The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

I

New York City

September 5, 2014

This is how it ends.

A boy wakes up alone in bed.

Sunlight spills through the gap in the curtains, the buildings beyond slick with the aftermath of rain.

He feels sluggish, hungover, still caught within the dregs of sleep. He knows he was dreaming, but he can’t for the life of him remember the details of the dream, and it must not have been very pleasant, because he feels only a deep relief at waking.

Book looks over the mound of the comforter, orange eyes wide and waiting.

It’s late, the boy can tell by the angle of the light, the sounds of traffic on the street.

He didn’t mean to sleep so long.

The girl he loves is always the first to wake. Shuffling beneath the sheets, the weight of her attention, the soft touch of her fingers on his skin—they are always enough to rouse him out of sleep. Only once did he wake first, and then he had the strange pleasure of seeing her, knees curled up and face tucked against the pillows, still beneath the surface of sleep.

But that was a rainy morning just after dawn, when the world was gray, and today the sun is so bright he doesn’t know how either of them slept through it.

He rolls over to wake her.

But the other side of the bed is empty.

He splays his hand over the place where she should be, but the sheets are cold and smooth.

“Addie?” he calls, rising to his feet.

He moves through the apartment, checks the kitchen, the bathroom, the fire escape, even though he knows, he knows, he knows, that she is not there.

“Addie?”

And then, of course, he remembers.

Not the dream, there was no dream, only the night before.

The last night of his life.

The damp concrete smell of the rooftop, the last tick of the watch as its hand found twelve, her smile as she looked up into his face, and made him promise to remember.

And now he’s here, and she’s gone, and there’s no trace of her left behind except the stuff in his head and—

The journals.

He’s up, crossing the room to the narrow set of shelves where he kept them: red, blue, silver, black, white, green; six notebooks, all of them still there. He pulls them from the shelf, spreads them on the bed, and as he does, the Polaroids tumble out.

The one he took that day of Addie, her face a blur, her back to the camera, a ghost at the edges of the frame, and he stares at them a long time, convinced that if he squints, she will come into focus. But no matter how long he looks, all he can see are the shapes, the shadows. The only thing he can make out are the seven freckles, and those are so faint he can’t tell if they’re really visible, or his memory is simply filling them in where they should be.

He sets the photograph aside and reaches for the first journal, then stops, so convinced that if and when he opens it, he will find the pages blank, the ink erased like every other mark she tried to make.

But he has to look, and so he does, and there they are, page after page written in his slanting script, shielded from the curse by the fact the words themselves are his, though the story is hers.

He picks up the next journal.

And the next.

Henry sits there for hours against the side of the bed, turning through every page of every book, every story she ever told, and when he’s done, he closes his eyes, and puts his head in his hands amid the open books.

Because the girl he loved is gone.

And he’s still here.

He remembers everything.

II

Brooklyn, New York

March 13, 2015

“Henry Samuel Strauss, this is bullshit.”

Bea slams the last page down on the coffee counter, startling the cat, who’d drifted off on a nearby tower of books. “You can’t end it there.” She’s clutching the rest of the manuscript to her chest, as if to shield it from him. The title page stares back at him.

“What happened to her? Did she really go with Luc? After all that?”

Henry shrugs. “I assume so.”

“You assume so?”

The truth is, he doesn’t know.

He’s spent the last six months trying to transcribe the stories in the notebooks, to compile them into this draft. And every night, after his hands had cramped and his head had begun to ache from staring at the computer screen, he’d collapse into bed—it does not smell like her, not anymore—and wonder how it ends.

If it ends.

He wrote a dozen different endings for the book, ones where she was happy, and ones where she was not, ones where she and Luc were madly in love, and ones where he clung to her like a dragon with its treasure, but those endings all belonged to him, and not to her. Those are his story, and this is hers. And anything he wrote beyond those last shared seconds, that final kiss, would be fiction.

He tried.

But this is real—though no one else will ever know it.

He does not know what happened to Addie, where she went, how she is, but he can hope. He hopes she is happy. He hopes she is still brimming with defiant joy, and stubborn hope. He hopes she did not do it just for him. He hopes, somehow, one day, he’ll see her again.

“You’re really going to method actor this shit, aren’t you?” says Bea.

Henry looks up.

He wants to tell her it’s all true.

That she met Addie, just like he wrote, that she said the same thing every time. He wants to tell her that they would have been friends. That they were, in that first-night-of-the-rest-of-our-lives kind of way. Which was, of course, as much as Addie ever got.

But she wouldn’t believe him, so he lets it live for her as fiction.

“Did you like it?” he asks.

And Bea breaks into a grin. There is no fog in her eyes now, no shine, and he has never been more grateful to have the truth.

“It’s good, Henry,” she says. “It’s really, really good.” She taps the title page. “Just make sure you thank me in the acknowledgments.”

“What?”

“My thesis. Remember? I wanted to do it on the girl in those pieces. The ghost in the frame. That’s her, isn’t it?”

And of course, it is.

Henry runs his hand over the manuscript, relieved and sad that it is done. He wishes he could have lived with it a little longer, wishes he could have lived with her.

But now, he is glad to have it.

Because the truth is, he is already beginning to forget.

It’s not that he’s fallen victim to her curse. She has not been erased in any way. The details are simply fading, as all things do, glossing over by degrees, the mind loosening its hold on the past to make way for the future.

But he doesn’t want to let go.

He is trying not to let go.

He lies in bed at night, and closes his eyes, and tries to conjure her face. The exact curve of her mouth, the specific shade of her hair, the way the bedside lamp lit against her left cheekbone, her temple, her chin. The sound of her laughter late at night, her voice when she was on the edge of sleep.

He knows these details are not as important as the ones in the book, but he still can’t bear to lose them yet.

Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you’re the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it’s hard to keep it from floating away.

“I knew you were going to be a writer,” Bea is saying. “All the trappings, you’ve just been living in denial.”

“I’m not a writer,” he says absently.

“Tell that to the book. You’re going to sell it, right? You have to—it’s too good.”

“Oh. Yeah,” he says thoughtfully. “I think I’d like to try.”

And he will.

He will get an agent, and the book will go to auction, and in the end he’ll sell the work on one condition—that there is only one name on the cover, and it is not his—and in the end, they will agree. They’ll think it some clever marketing trick, no doubt, but his heart will thrill at the thought of other people reading these words—not his, but hers, of her name carried from lips to lips, from mind to memory.

Addie, Addie, Addie.

The advance will be enough to pay off his student loans, enough to let him breathe a little while he figures out what he’s going to do next. He doesn’t know yet what that is, but for the first time, it doesn’t scare him.

The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.

III

London, England

February 3, 2016

The bookstore is about to close.

It gets dark early this time of year, and there’s snow in the forecast, which is rare for London. The various clerks bustle about, dismantling old displays and putting up new ones, trying to finish their work before the mist outside turns to frost.

She lingers nearby, thumb skating along the ring at her throat as a pair of teenage girls restock a wall in New Fiction.

“Have you read it yet?” asks one.

“Yeah, this weekend,” says the other.

“I can’t believe the author didn’t put their name on it,” says the first. “Must be some kind of PR stunt.”

“I don’t know,” says the second. “I think it’s charming. Makes the whole thing feel real. Like it’s really Henry, telling her story.”

The first girl laughs. “You’re such a romantic.”

“Excuse me,” cuts in an older man. “Could I grab a copy of Addie LaRue?”

Her skin prickles. He says the name with so much ease. Sounds tripping off a foreign tongue.

She waits until the three of them have moved off to the till, and then, at last, she approaches the display. It is not just a table, but a full shelf, thirty copies of the book, faced out, the pattern repeating down the wall. The covers are simple, most of the space given over to the title, which is long and large enough to fill the jacket. It’s written in cursive, just like the notes in the journals by the bed, a more legible version of her words in Henry’s hand.

She runs her fingers over the name, feels the embossed letters arc and curve beneath her touch, as though she had written them herself.

The shop girls are right. There is no author’s name. No photo on the back. No sign of Henry Strauss, beyond the simple, beautiful fact that the book is in her hands, the story real.

She peels back the cover, turns past the title to the dedication.

Three small words rest in the center of the page.

She closes her eyes, and sees him as he was that first day in the store, elbows leaning on the counter as he looked up, and frowned at her behind his glasses.

Sees him at Artifact, in the mirrors and then in the field of stars, sees his fingers tracing her name on the glass wall, and peering over a Polaroid, whispering across Grand Central and head bowed over the journal, black curls falling into his face. Sees him lying next to her in bed, in the grass upstate, on the beach, their fingers hooked like links in a chain.

Feels the warm circle of his arms as he pulled her back beneath the covers, the clean scent of him, the ease in his voice when she said, Don’t forget, and he said, Never.

She smiles, brushing away tears, as she sees him on the roof that final night.

Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.

An end.

That is the thing about living in the present, and only the present, it is a run-on sentence. And Henry was a perfect pause in the story. A chance to catch her breath. She does not know if it was love, or simply a reprieve. If contentment can compete with passion, if warmth will ever be as strong as heat.

But it was a gift.

Not a game, or a war, not a battle of wills.

Just a gift.

Time, and memory, like lovers in a fable.

She thumbs through the chapters of the book, her book, and marvels at the sight of her name on every page. Her life, waiting to be read. It is bigger than her now. Bigger than either of them, humans, or gods, or things without names. A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.

She begins to read, makes it as far her first winter in Paris when she feels the air change at her back.

Hears the name, like a kiss, at the nape of her neck.

“Adeline.”

And then Luc is there. His arms fold around her shoulders, and she leans back against his chest. They do fit together. They always have, though she wonders, even now, if it’s simply the nature of what he is, smoke expanding to fill whatever space it is given.

His eyes drop to the book in her hands. Her name splashed across the cover.

“How clever you are,” he says, murmuring the words into her skin. But he does not seem angry.

“They can have the story,” he says. “So long as I have you.”

She twists in his arms to look at him.

Luc is beautiful when he is gloating.

He shouldn’t be, of course. Arrogance is an unattractive trait, but Luc wears it with all the comfort of a tailored suit. He glows with the light of his own work. He is so used to being right. To being in control.

His eyes are a bright, triumphant green.

Three hundred years she’s had to learn the color of his moods. She knows them all by now, the meaning of every shade, knows his temper, wants, and thoughts, just by studying those eyes.

She marvels, that in the same amount of time, he never learned to read her own.

Or perhaps he saw only what he expected: a woman’s anger, and her need, her fear and hope and lust, all the simpler, more transparent things.

But he never learned to read her cunning, or her cleverness, never learned to read the nuances of her actions, the subtle rhythms of her speech.

And as she looks at him, she thinks of all the things her eyes would say.

That he has made a grand mistake.

That the devil is in the details, and he has overlooked a crucial one.

That semantics may seem small, but he taught her once that words were everything. And when she carved the terms of her new deal, when she traded her soul for herself, she did not say forever, but as long as you want me by your side.

And those are not the same at all.

If her eyes could speak, they would laugh.

They would say that he is a fickle god, and long before he loved her, he hated her, he drove her mad, and with her flawless memory, she became a student of his machinations, a scholar of his cruelty. She has had three hundred years to study, and she will make a masterpiece of his regret.

Perhaps it will take twenty years.

Perhaps it will take a hundred.

But he is not capable of love, and she will prove it.

She will ruin him. Ruin his idea of them.

She will break his heart, and he will come to hate her once again.

She will drive him mad, drive him away.

And then, he will cast her off.

And she will finally be free.

Addie dreams of telling Luc these things, just to see the shade it turns his eyes, the green of being bested. The green of forfeit, and of losing.

But if he’s taught her anything, it’s patience.

So Addie says nothing of the new game, the new rules, the new battle that’s begun.

She only smiles, and sets the book back on its shelf.

And follows him out into the dark.