The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 19
Luc’s voice rises up like fog against the reflection.
I would rather see clouds blot out the stars.
Addie sends the girl off in search of coral lipstick, and the moment she’s alone, Addie wipes the clouds away.
Somehow, she manages to shave off hours until it is 4:00 P.M., but she is outside the bookstore now, buzzing with hope and fear. So she forces herself to circle the block, to count the paving stones, to memorize each and every shop front until it’s 4:45 P.M. and she cannot bear it anymore.
Four short steps. One open door.
And a single, leaden fear.
What if?
What if they spent too long apart?
What if the cracks have filled back in, the curse sealed around her once again?
What if it was just a fluke? A cruel joke?
What if what if what if—
Addie holds her breath, opens the door, and steps in.
But Henry isn’t there—instead there is someone else behind the counter.
It is the girl. The one from the other day, who sat folded in the leather chair, the one who called his name when Henry ran out to catch Addie on the curb. Now she leans against the till, paging through a large book full of glossy photos.
The girl is a work of art, strikingly pretty, dark skin draped in silver threads, a sweater slouching off one shoulder. She looks up at the sound of the bell.
“Can I help you?”
Addie falters, knocked off-balance by a vertigo of want and fear. “I hope so,” she says. “I’m looking for Henry.”
The girl stares at her, studying her—
Then a familiar voice comes from the back.
“Bea, do you think this looks…” Henry rounds the corner, smoothing his shirt, and trails off when he sees Addie. For an instant, a fraction of a fraction of a moment, she thinks it is over. That he has forgotten, and she is alone again, the thin spell made days before snipped like a stray thread.
But then Henry smiles, and says, “You’re early.”
And Addie is dizzy with air, with hope, with light.
“Sorry,” she says, a little breathless.
“Don’t be. I see you’ve met Beatrice. Bea, this is Addie.”
She loves the way Henry says her name.
Luc used to wield it like a weapon, a knife grazing her skin, but on Henry’s tongue, it’s a bell, something light, and bright, and lovely. It rings out between them.
Addie. Addie. Addie.
“Déjà vu,” says Bea, shaking her head. “You ever meet someone for the first time, but you’re sure you’ve seen them before?”
Addie almost laughs. “Yes.”
“I’ve already fed Book,” says Henry, talking to Bea as he shrugs on his coat. “Do not sprinkle any more catnip in the horror section.” She holds up her hands, bracelets jingling. Henry turns to Addie with a sheepish grin. “You ready to go?”
They’re halfway to the door when Bea snaps her fingers. “Baroque,” she says. “Or maybe Neoclassical.”
Addie stares back, confused. “The art periods?”
The other girl nods. “I have this theory that every face belongs to one. A time. A school.”
“Bea is a post-grad,” interjects Henry. “Art history, in case you couldn’t tell.”
“Henry here is obviously pure Romanticism. Our friend Robbie is Postmodern—the avant-garde, of course, not the minimalism. But you…” She taps a finger to her lips. “There’s something timeless about you.”
“Stop flirting with my date,” says Henry.
Date. The word thrills through her. A date is something made, something planned; not a chance of opportunity, but time set aside at one point for another, a moment in the future.
“Have fun!” calls Bea cheerfully. “Don’t stay out too late.”
Henry rolls his eyes. “Bye, Bea,” he says, holding the door.
“You owe me,” she adds.
“I’m granting you free access to the books.”
“Almost like a library!”
“Not a library!” he shouts back, and Addie smiles as she follows him up onto the street. It is obviously an inside joke, some shared, familiar thing, and she aches with longing, wonders what it would feel like to know someone that well, for the knowing to go both ways. Wonders if they could have a joke like that, she and Henry. If they can know each other long enough.
It is a cold evening, and they walk side by side, not intertwined but elbows brushing, each leaning a little into the other’s warmth. Addie marvels at it, this boy beside her, his nose burrowed down into the scarf around his throat. Marvels at the slight difference in his manner, the smallest shift in ease. Days ago, she was a stranger to him, and now, she is not, and he is learning her at the same rate she is learning him, and it is still the beginning, it is still so new, but they have moved one step along the road between unknown and familiar. A step she has never been allowed to take with anyone but Luc.
And yet.
Here she is, with this boy.
Who are you? she thinks as Henry’s glasses fog with steam. He catches her looking, and winks.
“Where are we going?” she asks when they reach the subway, and Henry looks at her and smiles, a shy, lopsided grin.
“It’s a surprise,” he answers as they descend the steps.
They take the G train to Greenpoint, backtrack half a block to a nondescript storefront, a WASH AND FOLD sign in the window. Henry holds the door, and Addie steps through. She looks around at the washing machines, the white-noise hum of the rinse cycle, the shudder of the spin.
“It’s a laundromat,” she says.
But Henry’s eyes go bright with mischief. “It’s a speakeasy.”
A memory lurches through her at the word, and she is in Chicago, nearly a century ago, jazz circling like smoke in the underground bar, the air heavy with the scent of gin and cigars, the rattle of glasses, the open secret of it all. They sit beneath a stained-glass window of an angel lifting his cup, and Champagne breaks across her tongue, and the darkness smiles against her skin, and draws her onto a floor to dance, and it is the beginning and the end of everything.
Addie shudders, drawing herself back. Henry is holding open the door at the back of the laundromat, and she braces herself for a darkened room, a forced retreat into the past, but she’s met instead by the neon lights and electronic chime of an arcade game. Pinball, to be precise. The machines line the walls, crammed side by side to make room for the tables and stools, the wooden bar.
Addie stares around, bemused. It is not a speakeasy at all, not in the strictest sense. It is simply one thing hidden behind another. A palimpsest in reverse.
“Well?” he asks with a sheepish grin. “What do you think?”
Addie feels herself smiling back, dizzy with relief. “I love it.”
“All right,” he says, producing a bag of quarters from one pocket. “Ready to lose?”
It’s early, but the place is far from empty.
Henry leads her to the corner, where he claims a pair of vintage machines, and balances a tower of quarters on each. She holds her breath as she inserts the first coin, braces for the inevitable clink of it rolling back into the dish at the bottom. But it goes in, and the game springs to life, emitting a cheerful cacophony of color and sound.
Addie exhales, a mixture of delight and relief.
Perhaps she is anonymous, the act as faceless as a theft. Perhaps, but in the moment, she doesn’t care.
She pulls back the lever, and plays.
III
“How are you so good at pinball?” Henry demands as she racks up points.
Addie isn’t sure. The truth is, she’s never played before, and it’s taken her a few times to get the hang of the game, but now she’s found her stride.
“I’m a fast learner,” she says, just before the ball slips between her paddles.
“HIGH SCORE!” announces the game in a mechanical drone.
“Well done,” calls Henry over the noise. “Better own your victory.”
The screen flashes, waiting for her to enter her name. Addie hesitates.
“Like this,” he says, showing her how to toggle the red box between the letters. He steps aside, but when she tries, the cursor doesn’t move. The light just flashes over the letter A, mocking.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, backing away, but Henry steps in.
“New machines, vintage problems.” He bumps it with his hip, and the square goes solid around the A. “There we go.”
He’s about to step aside, but Addie catches his arm. “Enter my name while I grab the next round.”
It’s easier now that the place is full. She swipes a couple of beers from the edge of the counter, weaves back through the crowd before the bartender even turns around. And when she returns, drinks in hand, the first things she sees are the letters, flashing in bright red on the screen.
ADI.
“I didn’t know how to spell your name,” he says.
And it’s wrong, but it doesn’t even matter; nothing matters but those three letters, glowing back at her, almost like a stamp, a signature.
“Swap,” says Henry, hands resting on her hips as he guides her over to his machine. “Let’s see if I can beat that score.”
She holds her breath and hopes that no one ever will.
* * *
They play until they run out of quarters and beer, until the place is too crowded for comfort, until they truly can’t hear each other over the ring and clash of the games and the shouts of the other people, and then they spill out of the dark arcade. They go back through the too-bright laundromat, and then out onto the street, still bubbling with energy.
It’s dark out now, the sky overhead a low canopy of dense gray clouds, promising rain, and Henry shoves his hands in his pockets, looks up and down the street. “What now?”
“You want me to choose?”
“This is an equal opportunity date,” he says, rocking from heel to toe. “I provided the first chapter. It’s your turn.”
Addie hums to herself, looking around, summoning a mental picture of the neighborhood.
“Good thing I found my wallet,” she says, patting her pocket. She didn’t, of course, but she did liberate a few twenties from the illustrator’s kitchen drawer before she left that morning. Judging by the recent profile of him in The Times, and the reported size of his latest book deal, Gerald won’t miss it.
“This way.” Addie takes off down the sidewalk.
“How far are we going?” he asks fifteen minutes later, when they’re still walking.
“I thought you were a New Yorker,” she teases.
But his strides are long enough to match her speed, and five minutes later they round the corner, and there it is. The Nitehawk lights up the darkening street, white bulbs tracing patterns on the brick façade, the word CINEMA picked out in red neon light across its front.
Addie has been to every movie theater in Brooklyn, the massive multiplexes with their stadium seats and the indie gems with worn-out sofas, has witnessed every mixture of new releases and nostalgia.
And the Nitehawk is one of her favorites.
She scans the board, buys two tickets to a showing of North by Northwest, since Henry says he’s never seen it, then takes his hand and leads them down the hall into the dark.
There are little tables between each seat with plastic menus and slips of paper to write your order on. She’s never been able to order anything, of course—the pencil marks dissolve, the waiter forgets about her as soon as he is out of sight—so she leans in to watch Henry fill out their card, thrilled by the simple potential of the act.
The previews ramble on as the seats fill up around them, and Henry takes her hand, their fingers lacing together like links in a chain. She glances over at him, painted in the low theater light. Black curls. High cheekbones. The cupid’s bow of his mouth. The flicker of resemblance.
It is hardly the first time she’s seen Luc echoed in a human face.
“You’re staring,” whispers Henry under the sound of the previews.
Addie blinks. “Sorry.” She shakes her head. “You look like someone I used to know.”
“Someone you liked, I hope.”
“Not really.” He shoots her a look of mock affront, and Addie almost laughs. “It was more complicated than that.”
“Love, then?”
She shakes her head. “No…” But her delivery is slower, less emphatic. “But he was very nice to look at.”
Henry laughs as the lights dim, and the movie starts.
A different waiter appears, crouching low as he delivers their food, and she plucks fries from the plate one by one, sinking into the comfort of the film. She glances over to see if Henry’s enjoying himself, but he’s not even looking at the screen. His face, all energy and light an hour before, is a rictus of tension. One knee bounces restlessly.
She leans in, whispers. “You don’t like it?”
Henry flashes a hollow smile. “It’s fine,” he says, shifting in his seat. “Just a little slow.”
It’s Hitchcock, she wants to say, but instead she whispers, “It’s worth it, I promise.”
Henry twists toward her, brow folding. “You’ve already seen it?”
Of course Addie has seen it.
First, in 1959, at a theater in Los Angeles, and then in the ’70s, a double feature with his last film, Family Plot, and then again, a few years back, right in Greenwich Village, during a retrospective. Hitchcock has a way of being resurrected, fed back into the cinema system at regular intervals.
“Yeah,” she whispers back. “But I don’t mind.”
Henry says nothing, but he clearly does mind. His knee goes back to bouncing, and a few minutes later he’s up and out of the seat, walking out into the lobby.
“Henry,” she calls, confused. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She catches up with him as he throws open the theater door and steps out onto the curb. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Needed some air.”
But that’s obviously not it. He’s pacing.
“Talk to me.”
His steps slow. “I just wish you’d told me.”
“Told you what?”
“That you’d already seen it.”
“But you hadn’t,” she says. “And I didn’t mind seeing it again. I like seeing things again.”
“I don’t,” he snaps, and then deflates. “I’m sorry.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your problem.” He runs his hands through his hair. “I just—” He shakes his head, and turns to look at her, green eyes glassy in the dark. “Do you ever feel like you’re running out of time?”
Addie blinks and it is three hundred years ago and she is back on her knees on the forest floor, hands driving down into the mossy earth as the church bells ring behind her.
“I don’t mean in that normal, time flies way,” Henry’s saying. “I mean feeling like its surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”
He has his arms wrapped around himself, fingers digging into his ribs.
It’s been a long time since Addie felt that kind of urgency, but she remembers it well, remembers the fear, so heavy she thought it might crush her.
Blink and half your life is gone.
I do not want to die as I’ve lived.
Born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.
Addie reaches out and grabs his arm. “Come on,” she says, pulling him down the street. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” he asks, and her hand drops to his, and holds on tight.
“To find you something new.”
Paris, France
July 29, 1724
IV
Remy Laurent is laughter bottled into skin. It spills out of him at every turn.
As they walk together through Montmartre, he tips the brow of Addie’s hat, plucks at her collar, slings his arm around her shoulders, and inclines his head, as if to whisper some salacious secret. Remy delights in being part of her charade, and she delights in having someone to share it with.
“Thomas, you fool,” he jeers loudly when they pass a huddle of men.
“Thomas, you scoundrel,” he calls out as they pass a pair of women—girls really, though wrapped in rouge and tattered lace—at the mouth of an alley. They, too, take up the call.
“Thomas,” they echo, teasing and sweet, “come be our scoundrel, Thomas. Thomas, come have some fun.”
They climb the vaulting steps of the Sacré Coeur, are nearly to the top when Remy stops and spreads his coat on the steps, gesturing for her to sit.
They divide the food between them, and as they eat, she studies her strange companion.
Remy is Luc’s opposite, in every way. His hair is a crown of burnished gold, his eyes a summer blue, but more than that, it’s in his manner: his easy smile, his open laugh, the vibrant energy of youth. If one is the thrilling darkness, the other is midday radiance, and if the boy is not quite as handsome, well, that is only because he is human.
He is real.
Remy sees her staring, and laughs. “Are you making a study of me, for your art? I must say, you have mastered the posture and the manners of a Paris youth.”
She looks down, realizes she is sitting with one knee drawn up, her arm hooked lazily around her leg.
“But,” adds Remy, “I fear you are far too pretty, even in the dark.”
He has moved closer, his hand finding hers.
“What is your real name?” he asks, and how she wishes she could tell him. She tries, she tries—thinking maybe just this once, the sounds will make it over her tongue. But her voice catches after the A, so instead she changes course, and says, “Anna.”
“Anna,” Remy echoes, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. “It suits you.”
