Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO: THE RULE

Every family has rules that nobody made.

You understand this as a concept. You've understood it for years. The unspoken things: which topics you don't discuss at dinner, which memories you collectively agree to soften, which versions of events you've decided, together and without a single conversation, are the true ones. You know these things exist. You've always known.

But the rule about the door is different from those rules.

The rule about the door has no history. It has no story. It has no incident attached to it — no moment where someone got hurt, no reason that accumulated over years into an understanding. It simply is. Like gravity. Like the fact that winter follows autumn. You have never in your life even wondered why the door stays shut.

Until now.

You start paying attention.

At breakfast on the eighth day home, you watch your father walk down the hallway.

He passes the door. His body doesn't change. His pace doesn't slow. His eyes don't move toward the door or away from it in the deliberate way that avoidance looks. He simply — passes it. As if it isn't there. As if the space it occupies is occupied by a wall.

You try this yourself. Later, when you are alone, you walk down the hallway with the intention of looking at the door normally, the way you'd look at anything. A lamp. A picture frame.

You find that you can't.

You are not afraid. Not exactly. It's more that your eyes slide off it the way eyes slide off something that has been made, through long repetition, to be invisible. Like the hum of a refrigerator. Like the feeling of your own heartbeat. You've been trained not to see it, and the training goes very deep.

You have to stop walking and physically turn your head.

There it is.

An ordinary door. Wooden, painted white some years ago, the paint now slightly yellowed at the edges. A brass knob, oval, slightly tarnished, the kind you see on houses of a certain age. A frame, a threshold, the faint dark gap at the bottom where light does not come through.

You stand there for one minute.

Two.

Nothing happens.

But you notice — and this is new, this is something you have never noticed before, because you have never stood here and looked before — that the air near the door is slightly cooler than the air in the rest of the hallway. A degree or two. The kind of cool that means either a draft or something that doesn't want to be warm.

You go back to your room and write this down.

✦   ✦   ✦

On day ten, you ask your father about it.

You choose a careful moment: after dinner, while the two of you are sitting in the living room with the television on low, the comfortable kind of silence that you have always been able to have with him. He is reading. You are pretending to read.

"Hey, Dad," you say.

He mumbles.

"What's behind the door at the end of the hall?"

A pause.

Half a second. Not long. But you have been watching for it, and you catch it: a small cessation. Like a clock skipping a tick. His eyes move up from the book, and he looks at you, and he smiles, and the smile is warm and genuine and completely without guile, and he says:

"What door?"

And then, before you can respond, he laughs. A short, gentle laugh. Like you've said something endearing.

"Oh, the storage room. I think. To be honest, I haven't opened it in years. Nothing important in there."

He goes back to his book.

You sit with the words nothing important for a long time.

Later, in the journal:

He said it was a storage room. But the pause. There was a pause. And then it was gone, and he was smiling, and I almost let it go. I almost believed him. I think I am supposed to believe him. I think believing him is the path of least resistance, and I have always taken the path of least resistance in this house, and that is not an accusation; it is just something I am only starting to understand.

You ask your mother the next morning. She is at the stove. She doesn't pause. She says:

"Oh, that's just the old linen closet. I keep meaning to clear it out."

It's a storage room. It's a linen closet—two different answers, delivered with the same warmth, same certainty, and same complete absence of defensiveness.

As if the door is simply not worth thinking about. As if it never has been.

✦   ✦   ✦

You find the first drawing on day twelve.

It is tucked behind the old radiator in your bedroom, down in the gap between the radiator and the baseboard, the kind of place where things fall and are never retrieved. You only find it because you drop your pen and it rolls there, and when you reach in you pull out a folded piece of paper.

A child's drawing. Crayon. A house — this house, recognisably, the shape of the roof, the arrangement of windows — and inside the house, a long hallway rendered in thick lines. At the end of the hallway, a door. In front of the door, a small figure.

The figure has your face.

You know this is impossible. You know that you drew this as a child, that child-you had a face and you drew it on figures as children do, and that it simply resembles your current face because faces don't change as much as we think they do. You know this.

But the figure's hand is on the doorknob.

And the figure is looking back over its shoulder, back down the hallway toward the viewer, and the expression — rendered in the clumsy certain lines of a child who doesn't know yet how hard it is to draw feelings — is not fear.

It is warning.

You put the drawing in your journal and you go to dinner and you eat and you talk and you laugh at something your father says and the evening is warm and ordinary and you do not think about the drawing again until two in the morning when you wake suddenly from a dream you can't remember with the absolute certain knowledge that something pressed against the other side of the door at the end of the hall is pressing, right now, very gently, outward.