The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,25
the sunlight on the stream.
But the river only laughs, in its soft, slippery way, the burble of water over stone.
She wrestles with the laces of her wedding dress, peels the soiled thing away, plunges it down into the water. The current drags at the fabric, and her fingers long to let go, to let the river claim this last vestige of her life, but she has too little now to give up more.
Adeline plunges herself in, too, freeing the last flowers from her hair, rinsing the woods from her skin. She comes up feeling cold, and brittle, and new.
The sun is high, the day hot, and she lays the dress out in the grass to dry, sinks onto the slope beside it in her shift. They sit, side by side in silence, one a ghost of the other. And she realizes, looking down, that this is all she has.
A dress. A slip. A pair of stolen shoes.
Restless, she takes up a stick and begins to draw absent patterns in the silt along the bank. But every stroke she makes dissolves, the change too quick to be the river’s doing. She draws a line, watches it begin to wash away before she even finishes the mark. Tries to write her name, but her hand stills, pinned under the same rock that held her tongue. She carves a deeper line, gouges out the sand, but it makes no difference, soon that groove is gone, too, and an angry sob escapes her throat as she casts the stick away.
Tears prick her eyes as she hears the shuffle of small feet, blinks to find a round-faced boy standing over her. Isabelle’s four-year-old son. Addie used to swing him in her arms, spin until they both were dizzy and laughing.
“Hello,” says the boy.
“Hello,” she says, her voice a little shaky.
“Henri!” calls the boy’s mother, and in a moment Isabelle is there, on the rise, a basket of washing on her hip. She sees Adeline sitting in the grass, holds out a hand not for her friend, but for her son. “Come here,” she orders, those blue eyes lingering on Adeline.
“Who are you?” asks Isabelle, and she feels as if she’s at the edge of a steep hill, the ground plunging away beneath her feet. Her balance, tipping forward, as the dreaded descent begins again.
“Are you lost?”
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu.
Already seen. Already known. Already lived.
They have been here before, walked this road, or something like it, and so Adeline now knows where to put her feet, knows what to say, which words will draw out kindness, knows that if she asks in the right way, Isabelle will take her home, and wrap a blanket around her shoulders, and offer her a cup of broth, and it will work until it doesn’t.
“No,” she says. “I’m just passing through.”
It is the wrong thing to say, and Isabelle’s expression hardens.
“It is not fitting for a woman to travel alone. And certainly not in such a state.”
“I know,” she says. “I had more, but I was robbed.”
Isabelle blanches. “By who?”
“A stranger in the woods,” she says, and it is not a lie.
“Are you hurt?”
Yes, she thinks. Grievously. But she forces herself to shake her head and answer, “I will live.”
She has no choice.
The other woman sets the washing down.
“Wait here,” says Isabelle, the kind and generous Isabelle again. “I will come right back.”
She swings her young son up in her arms, and turns back toward her house, and the moment she is out of sight, Adeline gathers her dress, still damp at the hem, and pulls it on.
Isabelle will, of course, forget again.
She’ll get halfway to her house before she slows and wonders why she started back without her clothes. She’ll blame her tired mind, addled from three children, the infant’s distemper, and return to the river. And this time, there will be no woman sitting on the banks, no dress spread in the sun, only a stick, abandoned in the grass, a canvas of silt laid smooth.
* * *
Adeline has drawn her family house a hundred times.
Memorized the angle of the roof, the texture of the door, the shadow of her father’s workshop, and the limbs of the old yew tree that sits like a sentinel at the edge of the yard.
That is where she’s standing now, tucked behind the trunk, watching Maxime graze beside the barn, watching her mother hang linens out to dry, watching her father whittle down a block of wood.