Not many would expect my mom to be a great cook, considering that most mothers who spend ten hours a day at work would rather order takeout when they get home, but cooking’s always been a stress reliever for her. As soon as she gets home, she changes out of her professor uniform of tweed slacks and a white blouse into her sweats and trusty apron. She digs through the fridge, opens her cookbook, and doesn’t say a word until the meat’s roasting or stewing or frying and the whole house smells like fresh herbs and melted butter.
One time I joked that this was her own form of decompression, her way of becoming human again after a long day in another world wearing a hat that wasn’t labeled MOTHER or WIFE. She smiled at me and said, “Yeah. I suppose you’re right.” And then I sat down on the stool on the other side of the kitchen island and she asked me what I learned in school that day. Before Dad disappeared, it was our usual routine—me sitting at the kitchen island while Mom cooked, both of us waiting for Dad to return from his evening patrol. Both of us anxious for him to get home before the sun went down, although we hid it well behind small talk and smiles that never quite reached our eyes.
Now, I’m the one who patrols the wood every evening, and Mom waits for me in the kitchen by herself, with no small talk to keep the anxiety at bay.
Water sluices over my hands. I pump a dollop of soap into my palm and scrub out the creases with my fingers. The polished obsidian coin hanging from the leather straps around my wrist clinks against the sink. I turn my hands over and notice a splotch of dried blood on my forearm. Peasant girl must have nicked me when she charged. I wash it off quickly before Mom notices and walk over to the table.
“Looks delicious.”
“I hope it tastes as good as it looks,” Mom replies, pulling back her chair. She always says this, even after cooking one of her tried-and-true recipes. She’s always been so humble that she’s never known how to take a compliment. It was one of the reasons Dad said he fell in love with her.
I tell her about my history paper, due at the end of the week, and the A that I got on my English test. It’s been three weeks since I had to skip a class to take care of a “disturbance” in the wood, so Mom doesn’t feel the need to remind me homeschooling is an option as she’s done on other nights. Instead, she tells me about her students and some archaeological dig in Turkey she’s thinking about joining next spring.
We both know she won’t. I can’t leave the wood, and she can’t leave me, even though I’d be fine on my own. Even though Uncle Joe would check up on me.
But neither of us says this.
Only ten minutes into the meal and there’s nothing else to talk about. Silence fills the room like water in a bowl, pulling us under into our own thoughts and fears and white noise.
IV
Dad sits me down in the study on the morning of my tenth birthday. It’s February, and nearly a foot of snow glitters outside the frosted window. He’s made me my favorite drink, a mug of cranberry cider warmed over the stove with cinnamon sticks and a dash of orange juice. Flames crackle in the fireplace, consuming bits of old newspaper with the freshly cut wood. A bowl of scented pinecones sits in the middle of the coffee table, where it has sat since Christmas. The pinecones have lost most of their scent, but Mom sees no reason to throw anything away that still serves a purpose, even if that purpose is purely decorative.
Dad folds himself into his favorite reading chair, ice-covered branches fracturing the window at his back, as I curl my legs up underneath me on the couch. There are presents on the dining room table and sticky buns baking in the oven, but he tells me they can wait. It is a hard thing to hear at ten years old, especially when one of the presents is shaped like the Barbie dream car I’ve wanted for months, but I scrunch my eyes down into my “serious” face anyway and set the mug on the coffee table.
“You’re old enough now,” he begins, “to know about the wood.”
I no longer have to try to forget my presents. They have left my mind completely.
He launches into a story that begins here, in this old country house made of strong timber and river stone, in the year it was built, 1794, though the Parishes had been protecting the thresholds for nearly eight hundred years before that. One of our ancestors journeyed to America when he heard of a particular patch of trees in the Northwest Territory, a piece of land the Native Americans called sacred and the settlers called cursed, where people went in and never came back out. Not a totally uncommon occurrence back then, of course, but the fact that the trees in question were located next to a river made our ancestor wonder if it was connected to the wood between worlds he was sworn to protect.
“You see, rivers are the power sources that connect the wood to our world,” Dad explains, but he must see something in my face that says I don’t understand, because he adds, “The wood is like a carousel, a spinning wheel that has no real beginning or end, just the platform where the conductor controls its power. Without power, the carousel does not turn.”
I frown at the carpet. “But with a carousel, there’s more than one way to get in and out, right?”
He smiles. “There are many points of entry, yes, just as there are many points of entry into the wood, but there are only a few power sources which keep the wood grounded in the space between worlds. Unlike other thresholds that open and close throughout time, the threshold behind our house and the thresholds located next to rivers around the world that act as these power sources are always open. This is why the guardians live next to these thresholds, so they can have constant access to the wood.”
“There’s more than one guardian?”
“Oh yes,” Dad says. “Ten families in all.”
He explains a lot to me that morning, things I don’t fully understand until he begins my proper lessons, with old journals and guided walks through the wood. He explains how the thresholds work and talks about ley lines, points of power that intersect, and the way the never-ending flow of the river gives the wood a unique source of power. He says worlds were never meant to be crossed, and it is our job to protect the wood from travelers, and to see those travelers home safely.
I learn that the thresholds always open at the same locations—in an alley in Los Angeles that used to be a grazing meadow, or in a market in Shanghai, or in some tiny corner of a place no one would even think to look at twice—little rips in the fabric of time. Some open for fifteen seconds, others for fifteen minutes. The longest open threshold on record was an hour, back when my dad was still in diapers. Grandpa sent a group of seventeen travelers back through the same threshold in one afternoon, herding them like cattle.