Chapter 2
DANNI
I stopped by a fast-food burger place on the way home and got myself a cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake.
I’d been living on fast-food for a while and it showed.
I’ve never been exactly skinny but at least when Craig was healthy I tried to watch my weight.
But in the last three years, eating had been my only comfort.
As we slid deeper and deeper into debt and my husband got sicker and sicker, I found myself “eating my feelings” more and more, until it became a habit.
That was the reason most of my clothes were too tight.
Back home, I pushed aside the dusty knitting paraphernalia on the dining room table and opened my laptop.
I used to love knitting—I even dreamed of opening my own little knitting shop one day.
But that dream was long dead and I hadn’t picked up a pair of knitting needles in months—possibly years, though I used to make myself sweaters and scarves to wear during winter all the time.
Of course, we don’t get much winter where I live in Central Florida, but I could wear them for a month at least—usually in January. I was the only woman I knew who literally had a hand-knitted sweater for every day of the month. Not that it did me much good.
I scrolled through my laptop and looked over my sad excuse for a resume as I ate the tasteless, cardboard burger and soggy fries and sipped the watery shake.
I sighed as I wondered who would want to hire a middle-aged, overweight woman with sad, tired eyes and no recent work experience. Nobody, that’s who.
I couldn’t believe I was going to have to start looking for employment but I knew if I didn’t find something fast, I really was going to be out on my ass. Since living in my car wasn’t very appealing, I’d better start looking.
Tomorrow, I told myself, yawning. I’ll start looking tomorrow. I just can’t face it tonight.
One thing nobody tells you about grief is how sleepy it makes you.
Seriously, I’d been sleeping for ten and twelve hours a night since Craig’s funeral, and I found myself getting sleepy throughout the day, too.
It was like my mind wanted to hide from reality and sleeping was the refuge it sought.
In my dreams, my husband was still alive and healthy and I was young and happy again.
When I woke up and remembered the reality of my sad, lonely life, all I wanted to do was go back to sleep.
Maybe I should just go to sleep and never wake up again.
I eyed the bottle of sleeping meds on my nightstand as I climbed into the big, empty bed I used to share with my late husband. A handful would probably do it. At the moment death felt easier than life.
I stared at the bottle for a long time before my eyelids got heavy.
It wasn’t just that I missed my husband—I did, but Craig hadn’t been the man I married for years before he died.
The cancer ate away at him until there was nothing left of the big, strong man I had said “I do” to in our early twenties.
We hadn’t even had sex in the past three years—he was too sick and the chemo and other medications he took left him impotent.
But it wasn’t just grief that made me consider an overdose—it was the overwhelming struggle I knew was coming.
Finding a job to keep the house, or if I couldn’t find one, living out of my car or maybe moving to a shelter.
It sounded awful and I felt so tired. Too tired to struggle anymore.
I felt like I’d been treading water for years, trying to keep from drowning.
Now that Craig was gone, it seemed like my life was over and it would be easier to just let my head slip below the water.
With these dreary thoughts in my head, I finally drifted off.
I woke up at ten the next morning—only because the sunlight was shining in my eyes. I groaned and rolled over, pressing my face into the pillow as I remembered all over again that I was a widow now. A middle-aged, plus-sized widow with no family to turn to.
Craig and I hadn’t been able to have kids and we had talked about adopting…
but then he got sick. As for the rest of my family, my father had died when I was only seven and my mom had moved us to another state when I was ten, so I never got to see my Grandma, who was his mother, again.
She was dead too—I’d found that out when I moved away from home and tried to contact her.
Of course, it wasn’t like every relative I had was deceased.
My mom was probably still around but I had been estranged from her for years.
She would be in her late sixties now. I supposed I could try to reach out…
but then I remembered all the horrible things she’d said to me.
The way she wouldn’t believe me about Duke, my stepfather when I tried to tell her what he was trying to do to me…
I pushed that thought out of my mind fast. Even thirty years after the fact, it didn’t bear thinking of.
Craig’s parents had become my family when we started dating in college. They had welcomed me like a daughter and I had loved them dearly. Unfortunately, both of them had passed in the last ten years of our marriage and they didn’t have any other children—Craig had been an only child.
So I really was alone in the world. Remembering that made me want to roll over and go back to sleep.
Instead, I forced myself out of bed and into the shower. I washed and dried my hair and I even slapped on a little make-up. I thought about getting dressed and going outside for a walk, but it was past eleven by then—too damn hot.
As I said, I live in Florida where it’s pretty much miserable outside from May to October.
I spend six whole months of the year scurrying from the car to the house or from the car to the grocery store—running from one air-conditioned spot to another.
Anything to avoid the nasty, sticky heat that makes you feel like you’re being broiled alive under the glaring sunlight that’s always beaming down like a heat-ray.
When you were little, you could wish for a cloud to cover the sun and it would, whispered a little voice in my head.
I shook my head, frowning—where had that come from?
It’s true, whispered the voice. Remember Rebecca Hurly and the crayons? What about Dennis Stevens and his teeth? What about the crow with the crooked neck? Or the flower that never wilted?
My frown deepened. Why was I suddenly having these half-formed memories from a childhood I had done my best to forget?
I pushed them away and pulled on a fresh nightshirt and a robe as well as my little ballet-type slippers that Craig always bought me.
Then I went downstairs to make a cup of coffee.
As I drank it, I looked at the envelope again. The beautiful handwriting spelling out my name still looked vaguely familiar—where had I seen it before?
I looked inside to take out the keys and that was when I saw that I’d missed something. Folded up very small in the bottom of the envelope was a tiny piece of paper.
I dug it out and unfolded it to see more of the gorgeous, flowing script. I frowned as I read it—it was some kind of rhyme.
Use the key to draw a door,
From the ceiling to the floor.
Open it and you will see,
Where you are supposed to be.
“Huh,” I said aloud and took another sip of coffee. What the hell was this supposed to mean? Was I really supposed to draw a door with the key? And if so, which key?
I looked down at the two keys in my hand and saw that the larger one—the one that looked like it might unlock the gates to a mansion—was glowing.
I nearly dropped it out of reflex—usually anything metal that’s glowing is red-hot. But I realized that this wasn’t the case. The large metal key with the ornate head was still quite cool to the touch. It was just…glowing.
Maybe that’s the answer to your question, whispered that little voice in my head. Maybe that’s the key you’re supposed to use to draw the door.
It felt like a part of me—like a voice from my past that had just woken up for some reason. The question was, should I listen to it?
I looked at the glowing key in my hand again. It was either try drawing a door to see what happened…or crack open my laptop and start applying for jobs I knew I wasn’t qualified for.
No contest.
I put the chain with the smaller key around my neck and it settled between my breasts. Then I went to the wall closest to my dining room table with the larger key in my hand. Hmm…the poem had said I should draw from the ceiling to the floor but I couldn’t reach that high. Should I get a chair?
I did that, pushing the chair I had been sitting on right up to the wall. I dragged the head of the large key up from the baseboard—which needed to be dusted—up as far as I could. Then I climbed on the chair and continued drawing, extending the line all the way up to the ceiling.
The key left a faint scratch on the tan paint of the dining room wall and it occurred to me that I was ruining my wall for no good reason.
But what the hell, I probably wasn’t going to get to keep the house anyway.
The mortgage was due at the end of the month and I didn’t even have a third of the money I needed to pay it.
I decided to keep drawing.
I leaned over as far as I could to draw the top of the door and then extended the line downward, all the way to the floor. I hopped off the chair and stepped back to admire my handiwork. There—I had scratched a tall but rather narrow doorway on my dining room wall. Now what?
Nothing, seemed to be the answer, because nothing was happening. I was just about to give up this nonsense and start job hunting when that annoying little voice whispered in my ear again.
How can the door open with no knob to turn? It asked.
Well, good point. Feeling foolish, I stepped up to the door again and scratched out a knob to one side of the center. Then I stepped back again with my arms over my breasts and waited for more nothing to happen.
It did, for the next five seconds. I was about to give up again when I noticed something strange…the scratches I had made in the paint were glowing.
“Shit!” I whispered to myself, raking a hand through my curls. I took off my glasses and cleaned them on the hem of my t-shirt. But when I put them back on, the scratches were still glowing…and the space inside them was beginning to look like an actual door.
I watched, my jaw hanging open, as the door solidified and the round circle I’d scratched became an actual brass doorknob. Holy shit—I’d drawn a door and it had become real! Like really real.
Well don’t just stand there—go through it! commanded the little voice in my head. Go on—go! Before it fades away!
I stood there for a moment, feeling stunned. Then I grabbed the envelope and the scrap of paper off the dining room table and shoved them both into my robe pocket.
I half expected that this was all another dream and that the doorknob wouldn’t turn. But when I grasped it in my hand and twisted, it turned with no resistance at all. “As smooth as butter” my Grandma used to say.
I frowned—why was I thinking of her now when I hadn’t seen her in over thirty years? But the question was soon driven out of my mind because when I pushed, the door swung open and I saw it…
A whole new world waiting just for me.