I STUMBLED OUT OF the elevator, sucking in lungful of breath after lungful of breath, trying to get my chest to loosen up. To get myself to calm down. Breathe.
I was fine, I was fine—
I am fine—
“Clementine! Good morning to you,” Earl said, tipping his cap to me. “It’s a bit drizzly this morning—is something wrong?”
Yes, I wanted to tell him. There’s a stranger in my apartment.
“I’m just going for a short walk,” I said quickly, flashing him a smile that I hoped meant that nothing was wrong, and quickly left into the dreary gray morning. It was already so muggy, the humidity stuck to me like a second skin, and the city was much too loud for nine thirty in the morning.
I’d fallen asleep in yesterday’s clothes, which I just realized I still had on. I smoothed down my blouse, tied my hair back into a tiny ponytail, and hoped that the fallout from my mascara wasn’t too bad. Even if it was, I was sure I wasn’t the worst-looking person on the block.
This was the city that never slept, after all.
Why didn’t I tell Earl about the man in my apartment? He could’ve gone up there and vacated him—
It’s because you believe the story.
My aunt was good at telling stories, and the one she told about the apartment had always stuck to me like glue.
Obviously her apartment had its quirks: the pigeons on the AC refused to leave, generation after generation, the seventh floorboard in the living room creaked for no discernible reason, and under no circumstances were you to turn the faucet and the shower on at the same time.
“And,” she had said gravely, that summer I turned eight and thought I knew what made this apartment magical, but I did not, “it bends time when you least expect it.”
Like the pages of a book, uniting a prologue with a happy ending, an epilogue with a tragic beginning, two middles, two climaxes, two stories that never quite meet in the world outside.
“One moment you are in the present in the hall”—she pointed toward the front door, as if it was a journey she had lived already, retracing her steps in the map of her memory—“the next you open the door and you slip through time into the past. Seven years.” Then, a little quieter, “It’s always seven years.”
The first time she told me the story, sitting in that robin’s-eggblue chair of hers, Marlboro cigarette in hand, she told me only the good parts. I was eight, after all, and my first summer with my aunt stretched wide in front of me. “About twenty years ago, way before you were born, the summer was sweltering, and a storm had rolled across the city. The sky was brilliant with lightning . . .”
My aunt was a great storyteller. Everything she said, she made me want to believe, even while I was figuring out that Santa Claus didn’t really exist.
The way she told it, she’d just bought the apartment, and my mom had helped her move in that morning, so cardboard boxes with her things were stacked along the walls, words on the side detailing what was inside in long, loopy handwriting. Kitchen and bedroom and music. She had just ended her career with The Heart Mattered, the Broadway show she had starred in. She was twenty-seven, and everyone was baffled as to why she never wanted to act onstage again.
As she told it, the apartment was hollow. It was like a room without books. Her real estate agent had gotten the apartment for cheap—apparently the seller had wanted to get rid of it quickly—and my aunt wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She went out for groceries (and wine), because she wasn’t about to spend her first night in her new apartment, sleeping on the floor on an air mattress, without at least a wedge of Brie and some merlot to keep her company.
She returned to her new apartment, but something wasn’t right.
There weren’t any boxes in the living room. And it was furnished. There were plants everywhere, records of old bands suspended on the walls, a huge stereo system with a turntable under the living room windows. She thought she’d walked into the wrong apartment, and so she turned and left—
But no, it was B4.
She went back inside, and all the furniture was still there.
As was a strange young woman sitting on the windowsill, the window open, welcoming whatever breeze would break the sweltering hotness of a New York summer. The humidity just hung in the air, dripping, the sky cloudless of the thunderstorm that should have drenched the city just a few moments before. Her long beige shorts were a size too big, her tank top so loud it should have been in a Jazzercise special. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a bright blue scrunchie, and she was feeding two pigeons on the sill, talking to them in soft coos, until she noticed my aunt and stamped out her cigarette in a crystalline ashtray, her thick eyebrows raised high.
As my aunt used to say—she was the most beautiful woman she had ever met, the sunlight framing her in a halo of light. It was the exact moment she fell.
(“You always know,” she told me conspiratorially. “You always know the moment you fall.”)
The woman looked in confusion at my aunt, and then—
“Oh, so it happened again.”
“What happened? What’s happening—who are you?” my aunt asked, at a loss for words, because she was quite sure she’d stepped into the right apartment. She didn’t have time for something like this. The summer heat had already made her irritated, and her flats were soggy from the rain that was now nowhere to be found, and she needed to put her milk away before it spoiled.
The woman turned to her with a smile. “It’s a bit odd, but you look like the kind of person who might believe it.”
“Do I look that gullible to you?”
Her eyes widened. “That isn’t what I meant at all. You just moved in, right? To the Monroe—it’s still called that, isn’t it?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
The woman put a finger to her own lips and tapped them. “Things change. I’m Vera,” she said, and outstretched her hand. “I used to live here.”
“Used to?”
“Technically still do, for me.” Vera’s smile widened, and she motioned to my aunt’s groceries. “You can put them in the fridge. I was just about to make some summer fettuccine, if you’d like to stay, and I can explain?”
My aunt, flustered, quickly turned and started for the door again. “Absolutely not.”
So she left again and got the superintendent, who unlocked her door—the same one she had come from, B4, so she hadn’t gone into the wrong place before—and let her into her small, empty apartment. Her cardboard boxes greeted her. The superintendent looked around for her peace of mind, but he didn’t find the petite intruder anywhere, and my aunt couldn’t find any of the furniture she’d seen, either. Not the record player, the plants, none of it.
She didn’t see the woman again for another few months. By then my aunt was no longer sleeping on the floor, and she had bought a robin’s-egg blue wingback chair that she immediately set in the corner of the living room, and her fridge was stocked with wine and cheese, a travel guide for Malaysia open and facedown on the kitchen counter.
She left her apartment for a second—long enough to get a package from the mailbox downstairs—and by the time she unlocked her door and stepped back inside, she found herself in that same strange apartment again, with the records on the walls and the plants overflowing the counters, stacked across the sill.
The same woman, her hair now shorn short, was lounging on a threadbare couch that had gone out of style in the sixties. She looked at her guest over a copy of Jane Eyre and quickly sat up. “Oh, you’re back!”
The woman—this Vera—seemed quite happy to see her, too. Which was odd for my aunt. Most people, after she imploded her career, seemed to only ever look at her with either befuddlement or mild disdain. My aunt wasn’t quite sure where to go—what to do. Should she leave again, get the super?
(“Obviously I didn’t this time,” my aunt scoffed, and waved her hand in the air dismissively. “He couldn’t even fix my rat infestation. And I expected him to get a whole person out of my apartment? Absolutely not.”)
Instead, my aunt accepted Vera’s invite to fettuccine, a meal that was never quite the same twice. Vera never measured any of the ingredients, and watching her in the kitchen was like witnessing a hurricane personified. She was everywhere at once, dragging things, half-thought, out of the cupboards and abandoning them on the counter, forgetting the boiling pot on the stove, deciding on a side salad at the last minute—but oh, what kind of dressing?—and all the while she told my aunt this absolutely impossible story.
Of an apartment that sometimes slipped through time—seven years forward, seven years back.
“Like a seven-year itch?” my aunt had asked wryly, and Vera had looked so distraught that she’d even guess that.
“No, like the lucky number! Seven. It must be lucky, since you’re here.”
My aunt swore that she had never been flustered her entire life, but at that moment she hadn’t a clue what to say. They talked for hours over al dente pasta and wilted salad. They talked until morning was pink across the horizon. They laughed over cheap wine, and when my aunt told this story, you could see the happiness filling her face with youth and love. There was never a doubt in my mind that she loved Vera.
She loved her so much, she began to call her “my sunshine.”
And that was where she always stopped in her story—at the big reveal, the wonder and magic of this apartment that slipped through time—and when I was a kid, that was enough. It was a happy ending, and I got to exist in that same space, opening doors, hoping I’d slip, too, into some unknown past—or maybe a future. In seven years, would I be successful? Would I be popular? Pretty?
Would I have my life together? Would I fall in love?
Or if I slipped into the past, would I meet my aunt from the pictures of when I was born? The quieter, reserved woman who looked a little lost in those photos, and I never quite understood why.
It took a few years to realize that she had only told me the good parts that first summer afternoon, when she was trying to fill the silence.
I was twelve when she finally told me the sad parts. She told me to pay attention—that the heartbreak was important, too.
The summer evening was cool with a thunderstorm as we ate fettuccine that was never quite the same twice. I knew this story by now, backward and forward, wishing every time I stepped into the apartment it would choose me to whisk away—
“I wanted to marry her.”
She said it softly over her third glass of merlot while we were playing a game of Scrabble the night before our flight to Dublin. I remember that dinner so well—the way you do when your brain sticks on a scene and replays it over and over again years after, changing the details just slightly, but never the outcome.
“Finding a person was a little more difficult twenty-odd years ago. We’d met each other somewhere in time so often by then, I could trace the lines of her hands on mine. I had memorized the freckles on her back, drawn them into constellations. The apartment always drew us together when we were at crossroads, and oh, were we at so many—in our careers, in our personal lives, in our friendships. We helped each other. We were the only ones who could.” She had this far-off look in her eyes. “I thought I could find her, that it would be easy—that it would be like seeing someone you once knew on a crowded sidewalk, and your eyes meet, and time stands still. But time never stands still,” she added bitterly. “A lot can happen in seven years.”
She wasn’t wrong—in seven years, I’d be going to college. In seven years, I’d have my first boyfriend, my first heartbreak. In seven years, I’d have a passport more worn and weathered than most of the adults I met. I could only imagine what happened in the seven years between my aunt and Vera.
I didn’t have to.
It was simple, and it was sad:
When she found Vera in the present, she was different. She had changed, bit by bit, the way years often did, and my aunt, in all her love for new and exciting things, was afraid that what they had in that apartment out of time wouldn’t last. She was afraid that it would never be as good as it had been. That a lifetime together would sour, that the second taste wouldn’t be as sweet, that their love would grow stale like bread and their hearts would grow cold.
In the end, Vera had wanted a family, and Analea had wanted the world.
“So I let her go,” my aunt said, “rather than be burdened with me.”
And Vera moved on. Two kids on her own. She moved back to her hometown to raise them. Went back to college. Became a lawyer. She grew and she changed and she became someone new, as time always made you. And she had not looked back.
All the while, my aunt stayed the same, afraid to keep anything too long in fear it might spoil.
She only ever had two rules in this apartment—one, always take your shoes off by the door.
And two: never fall in love.
Because anyone you met here, anyone the apartment let you find, could never stay.
No one in this apartment ever stayed.
No one ever would.
So why would the apartment give me someone now? Why not my aunt—the person I wanted to see? Why did it spit me out into a time when she wasn’t there, her apartment loaned out to some charming stranger with the most piercing gray eyes?
It didn’t matter. He’d be gone by the time I went back. The apartment just made a mistake—or I was going nuts. Either way, it didn’t matter because he wasn’t staying.
I found myself walking a little farther than I anticipated, over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I always ended up here when I was stressed or lost. The timelessness of the portraits, the sweeping colorful landscapes, viewing the world through paint-splotched glasses. I walked through the galleries, and in that time I managed to summon up a little more decorum. And a plan. I got a macchiato from the Italian café across from the Monroe on my way back, and I downed it like a chaser, tossed it into the trash can outside of the building, and marched back toward the last place I really wanted to be.
