“Do it again,” she says.
And he brings the ballpoint to the blank page and writes her name, in tight but careful script.
Addie LaRue.
It doesn’t dissolve, it doesn’t fade, it sits there, alone in the center of the page. And Henry looks up at her, waiting for her to go on, to dictate what comes next, and she looks down past him, at the words.
Addie clears her throat.
“This is how it starts,” she says.
And he begins to write.
PART FIVE:
The Shadow Who Smiled And The Girl Who Smiled Back
Title: Ho Portado le Stelle a Letto
Artist: Matteo Renatti
Date: c. 1806–08
Medium: 20cm x 35cm pencil sketch on parchment
Location: On loan from the Gallerie dell’Accademia
Description: An illustration of a woman, the lines of her body imitated by the twisting bedsheets. Her face is little more than angles, framed by messy hair, but the artist has given her one very specific feature: seven small freckles in a band across her cheeks.
Background: This drawing, found in Renatti’s 1806–8 notebook, is thought by some to be the inspiration for his later masterpiece The Muse. While the model’s pose and the work’s medium are different, the number and placement of the freckles is conspicuous enough for many to speculate on the model’s enduring importance in Renatti’s work.
Estimated Value: $267,000
I
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France
July 29, 1764
Addie makes her way to the church.
It sits, near the center of Villon, squat and gray and unchanged, the field beside it bordered by a low stone wall.
It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.
Jean LaRue.
Her father’s grave is spare—a name, and dates, a Bible verse—Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. No mention of the man her father was, no mention of his craft, or even his kindness.
A life reduced to a block of stone, a patch of grass.
Along the way Addie had picked a handful of flowers, wild things that grow at the edge of the path, weedy blossoms, yellow and white. She kneels to set them on the ground, stops when she sees the dates below her father’s name.
1670–1714.
The year she left.
She searches her memory, tries to remember any signs of sickness. The cough that lingered in his chest, the shadow of weakness in his limbs. The memories from her second life are trapped in amber, perfectly preserved. But the ones from before, when she was Adeline LaRue—memories of kneading bread on a stool beside her mother, of watching her father carve faces into blocks of wood, of trailing Estele through the shallows of the Sarthe—those are fading. The twenty-three years she lived before the woods, before the deal, worn to little more than edges.
Later, Addie will be able to recall almost three hundred years in perfect detail, every moment of every day, preserved.
But she is already losing the sound of her father’s laugh.
She cannot remember the exact color of her mother’s eyes.
Cannot recall the set of Estele’s jaw.
For years, she will lie awake and tell herself stories of the girl she’d been, in hopes of holding fast to every fleeting fragment, but it will have the opposite effect—the memories like talismans, too often touched; like saint’s coins, the etching worn down to silver plate and faint impressions.
As for her father’s sickness, it must have stolen in between one season and the next, and for the first time, Addie is grateful for the cleansing nature of her curse, for having made the deal at all—not for her own sake, but for her mother’s. That Marthe LaRue had only to grieve one loss, instead of two.
Jean is buried among the other members of their family. An infant sister who only saw two years. A mother and father, both gone before Addie herself was ten. One row over, their own parents and unmarried siblings. The plot beside him, empty, and waiting for his wife.
There is no place for her, of course. But this string of graves, like a timeline, charting from the past into the future, this is what drove her to the woods that night, the fear of a life like this, leading to the same small patch of grass.
Staring down at her father’s grave, Addie feels the heavy sadness of finality, the weight of an object coming to rest. The grief has come and gone—she lost this man fifty years ago, she has already mourned, and though it hurts, the pain isn’t fresh. It has long dulled to an ache, the wound given way to scar.
She lays the flowers on her father’s grave, and rises, moving deeper between the plots, drawn back in time with every step, until she is no longer Addie, but Adeline; no longer a ghost but flesh and blood and mortal. Still bound to this place, roots aching like phantom limbs.
She studies the names on the gravestones, knows each and every one, but the difference is that once upon a time, the names knew her, too.
Here is Roger, buried beside his first and only wife, Pauline.
Here is Isabelle, and her youngest, Sara, taken in the same year.
And here, almost in the center of the yard, is the name that matters most. The one that held her hand so many times, showed her there was more to life.
Estele Magritte, reads her tombstone. 1642–1719.
The dates are carved over a simple cross, and Addie can almost hear the old woman hissing through her teeth.
Estele, buried in the shadow of a house she did not worship.
Estele, who would say that a soul is just the seed returned to soil, who wanted nothing but a tree over her bones. She should have been laid to rest at the edge of the woods, or amid the vegetables in her garden. She should have at least been buried in a corner plot, where the branches of an old yew reach over the low wall to shade the graves.
Addie crosses to the small shed at the edge of the churchyard, and finds a trowel amid the tools, and sets off for the woods.
It is the height of summer, but the air is cool beneath the cover of the trees. Midday, but still the smell of night lingers on the leaves. The scent of this place, so universal, and specific. With every breath the taste of soil on her tongue, the memory of desperation, a girl, sinking her hands into the dirt as she prayed.
Now, she sinks the trowel instead, coaxes a sapling from the soil. It is a fragile thing, likely to fall over with the next strong storm, but she carries it back to the churchyard, cradled like an infant in her hands, and if anyone finds it strange, they will forget about the sight long before they think to tell anyone. And if they notice the tree growing over the old woman’s grave, perhaps they will stop and think of older gods again.
And as Addie leaves the church behind, the bells begin to chime, calling the villagers to Mass.
She walks down the road as they pour from their homes, children clinging to their mother’s hands, and men and women side by side. Some faces new to her, and others, she knows.
There is George Therault, and Roger’s oldest daughter, and Isabelle’s two sons, and the next time Addie comes, they will all be dead, the last of her old life—her first life—buried in the same ten-meter plot.