Page Thirty-One, Read Aloud

I leave Ozzie standing over a stopped machine and I go home and I open the ledger and I make myself read page thirty-one the way you make yourself pull a splinter — all at once, before the flinch finishes. The smudge is still a smudge. But I've stopped letting it own me. So I do the thing I've never done. I don't try to read what's under the gray. I read *around* it. The lines above and below, the ones my eye always skids past on its way to the flinch. And there they are, in my mean-slanted hand, dated in a year I don't own: *She's small. She'll come to the low handle first because it's her height. Don't let him wait for a face — the face is the trick. Give the boy the photo. Tell him he'll know.* I put the pen down. My hand is steady, which is the worst part. I gave Ozzie the photo. I told him to wait for a face. And I wrote, years ago, that the face was the trick — and then I forgot writing it, forgot handing him the picture, forgot everything except the shape of a flinch. I've been protecting him from a plan I laid myself, one door at a time, without the courtesy of remembering the plan. *You never could tell them apart. That was always the trouble.* Now I understand the sentence. It isn't about doors and sisters. It's about *her* and *me*. The small one at the low handle. The one my height. I walk back to the laundromat. It's 11:51. Sixteen minutes. Ozzie hasn't moved. The photo's mouth has stopped moving; it's just a mouth now, half-formed, waiting for the rest. He looks up at me and I see he already knows I found something, because he's known me long enough to read my flinch too. "It's not your sister," I say. The words cost more than I expected. They come out flat and I watch them land — watch his hands go still on the blue shirt, watch a hope he's carried so long it grew calluses simply set itself down. "It's a place," I say. "Wearing a face I gave it. I gave you the photo, Ozzie. I told you to wait for her. And I didn't tell you the waiting was the door's idea." I make myself hold his eyes. "I did this to you. I don't remember doing it, but that doesn't unmake it." There. It's on the page now, and it cost something, and I don't get to walk away from having said it. Ozzie is quiet a long time. The dryers tick. "Did I have one?" he finally asks. "A sister. Was there ever a real one, before you gave me the fake?" And I don't know. That's the thing I have to say out loud, standing in a laundromat at 11:58 with a child-height door glowing yellow behind him. "I don't know. The photo came from me. But the *ache* — Ozzie, the ache came from somewhere. Doors don't give you an ache for a thing that never was. They give you a face to hang your ache on so you'll open them." He turns the photo over. On the back, in handwriting that isn't mine — smaller, rounder, a kid's — one word: *MAUVE.* Neither of us said that name. Neither of us knew it a second ago. But now it's in the room and it won't leave, and Ozzie's mouth is trembling around it like it fits. 11:59. "That's her," he whispers. "That's her name. I remember her *name.*" The yellow door's low handle turns half an inch on its own. "Don't," I say. "It heard you remember. Now it wants you to knock." 12:06. I take out my pen. If the door opens itself at 12:07, it chooses the price — and I will not let it choose Ozzie while I stall for a page. So I write, fast, the only thing the city can't unwrite: *Mauve Fen. Real. Remembered by Wren Calloway and Ozzie Fen, this night, before any door.* The ink dries. It won't unwrite. The clock ticks over. 12:07. The street coughs. And the yellow door — the one that came for Ozzie's sister — does not open. It can't take what I've already written down. It just sits there, low and yellow and furious, waiting for a name it no longer owns. Ozzie is crying, finally, the way you cry when a splinter's out. I let him. I don't tell him it's over, because it isn't. Somewhere a new door is being born, and this one won't be his. I look at my own handwriting drying on the page and I think: if I could save Mauve with a sentence, what did I write about myself, all those years ago, that I've been too afraid to read?