The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 20
She will use a hundred names over the years, and countless times, she will hear those words, until she begins to wonder at the importance of a name at all. The very idea will begin to lose its meaning, the way a word does when said too many times, breaking down into useless sounds and syllables. She will use the tired phrase as proof that a name does not really matter—even as she longs to say and hear her own.
“Tell me, Anna,” says Remy, now. “Who are you?”
And so she tells him. Or at least, she tries—spills out the whole strange and winding journey, and then, when it does not even reach his ears, she starts again, and tells him another version of the truth, one that skirts the edges of her story, smoothing the rough corners into something more human.
Anna’s story is a pale shadow of Adeline’s.
A girl running away from a woman’s life. She leaves behind everything she has ever known, and escapes to the city, disowned, alone, but free.
“Unbelievable,” he says. “You simply left?”
“I had to,” she says, and it is not a lie. “Admit it, you think me mad.”
“Indeed,” says Remy with a playful grin. “The maddest. And the most incredible. What courage!”
“It did not feel like courage,” Addie says, plucking at the rind of bread. “It felt as if I had no choice. As if…” The words lodge in her throat, but she isn’t sure if it’s the curse, or simply the memory. “It felt as if I’d die there.”
Remy nods thoughtfully. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
Addie’s throat tightens.
“Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”
Remy’s expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, “I think there are many ways to matter.” He plucks the book from his pocket. “These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”
He has misread her, of course, assumed the question stemmed from a different, more common fear. Still, his words hold weight—though it will be years before Addie discovers just how much.
They fall to silence, then, the quiet weighted with their thoughts. The summer heat has broken, given way to a breezy comfort with the thickest part of night. The hour settles on them like a sheet.
“It is late,” he says. “Let me walk you home.”
She shakes her head. “You do not have to.”
“But I do,” he protests. “You may disguise yourself as a man, but I know the truth, and so honor will not let me leave you. The darkness is no place to be alone.”
He does not know how right he is. Her chest aches at the idea of losing the thread of this night, and the ease beginning to take shape between them, an ease born of hours instead of days or months, but it is something, fragile and lovely.
“Very well,” she says, and his smile, when it answers, is pure joy.
“Lead the way.”
She has nowhere to take him, but she sets off, in the vague direction of a place she stayed several months before. Her chest tightens a little with every step, because every step brings her closer to the end of this, of them. And when they turn onto the street where she has placed her made-up home, and stopped before her imagined door, Remy leans in and kisses her once, on the cheek. Even in the dark she can see him blushing.
“I would see you again,” he says, “in daylight, or in darkness. As a woman, or a man. Please, let me see you again.”
And her heart breaks, because of course, there is no tomorrow, only tonight, and Addie is not ready for the thread to snap, the night to end, and so she answers, “Let me walk you home,” and when he opens his mouth to protest, she presses on, “The darkness is no place to be alone.”
He meets her gaze, and perhaps he knows her meaning, or perhaps he is as loath as she to leave this night behind, because he quickly offers his arm and says, “How chivalrous,” and they set off together again, laughing as they realize they are retracing their steps, returning the way they came. And if the walk to her imagined home was leisurely, the walk to his is urgent, threaded with anticipation.
When they reach his lodging house, they do not pretend to say good-bye. He leads her up the stairs, fingers tangled now, steps tripping and breathless, and when they reach his rented room, they do not linger on the threshold.
There is a faint catch in her chest at the idea of what comes next.
Sex has only ever been a burden, a necessity of circumstance, some required currency, and she has, up until now, been willing to pay the price. Even now, she is prepared for him to push her down, to shove her skirts out of the way. Prepared for the longing to break, forced away by the unsubtle act.
But he doesn’t thrust himself upon her. There is an urgency, yes, but Remy holds it taut as rope between them. He reaches out a single, steady hand, and lifts the hat from her head, sets it gently on the bureau. His fingers slide up the nape of her neck, and through her hair as his mouth finds hers, the kisses shy, and searching.
For the first time, she feels no reluctance, no dread, only a kind of nervous thrill, and the tension in the air is laced with breathless hunger.
Her fingers fumble for the laces of his trousers, but his own hands move slower, undoing the laces of her tunic, sliding the cloth over her head, unwrapping the muslin bound around her breasts.
“So much easier than corsets,” he murmurs, kissing the skin of her collar, and for the first time since those nights in her childhood bed back in Villon, Addie feels the heat rising in her cheeks, across her skin, between her legs.
He guides her back onto the pallet, kisses trailing down her throat, the curve of her breasts, before he frees himself, and climbs onto the bed, and onto her. She parts around him, breath hitching at the first thrust, and Remy pulls back, just enough to catch her eye, to make sure she’s okay, and when she nods, he drops his head to kiss her, and only then does he press on, press in, press deep.
Her back arches as that pressure gives way to pleasure, a deep and rolling heat. Their bodies press and move together, and she wishes she could erase those other men, those other nights, their stale breath and awkward bulk, the dull thrusts that ended in a sudden, abrupt spasm, before they pulled out, pulled away. To them, wet was wet, and warm was warm, and she was nothing but a vessel for their pleasure.
She cannot erase the memory of those other nights—so she decides to become a palimpsest, to let Remy write over the other lines.
This is how it should have been.
The name Remy whispers in her hair is not hers, but it doesn’t matter. In this moment, she can be Anna. She can be anyone.
Remy’s breath quickens as his tempo rises, as he presses deeper, and Addie feels herself quicken, too, her body tightening around him, driven toward the edge by the rocking of his hips and the blond curls tumbling into her face. She coils tighter and tighter, and then she comes undone, and a few moments later, so does he.
Remy collapses down beside her. But he doesn’t roll away. He reaches out, and sweeps a lock of hair from her cheek, and kisses her temple, and laughs, little more than a smile given sound, but it warms her all the way through.
He falls back against the pillow, and sleep comes over them, his leaden in the aftermath of pleasure, and hers light, dozing, but dreamless.
Addie no longer dreams.
She hasn’t, in truth, since that night in the woods. Or if she has, it is the one thing she never remembers. Perhaps there is no space inside her head, full as it is of memories. Perhaps it is yet another facet of her curse, to live only as she does. Or perhaps it is in some strange sense a mercy, for how many would be nightmares.
But she stays, happy and warm beside him, and for a few hours she almost forgets.
Remy has rolled away from her in sleep, exposing the lean breadth of his back, and she rests her hand between his shoulder blades, and feels him breathing, traces her fingers down the slope of his spine, studying his edges the way he’d studied hers in the midst of passion. Her touch is feather-light, but after a moment, he stirs, and shifts, and rolls to face her.
For a brief moment, his face is wide and open and warm; the face that leaned toward hers in the street and smiled through shared secrets in the café and laughed as he walked her first to her home and then to his.
But in the time it takes for him to fully wake, that face slides away, and all the knowing with it. A shadow sweeps across those warm blue eyes, that welcome mouth. He jerks a little, rises on one elbow, flustered by the sight of this stranger in his bed.
Because, of course, she is a stranger now.
For the first time since they met the night before, he frowns, stammers a greeting, the words too formal, stiff with embarrassment, and Addie’s heart breaks a little. He is trying to be kind, but she cannot bear it, so she gets up and dresses as fast as she can, a gross reversal of the time he took to strip the clothes away. She does not bother with the laces or the buckles. Does not turn toward him again, not until she feels the warmth of his hand on her shoulder, the touch almost gentle, and thinks, desperately, wildly, that maybe—maybe—there is a way to salvage this. She turns, hoping to meet his eyes, only to find him looking down, away, as he presses three coins into her hand.
And everything goes cold.
Payment.
It will be many years before she can read Greek, many more before she hears the myth of Sisyphus, but when she does, she will nod in understanding, palms aching from the weight of pushing stones uphill, heart heavy from the weight of watching them roll down again.
In this moment, there is no myth for company.
Only this beautiful boy with his back to her.
Only Remy, who makes no move to follow when she hurries to the door.
Something catches her eye, a bundle of paper askew on the floor. The booklet from the café. The latest of Voltaire. Addie doesn’t know what drives her to take it—perhaps she simply wants a token of their night, something more than the dreaded copper in her palm—but one moment the book is on the ground, cast-off among the clothes, and the next it is pressed to her front with the rest of her things.
Her hands have gotten light, after all, and even if the theft was clumsy, Remy would not have noticed, sitting there on the bed, his attention fixed anywhere but her.
New York City
March 15, 2014
V
Addie leads Henry down the street and around the corner to a nondescript steel door plastered with old posters. A man loiters next to it, chain-smoking and scrolling through pictures on his phone.
“Jupiter,” she says, unprompted, and the man straightens, and pushes open the door, exposing a narrow platform, and a set of stairs that drops down out of sight.
“Welcome to the Fourth Rail.”
Henry shoots her a wary look, but Addie grabs his hand and pulls him through. He twists, looking back as the door swings shut. “There is no fourth rail,” he says, and Addie flashes him a grin.
“Exactly.”
This is what she loves about a city like New York. It is so full of hidden chambers, infinite doors leading into infinite rooms, and if you have the time, you can find so many of them. Some she’s found by accident, others in the course of this or that adventure. She keeps them tucked away, like slips of paper between the pages of her book.
One stairwell leads to another, the second wider, made of stone. The ceiling arches overhead, plaster giving way to rock, and then tile, the tunnel lit only by a series of electric lanterns, but they’re spaced far enough apart that they do little to actually break the dark. A breadcrumb trail, just enough to see by, which is why Addie has the pleasure of seeing Henry’s expression when he realizes where they are.
The New York City Subway has nearly five hundred active stations, but the number of abandoned tunnels remains a matter of contention. Some of them are open to the public, both monuments to the past and nods to the unfinished future. Some are little more than closed tracks tucked between functioning lines.
And then some are secrets.
“Addie…” murmurs Henry, but she holds up a finger, tilts her head. Listening.
The music starts as an echo, a distant thrum, as much a feeling as a sound. It rises with every downward step, seems to fill the air around them, first a hum, and then a pulse, and then, at last, a beat.
Ahead the tunnel is bricked up, marked only by the white slash of an arrow to the left. Around the corner, the music grows. One more dead end, one more turn and—
Sound crashes over them.
The whole tunnel vibrates with the force of the bass, the reverb of chords against stone. Spotlights pulse blue-white, a strobe reducing the hidden club to still frames; a writhing crowd, bodies bouncing to the beat; a pair of musicians wielding matching electric guitars on a concrete stage; a row of bartenders caught mid-pour.
The tunnel walls are tiled gray and white, wide bands that wrap in arches overhead, bend down again like ribs, as if they are in the belly of some great, forgotten beast, the rhythm pulsing through its heart.
The Fourth Rail is primal, heady. The kind of place Luc would love.
But this? This is hers. Addie found the tunnel on her own. She showed it to the musician-turned-manager looking for a venue. Later that night, she even suggested the name, their heads bent over a cocktail napkin. His pen marks. Her idea. She’s sure he woke up the next day with a hangover and the first stirrings of the Fourth Rail. Six months later, she saw the guy standing outside the steel doors. Saw the logo they’d designed, a more polished version, tucked beneath the peeling posters, and felt the now-familiar thrill of whispering something into the world and watching it become real.
Addie pulls Henry toward the makeshift bar.
It’s simple, the tunnel wall divided into three behind a wide slab of pale stone that serves as a pouring surface. The options are vodka, bourbon, or tequila, and a bartender stands, waiting, before each.
Addie orders for them. Two vodkas.
The transaction happens in silence—there is no point trying to shout over the wall of sound. A series of fingers held up, a ten laid on the bar. The bartender—a slender black guy with silver dusting his eyes—pours two shots, and spreads his hands like a dealer laying down cards.
Henry lifts his glass and Addie raises hers too and their mouths move together (she thinks he’s saying cheers while she answers salut), but the sounds are swallowed up, the clink of their shots nothing but a small vibration through her fingers.
The vodka hits her stomach like a match, heat blossoming behind her ribs.
They set the empty glasses back on the bar, and Addie’s already pulling Henry toward the crush of bodies by the stage when the guy behind the bar reaches out and catches Henry’s wrist.
The bartender smiles, produces a third shot glass, and pours again. He presses his hands to his chest in the universal gesture for it’s on me.
They drink, and there is the heat again, spreading from her chest to her limbs, and there is Henry’s hand in hers, moving into the crowd. Addie looks back, sees the bartender staring after them, and there is a strange feeling, rising like the last dregs of a dream, and she wants to say something, but the music is a wall, and the vodka smooths the edges of her thoughts until it slips away, and then they are folding into the crowd.
Up above it may be early spring, but down here it is late summer, humid and heavy. The music is liquid, the air thick as syrup as they plunge into the tangled limbs. The tunnel is bricked up behind the stage, making a world of reverb, a place where sound bends back, redoubles, every note carried, thinning, without trailing off entirely. The guitarists play a complicated riff in perfect unison, adding to the echo chamber effect, churning the waters of the crowd.
And then the girl steps into the spotlight.
A teenage sprite—a fae thing, Luc would say—in a black baby doll dress and combat boots. Her white-blond hair is piled on her head, done up in twin buns, the ends spiking like a crown. The only color is the slash of her red lips, and the rainbow drawn like a mask across her eyes. The guitarists quicken, fingers flying over strings. The air shakes, the beat thumps through skin and muscle and bone.
And the girl begins to sing.
Her voice is a wail, a banshee’s call if a banshee screamed in tune. The syllables bleed together, the consonants blur, and Addie finds herself leaning in, eager to hear the words. But they draw back, slip under the beat, fold into the feral energy of the Fourth Rail.
The guitars play their hypnotic chorus.
The girl singer seems almost like a puppet, pulled along by the strings.
And Addie thinks that Luc would love her, wonders for an instant if he’s been down here since she’d found it. She breathes in as if she’d be able to smell the darkness, like smoke, on the air. But Addie wills herself to stop, empties her head of him, makes space instead for the boy beside her, bouncing in time with the beat.
Henry, with his head tipped back, his glasses fogged gray, and sweat sliding down his cheeks like tears. For an instant he looks impossibly, immeasurably sad, and she remembers the pain in his voice when he spoke of losing time.
But then he looks at her and smiles, and it’s gone, a trick of the lights, and she wonders who and how and where he came from, knows it is all too good to be true, but in this moment, she is simply glad he’s there.
She closes her eyes, lets herself fall into the rhythm of the beat, and she is in Berlin, Mexico City, Madrid, and she is right here, right now, with him.
They dance until their limbs ache.
Until sweat paints their skin, and the air becomes too thick to breathe.
Until there’s a lull in the beat, and another silent conversation passed between them like a spark.
