“So can I walk with you?”
It never occurred to me that bringing an uninvited guest to Swanson’s house might be rude. We just walked. We stomped through the Evanston snow, which sparkled just a few blocks from Chicago snow, and we said nothing. I was being escorted.
When 506 E. Elm came into view, I gasped. It was the house. It was Mom’s dream house, the one she always stopped in front of while holding her hand over her heart. There was the widow’s walk, where she wanted to watch the moon rise, the chimney she would have cleaned by a professional, the window planters where she would hang greenery at Christmas. The warmth of the front light spilled over the front door. Mom’s door.
“I’m not going in.” Michael frowned at the place in disgust.
“What are you going to do then? Walk back?”
“Yep. Well, happy New Year I guess.”
My response was lost in the wintery frost as he spun around, heading back through the same footsteps we had just created. Maybe a good girlfriend would have followed him, comforted him as something was troubling him. But I was a better daughter than girlfriend. I owed it to Mom to go inside her dream house.
Taking the steps up the curved sidewalk, I imagined Mom being pleased. My punch of the doorbell could have been her proudest moment as a mother. Any other mother would boast that her daughter was in a doctoral program, about to be on fellowship. But Mom, dear Mom, would have written to the relatives that I was invited into 506 E. Elm.
Swanson answered with that unclear expression, the one where you never know if you’re disappointing him or if he’s just distracted. The scent of spiced tea warmed my numb muscles. Yes, numb is what I felt. Even in Mom’s dream house.
“Come in! Gabriella will be so glad to see you.”
“Thanks for inviting me.”
He awkwardly took my coat, the way you would expect a divorcé-cum-bachelor to do. I stood in his entryway, staring like a tourist. The hardwood floors. The little table where Mom would have put a small vase with lilacs. The bay window. Oh Mom.
I followed Swanson into a living room, the exact image I expected to find: aging academics discussing their research, a couple graduate students trying to promote themselves, and enough alcohol to make it all endurable.
“So Gabriella is here?”
“Oh yes, she wanted you to see her room. Up the stairs, first one on the left.”
The spiral staircase was just what Mom had always imagined. “I bet the staircase bends or curls around in there. You can tell with the big bay window that they wanted to leave extra space for that living room. That’s where I’d put the tree.” Sure enough, it was where Swanson had his Christmas tree.
“Gabriella?” I tapped lightly on the door, only to find her fast asleep on her little toddler bed. Just when I thought she couldn’t look more angelic, her sweet expression lost in a dream caught my breath. Could beds even be made that small? It was Goldilocks, sleeping in Baby Bear’s bed.
I tiptoed away and headed back down the stairs. No one ever thinks to arrive early to New Year’s parties to see the kids. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, to have missed Gabriella, but even more dejected realizing that I would have to make drab conversation with these other guests.
Swanson looked up at me from his glass of dark red wine. Dark like blood.
“Gabriella was already asleep. I guess I should have come sooner.”
“Oh she’ll be so disappointed. Say, what will you have to drink?”
“The tea would be great.”
I followed Swanson into his kitchen and realized the tea was her tea. “My mom made this same tea. Cardamom and cinnamon, right?”
“Yes! Good nose! You’d be good at a wine tasting!” His words dissipated into the air, evaporated as my tears formed.
It was too much. Mom’s dream house. Mom’s tea. Michael’s weird exit.
“You miss her. What was her name?”
“My mom?” I wiped a tear away, glad I didn’t wear any mascara that night. “Katherine.” My teeth sunk into my lips, as if that would prevent more tears. Saying her name shouldn’t be so hard, not after all these months. “She lived just on the other side of campus.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She loved this neighborhood.” She lusted after your house.
“I almost forgot. Gabi wanted to tell you that she and I just installed a new front light. She was very concerned that you wouldn’t come in if the doorway was dark.”
***
It was not the buzz of a new text that woke me that New Year’s morning, but the ubiquitous sunlight, that warmth that permeated every corner of Swanson’s house. Apparently, drinking for three straight hours entitled me to sleep on their plush sofa. In fact, it was the new text that ruined the moment, the sweetness as I stirred.
Where are you? I’m at the cupcake shop drinking coffee alone.
Michael and I had never made plans to meet for coffee. I had never invited him to follow me to Swanson’s house. I had never asked him to run off into the night, deserting me.
And so I ignored the text and allowed the New Year’s sunshine to wrap itself around me. I wondered if Mom knew about the light inside this place, if perhaps that is why she was so convinced that it was a perfect house.
“Será!” Gabriella’s voice reminded me that I was in someone else’s home, intruding on their routine. But her hug, oh that consoling feeling of a child’s embrace, could have saved me from anything. Two angel’s arms reaching down from their mysterious celestial home to remind the mortals that there is hope. How did parents ever part from their children? How did Swanson bear this custody arrangement?
“Happy New Year, Gabriella!”
“You can just call me Gabi. That’s what everyone in my family calls me because my grandma’s name is Gabriella.”
“Okay then, Happy New Year, Gabi.”
Swanson’s feet padded down his gorgeous staircase, and I hadn’t seen a mirror in half a day. Straightening my hair along with my spine, I wondered who put the blue throw over me during the night.
“Good morning Sarah!”
“Oh good morning, Dr. Swan– Vadim. I’m so sorry that I slept on your couch. I normally don’t drink much. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I offered to pay cab fare, but you fell asleep before I could call one.” His thick brown curls fell in his face, disheveled and unbound by the rules of social norms. I wondered if his ex had ever tried to control his hair.
“Well, you are too kind. I should never have been in such a condition.”
“It’s New Year’s! Don’t worry about it! Will you drink tea or coffee?”
“Coffee sounds really great.”
Swanson gave me a neutral nod as he walked into the kitchen, the gesture he gave in every conversation. I imagined he and his ex in their engagement.
Vadim, I think we should get married.
Nod.
The head bob was comforting, though. There was nothing hurtful in it, no unkind words that could never be taken back. I slithered off to their bathroom, still ashamed of my overindulgence. Maybe I should have nodded more, those times when Mom and I fought over my studies, my boyfriends, my attitude. Regret had replaced the warmth of morning light as I emerged from the bathroom.
“Será, will you play treasure with me?”
“How do you play?”
“Well, one person makes a treasure map, and you have to show how to get to the treasure, and the other person has to go find the treasure.” Gabi was already pulling on my hand, leading me to the kitchen’s breakfast nook, where paper and crayons awaited us.
I was in Swanson’s house, where he was making me coffee, where his daughter was drawing me a treasure map. This, this oddity, was not how I thought I would start the new year.
“Cream and sugar?”
“Yes, both please.”
I allowed Swanson to serve me coffee while my skin eagerly absorbed the sunshine. It would be months before I would be able to
sit on the beach again, and so the moment had to last.
“Será,” Gabi began, pulling my attention back to the table with her tug. “See? This is the treasure map, and you have to find the treasure.”
“Oh, wow. I might have to walk kind of far. Is this campus? Where your dad works?”
“Yep!”
Swanson remained stoic, completely unmoved by Gabi’s pulsating light. Perhaps when you live your daily life, with your grocery shopping and your doctor’s visits, in Elysium, it ceases to be amazing after a while.
“Is this the fountain?” Deciphering her map proved harder than I thought.
“Uh-huh.”
“And is this your neighborhood here?”
“Uh-huh.”
Gabi’s message hit me; a dose of morphine swept through me, tingling every muscle. The map led me all through Evanston, then right back to this house. To Mom’s dream house. To Swanson’s house. This enigma shrouded in light.
***
Snow shouldn’t shift; it shouldn’t move below you as you walk. But as I walked to campus, knowing it was my last day to prepare for prelims, my feet hesitated like spooked horses. The snow was indeed shifting.
It wasn’t the normal shift you’d expect, the mudslides or earthquakes that typically emerge in the natural world. It was the snow itself, as if something was pulling it from under my feet, a great practical joke meant only for me.
Sure, people commuted to work as they normally did and drank their grande-non-fat-lattes like there was no tomorrow. I seemed to be the only victim of this vertigo.
The closer I got to the library, the more it seemed that I was being pulled in by shifting snow blocks as much as walking by my own efforts. There could have been any number of things luring me in, but I let it happen. It was time I let someone else make the decisions while I sit back and have fun. Fun, like riding the moving walkways at O’Hare. Or was it just unnerving? It was a fine line.
I never saw Michael that day, or the next day. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t there, just that I never saw him. He was in my thoughts as I slid into the library, as I found a table.
The tome came out of my bag too easily, too happy to be dictating how I spent my time. Swanson encouraged me to review his text– yes, his text, the text he wrote– to prepare for prelims. Gabi’s treasure map marked where I had left off, the sole bit of innocence in the 800-page volume, perhaps anywhere.
The lights rarely flickered in the library. Electricity knew better than to cross Northwestern’s rich old donors. That made it all the more peculiar when the industrial sized fluorescent lights tapped out their odd rhythm. It distracted me, yes, but what shook me was the dark shadow, the flickering shapes cast over each desk.
My gaze fell on the large floor to ceiling windows, so eager to collect a few rays of sunshine, so disappointed by the winter darkness. They drooped a bit with each spasm from the lights. They were eyelids, closing further with each new shadow, eyelids trying to close out the nightmare.
Get out.
The voice either pushed me or someone pulled me. No muscle moved; no part of me put any effort into the escape.
Get out.
Gabi’s map fluttered, a little butterfly escaping to warmer climates.
“Come on, little map.”
The treasure map butterfly and I, along with Swanson’s text, followed the windows to the exit. They don’t make escape plans for when eerie lights twitch. They don’t show you where the best exit is for escaping shadows. So I stayed where I saw light, the fading light of a winter afternoon.
“We have a few minutes before sunset,” I whispered as my butterfly and I found a door, only to hesitate.
The snow. The blasted shifting snow.
“Okay, I might be crazy, but I think I’m better off in the daylight than the library.” I took my steps and took my chances, chatting with a map. Off into the sinister snow, I was ignorant of what would swallow me alive or jerk me back into the building.
“Sarah, SARAH!”
Were the library windows winking or was I waking up?
“Sarah?” Grace’s voice was my answer. “Sarah, you fell asleep studying. The phone is for you. It’s Swanson.”
Shoving the phone at me, she frowned down at my shoes. My poor, tattered Goodwill shoes. I hadn’t bought a good pair for myself since the funeral.
“Sarah, what’s that on your shoe?”
My two-dollar flats had more than wear and tear lining the soles. The library’s holiday break hours were stuck to the bottom of my right foot.
“So I was there.”
“Where?” Grace had already moved on to dumping some cheese puffs on the floor.
“The library. I had the strangest dream. I thought it was a dream.”
***
“I miss you.”
There were no three words in the English language I wanted to hear less.
“I love you.”
I was wrong.
Michael and I had unyoked during prelims, whether intentionally or not we were unsure. Prelims consumed me.
My professors watched, unmoved, as my eyes slid further into my skull, as I became more animal than human, as they tortured me through a six-hour written exam and a two-hour oral exam. This was my initiation, the hazing that normally was only tolerated at frat parties.
It was another week later that I finally recovered, hauling myself out of the shell I had made in my bedroom. The mysteries that had become my life, normally diverging, finally barreled into each other during my week of hibernation. Michael’s bizarre behavior flowed into Swanson’s living room, right through the bay window. Eliza’s dark tea and dark doorway were seen through Gabriella’s eyes. The children pointed at me as I held on to Vadim, yes, I could call him Vadim that time.
Upon emerging from my cocoon, it was Michael who first found me. I wanted to hear Swanson telling me I had passed my prelims, but instead it was Michael.
“I miss you. I love you.”
His eeriness had drifted away just as my dream-convergences had. It was my old friend, the first friend I had made in grad school. My Michael. It never occurred to me, in my stupor and my hours of torture, that I might have missed him a little, that he filled a certain void in my life.
The fact that his I love you remained unrequited never seemed to come up as we walked along Devon. You would have thought we were in Mumbai with all the brightly colored fabrics and layers of spices penetrating our nostrils. We glided through the streets, and my feet never touched the ground. They say that’s what love feels like, like you’re floating. But there was more of a pulling than drifting.
The hot oil of my samosas dripped onto the last of the winter snow, melting down through layers of earth. I devoured as we chatted, more land deteriorating with each morsel of samosa.
“You know, there’s something that’s been bothering me,” I mumbled through peas and potatoes.
“The fact that you slept on Swanson’s couch?”
“You really need to stop being jealous.”
“Jealous? Ha!” Michael’s emotions seeped through the outer layer of his facial skin, dripping out through his pores like teenage acne.
“So it still bothers me that I never found out who Eliza is. Remember that girl?”
“Oh, the one who invited you over for tea?”
“Yeah. I mean what was that? What happened that day?”
Michael shook his head, still pulling me along the sidewalk, gliding, not walking, along Devon Avenue all the way to the lake.
A young girl, a blonde that could have been Gabriella’s age, glided by us. We were two vehicles passing in traffic. Her acknowledging look had become commonplace; rarely did I pass by children without some odd glance or gesture. But it was her expression toward Michael that paused our dialogue.
It was fear.
Why?
But there we went again, flowing down the street, sliding like hot paneer. Michael’s tugs, drawing us further from the child, never gave me the time to
process the child’s reaction.
“I’ll go with you,” Michael announced.
“What?” I was reeling from all the floating and dragging.
“To Eliza’s. We’ll go together and see what’s going on.”
***
Green bottles lined the wall, covered every inch they possibly could until they had to start rounding the corner to begin a new wall. The sun shining through the soft jade tint of each bottle and jar should have been romantic, not disconcerting. Michael normally chose decent restaurants, or at least places we both agreed were acceptable.
I told myself I’d give his choice a try, at least once.
This place, this solitary table where distorted emerald eyes waited to pounce on you when you weren’t looking, reeked of sterilization. Each poultry slaughtering was a surgery, each beef carcass a cadaver. It was hospital food, this strange meal we had stumbled upon.
Of course it was green curry that I forced down, there in the watchful gaze of the jade glass. The table was its own shade, a grass green I decided.
“I feel uncomfortable here. Can we go soon?”
The blank stare on Michael’s face spread through his body. Limp and lifeless, he had become a mannequin staring back at me. But oh how I craved that lifeless lump, how my loneliness called out for it.
The solitary waiter, a catlike man who might have clawed me at any moment, seemed to hiss in defense at our every request. It was an inconvenience, asking for the bill. The bill came on their terms, when they were ready.
“Okay, I’ll pay this time.” Again.
Rather than finding my debit card in my purse, Gabi’s map came flying up at me. Yes, it was a used purse and definitely not real leather. But that never completely explained why Gabi’s map flew out if it so disappointedly, like it had never seen such an inferior accessory.
Its wings stretched, arched, then flew toward the glass. It flew the way you’d imagine a treasure map would fly, gracefully like any other butterfly. The first glass broke elegantly, shattering and falling in fountains and arcs. It took only moments for the rest of the jade glass to realize what had happened and follow suit. They burst out like Niagra Falls, tumbling to the ground purposefully, beautifully. Tempted to watch, I instead grabbed Michael’s hand as I stood. My eyes hesitated, watching the verdant rivers of glass.
Dark Doorways Page 3
