The evening wind blows something sweet underneath Lilia’s windowpane. Despite the warmth inside her room, she touches her neck and feels gooseflesh rise under her fingers, her hair still wet from the shower and fanned out across her shoulders. With an involuntary shudder, she moves to close the window, and that’s when she first sees them.
At first she thinks she’s seeing things– she rubs her wrinkled eyes, once, twice, winces at the dull ache pulsing under her fingers from the day’s wear. But when she looks again, she’s faced with the same impossible image: her own face, from thirty years ago. Her dimples, not yet puckered with age, the mole that she’d lasered off the side of her nose the day she turned twenty-one. Cracked lips bitten into two bloodred lines. Lilia stands watching, mouth agape— it’s undoubtedly herself, but from a lifetime ago. From where she’s standing, she can see her younger self from the waist up, visage slightly blurry from the windows separating them. She’s standing in an exact replica of her childhood bedroom, mothhole curtains swaying in the night breeze, glowing a soft bronze in dim lamplight. The glare from an errant passing car obscures her view for a moment — and when she ducks down to continue watching, her breath catches at the second figure who walks into the room.
The curly hair is a dead giveaway— but nothing can really soften the blow of seeing your mother risen from the grave. Like her own younger self, her mother is the spitting image of herself three decades ago, and walks up to her daughter in a manner so confident and practiced that Lilia can barely breathe through the sudden panic, building thick and familiar. She hasn’t seen that face since organizing her funeral portraits two years ago. She hadn’t seen it in person for ten years before that, when Lilia had finally made good on her promises to move out to the city, and her mother never visited. Lilia sinks to the floor, hands tingling as she watches her mother’s wiry frame tense, and feels a wave of dizziness roll over her at the deja-vu as they start arguing almost on the spot. Even from far away, her young face looks so angry. Bitter at the world, and reflexively cruel to her mother.
Somehow, the past has come to visit her through the house next door. A ghost that lives a window away. Lilia doesn’t know why it’s come now, but she can’t help but think: This must be what I deserve.
She sits there, and watches until her mother leaves the room. Her younger self bows over and starts to cry.
The night breeze blows in again, and the smell tickles her nose. Night-blooming jasmine.
–
The next day, Lilia manages to push the window to the back of her mind. Whatever happened inside that house last night couldn’t have been anything more than an illusion, she assures herself. At worst, an indulgent fantasy. One more way to see her mother again. She chalks it up to the new medications she’s been taking for her joint pains, her wrists especially weary these days– but now, as the sun sets, she feels an uneasiness settle beneath her skin. The same sour dread settles into the back of her throat, and it makes her nauseous. It makes her mouth water. She lasts until nightfall, before the temptation is too much to take.
The first thing she notices when she looks over is that the window is closer than it was the night before. What distance once existed between their two floors has shrunken by half, and Lilia can now see clearly into the room inside. The closeness only confirms the impossible truth of it all, and the sour taste coalesces into something tangible, a heavy weight pressing in on her. It’s her childhood room again, and in it, her younger self is sitting cross-legged on the bed, scrawling into a journal. Every so often, she peeks up at the door, as if she’s waiting for someone to come in, before looking back down. Lilia knows the scene well enough from her own memory, and she feels her stomach turn– she’s listening for her mother’s footsteps to come down the hall. To come into her room and spark an argument that never really ends.
Lilia grew up noticing little things like that. Patterns of footsteps, the telltale creaking of a door opening. Waking up, and knowing just by the sounds of her house whether her mother had slept well or not. She remembers once, in a conversation with a teacher, that she’d been told it was a good thing. It’s a gift, her teacher had said, eyes crinkling at the corners. To see with more than just your eyes. Lilia, who had always been weak to praise, had taken the compliment and gone home glowing. When she told her mother about it, though, she had been less than enthusiastic. It’s true, you have an eye for these things, she’d replied, but her lips pursed around the words like they were something bitter, regrettable. Lilia took the hint. She never mentioned it again.
A flash of movement jolts her back to attention, and when she looks back up at the window, her mother is already leaving the room. Today’s argument seemed to have been cut short. Lilia watches her leave, and lets the burning feeling of missing her sink into her bones. She’s resented her mother for as long as she can remember, but she’s missed her for longer. Missed what it felt like to hug her, and to let herself feel warmed by it. Her eyes stay glued to the door long after it’s closed, and she almost draws up her curtains to turn in for the night, before an errant movement catches her eye.
Her younger self has returned to her journal, but is no longer writing— instead, she’s tearing the pages out. She starts ripping them one by one, before crushing them into messy wads of ink and paper and tossing them to the floor. Her shoulders heave up and down, but when she looks up, her eyes are completely dry. More than that, they’re filled with something foreign– a cold, unseeing rage. Lilia feels chills roll down her spine at the unfamiliarity of it. She doesn’t remember ever tearing up her journal after her and her mother’s fights. She still has every journal she’s ever written, stacked safely on her bookshelf. She certainly doesn’t remember feeling so intensely angry afterwards– hurt and sullen, yes, but never vengeful. Never cruel.
She stays there, watching with a growing sense of dread, until her younger self turns out the lights.
–
As the nights go on, Lilia watches the circumstances of the room become more and more unfamiliar. Every night, the window inches closer to her own, and she finds herself drawn to it in return, unable to tear herself away from the sill. Her younger self’s arguments with her mother play out as she remembers them, and the closer the window gets to her own room, the more Lilia feels as though she can hear their voices through the glass. Her own voice not yet worn thin by old age and cigarettes, her mother’s same accented yelling.
However, every night after her mother leaves, things continue to deviate. She watches her young self fall deeper into a violent daze— tearing clothes, snapping necklaces. One night, she lunges across the room and shatters the glass statue that’s sat on her bedside table since she was a little girl. It was a gift from her grandmother. There’s a detachedness, a frigid calculation to her movements that Lilia doesn’t remember. What Lilia remembers was the ache of realizing that once she turned eighteen, she could never live with her mother again. The loss of a childhood already worn to threads. What she sees now, is a genuine hatred, a loathing that’s taken root in the lines of her younger face, and it’s starting to make Lilia feel very, very sick.
She’s realized that the things she sees in the window are not coming from the past, but an alternate world— in which she and her mother’s arguments did not alienate them from one another, but pit them against each other. A world, contained into the microcosm of that window, where their disconnect didn’t separate them from each other, but tethered them together in a desperate need to hurt one another. To be together, if only to flay the other alive. Lilia watches, and feels the sour taste go acrid, burning holes into her stomach. Her chest. Every night, it gets harder to breathe under the weight of the watching. How nauseous it’s making her, and how viciously she refuses to stop.
–
On a particularly windless night, her mother comes into the room for the last time. The house has closed its distance to Lilia’s room so much so that their windowsills are nearly touching. The moonlight glances off the two symmetrical panes of glass and reflects into a swath of pearly gray.
Lilia watches the two figures argue and realizes that her younger self is refusing to speak. Her mother continues her lecturing as usual, but as Lilia stares at her younger face— her face, blurred by the haze of the window— she doesn’t recognize who she’s looking at. Her eyes have glazed over, and there’s a sheen of sweat covering her body; her shoulders, her nose. Her fingers are twisting holes into the filmy bedding. Panic rises up in Lilia’s chest, and she feels her eyes helplessly begin to burn. There’s an end coming— she can feel it in the quiet summer heat. The evening is holding its breath.
She watches as her mother turns to leave, and feels bile rise up in her chest as her younger self reaches underneath her pillow, and retracts it with a knife balanced in her palm. The silver glints like a winking star. Lilia’s hand comes up, outstretched in instinct, but the image is like water through her hands. Her fingers swipe through moonlight. Her mother turns around just as her younger self swings her hand down, but not soon enough— and when the blade sinks in, it does so cleanly.
Her mother, never one to go down quietly, wrests the blade from her stomach. She gathers her weeping daughter by the back of the neck, strokes her hair, and plunges the knife through her carotid.
As Lilia watches, she can’t help but think about how she never got to see her mother die in her lifetime. She was too many miles away, working too many hours, to know she was sick until the news came in the mail. Li Ah-Lin, 81 years old. In a way, she felt almost vindicated in it– she remembers thinking to her dead mother, see, I told you I’d never see you again, before the guilt carved her open. Now, she feels that same cavern yawning apart within her as she watches herself bleed out into the worn beige carpet. Her mother, arms still wrapped around her scared, slackening daughter, rubbing her back as they go together. Lilia misses that feeling. She wants it again so badly.
The evening is still silent when she draws the curtains. A lone firefly sputters out into the night.