A HAND ON MY shoulder shook me awake.
“Five more minutes,” I mumbled, brushing the touch away. There was a crick in my neck, and the pounding in my head made me want to burrow down into the sofa with all the chip crumbs and never return. It was so quiet, I thought I heard someone in the kitchen. My aunt humming. Getting her favorite chipped coffee mug that read F*CK THE PATRIARCHY. Putting on a pot of coffee.
It almost sounded like it used to, when I’d stumble in late at night, head full of wine, too tired (and too drunk) to make it back to my apartment in Brooklyn. I’d always crash on the couch, and wake up in the mornings with a mouth that tasted like cotton and a glass of water on the coffee table in front of me, and she’d be waiting at her yellow kitchen table for me to tell her all about last night’s gossip. The authors behaving badly, the publicists lamenting about the lack of datable men, the agent who had an affair with their author, the latest blind date Drew and Fiona hooked me up with.
But when I opened my eyes, ready to tell my aunt about Rhonda’s retirement and another failed relationship and the new chef Drew wanted to sign . . .
I remembered.
I lived here now.
The hand shook my shoulder again, the touch soft yet firm. Then a voice, gentle and rumbly, said, “Hey, hey, friend, wake up.”
Two things occurred to me then:
One, my aunt was very much dead.
And two, there was a man in her apartment.
With pure unbridled terror, I propelled myself to sit up, throwing my hands out widely. I connected with the intruder. In the face. The man gave a cry, clutching his nose, as I pushed myself to my feet, standing on the couch, my aunt’s decorative tasseled pillow of Jeff Goldblum’s face raised in defense.
The stranger threw up his arms. “I’m unarmed!” “I’m not!”
And I hit him with the pillow.
Then again, and again, until he backed up halfway into the kitchen, his hands raised in surrender.
Which was when, in my semi-sleepy state of fight or flight, I got a good look at him.
He was young—in his mid-twenties—clean-shaven and wide-eyed. My mother would have called him boyishly handsome. He wore a dark shirt with an overstretched neckline, a cartoon pickle on the front and the words (PICKLE)BACK ME UP, BRO, and distressed blue jeans that had definitely seen better days. His auburn hair was wild and unbrushed, his eyes so light gray they almost looked white, set into a handsomely pale face with a brush of freckles across his cheeks.
I angled my pillow toward him again as I (ungracefully) dismounted over the back of the couch and sized him up. He was a little taller than I was, and gangly, but I had nails and the will to live.
I could take him.
Miss Congeniality taught me to sing, and I was nothing if not a prepared, depressed millennial.
He gave me a hesitant look, his hands still in the air. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said apologetically in a soft Southern drawl. “I take it you’re . . . um, you’re Clementine?”
At the sound of my name, I held the pillow higher. “How do you know that?”
“Well, I’m actually—”
“How did you get here?”
“The—um—the front door, but—”
“How long have you been here? Have you been watching me sleep?
What kind of sick p—”
He interrupted me loudly, “All night. I mean—I didn’t watch you sleep all night. I was in the bedroom. I got dressed and came out here and saw you on the couch. My mom’s a friend of your aunt’s. She’s letting me sublet the apartment for the summer, and she said I might have a visitor.”
That made very little sense. “What?”
“Analea Collins,” he replied with that same confused hesitance. He began to reach for something in his back pocket. “Here, see—?”
“Don’t you dare move,” I snapped, and he froze.
And slowly raised his hands again. “Okay . . . but I have a note?” “Give it to me, then.”
“You told me—you told me not to move?” I glared at him.
He cleared his throat. “You can reach for it. Back left pocket.” “I’m not reaching for anything.”
He gave me an exasperated look.
Oh. Right. I told him not to move. “. . . Fine.” I carefully crept up to him and began to reach around to his back left pocket . . .
“And here we find the rare gentleman in the wild,” he began to narrate
—in a really terrible Australian accent, by the way. “Careful. He must be approached cautiously so not to be easily startled . . .”
I glared at him.
He raised a single infuriating eyebrow.
I snatched the contents out of his back left pocket and quickly moved an arm’s length away from him. As I backed away, I recognized my aunt’s apartment key. I knew it was hers because it was on a little key chain she bought in the Milan airport years ago when we went after my high school graduation. I thought this key had been lost. And with it was a note, folded into the shape of a paper crane.
I unfolded it.
Iwa ,
I ’ lovel tha thi coul wor ou ! Tel you mothe hell fo m an b ur t chec th mailbo ever da . I Mothe an Fucke com b th windo , d no ope i . The li . I hop yo enjo Ne Yor —i ’ quit lovel i th ummer , albei bi ho . T –t !
xox , AC (P.S. I yo e a elderl woma wanderin th hall , pleas
b dea an en Mis Norri bac t G6.)
(P.P.S. I m niec come b , pleas tel Clementin yo ’l b
ublettin fro m thi umme . Remin he abou ummer abroa .)
I stared at it for longer than I probably needed to. Even though I had countless birthday cards and Valentine’s cards and Christmas cards from her stashed in my jewelry box in the bedroom, seeing new words strung together in her looping script made my throat constrict anyway. Because I didn’t think I’d ever see any more combinations.
It was silly, I knew it was silly.
But it was a bit more of her than before that remained.
Summers abroad . . .
The stranger brought me out of my thoughts when he said, quite confidently, “Does everything make sense now?”
I set my jaw. “No, actually.”
His bravado faltered. “. . . No?”
“No.” Because Miss Norris passed away three years ago, and a young couple moved into her apartment and threw away all of her antique music boxes and her violin, since she didn’t have anyone to will them to. My aunt wanted to save them, but before she could, they were ruined out on the curb in the rain. “I’m not sure what you think subletting means, but it doesn’t mean you can waltz in just any summer you want to.”
His eyebrows scrunched together in vexation. “Any summer? No, I just spoke to her last week—”
“You’re not funny,” I snapped, hugging the sequined face of Jeff Goldblum to my chest.
He blinked then, and gave a slow nod. “All right . . . let me get my things, and I’ll be gone, okay?”
I tried not to look too relieved as I said, “Good.”
He dropped his hands and quietly turned back into my aunt’s bedroom. Inside, I expected to see my full bed on its IKEA black metal frame, and instead caught a glimpse of a blanket I hadn’t seen since I’d packed it up six months ago. I quickly looked away. It just looked like that blanket. It wasn’t really.
My chest constricted, but I tried to push the feeling down. It happened almost six months ago, I told myself, rubbing my sternum. She’s not here.
As he began to pack up, I turned and paced the living room—I always paced when I was nervous. The apartment was brighter than I remembered, sunlight streaming in through the large bay windows.
I passed a picture on the wall—one of my aunt smiling in front of the Richard Rodgers Theatre the opening night of The Heart Mattered. One that I knew I had taken down when I moved in the week before. It was in storage, along with the vase that was now on the table and the colorful porcelain peacocks on the windowsill she’d bought in Morocco.
And then I noticed the calendar on the coffee table. I could’ve sworn I threw it out, and I knew Aunt Analea had stopped keeping track of the days, but not for seven years . . .
“Well, I think that’s all of my things. I’ll leave the groceries in the refrigerator,” he added, a duffel bag over his shoulder as he came out of my
aunt’s room, but I barely noticed him. My chest felt tighter.
I could barely breathe.
Seven years—why was the calendar set to seven years ago?
And where were my things? The boxes I’d yet to unpack that were in the corner? And the pictures I’d hung up on the walls?
Had he moved my things? Put them somewhere to mess with me? He paused in the living room. “Are you . . . okay?”
No. No, I wasn’t.
I sat down—hard—on the couch, curling my fingers so tightly around Jeff Goldblum’s face that the sequins began to crinkle. I started noticing all of the little things, now—because my aunt never changed anything in her apartment, so when something went missing or changed, it was easy to tell. The curtains that she’d thrown away three years ago after a cat she brought in off the street peed on them. The Saint Dolly Parton candle on the coffee table that set fire to her feather boa robe, both tossed out the window. The afghan I’d covered up with last night that should’ve been boxed up and put into the hall closet.
There were so many things that were here that weren’t here anymore. Including . . .
My eyes fell on the wingback chair the color of robin’s egg. The chair that was no longer there. That shouldn’t be there. Because—because it was where—
“My aunt. Did she say where she went?” I asked, my voice wobbling, even though I already knew. If it was seven years ago, she’d be . . .
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, I think she said Norway?”
Norway. Running from walruses and taking photos of glaciers and looking up train tickets down to Switzerland and Spain, nursing a bottle of vintage wine she’d bought from a corner store across from our hostel.
Black spots began to eat at the edges of my vision. I couldn’t get a deep enough breath. It felt like there was something lodged in my throat, and there wasn’t enough air, and my lungs wouldn’t cooperate, and—
“Shit,” he whispered, dropping his duffel. “What’s wrong? What can I do?”
“Air,” I gasped. “I need—I need fresh—I need—”
To leave. To never come back. To sell this apartment and move halfway across the world and—
In two strides, he was over to the window. Alarmed, I shook my head. “No, not—!” He threw it open.
What came next was something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Because my aunt took care in naming everything that she adopted. The rat that lived in her walls for a few years? Wallbanger. The cat she adopted that pissed on her curtains? Free Willy. The generation of pigeons that roosted on her AC for as long as I’d been alive?
Two blurs of gray and blue darted into the apartment with savage coos. “Motherfu—” the man cried, shielding his face.
They came in like bats out of hell, rats of the night, vengeful terrors.
“The pigeons!” I cried. One of them landed with a hard thud on the countertop, the other took a round in the living room before landing in my hair. The claws scratched my scalp, getting tangled in my already knotted hair. “Get it out!” I cried. “Get it off me!”
“Hold still!” he cried, grabbing the pigeon by the body, and gently coaxed it out of my hair. It didn’t want to let go. I debated whether or not to shave off my entire head in that moment. But his hands were gentle, and it made my panicked heart in my throat beat a little more rationally. “I got it, I got it, there’s a good girl,” he murmured in a soft, low voice, though I wasn’t sure whether it was to the pigeon or to me.
I was glad he couldn’t see the blush that inched up my cheeks.
Then—we were free. I scrambled away from the pigeon, behind the couch, while he held it at arm’s length.
“What do I do?” he asked hesitantly. “Release it!”
“I just caught it!”
I mimed throwing it. “OUT THE WINDOW!”
The pigeon whirled its head around like the girl from The Exorcist and blinked at him. He made a face and threw it out the window. It took flight
into the air and left for the opposite rooftop. He gave a sigh. The other pigeon blinked, cooing, as it waddled itself to the edge of the counter and nibbled on a piece of mail.
“Erm, I take it this is . . . Mother and Fucker?” he asked, a little apologetically.
I patted down my hair. “Now you remember the note?”
“Could have specified pigeons,” he replied, and went to get the other one. It started running the other way, but he clicked his tongue to try and corral it.
I watched with mounting panic.
Seven years ago, I was supposed to go backpacking across Europe with my then boyfriend, but we broke it off just before our departure. I was more bereft about that, in hindsight, than him breaking up with me. Then my aunt had shown up at my parents’ house, traveling scarf tied around her head, in heart-shaped sunglasses, a suitcase at her side. She’d smiled at me from the front porch and said, “Let’s go chase the moon, my darling Clementine.”
And we did.
She didn’t know where we were going, and I certainly didn’t, either. We never had a plan, my aunt and I, when we chased an adventure.
Had she said she’d subletted her apartment? I . . . couldn’t remember. That summer had been a blur of some other girl without a map or an itinerary or a destination.
“This apartment is magical,” my aunt’s voice rang in my ears, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.
“I . . . I have to go,” I muttered, grabbing my purse beside the couch. “Be gone by the time I get back. Or—or else.”
And I fled.
