Page 14 of The Seven Year Slip

“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 Ihopedmeant 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’ttoobad. Even if it was, I was sure I wasn’t theworst-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 mademe 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.Kitchenandbedroomandmusic. She had just ended her career withThe 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,withoutat 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 wasfurnished. 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 beigeshorts 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’shappening—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?”

---