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.