I should walk through, Ayanna thought, and disappear too. But it would be her luck that the very next day Olivia would return, looking for her. When someone was lost, it was better to stay put.

The lake rippled. There was a mist too, she realized, lighter orange but it did nothing to make the sky feel lighter. She watched it for what felt like hours but was probably, Ayanna figured, maybe fifteen minutes. The mist swirled and shone, the water, Ayanna felt more and more certain, was warm, a few times it fizzed up as if it were carbonated and then stilled again. When the door shut, Ayanna was relieved. But was it a brighter blue now? The knob was no longer ornate; it had turned into a plain silver. Then it became brighter and brighter, until Ayanna had to shut her eyes. Even closed, she could see the intensity through her lids. Ayanna covered her eyes with her hands, drew her head to her knees, and still, pain. A creak, a pop, and the air was sauna-hot and dry, Ayanna raised her eyes, blinked at painful red-and-white spots in the corners of her vision, and the door was gone.

It will come back, Ayanna thought, and wished she could ask it why this time had been so dramatic. She walked back to her dad’s car by straying into the woods, not caring they belonged to a neighbor who hated the church. Wending their way between the broken branches on the ground and roots was a flock of wild turkeys, a mix of the dead and the spirits of their kin. Small heads and waddles. The spirits shifting between cloud and outstretched wings, all of them making strange hisses and garbled complaints until she backed away slowly. One of them had what looked like a bag of Chips Ahoy! in its mouth.

She took a picture but the dead did not appear in it. The living turkey with the cookies looked smug. He had found something delicious. Ayanna wanted to show Olivia. Later, in the middle of the night, she woke up and researched whether turkeys can eat chocolate. The answer was not really, and she lay awake wondering if the flock would die from eating the cookies, and feeling certain it would be her fault.

That night, Ayanna and her grandmother ate a pizza together in the backyard. It was chilly for the first time that summer, a wind pushing both of their hair away and then slapping it against cheeks and foreheads. Ayanna’s grandmother was asking her again what had happened when they had gone through the door.

“I saw spirits,” Ayanna said. “Some spoke English, some spoke maybe Korean, and some spoke a language I had never heard but I felt like I had once known or understood it.”