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.
4
Strangers in a Strange Time
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.
Iwan,
It’s so lovely that this could work out! Tell your mother hello for me and be sure to check the mailbox every day. If Mother and Fucker come by the window, do not open it. They lie. I hope you enjoy New York—it’s quite lovely in the summers, albeit a bit hot. Ta-ta!
xoxo, AC
(P.S. If you see an elderly woman wandering the halls, please be a dear and send Miss Norris back to G6.)
(P.P.S. If my niece comes by, please tell Clementine you’ll be subletting from me this summer. Remind her about summers abroad.)
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.