The Stranger You Already Know

She stands in Ancient History.

One hip pressed to the shelf, one boot crossed over the other. Black nail polish, chipped at the edges where she picks at it. She flips through a Fagles translation of The Odyssey, and the spine gives each time she turns a page. Crack. Crack. Two small dry sounds.

That dimple in her right cheek.

The dimple that put you on your knees before Apollo's altar twenty-three hundred years ago, forehead grinding stone, swearing oaths you broke before the incense cooled.

The bookstore on Clement Street smells like yellowing glue and someone's spilled latte, dried to a brown ring on the information desk. A kid wails in the children's section. Fleetwood Mac plays at a volume designed to vanish. Your hands tighten around the book you carried to the register, a paperback travel guide to a country you lived in twice.

Walk away. The trick is the first step. After that, momentum handles the rest.

You don't walk away.

"Sorry," you say.

She looks up. Her eyes shift under the fluorescents, gray to green and back.

"Thought you were someone else."

"Yeah?" She holds her place in the book with one finger. "Like an ex, or more of a restraining-order situation?"

The question lands with a half-grin, that dimple pressing deeper.

"Somewhere in between."

"Sounds like a story." She leans the book against her hip. "You going to tell it, or just keep standing there looking haunted?"

Your right hand drops into your pocket and finds the car keys. The teeth of the apartment key dig into your palm.

"You look familiar," you say.

"You said that already. The someone-else part." She turns the book over, studies the back cover, or pretends to. "I don't get a lot of people telling me I look like their old whatever in the Homer section. Usually it's the self-help aisle for that."

The fluorescent tube overhead ticks in a dry electric stutter. The kid's wailing downshifts to hiccups.

"Do I actually look like her?" she says.

"Identical."

She bites her bottom lip. Teeth pressing until the skin goes white, blood pooling beneath the surface. She did this in a church in Bruges in 1673 when she stood at the altar in a borrowed dress and swore to marry you. The lip, the teeth, the pressure. Then she walked out with a spice trader who owned three ships. You stood there for forty minutes before her sister came to tell you.

"That's either flattering or creepy." She slides the Fagles onto the shelf, spine out, and her fingers drum once against the cover. A quick patter, five fingertips in succession. Tap tap tap tap tap. She carried this habit in Athens when she played the lyre in the courtyard next door. The calluses on her fingertips prove the music followed her here.

"Flattering," you say.

"Sure." She crosses her arms. The thin silver ring on her left index finger clicks against her elbow. In 1297, you gave her a ring bent from a horseshoe nail because you couldn't afford silver, and she wore it until her hand swelled too much from the infection that killed her.

"So this mystery woman," she says. "She break your heart?"

"Several times."

"Her fault or yours?"

Your grip shifts on the keys. The cut edge bites harder into the crease of your palm. "Depends on the century."

Her head tilts. "Century," she says. "Interesting word choice."

"Figure of speech."

"Is it?"

She holds your gaze the way she held it across a fire in the Sahara, feeding you dates with sticky fingers while sand ticked against the tent walls. Her eyes carry the color of the Aegean twenty minutes before a storm.

"Tell me," she says. Her voice drops half a register.

Your mouth opens. Your tongue presses the back of your teeth. Your hand releases the keys and they drop to the bottom of your pocket. Clink.

"I think I went to school with her," you say. "Freshman orientation. Philosophy class."

Her shoulders settle half an inch lower.

"Huh," she says. "Must have made an impression."

"She did."

She picks the Fagles back up. Opens to where her finger kept the page. Book Five sits visible from six feet away: Odysseus on Calypso's island, trapped in paradise, weeping for a home he refuses to leave for.

"I'm Vera," she says.

Valeria in 1673. Eira in 1297. Thais in Athens.

"David."

"David." She lets the word sit, tongue pressing the D against her teeth. "You don't look like a David."

"I've been told."

"You look older. I mean, your face is fine, it's just." She gestures toward your eyes. "In there. You look tired in a way that sleep won't fix."

The fluorescent tube ticks. Joni Mitchell replaces Fleetwood Mac. The kid goes silent.

"You want to get coffee?" she says.

She asked you to share wine in Athens, in a courtyard thick with olive trees and bread smoke drifting from the house next door, and you said yes, and you got forty years, and she died while the dog slept at the foot of the bed. You carried her to the top of a hill and sat with her body until the stars burned white.

She asked you to grab a beer in a parking lot in 1987 and you said yes and you got eleven years before a truck ran a red light.

The apartment key has left a thin crescent cut in your palm. A shallow red line that heals by tomorrow and leaves nothing behind.

"I can't," you say.

Her face holds still. She nods once, the same nod she gave when the spice trader came with his ships.

"Okay," she says.

She turns back to Calypso's island. Her finger finds its place on the page.

You walk toward the door. The floorboards groan. Your reflection slides across the glass, your face dissolving into the traffic outside.

She calls your name from the doorway. The wrong name. The one that never fit.

"David."

Your left foot hangs mid-step, heel lifted, weight tilting forward. The afternoon sun catches the crescent on your palm and turns it the color of old copper, a mark so slight it could pass for a scratch from a key, a line where skin folded wrong, the kind of wound that heals in a day and proves nothing.

Her finger holds the page.