Stephanie always sat on the left side of the train. She never thought about why, just that she was there every morning, coffee in hand, listening to an audiobook through her AirPods as she watched the city thin out past the glass.
She could pick out the landmarks in the dark, the ones before the house that marked the halfway in her commute. The Victorian, complete with a widow's walk, stuck out in the bleak landscape, painted the color of old silver in need of a shine. She noted the crooked chimney, the blue curtains, and the dead plants on the porch. A window on the second floor, east side, stayed open with the curtain drifting in the wind. Not cracked, but fully opened to the elements, come cold or rain.
She'd never seen a car. Nor a light. The house appeared abandoned.
She imagined what it would look like inside; the setting of her current book adding a dimension to the unseen interior of the house.
Wednesday night, half-asleep with her forehead against the glass after work, her eyes opened before the house. She'd developed a sixth sense around the house after two years of the commute. But tonight there was a light. Second floor, across the hall from the open window. She twisted in her seat to hold on to it as the train slid past. Then it disappeared behind the treeline, and she was facing forward, staring at nothing.
The FOR SALE sign appeared Thursday morning. Newly staked and slightly crooked, a blight in front of the picturesque home. It landed like a stone dropped into still water, and she spent the whole workday wondering if she had imagined it, her heart picking up a beat although she did not know why. On Friday she'd looked up the house on Renner Road, accessible from a commuter platform she'd passed a thousand times. She told herself she was just curious.
Saturday morning, she took the train and exited at Renner.
She walked through the nonexistent neighborhood of former foundations and derelict buildings, the Victorian house shining like a beacon in the distance as she sipped her coffee. Approaching the house on foot rather than glimpsing it sideways at speed made it feel different. Its size impressed, even though weathered by age, with chipped paint and rotted wood around the eaves.
She stood at the gate. The FOR SALE sign was real. The window was open. She told herself she'd just take a quick look, see the porch up close, and then walk back and take the next train home. She went up the steps, leaned toward the front window to peer through the glass, and heard the door creak open behind her.
A woman the decades had settled into smiled back at her. Stephanie noticed her friendly eyes magnified behind her glasses, dark brown like her own. She didn't ask why Stephanie was there, looking at her as if she had been waiting for Stephanie to arrive, motioning for her to enter.
Stephanie explained herself in the foyer, flustered. The train, she said. I've been passing your house for two years. I always admired it from the window.
The old woman nodded as if she had heard this before and offered a tour.
Inside, the house was cool and dim, smelling of cedar and coffee. Stephanie couldn't explain the feeling that settled over her as she followed through the front hall. Not familiarity; she'd never been here. But the layout of the rooms, how the light shone through the hallway, and the sound the floorboards made under her feet all sat in her chest like something half-remembered. A dream she'd woken from that escaped consciousness, dissipating like a drop of blood in water. She held her coffee with both hands and didn't mention it.
They passed the staircase and turned toward the sitting room, and Stephanie saw the painting.
It hung on the wall between two narrow windows, a plain dark frame. A young woman, standing, turned slightly from the viewer, looking at something outside the frame. Her hair. Her jaw. The shape of her shoulders. Stephanie stopped, the air in the room charged, as if lightning had just struck nearby, setting the hair on Stephanie's neck on end. The old woman stopped beside her.
The old woman looked at the painting, then at Stephanie, then at the painting again. Not with surprise. But with the solemnity of someone leafing through a photo album.
"You are me," she said with a quiver in her voice, a tear dropping. "And I am you."
The sensation didn't hurt. It was not dramatic. It felt more like the moment you wake up on vacation and experience the pang of confusion about where you are.
Stephanie was looking at herself as if through some trick of mirrors.
She remained standing in the dim hallway, holding a paper coffee cup, staring at the painting with an expression Stephanie couldn't read from this angle. Stephanie looked at the painting and back at her former self.
Stephanie then looked down at her own hands.
Mapped with age, spotted skin hung loose over swollen joints, unfamiliar and somehow, impossibly, hers. The weight wasn't metaphorical. She felt it in her hips, her spine, the deep exhaustion of a body that had been fighting gravity for decades and was finally losing the battle.
Her former self walked to the front door and took the handle without looking back. The porch steps creaked as she stepped out into the bright sunlight of morning.
Anchored to the spot, Stephanie could not move. Could not speak to say stop. The door closed. The train thrummed by, rattling the windows.
Stephanie lurched forward and forgot what she was going to do. An exclamation was screaming to escape, but she could not latch on to it and eventually it fizzled away.
Coffee drew her to the kitchen, where an empty cup waited. She sat and wondered about her day.