Fifth Door

The first door closed. It was a solid panel of wood with a cool metal knob and the keypad of a university dorm. Anxiety and loneliness existed in the room with a twin bed and wooden dresser. It hurt. He hurt. The space between my legs was sore, an aching I was unused to. Empty bottles and cans fell out of an unlined trashcan. Cigarette butts sat at the base of a Heineken bottle. Red marks created a necklace that framed my face. What did I do wrong? Was I enough? He said he loved me. That I was perfect. That is all I wanted to hear regardless of the tears that streaked down my cheeks.

He rolled off my numb body, my hands shaking. He tossed a can into the corner and turned toward me. Exposed. Raw. Terrified. But he said he loved me.

“Marry me.”

I stepped away from my easel in the art department at nineteen. An undergraduate education slipped through clay fingers with paint under my nails. Failed. I fell into the arms of my first marriage. Emmett.

We lived in a van at first. Two years passed The blazing Arizona heat warmed our marital bed. I loved the idea of Emmett. He had beautiful curly hair and a wild scruffy look. Emmett trained me to be silent. To take him without question. It kept me under his care. If care was an appropriate title. I didn’t want to be alone. Alone I was afraid that someone else would ruin me. And one was enough.

By our third year of marriage, the warm breeze carried a change of heart in both of us. This door was warped and ever changing, like the canvas of an oil painter who can never quite get the right shade or shape. I saw art in everything. Instead of pain, I saw fractal abstract patterns. Sometimes the tones were cool, others warm, others charged with emotion. Art was my purest escape. No one was there for me to fall back on. My mother and sister died from cancer. My father and brother from alcohol poisoning. Emmett was all I had.

I was obsessed with the future. I could envision endless scenes of a life, worlds away into a future that had no place in my reality. I was blind to the present that consumed me. Nothing felt fixed or permanent. My job in real estate funneled my vision into an image of perfection. Each house was an image of dreams. Family, fresh starts, love, bickering. Potential memories were contained within the walls of new homes. I lived in the fantasies of others. Within my art and work I failed to see Emmett’s wandering eyes. He no longer left marks across my back and waited until the alcohol knocked me unconscious to strip me naked. I chose not to see the women who returned with my husband. The justifications made sense in my mind. Better them than me.

I was in the kitchen sometime in the morning. I layered sliced turkey breasts on whole grain sandwiches. A woman squeezed past me. Her deep stained raccoon eyes blended into cracked concealer. The scent of sex, salt, and shame mixed into the air around my head. Emmett arrived at my back moments after. His dusty button-down shirt was open. His hands caressed my elbows. His chin propped up on the top of my head. I smoothed on a thin layer of mayo.

I peeled my feet out of dirty Chacos when the Arizona sun slipped beyond the horizon. My mind numbed into complacency. Emmett and I skirted our waning affection and marriage. We parted. Married yet separated in everything but the legalities. That would do. It ensured my financial security. Unhappily married was better than being completely and utterly alone. I continued to make room for his women as they came and went. I distracted myself with various jobs that fizzled away quicker than morning dew in the desert.

A part of me craved more. Of something. Affection or more attention, it made no difference to me. I needed to feel seen and loved and secure. That is what existed in the movies. In the books that I read. A touch, a smile, a romance. Something. The van Emmett and I lived in trapped me. It didn’t inspire so much as an ink blot in my sketchbook. The well-worn, leather- bound pages I kept at the foot of the mattress documented each fantasy and truth day by day. It went untouched for months.

I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. There was a dream that lingered at the back of my mind. It wanted to be sought out, thought upon, and whisked away into an all consuming romance. Where could I find that sort of fairytale when I was already soiled. What came out was an impressionistic depiction of soft yet vibrant colors. Water frothed on rocks and beckoned to me with welcoming arms. Two brush strokes across the backdrop represented the warm gust of wind that blew off the mountaintop and into the distance. Somewhere. It existed somewhere, that paradise of mine, captured in fleeting moments of sleep.

I needed Ian. His fierce possession and electricity burned beneath the surface of the skin.

The fire that leapt from his lips waned into ashes in his absence. He was a layer of dust and destructive memories. It frightened me. It excited me just the same. I never knew what was going on in his mind and that unknowingness was addicting. Emmett’s hold of me waned until I no longer relied on his presence for survival.

Ian didn’t notice me at first. He was the stranger at the bar that I locked eyes with. Years of possibility flashed through my mind without a single word uttered. He went to that bar every evening. Ordered a Manhattan. And watched. His eyes grazed over the interactions at the bar and scanned the doors. An intense fire glinted in his eyes. I wanted that gaze to be on me.

A softness pressed against my eyelids at night. They were words of a man. The man from the bar. Ian. He approached my spot in the far right corner after the first week of subtle flirtations. With words of romance, softness, and tequila, he saw me. He found my body and lit it aflame with a single kiss on the cheek.

He accompanied me home. The wheels of his Harley flicked up the dirt. When the pavement met the dirt road, he dropped me off. Nightly talks turned into midday phone calls. His motorcycle got closer to my doorstep until he stepped over the threshold.

I closed my eyes. Ian had discovered me. His magnetism rooted itself deep behind my ribs. Ian’s fire devoured Emmett’s passive and uncaring yellow aura. Ian won me over with his eyes, his smile, his tilt of the head when he looked at me from across a room. On a Thursday, Ian came for dinner. Electricity sparked around the table. Tension spoiled the meat. Emmet sat at the head of the table. Ian faced me from across the table. I felt Ian’s gaze. It grazed my face and studied my neck and fixated on my collarbones. My husband saw. Emmett pinched his lips together and cracked his neck. It was the most reaction I had gotten from him since we said our vows.

Verbal sparring over what I deserved and needed bubbled into brawls. Ian calculated his words to garner rage from my husband. His skill with manipulation through words was intoxicating. I did nothing. Why would I?

Ian’s Harley scattered the gravel in from of my door in the afternoons. His body sweat bourbon and cigarette smoke. Emmett greeted him with a pistol filled with blanks. I didn’t want either of them to get hurt. I loved them both. Each in their own way. I relied on their energy and attention. I felt wanted.

The dust settled. Pools of blood needed to be mopped up. I dabbed and bandaged Emmett’s bloody knuckles and scrubbed steel appliances clean of splatters.

One night, Ian was gone. He didn’t lurk in the shadows or sneak in when Emmett was out at the bar. He was gone. I was left in the shadow of a marriage that pinched my ear to the ground and tied me to a man that destroyed my sense of self and agency. We were not nineteen and twenty anymore. Time had worn Emmet and my young relationship into dust. Emmett recognized that. He felt my hurt. He saw my pain at Ian’s disappearance. He rented us an apartment with a small pitiful smile. Second story with a balcony and a new, navy blue couch.

Emmett tried. I didn’t. My heart wasn’t mine to give away anymore. It was captured and shot full of bullets of joy, each yanked out leaving me empty. Ian had held the gun to my heart.

The summer temperatures fluctuated until fall settled. Ian hadn’t come looking for me.

He hadn’t shown up at my new real estate job, or at the bar, or even in distant, passing conversation. Ian’s hot fire settled to ash.

The sun set while I was out on the porch four months later. The apartment complex was covered in a misty haze from the cooling heat of the day. My eyes drifted shut. I inhaled the tarmac and construction stench. Fresh paint and linseed oil mingled with the fresh concrete and drifted out of the open doors onto the terrace. It would do for now. I felt at peace with complacency. Warm sunlight flushed my cheeks.

There was a presence on the horizon. A magnetism that pulled at a thread tied to my ribcage. Ian. He stood in the entrance of the apartment complex, a Samson between tall pillars of buildings. His black top hung low on his chest, his single dimple pinched in a smirk, hands stuffed into faded jeans. I blinked, shaking my head, but he was gone.

My breath quivered in my chest. I craned my neck back to the bedroom door behind me. Emmett had another raccoon-eyed girl writhing between my sheets. Little delicate gasps made their way to my ears.

Ian was behind me. I knew it. There was no doubt in my mind that that gut feeling was him. Every bone I my body felt him. I looked to the balcony. My eyes adjusted to the glare as Ian’s muscular arms pulled his body up and over the low railing and onto my terrace. The air boiled between us. A growl of pleasure and a sharp cry pierced the bated air. It came from the closed bedroom. I didn’t sleep there. I winced. Shit, I thought. The anger that existed in the two men were two fuses cut short.

Anger glinted in Ian’s eyes like embers on a windy night. It was raw, animalistic rage. In two long strides, Ian was at my bedroom door. He ripped it off its hinges. The girl fled in a sheet. I stepped to the side, into the shadows. I kept my eyes fixed on the golden horizon. My stomach twisted with anticipation. Ian had found me. He had found me and was there to claim me as his own. But he wasn’t. At least. Not yet. He left a blackened stamp on my soul, a marking of an angel, perhaps fallen, perhaps a promise of a future return. Ian vanished.

Four years passed. I divorced Emmett.. I stood a bit taller. I was a little freer. My eyes were set on the future. My artwork evolved into a swirl of thought and emotions. The dreamlike stupor of previous inspirations had gone.

Jake entered at twenty-three. There was a sort of security in his potentiality. He was a body that kept me warm in the northern Chicago winters. My duties were those of a housewife to his childish tendencies. He kept my mind busy. I cared for our three children, frozen in a second marriage, with an unequal transfer of give and take. I swam through the door that was home to Jake’s Star Wars sheets on a lone mattress in the corner of the cobwebbed loft. Our children slept with us, tucked between our bodies, when the electricity bill went forgotten and unpaid. The girls grew up, ages nine, eight, and six. Those girls were my life. A way to devote my love and energy and protect their innocent souls.

Jake was the first to inquire about the cost of a print at a small bohemian show. Jake was in his last semester of law school. His spindly limbs fit haphazardly in his silver Corvette, long fingers adjusting his thick glasses as he shifted the vehicle into drive. His mind drifted in and out of a fantasy and never truly understood the consequences of his negligence. He was a boy in the shell of a young man with the attention span of a toddler.

I juggled three jobs for eight years. I needed to compensate for Jake’s lack of care for detail and maintenance. At his firm, he forwent sending bills to clients and following up on late dues or paying his secretaries.

My three little girls were my motivation. My world was consumed with the responsibilities of cultivating a working household that encouraged growth in person and character. As long as my work and mothering overloaded my senses to drown out my dissatisfaction, I was fine. Fine. But not electric. Ian had left a stamp on my heart that left holes where flesh should have been. I saw him in everything. I felt his presence when I slept and could smell his stale cologne and whiskey when I walked past parked motorcycles outside the local bars.

I sat at my real-estate desk in Chicago. My pen scribbled down the day’s timetable for picking the girls up from school and getting dinner on the table later that evening. I couldn’t forget the electric and heating bills.

The glass door opened. Ian entered. His eyes found me in an instant. Crawling heat burrowed under my skin and made its way down my spine. His dimple was still permanently pinched beneath a well-trimmed beard, a little dusty white spotting at the ends.

Ian had returned to me. The dark knight breaking into my life to stay. The hinges of his abandonment ached against the front of my mind and strained with the pull of desire.

I could feel the emptiness of our nine years apart deep in my soul. The blank artist’s canvas that lived within me exploded into life with each breath. I didn’t blink. He may have vanished like a ghost. Ian fed my artwork with his romance, his brilliance, his hatred, his jealously, and his rage. Each doorway into his mind mixed a different palate of paints. The grazing of his fingertips down the length of my side, cupping at my hips, a brushstroke of ease. The details were sharper the farther away he was. His all-consuming fire blackened the edges of my vision and heightened my perception of the world. He was a wildfire that I contained within the boundaries of sketches and oil paint.

Time and circumstance stood as a barrier between us in that moment standing in the real estate office. Ian had left me with scars of passion and empty promises. Reflections of his impact were translated through my prints. Each brought calm acceptance. He had left. He wasn’t supposed to come back. With each step toward my desk, what had been reduced to a two-day-old papercut sting on my heart became a head-on collision on the Chicago interstate.

Ian drove me to lunch, announcing his plans loudly in the foyer for all to hear. He paid. He talked. Our souls collided over minestrone soup and toast. Every word from his mouth was smooth as silk. He spun tales of the past eight years, his own failed marriage, his sterility, and his love for me. Gears in my head spun, spitting out endings to our story. After all these years of confusion and heart wrenching impossibilities, everything collided. The steam of the coffee machine spewed, a cashier register clinked, and Ian wound me around his finger with the romance of a deep, soothing voice and plans for the future.

He drove me home after work. We wove the trees that surrounded the two-story riverfront home. The exterior was stone like a fairytale cottage. The driveway wrapped around in a loop. Flower baskets hung off of the windowsills and the bushes were carefully trimmed and maintained. Jake was at the boathouse, waxing the little green rowboat that had frogs hopping from bench to bench.

Jake turned and waved. He wiped his hands on his muddy jeans and walked over to the driver’s side. Ian rolled down the window and propped a thick arm up. The two shook hands. Jake looked him up and down. He shrank inward. In his eyes he was defeated. Ian’s Glock glinted from the glovebox. Two weeks later, Jake organized our divorce papers. Ian was always there, claiming to make up for the years he had lost with me. My daughters started asking for Ian, wondering when he was coming over and ignoring their father. Ian showered them with little gifts, including a trip to Disney World in the spring. He acted the perfect saint. The one I had been waiting for.

Jake didn’t mind. He saw the joy and accountability Ian offered our children and myself. Jake still loved me. I was his first and only love. I was all he had ever known. But Ian terrified him. Jake wouldn’t cross paths.

Even separated, he remained in my life. We were bound by our three children, with years of marital memories under the same roof. With me out of the picture, Jake was able to fill his empty house with bug collections and dried fish trophies where there should have been case files.

The few paintings of mine Jake kept now served as a divider between duck decoys and a catalogue of butterflies. I moved into a cottage with a quaint old barn and access to a lake that Ian purchased for my girls and I. The fresh paintings had time to dry before the next subject swirled into my mind. Ian’s charm fluctuated in and out of rage. His passion shifted from sensual to abusive. The colors were dark and brooding, a swirl of despair and psychological turmoil.

There was a black spiral staircase that vanished into the center vortex of the painting. Screaming figures clutched their faces in an endless state of falling.

Ian consumed me in every thought, action, and word. In between his flashes of passion and romantic gestures were spitting rages that shook the walls of our stone cottage. Ian oftentimes stood outside the window of my real-estate building watching. If a male client was seen lingering at my desk for a moment too long, I would lose a contract to the threats of my third husband.

Faces in the depths of my paintings were twisted in pain. Ian inspired their darkness and their hope. His words wove themselves into artful tales of love. Other dialogues would take on a choppy and spitting rage under a curled lip.

As long as he was away at his job in the local prison, I didn’t have to worry about his hands around my neck or pressing against my ribcage as the girls were downstairs spreading peanut butter on crustless Wonderbread.

Ian would drink. The bartender knew his order. The check usually fell to Ian’s security detail partner who had family connections in the police department. By the time he came home, I had the girls upstairs. The eldest saw his damage wash down the drain at night while she brushed her teeth. But her voice had not developed enough to speak up. Instead, she stroked her youngers sisters’ hair until they fell asleep.

I kept a stack of fairytales on the nightstand. In stories I told to my children, there were no belts around my wrists or bruises on my back. The paradise of these fantasies was someplace warm, with a breeze that tasted like frothy cold espresso foam and sea salt. I could imagine the sun casting a rosy glow over pastel buildings. My eyes would drift closed to the warm embrace of a thermal spring.

Ian and the Sherriff’s son would get into brawls with inmates. Work never failed to bring Ian home in a heated rage. He beat me in much the same way. The bedroom was my safe haven. I distanced myself from his hate and latched on to his romance. A hopeful fantasy kept my heart beating.

The day’s newspaper poignantly slid onto my keyboard. There had been a drug deal in the prison. The sheriff’s son and a low-tiered security guard had been the central focus’ of the story. The security guard was Ian.

I called Jake. He already knew. He took the case himself. Obscured from the official report, one of the inmates had been dealing. He had bribed and pestered Ian into picking up a package at a set address on a set date with a delivery location. Ian went. He did what the inmate asked. A letter had been found on the scene threatening myself and my children. Ian had gone through with the deal to protect us. He was trying to keep me safe. For his sacrifice, he was sent to prison.

I woke up a few months later. Something felt off. I couldn’t shake it. Ian served his primary sentence and was released on parole. He was home. Rehabilitating. Better. That’s what his counselor and I saw, at least. My heart was distant. I told myself that I could live without him. That he wasn’t necessary for my happiness. I looked for the good in him. I saw emptiness and sadness. We shared awkward glances and clipped, surface level sentences. The girls could see it in the way I reacted when he was in the room. He knew it as well. The absence of my passion muted his fire and brilliance in his speech and actions. He took up meetings with the pastor of the local Baptist church, coming back with pamphlets and phrases. Maybe the scriptures could be the spark to a new bundle of kindling. He wanted me back, he wanted to make things right. But I drifted away into my own future. Separated.

He was supposed to be baptized that weekend. The calendar had a little note marked with a heart. A lined piece of paper with a scribbled testament of faith had been developing on the kitchen counter. I was finishing up my last shift of the week when the nausea hit. My gut twisted. My head spun. I looked down and my hands shook. I had to get home.

The girls were still at school when I pulled into the driveway. Where is Ian? The gravel felt like daggers in my feet. The world pulsed and throbbed as my legs moved lethargically.

Panic rose with each step. I felt cold.

My fingers fumbled with the key. I choked on a sob. He’s fine, I told myself. He’s fine. My mind projected reasons for my unease. He’s away at work, I thought. Maybe there’s a new woman. He’s at the bar. Or there could be something he wants to tell me. He wants a divorce. That’s it. That has to be it. I pushed my way into the kitchen. There was nothing amiss. In fact, it was spotless. The magnets were perfectly spaced, the breakfast dishes all washed and stored in the glass front cabinets. My eyes scoured over everything. The bedroom. Check the bedroom.

Go. Now.

A tear slipped down my cheek. My lip trembled. He wasn’t okay. Covering my side of the bed was a shrine of plush animals, mostly teddy bears, holding valentine hearts and smiling. They were positioned in the shape of my sleeping body, on my side, back slightly curved. Each bear held a note on dusty rose cardstock, a small bow in the corner. I couldn’t comprehend anything other than the numb, horrific fascination at the overwhelming shrine that had been erected in the room.

Ian wasn’t there. I felt his presence in every corner of the room. I could smell his aftershave and feel his hands and see his phantom walking around the bedpost.

I fled. I passed the bathroom with the pill cabinet thrown open and stumbled outside.

I called the police. They didn’t get there for another three hours. Three hours for the girls to come back from school. My friends came and held me, paralyzed, in their arms. My lungs ached. My cheeks were sore from sustained sobs that tore at my stomach. I couldn’t stop crying. The ground fell away and I was enveloped in darkness.

The image of Ian’s body etched itself into my memory. He lay crumpled on the hay, the gun near his hand. Two casings glimmered by his elbow. Blood covered the floor, the walls, and the interior door of the barn. A white shard of skull was stuck in a wooden board.

The sheriff’s son arrived on the scene with his father. He was the one who had set my husband up on the drug deal. The police took everything. Every pillow, stuffed animal, letter, and photo we were in together without a word. What was written in those pages in Ian’s brilliant voice was gone. There were no photos taken of the scene in the barn. No photos of the shrine. Ian and his death were erased completely.

Chicago was a hostile atmosphere. There was little tying me to that spot. The girls and I fled to Madison Wisconsin. A tiny one-bedroom apartment on top of a game shop. One bed. The four of us girls. There I stayed. Away from men. And torment and hurt. I healed.

The years had come and gone. The girls had grown up, gone to college, gotten married, and were off making the world a brighter place. It was time for me to finish constructing my fifth doorway. A path where I was free from my past.

One step and my bags were packed. There was a scruff on my old leather shoes, laces loosely tied for the ease of slipping them off in the security checkpoint line. I stepped over someone’s briefcase as they juggled their fourth cold brew coffee of the day. The backpack slung on my shoulder slipped off, zipper barely holding it together, finding a momentary resting place in the overhead bin.

My shoulder nudged its way through the throng of people crowding the baggage claim. I stumbled backwards, eyes scouring the signs above. I noticed a brochure that slid under my shoe. On the glossy paper, printed in vibrant colors, was an island. My island. Procida.

A beach-tanned lady with straight hair pulled back into a bun sniffed at each customer with a raised eyebrow. After a few mutterings through the three slits in the plastic barrier, she slid a piece of paper over directing me toward my island. I was on the ferry.

A cloud of gasoline rose up in between the metal grating of the ferry. Bubbles spat out of the underwater exhaust pipes and mingled with the tangy metal of the port. The ferry’s hangar door creaked open, sharp sunlight causing the crows to squint and cover their eyes.

Underneath a baby blue sky with only a thin paintbrush of white cloud sat the harbor. Each building had a flat, squared off roof of terracotta that sheltered the freshly painted pastel colors beneath. The pinks came in coral, dusty rose, salmon, and magenta. The greens in a sort of aquamarine and fern. The blues were by far my favorite. Around black framed doorways and shuttered windows with strings of linens dancing in the breeze was a blue, almost the color of a robin’s eggshell that cracked on cobblestoned streets.

Boats were moored and tied of every variation. Quaint fishing boats with the name of a family mother were squeezed in between polished, shining yachts, which were situated next to tour boats that would taxi you around the island and out to sea for a picnic on the water.

Mothers gazed with a cigarette in between their teeth at their children skipping about the storefronts as the adults made small talk and gossip about the newest batch of newcomers that stepped giddily off of the four o’clock ferry.

My eyes darted around, locking on to a long, thin line of white taxi cars. The drivers had black freckles on their shoulders, like toast that was almost burnt. Two older taxi drivers caught my eye and waved me over enthusiastically. I glanced behind my shoulder at the dwindling number of tourists still loitering aimlessly around the harbor. One had whipped out one of those fancy, self-proclaimed professional cameras and was leaning back in unnatural positions to capture the magnificence of the sailing boat’s mast. I knew that no digital camera could ever contain the heart-fluttering joy that came from each gust of warm, sweet wind from the sea.

Nothing could capture it at all. Because it was my paradise.

I stayed in a boutique hotel on the highest point of the harbor side of the island. The journey had been exhilaratingly harrowing. The taxi car’s windows had been down, leaving my face inches from the blurred walls of the buildings on either side of the cobblestoned road. On what felt like no more than a pedestrian alley were Vespas and Fiats squeezing into doorways to let the honking taxi car through, twisting the steering wheel violently this way and that.

Later that day, I wandered the streets of Procida. My heart was floating. The elating feeling of joy and ecstasy had me tripping over my feet, the linen dress swirling around my knees as I tried to take in the island. Delicately painted bowls and ceramic tiles were stacked precariously in storefronts. Off-white linens billowed on clotheslines, gently swayed by the breeze. The air tasted sweet, possibly in part to the freshly baked sheet of chocolate and cream pastries. A grandmother bent over an oven inside an open window as I passed by.

The possibilities that could end up on my blank canvases were endless. Every gesture, glance, color, and newly turned corner presented inspiration.

My fingertips brushed against rough stone. The sun nodded to the mountain of Ischia in the backdrop. The fishing harbor of Procida was blanketed in a delicate gold. Fishing boats filtered into the shallow docks, fathers straining against the ropes to tie their wooden jewels down for the night. Children skipped about. Restaurants flipped on their twinkling lights and lay out tablecloths, adjusting the spotless wineglasses.

I bit the end of my paintbrush and tilted my head. I traced each line of wispy cloud and defined the pastel oil paint on my canvas with a delicate black streak. Standing back, my eyebrows dipped together. The scene that had unfolded in paint resembled a dream that I had had years before. Before I became a wife to three different men at their respective time. Before I was free. This little island was my paradise, and the final stroke on the door frame of the painting was my fifth and final door to be opened.