Eight Again, I Answered the Door First

The carpet smelled like dust and orange soda. I knew that smell before I knew my own name, because I had spent five years of my first life trying not to remember it. I was on the floor of our apartment living room, and the television was playing a cartoon I had not seen since I was a child. My knees were small. My hands were small. When I lifted them in front of my face, the skin was smooth and unscarred, no burn mark from the radiator in the hospital corridor where I had waited for my father to die. "Ruthie. Hey. Earth to Ruthie." I turned. My sister Nora was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked under her, twenty-three years old in my memory and seventeen in this room, holding her phone out toward me like a treat. Her hair was still long then. Before the hospital cut it. Before she stopped letting anyone touch it. "You awake or what?" she said. "Chicken wings or egg tarts, pick one. The app says the driver is two minutes out." My mouth opened. Nothing came. I had dreamed this exact moment a thousand times in the years after she died. I had rehearsed what I would say. I would tell her not to go down. I would tell her to let the driver leave it with the doorman. I would tell her about the stairwell, the service corridor, the gate that never latched. I would tell her every single thing I had learned from the police report that I was not supposed to read, the one my mother left open on the kitchen table the week after they found Nora by the construction site. In the dream, I always spoke in time. In the dream, I was never eight. "Ruthie?" Nora's voice changed. "You're pale. Did you eat something weird?" The phone in her hand buzzed. I heard it the way you hear a gunshot in a quiet house. The screen lit up. I could not see the words from where I was sitting, but I knew them. I knew the message because I had read it in a transcript four years later, when I was twelve and my mother was drinking in the kitchen and the detectives had mailed us copies of everything. Driver: I'm at the gate. Can you come down? Buzzer isn't working. That was the message. That was the whole thing. Nine words and a broken buzzer that had never been broken, and my sister stood up and reached for her shoes. "I'll be right back," she said. "Don't let Leo eat all the wings." Leo was our little brother. He was five that year, asleep in the bedroom with the door half open, and in my first life he grew up without either of his sisters and then without either of his parents, and the last I heard of him he had moved to a city I had never visited and stopped answering my calls. I got up. I do not remember deciding to move. My body simply stood, the way you stand when a car is coming and you have not yet understood that it is coming for you. My legs were short. My socks were mismatched. I crossed the living room in five steps and I put my hand on Nora's wrist. "Don't," I said. She laughed. "Don't what?" "Don't go down. I'll go." "You're eight." "I'll go." Nora looked at me the way you look at a child who has said something strange at a dinner party, half amused, half worried, waiting for the joke to land. The phone buzzed again. Driver: Hello? "I'll just be a minute," she said, and pulled her wrist free. I did the only thing I could think of. I started screaming. Not a pretend scream. A real one, the kind that scrapes your throat raw, the kind that makes neighbors knock on walls. I screamed and I grabbed the edge of the coffee table and I dropped to the floor like I had been shot, and I kept screaming until Nora knelt down beside me with her hands on my face and her voice high and frightened. "Ruthie. Ruthie. What hurts? Where does it hurt?" "My stomach," I said. It was the first lie of my second life. "It really hurts. Call Mom." Mom was at the pharmacy two blocks away. Dad was on night shift at the warehouse. Nora looked at her phone, then at me, then at the door. "Okay," she said. "Okay, okay. I'm calling Mom. Just breathe." She dialed. She put the phone to her ear. And while she was doing that, the buzzer from the front gate sounded in the kitchen, one long ugly note, and then the phone in her hand buzzed again, and then everything went quiet. I lay on the rug with my sister's hand in my hair and I listened to the building. No footsteps in the hall. No knock. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the cartoon still playing on the television, and my own heart going like a bird against the inside of my chest. Twenty minutes later Mom came home and found me on the floor and Nora crying on the couch, and the two of them argued about whether to take me to urgent care, and nobody mentioned the driver. Nobody mentioned the message. I asked, later, in the smallest voice I could manage, whether the food had come. Nora frowned. "No. The order got canceled. Weird, right?" My mother said something about the app glitching. My father, when he came home at dawn, said the city was full of scams. I lay in my bed that night with the lights off and I did not sleep. Because I had changed one thing. One thing. And I did not know yet whether the man at the gate had gone home, or whether he had simply made a note.