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The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. Estele Magritte 1642–1719
small white flowers tumble from her hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in her wake, almost like the one across her cheeks.
Seven freckles. One for every love she’d have, that’s what Estele had said, when the girl was still young. One for every life she’d lead. One for every god watching over her.
Miret attributed the idea to a figurine found on the streets of Paris in the winter of 1715. The wooden bird, found with a broken wing, is reputedly re-created as the fifth in the sequence (albeit intact), about to take flight.
Last night, she told him hers was Jess. She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass.
Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.
But here and there, another hand—the flowers he’s started keeping on the kitchen sill, though he can’t remember when the habit started. The book on Rilke he doesn’t remember buying. The things that last, even when memories don’t.
The cat, also named Toby (“So I can talk to myself without it being weird…” he explained)
“Morning,” she says, her voice cheerful, and her accent, once country French, now so faint that she hardly hears it.
“You’re really good,” and she is—it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time.
This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can’t leave her own mark, but if she’s careful, she can give the mark to someone else.
She looks back, and says, “Don’t forget me in the meantime.” An old habit. A superstition. A plea. Toby shakes his head. “How could I?” She smiles, as if it’s just a joke.
Estele used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.
That date a death, and a rebirth, rolled into one.
It is the only thing Addie refused to leave behind and feed to the flames in New Orleans, though the smell of him clung to it like smoke, his stain forever on everything. She does not care. She loves the jacket.
It was new then, but it is broken in now, shows its wear in all the ways she can’t. It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.
When Adeline told the girl about her trip, Isabelle had only shrugged, and said, “I like it here.” As if you couldn’t like one place and want to see another.
Adeline will sleep in a foreign bed, and wake to foreign sounds and smells, and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.
“And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
Adeline still prays to the new God, when she must, but when her parents are not looking she prays to the old ones, too.
“A dreamer,” scorns her mother. “A dreamer,” mourns her father. “A dreamer,” warns Estele. Still, it does not seem such a bad word.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.
His thumb brushes the freckle beneath her eye, the edge of her stars.
You ask for too much. How many years until you’re sated? How many, until I get my due? No, I make deals with endings, and yours has none.” She will come back to this moment a thousand times. In frustration, and regret, in sorrow, and self-pity, and unbridled rage. She will come to face the fact that she cursed herself before he ever did.
The shadow tips his head, suddenly intrigued. A smile—just like the smile in her drawings, askance, and full of secrets—crosses his mouth. And then he pulls her to him. A lover’s embrace. He is smoke and skin, air and bone, and when his mouth presses against hers, the first thing she tastes is the turning of the seasons, the moment when dusk gives way to night. And then his kiss deepens. His teeth skim her bottom lip, and there is pain in the pleasure, followed by the copper taste of blood on her tongue.
Being trapped, buried alive, these are the things that scare you when you cannot die.
Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.
Only twenty-six, but when he talked, he had the easy cadence, the slow precision, of a man who knew the weight of his own voice, belonged to the class of young men who dressed like their fathers, the charade of those too eager to grow old.
It is so much easier to share a secret than to keep one,
(There were photos, but her face was always conveniently in motion or obscured, and she remained a mystery girl in the tabloids for the next week,
Addie said that she’d been fascinated by the war, that she knew a few stories, told them as if they were someone else’s, a stranger’s experience instead of her own.
She has the sense that they would have been friends. If he’d remembered.
she swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel.
her name is still a shape she cannot say, and when she speaks of her life in the village, of the shadow in the woods, of the deal she made, the words make it across her lips, but stop before they reach the other girl’s ears. Isabelle’s face goes blank, her gaze flat, and when Adeline finally trails off, she gives her head a quick shake, as if throwing off a daydream.
“Get away from her.” It is Isabelle, her voice high and tight with panic. “Who let you in?” All the Christian kindness, erased in an instant by a mother’s fear.
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu.
A collection of palm-sized birds, their wings spread, or folded, or stretched mid-flight.
Saying good-bye, perhaps, to her father—her favorite person in this world.
She could not break the figurine. But she could take it.
her mind is now a flawless cage, her memory a perfect trap. She will never forget, though she’ll wish she could.
My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself. My father taught me how to be a dreamer, and my mother taught me how to be a wife, and Estele taught me how to speak to gods.
It is the kinder road, to lose yourself. Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.
Palimpsest. She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans.
The darkness has granted her freedom from death, perhaps, but not from this. Not from suffering.
Buildings go up and come down, businesses open and close, people arrive and depart and the deck shuffles itself again and again and again.
Seven small white dots stand out against the backdrop.
But they have a deal: she doesn’t mention Tabitha, and Henry doesn’t mention the Professor.
A fall woman indulging in a second spring.
