The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 24
“Addie, wait,” says Henry, but she kisses him, quick, and slips away, out of the apartment, and down the steps and into the dark.
She sighs, and slows, her lungs aching in the sudden cold. And despite the doors and walls between them, she can feel the weight of what she left behind, and she wishes she could have stayed, wishes that when Henry had said Wait, she had said, Come with me, but she knows it is not fair to make him choose. He is full of roots, while she has only branches.
And then she hears the steps behind her, and slows, shivers, even now, after all this time, expecting Luc.
Luc, who always knew when she brittle.
But it is not the darkness, only a boy with fogging glasses and an open coat.
“You left so fast,” says Henry.
“You caught up,” says Addie.
And perhaps she should feel guilty, but she is only grateful.
She has gotten good at losing things.
But Henry is still here.
“Friends are messy sometimes, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” she says, even though she has no idea.
“I’m sorry,” he says, nodding back at the building. “I don’t know what got into him.”
But Addie does.
Live long enough, and people open up like books. Robbie is a romance novel. A tale of broken hearts. He is so clearly lovesick.
“You said you were just friends.”
“We are,” he insists. “I love him like family, I always will. But I don’t—I never…”
She thinks of the photo, Robbie’s head bowed against Henry’s cheek, thinks of the look on his face when Bea said she was his date, and wonders how he doesn’t see it.
“He’s still in love with you.”
Henry deflates. “I know,” he says. “But I can’t love him back.”
Can’t. Not won’t. Not shouldn’t.
Addie looks at Henry, meets him eye to eye.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
She doesn’t know what she expects him to say, what truth could possibly explain his enduring presence, but for a second, when he looks back at her, there is a brief and blinding sadness.
But then he pulls her close and groans, and says, in a soft and vanquished voice, “I am so full.”
And Addie laughs despite herself.
It is too cold to stand, and so they walk together through the dark, and she doesn’t even notice they have reached his place until she sees the blue door. She is so tired, and he is so warm; she does not want to go, and he does not ask her to.
New York City
March 17, 2014
XI
Addie has woken up a hundred ways.
To frost forming on her skin, and a sun so hot it should have burned. To empty places, and ones that should have been. To wars raging overhead, and the ocean rocking against the hull. To sirens, and city noise, and silence, and once, a snake coiled by her head.
But Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses.
He plants them one by one, like flower bulbs, lets them blossom on her skin. Addie smiles, and rolls against him, pulls his arms around her like a cloak.
The darkness whispers in her head, Without me, you will always be alone.
But instead, she listens to the sound of Henry’s heart, to the soft murmur of his voice in her hair as he asks if she is hungry.
It is late, and he should be at work, but he tells her The Last Word is closed on Mondays. He can’t possibly know that she remembers the little wooden sign, the hours next to every day. The shop is only closed on Thursdays.
She doesn’t correct him.
They pull on clothes, and amble down to the corner shop, where Henry buys egg and cheese rolls from the counter and Addie wanders to the case in search of juice.
And that is when she hears the bell.
That is when she sees a tawny head, and a familiar face, as Robbie stumbles in. That is when her heart drops, the way it does when you miss a step, the sudden lurch of a body off-balance.
Addie has gotten good at losing—
But she isn’t ready.
And she wants to stop time, to hide, to disappear.
But for once, she can’t. Robbie sees Henry, and Henry sees her, and they are in a triangle of one-way streets. A comedy of memory and absence and terrible luck as Henry wraps an arm around her waist, and Robbie looks at Addie with ice in his eyes and says, “Who’s this?”
“That’s not funny,” says Henry. “Are you still drunk?”
Robbie draws back, indignant. “I’m—what? No. I’ve never seen this girl. You never said you met someone.”
It is a car crash in slow motion, and Addie knew it was bound to happen, the inevitable collision of people and place, time and circumstance.
Henry is an impossible thing, her strange and beautiful oasis. But he is also human, and humans have friends, have families, have a thousand strands tying them to other people. Unlike her, he has never been untethered, never existed in a void.
So it was inevitable.
But she still isn’t ready.
“Fuck’s sake, Rob, you just met her.”
“Pretty sure I’d remember.” Robbie’s eyes darken. “But then again, these days, it’s kind of hard to keep them straight.”
The space between them collapses as Henry steps in. Addie gets there first, catches his hand as it lifts, pulls him back. “Henry, stop.”
It was such a lovely jar she had kept them in. But the glass is cracking now. The water leaking through.
Robbie looks at Henry, stunned, betrayed. And she understands. It is not fair. It is never fair.
“Come on,” she says, squeezing his hand.
Henry’s attention finally drags toward her. “Please,” she says. “Come with me.”
They spill out into the street, the morning’s peace forgotten, left behind with the OJ and the sandwiches.
Henry is shaking with anger. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Robbie can be an ass but that was—”
Addie closes her eyes, sinks back against the wall. “It’s not his fault.” She could salvage this, hold the breaking jar, keep her fingers over the cracks. But how long? How long can she keep Henry to herself? How long can she keep him from noticing the curse?
“I don’t think he remembered me.”
Henry squints, clearly confused. “How could he not?”
Addie hesitates.
It is easy to be honest when there are no wrong words, because the words don’t stick. When whatever you say belongs to only you.
But Henry is different, he hears her, he remembers, and suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty such a heavy thing.
She only has one chance.
She can lie to him, like she would anyone else, but if she starts, she’ll never be able to stop, and even more than that—she doesn’t want to lie to him. She’s waited too long to be heard, seen.
So Addie throws herself into the truth.
“You know how some people have face blindness? They look at friends, family, people they’ve known their whole lives, and they don’t recognize them?”
Henry frowns. “In theory, sure…”
“Well, I have the opposite.”
“You remember everyone?”
“No,” says Addie. “I mean yes, I do, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s that—people forget me. Even if we’ve met a hundred times. They forget.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t.
“I know,” she says, “but it’s the truth. If we went back in that store right now, Robbie wouldn’t remember. You could introduce me, but the moment I walked away, the moment I was out of sight, he’d forget again.”
Henry shakes his head. “How? Why?”
The smallest questions. The biggest answer.
Because I was a fool.
Because I was afraid.
Because I wasn’t careful.
“Because,” she says, slumping back against the concrete wall. “I’m cursed.”
Henry stares at her, brow furrowed behind his glasses. “I don’t understand.”
Addie takes a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. And then, because she has decided to tell the truth, that’s what she does.
“My name is Addie LaRue. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, my parents were Jean and Marthe, and we lived in a stone house just beyond an old yew tree…”
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France
July 29, 1764
XII
The cart rattles to a stop beside the river.
“I can take you further,” says the driver, gripping the reins. “We’re still a mile out.”
“That’s all right,” she says. “I know the way.”
An unknown cart and driver might draw attention, and Addie would rather return the way she left, the way she learned every inch of this place: on foot.
She pays the man and steps down, the edge of her gray cloak skimming the dirt. She hasn’t bothered with luggage, has learned to travel light; or rather, to let go of things as easily as she comes into them. It is simpler that way. Things are too hard to hold on to.
“You’re from here, then?” he asks, and Addie squints into the sun.
“I am,” she says. “But I’ve been gone a long time.”
The driver looks her up and down. “Not too long.”
“You’d be surprised,” she says, and then he cracks the whip, and the cart trundles off, and she is alone again in a land she knows, down to her bones. A place she has not been in fifty years.
Strange—twice as long away as she was here, and still it feels like home.
She doesn’t know when she made the decision to come back, or even how, only that it had been building in her like a storm, from the time spring began to feel like summer, the heaviness rolling in like the promise of rain, until she could see the dark clouds on the horizon, hear the thunder in her head, urging her to go.
Perhaps it is a ritual of sorts, this return. A way to cleanse herself, to set Villon firmly in the past. Perhaps she is trying to let go. Or perhaps she is trying to hold on.
She will not stay, that much she knows.
Sunlight glints on the surface of the Sarthe, and for an instant, she thinks of praying, sinking her hands into the shallow stream, but she has nothing to offer the river gods now, and nothing to say to them. They did not answer when it mattered.
Around the bend, and beyond a copse of trees, Villon rises amid the shallow hills, gray stone houses nestled in the basin of the valley. It has grown, a little, widened like a man in middle age, inching outward, but it is still Villon. There is the church, and the town square, and there, beyond the center of the town, the dark green line of the woods.
She does not go through town, instead bends around it to the south.
Toward home.
The old yew tree still stands sentinel at the end of the lane. Fifty years have added a few knotted angles to its limbs, a measure of width around its base, but otherwise, it is the same. And for an instant, when all she can see is the edge of the house, time stutters, and slips, and she is twenty-three again, walking home from the town, or the river, or Isabelle’s, washing on her hip, or the drawing pad under her arm, and any moment she will see her mother in the open doorway, flour powdering her wrists, will hear the steady chop of her father’s ax, the soft hush of their mare, Maxime, swishing her tail and munching grass.
But then she nears the house, and the illusion crumbles back into memory. The horse is gone, of course, and in the yard, her father’s workshop now leans tiredly to one side, while across the weedy grass, her parents’ cottage sits, dark and still.
What did she expect?
Fifty years. Addie knew they would no longer be there, but the sight of this place, decaying, abandoned, still unnerves her. Her feet move of their own accord, carrying her down the dirt lane, through the yard to the sloping ruins of her father’s shop.
She eases the door open—the wood is rotted, crumbling—and steps into the shed.
Sunlight streams through the broken boards, striping the dark, and the air smells of decay instead of fresh-scraped wood, earthy and sweet; every surface is covered in mold, and damp, and dust. Tools her father sharpened every day now lie abandoned, rusted brown and red. The shelves are mostly empty; the wooden birds are gone, but a large bowl sits, half-finished, beneath a curtain of cobwebs and grime.
She runs her hand through the dust, watches it gather again in her wake.
How long has he been gone?
She forces herself back out into the yard, and stops.
The house has come to life, or at least, begun to stir. A thin ribbon of smoke rises from the chimney. A window sits open, thin curtains rippling softly in the draft.
Someone is still here.
She should go, she knows she should, this place isn’t hers, not anymore, but she is already crossing the yard, already reaching out to knock. Her fingers slow, remembering that night, the last one of another life.
She hovers there, on the step, willing her hand to choose—but she has already announced herself. The curtain flutters, a shadow crossing the window, and Addie can only retreat two steps, three, before the door opens a crack. Just enough to reveal a sliver of wrinkled cheek, a scowling blue eye.
“Who’s there?”
The woman’s voice is brittle, thin, but it still lands like a stone in Addie’s chest, knocks the air away, and she is sure that even if she were mortal, her mind softened by time, she would still remember this—the sound of her mother’s voice.
The door groans open, and there she is, withered like a plant in winter, gnarled fingers clutching a threadbare shawl. She is old, anciently so, but alive.
“Do I know you?” asks her mother, but there is no hint of recognition in her voice, only the doubt of the old and the unsure.
Addie shakes her head.
Afterward, she will wonder if she should have answered yes, if her mother’s mind, emptied of memory, could have made room for that one truth. If she might have invited her daughter in, to sit beside the hearth, and share a simple meal, so that when Addie left, she would have something to hold on to besides the version of her mother shutting her out.
But she doesn’t.
She tries to tell herself that this woman stopped being her mother when she stopped being her daughter, but of course, it doesn’t work that way. And yet, it must. She has already grieved, and though the shock of the woman’s face is sharp, the pain is shallow.
“What do you want?” demands Marthe LaRue.
And that is another question she can’t answer, because she doesn’t know. She looks past the old woman, into the dim hall that used to be her home, and only then does a strange hope rise inside her chest. If her mother is alive, then maybe, maybe—but she knows. Knows by the cobwebs in the workshop door, the dust on the half-finished bowl. Knows by the weary look in her mother’s face, and the dark, disheveled state of the cottage behind her.
“I’m sorry,” she says, backing away.
And the woman does not ask what for, only stares, unblinking as she goes.
The door groans shut, and Addie knows, as she walks away, that she will never see her mother again.
New York City
March 17, 2014
XIII
It is easy enough to say the words.
After all, the story has never been the hard part.
It is a secret she has tried to share so many times, with Isabelle, and Remy, with friends and strangers and anyone who might listen, and every time, she has watched their expressions flatten, their faces go blank, watched the words hang in the air before her like smoke before being blown away.
But Henry looks at her, and listens.
He listens as she tells him of the wedding, and the prayers that went unanswered, the offerings made at dawn, and dusk. Of the darkness in the woods, parading as a man, of her wish, and his refusal, and her mistake.
You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.
Listens as she tells him of living forever, and being forgotten, and giving up. When she finishes, she holds her breath, expecting Henry to blink away the fog, to ask what she was about to say. Instead, his eyes narrow with such peculiar focus, and she realizes, heart racing, that he has heard every word.
“You made a deal?” he says. There is a detachment in his voice, an unnerving calm.
And of course, it sounds like madness.
Of course, he does not believe her.
This is how she loses him. Not to memory, but to disbelief.
And then, out of nowhere, Henry laughs.
He sags against a bike rack, head in his hand, and laughs, and she thinks he’s gone mad, thinks she’s broken something in him, thinks, even, that he is mocking her.
But it is not the kind of laughter that follows a joke.
It is too manic, too breathless.
“You made a deal,” he says again.
She swallows. “Look, I know how it sounds but—”
“I believe you.”
She blinks, suddenly confused. “What?”
“I believe you,” he says again.
Three small words, as rare as I remember you, and it should be enough—but it’s not. Nothing makes sense, not Henry, not this; it hasn’t since the start and she’s been too afraid to ask, to know, as if knowing would bring the whole dream crashing down, but she can see the cracks in his shoulders, can feel them in her chest.
Who are you? she wants to ask. Why are you different? How do you remember when no one else can? Why do you believe I made a deal?
In the end, she says only one thing.
“Why?”
And Henry’s hands fall away from his face and he looks up at her, his green eyes fever bright, and says—
“Because I made one, too.”
PART FOUR
THE MAN WHO STAYED DRY IN THE RAIN
Title: Open to Love
Artist(s): Muriel Strauss (design) and Lance Harringer (manufacture)
Date: 2011
