ON THE VERY SAME DAY his sister disappeared, and only a few hours before he walked alone through the streets of New Orleans all the way to Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, Leo Jardine hid in the closet, trying to breathe slow and quiet. He calmed himself by counting the long, straight wires in his pocket, a lock-picking set that was a gift from a great-uncle he could barely remember. He traced the wires with his finger, some jagged, some straight, and he knew them all by touch.
This one straight as an arrow for locks that could be popped open.
This one with teeth for reaching and twisting.
This one with a hook on the end, like the answer to a question.
His father and the doctor were upstairs in his sister’s room. The doctor—her last name started with an N, but he had never heard it clearly or seen it written down—reminded him of the slender, straight pick in his lock-picking set. She was firm and direct, no-nonsense. She came and went quickly, and always walked the shortest distance from here to there. She did not look to one side or the other.
Leo leaned against the wall in the closet down the hall from the dining room, where the two always sat after his sister’s checkups, and he waited for them to come down.
Leo’s father Amos owned a house with many doors. There was the weighty front door that opened out onto a wide front porch shaded by ancient, leaning sycamore trees, their bark shedding in strips like sunburned skin. That same front door was flanked by two windows, each clouded by thick, heavy drapes, solemn as guardian angels. When the drapes were drawn, not a speck of light could get in.
Then there was the side door, the door everyone used, the one clinging to its hinges. It moved without a sound. It was a friendly door, one that even strangers felt comfortable knocking on or pushing open a few inches before calling inside.
There was the back door, the one that led from the kitchen into a yard thick with overgrown azaleas planted in straight lines. Rising around them were tall cedar trees that fought their way among each other, higher, reaching for the sun. Their lower branches were dead and snapped off—only the highest branches still flaunted green needles, so far from the ground, too afraid to let go.
Inside the house there were even more doors, some of which Leo had never been through. His father’s office door, for example—he was absolutely, positively, never-in-a-million years to go through that door. He could only imagine the consequences. He heard strange things on the other side, muffled conversations and sliding filing cabinet drawers that clicked closed. There was the latching of padlocks and the soft spinning of a safe’s dial. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.
There was the attic door, the one that led up up up into darkness and dust. His father had never made any rules about that door, but he didn’t have to. Leo was terrified of that uppermost level, scared of what might be there.
Perhaps the most peculiar door was the small trapdoor in the floor of the guest room closet, a door he had never had reason to lift. He noticed the small round handle the first time he explored the house, and he had pushed at the loose boards of the flat door, but it seemed harmless enough, and rather plain and boring. Curiosity about what was under it came at strange times, like the middle of the night, or when he was staying at his mother’s house. But when he was in his father’s house, when it would have made sense to open it, the thought never occurred to him.
There were also bedroom doors and pantry doors, heavy sliding doors and soundless French doors. Most importantly, there was a closet door in the hallway just inside the front door. It was a deep closet that ran the length of the stairwell, the kind where the ceiling got lower and lower the further in you went, all the way down to nothing.
The air where he hid smelled old and musty, and the wood floor was smooth and hesitant beneath him, ready to give him away. He stood up straight and leaned against the wall again. He left the closet door barely open because he was ten years old and still a little bit scared of the dark, a little bit worried about what crept around in the deep spaces he could not see. He had this fear that if he closed the door, he wouldn’t be able to open it again.
Recently he had begun to doubt the stories he always believed to be true—stories about knights and dragons, angels and demons, secret worlds and invisible people. Even at ten years old, he knew belief was slipping away from him. He could feel it going, like honey through a crack in the jar. But in that closet, he could believe those things might be true. Was it the darkness? The stillness? The feeling that there were live things all around him, things he could not see?
He peeked through the door, and a slanted line of golden light ran diagonally down his face and over his eye.
His father’s house was a tired one, and it leaned and creaked when you walked through it. It was the kind of house that would talk to you if you were the only one there, the kind of house that sighed when it thought about all the people it had known. Many things had taken place in that house, nearly unimaginable things, some so small that they’d make no difference to you—nothing more than a sigh that marked the change of a friendship or a glance that sparked the flames of love. That house was like a kind old man: a little crazy, a little angry, but mostly quiet and reflective. And waiting. Always waiting.
Leo felt his father and the doctor approach before he heard them, their footsteps shifting down the long flight of stairs from the third floor to the second floor to the main level. His father’s steps were loose and uneven. He walked without any semblance of a rhythm. He was the opposite of clinical, the definition of superstitious. When he walked anywhere, he hurried, his limbs flailing.
Behind his father’s footsteps came the unremarkable steps of the doctor. Firm. Calculated. Their beat was so constant that a conductor could have directed an entire symphony under their guidance. She seemed to pause as she walked past the closet where Leo was hiding, a rest in the stanza. Leo froze in place. He thought he heard the doctor sniffing as if catching his scent, but immediately after that he thought, What a silly thing to think. People don’t sniff for things the same way animals do.
Did they?
The two moved past the closet, along the short hall, and sat down at the dining room table. Leo held his breath so he could hear them.
“I’m sorry, Amos,” the doctor said, and her voice soaked into the walls of the house, ran quietly along the high oak baseboards. It seemed muffled and distant.
“What do you mean, you’re sorry?” Leo’s father asked, his voice sounding weary. Scratchy. Leo couldn’t see him, but he could tell by the sound that his father held his hand over his own mouth while he spoke, as if trying to hold in the questions that would lead to the diagnosis he didn’t want to hear.
The doctor sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said again, “because your daughter is not getting better. She is, in fact, declining. Fading. There is very little that I can do.”
She said the last sentence quickly, as if trying to rid her mouth of the words. The sound of them soaked into the walls. Leo wondered where those words went. He wondered if you could find them again. He wondered if you scratched deep enough into the plaster, would you find all the words the walls had ever heard? He suddenly thought of the trapdoor in the bottom of the guest room closet. He imagined opening it, pulling all of its weight up by the small round ring, and being overcome by a wave of trapped words, emerging in an overwhelming stream like a burst of bats from a cave.
“Fine. I’ll take her somewhere else. Someone else can help her. Not everyone is as incompetent as you.”
“There is very little that anyone else could do,” the doctor said. She didn’t sound angry at Amos’s slight. Her words came out like her footsteps, measured and matter-of-fact. She was not threatened by his anger or grief. Her response waved off both of them like pesky flies.
Silence settled in the house again, more imposing than a shout. Leo tried very hard not to make a sound. His father was touchy these days, as Ruby’s health declined. She was only five years old, but her breathing sounded like the wheezing of an old woman. Her skin was pale, nearly transparent, and she slept all the time. She threw up whatever she ate.
“If you’d like,” the doctor said, “I could meet with you and your wife together, review the girl’s condition, explain our options?”
Leo’s father laughed. “No, no, that won’t do,” he said, then paused as if trying to decide how much to say. “Her mother is away. She left last week. It’s all happened very quickly. It wouldn’t do to worry her.”
Leo pictured his mother waiting to board a plane somewhere in some other city. He pictured her in her professional clothes, carrying her professional bag. She, too, walked straight, had goals, knew the most direct path to achieve them. But he could also imagine her chewing her fingernails, wondering if her children were okay, finding a clock and staring at it as the second hand went around and around. He had seen her do that before. He had wondered what was in her mind as she watched the moments pass.
Leo knew his mother loved him fiercely. He could not have told you how he knew this, but he knew it. On the other hand, his father’s love for him had somehow faded, and he knew this too, in some intangible way. When Ruby became sick, her illness had become his father’s obsession, so that nothing could exist alongside it. When his father sat with his sister, Leo could say anything he wanted but his father would only nod and blink, his gaze never leaving Ruby. Sometimes, when Leo came in the house, he would find his father staring at a crack in the wall or a doorknob or a streak of light between shadows. Leo’s existence had faded from his father’s awareness. There was only Ruby and her sickness, and like a spot that burns into your vision if you stare at the sun too long, Amos couldn’t see past it.
“Amos,” the doctor said again, as if saying the name would change things, be a key in a lock that opened the door to a better time. Her voice had gone quieter, calmer. “Amos. What are you going to do?”
It seemed a strange question. Leo heard the inexplicable sound of his father weeping. He nearly walked out of the closet in order to see it. Unbelievable. He had thought his father incapable of tears. When he leaned forward to try to see what was going on, the floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He held his breath and stopped blinking, as if even the movement of his eyelids would give him away. The two stopped talking, and for a moment Leo was sure he had been found out.
“Is it a curse?” Leo heard his father mumble. “Is it something I’ve done? Did I bring this on the girl?”
“I don’t think—” the doctor began, but Leo’s father interrupted.
“Is it this house? Is this house under some kind of an ancient spell? If I burn it down, will she recover?” His voice became louder and more urgent with each far-fetched grasp at a cure. “You know this city, Doctor. You know what people are capable of here. There is a darkness.”
The doctor didn’t reply.
“What if we ran? Took off. Could we leave all of this behind us?” Amos asked.
And when he said “all of this,” Leo knew he meant everything: the sickness, the city, Leo’s mother.
Leo.
His father would leave everything, including him.
Leo peered through the crack in the door again, and he could barely see the doctor, her pale white skin, the way her hands were folded on the table, fingers laced together, one finger tapping, tapping, tapping. The dining room had a low chandelier, and it shone like a spotlight on him.
“If you want to leave—I mean really leave,” the doctor said, “I might know someone who could help you do that.”
Amos laughed again, and the sound scared Leo. He reached into his pocket and again felt the ten pieces of wire, roughly the length of his little finger, each attached to a key ring. Each wire was a different thickness, each bent in different ways. The lock-picking set could get him to the other side of almost any door. Feeling the cold metal, the pointed ends, the familiar bending here and there—all of it comforted him.
“My wife would find us, Doctor. No matter where we went. No matter how far. Trust me—you don’t know her like I do. I could never rest because she would find us, and then what? I’d end up in prison for kidnapping, or worse.”
“I can assure you that she would never find you. And there is hope in this other place, hope for your daughter.”
Amos went from laughing to sounding angry.
“What do you mean? Hope? What’s that? I thought you said there was nothing you could do. I thought you said there was no hope.”
“I didn’t tell you because this place,” the doctor said slowly, “is at the Edge of Over There. If you go, you can’t come back. Not ever.”