The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 33
Addie is sure that Estele’s things were taken up after her death, parceled out through the village, just as her life was, deemed public property simply because she did not wed. Villon, her ward, because Estele had no child.
She goes into the garden, and harvests what she can from the wild plot, carries the ragged bounty of carrots and long beans inside and sets it on the table. She throws the shutters open and finds herself face-to-face with the woods.
The trees stand in a dark line, tangled branches clawing at the sky. Their roots are inching forward, crawling into the garden and across the lawn. A slow and patient advance.
The sun is sinking now, and even though it’s summer, a damp has crawled in through the gaps in the thatched roof, between the stones and under the door, and a chill hangs over the bones of the little hut.
Addie carries a stolen lantern to the hearth. It has been a rainy month, and the wood is damp, but she is patient, coaxing the flame from the lamp until it catches on the kindling.
Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse.
She cannot make a thing, but she can use it.
She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it.
She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.
She does not know if it’s some kind of mercy, or simply a crack in the mortar of her curse, one of the few fissures she’s found in the walls of this new life. Perhaps Luc hasn’t noticed. Or perhaps he has put them there on purpose, to draw her out, to make her hope.
Addie draws a smoldering twig from the fireplace and brings it idly to the threadbare rug. It is dry enough that it should catch, and burn, but it does not. It gutters, and cools too quickly, just outside the safety of its hearth.
She sits on the floor, humming softly as she feeds stick after stick into the blaze until it burns the chill off the place like a breath scattering dust.
She feels him like a draft.
He does not knock.
He never knocks.
One moment she is alone, and the next, she is not.
“Adeline.”
She hates the way it makes her feel to hear him say her name, hates the way she leans into the word like a body seeking shelter from a storm.
“Luc.”
She turns, expecting to see him as he was in Paris, dressed in the fine salon fashion, but instead he is exactly as he was the night they met, wind-blown and shadow-edged, in a simple dark tunic, the laces open at the collar. The firelight dances across his face, shades the edges of his jaw and cheek and brow like charcoal.
His eyes slide over the meager bounty on the sill before returning to her. “Back where you started…”
Addie rises to her feet, so he can’t look down on her.
“Fifty years,” he says. “How quickly they go by.”
They have not gone quickly at all, not for her, and he knows it. He is looking for bare skin, soft places to slide the knife, but she will not give him such an easy target. “No time at all,” she echoes coolly. “To think one life would ever be enough.”
Luc flashes only the edge of a smile.
“What a picture you make, tending that fire. You could almost be Estele.”
It is the first time she has heard that name on his lips, and there is something in the way he says it, almost wistful. Luc crosses to the window, and looks out at the line of trees. “How many nights she stood here, and whispered out into the woods.”
He glances over his shoulder, a coy grin playing over his lips. “For all her talk of freedom, she was so lonely in the end.”
Addie shakes her head. “No.”
“You should have been here with her,” he says. “Should have eased her pain when she was ill. Should have laid her down to rest. You owed her that.”
Addie draws back as if struck.
“You were so selfish, Adeline. And because of you, she died alone.”
We all die alone. That is what Estele would say—at least, she thinks. She hopes. Once, she would have been certain, but the confidence has faded with the memory of the woman’s voice.
Across the room, the darkness moves. One moment he is at the window, the next, he is behind her, his voice threading through her hair.
“She was so ready to die,” Luc says. “So desperate for that spot in the shade. She stood at that window and begged, and begged. I could have given it to her.”
A memory, old fingers tight around her wrist.
Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
Addie turns on him. “She would never have prayed to you.”
A flickering smile. “No.” A sneer. “But think of how sad she’d be to know you did.”
Addie’s temper flares. Her hand flies out before she thinks to stop it, and even then, she half expects to find no purchase, only air and smoke. But Luc is caught off guard, and so her palm strikes skin, or something like it. His head turns a fraction with the force of the blow. There is no blood on those perfect lips, of course, no heat on that cool skin, but she has at least wiped the smile from his face.
Or so she thinks.
Until he begins to laugh.
The sound is eerie, unreal, and when he turns his face back toward her, she stills. There is nothing human in it now. The bones are too sharp, the shadows too deep, the eyes too bright.
“You forget yourself,” he says, his voice dissolving into woodsmoke. “You forget me.”
Pain lances up through Addie’s feet, sudden and sharp. She looks down, searching for a wound, but the pain lights her from within. A deep, internal ache, the force of every step she’s ever walked.
“Perhaps I have been too merciful.”
The pain climbs through her limbs, infecting knee and hip, wrist and shoulder. Her legs buckle beneath her, and it is all she can do not to scream.
The darkness looks down with a smile.
“I have made this too easy.”
Addie watches in horror as her hands begin to wrinkle and thin, blue veins standing out beneath papery skin.
“You asked only for life. I gave you your health, and youth, as well.”
Her hair comes loose from its bun and hangs lank before her eyes, the strands going dry and brittle and gray.
“It has made you arrogant.”
Her sight weakens, vision blurring until the room is only smudges and vague shapes.
“Perhaps you need to suffer.”
Addie squeezes her eyes shut, heart fluttering with panic.
“No,” she says, and it is the closest she has ever come to pleading.
She can feel him, moving closer. Can feel the shadow of him looming over her.
“I will take away these pains. I will let you rest. I will even raise a tree over your bones. And all you have to do”—the voice seeps through the dark—“is surrender.”
That word, like a tear in the veil. And for all the pain, and terror, of this moment, Addie knows she will not give in.
She has survived worse. She will survive worse. This is nothing but a god’s foul temper.
When she finds the breath to speak, the words come out in a ragged whisper. “Go to Hell.”
She braces herself, wonders if he will rot her all the way through, bend her body into a corpse, and leave her there, a broken husk on the old woman’s floor. But there is only more laughter, low and rumbling, and then nothing, the night stretching into stillness.
Addie is afraid to open her eyes, but when she does, she finds herself alone.
The ache has faded from her bones. Her loose hair has regained its chestnut shade. Her hands, once ruined, are again young, smooth, and strong.
She rises, shaking, and turns toward the hearth.
But the fire, so carefully tended, has gone out.
That night, Addie curls up on the moldering pallet, beneath a threadbare blanket left unclaimed, and thinks of Estele.
She closes her eyes and inhales until she can almost smell the herbs that clung to the old woman’s hair, the garden and sap on her skin. She holds fast to the memory of Estele’s crooked smile, her crow-like laugh, the voice she used when she spoke to gods, and the one she used with Addie. Back when she was young, when Estele taught her not to be afraid of storms, of shadows, of sounds in the night.
New York City
March 19, 2014
II
Addie leans against the window, watching the sun rise over Brooklyn.
She wraps her fingers around a cup of tea, savoring the heat against her palms. The glass fogs with cold, the dregs of winter clinging to the edges of the day. She is wearing one of Henry’s sweatshirts, cotton branded with the Columbia logo. It smells like him. Like old books and fresh coffee.
She pads barefoot back into the bedroom, where Henry lies facedown, arms folded beneath the pillow, his cheek turned away. And in that moment, he looks so much like Luc, and yet nothing like Luc at all. The resemblance between them wavers, like double vision. His curls, spread like black feathers on the white pillow, fading to downy fluff at the nape of his neck. His back rises and falls, steady with the smooth, shallow tread of sleep.
Addie sets the cup down on the bedside table, between Henry’s glasses and a leather watch. She traces her finger along the dark metal rim, the gold numerals set into the black ground. It rocks under her touch, reveals the small inscription on the back.
Live well.
A small shiver runs through her, and she’s about to pick it up when Henry groans into his pillow, a soft protest to morning.
Addie abandons the watch, and climbs back into bed beside him. “Hello.”
He gropes for his glasses, puts them on, and looks at her, and smiles, and this is the part that will never get old. The knowing. The present folding on top of the past instead of erasing it, replacing it. He pulls her back against him.
“Hello,” he whispers into her hair. “What time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
Henry groans, and tightens his grip around her. He is warm, and Addie wishes aloud they could stay there all day. But he is awake now, that restless energy winding around him like rope. She can feel it in the tension of his arms, the subtle shifting of his weight.
“I should go,” she says, because she assumes that is what you are supposed to say when you are in someone else’s bed. When they remember how you got there. But she doesn’t say “I should go home” and Henry senses the dropped word.
“Where do you live?” he asks.
Nowhere, she thinks. Everywhere.
“I manage. The city is full of beds.”
“But you don’t have a place of your own.”
Addie looks down at the borrowed sweatshirt, the sum total of her current possessions flung over the nearest chair. “No.”
“Then you can stay here.”
“Three dates, and you’re asking me to move in?”
Henry laughs, because of course it is absurd. But it is hardly the strangest thing in either of their lives.
“How about I ask you to stay—for now.”
Addie doesn’t know what to say. And before she can think of something, he is out of bed, pulling open the bottom drawer. He pushes the contents to one side, carving out space. “You can put your stuff here.”
He looks at her, suddenly uncertain. “Do you have things?”
She will explain, eventually, the details of her curse, the way it twists and curls around her. But he doesn’t know them yet—doesn’t need to. For him, her story has just started.
“There’s no point really, in having more than you can hold, when you have no place to put things down.”
“Well, if you get things—if you want them—you can put them there.”
With that, he heads sleepily for the shower, and she stares at the space he’s made for her, and wonders what would happen if she had things to put inside. Would they disappear immediately? Go slowly, carelessly missing, like socks stolen by a dryer? She has never been able to hang on to anything for long. Only the leather jacket, and the wooden ring, and she’s always known it is because Luc wanted her to have both—had bound them to her under the guise of gifts.
She turns and studies the clothes flung over the chair.
They are streaked with paint from the High Line. There’s green on her shirt, a purple smear on the knee of her jeans. Her boots, too, are flecked with yellow and blue. She knows the paint will fade, rinsed off by a puddle, or simply wiped away by time, but that’s how memories are supposed to work.
There—and then, little by little, gone.
She gets dressed in yesterday’s outfit, takes up the leather jacket, but instead of shrugging it on, she folds it carefully, places it in the empty drawer. It sits there, surrounded by open space, waiting to be filled.
Addie rounds the bed, and nearly steps on the notebook.
It lies open on the floor—it must have slipped off the bed during the night—and she lifts it gingerly, as if it’s bound with ash and spider silk instead of paper and glue. She half expects it to crumble at her touch, but it holds, and when she chances to pull back the cover, she finds the first few pages filled. Addie takes another chance, runs her fingers lightly over the words, feels the indent of the pen, the years hidden behind each word.
This is how it starts, he wrote under her name.
The first thing she still remembers is the ride to market. Her father in the seat beside her, cart filled with his work …
She holds her breath as she reads, the shower filling the room with a quiet hush.
Her father tells her stories. She doesn’t remember the words but she remembers the way he said them …
Addie perches there, reading until she runs out of words, the script giving way to page after page of empty space, waiting to be filled.
When she hears Henry turn the water off, she forces herself to close the book, and sets it gently, almost reverently, back on the bed.
Fécamp, France
July 29, 1778
III
To think, she could have lived and died and never seen the sea.
No matter, though. Addie is here now, pale cliffs rising to her right, stone sentinels at the edge of the beach where she sits, skirts pooling on the sand. She stares out at the expanse, the coastline giving way to water, and water giving way to sky. She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.
It will be a century before she crosses the Atlantic, and when she does, she’ll wonder if the maps are wrong, will begin to doubt the existence of land at all—but here and now, Addie is simply enchanted.
Once upon a time, her world was only as large as a small village in the middle of France. But it keeps getting bigger. The map of her life unfurls, revealing hills and valleys, towns and cities and seas. Revealing Le Mans. Revealing Paris. Revealing this.
She has been in Fécamp for nearly a week, spending her days between the pier and the tide, and if anyone takes notice of the strange woman alone on the sand, they have not seen fit to bother her about it. Addie watches boats come and go, and wonders where they are going; wonders, too, what would happen if she boarded one, where it would take her. Back in Paris, the food shortages are getting worse, the penalties, worse, everything steadily worse. The tension has spilled out of the city, too, the nervous energy reaching all the way here, to the coast. All the more reason, Addie tells herself, to sail away.
And yet.
Something always holds her back.
Today, it is the storm that’s rolling in. It hovers out over the sea, bruising the sky. Here and there the sun splits through, a line of burned light falling toward the slate gray water. She retrieves the book, lying in the sand beside her, begins to read again.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
It is Shakespeare’s Tempest. Now and then she trips over the playwright’s cadence, the style strange, English rhyme and meter still foreign to her mind. But she is learning, and here and there she finds herself falling into the flow.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself …
Her eyes begin to strain against the failing light.
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind—
“‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’” comes a now familiar voice behind her. “‘And our little life is rounded with a sleep.’” A soft sound, like breathless laughter. “Well, not all lives.”
Luc looms over her like a shadow.
She has not forgiven him for the violence of that night back in Villon. Braces for it even now, though they have seen each other several times in the intervening years, forged a wary kind of truce.
But she knows better than to trust it as he sinks onto the sand beside her, one arm draped lazily over his knee, the picture of languid grace, even here. “I was there, you know, when he wrote that verse.”
“Shakespeare?” She cannot hide her surprise.
“Who do you think he called on in the dead of night, when the words would not come?”
“You lie.”
“I boast,” he says. “They are not the same. Our William sought a patron, and I obliged.”
The storm is rolling in, a curtain of rain sliding toward the coast. “Is that really how you see yourself?” she asks, tapping sand from her book. “As some splendid benefactor?”
“Do not sulk, simply because you chose poorly.”
“Did I though?” she counters. “After all, I am free.”
“And forgotten.”
But she is ready for the barb. “Most things are.” Addie looks out to sea.
“Adeline,” he scolds, “what a stubborn thing you are. And yet, it has not even been a hundred years. I wonder, then, how you will feel after a hundred more.”
