IT WASN’T THAT I didn’t want to take my vacation—I did. Every year for the last seven years, I’d taken that week and I’d flown off to some distant part of the world. I just . . . didn’t want to be the girl who kept looking around airports for a woman with an azure-blue coat and a loud laugh, waving her large heart-shaped sunglasses for me to catch up.
Because that woman didn’t exist anymore.
And neither did the girl who loved her unconditionally.
No, she was replaced by a woman who worked late on a Friday night because she could, who would rather attend work functions than first dates, who had a spare pair of tights and deodorant in her desk drawer just in case she pulled an all-nighter (not that she had yet). She was always the last one in the building, when even the motion-sensor lights thought she’d gone home, and she was happy.
She was.
I finally logged out of my work computer, stood from my chair, and stretched, the fluorescent light above me flickering to life again. It was around 8:30 p.m. I should get going before security started to make their rounds, because then they’d tell Strauss and Rhonda, and Rhonda had this policy against working late on Fridays. So I grabbed my purse, made sure that Rhonda had everything on her desk for the Monday morning meeting, and left for the elevator.
I passed one of the company bookcases—the ones where people put freebies of extra galleys and final copies. Novels and memoirs and cookbooks and travel guides. Most I’d already read, but one caught my eye.
DESTINATION TRAVEL: NEW YORK CITY
It must have been a newer one, and there was a delicious sort of irony to reading a travel guide about a city you lived in. My aunt used to say that you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.
I thought—for a split second—that my aunt would love a copy, but when I took it off the shelf and put it in my purse, reality hit me again like a brick to the head.
I thought about putting it back, but I felt so ashamed for forgetting that she was gone that I quickly left for the elevator. I’d donate it to a secondhand bookshop this weekend instead. The lone security guard at the front of the building looked up from her phone as I hurried past, not surprised at all to find me working so late.
I walked to the subway station, and headed uptown to the Upper East Side, where I got off the train at my stop and pulled out my phone. It was a reflex by now to call my parents on the walk from the station to my aunt’s apartment building.
I never used to do this, but ever since Analea died, it’d become a sort of comfort. Besides, I think it helped Mom a lot. Analea was her older sister.
After two rings, Mom answered with a “Tell your father that it is perfectly acceptable to finally move my exercise bike into your old room!”
“I haven’t lived there in eleven years, so it’s absolutely okay,” I said, dodging around a couple looking at Google Maps on their phone.
Mom shouted, making me wince, “SEE, FRED! I told you she wouldn’t care!”
“What?” my dad called faintly in the background. The next I knew, he was picking up the phone from what I assumed was the kitchen. “But what if you come home, baby girl? What if you need it again?”
“She won’t,” Mom replied, “and if she does, she can take the couch.” I massaged the bridge of my nose. Even though I’d been moved out since I was eighteen, Dad hated change. My mom loved repetition. They were a match made in heaven. “Isn’t that right?”
Dad argued, “But what if—”
I interrupted, “You can turn my room into anything you want. Even a red room, if you want.”
“A red . . . ?” Mom began.
Dad said, “Is that the sex dungeon in that movie?”
“FRED!” Mom shrieked, and then said, “Well, that is an idea . . .”
My father said, with a sigh that weighed about as much as all thirty-five years of their marriage, “Fine. You can put your exercise bike in there—but we’re keeping the bed.”
I kicked a piece of trash on the sidewalk. “You really don’t have to.”
“But we want to,” Dad replied. I didn’t have the courage to admit to my dad that home wasn’t their two-story blue vinyl house on Long Island anymore. Hadn’t been for a while. But it also wasn’t the apartment I was walking to—slower and slower by the minute, as if I didn’t really want to go at all. “So how was your day, baby girl?”
“Fine,” I replied quickly. Too quickly. “Actually . . . I think Rhonda is retiring at the end of the summer, and she wants to promote me to director of publicity.”
My parents gasped. “Congrats, sweetheart!” Mom cried. “Oh, we are so proud of you!”
“And in only seven years!” Dad added. “That’s gotta be a record! Why, it took me eighteen years to make partner at the architecture firm!”
“And it’s just in time for your thirtieth birthday, too!” Mom agreed happily. “Oh, we are going to have to celebrate—”
“I don’t have the job yet,” I quickly reiterated, crossing the street to the block where my aunt’s apartment was. “I’m sure there will be other people in the running.”
“How do you feel about it?” Dad asked. He could always read me in this alarming way that my mom absolutely couldn’t.
Mom scoffed. “How do you think she feels, Fred? She’s ecstatic!”
“It’s just a question, Martha. An easy one.”
It was an easy question, wasn’t it? I should feel excited, obviously—but my stomach just couldn’t seem to unknot itself. “I think I’ll be more thrilled when I finally finish moving in,” I said. “There’s just a few more boxes I have to situate.”
“If you want, we can come this weekend to help,” Mom suggested. “I know my sister probably left a lot of junk hidden places . . .”
“No, no, it’s fine. Besides, I’m working this weekend.” Which probably wasn’t a lie—I’d find some work to do this weekend. “Anyway, I’m almost home. I’ll talk to you later. Love you,” I added, and hung up as I turned the corner and the towering building of the Monroe came into full view. A building that housed a small apartment that once upon a time belonged to my aunt.
And now, against my will, it belonged to me.
I tried to stay out of it for as long as possible, but when my landlord said my rent would be increasing in the apartment I leased in Greenpoint, I didn’t have much of a choice—here was my aunt’s apartment, sitting empty in one of the most sought-after buildings on the Upper East Side, willed to me.
So I packed all my things into tiny boxes, sold my couch, and moved in.
The Monroe looked like every other century-old apartment building in this city—a skeleton of windows and doors, having housed people long dead and long forgotten. A bone-white exterior with detailed trim work that looked vaguely mid-century, winged lions chiseled into the eaves and placed at the entrance with missing ears and teeth, and a tired-looking greeter just inside the revolving doors. He’d been there for as long as I could remember, and tonight he was sitting at the welcome desk, his hat slightly askew, as he read the newest James Patterson novel. He looked up as I came in and his face lit up—
“Clementine!” he cried. “Welcome home.”
“Good evening, Earl. How’re you? How’s the book?”
“This Patterson guy never misses,” he replied happily, and wished me good night as I headed for the brassy elevators. My heart hurt a little, how familiar all of this was—how easy, how much it felt like home. The Monroe always smelled old—it was the only way I could describe it. Not musty or moldy, just . . . old.
Lived-in.
Loved.
The elevator dinged its arrival to the first floor, and I slipped inside. It was gilded just like the lobby, in brass that needed a nice polish, with fleur-de-lis accents across the baseboard and a cloudy mirror on the ceiling where a tired and blurry reflection of myself stared down at me. Brown hair cut at the shoulders, curling in the summer humidity, and blunt-cut bangs that never quite seemed to look purposeful, but some haphazard job done at 3:00 a.m. with kitchen shears and a broken heart.
The first time I came to stay at my aunt’s apartment, I was eight and the entire building seemed like something out of a storybook. Something I’d read about in the cramped library back home—somewhere Harriet the Spy or Eloise would live, and I imagined that I’d be just like them.
Clementine was the kind of name you gave to a quirky children’s book character, after all.
The first time I rode this enchanted elevator, I carried a too-big duffel bag with me, the color of cherries, clutching Chunky Bunny—my stuffed animal, which I still had—with all my might. Going somewhere new used to terrify me, but my parents thought I’d be better off with my aunt for the summer as they packed up our house in Rhinebeck and moved to Long Island, where they’d lived ever since. The mirrors on the ceiling were warped even then, and on the slow ride up, I found a spot where the mirrors were uneven and it bowed my face and twisted my arms like a fun-house mirror.
My aunt had said in a conspiratorial voice, “That’s your past self looking back at you. Just a split second, from you to you.”
I used to imagine what I’d say to that split-second-behind self.
That was when I still believed in all of my aunt’s stories and secrets. I was gullible and fascinated by things that sounded too good to be true, a spark of something other in the mundane. A mirror that showed your past self, a pair of pigeons who never died, a book that wrote itself, an alleyway that led to the other side of the world, a magical apartment . . .
Now the stories tasted sour in my mouth, but still, as I looked up at my mirrored self, I couldn’t help but play along, like I always had.
“She lied,” I told my reflection, her mouth moving to my words. If my split-second-past me was shocked by the words, she didn’t show it.
Because she already knew, too.
The elevator dinged, and I got off on the fourth floor. The apartments were labeled with letters. In the summers after I first visited, I’d memorized how to say the alphabet backward with them.
L, K, J, I, H, G, F . . .
I turned the corner. The hall hadn’t changed in years. The carpet was a faded Persian design, the sconces forgotten with cobwebs. I trailed my fingers down the white chair-rail molding that lined the hall, feeling the rough wood underneath prick at my fingertips.
E, D, C . . .
B4.
I stopped at the door and fished the keys out of my purse. It was almost 9:30 p.m., but I was so bone-tired, I just wanted to go to sleep. I unlocked the door and slipped off my flats in the doorway. My aunt had only two rules in this apartment, and the first was to always take off your shoes.
When I moved in last week, my eyes had wandered over all the tall shadows, as if I expected to see a ghost. A small part of me wanted to—or maybe it wanted at least one of my aunt’s stories to come true. Of course, none did.
And now I barely even looked up as I came inside. I didn’t turn on the lights. I didn’t study the shadows to see if they were stranger, if any were new.
She said this apartment was magical, but it just felt lonely now.
“It’s a secret,” she had said with a smile, pressing her finger to her lips. The smoke from her Marlboro curled out of the open window. I still remembered that day like it was yesterday. The sky had been crisp, the summer hot, and my aunt’s story had been fantastical. “You can’t tell anyone. If you do, it might not ever happen to you.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I had promised, and I’d kept that promise for twenty-one years. “I won’t tell a soul!”
So she told me in a whisper, her brown eyes glimmering with impossibility, and I believed her.
Tonight, the apartment smelled like it always had—of lavender and cigarettes. Moonlight streamed in through the large windows in the living room, two pigeons nesting on the AC, huddled into their sturdy nest. The pieces of furniture all looked like shadows of themselves, everything still where I last remembered. I dumped my purse by the barstool, my keys on the counter, and I fell onto the velvety blue couch in the living room. It still smelled like her perfume. The entire apartment did. Even six months later, after I’d traded most of her furniture for mine.
I grabbed the crocheted blanket from the back of the couch and curled myself under it, and hoped I could fall asleep. The apartment was foreign to me now, missing something terribly large, but it still felt like home in a way that nothing else ever could. Like a place I once knew, but that no longer welcomed me.
I wished I hated this place that still felt like my aunt could live here. That she could still walk out of her bedroom and laugh at me on the couch and say, Oh, my darling, going to bed already? I still have half a bottle of merlot in the fridge. Get up, the night’s young! I’ll cook you some eggs. Let’s play some cards.
But she was gone, and the apartment remained, along with all of the foolish fake secrets she whispered about it. Besides, if this apartment really was magical, then how come it hadn’t brought me back to my aunt yet, over the hundreds of times I’d come in and out, and in and out, over the last six months?
Why was I still here alone, on this couch, listening to the sounds of a city that kept moving forward, and forward, and forward, while I still mourned somewhere in the past?
It was a lie, and this was just an apartment like A4 or K13 or B11, and I was way, way too old to believe in an apartment that could carry me to a time that no longer existed.
Her apartment.
But now mine.
