Back Through the Blue Door

They walked back up the hill together as the strange golden sky above the Inbetween began to shift into something that was almost like dusk, the green at the edges deepening, the gold becoming richer and warmer.

The blue door was where Milo had left it, standing alone on the hillside.

He stopped in front of it. He turned around to look at the valley one more time. The silver river. The rooftops of Fallow. The glowing moss on the roofs. The door somewhere behind him that had appeared where it was not supposed to be because, apparently, he had needed it to.

He thought he understood now what Dort had meant. About paying attention. About not looking for one thing and missing everything else around it. He had come through the door looking for something interesting, and he had found something true instead, which was better and harder and more useful.

He had not expected to find anything through the door except something interesting, which was all he had been looking for when he turned the handle that morning. He had not expected to sit by a river in another world and think clearly about his dad for the first time since any of this had started. He had not expected it to help.

But it had.

"Will the door come back?" he asked Senna. "If I look for it again?"

Senna considered this. "Sometimes," she said. "If you need it." She paused. "You probably will not need it. But sometimes it is good to know it is there."

He nodded. He looked at the door.

"Thank you," he said. Not just to Senna but to the hillside and the valley and the strange golden sky and the silver river and all of it.

Senna smiled. It was the first full smile he had seen from her and it changed her face completely. "Go on then," she said.

He turned the handle. The lane was on the other side, grey and ordinary and Tuesday morning, a little further along in the day now, the light shifted, probably late enough that he was going to be very late for school.

He stepped through.

He turned around. The door was still there for a moment, blue and quiet in the stone wall. Then it was not.

Just the wall, moss-covered and solid, the same as it had always looked from the lane.

Milo stood very still for a moment. Then he turned and walked to school. He was late. His teacher asked why and he said he had stopped to look at something on the way, which was entirely true.

He walked fast, his hands in his pockets, and the ordinary sounds of the lane came back around him gradually. A car in the distance. A dog barking somewhere. The postman's trolley squeaking down a nearby street. All of it perfectly normal and somehow very good to hear.

That evening his dad came for dinner, the way he had been doing on Tuesdays. They sat at the table, the three of them, and it was awkward the way it had been awkward for weeks. But after dinner Milo said: "Dad, can we go to the market on Saturday? I want to try making that fish soup you showed me last month."

His dad looked at him across the table. Something in his face shifted, the way things shift when they change shape into something better.

"Yes," his dad said. "Absolutely yes."

Milo nodded and started clearing the plates.

The blue door had not fixed anything. His parents were still his parents and the end of the month was still coming and things were still going to be different.

But different was not the same as broken.

He thought Senna would be pleased he had remembered that.

***The End***