the frame.
She holds her breath, and hopes.
A click. A flash.
This time, the picture comes out.
* * *
Here is a life in still frames.
Moments like Polaroids. Like paintings. Like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. Perfectly preserved.
The three of them, napping in the sun.
Addie, stroking Henry’s hair while she tells him stories, and he writes, and writes, and writes.
Henry, pressing her down into the bed, their fingers tangled, their breath quick, her name an echo in her hair.
Here they are, together in his galley kitchen, his arms threaded through hers, her hands over his as they stir béchamel, as they knead bread dough.
When it is in the oven, he cups her face with floury hands, leaves trails everywhere he touches.
They make a mess, as the room fills with the scent of freshly baking bread.
And in the morning it looks like ghosts have danced across the kitchen, and they pretend there were two instead of one.
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France
July 29, 1854
XI
Villon was not supposed to change.
When she was growing up, it was always so painfully still, like summer air before a storm. A village carved in stone. And yet, what was it Luc said?
Even rocks wear away to nothing.
Villon has not worn away. Instead, it has shifted, grown, new roots thrown out, and others cut. The woods have been forced back, trees on the forest edge all felled to feed hearth fires and make way for fields and crops. There are more walls now than there were before. More buildings. More roads.
As Addie makes her way through town, hair tucked beneath a well-trimmed bonnet, she marks a name, a face, a ghost of a ghost of a family she once knew. But the Villon of her youth has finally faded, and she wonders if this is what memory feels like for others, this slow erasure of details.
For the first time, she does not recognize every path.
For the first time, she is not sure she knows her way.
She takes a turn, expecting to find one house, but instead finds two, divided by a low stone wall. She goes left, but instead of an open field, she finds a stable, surrounded by a fence. At last, she recognizes the road home, holds her breath as she makes her way down the path, feels something inside her loosen at the sight of the old yew tree, still bent and knotted at the edge of the property.
But beyond the tree, the place is changed. New clothes laid over old bones.
Her father’s workshop has been cleared away, the footprint of the shed marked only by a shadow on the ground, the weedy grass long filled in, a slightly different shade. And though Addie braced herself for the stale stillness of abandoned places, she is met instead by motion, voices, laughter.
Someone else has moved into her family home, one of the new arrivals in the growing town. A family, with a mother who smiles more, and a father who doesn’t, and a pair of boys running in the yard, their hair the color of straw. The older one chases a dog who has absconded with a sock, and the younger one climbs the old yew tree, his bare feet finding the same knots and crooks as hers, back when she was a girl, the drawing pad tucked under her arm. She must have been his age … or was she older?
She closes her eyes, tries to catch hold of the image, but it slips and slides between her fingers. Those early memories, not trapped within the prism. Those years before, lost to that other life. Her eyes are only closed a moment, but when she opens them, the tree is empty. The boy is gone.
“Hello,” says a voice, somewhere behind her.
It is the younger one, his face open and upturned.
“Hello,” she says.
“Are you lost?”
She hesitates, torn between yes and no, unsure which is closer to the truth.
“I am a ghost,” she says. The boy’s eyes widen in surprise, delight, and he asks her to prove it. She tells him to close his eyes, and when he does, she slips away.
* * *
In the cemetery, the tree Addie transplanted has taken root.
It looms over Estele’s grave, bathing her bones in a pool of shade.
Addie runs her hand over the bark, marvels at how the sapling has grown into a wide-trunked tree, its roots and branches escaping to every side. A hundred years since it was planted—a span of time once too long to fathom, and now, too hard to