The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 45
New York City
July 30, 2014
XV
Addie is surrounded by trees.
The mossy scent of summer in the woods.
Fear winds through her, the sudden, horrible certainty that Luc has broken both rules instead of one, that he has dragged her through the dark, stolen her away from New York, abandoned her somewhere far, far from home.
But then her eyes adjust, and she turns, and sees the skyline rising above the trees, and realizes she must be in Central Park.
Relief sweeps through her.
And then Luc’s voice drifts through the dark.
“Adeline, Adeline…” he says, and she cannot tell what is an echo, and what is simply him, unbound by flesh and bone and mortal shapes.
“You promised,” she calls.
“Did I?”
Luc steps out of the dark, the way he did that night, drawing together from smoke and shadow. A storm, bottled into skin.
Am I the devil or the darkness? he asked her once. Am I a monster or a god?
He is no longer dressed in the sleek black suit, but as he was when she first summoned him, a stranger in trousers, a pale tunic open at his throat, his black hair curling against his temples.
The dream conjured so many years ago.
But one thing has changed. There is no triumph in his eyes. The color has gone out of them, so pale they’re almost gray. And though she’s never seen the shade before, she guesses it is sadness.
“I will give you what you want,” he says. “If you will do one thing.”
“What?” she asks.
Luc holds out his hand.
“Dance with me,” he says.
There is longing in his voice, and loss, and she thinks, perhaps, it is the end, of this, of them. A game finally played out. A war with no winners.
And so she agrees to dance.
There is no music, but it does not matter.
When she takes his hand, she hears the melody, soft and soothing in her head. Not a song, exactly, but the sound of the woods in summer, the steady hush of the wind through the fields. And as he pulls her close, she hears a violin, low and mournful, along the Seine. His hand slides through hers, and there is the steady murmur of the seaside. The symphony soaring through Munich. Addie leans her head against his shoulder, and hears the rain falling in Villon, the brass band ringing in an L.A. lounge, and the ripple of a saxophone through the open windows on Bourbon.
The dancing stops.
The music fades.
A tear slides down her cheek. “All you had to do was set me free.”
Luc sighs, and lifts her chin. “I could not.”
“Because of the deal.”
“Because you are mine.”
Addie twists free. “I was never yours, Luc,” she says, turning away. “Not in the woods that night. And not when you took me to bed. You were the one who said it was just a game.”
“I lied.” The words, a knife. “You loved me,” he says. “And I loved you.”
“And yet,” she says, “you didn’t come to find me until I’d found someone else.”
She turns back toward him, expecting to see those eyes yellowing with envy. But instead, they have gone a weedy, arrogant green, mirrored by the expression on his face, the faint lift of a single brow, the corner of his mouth.
“Oh, Adeline,” he says. “You think you found each other?”
The words are a missed step.
A sudden drop.
“Do you truly think that I would let that happen?”
The ground tilts beneath her feet.
“That for all the deals I do, such a thing would ever pass beneath my notice?”
Addie squeezes her eyes shut, and she is lying beside Henry, their fingers laced together in the grass. She is looking up at the night sky. She is laughing at the idea that Luc finally made a mistake.
“You must have thought yourselves so clever,” he is saying now. “Star-crossed lovers, brought together by chance. What are the odds that you would meet, that you would both be bound to me, both have sold your souls for something only the other could provide? When the truth is so much easier than that—I put Henry in your path. I gave him to you, wrapped and ribboned like a gift.”
“Why?” she asks, throat closing around the word. “Why would you do that?”
“Because it’s what you wanted. You were so set upon your need for love, you could not see beyond it. I gave you this, I gave you him, so you could see that love was not worth the space you held for it. The space you kept from me.”
“But it was worth it. It is.”
He reaches out to brush her cheek. “It won’t be, when he’s gone.”
Addie pulls away. From his words, his touch. “This is cruel, Luc. Even for you.”
“No,” he snarls. “Cruelty would be ten years instead of one. Cruelty would be to let you have a lifetime with him, and have to suffer more for losing.”
“I would choose it anyway!” She shakes her head. “You never intended to let him live, did you?”
Luc inclines his head. “A deal is a deal, Adeline. And deals are binding.”
“That you would do all this to torment me—”
“No,” he snaps. “I did it to show you. To make you understand. You put them on such a pedestal, but humans are brief and pale and so is their love. It is shallow, it does not last. You long for human love, but you are not human, Adeline. You haven’t been for centuries. You have no place with them. You belong with me.”
Addie recoils, anger hardening to ice inside her.
“What a hard lesson it must be for you,” she says. “That you can’t have everything you want.”
“Want?” he sneers. “Want is for children. If this were want, I would be rid of you by now. I would have forgotten you centuries ago,” he says, a bitter loathing in his voice. “This is need. And need is painful but patient. Do you hear me, Adeline? I need you. As you need me. I love you, as you love me.”
She hears the pain in his voice.
Perhaps that is why she wants to hurt him worse.
He taught her well, to find the weakness in the armor.
“But that’s the thing, Luc,” she says, “I don’t love you at all.”
The words are soft, steady, and yet they rumble through the dark. The trees rustle, and the shadows thicken, and Luc’s eyes burn a shade she’s never seen before. A venomous color. And for the first time in centuries, she is afraid.
“Does he mean so much to you?” he asks, voice flat and hard as river stones. “Then go. Spend time with your human love. Bury him, and mourn him, and plant a tree over his grave.” His edges begin to blur into the dark. “I will still be here,” he says. “And so will you.”
Luc turns away, and is gone.
Addie sinks to her knees in the grass.
She stays there until the first threads of light seep into the sky, and then, at last, she forces herself up again, walks to the subway in a fog, Luc’s words looping through her head.
You are not human, Adeline.
You thought you found each other?
You must have thought yourselves so clever.
Spend time with your love.
I will still be here.
And so will you.
The sun is rising by the time she gets to Brooklyn.
She stops to pick up breakfast, a concession, an apology, for staying away all night. And that is when she sees the paper stacked against the newsstand. That is when she sees the date stamped in the upper corner.
August 6, 2014.
She left the apartment on the 30th of July.
Spend time with your love, he said.
But Luc has taken it. He didn’t just steal a night. He took an entire week. Seven precious days, erased from her life … and Henry’s.
Addie runs.
She stumbles through the door, and up the stairs, turns out her purse, but the key is gone, and she pounds on the door, terror surging through her that the world has changed, that Luc has somehow rewritten more than time, somehow taken more, taken everything.
But then the lock slides, and the door falls open, and there is Henry, exhausted, disheveled, and she knows, by the look in his eyes, that he did not expect her to come back. That at some point, between the first morning and the next, and the next, and the next, he thought she was gone.
Addie throws her arms around him now.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and it is not just for the stolen week.
It is for the deal, the curse, the fact it is her fault.
“I’m sorry,” she says, over and over, and Henry doesn’t shout, doesn’t rage, doesn’t even say I told you so. He simply holds her tight, and says, “Enough,” says, “Promise me,” says, “Stay.”
And none of them are questions, but she knows he is asking, pleading with her to let it go, to stop fighting, stop trying to change their fates, and just be with him until the end.
And Addie cannot bear the thought of giving up, of giving in, of going down without a fight.
But Henry is breaking, and it is her fault, and so, in the end, she agrees.
New York City
August 2014
XVI
These are the happiest days of Henry’s life.
It is an odd thing to say, he knows.
But there is a strange freedom to it, a peculiar comfort in the knowing. The end is rushing up to meet him, and yet, he does not feel like he is falling toward it.
He knows he should be scared.
Every day he braces for the restless terror, waits for the storm clouds to roll in, expects the inevitable panic to climb inside his chest, pry him apart.
But for the first time in months, in years, in as long as he can remember, he is not afraid. He is worried about his friends, of course, about the bookstore, and the cat. But beyond the low hum of concern is only a strange calm, a steadiness, and the incredible relief that he found Addie, that he got to know her, to love her, to have her here beside him.
He is happy.
He is ready.
He is not afraid.
That is what he tells himself.
He is not afraid.
* * *
They decide to go upstate.
To get out of the city, away from the stagnant summer heat.
To see the stars.
He rents a car, and they drive north, and he realizes, halfway up the Hudson, that Addie has never met his family, and then he realizes, with a sudden, sinking weight, that he is not supposed to go home until Rosh Hashanah, and that he will be gone by then. That if he does not take this exit, he will never get a chance to say good-bye.
And then, the clouds begin to roll in, and fear tries to climb inside his chest, because he doesn’t know what he would say, he doesn’t know what good it would do.
And then he is past the exit, then it is too late, and he can breathe again, and Addie is pointing to a sign for fresh fruit, and they pull off the freeway and buy peaches from the stand, and sandwiches from the market, and drive an hour north to a state park, where the sun is hot but the shade beneath the trees is cool, and they spend the day wandering the woodland paths, and when night falls they make a picnic on the roof of the rented car, and stretch out between the wild, weedy grass and the stars.
So many, the night doesn’t seem that dark.
And he is still happy.
And he can still breathe.
They have no tent, but it is too hot for covers anyway.
They lie on a blanket in the grass, and look up at the ghost of the Milky Way, and he thinks of the Artifact on the High Line, the exhibit of the sky, how close the stars felt then, and now, how far away.
“If you could do it again,” he says, “would you still make the deal?”
And Addie says yes.
It has been a hard and lonely life, she says, and a wonderful one, too. She has lived through wars, and fought in them, witnessed revolution and rebirth. She has left her mark on a thousand works of art, like a thumbprint in the bottom of a drying bowl. She has seen marvels, and gone mad, has danced in snowbanks and frozen to death along the Seine. She fell in love with the darkness many times, fell in love with a human once.
And she is tired. Unspeakably tired.
But there is no question she has lived.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?
Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain?
And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”
They fall asleep beneath the stars, and when they wake up in the morning, the heat has leaked away, the air is cool, the first whispers of another season, the first one he won’t see, waiting in the distance.
And still, he tells himself, he is not afraid.
* * *
And then the weeks turn into days.
There are some good-byes he has to make.
He meets Bea and Robbie at the Merchant one night. Addie sits across the bar, sipping a soda and giving him space. He wants her there, he needs her there, a silent anchor in the storm. But they both know that if she were at the table with him, Bea and Robbie might forget, and he needs them to remember.
And for a little while, everything is wonderfully, painfully normal.
Bea talks about her latest thesis proposal, and apparently ninth time’s the charm, because it’s been approved, and Robbie talks about the show’s premiere next week, and Henry does not tell him that he snuck into a dress rehearsal yesterday, that he and Addie lurked in the last row of seats, slouched low so he could watch Robbie on the stage, brilliant, and beautiful, and in his element, lounging on his throne with Bowie’s flare, and a devil’s grin, and a magic all his own.
And at last, Henry lies, and tells them he is going out of town.
Upstate, to see his parents. No, it is not time, he says, but he has cousins visiting, his mother asked. Just for the weekend, he says.
He asks Bea if she can work the store.
Asks Robbie if he will feed the cat.
And they say yes, as simple as that, because they do not know it is good-bye. Henry pays the tab, and Robbie jokes, and Bea complains about her undergrads, and Henry tells them he’ll call when he gets back.
And when he gets up to go, Bea kisses his cheek, and he pulls Robbie in for a hug, and Robbie says he better not miss his show, and Henry promises he won’t, and then they are going, they are gone.
And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be.
Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up.
It is a door left open.
It is drifting off to sleep.
And he tells himself he is not afraid.
Tells himself it is okay, he is okay.
And just when he begins to doubt, Addie’s hand is there, soft and steady on his arm, leading him back home. And they climb into bed, and curl into each other against the storm.
And sometime in the middle of the night, he feels her get up, hears her padding down the hall.
But it is late, and he thinks nothing of it.
He rolls over, and goes back to sleep, and when he wakes again it is still dark, and she is back beside him in the bed.
And the watch on the table twitches one step closer to midnight.
New York City
September 4, 2014
XVII
It is such an ordinary day.
They stay in bed, curled together in the nest of sheets, head to head and hands trailing over arms, along cheeks, fingers memorizing skin. He whispers her name, over and over, as if she can save the sound, bottle it up to use when he is gone.
Addie, Addie, Addie.
And despite it all, Henry is happy.
Or at least, he tells himself he is happy, tells himself he is ready, tells himself he isn’t afraid. And he tells himself that if they just stay here, in the bed, the day will last. If he holds his breath, he can keep the seconds from moving forward, pin the minutes between their tangled fingers.
It is an unspoken plea but Addie seems to sense it, because she makes no motion to get up. Instead, she stays with him in bed, and tells him stories.
Not of anniversaries—they have run out of July 29ths—but of Septembers and Mays, of quiet days, the kind no one else would remember. She tells him of fairy pools on the Isle of Skye, and the Northern Lights in Iceland, of swimming in a lake so clear she could see the bottom ten meters down, in Portugal—or was it Spain?
These are the only stories he will never write down.
It is his own failing; he cannot bring himself to unfold, to let go of Addie’s hands and climb out of the bed, and grab the latest notebook from the shelf—there are six of them now, the last only half-filled, and he realizes it will stay that way, those last blank pages, his cramped cursive like a wall, a false end to an ongoing story, and his heart skips a little, a tiny stutter of panic, but he can’t let it start, knows it will tear through him, the way a shiver turns a momentary chill into teeth-chattering cold, and he cannot lose his hold, not yet, not yet.
Not yet.
So Addie talks, and he listens, letting the stories slide like fingers through his hair. And every time the panic tries to fight its way to the surface, he fights it back, holds his breath and tells himself he is fine, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t get up. He cannot, because if he does, it will break the spell, and time will race forward and it will be over too fast.
It is a silly thing, he knows, a strange surge of superstition, but the fear is there now, real now, and the bed is safe, and Addie is steady, and he is so glad she is here, so glad for every minute since they met.
Sometime in the afternoon, he is suddenly hungry. Famished.
He shouldn’t be. It feels frivolous, and wrong, inconsequential now, but the hunger is swift and deep, and with its arrival, the clock begins to tick.
