Chapter 1 #3
I peeled the wet blouse off over my head and dropped it into the laundry bag on the back of the door.
I unhooked the bra. I stepped out of the Mary Janes and left them, soaked, on the doormat.
I pulled the gray hoodie off the hook—the one with the cuff I had worried into a small frayed half-moon—and I pulled it on over nothing else, and I tugged the sleeves down past my wrists, and I stood in the middle of my one room in the gray hoodie and a pair of damp tights and I breathed.
I should have made tea.
I should have boiled the kettle and made tea and gotten into bed with the laptop and watched something that did not require me to think and gone to sleep at eleven, the way I did on launch nights, the way I had done on three previous launch nights, the way the small careful protocol of my survival had been designed.
I went to the desk.
I did not turn on the desk lamp. The streetlight on Suydam Street, even through the rain, was enough to see by.
I pulled out the chair. I sat. I put my hand on the brass pull of the drawer and I held it there for a count of ten, the way a person holds the cap of a bottle they have promised themselves they will not open, and then — because something had cracked in the fluorescent light of the Crosby’s ladies’ room and I had not been able to put it back together on the J train or in the rain on Knickerbocker — I opened it.
The manuscript was where I had left it in June.
Two hundred and forty pages, hand-numbered in pencil along the bottom right corner because I did not trust the printer at the FedEx on Fulton with anything sequential.
The title page on top. Salt and Stay. My name underneath it, because in the privacy of my own drawer I had, for once, allowed myself my name.
A novel by Rachel Booker. The B was a little crooked because the o of the typewriter had stuck.
I had not opened the drawer since June. I had told myself, in June, that I would open it again when I had the bandwidth.
I had told myself, in July, that I would open it when the new Margot deadline cleared.
I had told myself, in August, that I would open it after Labor Day.
I had told myself, in September—I had stopped telling myself anything in September.
I lifted the title page.
The first line of chapter one was the line I had written in October of last year on the L train going the other direction, in a notebook I had since lost.
By the ocean it’s easy to take up space.
I read it.
I read the second line.
In the city, in the gaps between other people, there’s no space to take.
I sat very still.
The two lines had a rhythm in them I had not, in nine years of ghosting, ever quite given to her. The rhythm was mine. The rhythm was, possibly, the only thing I had not let her have.
I shut the drawer.
I shut it hard. The brass pull jumped under my palm. The whole desk shook. The fiddle leaf fig leaned a fraction further toward the lamp.
I pressed both palms flat over my face.
It was then that the air pressure in the room dropped.
It dropped the way it dropped in the seconds before a real storm — that small, unsettling lift in the inner ear, the soft pop in the sinuses, the sense that the apartment itself had taken a breath and was holding it.
The fig‘s largest leaf shivered without any wind to shiver it.
The kettle, which was empty, made a small metallic tink on the burner as though it had been knocked.
I lowered my hands.
The bathroom door was open. I had not closed it on my way in.
From the desk chair I could see directly into the bathroom—three feet of doorway, the edge of the white tile, and, on the far wall, the small medicine-cabinet mirror over the sink.
The cabinet was old. The mirror was old.
The silvering had worn in two thin lines along the bottom edge and I had been meaning, for two years, to ask the super about replacing it.
The mirror was rippling.
It was rippling the way the surface of a pond ripples when a stone has been dropped at the far end and you are watching the rings come toward you.
It was rippling the way skin ripples under a hand pressed flat against the inside of it.
It was rippling, and it was not—quite—reflecting my bathroom anymore.
I stood up.
It was a mistake. I should have backed against the desk and called somebody, although I was not sure who I would have called.
But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have any option but to move closer.
I crossed the three feet of bathroom doorway and the white tile underneath my bare feet was, impossibly, warm.
The air in the bathroom smelled of things that did not belong in a bathroom on Suydam Street.
It smelled of cold water on stone, the way the inside of a cathedral smells in summer.
It smelled, faintly, of jasmine, the way the air had smelled outside a hotel in Lisbon on a trip I had taken, once, alone, in my early twenties.
It smelled of ozone, the way the platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn smelled in the seconds after a train.
It smelled, very faintly, of someone else’s perfume — a perfume I had never worn but recognized, the way you recognize a piece of music you have heard once in a film you cannot place.
The mirror was no longer a mirror.
It was a sheet of something the color of mercury, pearled along its surface with the soft iridescence of an oyster shell, and it had—somehow, without depth and with all the depth in the world—become a window.
Behind it I could see the suggestion of a room: dark stone the color of wet slate, polished to a mirror finish, and the faintest wash of a sky going through a color that did not, that I could remember, exist. Lavender turning to bronze turning to a green I had no name for.
Not the green of a leaf. Not the green of the sea.
A green that had been waiting, somewhere, to be the green of something.
In the mirror—in the not-mirror, in the silver—there was a face.
It was almost my face. It was the face of a woman who looked the way I had looked in the Crosby’s ladies’ room when I had let myself, for one second, look.
Want. Bare. Undeflected. The hair down. The shoulders down from around the ears.
The hazel eyes finally landing somewhere — landing, I realized with a small, distant shock, on me.
The face in the silver was looking back at me.
The pressure in the apartment held.
The mirror did not close.
Somewhere on the other side of the silver—far away and also, it turned out, very near—there was a sound that was almost a voice.
Not a word. Not yet. The shape, perhaps, that a voice makes in the half-second before it becomes a word.
A breath in a room that had been quiet for a long time. A breath that knew my name.
The pilot light behind my ribs, the one I had felt at the bar, came back up.
I lifted my hand.
I put my fingertips to the silver. It was warm. Liquid. It gave, the way the surface of a held breath gives, and my fingers went through to the wrist, and the wrist went through to the elbow.
On the other side I felt a hand—hands—the tug of want, of need, of jealousy.
I stepped through.