A Thousand Doors

by J. T. Ellison

  ————

  We’re in the car when the phone rings. Martin is driving me home after lunch, his hand tapping to a beat on the radio. The windows are down, the air in the car is warm. My chest feels tight with happiness. The happiness that feels fleeting, I know it’s fleeting, and I’m thinking about the temporary nature of it even before I see his face.

  “It’s hospice,” he says before he picks it up with a deep hello. He’s quiet for a moment and I can hear the tinny echo of a voice on the other end, though I can’t make out the words.

  He hangs up and without looking at me, says, “I have to go.”

  It’s the call we’ve been waiting for. The one that would make or break us. The one, maybe, that would be the end to this fleeting, crazy, stupid idea we’d had. Or the beginning, who knew? I close my eyes for a second, reach out. Tap his hand twice, feeling the bones beneath my fingertips, large knuckles, capable hands, veins.

  “I’ll go, too,” I say, unsure of what he wants. He turns to look at me briefly, his face unreadable, then eyes back to the road. He nods and steers the car into a cul-de-sac to turn around.

  ————

  The waiting room is cold, the air conditioner blasting. I’ve read two People magazines and an Enquirer. A story about aliens and Oprah. Martin has gone in to talk to the doctors, come out to check if I’m okay, and gone back in again. After an hour, Trevor and Inga tumble out of the elevator. Trevor follows his dad into the locked corridor. Inga and I wait, making mild small talk, but my answers are short and clipped. My heart is a steady drumbeat in my chest. My head aches and I pop an ibuprofen, swallowing it dry.

  I wonder if I’m meant to be here. It feels both intrusive and necessary. Could I just leave? I imagine scribbling a note. Sending a text. The doors at the end of the hallway swing open and shut with a continuous parade of visitors. I could easily join the stream. I don’t. I imagine that if it were Pen or Paige here, would Martin leave? No. It’s hardly an apt comparison.

  Eventually, Martin comes through the double doors, looking a decade older. Trevor trails behind him, childlike, his expression lost.

  My phone dings, and I look at the display. It says “Paige,” and the time is 7:10 p.m. I don’t know where the afternoon has gone, as I’ve sat here, heart in my throat, knowing my life is about to be upended again. If, in fact, it had been ever righted, even for a few months.

  A text comes through.

  Are you here?

  It takes me a minute (why is Paige at hospice?), then:

  No. Russo’s. Paige. Just the two of us.

  Shit.

  Martin stops in front of me. I hold my breath.

  “She’s awake.”

  Two words, an absolute explosion of emotion. I cannot cry. Trevor has a mother. Martin has a wife again.

  But. She gets to live and he doesn’t.

  Life is infinitely complicated. She, who drifted across the yellow line in a sleepy haze, pushing Linc’s car into a ravine. She, Martin’s wife.

  Mom?

  Another text. I look from Martin, his face pained and aching. I want to throw my arms around his neck, comfort him, cry in his neck for both his gain and my probable, eventual, loss. For the first time, I want to slam my hands into his chest. Why didn’t he stop her from drinking? The thought is quick, subconscious. It’s the first time I’ve ever blamed him. With a jolt, I realize that I’d been pretending she died, too. I hadn’t thought about her, the accident. I hadn’t let myself wonder what would happen if she woke up. I had assumed that she would die. The doctors had said it was likely.

  “I have to go,” I tell Martin. He looks startled. I show him the phone. “Paige. I promised her dinner. I forgot.” I gesture helplessly to the doors behind him.

  “We can get through this,” he says. He wants to say it changes nothing, but it’s not true. It’s become an impossible situation.

  “You have so much more to deal with,” I tell him. “Don’t worry about me, okay?” I hug him and he holds me. I let him go when my phone rings again.

  Mom, I hope you’re coming. I want you to be happy. You deserve everything, I’m sorry I’ve been such a shit. I don’t know what we would do without you. Please?

  I think for a moment he’s going to tell me he loves me, but it passes.

  On my phone, I type back:

  On my way. Hold a table for us. I love you, too.

  I look at Martin and think, I love you, too.

  What

  Is

  All Her Lives

  J.T. Ellison

  The angel’s voice is silent and yet I can hear it clearly, as if bells are ringing in my head.

  “Here. And here. And here.”

  It points from life to life, allowing me to see myself in different guises, as different people, all me, all not…me. There I am, with a child. There I am, all alone. There, desperate. There, happy, in a way.

  The angel points to my lives, and they run across the darkness as if they are movies on a screen being shown to strangers. Is that really me, standing in the Tuileries? She looks like me. She seems happy. But she is shadowed by something. A regret, maybe. A loss. I can see it surrounding her, though she is oblivious.

  The view switches, again and again. Life after life.

  “Go slower,” I demand, but the images go faster, blurring, making me dizzy.

  The exciting, the banal, the strange, the scary. The loves and losses.

  None of my lives are right. None are perfect. None are free of pain. No matter what choice I made, they all lead to the same place—some level of dissatisfaction. They all lead me back to me.

  “This is a strange dream,” I say. “I want to wake up, now.”

  “You do?” The angel, the being, whatever it is, seems…inquisitive. “You say you want to wake. This feels like a dream. But perhaps it’s truth. Perhaps you have lived all of these lives. Perhaps you haven’t. However you wish to see it. But I have a question for you, Mia. A very important question.”

  The spinning images stop. The darkness returns. There is a sliver of light now, far, far away. It shimmers, and I feel drawn to it. “Yes?”

  “Now that you know how it all would have worked out, every thought, every wish, every change, every decision—Mia, would you do it all again?”

  “I—

  It cuts me off. “Think carefully, Mia. Your answer is very important. Knowing your life will lead to this moment, that at 8:03 p.m. this evening, right now, you will die by your husband’s hand, will you accept your life as you’ve lived it? Or will you take one of the other paths? Live a different life?”

  This feels all wrong. A decision of this magnitude…

  “Am I the one who has to choose? Can someone choose for me?”

  The angel shakes its head. “Have you learned nothing? You, and you alone, can choose. Your choices make you who you are.”

  The images begin again, slower this time. I stare at the various lives I’ve been living. At the choices that led me to them. And then back to myself, me, lying on the gurney, a man with sandy hair standing over me, screaming something at the woman next to him. A nurse, I think.

  I am broken. Dead. The life-support machines are keeping me alive. This sandy-haired man is keeping me alive.

  For what?

  I recognize myself, lying alone in the hospital. Flawed. Unhappy. Always wishing for more, for different, for something…else.

  But it’s me. I don’t know how to be anyone else.

  Sorrow fills me. I could have done so many things. Should have done so many things.

  But now I know what I have to do.

  “I don’t want any other life than mine,” I say. “Even if it’s my time to go, I want the life I’ve led.”

  The angel looks…luminous, suddenly, as if I’ve pleased it somehow.

  “As you wis
h, Mia.”

  ————

  Happiness.

  What is it, really? How do you know if you’re happy? So many things make me feel the emotion: The blue sky of an October day. The feeling of sand beneath my toes, waves crashing nearby. The silence of a beautiful museum, the energy of a bookstore, the freedom of an airplane flight. A kiss.

  When I died, I hadn’t been happy in a very long time. I made some bad decisions. I let some opportunities pass me by. I let myself live in a bad marriage because it was too hard to leave it. I was consumed with regret. Consumed with anger. Obsessed with the thoughts of what could have been.

  I’ve seen my lives now. I’ve seen the threads pulled. I’ve seen all the decisions I made differently lead to different places. The paths I chose, the paths I didn’t choose.

  Some paths brought me joy. Some brought me pain. Some brought me too close to the abyss. The abyss I now stand in front of, alone, watching them work on my body.

  And now I have made my final choice.

  It is time. I take my final breath.

  Then I fall back into myself as if I’ve done a swan dive from the highest point of the room, and hit my body, hard.

  ————

  There are flashes.

  My body, jostled. Pain, so intense and swift I want to cry out, but no sound comes from my mouth, only a scream from deep inside, waxing and waning as I struggle to catch my breath. I can’t breathe. I am drowning.

  The doctor’s voice, so loud, so harsh.

  “Charging. Hit her again. Who did this to you, sweetheart? Did you recognize him?”

  The light is so bright, so intense, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I hurt. I hurt so badly. I can feel every ounce of electricity shooting through my body. It burns. I realize I can feel again. I put up a hand to stop them, and there is cheering.

  “She’s back, she’s back.”

  I open my eyes.

  How

  It

  Ends

  Mia. Just, Mia

  J.T. Ellison

  It has been a year since I died. A year of ups and down, of grueling recovery, painful therapy and setbacks. A year of changes.

  Roger is in jail, festering like the bastard he is. He was worried an embezzlement charge was going to ruin him. I wonder what he thought was going to happen once an attempted first-degree murder conviction placed him squarely on death row.

  I testified against him, in both trials: the embezzlement, and my attempted murder. It gave me such great satisfaction to see him wasted and worn, gray from being indoors all the time, the shackles around his legs and wrists. If there was ever a man who deserved what was surely to come from his future, it was Roger. Good. Riddance.

  I’ve bought a new house. I couldn’t possibly go on living in the cottage where I died. My new place is sunny and comfortable. I no longer have glass French doors, but there is a bright, sun-lit studio, and I’ve spent my recovery downtime painting again. The settlement with Roger’s company means I’ll never have to work again, though I probably will. I’ve written this story, and there are more brewing in my head. Like my paints and canvases and the smell of linseed oil, the words feel natural, and flow out of me without reproach from my inner critic anymore.

  I even have a boyfriend. I’ve been dating the doctor who saved my life. Silly, right? Total Hallmark Channel, I know. But we had some sort of weird connection after what we’d been through together, and when I was finally discharged from the hospital, and from his care, he called me and asked to have coffee.

  One thing led to another. As it does.

  His name is Ben. He’s quiet, and funny, and well-read, and devastatingly handsome. He’s taking me to Paris next week. He wants kids. He likes to cook, and thinks I should try to sell my paintings.

  He accepts me for me. He has never asked for more than I can give. Has never raised a hand, or his voice. He has an easy smile.

  I might even love him. He is easy to love.

  I will never understand exactly what happened in the moments I was dead. Was it an out-of-body experience? Was I truly visited by some sort of angel? I don’t know, and I don’t care. Because while I died, I saw so many things. Some were memories, clearly. Some were fantasies. But others, others were a part of me, little bits that fell away from a decision made here and there that truly did take me on another path through my life. The ripples, the currents, that moved me into position after position, life after life.

  I understand one thing, though. If I’d chosen another life, one that I coveted, I most certainly would have died.

  I lived because I decided, once and for all, to be me, even if that meant my life was over.

  I was given the best gift ever. By allowing myself to die, I was finally able to accept myself, just as I am. And live.

  I’m Mia Jensen. I’m forty-one years old. And I am finally alive.

  A Note from the Editor

  I am so humbled to see Mia finally come to life.

  You see, I’ve been playing with this idea since 2010, the concept of a dissatisfied woman dying at the opening of a story, and as she dies, she gets to live her “what if” lives. I know I have a few lives I could have lived if I’d made a different choice here or there. I’m sure you do as well. I pitched it to my agent as Sliding Doors meets The Lovely Bones, but I never got around to writing it. There was a reason for that.

  I never knew how to make it work. How to make Mia’s lives—Mia’s voice—different enough to allow her to live a series of completely unique, encapsulated lives.

  So I decided to ask some incredibly talented authors to help. And help they did.

  A Thousand Doors is one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever had the pleasure to work on. My authors knocked it out of the park with the lives they chose to portray. I read every story with my heart in my throat and tears in my eyes, seeing my Mia come to life over and over again.

  I owe them all a debt of gratitude, especially Ariel Lawhon and Laura Benedict, who helped with the shaping of this work, on the front end, and the back, and especially the middle, supporting me while the writing and building and editing and adjusting went on (and on), Kim Killion, who brought the story to life with her fabulous design work, and Phyllis DeBlanche, for her keen editorial eye. And as always, my husband, Randy, who encouraged and listened and helped me dream.

  If you’ve enjoyed the stories you’ve just read, I encourage you to pick up the contributors’ novels. They are all incredible writers, and their books will transport you.

  Thank you for journeying through Mia’s lives with us.

  —J.T. Ellison

  Contributors

  Kimberly Belle is the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of four novels: The Last Breath, The Ones We Trust, The Marriage Lie, and Three Days Missing. Her third novel, The Marriage Lie, was a semifinalist in the 2017 Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Mystery & Thriller and has been translated into a dozen languages. A graduate of Agnes Scott College, Kimberly worked in marketing and nonprofit fundraising before turning to writing fiction. She divides her time between Atlanta and Amsterdam.

  www.kimberlybellebooks.com

  Laura Benedict is the Edgar- and ITW Thriller Award- nominated author of eight novels of mystery and suspense, including The Stranger Inside (February 2019). Her Bliss House gothic trilogy includes The Abandoned Heart, Charlotte’s Story (Booklist starred review), and Bliss House. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and in numerous anthologies.

  www.laurabenedict.com

  A.F. Brady is a NYS Licensed Mental Health Counselor born and raised in Manhattan, currently living in New York with her husband, children and dog. Her first novel The Blind (Park Row Books) was published in September 2017. In addition to writing, A.F. currently works as a psychotherapist in her own private practice where she treat individuals and
couples. She also runs a professional organizing and design business, based in the idea that mental health is affected by our home environments. She has been working in the field of mental health since she was eighteen. She has worked in the psychiatric units of private hospitals, public mental health agencies, day treatment programs and private practices. She primarily works with adults suffering from major mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.), and addictions to drugs and/or alcohol. Her next novel Once A Liar (Park Row Books) is coming out in early 2019.

  www.afbrady.com

  Paige Crutcher is a writer, reader, yogi, journalist, and story wrangler. She’s written for a variety of literary publications, including Publishers Weekly, where she worked as the Southern Correspondent and contributing editor. She’s currently co-owner of the online marketing company cSocially Media. Paige lives in her hometown of Franklin, Tennessee with her husband, son, tiny chihuahua, and a houseful of books.

  www.paigecrutcher.com

  Rebecca Drake’s latest book, Just Between Us, was recently released by St. Martin’s Press. O, The Oprah Magazine, chose it as a “compulsively readable thriller” and Publisher’s Weekly and the Associated Press lauded it as “tense, bombshell laden and action-packed” and “twisty and compelling…a terrific read.” Rebecca’s last novel, Only Ever You, was chosen by Barnes & Noble as a top thriller of the month. Library Journal gave it a starred review, calling it a “gripping domestic thriller.” She’s also the author of Don’t Be Afraid, The Next Killing, and The Dead Place, as well as “Loaded,” which appeared in the anthology Pittsburg Noir. Rebecca is a Penn State grad and an instructor in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her husband, two children, a tiny dog, and a feisty cat. Rebecca loves to talk with readers.