Everyone Else in This Building Is a Returnee novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Twelve

The tenants admit they have all lived before and remember it; Dara is the only one on her first life. Perry says she leaves on March 3 and he wants her to stay. The storm takes out the lights.

I went straight to Stan's door and knocked until he opened it.

"Twelfth first day," I said. "Explain it."

Stan looked past me down the hall, where Perry was still standing under the fixed light.

"Ah," he said. "He told you already. Ida's going to be unbearable."

Ida's apartment was on the fourth floor, and Stan took the stairs one at a time with his bad hip.

The old woman from the lobby opened her door in a purple cardigan and handed me a cup of real tea.

"Sit," she said. "I'm Ida Wallin. It's easier with a chair."

Her living room had a plastic fern on every windowsill.

I sat on the edge of a velvet couch with my coffee in one hand and tea in the other.

Six or seven tenants had somehow filled the room by the time I looked up.

The mother of the twins was there, and so was the man in the bathrobe.

"We should just say it," said the man in the bathrobe. "Dara, everyone in this building has lived before."

I waited for the joke.

"Lived before as in a past life?" I asked.

"Lived before as in last time," Ida said. "I died at eighty in a nursing home in Waukesha."

"Then I woke up in my bed at twenty-two with all of it in my head."

"I lived the whole thing again, and now I'm eighty-two, and I've got two years on my last time."

She sipped her tea.

"Stan came back at forty," said the mother of the twins. "The man in the bathrobe came back at nineteen."

The man in the bathrobe lifted a hand.

Every face in the room was calm, a little amused and a little kind.

I put the tea down.

"You're all telling me this like it's normal."

"For us it is," Ida said. "You're the one who's rare."

She leaned forward in her chair.

"You've got one life, Dara. Just the one, and you don't know what's in it."

"That's why Stan picked you from forty applicants."

"I did," Stan said, and had the grace to look sorry.

"That's why everyone knows your name," Ida went on. "Stan passed your file around the building, and we're nosy."

"And the coffee?" I said.

The room went quiet.

"That's Perry's to explain," Ida said. "He's not like us."

I found him on the second-floor landing, because I'd have been waiting there too.

He had put the ladder away and was sitting on the top stair with his elbows on his knees.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said before I could speak.

"I know that," I said, and I was annoyed that I knew it.

"Then ask me anything."

"Fine. How many times have you done this?"

"I've lived this year eleven times," Perry said.

"Not my whole life. This one year."

"I wake up on September first, in 2B, on the morning you carry your boxes in."

"I'm thirty-three, and the radio is playing the song it's playing now."

He nodded at the radio upstairs.

"How does it end?"

"It ends when you leave," he said.

His voice caught on the last word and he waited for it.

"I get sent back the night you walk out the front door."

"Then I wake up in 2B, and it's the first of September again."

"I just got here."

"I know. You leave on March third."

I stared at him.

I thought I should be frightened, but mostly I was angry.

"Why would I leave?" I said.

"I'm not going to tell you."

"That's a terrible answer."

"Every time I told you the reason, you left sooner," Perry said.

"This time I think you should find out on your own."

I laughed, because I had no better reaction.

"You think I'm going to fall for this?"

"No," he said. "I think you're going to do exactly what you want, Dara."

"That's what I like about you."

It was the nicest thing a man had said to me in years.

It came from a stranger on a staircase.

I took a step back from him anyway.

"Stay out of my head," I said.

"I'm not in your head," Perry said quietly. "I'm only very well informed."

"Then be informed that I'll be here on March fourth."

"That's the thing I want most in the world."

He said it plainly.

Something low in my stomach turned over.

Before I could answer, thunder cracked over the roof and every light in the building went out.

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