Part 7

I go shopping with the Rake now, because he actively encourages larceny and he knows how to pick locks, and I’ve seen too many empty alternate versions of my house that are inexplicably locked despite an utter lack of inhabitants.

"So," I say as he’s jimmying a particularly stubborn door with his favorite crowbar—Heaven help me, he has a favorite crowbar—"what do you think?"

"‘Bout what?"

I smile. "About this house, this empty house that looks just like a house—have you looked outside? It’s all just beach for as far as you can see."

"It’s too cold to be a beach," he says. He’s stopped jimmying, now he’s just striking the door in frustration, and his breath fogs up. It reminds me of the Ice Palace, but more humid.

"Well it’s all just beach as far as we can tell," I say.

And he says: "It can’t all just be beach."

"Why not?"

"Because beach is just where two bits meet. It might be all beach for a little line, but one direction it’s really all sandbox and the other direction it’s really all water, so it can’t be all beach."

He gives the jimmying one last go and then we decide, very adult-like, to have a lunch break and give prying a go in about thirty minutes. I unpack a pair of apples and sandwiches and set them out on a few paper napkins.

"What’s your plan?" I ask as he picks up the sandwich, some pastrami on wheat.

"Lunch and then the door"—he gestures rudely towards it—"is fucked."

"No," I say, "the big plan. Did Nico number your door before you left?"

"I left before I met your Nico," he says and everything gets a little more awkward, a little more complicated. Whatever hope I had of sending them all back was getting ridiculously slim. I had already given up on the Dog. Still, I had three extra (human) relatives, now, and nothing much to do with them—Niki and Manny kept to themselves and had taken to spending school days holed up in my father’s old study. And then there was the Rake. He was generally Nico, plus about a half a foot more and this time with Esperanza’s moon-wide eyes, the same dark circles she had under her lids like permanent bruises.

"The beach thing reminds me of philosophy," I say, swallowing down a bite of my sandwich.

"Oh?" There’s a flash of recognition in his eyes.

"Yeah, I say, an argument for God, where if you come across a watch on a beach, you have to assume that there was once a watchmaker. He’s still silent, so I go on: This house makes no sense, and a lot of the houses and doors and worlds don’t make much sense because they’re still my house—our house, but somewhere else, even in places without anyone around."

"So," he says, one eyebrow peaking out at a suspicious slant, "you think the hallway’s from God?"

I let it linger for a moment in the air: was that what I was saying? I decide: "Not really, no. It just reminded me of that because at the very boundary of improbability, there’s always the chance that the watch never had a watchmaker at all."

"Mmm," he says through his sandwich. A few minutes more, and he’s up to prying—the crowbar slips into a groove in the old oak door and wiggles for just a second before he finally bursts it open to reveal the room of some other, perhaps nonexistent Esperanza: hers, down to the faded blue comforter and grandmothers’ jewelry box. Hers, if her windows opened out onto a cold, damp shore in a strange world. Hers, if she had never even existed. I take the jewelry box, brush the dust from it, and we head back to the hallway.