.

  I head down the hallway as somewhere in the bottom of my bag, my cell phone tinkles out a melody I try to ignore. By now Ford is wrapped around me like a monkey, a precursor to the meltdown that’s coming. Some days he scuttles happily out of the car without looking back, others it’s a screaming shit show. I never know which it will be until I pull up to the school.

  “You’re going to have so much fun today,” I say, trying to peel a sticky arm from around my neck. “And it’s a gorgeous day. I bet you’ll spend lots of it on the playground.”

  But the closer we get to his classroom, the harder he clings, and the tighter his fists grab onto my T-shirt. His teacher spots us through the window in the door, and she drops what she’s doing to peel him off me. His screams almost drown out the sound of my cell phone, starting up again.

  The first flicker of worry crawls across my skin. Nobody calls twice in a row if there’s not something wrong. Sam, I think, or maybe one of his parents. My heart gives a heavy thud.

  Ford lurches in his teacher’s arms, screaming and reaching for me, and I blow him a kiss and shut the door. Most kids calm down after a minute or two, but not Ford. He’s got his daddy’s stubborn streak, and his tantrums can last all day.

  And through this one, my phone rings and rings.

  I fumble through my bag, swiping to pick up even though I don’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

  “Hello, beautiful.”

  The air around me shimmers, growing thin and light, making me dizzy with memories of another time, another place. A sprawling terra-cotta-tiled house high on a hill. A gallery in the shadow of Sedona’s red rocks. A man smiling at me from behind an easel.

  “Who’s this?” I say, even though I know exactly who it is. There’s only one man who’s ever greeted me that way.

  I stumble back until my back hits a solid surface, slide down it onto the floor. On the other side of the wall, Ford wails.

  “How did you get this number?” My voice sounds strange, strangled and faint.

  The last time I saw him was in a courtroom, after I’d placed my hand on a Bible and told a truth that would send him away for seven years. My pulse races hard enough I wonder if I’m having a panic attack.

  “I have my ways. Hey, listen, I just walked through the door of this little dive in Atlanta where they make the best café de olla. Like the ones we had in Tulum, remember?”

  Oh, I remember. We each drank three, and then we didn’t sleep for days. Then again, that might have been the cocaine. Tyler isn’t the only person I left seven states in my rearview mirror; I buried the old me there, too.

  “I’ll save us a table.”

  His words, what he’s asking of me, snap me out of my stupor. Atlanta is more than a hundred miles away, a two-and-a-half-hour drive at this time of day. There’s no way I’d make it back in time for carpool.

  I shake my head. “No, Tyler. No. I—I can’t just leave. I…”

  “You, what, have a family now? A husband?” Tyler laughs, but the sound is harsh, mean. When he speaks again, he’s no longer smiling. “Does he know about us?”

  I don’t answer. I can’t. Dread, like warm bile, bubbles up my throat.

  Sam knows about my difficult past. He knows there are some things I won’t talk about, some subjects we skirt around like an invisible grenade. What he doesn’t know is that one of those subjects is Tyler, or that his hand painted the piece above our living room sofa, a three-by-four-foot watercolor of me. One I rolled up and stashed in an air vent until after the trial, like contraband.

  “Check your texts, Mia. I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

  ————

  I push through the door of the east Atlanta coffeehouse, a bright space with exposed brick walls hung with colorful folk paintings, in a neighborhood on the grungy side of transition. I do a quick scan—hipsters tapping away on laptops, a cluster of overly chatty women in workout gear, a tattooed and pierced barista, but no Tyler. My heart kicks, but it doesn’t settle.

  The last time I saw him, in handcuffs and flanked by two armed guards, I could barely breathe around the guilt. I’d spent most of the trial staring at the floor, the table, my hands because I didn’t dare look at him. But the one time I did, after the verdict came down on the wrong side of guilty and the guards were dragging him out of the courtroom, he didn’t look angry at all. He looked like he always did, confident and unruffled, and when his gaze caught mine, he winked. Righ
t before the metal door clanged shut on him for seven long years, Tyler winked. I’ve spent the past seven years wondering what he meant by it.

  I order a decaf latte at the counter and carry it to a table by the window, my gaze roaming the sidewalk outside, my head filled with memories of Tyler.

  Tyler and I met when we were still teenagers, though neither of us felt all that young at the time. The foster system will do that to a kid, age them in ways their undeveloped brains can’t wrap around until much later, but the point is, we’d both had the worst life could throw us and came out the other side, broken but still breathing. He walked into the diner where I was busing tables, and the whole place stopped to take him in. Tanned skin, blond hair streaked with sunshine. A surfer boy from the West Coast, plopped in dusty Phoenix. I watched him across the busy space, and I couldn’t look away.

  “Hello, beautiful,” he said—his first words to me. I was half in love with him already.

  Our jobs at the diner were a tedious but necessary way to pay the rent until his paintings sold, giant canvases that took up most of our shoebox of an apartment. Between shifts at the restaurant, we hauled them back and forth to galleries in his convertible Beetle, a temperamental old thing with a cracked dash and bald tires. I was his favorite subject, his muse, his lover. When Tyler’s paint stroked the lines of my body, I never felt more gorgeous.

  It was his idea to open the gallery in Sedona, first to sell his work and later to sell the work of others. Somewhere along the way, he’d fallen in love with Mexican folk art, and the thrill he got from discovering new, up-and-coming artists showed in our bank account. We hung paintings of famed artists on our walls, and we sold them for prices that once upon a time we could have lived on for a decade. Only later did I learn most of what we were selling was fake; I was wearing handcuffs at the time.

  Fear and pain, shock and shame. Even now, all these years later, they feel like the same emotions in my head, all jumbled up with the taste of tears and jailhouse coffee.

  I’m checking the time on my cell when I hear it, a whistle coming from the back of the store like birdsong. I look around, my gaze skirting the windows and the ceiling, but there’s no bird, no indication anyone else has even noticed the sound pushing up through the music and whirring of the bean grinder. For a second, I wonder if I imagined it.

  And then I hear it again. A trilling whistle, a call that demands a response. The wind catches the tune, and I stand up and follow it into a hall that runs the length of the store. At the end, a door stands open, and sunlight lights up the alleyway outside, the graffitied walls too colorful and too bright, like an overexposed photo.

  I step outside and there he is. Tyler, seated on the bottom step of a rusty fire escape. His face just a bit thinner, blond hair just a bit wilder, blue eyes just a bit brighter, more open.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” he says and the years peel away. I’m twenty-six again, Tyler twenty-seven.

  Frozen in that moment when everything changed.

  ————

  He stands, and I fight the urge to run.

  “Thanks for coming,” he says, almost conversationally.

  I take a step back, clocking the distance between us. Six feet, maybe more. Nowhere near enough. “It’s not like you gave me much choice.”

  “Just like you didn’t give me a choice when you testified against me.”

  His words spark an electrical storm in my chest, one that’s been brewing for seven long years. “I told the truth, remember? You were the guilty one, not me. I had no idea what you’d been doing behind my back. We were a team, and you screwed me just as much as you screwed all those people who bought your fake paintings.”

  The truth is, I’ve spent a good part of those years nursing my own kind of guilt. That I should have asked how we could afford all that priceless artwork. That I should have known they were fakes. The questions have kept me awake for years, pulsing hot behind my eyelids while Sam snored beside me. I never asked, I didn’t know, and my guilt almost destroyed me.

  But unlike me, Tyler doesn’t seem the least bit worked up. He leans against the alley wall and shrugs. “I’m not going to lie to you, Mia. I was all kinds of pissed for the first year, maybe two. Okay, fine—five. But even when I was at my angriest, when I wished you were there so I could wring your neck, I never hated you. Not even a little bit.” He says it quietly, purposefully, like he’d been practicing the words in his head for days.

  “Well, I hated you,” I say, which makes him laugh. My lie is that transparent. “I hated you for putting me in that position. Where I had to choose.”

  Tyler or freedom. That was the choice given to me. I was barely twenty-six, my whole life ahead of me. In the end, I chose freedom.

  “You did what you had to do. I get it. I would have done the same.” He smiles, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  He shrugs. “If nothing else, seven years in a six-by-eight-foot cell gives you perspective.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, don’t know what to do with Tyler’s honesty. We’ve never had this moment, never officially fought it out after the police stormed the gallery, but seven years’ time doesn’t change anything. He still lied to me. He still broke my heart.

  He pushes a hank of hair back with a hand, and that’s when I see it—dark stains along the beds of his nails, a flash of color the soap missed—and my heart, that fickle bitch, leaps. “Are you painting again?”

  Tyler’s work should have been the pieces lining the walls in the gallery, not those artists he plucked from obscurity. We should have been bringing in five figures for his pieces, not theirs.

  He looks down at his hands like he’s noticing the paint for the first time. “I’m playing around with encaustics.” He shoves his hands in his pockets.

  This is the dangerous part, me and Tyler out here all alone in a deserted alleyway, talking about his art. It doesn’t matter that I’m married and pregnant with another man’s child, or that I live miles from here and he’s fresh from prison. I want to see those encaustics in the same way I want to breathe.

  He moves closer, and this time I don’t step back. Images flash in my head: Tyler’s smile across the crowded restaurant. The first time his lips met mine. Me naked on our ratty couch, one arm thrown above my head. Him, tossing the brush over his shoulder, that look on his face as he stalked across the room. My brain slows, and the entire world contracts to the life we could have had, the children we could have made, if only he hadn’t ruined it.

  “Mia?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, my skin tingling. If he kisses me now, God help me, I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to stop him.

  “I want it back,” he says, and the world comes crashing back. The hum of tires on asphalt, of people talking in the café, a salamander skittering up the painted alleyway wall. I search Tyler’s face, study the lines fanning out from the corners of his narrowed eyes, trying to decide if he’s saying what I think he is.

  “The painting,” he says. “I want it back.”

  ————

  “What did you just say?”

  I know what he said. I heard every word. Tyler wants the painting back, the one he gave me, the only thing I have left of him and me. I plant a palm in his chest and shove. “I…I can’t believe you’re even asking me that.”

  “Come on, Mia. Stop making this so difficult. That’s my signature on the bottom.”

  “You gave it to me! You told me to keep it safe! And maybe you don’t know what I had to do to keep it from my attorney and yours, but I committed perjury for that thing.”

  “I told you to take it, yes, but I didn’t mean for you to keep it, keep it. I just wanted you to hold on to it until I could come back.” He spreads his arms and winks, a spitting image of the last time I saw him, minus the armed guards. “I
’m back.”

  “Too bad. I’m not giving it to you.”

  It’s not only for sentimental reasons that I’m pushing back. There are too many lies swirling around the piece already—I barely remember the artist, some guy who paid me twenty bucks. I can’t read the signature. Taylor Something. If the painting were to suddenly disappear, how would I explain the empty spot on the wall?

  “You never answered me before. Does your husband know about us? Does he know the woman he married?”

  I don’t answer. How many times did I try to tell Sam the truth? A million, at least. But we fell in love so fast, our relationship going from zero to Mach in a matter of days. Every time I tried, the words piled up on my tongue until suddenly, I was in too deep, and telling him became impossible.

  It’s true that I’ve kept Sam in the dark about that part of my past, but he knows other, more important things. That I love him. That I will never leave. I think these things, and yet the doubts still niggle.

  “So…what, your silence for the painting? Is that why you brought me all the way here?”

  He lifts a shoulder. “Seems like a fair trade.”

  “If I give it to you, how do I know you’ll leave me alone?”

  “I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

  And this is when I know giving Tyler the painting will not be the end. I don’t trust him to leave me alone, not even a little bit. Tyler will be back. Tomorrow or next month or ten years from now, but he’ll be back. I’ll never be free.

  “Is this some sick kind of revenge? Because this isn’t just my life you’re messing with. This is Sam’s, too. My children’s.”

  Another shrug. “Not my fault your marriage is as fake as those Frida Kahlos we used to pass off as—”

  “You. You used to pass them off as authentic, not me. I didn’t know.”

  “Stop fucking around and give me back the painting!” His shout is so sudden, so fierce that the silence that follows rings in my ears.

  My skin prickles with understanding. The wink was a message. A sign I didn’t understand until now. This isn’t just any painting.