Part 6

I have too many Nico’s. I realize this now. There are five of them seated around the breakfast table, and not nearly enough cereal left. I have allowed this all to spiral wildly out of control, and now I have five Nicos—one original, one girl, two boys, and the Dog—sitting around my breakfast table, fighting over the Chex.

And of course, there’s the question—are they really my nephews, my niece, if they’re from the hallway? They’re the children of sisters who aren’t my sister, not really, not exactly. But their faces are the same, and their eyes, and their Moreno noses are unmistakably Moreno-ish. So I gave in. I said to Nico, Yes your little friend can come stay if the alternative is catching her death of cold in the Ice Palace, and that probably tipped my hand right there, but Nico didn’t seem to notice or care and what started as one little friend became four because when a Nico decides to get lost in the hallway, my house is apparently the orphanage of infinity.

I use nicknames now. The girl is Niki, and she thinks that sounds weird because in her world that would be a very mannish name, but I reassure her that here, in this world, it’s the epitome of femininity. Then there’s the Rake, and I call him the Rake because it fits and because it makes him smile a little shiteater smile because he’s smarter than he looks and knows what it means. Then there’s Manny, because Nico’s middle name is Emanuel, and he’s like my Nico, if my Nico were even quieter—I haven’t heard him say a word yet. The last one I just call the Dog, because he’s a dog: a big Siberian husky with a somehow unmistakably Moreno-ish snout, and the others swear to me that he’s Nico if Nico was a dog, and to my great frustration, he seems to be the smartest out of the five of them. Sometimes at night I hear the toilet flush and the Dog just comes out of the bathroom, as if it were normal. At the insistence of the others, the Dog even has his own room, and finally pressed for space, it’s Esperanza’s. Which does seem fitting.

I drag my Nico away from the breakfast table and the Dog follows us up the three flights of stairs to the hallway, and I don’t have the wherewithal to send him back because he’ll just pretend that he’s a dog and not the Dog and it’ll be so awkward and frustrating that it’s just easier to let him follow.

"We’re going shopping again?" Nico asks, a little flustered. He’s been like this way lately.

"We are."

"It feels so skeezey," he says, and the Dog howls his agreement.

"What does skeezey even mean?"

Nico isn’t quite sure himself, but does his best to explain it as a general sense of discomfort as we make our way through the hallway. I pull out my notebook and cross reference our latest shopping list with the list of doors.

"44 has all the apples, right?"

"Yeah," Nico says, "and the mysterious shoe pile."

"I hope Door 44 decides to show up."

The Dog hears this and full-stops, scanning the horizon slowly, head upturned. Nico and I look at him, at the way his blue eyes seem to look right through the doors and the infinity of the hallway. His nostrils flare for a second and then he’s off and running, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth as he rushes forward, howling more like a wolf than a dog. We follow him as fast as we can and that’s when something happens that has never happened before: the hallway twists, like in a funhouse. The floor skews to one side and the doors kind of shift with it, but it’s just as easy to walk and to run as it’s always been. A second later and it’s over—the hallway is normal, for given values of normal, with flat floors and perfectly parallel doors and the Dog is sitting, tail wagging, in front of an open doorway.

DOOR 44
THE ORCHARD

The doorway, from the other side of it, is just a doorway, standing around in the middle of a big apple orchard without context. Nico’s been here a couple times, and he brought the bike last time just to make sure that there wasn’t anyone around. The trees are planted four yards apart exactly, in a very precise grid. About a mile from the door in any direction, you start looping back on yourself and you’ll hit the door again. Nico made a map of it in the notebook, with rough directions towards the shoe pile, which is exactly what it sounds like—an inexplicable pile of new shoes in different sizes, colors, and styles, men’s and women’s alike. I pick out some tennis shoes for Manny and the Rake, then start digging through to try and find the matching shoe for a nice little espadrille that I think would look good on Niki while Nico loads some old plastic grocery bags with apples. This was the place I felt the least guilty about shopping from—which was really just stealing with a quantum twist—but it wasn’t the only place by a long shot. We’d started keeping tabs on the alternate versions of our house, especially the ones that were either abandoned or loaded. We’d raid the pantries and the wardrobes, take occasional provisions. Those were the ones that really got Nico frustrated.

The Dog digs through the pile on his own, and then trots over happily with the espadrille’s match clutched softly in his teeth. I scratch him behind the ear out of reflex, and he enjoys it well enough, but there’s something about him that makes treating him like a dog uncomfortable.

"You’ve been acting weird lately," I say almost without meaning to. I’m looking directly at the Dog, so he tilts his head and whines a little, confused, but Nico hears me and drops another apple into the plastic bag. I wait a moment, shift around a stack of thigh-high leather boots, and give it another try: "Is it the school thing?"

"No. It’s not the school thing."

"Oh," I say, and I swear the Dog rolls his damn eyes which shouldn’t be possible because dog eyes are almost nothing but iris to begin with. "But, then, how is school?"

"It’s school," he says. "It was school back at home and its school here." He unravels another balled-up garbage bag from his pocket and starts plucking apples, alternating between putting them in the bag and throwing them off into the distance.

"You’re doing well, then?"

"Yeah."

"Find any good new doors?"

"You’ve got the notebook," he says, and it cuts a little.

I stand there with the notebook open, paging through it half-heartedly. I pass by the page marked DOOR 21. It’s still blank and a little crumpled now, as if in frustration, and there’s a little drop where the blue lines are smeared near the middle of the blank page. I flip past it as he looks back.

"C’mon," I say at last, and I take one of the bags and fill it with shoes, sling it over my shoulder dramatically and tuck the notebook under my arm. The Dog leads the way back to reality.