by Jodi McIsaac
“But why isn’t he here?” Eden sniffed.
Cedar took a deep breath to steady her voice. “I don’t know, to be honest. I wish I did. He went away before he knew I was pregnant. He didn’t leave because of you, Eden. That’s really important for you to understand. I know it’s hard, but he probably doesn’t even know about you. He left before I could tell him. When you came along, I tried to find him. But I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
Eden pulled away, her face twisted. “It’s not fair!” Cedar tried to hug her again, but she yanked herself free and stormed down the hall. Cedar stood and watched her disappear around the corner. She’d give her a few minutes of alone time, and then go talk to her again. She listened for the inevitable slamming of Eden’s door. It didn’t come. Instead, Eden’s screams died off as suddenly as if she had run out of air. The apartment fell silent, a sharp contrast to the storm of six-year-old anger that had been raging only moments before.
“Eden?” Cedar called out. Nothing. “Eden?” she tried again, starting to walk down the hall.
“Mummy? Mummy!” came Eden’s voice.
Cedar quickly rounded the corner and saw Eden standing in the hallway outside her bedroom, staring open-mouthed through the gaping doorway. There was some sort of light reflecting on her face. It glimmered and shifted and created strange shapes and lines on her skin, casting her in an otherworldly glow. A slight breeze was lifting the edges of her sundress, brushing it against her legs. A small trail of fine sand crept through the doorway and was starting to collect around her feet.
“What is it, Eden?” Cedar asked as she moved to stand beside her daughter. Then her jaw dropped. “What the…?”
The two of them stood in shocked silence, looking into the room. The air in the open doorway was sparkling with a thousand points of light, like the surface of a pond catching the mid-afternoon sun. Strangely, the sight reminded Cedar of looking through the windows in her old apartment. She and Finn had covered them with clear plastic to help keep the cold out. They could still see what was on the other side, but through a film. In this case, the film glittered and moved. Even more remarkable than the way the air had changed in the doorway was what was on the other side.
“Pyramids?” Cedar whispered. No longer could she see Eden’s room, with its pink walls and bright, flowered bedspread. Instead, she was looking at the unmistakable form of two giant pyramids. The sky around them was black, but they were lit by huge spotlights and were glowing like fallen stars embedded in the desert. Cedar glanced at her bare feet, where she could feel the breeze swirling around her ankles. She slowly bent, picked up a few grains of white sand and rolled them between her fingers. Eden reached over and took hold of her hand.
Cedar tore her eyes away from the spectacle in front of them and asked the first question that came to mind. “Can you see them too?”
Eden nodded.
“What did you do?” Cedar asked.
“I didn’t do anything! It was just like this when I opened the door!” Eden said, still holding onto Cedar’s hand. “It’s like magic! Is our house magic?”
“No,” answered Cedar automatically, thinking of what Finn had said about magic. You just need to open your mind a wee bit more. “I mean, of course not. That’s impossible. There’s got to be some logical explanation.” But even as she said it, she felt something shift deep inside her, like the tectonic plates of reality were being realigned.
Still, she considered the options. She was pretty sure she was awake, but she grabbed a fold of skin on her arm and gave it a hard pinch. Ouch. Maybe they were sharing some sort of collective hallucination. Maybe they both had a brain tumor. Or maybe there was some sort of toxic gas in the air that was causing them to see this. But the sand felt real, and a few grains were still stuck to her fingers.
“I’m going to close the door,” Cedar said.
“What if it goes away?” Eden protested. She let go of Cedar’s hand and stretched her arms across the door as if to guard it.
“Yes, well, let’s just see what happens,” Cedar said.
She reached out a hand toward the doorknob, but in order to take hold of it she would have to move her arm through that glittering…whatever it was. She pulled her hand back. “Did you touch this?”
“I went through it. Just, like, one step,” Eden said. “But I came right back out.”
“I think we should test it,” Cedar said. “I want to see what happens.”
Looking around, she spotted Eden’s favorite stuffed animal lying on the floor of the hallway and picked it up.
“Is Baby Bunny very brave?” she asked. Eden nodded, eyes wide. Cedar gently lobbed Baby Bunny through the shimmering doorway. The pink and brown rabbit landed in the sand on the other side, raising a small poof of dust in the air. Cedar leaned forward as far as she dared and peered at the rabbit. “She looks all right, just the same as usual,” she said. She took a deep breath and slowly stretched her hand through the air and toward the doorknob. She expected to feel something, a tingling sensation maybe, but there was nothing. It was like passing through ordinary empty air, except that the air on the other side felt slightly warmer. She grabbed hold of the doorknob and quickly swung the door toward her.
The click of the latch echoed in the hallway as she and Eden stared at the closed door. There was still a small mound of sand on the carpet, and Eden bent down and poked her fingers into it. Then she stretched out on her stomach to look under the door.
“I think it’s still there,” she said.
Cedar opened the door a crack before pushing it more forcefully. The same eerie scene met their eyes: Egyptian pyramids surrounded by an inky black sky. It was undeniably there.
“Why Egypt?” Cedar whispered.
“I like Egypt. I watched a show about the pyramids with Gran. Can I go in?” Eden asked.
“No!” Cedar said. “It’s not safe! It’s not…normal. We have to get your bedroom back. Maybe if I go through, I can figure out a way to fix this from the inside.” She gave Eden a stern look. “You stay here; I’m going to get a rope or something to hang on to, okay?” Eden nodded. Cedar ran down the hall and started rummaging through her closet. After a minute she came back, armed with a bike lock, two of Eden’s toy dog leashes, and a skipping rope.
Eden was nowhere to be seen.
“Eden?” Cedar dropped her makeshift ropes, her heart pounding. “Eden!” she screamed. Through the shimmering veil she could see Eden standing ankle-deep in the sand, looking around with wonder. “Eden! Get back here right now!” Cedar yelled. Eden was smiling and waving at her, but she didn’t seem to hear her. Cedar swore and stepped through the doorway after her daughter.
CHAPTER TWO
It was incredible. The air was only slightly warmer than it had been in the apartment, but the way it smelled, the way it felt on her skin and tasted in her mouth, these were all different. The sand was cool beneath her feet. She was standing about half a mile from the base of one of the pyramids. The other loomed even farther in the distance, and a massive pile of rubble lay a few hundred yards to her left. There was a fringe of trees, or maybe buildings, in the distance, silhouetted by yellow streetlights. Cedar had never been to Egypt, but she had seen her share of National Geographic magazines, and this looked like the real thing. Other than the two of them, there was no one nearby. It was so quiet Cedar felt as if they had walked in on something private, some secret vigil the pyramids were having with the night sky.
“What are you doing?” she said in a hushed voice to Eden, who had picked up Baby Bunny and was brushing the sand off her. “I told you to stay put! We have no idea what’s going on!”
Eden looked slightly abashed. “I just wanted to get Baby Bunny. It seemed okay when I stepped in the first time, so I figured it would be safe.”
“You thought this would be safe?” Cedar waved her hands around them, feeling slightly hysterical. She breathed out slowly. “It’s okay,” she told Eden, who was looking at her with worried eyes. “I�
��m just a little freaked out.” She took her daughter’s hand, holding it more tightly than necessary, then turned and looked behind them.
The bedroom door stood open in the sand. The same shimmering, luminescent air danced in the doorframe. Cedar walked around to the other side of the door. Behind it was more sand. It was as if someone had stood a freestanding door, complete with a frame, in the middle of the desert. Cedar went back around to the front side. She was tempted to close the door from this side to see what would happen, but stopped herself. What if it disappeared? What if they became trapped in Egypt or wherever this place was? She panicked slightly at that thought. “We’re going to go back now,” she told Eden.
“Nooo!” Eden moaned. “I want to stay here!”
Cedar stepped through the doorway and into the hallway, pulling Eden with her. The familiar air of the apartment hit her in the face, and she shivered.
“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Eden whispered, turning around and staring back through the door of what used to be her bedroom at their footprints in the sand.
Cedar blinked a few times, and then said, “I have no idea what to do.” She closed and opened the door again, but Eden’s bedroom did not reappear. The pyramids were still there.
“Let me try!” Eden said, and before Cedar could stop her, she reached through the shimmering air and pulled the door closed. When she opened it again, the pyramids were gone, and they were greeted with the familiar sight of pink walls and a fluffy speckled carpet.
Cedar stared at her daughter. Something inside her shifted again.
Eden scowled at the interior of her room as she entered it. She sat down on the edge of her frilly bed, then got up and crossed the room back out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. “What are you doing?” asked Cedar, who was still standing in the hallway. Eden stood staring at the door, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Then she opened it. Cedar gaped.
“Eden!” she said. She looked at her daughter as if she had sprouted wings or turned into a frog, both possibilities as likely as what she was now seeing through the doorway. Instead of white sand or girlish decor, she was looking at a small rustic cottage and the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean behind it. Cedar recognized it immediately as the cabin on Cape Breton Island that Maeve had rented for two weeks last summer. Eden had spent the whole time there, but Cedar had only been able to join them for less than a week because of work. The sky around the cabin was the deepening blue of early evening, just as it was outside the windows of their apartment.
The look on Eden’s face was one of sheer delight. “This is so cool! Mum, look!” she said.
“Yeah, I can see,” Cedar said, dumbfounded. “How are you doing this?”
Eden shrugged. “I dunno.” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “My hands feel kind of tingly.”
Cedar’s mind was still whirling and churning, searching for an explanation. Eden, however, wasn’t nearly as concerned with finding an explanation as she was with discovering more about this newfound ability of hers. She gave her mother a grin and said, “Wheee!” before bounding through the open door onto the lawn of the cottage.
“Eden!” Cedar shouted, and then ran through after her. Immediately her senses were assailed—the cool ocean breeze on her face, the intoxicating smell of the salt air, the sight of the ocean stretching out in front of her and, when she turned and looked behind her, the gentle mountains of the Cape Breton coast. Eden was doing cartwheels on the lawn, squealing with joy.
“Shh!” Cedar said, looking around frantically. “There are probably people living here right now! Come here!”
Eden finished a cartwheel and ran over to Cedar, who was standing just in front of the disembodied doorway. “What if someone sees us? How are we going to explain this?” she asked, gesturing at the door. “We need to get out of here.”
Eden reluctantly followed her back through the door. Again, Cedar tried closing it, but when she opened it, the cottage was still there. Then Eden closed and reopened it, and her bedroom reappeared. They sat down on the bed together. Cedar put her arm around Eden. “Eden, this isn’t normal. How do you feel?”
Eden sprung off the bed. “Great!” Her eyes grew wide and sparkled almost as much as the air through which they had traveled. “I’m magic!”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Cedar said weakly.
Eden ignored her. “Let’s try your room!” she said as she dashed down the hall. Cedar felt as if she should stop her, but in all honesty, she, too, wanted to see what would happen. So she followed her daughter, who had closed Cedar’s bedroom door and was standing outside it, face screwed up tight.
“You’re sure you feel okay?” Cedar asked, her voice anxious. “You don’t feel sick or anything?”
“Nope!” Eden answered.
“Okay,” Cedar said slowly. “Where to this time?”
“Gran’s house!” Eden replied.
“No!” Cedar said quickly. “We don’t want Gran to know about this. I mean, we don’t want to freak her out, okay? Let’s pick a place where there probably won’t be a lot of people.” She searched her brain for a suitable location. “How about the library? It should be closed by now.”
Eden rolled her eyes at her mother, but then closed them in concentration and reached for the doorknob. A second later, the stacks of the local library were dimly visible through the open door. They stepped inside and Eden started to move toward one of the shelves, when the ear-piercing wail of an alarm went off, causing both of them to jump and scream.
“Dammit! The alarm!” Cedar said as she grabbed Eden by the arm and they hurled themselves both back through the doorway. Eden slammed the door shut. They stood there for a moment, hearts racing, and then Eden burst into giggles. Cedar pressed her hand against her heart, but then a grin cracked her face and soon both of them had collapsed on the floor, laughing.
“Note to self,” Cedar said. “Don’t go to places that have alarms.” Eden giggled again.
Cedar shook her head at her daughter. “This is insane.”
They spent the next hour opening doors all over the house to see where Eden could take them. They took the scenic calendar of Atlantic Canada off the wall in the kitchen and flipped through the pages for inspiration. They went to Green Gables on Prince Edward Island, the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, and a remote lighthouse in Newfoundland. They never stayed for longer than a moment, but with each new foray, the reality of what was happening sank in a little deeper.
The only hiccup occurred when Eden wanted to try creating a doorway to a place she’d never seen before, not even in pictures. Cedar suggested Stanley Park in Vancouver, where she had spent many glorious afternoons during university. She tried to describe it to Eden, but when Eden swung open the bathroom door, nothing happened. Cedar grabbed a pencil and paper and made a quick sketch of her favorite beach in the park. She drew the huge driftwood logs spread across the sand, the sailboats and freighters dotting the distant horizon, and even a few tiny sea stars clinging to the rocks. She couldn’t help but smile as she drew—it had been a long time since she had created something other than a client’s new logo. She showed the sketch to Eden, who examined it closely. But when she tried to take them there, it still didn’t work.
“Huh. Well, it’s just a sketch, and not a very good one. Maybe it doesn’t work if you haven’t been there?” Cedar said, squinting at the door. “But you haven’t been to Egypt or Newfoundland either…”
Eden wasn’t listening. She was looking at her fingers and pulling on each one as if she could activate the magic that way. Then she said in a voice so low Cedar could hardly hear her, “Was my dad magic too?”
Cedar felt as if the room had grown several times larger. She felt very, very small. She sat on the floor and pulled Eden onto her lap. “I don’t know, Eden. I don’t know why you can do this. Your father used to talk about magic sometimes, but I thought it was only talk. Now, I just don’t know. Maybe. W
e’ll find out what’s going on, okay? You and me, together. We’ll figure it out.” Cedar wrapped her arms tightly around her daughter and buried her hands in the wavy brown hair that reminded her so much of the man she had loved.
I wish you were here, she thought. I wish you could see her, and know her, and help me take care of her.
As if Eden could read her thoughts, she suddenly lifted her head from Cedar’s shoulder and said, “I know! We can find him! We can go anywhere! We can start right now!”
Cedar’s eyes widened in alarm. “No, Eden! You can’t go opening these portals or whatever they are all over the place to look for him, especially when I’m not with you. You could get lost or hurt or trapped somewhere. Remember when we were at the mall and you couldn’t find me? Do you remember how scared you were? This would be a thousand times worse. I wouldn’t know where you were, where to go looking for you.”
Eden started to pout. Cedar put her hands on either side of Eden’s face and looked directly into the mutinous golden eyes. “I know you are very excited right now, but you have to listen to me. This is very important. If people find out what you can do, I can’t even imagine what will happen to you. They might take you away; they might do experiments on you, like Hannah said—not because you don’t have a dad, but because you can do this. I don’t know what would happen, but it would be bad. You can’t tell anyone what you can do until we figure out what’s going on. Not even Gran, not your friends, no one.” Cedar’s mind was reeling with all the things that could go wrong. She didn’t want to scare her daughter, but she didn’t know how else to protect her. She couldn’t be with Eden all the time. In fact, she was hardly with Eden at all. “We’ll figure this out, I promise. But don’t go anywhere unless I’m with you.”
Several hours later, Cedar sat on the sofa nursing a Manhattan and staring at the screen of her laptop in frustration. The Internet was, for once, failing her. She had tried a number of searches, but subtle search terms such as “children with special abilities” led her to teachers’ resources or websites about autism. More direct attempts like “warp zone” or “opening a portal” led her to sites about Super Mario, World of Warcraft, or lists of sci-fi/fantasy tropes. She found some unhelpful information about spiritual portals on a few astrology sites, and came to the conclusion that far too many charities used the phrase “opening doors” as their slogan.
