The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 13
Even the man slumped on the floor.
She draws the stoppered bottle of laudanum from her skirts, and holds it to the meager light. Three tries, and two bottles of the precious medicine wasted before she realized she could not drug the drinks herself, could not be the hand that did the harm. But mix it in the bottle of wine, reset the cork, and let them pour their own glass, and the action is no longer hers.
See?
She is learning.
It is a lonely education.
She tips the bottle, the last of the milky substance shifting inside the glass, and wonders if it might buy her a night of dreamless sleep, a deep and drugged peace.
“How disappointing.”
At the sound of the voice, Addie nearly drops the laudanum. She twists around in the small room, scouring the dark, but cannot find its source.
“I confess, my dear, I expected more.”
The voice seems to come from every shadow—then, from one. It gathers in the darkest corner of the room, like smoke. And then he steps forward into the circle cast by the candle flame. Black curls tumble across his brow. Shadows land in the hollows of his face, and green eyes glitter with their own internal light.
And for a traitorous instant, her heart lurches at the familiar sight of her stranger, before she remembers it is only him.
The darkness from the woods.
A year she’s lived this curse, and in that time, she’s called for him. She’s pleaded with the night, sunk coins she could not spare into the banks of the Seine, begged for him to answer just so she could ask why, why, why.
Now, she throws the bottle of laudanum straight at his head.
The shadow does not move to catch it, does not need to. It passes straight through, shatters against the wall behind him. He gives her a pitying smile.
“Hello, Adeline.”
Adeline. A name she thought she’d never hear again. A name that aches like a bruise, even as her heart skips to hear it.
“You,” she snarls.
The barest incline of his head. The curl of his smile. “Have you missed me?”
She hurtles toward him like the stoppered bottle, throws herself against his front, half expecting to fall through and shatter as it did. But her hands meet flesh and bone, or at least, the illusion of it. She pounds against his chest, and it is like striking a tree, just as hard and just as pointless.
He looks down at her, amused. “I see you have.”
She tears herself away, wants to scream, to rage, to sob. “You left me there. You took everything from me, and you left. Do you know how many nights I begged—”
“I heard you,” he says, and there is an awful pleasure in the way he says it.
Addie sneers with rage. “But you never came.”
The darkness spreads his arms, as if to say, I am here now. And she wants to strike him, useless as it is, wants to banish him, cast him from this room like a curse, but she must ask. She must know. “Why? Why did you do this to me?”
His dark brows knit with false worry, mock concern. “I granted your wish.”
“I asked only for more time, for a life of freedom—”
“I have given you both.” His fingers trail along the bedpost. “This past year has taken no toll—” A stifled sound escapes her throat, but he continues. “You are whole, are you not? And uninjured. You do not age. You do not wither. And as for freedom, is there any keener liberation than what I’ve gifted you? A life with no one to answer to.”
“You know this isn’t what I wanted.”
“You did not know what you wanted,” he says sharply, stepping toward her. “And if you did, then you should have been more careful.”
“You deceived—”
“You erred,” says the darkness, closing the last space between them. “Don’t you remember, Adeline?” His voices drops to a whisper. “You were so brash, so brazen, tripping over your words as if they were roots. Rambling on about all the things you did not want.”
He is so close to her now, one hand drifting up her arm, and she wills herself not to give him the satisfaction of retreat, not to let him play the wolf, and force her into the part of sheep. But it is hard. For all that he is painted as her stranger, he is not a man. Not even human. It is only a mask, and it does not fit. She can see the thing beneath, as it was in the woods, shapeless and boundless, monstrous, and menacing. The darkness shimmers behind that green-eyed gaze.
“You asked for an eternity and I said no. You begged, and pleaded, and then, do you remember what you said?” When he speaks again, his voice is still his voice, but she can hear her own, echoing through it.
“You can have my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”
She draws back, from the words, from him, or tries to, but this time he does not let her. The hand on her arm tightens; the other rests like a lover’s touch behind her neck.
“Was it not in my best interest, then, to make your life unpleasant? To press you toward your inevitable surrender?”
“You did not have to,” she whispers, hating the waver in her voice.
“My dear Adeline,” he says, hand sliding up her neck into her hair. “I am in the business of souls, not mercy.” His fingers tighten, forcing her head back, her gaze up to meet his own, and there is no sweetness in his face, only a kind of feral beauty.
“Come,” he says, “give me what I want, and the deal will be done, this misery ended.”
A soul, for a single year of grief and madness.
A soul, for copper coins on a Paris dock.
A soul, for nothing more than this.
And yet, it would be a lie to say she does not waver. To say that no part of her wants to give up, give in, if only for a moment. Perhaps it is that part that asks.
“What would become of me?”
Those shoulders—the ones she drew so many times, the ones she conjured into being—give only a dismissive shrug.
“You will be nothing, my dear,” he says simply. “But it is a kinder nothing than this. Surrender, and I will set you free.”
If some part of her wavered, if some small part wanted to give in, it did not last beyond a moment. There is a defiance in being a dreamer.
“I decline,” she growls.
The shadow scowls, those green eyes darkening like cloth soaked wet.
His hands fall away.
“You will give in,” he says. “Soon enough.”
He does not step back, does not turn to go. He is simply gone. Swallowed by the dark.
New York City
March 13, 2014
V
Henry Strauss has never been a morning person.
He wants to be one, has dreamed of rising with the sun, sipping his first cup of coffee while the city is still waking, the whole day ahead and full of promise.
He’s tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he’s managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, to feel, at least for a little while, like he was ahead instead of behind. But then a night would go long, and a day would start late, and now he feels like there’s no time at all. Like he is always late for something.
Today, it is breakfast with his younger sister, Muriel.
Henry hurries down the block, his head still ringing faintly from the night before, and he would have canceled, should have canceled. But he’s canceled three times in the last month alone, and he doesn’t want to be a shitty brother; she just wants to be a good sister and that’s nice. That’s new.
He’s never been to this place before. It’s not one of his local haunts—though the truth is, Henry’s running out of coffee shops in his vicinity. Vanessa ruined the first. Milo the second. The espresso at the third tasted like charcoal. So he let Muriel pick one, and she chose a “quaint little hole in the wall” called Sunflower that apparently doesn’t have a sign or an address or any way to find it except by some hipster radar that Henry obviously lacks.
At last he spots a single sunflower stenciled on a wall across the street. He jogs to make the light, bumping into a guy on the corner, mumbles apologies (even as the other man says it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s totally fine). When Henry finally finds the entrance, the hostess is halfway through telling him there’s no space, but then she looks up from the podium, and smiles, and says she’ll make it work.
Henry looks around for Muriel, but she’s always considered time a flexible concept, so even though he’s late, she’s definitely later. And he’s secretly glad, for once, because it gives him a moment to breathe, to smooth his hair and wrest himself free of the scarf that’s trying to strangle him, even order a coffee. He tries to make himself look presentable, even if it doesn’t matter what he does; it won’t change what she sees. But it still matters. It has to.
Five minutes later, Muriel sweeps in. She is, as usual, a tornado of dark curls and unshakable confidence.
Muriel Strauss, who at twenty-four only ever talks about the world in terms of conceptual authenticity and creative truth, who’s been a darling of the New York art scene since her first semester at Tisch, where she quickly realized she was better at critiquing art than creating it.
Henry loves his sister, he does. But Muriel’s always been like strong perfume.
Better in small doses. And at a distance.
“Henry!” she shouts, shedding her coat and dropping into the seat with a dramatic flourish.
“You look great,” she says, which isn’t true, but he simply says, “You too, Mur.”
She beams, and orders a flat white, and Henry braces for an awkward silence, because the truth is, he has no idea how to talk to her. But if Muriel’s good at anything, it’s holding up a conversation. So he drinks his black coffee and settles in while she rolls through the latest pop-up gallery drama, then her schedule for Passover, raves about an experiential art festival on the High Line, even though it isn’t open yet. It isn’t until after she finishes a rant on a piece of street art that was definitely not a pile of trash, but in fact a commentary on capitalist waste, to the echo of Henry’s mhm’s, and nods, that Muriel brings up their older brother.
“He’s been asking about you.”
This is a thing Muriel has never said. Not about David; never to Henry.
So he cannot help himself. “Why?”
His sister rolls her eyes. “I imagine it’s because he cares.”
Henry nearly chokes on his drink.
David Strauss cares about a lot of things. He cares about his status as the youngest head surgeon at Sinai. He cares, presumably, about his patients. He cares about making time for Midrash, even if it means he has to do it in the middle of a Wednesday night. He cares about his parents, and how proud they are of what he’s done. David Strauss does not care about his younger brother, except for the myriad ways in which he’s ruining the family reputation.
Henry looks down at his watch, even though it doesn’t tell the time, or any time, for that matter.
“Sorry, sis,” he says, scraping back his chair. “I’ve got to open the store.”
She cuts herself off—something she never used to do—and rises from the chair to wrap her arms around his waist, squeezing him tight. It feels like an apology, like affection, like love. Muriel is a good five inches shorter than Henry, enough that he could rest his chin on her head, if they were that kind of close, which they’re not.
“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, and Henry promises he won’t.
New York City
March 13, 2014
VI
Addie wakes to someone touching her cheek.
The gesture is so gentle, at first she thinks she must be dreaming, but then she opens her eyes, and sees the fairy lights on the roof, sees Sam crouched beside the lawn chair, a worried crease across her forehead. Her hair has been set free, a mane of wild blond curls around her face.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” she says, tucking a cigarette back into its box, unlit.
Addie shivers and sits up, pulling the jacket tight around her. It’s a cold, cloudy morning, the sky a stretch of sunless white. She didn’t mean to sleep this long, this late. Not that she has anywhere to be, but it certainly seemed like a better idea last night, when she could feel her fingers.
The Odyssey has fallen off her lap. It lies facedown on the ground, the cover slick with morning dew. She reaches to pick it up, does her best to dust the jacket off, smooth the pages where they got bent, or smudged.
“It’s freezing out here,” says Sam, pulling Addie to her feet. “Come on.”
Sam always talks like that, statements in place of questions, imperatives that sound like invitations. She pulls Addie toward the rooftop door, and Addie is too cold to protest, simply trails Sam down the stairs to her apartment, pretending she doesn’t know the way.
The door swings open onto madness.
The hall, the bedroom, the kitchen are all stuffed full of art and artifact. Only the living room—at the back of the apartment—is spacious and bare. No sofa or tables there, nothing but two large windows, an easel, and a stool.
“This is where I do my living,” she said, when she first brought Addie home.
And Addie answered, “I can tell.”
She’s crammed everything she owns into three-quarters of the space, just to preserve the peace and quiet of the fourth. Her friend offered her a studio space at an insane deal, but it felt cold, she said, and she needs warmth to paint.
“Sorry,” says Sam, stepping around a canvas, over a box. “It’s a bit cluttered right now.”
Addie has never seen it any other way. She would love to see what Sam is working on, what put the white paint under her nails and led to the smudge of pink just below her jaw. But instead Addie forces herself to follow the girl around and over and through the mess into the kitchen. Sam snaps on the coffeemaker, and Addie’s eyes slide over the space, marking the changes. A new purple vase. A stack of half-read books, a postcard from Italy. The collection of mugs, some sprouting clean brushes, and always growing.
“You paint,” she says, nodding at the stack of canvases leaning against the stove.
“I do,” says Sam, a smile breaking over her face. “Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just—other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.”
Sam pours two cups of coffee, one mug green, as shallow and wide as a bowl, the other tall and blue. “Cats or dogs?” she asks, instead of “green or blue,” even though there are no dogs or cats on either of them, and Addie says, “cats,” and Sam hands her the tall blue cup without any explanation.
Their fingers brush, and they are standing closer than she realized, close enough for Addie to see the streaks of silver in the blue of Sam’s eyes, close enough for Sam to count the freckles on her face.
“You have stars,” she says.
Déjà vu, thinks Addie, again. She wills herself to pull away, to leave, to spare herself the insanity of repetition and reflection. Instead, Addie wraps her hands around the cup and takes a long sip. The first note is strong and bitter, but the second is rich and sweet.
She sighs with pleasure, and Sam flashes her a brilliant grin. “Good, right?” she says. “The secret is—”
Cacao nibs, thinks Addie.
“Cacao nibs,” says Sam, taking a long sip from her cup, which Addie is convinced now is really a bowl. She drapes herself over the counter, head bowed over the coffee as if it were an offering.
“You look like a wilted flower,” teases Addie.
Sam winks and lifts her cup. “Water me, and watch me bloom.”
Addie has never seen Sam like this, in the morning. Of course, she’s woken up beside her, but those days were tinged with apologies, unease. The aftermath of the absence of memory. It is never fun to linger in those moments. Now, though. This is new. A memory made for the first time.
Sam shakes her head. “Sorry. I never asked your name.”
This is one of the things she loves about Sam, one of the first things she ever noticed. Sam lives and loves with such an open heart, shares the kind of warmth most reserve only for the closest people in their lives. Reasons come second to needs. She took her in, she warmed her up, before she thought to ask her name.
“Madeline,” says Addie, because it is the closest she can get.
“Mmm,” says Sam, “my favorite kind of cookie. I’m Sam.”
“Hello, Sam,” she says, as if tasting the name for the first time.
“So,” says the other girl, as if the question only just occurred to her. “What were you doing up there on the roof?”
“Oh,” says Addie with a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep up there. I don’t even remember sitting down on the lawn chair. I must have been more tired than I thought. I just moved in, 2F, and I don’t think I’m used to all the noise. I couldn’t sleep, finally gave up and went up there to get some fresh air and watch the sun rise over the city.”
The lie rolls out so easily, the way paved with practice.
“We’re neighbors!” says Sam. “You know,” she adds, setting her empty cup aside, “I’d love to paint you sometime.”
And Addie fights the urge to say, You already have.
“I mean, it wouldn’t look like you,” Sam rambles on, heading into the hall. Addie follows, watches her stop and run her fingers over a stack of canvases, turning through them as if they were records in a vinyl shop.
“I’ve got this whole series I’m working on,” she says, “of people as skies.”
A dull pang echoes through Addie’s chest, and it’s six months ago, and they are lying in bed, Sam’s fingers tracing the freckles on her cheeks, her touch as light and steady as a brush.
“You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”
