Fern Falco's Arc

Chapter 32 of 2

Fern sat on the serpent's flat coils with the blank door before her. She had given up drawing it from want. A door needs a memory, and she had none of home. The golden moons rested in her lap, warm against her chest. The other girl had a cabin, a lamp, a mother who waited. Fern had only a dark rectangle that would never open. Then she remembered the mirror. The old woman had shown her that warm room through the glass. Fern had never walked into that room, yet she had drawn its door clean. Borrowed sight had been enough. She turned the moons over in her hands. Maybe home did not have to be a place she had slept in. Maybe it was a place that had already seen her. Fern stood. She carried the moons back through the clear door one last time, into the cabin's warm light. The old woman still knelt by the phoenix. She rose when Fern crossed the threshold. "You came back," the mother said. Her wet eyes searched Fern's face. "Did you find your door, child?" Fern shook her head. She held up the moons. Then she pointed at herself, at the lamp, at the couch, at the window where black-veined ivy trailed over the sill. She pressed her small hand flat against her own chest. The old woman understood slowly. Her hand covered her mouth. "You have nowhere," she said. "No mother waiting." She sank down and took Fern's hands. "My daughter drew doors on every wall. She crossed into your dark world and you brought her home to me. I have a room. I have a lamp. I kept it all for one girl who came back." She drew Fern close. "Stay. Let this be the place you remember." Fern stood very still. She looked at the cabin walls, the worn floor, the flowers crowding the yard past the glass. She looked at the phoenix singing softly on the rug. She looked at the old woman's lined face. For the first time she was not imagining a home. She was inside one. Witnessing it. Every corner fixed itself in her eyes, bright and true. The mother led her through the rooms. Fern touched the couch, the lamp, the mirror's worn frame. She pressed her palm to the ivy on the sill and felt the green leaves, the dark veins. She breathed the warm air. She let it all become memory. Not want. Not an empty picture. A real place that held her. Then Fern knew what she had to do. She could not stay forever. Her herd waited in Goremaw. The keeper held the lantern. The hollow needed her. But she no longer needed her true door to carry her away from an empty longing. She needed only this: proof that one place had room for her. Fern took the chalk from her pocket. She knelt by the cabin's inner wall, under the lamp, beside the mirror. She drew. The lines came easy now. The cabin, the porch, the flowers, the window. She drew the room around her as she saw it, held firm in her memory at last. The chalk darkened on its own. The handle turned. The door opened, and it was not blank. Through it Fern saw the cabin itself, warm and whole, exactly as it stood. Her true door no longer led to nowhere. It led here. She had made a home she could always find again. The old woman wept and smiled. "You drew it," she whispered. "You can come back whenever you want." Fern pressed the golden moons into the mother's hand, then closed the mother's fingers over them and shook her head. She pointed from the moons to her own heart, then to the open door. A gift kept, a place remembered. She would carry the memory, not the ornament. Fern stepped back through the clear door into Goremaw one final time. Her chalk door stayed open behind her on the cabin wall, a bright crossing she had drawn from true memory, a passage she could reach from anywhere now. The thing she had always wanted had not come from the dark. It had opened into the light. She went down to the hollow where her herd waited. The keeper raised the lantern. The snakes stirred at her feet. Fern looked back once at the glow of the far-off door, the one that led to a room with a lamp and a waiting woman. She had spent all this time trying to open the door she longed for. In the end she found that home was not a place she escaped to. It was a place that let her in, and now it always would.