The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,187
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.
She wants to be a tree.
There is nothing wrong with Roger.
She simply wants to live before she dies.
It will take her years to learn the language of those eyes.
She claws her way up, and out, hands splayed across the bony mound of a dead man’s back.
This is her first. How it should have been.
She feels him press three coins into her hand.
Soul is such a grand word. The truth is so much smaller.
It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.
He picks up the next journal.
Paris is burning.
The darkness comes undone.
And the next.
There is an angel above the bar.
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.
Brooklyn, New York
March 13, 2015
II
“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.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
“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.