Page 77 of The Seven Year Slip

He smiled as he led me to the door, his eyes bright with the possibility. “We’ll go everywhere. Find some of the greasiest pizza in New York. We’ll—”

And the second he opened the door, he vanished, leaving only the warmth of his fingers through mine, and then even that faded, and I stood in my aunt’s dark apartment in the present, and looked at my empty hand.

31

Letters to the Dead

After I tried togo back four—no, five—times, I finally gave up and realized that the apartment wasn’t going to send me back to him today, and decided to go run some errands. I locked the door and shoved my keys into my purse as I headed out of the building. I didn’t want to stay right now, with the feeling of Iwan’s hand still in mine. At the front desk, Earl closed his latest James Patterson novel and waved to me. “Oh, hello, Clementine! Summer really blows up thunderstorms in a blink, don’t it?” he said as I came up to the revolving door and looked out into the dreary gray rain. I was glad I didn’t look that hungover, though I felt it in every bone in my body. “You know, I remember when you and your aunt would come down the elevator and race into the courtyard and come back in soaking wet.” He shook his head. “It’s a wonder you never caught your death out there.”

“She always said dancing in the rain made you live longer,” I replied, though it was silly and certifiably untrue. It was a nice thought, even if it turned out to be false.

“I’ll have to try it someday,” he replied with a laugh. “Maybe I’ll live forever!”

“Maybe,” I conceded, and leaned against the desk to wait out the storm. Whenever rain would begin to drum on the windows, wherever my aunt and I were—it didn’t matter if we were home, or in some foreign place—she would grab my hand and pull me out into the rain. She would stretch out her arms and tilt her head back to the sky. Because that’s what life felt like, she’d always say.

That’s what life was for—

Who else could say they danced in the rain in front of the Louvre?

“Come on, my darling Clementine,” she urged, coaxing me into the downpour in front of Paris’s famous museum, the great glass pyramid our dance partner. Then she raised her hands over her head and closed her eyes as if to channel some divine power. She struck a pose and began to shake her shoulders. “You only live once!”

“What? No, stop,” I begged, my shoes squeaky, my pretty yellow dress already soaked through. “Everyone is looking!”

“Of course they are, they want to be us!” She grabbed me by my hands and threw them up, and spun me around the cobblestones, a waltz against sadness, and against death, and grief, and heartache. “Enjoy the rain! You never know when it will be your last.”

That was the thing about my aunt, she lived in the moment because she always figured it’d be her last. There was never a rhyme or reason to it—even when she was healthy, she lived like she was dying, the taste of mortality on her tongue.

I used to love the way she saw the world, always as one last breath before the end, drinking in everything as if she never would again, and maybe I still loved bits of that.

I loved how she spent every moment making a memory, everysecond living wide and full, and I hated that she never thought—never once entertained the idea—that she would have another dance in the rain.

The confused looks of the tourists in the courtyard of the Louvre melted into wonder as she pulled them—all strangers—one by one into the storm. A violinist who had sought shelter under the brim of a newspaper stall lifted their instrument to their shoulder and started playing again, and kids ran out to join us, and soon everyone was spinning around in the rain.

Because that was my aunt. That was the kind of person she was.

The melody of an ABBA song sang over the violinist’s strings, a yawp about taking chances, about falling in love, and we danced, and the next day I’d caught a cold and spent the rest of the week in the apartment we’d rented, surviving on brothy soup and club soda. We never told my parents that I’d gotten sick, only that we’d danced in the rain.

I never told my parents the bad bits, anyway.

Maybe if I had...

The rain began to let up as Earl said, “Oh, I think you’ve got something in your mailbox.”

My mailbox. It felt so jarring to hear. It was supposed to be my aunt’s, but I had the keys now, and any letters addressed to her had gone unanswered for the last six months anyway. She didn’t get much mail anymore, after I’d closed her bank account and credit cards, but sometimes there would be a piece of junk mail, so I went over to the row of golden mailboxes and took out my key.

“What is it?” I asked as I opened it.

He shrugged. “Just a letter, I think.”

A letter? My curiosity was overtaken by dread. Perhaps a letter returned to sender, address unknown. Perhaps it was junk mail in disguise. Or maybe—

I unlocked the mailbox and took it out. It looked like junk—like everything else that came for her—until I noticed the handwritten address in the corner.

FromVera.

My heart leapt into my throat. Vera—my aunt’s Vera? The Vera from her stories? Black spots crept into the edges of my vision. My chest was tight. This was too real, too quickly.

“Clementine?” I heard Earl say. “Clementine, is everything all right?”

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