Opening the Door: On the Secrets Old Buildings Can Keep

A glitch in the library’s database mismatched her name to an address from her past, an error that sent letter after letter falling through a door she’d rented years before. Opening that door had never been easy, since she always seemed to be tangling the key among other things, trying to steer a small scooter over the step while library books shifted and slid against her chest, or fumbling a bin bag and a football and the clammy fingers of a toddler. They only left Sweetbriar Lane because the landlord’s family needed it, although that was what landlords always said—some brother or cousin would suddenly return from Australia, desperate for somewhere to stay, but then, within weeks, the house would be seen advertised at a higher rent.

She was too busy scrubbing the grime from their next set of rented rooms to mourn the loss of the sunlit kitchen where her babies had been little. She knew she couldn’t return, either to those years or that door—but then this glitch insisted on sending her name back there again and again and again. Every time she requested a library book, a confirmation slip landed on that mat, to be lifted with a stranger’s sigh and slammed onto a growing stack.

When the estate agent rang to request a forwarding address for all her letters, she blushed at the tiresomeness she’d caused and promised to have any future notices diverted to her home. Once she’d hung up, she tried to continue folding the laundry, but the sight of the agency’s name on her phone had brought a sign to mind, one that always turned her head as she made her way home. On a hill over the city, a derelict mental hospital had been partly converted into apartments, and now the hospital chapel was being advertised as a development opportunity too.

She counted herself among the many who flinched as they passed that old institution. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she—whose distress had twice sent her clambering river railings seeking her ending—might have lived within those walls. Neither home nor sacred space, to her the building felt stuck between states, stubbornly shaking its head.

She called it a whim, the force that lifted the phone and made her thumb ask a favor: if the agent was arranging viewings of the chapel, might he allow her to pop in afterwards, just for a quick look? It all happened quite quickly then, the phone began to ring in her hand, and within fifteen minutes, she was watching him unlock the gate. Among mounds of overgrown gravel, a bankrupt digger sat abandoned, its rust-ruptured bucket still holding a final load of dirt aloft, a garden of dandelions and ragwort thriving mid-air.

Beyond, the chapel stood as it always had, waiting for her to find it. Once the old key entered, the old lock nodded. Panels of plywood had been fixed to every wrecked window.