A shroud-like silence greeted me in the hall as the elevator doors opened smoothly.  The silence felt no different from that of an abandoned church in winter, I thought.

I took a tentative step forward, but pulled back, and then looked around the 5’ x 5’ softly-lit box of the elevator. I ran my fingertips over the dark wood panel surrounding me. There was no reason to stay; but there was no reason to go, either. So I stayed, ensconced in the same trance I’d been in over the last six or so hours.

It wasn’t as if the elevator would be used by anyone else, anyway, since it serviced the penthouse level of this pre-war apartment building exclusively. It never took stops in the intervening floors. From as far back as I could remember, I was either steps away from Central Park, which I could quickly reached from the lobby, or I was 10 floors above, enjoying a priceless view of the broad green expanse of the Park in the spring and summer, the leafy riot of the fall, or the white-out wonderland of Central Park in winter.

I refocused on the present. From inside the dark space of the hushed elevator I could see the white marbled floor that flowed around the elegant black-and-white-tile pattern of the diamond-shaped center of the hall of our penthouse floor. Shards of light bounced off of the antique Venetian glass chandelier that hung ominously over the thick wooden oval-shaped table which sat precisely dead-center in the middle of the hall. It was just past midnight of a mid-February winter’s night, so the heavy black drapes at the far end of the hall were drawn.

I saw but could not process that there was now a red and white-themed bouquet of roses that replaced the lily-white orchids I’d seen all week. There was also a beautiful sculptural vase in which the roses were elegantly arranged that hadn’t been there before.

Must be the work of the only other person who lived on this floor, I realized.

When I was about thirteen, my parents sold part of the penthouse, splitting the lone penthouse the size of a city block into two, albeit unequal, apartments. Successive owners of the other apartment were perennially renovating or changing that space – at least once every time it changed hands, which drove my parents crazy. In the midst of the first renovation, my dad had our own walls redone to make them soundproof; after the third renovation my mom had the bisecting hall redone, because the contractor doing the work in the other penthouse apartment had damaged the antique wooden floors so badly that the floors had to be torn off. The third owner of that space had the nerve to “offer” to pay for only half of the resulting costs, but my mom coolly turned him down (and she used it as a teaching moment: “learn from this Aerin, and see how abhorrent it is to be devoid of integrity or manners. He should’ve owned the problem he’d caused. What do you think his behavior in this case says about him?”). The fact that he was later targeted for financial fraud seemed to prove her argument.