A Thousand Doors

by J. T. Ellison

  Mia Jensen. Who never looked back. Ever.

  Until, perhaps, today.

  Of all days.

  “Excuse me,” I tell the reporter abruptly, and she startles, her spare pen dropping from behind her ear. “Do forgive me a moment while I make a phone call I should have made a few moments ago, just as you arrived.”

  I do not wait for the response, sweet and deferential, that she has no choice but to make. I do like this about my life—about the Mia that is not the one Scott Sandlin remembers: People respond to me sweetly regardless of what they are feeling.

  I step outside the patio gates, the cliffs dropping a hundred feet down to the sea. It may be partly the vertigo making me queasy, but also the man I am having to call, and the message he will have to relay.

  I brace myself for the sound of his voice. And there it is.

  “Hello, Mia. I’m so sorry. That I had to call.”

  “I’m so sorry. That you had to take this on.”

  The sorrys are words we never said to each other back then, when it might have mattered.

  But it’s easier now, because the sorrys aren’t about us anymore.

  His voice is deeper than it was at eighteen, but the same gentle stir, the consonants always soft as a mountain breeze. As he speaks, I close my eyes and can see the Blue Ridge, their peaks tipped in white, the tumble of the waterfalls, the smell of the sun on pine and rhododendron. But then we are past the uneasy, whispered hellos. And what he has to say is a right hook to my gut.

  That’s right, four.

  No, she might not have told you exactly the truth, for fear you would worry.

  They say we are looking at hours, days at best. Your mother says to stay there and no argument. It’s the night of your life. There might not be another one like it.

  Still, I thought you’d want to know.

  I hope I thank him before we hang up, but I’m not sure.

  I’m aware of the waves slamming themselves into rock just below. And that my body’s gone numb.

  A few feet away on the path that winds past Las Brisas at the edge of the cliffs, a child whines. But it is several moments before I’m aware the child is saying my name. “But I made it for her! You said that was Mia right there, and I made it for her. Pleeease let me give it.”

  I try to pretend not to hear. But the girl is inching into my line of sight, her mother gripping one hand to keep her back from the cliffs.

  Still, I plan to ignore her and am turning away—but am stopped by the brown curls. A head full of them. The girl must be no older than five, with ruddy cheeks.

  The child holds something up for me to see, but I am staring, immobile, unable to lift my arm to hers.

  We’d have had a child that looked something like that, Scott and I, I hear myself think.

  And I hate myself for it—because Mia Jensen never looks back.

  God, I am coming undone.

  “Good morning, sugar,” I manage at last.

  The girl’s eyes saucer with joy and the mother wraps both arms around her just like my mother held me when I was especially happy or especially sad.

  My mother, who raised a daughter all by herself. Who fell into bed every night facedown on her pillow, immobilized by exhaustion. But who always managed a gentle word for her daughter and held me close when the world was scary and messy and mean.

  Tears are welling behind my sunglasses now, and the audience can’t be allowed to see that. I turn abruptly away on the heel of one sandal.

  “Mia, for you!” cries the child and breaks from her mother’s arms to block my path. She thrusts out an arm to present…a Coke bottle, it looks like. Covered in aluminum foil. At its top, she has included a tennis ball for a head and covered it over in foil, as well.

  “It’s—” her mother offers.

  But I understand before she can say it, and I am quick to lean down to the child. “An Oscar. Oh my heavens, how perfect!”

  And those watching—a small crowd has gathered nearby on the path—will assume my tears now are my being so touched. They wouldn’t know that Mia Jensen has lost her composure and forgotten her script.

  “I am so grateful,” I say to the girl. “Thank you.” I give her a hug, hurry away, and from a safe distance, wave.

  “Good luck tonight!” somebody calls.

  “I love your work!” someone else shouts from down the path.

  I want your life, I know they are thinking. Perhaps even the child’s mother. I want to be you.

  Because they would assume I am a woman without any regrets.

  I lift a hand to the reporter to assure her I’m returning now to our table. She has drained her second Chardonnay.

  Do you have any regrets, she asked me—with no idea what she was asking.

  But Mia Jensen has always known where she was going and never looked back.

  “Are you sure?” my mother wanted to know as we sat by the lake the morning I left. “Are you certain this is the life that you want—not just the job, getting to act, but the whole different life that will come with it out there? Are you sure?”

  She knew the answer.

  But perhaps a mother is obligated to ask.

  “I’ll send you back money when I make it big, Momma. I’ll send you back lots.”

  How grown-up I thought I was at the time to say that. How magnanimous.

  Grace had thrown her head back and laughed. “Have you really known me your whole life and still could think I ever want money from anyone, including you, my gifted Mia? What would I buy? A flannel shirt? A pair of jeans I paid good money for so that some underpaid child factory worker could slice holes through the knees, rather than working them in myself the real way?”

  I would send checks home, all right. Every one of them cheerfully snipped into paper dolls.

  Still laughing that day, Grace reached to stroke my cheek. But then her face fell and saddened. “What about Scott, my girl?”

  I bristled, of course. And jerked away. “You lived your whole life without a man.”

  Grace was silent. Then she glanced up, eyes twinkling. “There was the small detail of—”

  “Right, okay, of my existence. Of the sex—is that what you want me to have to say in front of my mom?—the sex that got me here in the first place. Fine. But you’ve lived most of your life without the help of a man—or anyone else. And done a hell of a good job of it.”

  Grace’s hand came back to my cheek. “You get that fierce independence from me, I suppose. And it can be a gift, Mia, I’ll say that.” Then Grace had bitten her lower lip. “But know this: Feeling like you can do anything and everything all on your own, that can also be a bit of a curse, if you let it.”

  Feeling like you can do anything and everything all on your own…

  “And your mother, the one who helped make the costumes for the school play,” the reporter is saying as I slide back into my seat. She is lifting her glass of wine and blinking as she finds it empty. She motions to our waitress for another. “Your mother still lives in the little town where you grew up?”

  Lives.

  How should I define lives for this reporter, who has no idea what she’s stumbled into with that one little word?

  Lives? Not for very much longer, I am tempted to say, with all the bitterness swelling inside like a tide.

  Take that, tipsy little reporter. See if you can keep the little that’s left of your composure.

  With effort—and years of practice, I steady my voice. “My mother lives in the very same house that I grew up in, yes. Nothing fancy, but cozy. Next door to the very same family that lived there when I was growing up. The Sandlins. That is, the son lives in the house now. He was…a close friend.”

  The reporter’s pen slows on her pad, her eyes lifting to me. She suspects there is something more here in these words I tacked on
. And she is right.

  Another point, then, for the tipsy reporter.

  “A…close friend?”

  “A good guy.” I grip my phone so hard I can almost feel the words of the text cutting into my flesh. “A really good guy.”

  I wish I were contacting you for a happier reason…

  “The kind of guy who has apparently checked on my mother regularly while she’s been sick.”

  “Oh.” The reporter blinks again. Her frozen smile says she was hoping we weren’t headed for something sad or heavy. She is unarmed for this.

  I shake my head. “Of all the men I’ve dated here over the past twenty years…”

  She nods eagerly, hoping for a detail or two. She has read of my romances, I see.

  “Of all those, I can’t think of a single one who’d have done that. Checked every day on a neighbor who’s sick. I’m sure of it. Not one.” I lay a hand over her pad. “Although, better not to publish that part.” I am not being kind so much as recalling what these men could tell reporters of me in return.

  Dutifully, she scratches through something she’d just scrawled and looks up. “I’m sorry to hear your mother’s sick.”

  “Breast cancer. Stage four, it turns out.”

  She sucks in air through gathered lips.

  “Yeah. Exactly. That number four was not shared with me. Until today.”

  Although I never took the time to call the doctor myself. Because I trusted what was told to me.

  And because—let’s be honest—because I had other things on my mind.

  “Oh. My. Mia. With the awards ceremony and all, I mean. And your clearly needing to be here for that. What bad timing for you.”

  “It’s a whole lot worse timing for her.” The words come out harshly, which I can see in the reporter’s drawing back, the melting of her frozen smile.

  “Of course. Mia, I didn’t mean to imply… And today of all days!”

  I want to shake the girl till her frizzy brown bob falls out of her head and her tortoiseshell glasses tumble into her wine.

  Which isn’t quite fair, I realize. It isn’t this poor little reporter on her third glass of wine that I am so angry at.

  “She told me not to come home,” I hear myself say. “She made me promise that if she ever someday took a turn for the worse—even more of the worse—that I wouldn’t come home. Not if it conflicted with…with anything even remotely important, she said.”

  “She knew? About tonight? That the Oscars were coming up?” The reporter seems to be processing this slowly.

  “Of course. She was out here to visit not long ago…”

  Out here to visit, as always, because I never went back there. Too busy. And maybe too many things there that might feel like regrets if I had to see them again.

  Or see him again.

  “She was back here to visit, and she was doing okay.”

  “Or she told you she was,” the reporter muses—more to her wine than me, I realize.

  Still, I give her a hard stare.

  “That is… I didn’t mean—”

  “No. Of course not. A writer never means to imply.” I hear the defensiveness in my voice, and I can see a director shaking his head: Mia, your character is experiencing grief. You should be playing this scene as sad, not angry.

  But grief can be funny that way, I am learning—spinning one emotion around blindfolded until it comes staggering out a side exit, changed. I shake my head at the reporter. “But you might be right. It may have just been what she told me. And what the neighbor, Scott—”

  “Your friend,” she interjects with a smirk that is probably the result of glass number three, and also of watching too many chick flicks where nobody leaves town and stays gone. And where nobody dies.

  “What Scott assured me because, no doubt, that’s what she told him. And what I wanted to believe. But she walked all over the Paramount lot—and if she ever so much as winced, I didn’t see it. Even when she said she wouldn’t fly out for…” I stare out at the sea. “For tonight.”

  “For the Oscars. For your first nomination. And your win. Which, you know, you could accept in her honor, right?”

  I give a single nod. I have no energy to add a more humble if I win.

  I hear myself explaining—voice rising, needing this scene of mine to persuade the audience, to evoke sympathy for the character’s choices—how I came to be here, sitting at a Las Brisas table overlooking an ocean on the other side of the country from a dying mother I genuinely care for and an old friend that, yes, I also once loved. I gesture to my yellow BMW convertible just a few yards and one valet tip away from driving to Pasadena. I am explaining how from there, my other home, I will dress for the evening—even though I am grief-gutted now—because it was what my mother insisted I do if it came to this, a decision.

  “She made me promise,” I say. “Just in case, she insisted. Though she would be fine. And then she wanted to see the dress I’d had made.”

  The dress. The one I’d dreamed of since I watched Casablanca for the first time at age seven and knew this was what I would do with my life. Like Ilsa’s plane rising up through the fog, there would be no stopping me.

  The reporter lurches forward, her eagerness enhanced by glass number three. “Do tell me about the dress. I’ll see it tonight, of course, but the readers would looove the details.”

  The readers of the New York Times don’t give a damn about the details of my dress, I know full well. But I tell her because she’s young and she wants to know and the dress is an easier thing to conjure up in my head than my mother’s face nearing death, or Scott’s as he called to tell me.

  “Giorgio Armani designed it for me.” I give her what she’s wanting so my mind can wander elsewhere while I speak. “It’s black—did I say that? The color is black.” I chose it long before I knew I’d be in mourning. “It’s basically a shimmering set of slits and plunges.”

  “That will require some care when easing into your limo.” She is gushing again, and I cringe. “When you’re driven to the Dolby Theatre to stroll down the red carpet you’ve been waiting your whole life to walk!” The reporter bends low over her pad and squints at what she is writing—the letters have to be blurring by now.

  “My mother said she’d love to come out for the Oscars, but that she was just a little bit tired from work—too tired to fly. Made me promise again I wouldn’t miss going. No matter what. She even said—but her voice was so strong, cheery even, it just seemed like just something random she wanted to say—she reminded me what a nice time we’d had in L.A. when she’d come, how we’d already said our good-byes in the best way, when we were both laughing and feeling fine.”

  The reporter lifts her glass, but this time only holds it and sets it back down. “But now… Today…”

  “On this day of all days…” I fix my gaze back on the sea. “She’s…” I do not deliver the word aloud. Because that would make it too real. I try again. “When Scott—”

  “The name of the very dear friend,” the reporter supplies. And I see the question behind her words.

  But I ignore what she doesn’t ask. “When I talked to him on the phone just a few moments ago, he said Grace was still insisting adamantly, for all to hear, that I not come home—on today of all days.”

  The reporter lifts her glass in a kind of toast. “How nice, how really nice you can be there tonight, then—guilt-free. For the crowning achievement of a brilliant career. What would it be to miss that, after all?”

  I stare at her lifted glass. Her toast to my brilliant career. To all I’ve achieved.

  And my stomach twists in on itself.

  The marimba of my iPhone just now makes me drop the cell—I’d been gripping it like some sort of lifeline. The screen of the phone, which lands faceup, says it is only my agent calling.

  I stare stupidly at m
y cell as it rings a second and third time. To the diners around us, not even pretending now not to watch, I must look like I’ve forgotten how to answer a phone.

  “It’s my agent,” I tell the circle of curious faces. “Checking how the interview went. And how I’m feeling about tonight.” They’ve made themselves part of this drama, so why not include them now?

  It rings a fourth and a fifth time, but I only watch it vibrate its way across the table.

  Now I am on my feet and slinging the strap of my purse over my shoulder. “Forgive me.” I address the circle of faces and the tipsy little reporter. “But I need to go.”

  With a swipe of one finger and no greeting, I ask my agent at the other end of the phone, “How much to charter a plane?”

  Silence from the other end of the cell. And from the circle of baffled faces.

  Only the reporter responds. “Of course. Wait. What?” Sloshing wine down her blouse, she totters up to her feet.

  “You asked about regrets a moment ago. Thank you for that. Because whatever of those I’ve had before, or not, I don’t intend to add more.”

  Whipping a handful of twenties from my wallet, I present them and the aluminum Oscar to our waitress, who is standing, wide-eyed. “Thank you for your good work. And please know that it is, in fact, good. I’m sorry I have to rush off.”

  Nodding knowingly, the waitress beams. “You don’t want to be late for tonight.”

  “No,” I agree, calling back over my shoulder. “No, I do not.”

  The Suicide

  A.F. Brady

  It hurts. I’m not going to say it doesn’t hurt and pretend like I’m tough. It hurts, but less than everything else. That’s the whole point. Once this is done, none of the other things will matter anymore. This is the last hurt.

  I’m sitting on the bathroom floor. The tile is cold and hard and it’s making the bones in my butt sore. I’m listening to Nirvana. I always listen to Nirvana, but I’m listening even more now because Kurt offed himself, and if he can do it then I can, too. Everything else just sounds like noise to me. The lights in here are incredibly bright, so I turned them off and brought in some candles and the lava lamp I bought at Urban Outfitters last year. The orange globs seem to flow with the beat of the music. I have to have mood lighting if I’m going to do this or else it just feels like surgery. I don’t really want to see it, either. I’ve never had a stomach for blood.