The House of Sticky Doors

My mother told me this when I was older, but the memory is like a photograph taken in fog. We were at my Aunt Rita and Uncle Paul’s place for the night, a farmhouse perched on a hill outside of Ellery, New York. They’d made me a nest of quilts at the foot of their bed, and I drifted off to the sound of crickets and the distant bark of a dog.

Their house had two entrances: one on the east side, facing the gravel drive, and one on the west, which butted against an overgrown apple orchard. The west door was warped by years of rain and neglect; it took both of them to shove it open. So they always used the east door, the one with a working light and a porch where they kept their muddy boots.

I woke in the black belly of the night, and something in my chest felt like a clock winding too tight. The grown-ups snored. I slipped out of the quilts, my bare feet finding the cold floorboards. I was wearing only a thin white cotton gown and a pair of knit socks. I crept down the hallway, past the kitchen where the refrigerator hummed, and stopped at the west door. It was ajar, just a crack, as if someone had oiled it while we slept. I pushed with all my three-year-old strength, and it swung open without a sound, revealing a moonless night and the rank smell of fallen apples.

I stepped outside, my socks soaking up dew, and walked up the slope of Cider Hill Road, which climbed behind the house. I carried my little red shoes in one hand, the laces dragging. At the crest, the road flattened, and the whole valley spread out beneath me, dotted with the yellow squares of lit windows. I stopped and stood there, my nightgown flapping, and I felt a calm that was too large for my body.

A car came up the hill, its headlights washing over me. It slowed to a stop a few yards away. The driver, a man with a bald head and a tie loosened, rolled down his window. His wife leaned over. ‘Honey, are you lost?’ she asked. I didn’t answer. I just stared at the hood of their car. The man looked at his wife, then at me, and his jaw tightened. ‘I can’t touch her,’ he whispered, but I heard him. ‘If anything happens, they’ll blame me. Go get something from the house—it’s just across the street.’

The wife got out, leaving the door open, and hurried across the road to a two-story colonial with a wraparound porch. The man stayed in the car, his hands clenched on the wheel, watching me. I didn’t move. I felt the wet grass between my toes, the slight tickle of a caterpillar on my ankle. The wife returned with a quilt, and she wrapped it around me, scooping me up. I laid my head on her shoulder, and the man drove us back to Aunt Rita and Uncle Paul’s. They woke to the doorbell, and there was chaos, but I remember only the quilt and the smell of lavender.

For years, my mother told that story with a smile, but she always ended it with the same phrase: ‘And when they brought you back, the west door was locked from the inside, and no one had the key.’ I’m older now, and I’ve gone back to that farmhouse, which stands abandoned. I’ve tried the west door. It won’t budge, as if the frame has swollen shut. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear a child’s voice humming on Cider Hill Road, and I see a flicker of white in the apple orchard. And I know that door isn’t for us. It’s for them.