The Door to Heaven Read online

  Pascala started to walk toward the house. She tried to pull Dominic with her but he would not budge. She thought he was being playful. She smiled and moved closer to him. She did not look into his eyes. She leaned her body against his and kissed his neck. Her lips felt warm and good on his skin. His nostrils filled with her rosy scent. His skin prickled.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I won’t leave you.”

  A mist came over the lake and enshrouded Duck Island.

  He could only see the peak of its hill.

  Winter sunlight glinted off the smooth brown rock face that rose up through the mist like a lighthouse.

  She gripped his hand tighter. She pulled him toward the wedding reception and he began to give in and go with her.

  But then he stopped. He suddenly saw someone he had not seen in a long time. He almost didn’t believe his eyes. But then the boy waved and Dominic knew who it was.

  “Eric Flu,” he said in astonishment under his breath.

  The boy had not changed at all. Still the same boy, he had not grown, but he seemed more ancient than the deepest places of the world, yet shallower than a broken bowl. He had come through Dominic’s front door, and now he was walking down the front porch steps past Mr. King. Eric Flu was still hiding part of his face but Dominic did not think that was the reason no one else seemed to notice him.

  Pascala felt Dominic’s body instantly tense, as though he were about to be attacked. She turned to see what he was looking at. Seeing only the same wedding reception, she turned back to him. “What’s wrong?” she asked him. He almost responded to her, but Eric Flu waved at him again, catching his attention. Then the boy ran through the crowd. Dominic watched him go, but lost sight of him between the villagers grouped together on the front lawn. Pascala walked in front of Dominic and she placed her hands on both his cheeks and directed his face toward hers. “Dominic,” she called out, but he would not look at her. He was looking for Eric Flu. He finally caught sight of him running through the forest. The boy stopped and gestured for Dominic to follow. Then he turned around and ran deeper into the woods. Dominic ran after him. He did not look back. He heard Pascala calling his name but he would not listen to her.

  Dominic ran as fast as he could, but he could not catch Eric Flu. The boy led him to the inlet where the raft was still moored to the juniper trees. Dominic watched helplessly as Eric Flu pushed the raft from the inlet and onto the lake. He tried to pick up his speed, but he could not reach the juniper trees in time. The boy was already a good distance from the shore, punting out to Duck Island. Hurriedly, Dominic took off his jacket and threw it over a branch. He removed his shirt while kicking off his shoes and tearing off his socks. And he was just about to dive into the lake after Eric Flu, but he heard Pascala’s voice.

  “Dominic!”

  He turned around, his feet on the edge of the shore, his hands poised to dive in. She was behind him, leaning on a juniper branch, panting, wide-eyed with concern, clutching her shoes in her hand. She had run barefoot through the forest to follow him. Her dress had torn. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were wide with confusion. She looked so beautiful to him. She looked like a woman who knew her self and had no fear of the future. He had never felt for any woman what he felt for her.

  “Is that what love is?” he wondered.

  “Why did you run from me?” she asked. “Why did you come here?”

  Dominic was about to answer her when behind her suddenly appeared the Door to Heaven.

  Pascala did not seem to know it was there.

  The old face in the doorknob looked at Dominic without any expression.

  “Why are you here?” he asked the Door.

  “You’re worrying me,” Pascala answered him, not realizing that he was not talking to her.

  But the Door to Heaven said to Dominic, “I’m here because you are going to die.”

  “I’m not afraid of death,” he replied.

  But Pascala thought he was talking to her, so she said to him, “You sound like a little boy who has just had his toy taken from him.”

  The Door to Heaven glanced at Pascala, smiled knowingly, and then said to Dominic, “You’re afraid of opening doors.”

  Dominic pointed toward Eric Flu on the raft. “Don’t you see what’s being taken away from me?”

  Pascala saw the raft drifting toward the island. But she did not see Eric Flu. She tried to understand what Dominic was talking about. “Dominic, are you talking to me?” she asked.

  He glanced at her, but then he turned back to the Door to Heaven, and said to the old face in the doorknob, “Everything I’ve worked so hard to build is about to be ruined.”

  Pascala stepped toward him. “What about all we’re working toward?”

  The Door to Heaven said to him, “She asks a fair question. But who you are is not what you do. How you open up for someone else, how you let that person inside is how you are made to be. All people are made to be like a doorway.”

  “I can’t fix how I am,” Dominic said. “I can’t remake who I’m not.”

  Pascala shook her head. Tears were welling in her eyes. Fear was a demon lurking like a lion for her in the forest. “How you are is what I want,” she said to Dominic while her heart asked her angel to protect her. “Who you are is what I need.”

  He turned back toward the lake and the island. He could almost see his cave. But his raft was getting farther away, and he was anxious to catch it. He would not let Eric Flu defeat him again. “All that I’ve made of my life I have made on that island,” he said.

  The Door to Heaven said to him, “Your whole life until now might be there but the wholeness and holiness of your life is right here, right now.”

  “Righty tighty,” Dominic said beneath his breath. He felt he needed to tighten a screw more than talk about what he might gain. What he might lose frightened him. His fear was fueling and filling. His anger was revving. He felt he had to go.

  The Door to Heaven said to him, “There are no doors for you in a cave on an island. This is your chance to let go of a life of aloneness and loneliness. That kind of life would satisfy the want of a boy, but not the need of a man.”

  Dominic poised himself to dive into the lake.

  Pascala saw what he was about to do. Her angel Ruth whispered into her ear, and she had a sudden realization that he might not come back to her. “Dominic!” she cried out. He almost turned around to look at her. She dropped her shoes and stepped toward him with her arms outstretched. “I’m in love with you,” she said in a soft, undefeated voice. But he had already leaped from the shore, from the Door to Heaven, from Pascala, and was diving headfirst into Lake La Muerta.

  He swam as hard as he could after his raft. The water was ice cold and a shock. His knees hit the shallow silt and his feet kicked and got tangled in the coontail weeds. He swam into deeper water. The day before had been very windy and cold. There was little wind now, but the current was strong. It pushed him in a slow steady drag clockwise around the island. He could hear Pascala calling after him, but he didn’t stop. He swam harder. His pants were soaked and heavy, and they clung to his legs. The muscles in his shoulders burned. The pores in his scalp tingled and opened. He perspired and he did not feel the cold. But he could not catch the raft. It disappeared into the mist over the lake.

  The island was farther than he remembered. He had punted out there often, but he had not swum out there since his childhood, before his papa went through the Door to Heaven. He had never swum to the island in mist. It was thick and he could not see far ahead. He began to feel very tired. He struggled to remember why he was doing this. Muscles burned. Breathing was difficult. He inhaled water and choked and told himself that he might drown. He remembered the words of the Door to Heaven. He almost swam back to Pascala. But then he saw the shore of the island and he felt hopeful.

  Dominic was exhausted when he reached the island’s shore. He was panting heavily. He could barely lift his arms to crawl from the water. The a
ir was ice cold. Goosebumps rose on his bare chest and arms. His mouth was dry. His tongue felt thick. He could not call out for Eric Flu. The raft lay ahead of him in the sand. Eric Flu was nowhere in sight. Dominic walked up the shore. The current had carried him farther along the shoreline than he expected. He had to walk a ways in the direction of his cave. The mallards had not forgotten him. They waddled toward him and beat their gray wings and turned their green velvet heads, expecting stale bread from his hand. “I’ve nothing to give you,” Dominic said to them. But they did not listen. They didn’t seem to care. They followed with the trust of little children.

  Dominic came to his cave. Eric Flu did not seem to be there. Dominic called his name. The boy did not answer. He was not hiding behind the squaw bushes or the trees near the cave. Dominic crept toward the mouth of the cave. The last project he had worked on was still there. The awning was still unfinished. He had been building it to keep out the rain. But then the Door to Heaven had appeared and he had forgotten about the awning and the rain and the death of Mrs. King because his mamá had invited over visitors. “Pascala,” he said as he walked beneath the awning’s skeletal structure. He wished she could see this, and he smiled, realizing that he had never wanted anyone else to see his work in his cave. He reached up. His fingertips traced the age-lines in the wood boards that he had hewn from a thin pine tree. Still smooth. He gripped the boards and felt proud of the sturdiness of his work. Not surprised that it had weathered the months, he was also thankful that the awning had remained standing, unbroken, unmoved, like a monument. But he was not sure if he still felt eager to finish.

  His screwdriver was on the table in the cave. He entered. The air felt compact. He picked up his screwdriver and gripped the handle. The axial shaft looked new. Stainless steel. The screwdriver felt familiar in his hand. But it also felt somewhat strange. He remembered how important it used to seem to him. He set the screwdriver back down on the table. He examined the cave. He saw everything. He remembered everything. He had not been gone that long. Only a few months, he said to himself, his voice echoing. Or has it been a year? The cave also seemed somewhat different. Perhaps it was shorter. Perhaps he was taller. Dominic could not tell whether the cave had changed or he had. He had made the clay pots and the desk. He had felt confident that he would use them for the rest of his life. That seemed like so long ago now. He had made the cave livable. He had believed that he would live there until he died. He never expected to feel different.

  He looked over his shoulder out of the cave. The mist cleared for a moment like the eye of a storm. Across the water through the trees he could barely see his house on the mainland. He could not see whether Pascala was still on the shore. He regretted that he had come to the island, to his cave, without her.

  The mist thickened again and obscured his view. He turned back around and walked deeper into his cave. The desk was against the back wall. A thin layer of dust covered it. No not dust. It was silt brought in by the wind. He opened the top drawer. Crammed in were the designs he had made in his school classes. Now they were wrinkled and yellowing and warped from the open weather. On top was his papa’s book (“my book”) Robinson Crusoe. The paperback was worn and tattered. His papa had loved that book. Dominic flipped through a few pages. He stopped at a dog-eared page that he had admired long ago. He had forgotten about it too. He read a passage aloud, his voice echoing in the cave:

  In a word, as my life was a life of sorrow one way, so it was a life of mercy another; and I wanted nothing to make it a life of comfort but to be able to make my sense of God's goodness to me, and care over me in this condition, be my daily consolation; and after I did make a just improvement on these things, I went away, and was no more sad.

  Dominic closed the paperback and returned it to the drawer. He closed the drawer and opened the one below it. There was his sketchbook wherein he had copied his papa’s designs from the walls of his house. He had built many designs. But there were still designs to be built, still work to be done. He felt he had left so much work unfinished — much the same way his papa had left things when he was taken from this world. Could I just put this work down even though I can still use my hands and my head, he wondered.

  His clay pots and plates were stacked beside the desk. He ran his fingertips over the top plate and wiped streaks in the thin layer of silt. Nearby was a rock speckled with fingerprints that he had made from squaw bush berry juice. The red color had faded to brown. One set of fingerprints was small. Another set was much larger. Papa, he thought and he pressed his fingers against the rock. His fingertips were not as small as the fingerprints he had made long ago, but they were not as large as his papa’s fingerprints. Dominic could almost hear the voice of the old face in the doorknob of the Door to Heaven, saying to him, “Sometimes we feel we need to grow just a little more before going through a door.”

  On the cave wall the ancient pictograph of the two struggling figures were as faded as his fingerprints. He walked over to it to study it more closely because he was having a little difficulty telling the lighter figure apart from the darker. It was not until he was very close that he could see the difference. The two wrestling figures would be indistinguishable one day. He ran his finger along the lighter figure. The darker one made him shiver.

  The sound of scuffing shoes came from behind. Dominic felt a sudden urge to defend himself. He whirled around, prepared for an attack. Eric Flu was standing at the mouth of the cave, examining the awning also. He was turned away in profile and Dominic still could not see his face. But he was exactly how Dominic remembered him — same size, same height, same clothes.

  “You haven’t grown at all,” he said.

  “But I’m more ancient than the Garden of Eden,” Eric Flue said.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I thought I’d never see you again?”

  “You are the one who disappeared.”

  “You stopped looking for me.”

  “I haven’t seen you since I was a boy.”

  “But I’ve always been here.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, nowhere, everywhere, just roaming the earth, going back and forth on it.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Eric Flu grinned. “Why, the prodigal son has returned,” he said sardonically.

  “Why did you attack me when we were boys?”

  The boy rushed into the cave. Darkness hid his face. He kicked the table. A leg broke and the table fell over. The screwdriver fell off and rolled toward Dominic. He lowered and picked it up. Eric Flu strode from the cave. His hands were at his sides. He was clenching and unclenching his fists. He looked eager for a fight.

  “Do you remember when we first fought?” he asked Dominic.

  “We didn’t fight.”

  “We’re always fighting.”

  “You attacked me.”

  “Semantics.”

  “No, I don’t fight.”

  “You’re so angry.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “That’s fear in your voice.”

  “No, I’m not afraid.”

  “Not even of death?”

  “Everyone must die.”

  The boy waved dismissively. “That’s a simple truth — like a Door to Heaven.”

  Dominic’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How do you know about that?”

  Eric Flu smirked. “A little mockingbird told me.”

  “No,” Dominic said, shaking his head. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Want to know what else I heard?”

  “No.”

  “You met someone special.”

  “So?”

  “Is she the reason you stayed away?”

  “How did you know I met a woman?”

  Eric Flu laughed at him. “She’s not a woman,” he said mockingly. “She’s just a girl. She’s a child — like you.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “Do you?”

  “She’s not like anyone
I’ve ever met.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know what love is?”

  “I know I want to be with her.”

  “Will you sacrifice her?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what a Pascal Lamb is for.”

  Dominic didn’t understand what the boy was talking about, but this conversation felt threatening. “Stay away from Pascala,” he said.

  “Stay with me on the island.”

  Dominic looked at his cave. He surveyed the island. He shook his head. “I’m not staying here,” he said softly.

  “Why not?” Eric Flu sounded wounded.

  “Pascala is waiting for me on the mainland. I have to return to her.”

  “What about everything you’ve created,” Eric Flu asked, “the cave and the table and the pots? What about your tools?”

  “I can always come back for them.”

  “You’ll never come back.”

  “You don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “You sound so sure for someone so lost.”

  “What do you care if I go?”

  “I care because you care.”

  “I care about Pascala.”

  “I hate her.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “You’re such a child.”

  Dominic turned and walked from the cave. He didn’t look at Eric Flu. He was almost at the shore when he heard the boy shout. Dominic turned around just in time to see him charging at him with his head down and hands outstretched and fingers bent like claws. Dominic braced himself. His legs and chest and arms tightened. Eric Flu rammed Dominic in the stomach. He was the size of a boy but he was very powerful. He knocked Dominic backwards. Dominic fell on the sand. He felt pain and he ignored it. They rolled together and struggled. Both tried to overpower the other. Sand was spraying. Dominic used all his might against Eric Flu but they were both evenly matched in strength and resolution. Dominic rolled the boy onto his back. Eric Flu shoved him off. Then he leapt to his feet and charged at Dominic again. Dominic flung him down. Eric Flu held on to Dominic and yanked him, and together they fell. The boy kicked and kneed Dominic. Dominic head-locked him. Eric Flu punched Dominic. Dominic pinned his arms and legs. The struggle continued for a long time. Dominic had never known such exertion. He had never been more weakened by any work and he had never been more determined in any project. He would not surrender. He locked hands with Eric Flu and the two stood. The boy screamed his outrage. Dominic felt that he was about to win.