The Window that Remembers Faces - #3

The landing window looks out on a courtyard I never use. The glass is old, butter-smooth, which makes the world a little softened, a little edible. By day it brings gentle light; by night it returns my outline with an aunt’s patience. Since I moved in, the window has been remembering things that haven’t happened yet.

The first rainy afternoon I saw, in the glass, a visitor who didn’t arrive: a friend from another city, dark coat, airport smile. Behind me, in the real landing, no one. In the pane, he raised a hand to greet me and I answered the air. The bell never rang.

The second time was near dusk. In the glass a woman stood beside me, younger than I dare to be, notebook under her arm, ink on her index finger. I, outside the glass, remained alone. She tapped the frame with a nail and the foyer clock jumped four minutes ahead, as if it had lost its beat. In the reflection she wrote a name on the wood—mine—without the last vowel. A piece missing, as if the window hadn’t learned it yet.

That night the courtyard smelled like freshly ironed clothes no one hung. I slept with the sense that the window was rehearsing my visitors, practicing the house so it would know how to receive.

One Sunday a handkerchief lay folded on the sill. Not mine. Clean, a corner embroidered with eleven stitches forming the upper half of a letter. I picked it up and cold climbed my arm like a polite warning. I left it where it was. The window thanked me with a thin fog, like a dog accepting a treat without moving its head.

I started keeping notes. In the pane, visits always arrived a little delayed, as if the reflected world moved half a beat behind. Sometimes lips shaped words without sound; other times sound came before the movement, like voices that lift the receiver before they speak. I learned these choreographies until, on a mild afternoon, the window returned an impossible scene: myself tapping the pane from the courtyard, mud on my shoes, a key on a blue cord.

I went still. The glass-me knocked twice—tap, tap—and pointed to the lower edge of the frame. Outside, no one. Inside the glass, someone. Heart rising to its lawful place in my throat, I felt along the wood. The paint had a seam, a nearly invisible ridge. I worked a nail under it and felt on the far side the lip of paper.

I drew it out: a photograph—the landing, my body in profile, the window fogged, and in the photo’s reflection the notebook woman— the same—watching me from a station that isn’t on any map. In the corner, pencil notation: 11:14. Not when I took it—I didn’t remember taking it—but when the window wanted it to occur.

I waited. At 11:10 the clock coughed; at 11:12 the hallway learned a colder language; at 11:14 the bell tried and failed. I opened anyway. No coat, no notebook—nobody—but the smell of a swept courtyard and an obedient storm. I left the door unlatched and stood by the pane, the photo trembling in my hand.

Then the window gave me the word back: in the reflection, the notebook woman wrote my name again, this time complete. She added, neat teacher-hand: “Return the last vowel when you can pronounce it.” I understood: the window didn’t only remember faces—it rehearsed my voice.

Since then, on the landing, I pronounce my name under my breath, round, the final vowel held a second longer than habit allows. The pane answers with a small warm fog. Sometimes the reflection shows chairs we haven’t bought and cups half-drunk, and a shadow of conversation settles as if we’d already talked. The window keeps those leftovers of visit in its cool belly until the house is ready.

A week ago, at 11:14 sharp, I finally saw the dark-coated friend on the right side of the wood. Mud on his shoes, a blue key. He said “at last,” as if he’d been practicing me too. When we hugged, the pane didn’t show us. It showed the notebook woman, seated on a chair we haven’t purchased, waiting for her previous turn or her next one.

We didn’t discuss it. We’ve learned the rule: the window remembers first; the house receives second. Between the two, the part of my name the house keeps stops being incomplete: the last vowel returns, settles, sounds. Sometimes, when I turn off the light, the window silently corrects the clock two minutes backward, as if gifting us the grace to be on time for a visit we still haven’t decided to accept.

I don’t curtain the glass. It curtains me. And when I jot in the diary’s margin “Today I remembered to pronounce myself whole,” I feel, on the other side of the frame, an inked index gently underlining, so I won’t forget again.