Doors
By Beatrice Garrard
I met Lillian on Tinder, but secretly I thought my dead grandmother had sent her. Like my grandmother, Lillian was a Democrat, raised Episcopalian, and had a deep and tender love for plants. Like my grandmother she believed in reading aloud to the people you love, and mending old clothes before buying new ones. When we hiked, I wanted to climb uphill until my thighs burned. She wanted to pause and pet the mosses. I liked the way she moved through the world, admiring handsome spiders, sniffing ponderosa trees. When I got frustrated over the political situation, and all the people who hated us, she told me that everyone was just doing their best.
I had no idea how my Christian grandmother had pulled off this conjuring trick. I was Jewish, if anything, and had only set foot in churches while sightseeing in Europe. But when I sat by my grandmother’s bedside, clutching her hand for two days as she died, I saw the sky open. There we were, in her room with the cranked-up hospice bed, unseasonable November sunshine pouring through the windows. I looked out at those enormous Doug firs with the searing blue sky like a coin in the middle and felt the blue fall open with a gush. I wasn’t daydreaming. Not sleeping either. Then, my grandmother breathed out and didn’t breathe in again.
A year after that, when I saw the same light in a field in Montana surrounding Lillian as she waded through the tall grass, I told her I’d already remembered that moment — her orange shirt, dark hair, golden sun, everything. She teared up at that. She was applying for jobs all over the country. A month later, after the Missoula winter had clubbed us into submission, she got a good gig in Georgia two thousand miles away.
“I’ll buy your ticket back from Atlanta,” she told me, although we hadn’t decided to stay together. Neither of us was keen on doing long-distance. Still, she wanted company for the drive. “I’ll take you to Waffle House.”
“Sure,” I said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
When I explained the plan to my roommate and her boyfriend, they burst into worried laughter. Blizzards were predicted for the Midwestern states.
“When you ask what’s the worst thing that could happen,” Cass told me, “there’s always an answer.”
“Yeah,” said Alex. “Like skidding off an icy road and getting eaten by bears.”
Lillian and I had decided to save money by camping along the way, despite it being the dead of December. On the first night, we pulled off the highway and trundled down a long potholed road to the campground we’d Googled. It was fifteen degrees, less with windchill, the gusts howling as they scraped the canyon raw. The rangers had locked all the vault toilets. An owl kept calling from somewhere, a burrow maybe, since there was hardly a tree in sight.
We jammed stakes into the rocky ground, and heaped the three-season tent with every pillow, blanket, fleece, and parka we could claw out of the moving boxes. I shivered all night and woke with my muscles aching. Observing the watery winter light shining through the tarp, I was relieved to find that — like Shackleton — I had somehow survived. And Lillian was gone. As I checked for missing toes, I made a few calculations. How long had we known each other? Five months? Was I insane?
When I stumbled out of our crumpled nest, I found her brewing coffee on an alcohol stove. It was so hot and good-smelling I wanted to cry.
“How did you sleep?” she said.
“I didn’t, exactly.”
In fact, I’d dreamed about that owl, and the book where it calls people’s names before they die. But the canyon didn’t look so desolate in morning. Ribs of snow striped the red rock. Banks of clouds — brown, pink, gray — muted the sunrise. We took reference pictures for Lillian’s grandmother, who was part of a sky-painting club in Georgia. Then we hit the road. The wind from the heater dried out my throat and defrosted my bone marrow until, at last, I felt human again.
In the Badlands, we saw herds of bighorn sheep, brought back from the brink — a few dozen of the wary, muscled beasts, their necks bent over the frozen grass. We stopped, shivering, to see the layer-cake hills: a purple strip of fossilized mulch from a long-dead jungle, the yellow of a dead sea, and then a jungle again. We witnessed the spot where Chief Big Foot’s people had carried him over the wall of earth, pursued by White soldiers. They were limping toward Pine Ridge, searching for a place where their children could be warm. Though most of them never got there, or made it past Wounded Knee.
We were the sort of people who were hurt by the past. I was in the thick of a history PhD, and should’ve known better.
“It’s a relief sometimes,” I said, as we drove through the Martian landscape. “To think in terms of geologic time.”
“Human time matters,” Lillian said, looking at me like I’d said something shitty.
“Yeah, but it’s a relief, don’t you think? To remember that there will be more oceans and more jungles?”
“You can’t use that as an excuse to give up on the now.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, without candor.
Outside the boundaries of the park, barbed wire fences sprang back into existence. Billboards screamed at us to stop in a small South Dakotan town and meet a camel named Orville. You could pay to feed him peanuts out of your hand.
“Do you think he’s warm enough?” Lillian said, with genuine concern.
I wanted to say, You worry too much. Instead I told her, “They must keep him in a barn.”
Not long after the Badlands flattened out, we drove past the body of a bighorn sheep heaped in snow. I glimpsed the curl of its horn, a spiral ammonite in silt. I pretended not to notice, for her sake. She pretended not to notice, for mine.
That’s how it went — stretches of wild country, the sweep of snow and grass and stone. Then asphalt and neon signs with the letters missing. Those patches of urban mange sprang up again and again. The farther east we got, the shorter the pauses in between. I was from the Seattle suburbs, and though box-store wastelands depressed me, I was used to them. Lillian, on the other hand, grew up on a farm. She was going to fight forest fires in the Chattahoochee. I was proud of her. But it also seemed a kind of high-stakes whack-a-mole—not like a thesis you can finish or a law you can pass and expect your achievement to stand.
Somewhere in Kentucky, the hills grew lush again. Torrents of rain slashed the windshield. Our phones buzzed with flood alerts we chose to ignore. As we came up on the Land Between the Lakes, Lillian told me that it used to be the Land Between the Rivers; there was only one natural lake in all of Tennessee.
“And it didn’t even exist until 1812.”
“How did that happen?”
“It used to be a river. Then an earthquake hit. The land cracked open, and the river flooded into a lake.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Geology,” she said.
We embarked on an ill-advised hike, squelching down a swampy trail. Out of the drenched ground sprouted neon green moss and crispy blue lichens. Heaps of orange mushrooms wriggled out of the downed logs. It was rupture. It was creation. It was extremely fucking damp.
Looking at the draped vines and twisting streams, I felt a twinge of déjà vu. A framed photo used to hang in my grandmother’s living room. The woods in the picture were not like our own, but I’d assumed, as I always assumed with deciduous trees, that they’d been photographed in New England. She’d told me once about a trip with my grandfather, long before I was born. They’d toured Sewanee, his alma mater, and visited their eldest son in Kentucky. Of course they’d been here. My grandmother would’ve taken pictures and perhaps displayed the best. There was nowhere she didn’t look like a tourist, her camera swinging from her neck.
By then we were heading back to the car, through air as wet and warm as a childhood garden. Rays of sun hit the mist and fractured, golden-brown. I had the sensation, strange but not unpleasant, that we were walking through spiderwebs. Each strand we broke clung to our slick jackets. Each step we took, we waded through cool molasses. The raindrops hung suspended. In that instant I thought I would see her, dark-haired and light-stepping as she was when she helped raise me, wearing her sporty little raincoat, bright cardinal red.
Instead, I saw a white tree. No leaves, only branches. Bones in the dusk.
“What species is that?” I asked.
I don’t know if Lillian had seen the years shuck away. But there was reverence in her voice when she told me, “A sycamore.”
We liked the sound of that, and said it a few more times. The webs fell away. We stepped back into our lives.
*
Lillian didn’t broach the subject of our future until the morning of my flight. Even then, we drove an hour and a half in silence. When we saw the lights of Atlanta, she asked.
“It’s only until May,” I said. “And, I like you. I’m not ready for this to be over.”
“I like you, too.”
As they say in Yiddish: an understatement from Understatementland. If that was a place, we would’ve been empresses. Instead, we kissed and went off to different parts of the country.
That was the January of 2020. I returned to the Soviet-gray grad student housing, where I had to make my own breakfast and sleep in my own bed. There wasn’t enough snow to ski on. Australia was on fire. I had just gotten a digital subscription to the New York Times and was staying well-informed about all the ways in which the world was tearing itself apart.
I thought, Grandma would’ve donated so much money to Elizabeth Warren. She would’ve been crazy about Lillian, squeezed her hand and fed her Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and told her all about growing up in Peru, Illinois. She would’ve offered us the wedding ring my grandfather gave her, a tiny diamond set in gold. It was mine now. I could give it to Lillian whenever we wanted, if we ever wanted. But that wasn’t the same.
“My brother’s scared,” I told Lillian over the phone. We talked every day, sometimes for hours. “His husband, too. They’re getting enhanced Washington State driver’s licenses in case the election goes to shit, and they have to flee to Canada. Is that alarmist, or just smart?”
“It can be both.”
“My mom read something about epigenetics once. Now she thinks our fear of Fascists is inherited. We’re scared because we’re Jewish; we’re alive because we’re scared.”
“I don’t think safety comes from distrusting the people around you,” Lillian said. “It comes from surrounding yourself with people you trust.”
“Like Canadians.”
She laughed. “Maybe.”
“Seriously, though. America is haunted. Is this where we should be building our lives?”
We fell quiet. I liked Missoula—the warm pine and dust smell of the Rattlesnake in summer, the queer dance parties they sometimes threw in breweries or barns. But rent was high, and climbing higher. Surely it wasn’t the only mountain town where the straights wouldn’t wish us dead.
“How about this?” Lillian said. “We’ll only work as much as we have to. We’ll travel around and try out different places until we find one we love.”
And this, this was nothing like my grandmother, who stopped leaving her house years before she stopped being mobile. Lillian told me once that when she got old she would chain herself to a bulldozer. She’d climb into an old-growth tree and refuse to climb out. In the last few years, when I visited her every day, Grandma and I could’ve bounced around in her wheelchair and taken pictures of flowers. Instead, we sat at the kitchen table and studied her old duplicates — pine trees, Puget Sound, pink azaleas. The billowing clouds she always said were better on the West Coast.
“I do like a good road trip,” I said.
“What would you look for?”
“A community. A place with seasons. I don’t know. What about you?”
“I want a few acres,” Lillian said.
“Do you think that’s enough?”
I meant for the goats and the chickens and the garden. Also — I hadn’t mentioned this — a knot of aspens for the yard. I wanted to sit in the middle of that light-filled grove and read in the summers, listening to the rustle the leaves make in a strong breeze.
“It’s plenty,” Lillian said. Her voice was so warm I thought I could dive into it, swim through it, find a space on the other side.
It is plenty, I told myself. I’d glimpsed it for a second, through the darkness and the fog: a world riddled with doors. We would open them until the last one opened for us. We would try them all, then step through into the sky.
Beatrice Baltuck Garrard (she/they) is a queer, Seattle-based writer with an MFA from the University of Montana and a history degree from Stanford. Her work has appeared in The Jewish Quarterly and StoryQuarterly, and received the International Amy Levy Short Story Prize.