The portal opens for the first time the week after the move, when you go upstairs to search the unopened boxes in the walk-in closet. Surely, you think, one of them contains the grill pan, so you can cook bacon the way Zach likes it for his first weekend home from college.
But when you open the closet door, there’s a dark void, a page torn out of reality. It sucks in light like the horrid black nail polish Clare wore when she was thirteen.
Your first thought is: this is why we got the house for less than asking. Your next is of the days, long ago, when you would have given anything to have your closet open onto another world, like something out of a childhood story. But now, instead of childlike wonder, there’s middle-aged apathy, and instead of snowflakes in lantern-light there’s…this. The darkness at the bottom of a bottomless well.
You slam the door shut. The happy endings in those stories were always bullshit, anyhow.
•••
When you look again fifteen minutes later, the walk-in closet is a closet again. You find the grill pan lodged at the bottom of a box labelled Misc Bdrm, but it turns out Zach has plans with friends the whole weekend anyway. The bacon languishes on the back of the stove, uneaten. Clare, three weeks a vegan, pauses on her way to god-knows-where to yell, “Bacon, Mom? You know pigs are smarter than toddlers, right?” So you choke it down yourself, standing in the kitchen in bathrobe and sock feet, listening to the muffled howl of Glenn watching hockey in the basement. The congealed fat lies sticky on your tongue.
•••
Date night. You’re supposed to go to a movie; you don’t know which one—or care, particularly—but you want to find an outfit that will feel right when you lean your head against Glenn’s shoulder in the theater, the way you used to do. Five years ago, maybe. Or ten.
The closet opens on a fold of endless obsidian.
You pause. And pause, and then—then, you go in.
Later, someone will ask why. Your therapist likes to ask questions like that, his bushy eyebrows quizzical, as if he can’t imagine what could possibly lead someone to step into the endless dark. You tell him it was because you knew (because the future is just the past, multiplied) that in five minutes your phone would buzz: gotta stay late tonight for budget stuff, don’t wait up, and when you tried to text back, the words would catch in your fingers, clutch in your fists.
But that wasn’t the real reason. Really, it was—when in your life had a door ever opened just for you?
•••
What is it like inside, your therapist wants to know. He does that thing with his eyebrows again. It’s hard to tell if he believes you.
There are a lot of things you might say in response. You might say: the first time you went in, when you fumbled for the light on your phone, nothing happened; the phone in your hand felt like a dead thing, like the broken bird Zach found in the yard as a toddler. The next time you took a flashlight, and it flicked on, hung a paper moon mid-air, but the light didn’t penetrate the darkness.
Or: inside, it’s so dark you can’t see your hands in front of your face. It’s a slice out of a black hole, standing water in a cave that has never seen sunlight. There’s no smell, no sound; even your voice—Hello? Anybody in here?—comes out muffled, like somebody pressed the damper pedal on a piano. It has the same quality as the silence at the dinner table, most evenings: you can tell no-one’s listening.
You don’t say any of that.
You say: it’s just an empty place in the dark, that’s all.
•••
You call it the Empty. If the name lacks the poetry of the other worlds you read about as a child, well, there are no talking animals or grand adventures or evil queens in there, either. There’s nothing in there, and whatever you feel when you go in doesn’t come back out.
The slow choke of traffic on your commute home, windshield wipers slashing through the endless winter deluge, the flare of rage as another smear of orange lights cuts you off without so much as a blinker—
Jill’s weekly telephone calls, the grinding guilt of Mom’s perilously close to needing to go into a home, she’ll hate it, all those strangers all the time, and when Clare moves out you’ll have an extra room—
Adam, your boss, laughing at the women who pay him too much money to handle their divorces, the boiling rush of anger as he tells you what he thinks turned their husbands against them. This one’s tits, that one’s nose, her ass. The breathy way this one cries—
The Empty takes it all.
•••
It’s a few months before you understand exactly what’s happening when you go inside. In your defense, none of your childhood reading prepared you for the emotional appetites of your walk-in closet; you were ready for magic spells, for glorious battles, for castle keeps. It’s a bit of an adjustment. The evidence keeps mounting, though: when Jill says, smirking, looks like you’ve gained a couple pounds; when your mother calls you by her dead sister’s name; when Zach phones home just to say he needs more money on his cafeteria card—you smile, and smile, and none of it seems to touch you.
One afternoon Clare catches you standing in front of the closet door, fingers on the handle, thoughtful.
“Mom,” she says, leaning into the bedroom. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” you say. “Just—looking for something.”
“With the door closed?”
You shrug. “Do you need something?”
The kids always need something, always have complaints about how you aren’t providing it in quite the right way. Seven years ago, when you realized you were pregnant again, you had an abortion, and kept it secret; you didn’t want Glenn to realize you couldn’t stand to have another child, that you desperately wanted to stop feeling like nothing—nothing more than a mother, nothing more than a wife—
The abortion couldn’t erase those feelings. But the Empty—
“You said you’d drive me downtown tonight, remember?” Clare says.
“We’ll go in ten minutes,” you say, waving her away. You wait until you hear her stomping down the hall before you open the door.
Inside, it’s dark as a buried tomb. Horrid, sure, but once you’re inside you can admit that there’s something soothing about it, too; something about the way the dark and silence press down on you, like a weighted blanket.
When you come back out three minutes later, Clare’s complaints—why can’t I stay out late like my friends, when are you going to get me a car, can I have twenty bucks—wash over you like white noise, the static of a detuned radio. Maybe you were wrong, you think. Maybe there’s magic in the Empty after all.
•••
The Empty has its own rules, as every portal does. You learn them, through trial and error. Like—some days, the closet remains a closet (stuffed with Glenn’s suits, the bland wrap dresses you wear to work, boxes of abandoned sheet music) no matter how many times you try the door. At first, you think that’s just the nature of portals, that they choose who comes in, choose when they open, but after a while you accept the truth: this one only opens when you have something to offer.
That’s no problem. You have so many emotions that aren’t doing anything except holding you back—why not drag them out into the light, feed them to the Empty? Let it steal your anger, your anxiety, all the feelings that boil beneath your skin, that threaten to spill out and scald you. You never wanted them anyway.
“You seem mellow lately,” Glenn says, watching as you load the dishwasher. “You haven’t even nagged me about my laundry this week.” He makes a self-deprecating gesture that somehow holds within it twenty-two years of you picking up his forgotten laundry, washing it, drying it, folding it. You took that resentment to the Empty weeks ago, though, along with the seven thousand three hundred and forty-seven times you’ve done the dishes, and now? Now, here you are cleaning up after dinner and not minding at all.
“Is that a bad thing?”
He shrugs. “Just weird, that’s all.”
You wonder what he would say if you told him the truth. “I’ve been trying some guided breathing exercises. Kind of like meditation.”
“Well,” he says. “Keep it up, I guess.”
•••
How does it feel, when—the therapist makes air quotes around the name—the Empty takes your feelings?
You think about it for a while, staring out the office window at the dead leaves of some spindly boulevard tree. Last night, you took in the creeping shame you feel whenever you pass by the neglected electric keyboard, that sorry excuse for an instrument you got after you let the upright fall out of tune and gather dust and Glenn talked you into selling it. You took in the knowledge that you squandered whatever musical talent you had in singing lullabies and nursery rhymes.
All of that, surrendered to the waiting dark. What did it feel like?
Like an epidural, you decide; pain swallowed whole, leaving you to swoon into the absence that followed. He won’t understand that, though, so you come out with the next closest thing. “You know when you have a filling done at the dentist, after the freezing goes in? It’s like that. Like that part of me isn’t there anymore.”
“Almost like you’re numb?” Now he’s frowning.
The session ends early. Honestly, you might stop going. You’ve made more progress in the last six months with the Empty than you have in four years with the therapist.
•••
Here’s another thing you learn: time is strange in the Empty.
In the stories, they went through the portals as children, grew up inside, and then, when they came out—were expelled, really, because that’s another thing portals do—no time at all had passed. Or maybe it was the opposite: a minute inside, a lifetime out.
With the Empty it’s not like that, not at first. At first, no matter how long you think you’ve been inside, when you come out it’s been three minutes, give or take. Then, after a while, time begins to stretch: you lose an hour, two. One day you stumble out to find that four hours have passed in seconds. Where are you, your phone bleats, filled with Glenn’s frantic texts. Zach called, he’s struggling with things at school and I don’t know what to say, you’ve always been better at dealing with that sort of stuff—
The next time you go in, you lose half the day. You never bother calling Zach back.
You sit in the dark and imagine opening the closet door to find fifty years have passed, Glenn dead, Clare and Zach grown old. Children and grandchildren of their own. You would be the story they told of the mother that disappeared; of the mother who went into the walk-in closet and never came back; of the mother who ran away, who abandoned them. How would they describe you, you wonder; would time and absence wash away your edges, transform you into the perfect mother? Would they reminisce about the little moments—Clare’s seventh birthday, when you rented a karaoke machine and belted out ‘90s pop hits together; the snow day when both kids were still little enough to crawl beneath the covers and pretend to find a whole new world hiding under the duvet; Zach’s comedy routines at eleven, where you laughed uproariously, no matter how terrible the jokes? Or maybe they’d barely mention you at all. Maybe they’d let you fade away to nothing; just a person they used to know.
The thought doesn’t bother you. At one point you cared about that sort of thing, but now—now, you can’t seem to remember why.
•••
Is this really what you want, your therapist asks. (You never got around to firing him. It seemed like a lot of effort.) He leans forward in his armchair, fingers steepled. Behind him, a long row of self-important books by self-important men, bound in glossy red leather.
All these years, you have said to me, I want something more, more than the grind of suburban middle-class motherhood—
I don’t know, you tell him. I don’t know what I want.
When you get home, the house is quiet. Glenn is at work; Clare is out somewhere with her friends, and your phone—well, it doesn’t ring much anymore. You stand in front of the door,
looking in at the place where your closet should be.
There it is, you think, almost fondly: the Empty.
Here, in the face of the void, you can admit: that was a lie. This is what you want. It’s not the portal you dreamed of, long ago; it’s not a door to somewhere shiny and glorious, doesn’t open on a grand adventure. But who has the energy for that, anyway? No; you got the portal you needed.
It almost makes you believe in happy endings.
