Jane handed her the phone. It was open to a breaking news article. At first, Ayanna didn’t understand what she was reading. Around her more and more people were looking and talking on their phones. Felix was speaking to her, his hand was on her shoulder, and Jane was talking too, looking into her eyes. Jane’s eyes were so dark, the whites so sharp, and she had dusted gold above and around, and it was easier for Ayanna to pay attention to those details because her brain was still reacting to the headline’s slap. Then, Ayanna looked down at the screen. Once, her father had thought aloud to her, told her it probably wasn’t right but maybe the ways we perceived the world, the universe, were all wrong. People were always thinking in terms of distances, but maybe everything in the universe, excluding people and animals, was speaking together. Gravity, light, heat were maybe also tools of communication between planets, between stars, between gases. Sometimes, meanly, Ayanna had wanted to hear him say these things again but to an astrophysicist, to hear him try to explain his half-baked but poetic understandings of these things and how the doors maybe tied into what he called “celestial forces for communication and understanding.” It was easier, Ayanna knew, to think of him reading the same headline and to wonder about him instead of the doors and what their return meant. Her father had two more kids, was living abroad, and was raising them to believe in nothing. They were lucky, Ayanna had thought, because they were being raised to be realistic. Ayanna scrolled. There it was: her door. There were no longer fields around it but brown soil tinted with gold, long light-green grass in the background, the barn where she had prayed standing behind it.

26

After dinner, Ayanna quickly went back to her hotel. Inside her suitcase, a spirit had stuffed itself in among her untouched clothes and she ordered it out. It lingered, pretending it had somehow not heard her, and she said “now” in a voice that made her sound like her mother. The spirit sulked its way into the minibar, misting and leaving a basement scent behind it. Ayanna rolled her eyes. She packed quickly, until there was a soft knock on the door. Dreading a confrontation with Jane, Ayanna ignored it, but the person kept insistently and evenly knocking. Knowing it could only be Felix, Ayanna opened the door. He hugged her, said nothing, and in silence helped her pack. He looked under the bed and gathered her toiletries from the bathroom.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said at least three times.

Finally, Felix said, “I know but I want to.”

She stopped then, and hugged him, tipped her face up toward his and kissed him. Ayanna felt certain it wasn’t a goodbye.

“You should talk to Jane,” he said. “She is freaking out.”

“I can’t.”