The Woman at Apartment 7B

Maplewood was the sort of town where everyone was polite but no one talked too much. Neighbors did not engage in lengthy discussions. For many, the only way they knew their neighbors was to look at the curtains drawn in windows. So when suddenly a new name showed up on the list for apartment 7B, it raised eyebrows. The name was Aria. Yet that nobody asked questions, in Maplewood they held it rude to be too curious.

Aria was someone that didn’t belong to any one place. She altered her accent to give it a different tone with each person she spoke to. She would sound sometimes a little European, sometimes sounded a little Middle Eastern and she could sound very American. It was odd, but nobody asked any questions.

She had moved in around when fall began. The trees were gold and the air smelled of dry leaves and rain. She came with only two old suitcases and one small cardboard box that she personally held. She had a long coat and gloves on, regardless of season. They just thought she was a little strange.

Almost no one knew who she was in her first week. But little by little, people started to observe that some odd things were happening.

Aria was always at home. There was never any evidence of her walking out of the building. Most apartments were dark at night, but her lights burned for hours. Soft music would sometimes make its way from her window. It was slow, mellow and didn’t sound like any song people had heard before. It was more like subdued breaths that had been magically transformed into music.

Jake was the first person who really noticed her. He was a web designer, working out of his home, and liked to unwind by watching the street go by from his balcony.

Each day, without exception, he saw Aria observing a small plant watering it at the exact same time even while rains poured down. He called out from his balcony one day and told her that it was nice, her plant. She chuckled and told her the plant was ugly but really nice, because it had remembered her. He laughed it off, assuming she must be poetic. But the sentence stuck with him.

Their chats remained basic, at least initially. They discussed the weather, how quiet Maplewood was and how few people were out. But Jake always sensed that she was only there halfways. She appeared to be somewhere else, even when she was talking with him.

Weeks passed. Aria never changed, remaining for hours before the window, gazing out upon the yard. Her music never changed. The plant never changed. No one ever visited her. It was as though she existed very much on her own.

One night, the power went out for the entire building. All the apartments turned dark except for Aria’s. Her window was illuminated with a pale orange light. Jake was curious and worried, so he walked to her door and knocked.

She opened and looked at him with bright, clear eyes, as if she had been expecting some one.

Her apartment was orderly and quiet. The only thing suggesting life was a lone chair next to the huge window and small plant near the balcony door. Everything else was calm and still, but there could be no mistake — some one continued to inhabit it.

Jake believed that it would be finally when she confide the truth.

Aria spoke quietly. She said there wasn’t much she remembered about her own life. GreatNan had been somewhere she loved, once, a place where she dreamed her future. “I was never taken away from my heart,” she said. Jake did not interrupt her. He only listened.

As she talked, many things about her fell into place. Her silence, her weird routines, her omnipresence. It was not danger that enveloped her in mystery. It was loneliness.

She informed him that she was not the terror of the building. She was just a woman forsaken by the world. Jake has been the first person to ever truly see her. That made him special to her.

Gradually, her apartment got darker. Her music stopped. The plant on her balcony did not make it. One day Jake noticed that the plant-and the chair-had disappeared, and when he went to get it back from where Susan obviously stashed it in some unknown location—she pointed him toward an industrial part of town!

Aria was gone too.

The other residents thought she had just slipped out one night.

But every now and then, on windy nights when the trees were moving around a lot and the stars were twinkling like mad, Jake heard a sweet slow tune in those gusts.

In those seconds, Aria came flooding back.