27

THERE ARE THINGS that happened to Ruby before Leo showed up, things about her and her father Amos, that are important. Not too long before Leo appeared to her in the abandoned house, claiming to be her brother and upending everything she knew about her world, she was sitting in her bedroom, her father delivering some important news.

“Very soon, Ruby,” her father began, and he held his own breath with the anticipation of it all. When he couldn’t hold it in any longer, he practically popped with the words. “I’m going to take you somewhere. I’m going to take you for a tour in the building.”

She looked at him with questions in her eyes, to see if it was really true, and he nodded his head in a flurry of up-and-down movements, giving a crooked grin.

Ruby glanced away from him and stared out the window. The tall building behind their house blocked most of the sky, so that the shadowy light that fell down in the alley was tinted the color of rust. The narrow shards of sky she could see on either side of the building were a dark maroon. Night was falling in that city under the red sky.

The building behind her house was always growing, always getting taller. Carpenters and masons and engineers had worked on it for as long as she could remember, and every year it climbed higher, until it grew so tall that sometimes the low-lying orange clouds obscured the top of it and at night it seemed to rise right up through the blood-red sky. She wondered if they would ever finish working on it. She wondered what went on inside.

Her father stood in the doorway, staring at her. She could tell he wanted to see some kind of excitement, some sign that she was as eager to walk through the building as he was eager to show it to her.

“That night, after I give you the tour, there’s going to be a meeting with all the people I know in the city who are ready to . . . make changes,” he said. “We’re ready to make this city into something wonderful. Something new.”

“Dad,” she started to say, but her voice trailed off. He took over again, going on and on about the glorious future, the new days ahead, the shining city. He started pacing from the hallway and into her room. Back into the hallway. Back into her room.

“We’re not far off. But we have to maintain . . . space. The Frenzies. We have to eliminate them. After that we can build a new foundation. A new . . . ” His voice faded.

He stopped walking and looked up at Ruby. “Very soon, you’ll understand. Very soon. Ha! Oh, Ruby. I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to tell you any of it. I’m sorry for all the secrets.” He took a deep breath. “But soon you’ll understand, and you’ll know everything. This city will be . . . it will be . . . wonderful. Better than anything from . . . before. Better than anything.”

He turned abruptly and walked into the hallway. He closed her door carefully as if it was made of tissue paper and might tear. The latch clicked. Ruby heard him turn the key and lock her into her room. He did it every night. He said the city was unsafe. He said it was for her own good. He said it was to protect her in case the Frenzies came into the house.

This is what he told her, and she believed him, the way a child will often believe their parent even when their parent is not telling the truth.

She stared at the building again, thinking about the word she thought she’d heard her father say.

“After that we can build a new foundation. A new . . . heaven.”

The house Ruby lived in, her father’s house, was a house of many doors.

Of course, there were many windows too, but they didn’t interest her—perhaps because they had large metal bars over the outside, so that even if you opened the windows as high as they could go, there was no way to get through. The bars were an inch thick and four inches apart, black as shadows. Ruby could reach her arm through them, right up to her shoulder, but no farther. The black bars were cold to the touch, even in the summer. Once a year, her father spent three or four late afternoons painting them in slow up-and-down strokes with a look on his face that made Ruby think that even though he was painting he was not thinking about painting. The paint he used was black, black, black, like spilled ink.

While the windows did not interest her, the many doors did. Her father kept most of them locked, but there were no bars over them, so there was at least some hope of passing through, if she could only have the keys. There was the large wooden front door, stained with a light cedar stain, and it creaked when it opened. The front door led into a small entranceway, and then another door like the first led into the house. There were the two large pocket doors to the left of the hall as you went in, heavy as cinder blocks. They slid smoothly over their rollers and covered the entrance to her father’s study. There were the white, five-panel doors that led to three second-floor bedrooms, all empty, the doors always locked. And there were the third-floor doors, the ones that opened up to her bedroom, her father’s bedroom, and the attic.

If only she had the keys.

All of those doors had antique keyholes below the doorknobs, the kind that are large enough to peek through. They were set in decorative brass plates with raised images around the edges: flowers and leaves and oblong shapes that looked like tears. Her father kept all the keys to all the doors hanging in his study on a square arrangement of hooks. Under each hook was the name of the room the key belonged to, and every single hook had a key on it.

The narrow door to the attic was down the hall from her room, and Ruby had heard from someone that the attic connected all the houses on her street. Even if she had the key, she never, never, ever would have opened that door because her father had told her that opening it would let all manner of terrible things into the world, things that would take up residence under her bed and never leave. They were awful things. Some of them were alive and could think for themselves, he said. They were growing things, and while some would remain under her bed, other things that came through the door would go out into the city: the seeds to poisonous trees or plants that could bring down entire buildings, ivy strong enough to crumble cement blocks, flowers with roots that upended sidewalks. Irresistible things. And the only way to keep them out of their world was to keep the door to the attic shut tight.

“Doors are made to keep things out,” her father always said, raising his eyebrows and pointing his finger with each word.

She believed anything he told her, and the stories stuck and hardened like plaster, and no matter what she told herself, those stories remained, impossible to chip away. She didn’t have the right tools for that.

These days her father was always writing, writing, writing in a stack of journals he kept on his desk. Or making frantic phone calls in his office, his voice rising until she could hear every word he said. He was very concerned about the city. He was very concerned that the Frenzies were driving it into chaos. She started hearing words that alarmed her, words like “surrounded” and “only option” and “last stand.”

But sometimes he would stop working, stop making calls, and sigh, and relent to her endless pleas for attention. He would tell her about the tunnels that ran under the city, full of things that children shouldn’t have to know about, and he would tell her about the back alleys in the city where all the terrifying people lived, and he would tell her about the river to the south of the city that had no far side—just an endless stretch of waves and shifting shades of blue.

She liked the stories. She liked how the scary ones made her insides quiver. But most of all she couldn’t stop thinking about the river.

“If it doesn’t have a far side, why is it a river and not an ocean?” she asked her father one day, and he looked surprised.

“Why, that’s a good question, Ruby. I guess it’s because it flows in one direction, like a river.”

“Seems like it must have a far side, if it’s flowing,” she said.

He stared at her for a long time. “You must be right,” he whispered. “You are a very smart little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl anymore, Dad,” she protested. “I’m thirteen!”

She asked him often about the War. She asked him over and over again about the fate of her mother and her brother.

“Do you remember much of those days?” he would say.

“No, Dad, I don’t remember anything.”

He always seemed relieved at her answer. “Yes, yes. You were very ill.”

He told her how the War had ravaged the city soon after she was born. He told her about the last days of her mother and brother, when the War had taken them.

“Ruby, after your mother and brother were killed, we joined a group of citizens here in the city who finally drove the Frenzies back into the woods. The city was safe for most of your childhood, perhaps most of your life that you can remember. It was safe. But time passed, and more people entered the city, and for some reason most of them sided with the Frenzies. And the Frenzies joined together. This was . . . unfortunate.” He clenched his jaw, licked his lips, and shook his head as if trying to gather his thoughts. “They’ve been advancing. We’re preparing again for war, but this time we have a weapon.”

Ruby loved when her father told her stories because those were the few times her father actually spoke to her, only her. He wasn’t ranting on the telephone or talking in hushed tones to someone on the front porch. He was talking only to her, and she loved his stories, loved them the way she loved the taste of something sweet. She craved those stories, the deep rumbling sound of her father’s voice, the way his eyes flashed in the light.

It is possible, when we have nothing else, for stories to be the food that sustains us.

There were other doors in the house too.

There was the back door, with a screen that hung on its hinges like a loose tooth and left a scratched arc in the cement slab from being opened again and again. Sometimes the back screen door swung loose on windy nights and slapped the side of the house, as if someone was knocking and knocking but no one would let them in. She was not allowed to go through the back door on her own—the heavy door inside the flapping screen—and it was always locked.

Beyond that door was a small yard surrounded by a tall wooden fence, and beyond the fence was an alley, coarse and gray, and beyond the alley a large hole in the ground where they had torn down a part of the tall building, torn it out by its roots, but that must have been a long time ago, because now they were building the rest of it up, higher and higher, floor after floor.

The hole beside the building was huge and deep, the size of a football field, and it was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Every ten feet along the fence were red signs:

NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT. DANGER.

There was a plain red wooden door that led into the foundation of the tall building. The door looked very old and very important, and no building that had a red door like that could be a building full of nothing. She became obsessed by the door, and she spent as much time as she could beside her bedroom window, staring at the building, staring at the door, keeping close watch on the alley, waiting for something to happen.

So, after her father left her room that night, after he told her that he was going to take her to the building very soon, she knew, she just knew, that it was something fabulously important, something life changing, something better than anything else she had ever seen. She fell asleep and dreamed of a tree, and dust, and a woman who held open her mouth and tried to make her eat the dust, so that she woke up gasping for breath, her mouth parched and dry.

She walked to her bedroom door and tried the knob, but it was still locked. She was so thirsty. She considered shouting for her dad, but he didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night, so she sat down with her back to the door and fell asleep. This time she dreamed of the river and of a key longer than she was tall, a key that would open every door, if only she could lift it.