flutters with the possibility as I run up the stairs. A fire on the stove. Clean sheets on the beds.
I’ve barely even touched the handle when it swings open.
ABEK!” I RUSH INTO THE FOYER. “ABEK? ARE YOU HERE?”
Straight ahead of me in the parlor is furniture, but not enough of it, and not ours. A large area rug too modern for Baba Rose’s taste. On top of it, an unfamiliar chaise lounge and a few spindly chairs.
I must be in the wrong apartment, one floor too low. I must have gotten confused again.
But no, from here I can see: The center of the floor is marked with three round water stains. Could the stains have moved, too? Five years. I haven’t been in this building in five years. I’m not in the wrong place. It’s just that this apartment has lived its own life since I was here.
I am home. I am home. A sound escapes my lips, something between a bark and a cry.
The air is the same. The heavy heat, which Mama always said was the downside of living on the highest floor. Is it possible I can still smell the leftover ghosts of Aunt Maja’s nightly cigarette? I look down, and without realizing it, I’ve slipped off my shoes. I haven’t done this in months. Even at nighttime, I’ve slept holding my shoes, to make sure they weren’t stolen, to make sure I could be ready to run. It’s because it’s Thursday. Thursday is the day Mama washed the floors.
My feet remember to take off my shoes, and my hands remember to deposit my parcel where a credenza used to be.
“It’s me,” my voice remembers to say, and is it possible that in this apartment, my voice remembers that it used to be a higher pitch? That it used to have a sharpness, a bit of wit?
Now, the only response to my voice is an echo.
Abek’s room first. I try to focus, walking toward the smallest room at the end of the hall, feet sticking to the polished walnut floors—there used to be a carpet runner—and pushing the carved door open. Sky-blue walls; the Germans kept those. White trim, curtains.
But those are the only familiar things. There’s no furniture. Even the bed is gone. A pile of rumpled bedsheets sits in the corner, but I can’t tell whether someone used them recently or whether they were tossed there by whomever stole the bed. When I bring one to my nose, soft and flannel, it smells faintly of must. His closet is empty. No picture books. No model cars, no stray sock catching on the door.
Backtracking, to my parents’ room next and then Baba Rose’s, and with each empty room I can feel my brain wanting to break into pieces.
My room, the one I shared with Aunt Maja. Dark wood panels; it had been my grandfather’s study before he died. The bed frames are gone here, too. I scan the rest of the room. I’d pasted posters on my walls, travel advertisements from train companies. Someone tried to scrape them off, but I can make out half of the Eiffel Tower.
If Abek had been back to this house, my room is where he would have left me something—a letter or a memento. I’m sure of it. Something to say, I was here. Wait for me. So I pick up a mildewed towel crumpled along a baseboard and shake it out, and I run my fingertips along the windowsill in case a slip of paper is jammed in the pane.
Inside my closet, naked wooden hangers clatter together. On the shelf above, an upholstered valise I don’t recognize. I pull it down and upturn it, but nothing falls out. It’s empty, and the clasp is broken, a beaten-up piece of luggage the previous occupants couldn’t even bother to take.
They left me trash. They left me nothing. They left us nothing. This apartment is both familiar and strange. How can something feel like too much and not enough?
On the floor of the closet sits a wooden box. It’s flush with the corner as though it was placed there intentionally, not just left at random. My heart speeds as I drop to my knees.
When I slide it out, it’s heavy; it scratches the floor. And then, from near the front door, I hear a familiar click and whir. Someone is here.
“Abek!”
I race back down the hallway and, in the foyer, skid to a stop. The figure at the door is a reed-thin