Behind the door was the lake.
There was no shore. No boat waiting at the end of a dock. Elena stood at the edge of dark water, with the landing carpet beneath her heels and cold pressing against her toes. She could smell the deep mud. Far below, a pale shape turned slowly.
She did not want to go in.
Every part of her body refused it. The muscles in her thighs pulled her backward. Her chest tightened. Twenty years earlier she had fought for the surface until fighting had become a thing she could no longer remember how to do. This doorway held that last effort. She could feel its end waiting beneath the water.
Miles could see the door now. His good hand touched the blue frame. He looked into the dark and then at her, and for a second his anger was overwhelmed by something he did not try to hide.
“How far?” he asked.
“I don't know.”
“Can I go with you?”
She looked down. The pale shape wore her dress. It moved only when the water moved it.
“Not first.”
She took the little bundle from her pocket: lighter, matches, cloth. Miles accepted it with his left hand. He tucked it beneath the sweatshirt where it was dry.
Behind them Daniel said, “Stay with me. You don't have to do this.”
Elena turned. He stood among the coats and the broken kitchen things, his face beloved. She tried to look at him long enough to carry something out that the fire could not take. The shape of his eyebrows. The tiny white scar beside his mouth. His way of standing with one foot turned out. She held them deliberately and knew, with a sick certainty, that deliberate holding would not help.
She turned back to the water.
“Don't let me stop,” she told Miles.
He took a breath. “Then don't ask me to.”
Elena stepped through.
The water closed over her waist, her chest, her mouth. There had been no drop, no falling, but suddenly she was below the surface. Her clothes pulled upward around her. She reached for the doorway and found only dark water. The weight of her body had changed. She could not tell which way the light lay.
She kicked. Her foot struck wood: the overturned boat. A rope slid along her arm. She caught it and found that it did not lead upward. It lay loose beside her, ending in nothing she could grip.
The younger body turned beneath her. For an instant Elena looked into her own open eyes. Then the two bodies were one, and her lungs were burning.
She had never remembered this. She had remembered a hand reaching for her and waking afterward. Between them lay all this work, all this stubborn effort to remain herself. She tried to lift an arm. It moved so slowly she could watch it without feeling it belonged to her.
The dark was full of sounds. Daniel striking the water above. A boat knocking against stone. Her own mouth trying to make a noise no air could carry.
She did not let herself turn toward the doorway.
The effort ended.
There was a stillness so complete that she could not even be afraid inside it. Her name ceased to feel necessary. A light moved somewhere, small and far away. She watched without wanting to reach it.
Then something hurt.
A fierce pain ran across her chest, and she took a breath that seemed to tear her in half. Her eyes opened onto the honeymoon bedroom ceiling. Sunlight made the water on the bed glitter. Daniel bent over her, twenty-seven and white-faced, his mouth shaking.
“Elena,” he said. “You're here.”
She was lying on the bed in her wool trousers. She was also lying there twenty years earlier in her wet white dress. The room held both moments, the returned woman gasping and the present woman feeling how fiercely she had wanted that first breath. It was air, and she wanted another.
She took it.
At the edge of the room the blue door opened. Miles came through, water falling from the sweatshirt. He put his good hand on the bedpost and nearly sank to the floor.
Elena rolled away from the younger body. It remained on the sheets beneath Daniel's hands, fading at its edges. The window looked over the lake. Beyond the bed stood their honeymoon suitcase, the peaches, the first studio's mirror. Other rooms were pressing into this one, connected now by openings where solid walls had stood.
She could see the yellow kitchen at the edge of them, though she could no longer remember the evening it held. Its curtains were gone. The rest waited dry and full of light.
Miles took the bundle from beneath the sweatshirt. His left hand shook too much to open it. Elena sat up and took it from him. The cloth was damp at the outside but the matches inside were dry.
Young Daniel held the drowned woman's hand. Older Daniel stood by the doorway. Both looked at Elena. She could see their years together, not an ordered history but little things appearing in the linked rooms: his watch on a bedside table, a burnt pan, the mirror, the winter coat he hung on the wrong hook. A life cluttered with things nobody else would know to keep.
“You can still have it,” the older man said.
She stood beside the bed. Miles watched her, not moving. He had every reason to believe she might turn toward Daniel again. The knowledge of that made her feel sick, but she did not ask him to trust her.
She put the flame against the edge of a honeymoon card lying on the bedside table.
It was a stupid card. Two cartoon swans forming a heart. Daniel had bought it after the wedding because he said getting married entitled them to enjoy bad taste without explanation. She watched one swan blacken and fall away.
Fire caught the old tissue paper in the suitcase. A bright seam ran beneath the lid. The younger Daniel looked down at his hands. The woman he held was no longer there. He reached for her, and Elena had to grip the bedpost to keep from going to him.
“More,” Miles said.
She looked at the curtains. At the duvet. At the rooms opening beyond them. The fire was small enough to stop. She could put water on it. She could kneel beside Daniel. She could spend the last of her living fear in his arms.
Instead she carried the burning card to the curtain and let it fall into the old fabric.
The room changed with a long, low sound, like a breath let out from somewhere beneath the house. Water began to seep through the boards. Miles grabbed her elbow with his good hand.
“We need to go.”
She watched the fire climb. The swans were gone. She knew she had set a card alight. She could not remember why she had loved it.
Miles pulled again. This time she went with him.