Chapter : A BEGINNING

“THIS APARTMENT IS MAGICAL,” Aunt Analea once said, sitting in her wingback chair the color of a robin’s egg, her hair twisted up with a silver dagger hairpin. She told me with mischief in her eyes, as if daring me to ask her what she meant. I had just turned eight and thought I knew everything.

Of course this apartment was magical. My aunt lived in a century-old building on the Upper East Side, with stone lions on the eaves, half broken and clinging to the corners. Everything about it was magical—the way the light poured into the kitchen in the mornings, golden like egg yolk. The way the study seemed to fit more books than possible, pouring off the shelves and piled against the far window, so high they almost blocked out all the light. I charted foreign maps in the brick face of the far living room wall. The bathroom, with its perfect high window and frosted glass that reflected rainbows against the sky-colored walls and ornate claw-foot tub, was the perfect place to paint. My watercolors came alive there, pigments dripping from my brushes as I imagined far-off places I’d never been. And in the evenings, the moon looked so close from her bedroom windows I could almost catch it.

The apartment was indeed magical. You couldn’t convince me otherwise. I just thought it was my aunt who made it magical—the way she lived, wide and wild, that infected everything she touched.

“No, no,” she said with a wave of her hand—the one holding a lit Marlboro cigarette. The smoke wafted out of the open window, ruffling the two pigeons cooing on the sill, and into the cloudless sky. “I don’t mean metaphorically, my darling Clementine. You might not believe me at first, but I promise it’s true.”

Then she leaned closer, and her mischief turned into a smile that shone in her glittery brown eyes, and she told me a secret.