Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

Yet she had her quiet days, her pensive ones, those days when she dug through her memories, trying to find the truth at the bottom of them.

As if the truth were a jewel you could unearth and hold in your hand, as if the truth wasn’t more like something you’d find under a rock, gray and faceless and squirming away from the light.

Once, Frankie had believed that only people whose hearts were true could sleep so soundly, but that was a long time ago.

The whole damned room was beautiful because it was her room, hers and her sister’s. That was something she could hold on to, even when so much else had been lost.

Of course, it wasn’t her mother’s voice she heard. It was mine. Because the dead never sleep, you see. We have so many other things to do.

Perhaps it was mean to lie. But they were only babies. They would discover the churning furnace of this world soon enough.

More than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929, too many people were still reeling—out of work, homeless. Rather than watching their children go hungry, they gave the kids over to the care of the nuns. A few beatings and a whole lot of church seemed a small price to pay for food and shelter—at least, that was what the parents told themselves. Some of these parents would visit their “half orphans” every other Sunday.

Frankie could almost taste the chocolate melting on her tongue. I could almost taste it.

This is weird, because we’re in the head of the ghost, but the ghost knows what Frankie is feeling and doing? Odd perspective

as my mother had often reminded me, I only looked harmless. That’s the problem with girls, she said. They trick you every time.

Once I’d confessed to my own mother that I thought God was a woman, because who but a woman would care so much about the oceans and the plants and the animals, who but a woman could build a whole world in seven days?

I love this quote so much

had seen Father Paul in his striped pajamas, curled up in his bed like a child. Once you’ve seen someone in their striped pajamas curled up like a child, eyes shifting under thin lids, it’s hard to think of him as a person you should trust with your deepest secrets, your greatest sins, a person who could offer you absolution.

I might be doomed to watch, but I could choose what to witness.

Soon, though, they half forgot about it, and ended up talking about the things they always did: food they wished they had to eat, the way they’d wear their hair if they could. That’s the amazing thing, that you could half forget a war. But you could. Especially when that war is fought far away across the ocean,

How nice to be a man, to be free to read a monster book in public without anyone worried that you would turn into a monster yourself.

all the other truths of a body that seem so mundane when that body is yours, and so fascinating when that body belongs to someone else.

“Don’t get smart with me.” Frankie hated when Sister said that. She hated when any of the nuns said that. What did they want the girls to be, dumb?

Death was everywhere, but it seemed to have so little to do with me; nothing but a bunch of scary stories that my parents spoke about in hushed tones when they thought their children were asleep.

“Books are weapons in the war of ideas!” She knew they were in a war, but she didn’t think it was about ideas.

“Nothing is funny about war,” Sister said. “But one must find reasons to laugh anyway, especially when nothing is funny. Sometimes joy is the only defense you have, and your only weapon. Remember that.”

He thought the shelves of books made him appear cultured, a man of many interests, even a man of secret passions. He wasn’t.

According to my mother, no book is only a book. A book can improve your mind or it can break it, I said.

Frankie was the story. She moved in one direction, she had a beginning and a middle and a possible painless end.

But there was sadness twisting through her laughter, woven into it, a grief she couldn’t name, a fear that the future would never come and a fear that it would, a strange sense that she wouldn’t be strong enough to meet it.

How beautiful the flowers, how beautiful this boy. How terrible this place that worked so hard to keep them apart, to keep them all from one another. How horrible a war howling across the ocean that could whisk him away as easily as the wind tears a leaf from a tree.

I did not hear the howling of wolves, but I could hear the voice of the girl in gold: You lie to yourself.

The world keeps many secrets from itself, the angel said. But it can’t keep secrets from you without your permission.

Whoever promised you that you would never get hurt was lying, she said.

Do you always give everything away so soon? Never, I said. Then: Always. Me too, she said. Me too.

But hearts sometimes want what they shouldn’t, she said. Such is the way of hearts.

Another door, I said. What? Doors can be dangerous. You never know what’s on the other side, what you’re letting in. True, she said. In stories, girls are always opening doors, always the wrong ones. Always crossing thresholds thinking they’re getting away free. Nothing is free.

It doesn’t matter which door you open, she said. Three or ten or thirteen doorways, there are wolves behind them all.

I didn’t tell her that maybe the lights were just one more door that we should hesitate to open.

Names have power. He didn’t want to give away what little he had.

Somehow hearing that happy song at such a sad time made her that much sadder, as if happy songs were nothing but wishes, fleeting as the first blooms of spring.

Sensible. Responsible. In control. What if she wanted to get a little out of control? What if she already had? What if she was tired of being so responsible all the time? Didn’t she deserve more?

Even when the fury of it had passed like a thunderstorm, and we lay panting in the pine needles, I didn’t feel any shame, I wouldn’t damn myself for it. Who wanted to be a girl in a box—a jewel, a stone? Who wouldn’t want to feel that alive?

She pictured Beatriz ripping a gun from the belt of a felled soldier, taking aim at a passing plane, pulling the trigger till the bullets ran out. Then she imagined herself doing the same things—running, aiming, shooting. Why not a woman? she thought. Why not?

there is joy in everything, even in sadness,

Why does the world demand girls be beautiful, but when they are, punish them for it? Why does it punish girls either way? Why does the world want girls to be sorry, some even more than others? Sorry, sorrier, sorriest.

I don’t know how the other girls do all these things. I don’t know how the other girls are girls. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Every closed door was a test, every open one was a trap. And now she was going to shut this door and no one would be able to hear her scream over the sound of the typewriters.

What do you do when the story you’ve been telling yourself about yourself is a lie? When your heart has been broken so many times and so fast it feels like little chewed bits of it are traveling the length of your body, beating all over?

There were girls who had worked too hard or loved God too much, girls who’d been caught with pillows clutched between their thighs, girls who had just been caught—with boys, with girls, with babies, with drink, with ideas, with a temper, with a plan.

Girls were punished so hard for their love, so hard, hard enough to break them.

We are all our own devils, and we make this world our hell. Oscar Wilde had said that.

One day she would wake up, one day she would see me, one day she would forgive me, one day I would forgive myself. And maybe, one day, she would see herself, know herself. I had transgressed, but she wasn’t a transgression. She was everything good and beautiful in the world.

Every little decision you made, every person you met could change your life, set it on a different course, or end it.