Dark Doorways (9 page)

The walls of the boat were
precariously fluid, as if the boat itself was becoming the liquid of the river.
The crack in the pleather wavered like a wind sock. And still, all I saw was
Mom, beautiful Katherine H. Faro in the flesh.

“Mom, I–” A thousand
questions raced through my mind, some related to her, some just things I wanted
to share because I hadn’t seen her in so long. I needed advice on Michael and
where that relationship was headed. I needed to know if my haircut was too
short, if I had too many credit cards, if I could wait until after grad school
to have kids. “I–”

“Sarah, there’s something you
need to know.”

“Like why you’re here? Ha!”
The laugh that came out of me was meant as part of our repartee, but exposed
how truly nervous I felt. Moving down the corridor to the boxcar had reminded
me of where we were, and I soon began to distrust my own senses.

I could smell her, feel her,
hear her, see her. But this was my
mother
, the same mother I buried in
Lakeside Cemetery, just a mile from her home.

“You shouldn’t be here,
Sarah. Michael either.” Her face, entirely downcast now, revealed a tremendous
sadness that I was unprepared to experience while I had her in my presence.
This should have been glorious, reuniting with my mother.

“Mom, I want to be wherever
you are. I’ve missed you
so
much. I... I need my mom.”

Just as I tried to reach over
to clasp her hand, I noticed a beautiful maroon bridge outside the small
window, perched innocently on the raised edges of the Chicago River. Which
number it was, somewhere after four, and hopefully not yet to seven, was unclear.
We had lost count somewhere between our abduction and Mom’s return.

Standing just outside that
bridge and waving was little Gabi, my angelic sister Gabi, with Swanson next to
her. He was absorbed in a phone conversation and ignored her as she jumped up
and down in excitement, still waving eagerly toward the boat.
She knew
,
I thought.
She knew this entire time that I would be on this boat
.

“She’s beautiful, that little
girl.”

“She’s my sister, Mom. She’s
Swanson’s little girl.”

Mom’s gentle hand found its way
to her heart, admiring Gabi in all her purity. “She lives in that house then?”

“Oh, Swanson’s house? Well,
yeah, but he shares custody, so only like half the time.”

It seemed natural for Mom to
nod, to connect all these convoluted parts of my life as if it was all so
ordinary. We could have been talking about the weather, the fog.

“You should be there with
them.”

“No...
no!
I want to
be with you, even if it’s on this boat.”

“Sarah, you don’t
understand.”

“So tell me!”

My mother’s eyes moved toward
the doorway, where the corridor and the boxcar seats met. The darkness of the
corridor seeped into our little compartment despite the brightness left behind
the lifting fog.

“Mom? Are you going to tell
me? Are you going to explain why you always said
never enter a dark doorway
?”
I could have added the mysterious trips to Swanson’s house when I was little,
or the odd glances from Parker whenever I walked by his house, or the fact that
Mom was even able to have a conversation with me at that moment. But one thing at
a time.

Outside the window, Gabi
continued to wave her chubby arm at me. It was the right amount of chubby, the
way little girls’ arms should look. It took effort to focus on Mom, when just
minutes ago I couldn’t pull my eyes off of her. It bothered me, the way Gabi
stole my attention, when these moments with Mom were so precious. It was
awfully ballsy of her to try to catch my eye when I was with my mom.

“You’re going to have to make
a choice, Sarah. You can’t have both, me and them. This boat doesn’t make
return trips.”

I was beginning to see things
clearly, just as she began to fade.

“Sarah! We’re passing under
the bridge! You need to get off now!”

She was being her typical
self, that caregiver who only thought of others. All I could do was stare at her,
wondering how I ever forgot that she had so many gray strands already. My
memory of her had dyed them back to their original dark brown.

I slowly raised my eyes to
look out the window, only to confirm that we were indeed nearing the bridge.
Gabi ran along the river’s edge, Swanson chasing her this time. She was
shouting something to me, crying even. I would never know what she was trying
to say to me that day, but the message was pretty clear.

“Mom, you have to explain
this to me. The boat is…
fading
. I can’t just leave you here.”

“Sarah, Dear, I’ve already
left
you
.”

The words hit like a bag of
bricks, knocking me back into the pleather seats like I was already defeated.
“Then how am I seeing you, talking to you? I mean, I can
hug
you.”

She wrapped an arm around my
shoulder, pulling me closer so I could rest my head on her shoulder. I had
forgotten what a bony shoulder it was, and how disappointing it was when the
fashion world stopped loving shoulder pads. Still, the comfort of her closeness
was enough to help me close my eyes. I might have been able to make that moment
last forever if she hadn’t kept pushing.

“Do you remember that summer
when you fell off your bike and got hurt?”

“When I had to get stitches
on my shin?” I laughed and looked up at my mom, so thrilled to be sharing my
childhood with her again. “You were so mad that you had to take me to the
hospital.”

She ran her fingers through
my hair, the mane that she had so carefully groomed and trimmed for over a
decade of her life. I could have let her braid my hair more often when I was a
teenager. I could have done a good many things differently.

“No! I was mad that you were
being so fearless with your bike after I kept asking you to be more careful.
You were always so adventurous, dangerously so.”

“Was I?”

“Yeah. I remember you always
made new friends with such ease. It scared me the way you’d walk up to complete
strangers and want to be their friend. What was that little girl’s name who
always had you over for tea?”

My blood turned cold as I
bolted up straight in the seat. “I never went to anyone’s house for tea.”

“Sure you did! You were
really little though, maybe three or four. You just don’t remember. She lived
over on Maple Street. What was her name?”

“
Eliza?
” I whispered.

“Oh, so you do remember!”

“Mom,” I hissed. “
Eliza?
Are
you kidding me? Eliza? Creepy Eliza who runs this boat?”

“Wha–” Mom’s confusion
was getting me nowhere. Perhaps Eliza hadn’t introduced herself yet.

“Okay, so dark doorways.
Eliza’s house had one. Parker’s house, your old house, had one. The university.
The boat. But how are they connected? Mom, this doesn’t make sense to me.
You’ve got to know more than you’re letting on.”

When Mom’s confusion turned
to frowning, I knew there was something she had been hiding. Somehow, in the
midst of the boat’s continued dismantling, or liquifying you could call it, she
finally decided to talk openly.

It began as a whisper, her
voice sharing these secrets. “I didn’t know Eliza was one of them. I never
would have let you play there.”    

“One of who, Mom?”

“They steal light. They take
light and distort it into something repulsive.”

“Uh, darkness?”

“Worse.”

Her eyes wondered toward the
corridor, to where the mysteries of the boat could have consumed us any moment.

“It looks like darkness, but
it’s them. It’s them just taking away all the light.”

“Mom, you’re not making
sense.”

“Darkness belongs here; it’s
part of life. But them, those things–” She halted abruptly and shifted
her gaze out the window. “We don’t have time. That bridge? It’s the last one,
number seven. You need to get off. Now!”

“Then I’m taking you with
me.”

Gabi’s little treasure map
that had remained silent all this time finally began to flutter and work its
way out of my pocket. Much like the night it broke all the jade glass, it went
straight for the boxcar’s glass window.

“Genius.”

“What?” Mom was still staring
at the map, unsure of where it came from.

“Just watch,” I assured her.

Sure enough, the map hit the
glass repeatedly until a small crack formed. Soon, the crack spread, weblike,
and I knew it would collapse any second.

“Michael, wake up!” I was
shaking him by this point, though it didn’t do much good. So I resorted to
shouting. “
Michael!
”

Watching him wake slowly, his
face peeling off the cheap pleather, I began to slap his cheeks to accelerate
the process. He’d hate me for it later, I knew, but we were running out of
time. The bridge was a block away.

“Michael, we have to get Mom
out of here. Come on!”

The window finally succumbed,
shattering around our feet, shattering like so many things in life seem to do.

“You first,” she insisted.

“Mom, no.”

“Yes. You first, then I’ll
push Michael out.”

“No, we’ll push Michael out,
then I’ll hold on to you while I squeeze through. I’m not letting go of you.”

Shaking her head, she helped
me drag him off the couch. His limbs were useless, but I’d be there soon to
help him out of the river. Surely those swimming lessons from my youth would
all come back to me, at least that’s what I was hoping.

Once we got his head, arms
and shoulders through the open window, it was only moments before the rest of
him slid through. I could tell from the splashing that the impact of the cold,
polluted water roused him a bit more.

“Now you, Sarah.”

“Okay, but hold on to me.”

She pushed me through,
duplicating Michael’s escape. Just as I felt my torso teetering on the edge, I
told her to hold on to my feet. I was hoping some miracle of physics would
allow her to get sucked out with me, even though the window was a good three
feet above the floor.

“Sarah, I love you! I’ve
always lo–” Her voice disintegrated, just as I felt her grip slip away
from me. It was all disappearing so quickly, every conversation I had hoped to
have with her, every shopping trip, every dinner waiting in the slow cooker.

With that, I fell, kicking
and screaming for my mom, into the dirty Chicago River. Motherless.

***

Others at street level stared
dumbly, watching the two of us floundering in the river. Chicago’s finest were
all out for their lunch break, from the suited corporates checking their phones
to the lost tourists checking their maps. Not one person considered helping us.
Looking back, though, I wasn’t sure I would jump voluntarily into the Chicago
River either. The Italian Riviera this was not.

Michael was already reaching
the edge of the river, trying to grasp onto the stones of the sidewalk. Just as
I hauled myself up to catch my breath beside him, we both turned to look for
the boat. Part of me was still hoping to get Mom back, to perhaps take a taxi
to outrun the boat, jump on it from a bridge somehow, and get her off. Such are
the impractical thoughts of a mourning daughter.

But as we turned our heads,
still dripping the sewage of the Chicago River, there was no boat.

The morning fog lingered just
a bit, but not enough to conceal an entire boat. Neither of us expected to see
the boat, really. We looked, acted surprised not to see it, but knew it
wouldn’t be there. It would have crossed under the last bridge by that point,
never to return. We didn’t have to understand any of it to admit the boat was
gone.

There were no words needed.
There never are when you finally realize you’ve lost someone, really lost them.
You have to pick yourself up and let people stare at the polluted water leaking
off you. That’s what you have to do.

Michael knew instinctively to
stand beside me as I stared at the void where Mom last had held me. If I graced
my cheek, I could still feel the comfort of resting on her shoulder.
Maybe
that’s what I should do
, I thought.
I should just stay here forever, in
this place where I let down my mom.

“Será!” Gabi’s voice cut
through the smog in my head, her tender voice making my misery all the more
pathetic.

“Sarah? Michael? Are you two
okay?” Swanson was out of breath, clearly not the sign of a man who visited the
gym.

“Yeah, I think so. Michael,
are you feeling alright?”

The fuzziness in his eyes
told me all I needed to know. How he ever swam out of the river by himself was
beyond me.

“You need a doctor. I should
call 911.” I was already feeling around for my phone.