The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 11
Her fingers close around the key, the metal scraping softly as she drags it from its hiding spot. It takes three tries in the rusted old lock, just like it did that first night, but then the door swings open, and she steps out onto the building’s roof. A breeze kicks up, and she shoves her hands in the pocket of her leather jacket as she crosses the roof.
It’s empty, save for a trio of lawn chairs, each of them imperfect in its own way—seats warped, stuck in different poses of recline, one arm hanging at a broken angle. A stained cooler sits nearby, and a string of fairy lights hangs between laundry posts, transforming the roof into a shabby, weather-worn oasis.
It’s quiet up here—not silent, that is a thing she’s yet to find in a city, a thing she is beginning to think lost amid the weeds of the old world—but as quiet as it gets in this part of Manhattan. And yet, it is not the same kind of quiet that stifled her at James’s place, not the empty, internal quiet of places too big for one. It is a living quiet, full of distant shouts and car horns and stereo bass reduced to an ambient static.
A low brick wall surrounds the roof, and Addie lets herself lean forward against it, resting her elbows and looking out until the building falls away, and all she can see is the lights of Manhattan, tracing patterns against the vast and starless sky.
Addie misses stars.
She met a boy, back in ’65, and when she told him that, he drove her an hour outside of L.A., just to see them. The way his face glowed with pride when he pulled over in the dark and pointed up. Addie had craned her head and looked at the meager offering, the spare string of lights across the sky, and felt something in her sag. A heavy sadness, like loss. And for the first time in a century, she longed for Villon. For home. For a place where the stars were so bright they formed a river, a stream of silver and purple light against the dark.
She looks up now, over the rooftops, and wonders if, after all this time, the darkness is still watching. Even though it has been so long. Even though he told her once that he doesn’t keep track of every life, pointed out that the world was big and full of souls, and he had far more to occupy himself than thoughts of her.
The rooftop door crashes open behind her, and a handful of people stumble out.
Two guys. Two girls.
And Sam.
Wrapped in a white sweater and pale gray jeans, her body like a brushstroke, long and lean and bright against the backdrop of the darkened roof. Her hair is longer now, wild blond curls escaping a messy bun. Streaks of red paint dab her forearms where the sleeves are pushed up, and Addie wonders, almost absently, what she’s working on. She is a painter. Abstracts, mostly. Her place, already small, made smaller by the stacks of canvas propped against the walls. Her name, crisp and easy, only Samantha on her finished work, or when traced across a spine in the middle of the night.
The other four move in a huddle of noise across the roof, one of the guys in the middle of a story, but Sam lags behind a step, head tipped back to savor the crisp night air, and Addie wishes she had something else to stare at. An anchor to keep her from falling into the easy gravity of the other girl’s orbit.
She does, of course.
The Odyssey.
Addie is about to bury her gaze in the book, when Sam’s blue eyes dip down from the sky and find her own. The painter smiles, and for an instant, it is August again, and they are laughing over beers on a bar patio, Addie lifting the hair off her neck to calm the flush of summer heat. Sam leaning in to blow on her skin. It is September, and they are in her unmade bed, their fingers tangled in the sheets and with each other as Addie’s mouth traces the dark warmth between Sam’s legs.
Addie’s heart slams in her chest as the girl peels away from her group and casually wanders over. “Sorry for crashing your peace.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” says Addie, forcing her gaze out, as if studying the city, even though Sam always made her feel like a sunflower, unconsciously angling toward the other girl’s light.
“These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”
Time slides. It’s the same thing Sam said the first time they met. And the sixth. And the tenth. But it’s not just a line. Sam has an artist’s eye, present, searching, the kind that studies their subject and sees something more than shapes.
Addie turns away, waits for the sound of retreating steps, but instead, she hears the snap of a lighter, and then Sam is beside her, a white-blond curl dancing at the edge of her sight. She gives in, glances over.
“Could I steal one of those?” she asks, nodding at the cigarette.
Sam smiles. “You could. But you don’t need to.” She draws another from the box and hands it over, along with a neon blue lighter. Addie takes them, tucks the cigarette between her lips and drags her thumb along the starter. Luckily the breeze is up, and she has an excuse, watching the flame as it goes out.
Goes out. Goes out. Goes out.
“Here.”
Sam steps closer, her shoulder brushing Addie’s as she steps in to block the wind. She smells like the chocolate-chip cookies that her neighbor bakes whenever he’s stressed, like the lavender soap she uses to scrub paint from her fingers, the coconut conditioner she leaves in her curls at night.
Addie has never loved the taste of tobacco, but the smoke warms her chest, and it gives her something to do with her hands, a thing to focus on besides Sam. They are so close, breaths fogging the same bit of air, and then Sam reaches out and touches one of the freckles on Addie’s right cheek, the way she did the first time they met, a gesture so simple and still so intimate.
“You have stars,” she says, and Addie’s chest tightens, twists again.
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.
She has to fight the urge to close the gap, to run her palm along the long slope of Sam’s neck, to let it rest against the nape, where Addie knows it fits so well. They stand in silence, blowing out clouds of pale smoke, the other four laughing and shouting at their backs, until one of the guys—Eric? Aaron?—calls Sam over, and just like that, she is slipping away, back across the roof. Addie fights the urge to tighten her grip, instead of letting go—again.
But she does.
Leans against the low brick wall and listens to them talk, about life, about getting old, about bucket lists and bad decisions, and then one of the girls says, “Shit, we’re gonna be late.” And just like that, beers get finished, cigarettes put out, and the group of them drifts back toward the rooftop door, all five retreating like a tide.
Sam is the last to go.
She slows, glances over her shoulder, flashing a last smile at Addie before she ducks inside, and Addie knows she could catch her if she runs, could beat the closing door.
She doesn’t move.
The metal bangs shut.
Addie sags against the brick wall.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.
If no one heard it, did it happen?
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
Addie stubs the cigarette out on the brick ledge, and turns her back on the skyline, makes her way to the broken chairs and the cooler wedged between them. She finds a single beer floating amid the half-frozen melt and twists off the cap, sinking onto the least-damaged lawn chair.
It is not so cold tonight, and she is too tired to go looking for another bed.
The glow of the fairy lights is just enough to see by, and Addie stretches out in the lawn chair, and opens The Odyssey, and reads of strange lands, and monsters, and men who can’t ever go home, until the cold lulls her to sleep.
Paris, France
August 9, 1714
III
Heat hangs like a low roof over Paris.
The August air is heavy, made heavier still by the sprawl of stone buildings, the reek of rotting food and human refuse, the sheer number of bodies living shoulder to shoulder.
In a hundred and fifty years, Haussman will set his mark upon the city, raise a uniform facade and paint the buildings in the same pale palette, creating a testament to art, and evenness, and beauty.
That is the kind of Paris Addie dreamed of, and one she will certainly live to see.
But right now, the poor pile themselves in ragged heaps while silk-finished nobles stroll through gardens. The streets are crowded with horse-drawn carts, the squares thick with people, and here and there spires thrust up through the woolen fabric of the city. Wealth parades down avenues, and rises with the peaks of each palace and estate, while hovels cluster in narrow roads, the stones stained dark with grime and smoke.
Addie is too overwhelmed to notice any of it.
She skirts the edge of a square, watching as men dismantle market stalls, and kick out at the ragged children who duck and weave between them, searching for scraps. As she walks, her hand slips into the hem pocket of her skirts, past the little wooden bird to the four copper sols she found in the lining of the stolen coat. Four sols, to make a life.
It is getting late, and threatening to rain, and she must find a place to sleep. It should be easy enough—there is, it seems, a lodging house on every street—but she is hardly across the threshold of the first when she is turned away.
“This is no brothel,” chides the owner, glaring down his nose.
“And I’m no whore,” she answers, but he only sneers, and flicks his fingers as if casting off some unwanted residue.
The second house is full, the third too costly, the fourth harbors only men. By the time she steps through the doors of the fifth the sun has set, and her spirits with it, and she is already braced for the rebuke, some excuse as to why she is unfit to stay beneath the roof.
But she isn’t turned away.
An older woman meets her in the entry, thin, and stiff, with a long nose and the small, sharp eyes of a hawk. She takes one look at Addie and leads her down the hall. The rooms are small, and dingy, but they have walls and doors, a window and a bed.
“A week’s pay,” demands the woman, “in advance.”
Addie’s heart sinks. A week seems an impossible stretch when memories only seem to last a moment, an hour, a day.
“Well?” snaps the woman.
Addie’s hand closes around the copper coins. She is careful to draw out only three, and the woman snatches them as fast as a crow stealing crusts of bread. They vanish into the pouch at her waist.
“Can you give me a bill?” asks Addie. “Some proof, to show I’ve paid?”
The woman scowls, clearly insulted. “I run an honest house.”
“I’m sure you do,” fumbles Addie, “but you have so many rooms to keep. It would be easy to forget which ones have—”
“Thirty-four years I’ve run this lodge,” she cuts in, “and never yet forgotten a face.”
It is a cruel joke, thinks Addie, as the woman turns and shuffles away, leaving her to her rented room.
A week she paid for, but she knows that she will be lucky to have a day. Knows that in the morning she will be evicted, the matron three crowns richer, while she herself will be out on the street.
A little bronze key rests in the lock, and Addie turns it, relishes the solid sound, like a stone dropped into a stream. She has nothing to unpack, no change of clothes; she casts off the traveling coat, draws the little wooden bird from her skirts and sets it on the windowsill. A talisman against the dark.
She looks out, expecting to see Paris’s grand rooftops and dazzling buildings, the tall spires, or at least the Seine. But she has walked too far from the river, and the little window looks out only onto a narrow alleyway, and the stone wall of another house that could be anywhere.
Addie’s father told her so many stories of Paris. Made it sound like a place of glamour and gold, rich with magic and dreams waiting to be uncovered. Now she wonders if he ever saw it, or if the city was nothing but a name, an easy backdrop for princes and knights, adventurers and queens.
They have bled together in her mind, those stories, become less a picture than a palette, a tone. Perhaps the city was less splendid. Perhaps there were shadows mixed in with the light.
It is a gray and humid night, the sounds of merchants and horse-carts muted by the soft rain beginning to fall, and Addie curls up on the narrow bed and tries to sleep.
She thought at least she’d have the night, but the rain hasn’t even stopped, the darkness barely settled when the woman bangs upon her door, and a key is thrust into the lock, and the tiny room is plunged into noise. Rough hands haul Addie from the bed. A man grips her arm as the woman sneers and says, “Who let you in?”
Addie fights to wipe away the dregs of sleep.
“You did,” she says, wishing the woman had only swallowed her pride and given a receipt, but all Addie has is the key, and before she can show it, the woman’s bony hand cuts hard across her cheek.
“Don’t lie, girl,” she says, sucking her teeth. “This isn’t a charity house.”
“I paid,” says Addie, cupping her face, but it is no use. The three sols in the pouch at the woman’s waist will not serve as proof. “We spoke, you and I. Thirty-four years you said you’ve run this house—”
For an instant, uncertainty flashes across the woman’s face. But it is too brief, too fleeting. Addie will one day learn to ask for secrets, details only a friend or intimate would know, but even then it will not always gain their favor. She will be called a trickster, a witch, a spirit, and a madwoman. Will be cast out for a dozen different reasons, when in truth, there is only one.
They don’t remember.
“Out,” orders the woman, and Addie barely has time to grab her coat before she’s forced from the room. Halfway down the hall, she remembers the wooden bird still resting on the windowsill, and tries to twist free, to go back for it, but the man’s grip is firm.
She’s cast out onto the street, shaking from the sudden violence of it all, the only consolation that before the door swings shut, the little wooden bird is tossed out, too. It lands on the stones beside her, one wing cracking with the force.
Though this time, the bird doesn’t mend itself.
It lies there, beside her, a sliver of wood chipped off like a fallen feather as the woman vanishes back inside the house. And Addie stifles the horrible urge to laugh, not at the humor but the madness of it, the absurd, inevitable ending to her night.
It is very late, or very early, the city quieted and the sky a cloudy, rain-slicked gray, but she knows the dark is watching as she scoops up the carving, buries it in her pocket with the last copper coin. Gets to her feet, drawing the coat tight around her shoulders, the hem of her skirts already damp.
Exhausted, Addie makes her way down the narrow street and takes shelter beneath the wooden lip of an awning, sinking down into the stone crook between buildings to wait for dawn.
She slips into a feverish almost-sleep, and feels her mother’s hand against her brow, the faint rise and fall of her voice as she hums, smoothing a blanket over Addie’s shoulders. And she knows she must be ill; that is the only time she saw her mother gentle. Addie lingers there, holding fast to the memory even as it fades, the harsh clop of hooves and strain of wooden carts encroaching on her mother’s whispering song, burying it note by note until she jerks forward out of the haze.
Her skirts are stiff with grime, stained and wrinkled from the brief but restless sleep.
The rain has stopped, but the city looks just as dirty as it did on her arrival.
Back home, a good storm would wash the world clean, leave it smelling crisp and new.
But it seems nothing can rinse the grime from the streets of Paris.
If anything, that storm has only made things worse, the world wet and dull, puddles brown with mud and filth.
And then, amid the muck, she smells something sweet.
She follows the scent until she finds a market in full swing, the vendors shouting prices from tables and stalls, chickens still squawking as they’re hauled off the backs of carts.
Addie is famished, cannot even remember the last time she ate. Her dress doesn’t fit, but it never did—she’d stolen it from a washing line two days outside of Paris, tired of the one she’d worn the day of her wedding. Still, it hangs no looser now, despite the days without food or drink. She supposes she does not need to eat, will not perish from hunger—but tell that to her cramping stomach, her shaking legs.
She scans the busy square, thumbs the last coin in her pocket, loath to spend it. Perhaps she does not need to. With so many people in the market, it should be easy to steal what she needs. Or so she thinks, but the merchants of Paris are as cunning as its thieves, and they keep twice as tight a grip on every ware. Addie learns this the hard way; it will be weeks before she learns to palm an apple, longer still to master it without the faintest tell.
Today, she makes a clumsy effort, tries to swipe a seeded roll from a bread-baker’s cart, and is rewarded with a meaty hand vised around her wrist.
“Thief!”
She catches a glimpse of men-at-arms weaving through the crowd, and is flooded with the fear of landing in a cell, or stock. She is still flesh and bone, has not learned yet to pick locks, or charm men out of charges, to free herself from shackles as easily as her face slips from their minds.
So she pleads hastily, handing over her last coin.
He plucks it from her, waves the men away as the sol vanishes into his purse. Far too much for a roll, but he gives her nothing back. Payment, he says, for trying to steal.
“Lucky I don’t take your fingers,” he growls, pushing her away.
And that is how Addie comes to be in Paris, with a crust of bread and a broken bird, and nothing else.
