The door wasn't locked. She'd said it wouldn't be.
I stepped into the entryway of my parents' house and the smell almost finished me off right there. Rice cooker on warm. Laundry soap. Whatever Mom had fried at six still in the air. A hundred years of memory palaces, and I'd built this hallway in my head a thousand times, and I'd gotten the smell wrong the whole time. Too clean. The real thing had garlic in it.
The ceiling opened up past the entry. Stone fireplace running floor-to-beam on the far wall, woodsmoke still breathing off the grate, the pendant lanterns over the kitchen island throwing amber across the marble. Big arched windows framing nothing but dark sky and the silhouette of the live oaks.
The TV was going in the living room, the firelight and the screen light trading off across the stone. Dad was asleep in front of it, remote riding his chest, head tipped back. Some detective show was solving a murder.
I stood there and watched my father breathe.
For him, I'd left for campus this morning with a granola bar and no jacket. For me, he'd been out of reach for a hundred years. There were worlds where I had to stop thinking about him entirely, because missing him was more than I could carry. And here he was. Snoring at a commercial.
The floorboard by the closet creaked when I shifted my weight. It had always creaked. I knew it creaked. I stepped on it anyway, on purpose.
Dad woke up the same as he always woke up, with total confidence that he had never been asleep.
"Hey," he said. "You're back late."
"You're watching your murder show without me." I dropped my bag by the couch and nodded at the screen. "Did the sad British guy solve the canal thing? I've been thinking about it."
"He's about to. It was the brother."
"It's always the brother."
"That's what I said." He found the remote and muted it. "Your mother said library. Long session?"
"Longer than I planned. How was your day? Did the Hendersons ever come get their ladder back, or is it legally ours now?"
"Week three," Dad said. "I've started calling it my ladder. It responds to it."
"Good. It should know who loves it."
I looked at him. He looked exactly like my memory of him. "You look good, Dad."
He squinted at me. "I look like a man who fell asleep during a commercial for boat insurance. You, on the other hand, look tired, kiddo. You look like finals week and it's September."
"That's fair. It was a finals-week kind of day. Is there food? Tell me there's food."
"There's rice. Your mother made the spicy pork. She'll be upset if it's still there in the morning, and then it becomes my problem."
"I'll handle it."
"You're a hero," Dad said, and unmuted the sad British guy.
I made it two steps toward the kitchen before the stairs creaked behind me. She'd been waiting for the door since Mrs. Alvarez reported me. My mother came down in her robe with her arms crossed, already talking.
"No jacket," she said. "September, midnight, no jacket."
"Hi, Mom." I kissed her cheek before she could get more momentum. "Is that robe new? It looks new."
"This robe is older than your license. Sit."
I sat. She took the bowl I'd picked up out of my hands, added more rice than the bowl was designed for, put the pork on top, and set it back in front of me with a spoon already in it. Then she sat down across the marble counter to supervise, the lantern light catching her face, the woodsmoke and garlic and warm rice filling the space between us.
"Did you eat today?"
"Something on campus, which doesn't count, so let's say no. Let's say I held out for this." I took the first bite.
It was rice and pork and my mother's kimchi at a kitchen counter at midnight, and it was the best meal of my life. Somewhere in the middle of the bowl I had to stop for a second and breathe. If she saw, she let me have it.
"Mom. The pork," I said, when I could.
"Good?"
"What did you do differently? Something's different."
"More garlic," she said, watching me. "You noticed?"
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"It's better. Don't change it back."
She tried not to look pleased. The corner of her mouth moved anyway. Then she pushed the kimchi closer and refilled my water, watching me the whole time.
"Your face is doing something," she said.
"It's the spice."
"It's my recipe. I know exactly what the spice does. That's not the spice."
I looked up. My mother looked back at me across the counter, twenty hours into her day, and I had crossed ten worlds and killed gods, and not one of them had ever figured me out that quickly.
"Long day," I said.
She held my eyes a moment. In the living room the show came back on.
"Hm," she said, and let it go.
She switched to Korean without signaling.
"Jal meokgo danyeosseo?" Are you eating well.
"Ne, eomma. Jal meokgo danyeosseoyo. Geokjeong maseyo."
It came out perfect. Native. Seoul on the vowels, soft where my Korean had always been flat and American.
The kitchen went quiet.
Mom looked at me. Dad's show got quieter.
"Since when," my mother said slowly, in English, "do you speak like my sister?"
Eleven worlds of languages in my head, and not one of them had a cover story for this.
"Okay, so, don't laugh. I've been using an app — one of the language ones, with the speaking drills, where the owl gets emotionally abusive if you skip a day. I've been doing it at the gym, in line, everywhere. I was going to surprise you at Sunday dinner, so thank you for ruining that. This was going to be a whole moment."
"An app taught you my mother's accent."
"It's a very good app, Mom. Five stars. The owl doesn't play around."
She stared at me. She wanted to believe it. She didn't. She set it aside the way she always did.
"Eat more," she said, pointing her chin at my bowl. "You're pale."
I ate more. I would have eaten the bowl itself to keep that look on her face. I hadn't been anybody's cagey son in a hundred years.
Dad wandered in around the end of the second helping, put a glass in the sink, and stood beside me at the counter in his socks. The fireplace had burned down to coals. The lanterns were warm and low.
"School's good? The thesis moves?"
"The thesis moves like a long crossing with no water in the—" I stopped. Dad looked at me. "Slowly. My advisor only sighs about forty percent of the time now, which I'm choosing to call momentum."
"A long crossing with no what?"
"Something I read. How's the Hendersons situation? Is the ladder eating well?"
"Fed it just this morning," Dad said. "Gave it some WD-40, told it it was loved."
"Good man."
"Bread rises slow," he said, patting my shoulder twice.
"That's not how you use that saying, Dad."
"It's my saying. I use it how I like." He looked at me a beat longer than usual. "You're sure you're okay? You have a face tonight. Your mother texted me about your face before you even got here."
"You were asleep."
"I received it spiritually."
"I'm okay. Strange day, and I'm tired. But I'm home, there's rice, and the brother did it. This is the best night I've had in a very long time."
"Well," he said. "It's good to have you home. There's always rice."
"I know. More than you'd think."
"Sunday," Mom said. "Dinner. Real dinner, not this midnight raccoon situation. No excuses."
"I'll be there early. I'll even help cook."
"You'll peel things."
"I'll peel everything you put in front of me."
Then I hugged my mother in the kitchen.
I felt her surprise. I did it anyway. And I was careful. I have cut the wards on a god's vault with less concentration than I put into that hug, because I had a century of strength in my arms and my mother's actual ribs under them, and she still made a small sound like I'd squeezed too hard.
"Aigo," she said into my shoulder. "What happened."
"I just don't say thank you enough. So thank you. For the rice. For all of it."
She leaned back and held my face in both hands and checked me over like she used to check for fever. Whatever she found, she didn't name it.
"Sleep," she prescribed. "You look a hundred years old."
I laughed.
Dad got his hug too, one-armed, with the shoulder pats, and he said "goodnight, kiddo" into the side of my head. I hadn't been anybody's son in a hundred years. I could have stood there all night.
My room was exactly as I'd left it this morning.
That was the part I hadn't braced for. Not like a childhood museum. Like this morning. A coffee mug on the desk with a dried ring in the bottom, from a Tuesday a hundred years ago. My laptop open to a page I'd been reading. Yesterday's shirt on the chair doing its best. A textbook splayed face-down, holding a spot I would never need again, in a chapter I could now recite.
I stood in the doorway for a while.
Then I moved through it slowly and touched things, one at a time. The mug. The chair. The dent in the wall from the doorknob, freshman year of high school. On the shelf, a photo from some game last fall, half the crowd mid-yell, and Sienna in the front of it with her arms up, caught laughing, and me at the edge of frame looking at her instead of the field like an absolute amateur.
I sat down on my bed. Exactly right.
Two heartbeats on the other side of the walls, slowing into sleep. Down the block, a dog. Further out, the city.
Something was coming for all of it.
I took out my phone and opened the drafts.
Library. Tomorrow. I owe you an ending.
I looked at it for a long minute. Then I sent it, and put the phone on my chest, and stared at the ceiling I'd stared at all through high school.
The phone buzzed almost immediately. She was awake.
Three dots appeared. Stopped. Appeared again. Stopped again.
Then, finally.
Sienna.it better be a good ending
Three dots, once more, brief.
Sienna.the seat is still mine though. that's separate
I fell asleep holding the phone, and for the first time in a hundred years, I didn't dream of doors.