The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

They will stay the night in a local inn, and for the first time in her life, 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 by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

He sat, and soon easy smiles gave way to easy conversation. Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.

“Are you lost?” Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu. Already seen. Already known. Already lived.

But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

“Come,” says the shadow, offering his arm. “I will walk you.” He does not say that he will walk her home. And if it were midday, she would scorn the offer just to spite him. (Of course, if it were midday, the darkness would not be there.) But it is late, and only one kind of woman walks alone at night. Addie has learned that women—at least, women of a certain class—never venture forth alone, even during the day. They are kept inside like potted plants, tucked behind the curtains of their homes. And when they do go out, they go in groups, safe within the cages of each other’s company, and always in the light of day.

“I see a boy with dark hair and kind eyes and an open face.” He frowns a little. “Is that all?” “Of course not,” she says. “But I don’t know you yet.” “Yet,” he echoes, and there’s something like a smile in his voice. She purses her lips, considers him again. For a moment, they are the only silent spot in the bustling café. Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.

“you strike me as someone not easily restrained. Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.” She does not know Latin yet, and he does not offer a translation, but a decade from now, she will look up the words, and learn their meaning. To find a way, or make your own.

“Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?” Remy’s expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, “I think there are many ways to matter.” He plucks the book from his pocket. “These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”

“Say it again,” she pleads. “Say what?” he murmurs. “My name.” Henry smiles. “Addie,” he whispers against her throat. “Addie.” The kisses trail over her collar. “Addie.” Her stomach. “Addie.” Her hips. His mouth finds the heat between her legs, and her fingers tangle in those black curls, her back arching up with pleasure. Time shudders, slides out of focus. He retraces his steps, kisses her again, and then she is on top of him, pressing him down into the bed. They do not fit together perfectly. He was not made for her the way Luc was—but this is better, because he is real, and kind, and human, and he remembers. When it is over, she collapses, breathless, into the sheets beside him, sweat and rain chilling on her skin. Henry folds around her, pulls her back into the circle of his warmth, and she can feel his heart slowing through his ribs, a metronome easing back into its measure. The room goes quiet, marked only by the steady rain beyond the windows, the drowsy aftermath of passion, and soon she can feel him drifting down toward sleep. Addie looks up at the ceiling. “Don’t forget,” she says softly, the words half prayer, half plea. Henry’s arms tighten, a body surfacing from sleep. “Forget what?” he murmurs, already sinking again. And Addie waits for his breath to steady before she whispers the word to the dark. “Me.”

Everyone needs to be seen and, eventually...wants to be remembered too.

“Why don’t you come with me?” And she doesn’t know how to say I can’t when there is no explaining why, when she was ready to spend all night with him. So she says, “I shouldn’t,” and he says, “Please,” and she knows it is such a terrible idea, that she cannot hold the secret of her curse aloft over so many heads, knows she cannot keep him to herself, that this is all a game of borrowed time. But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone. So she says yes.

This is how you live forever

Mischief glints in those green eyes. “I think you’ll find my word won’t fade as fast as yours.” He shrugs. “They will not remember you, of course. But ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.” It will be fifty years before she realizes that he is right. Ideas are wilder than memories. And she can plant them, too.

“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.

There are a hundred kinds of silence. There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying. There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves. There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.

She is wearing one of Henry’s sweatshirts, cotton branded with the Columbia logo. It smells like him. Like old books and fresh coffee.

Perhaps he meant to cast her into chaos. Perhaps he thought she was getting too comfortable, growing too stubborn. Perhaps he wanted her to call for him again. To beg him to come back. Perhaps perhaps perhaps—but she will never know.

Ideas are wilder than memories. He meant it as a barb, no doubt, but she should have seen it as a clue, a key. Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps—perhaps—they are in reach.

“Semantics may seem small, Adeline, but the power of a deal is in its wording.

Luc lifts his glass. “Happy anniversary, my Adeline.” She looks at him, lips parting with their usual retort, but then stops short. If she is his—then by now he must be hers as well. “Happy anniversary, my Luc,” she answers, just to see the face he’ll make. She is rewarded with a raised brow, the crooked upturn of his mouth, the green of his eyes shifting in surprise. Then Luc looks down, turns the glass of port between his fingers. “You told me once that we were alike,” he says, almost to himself. “Both of us . . . lonely. I loathed you for saying it. But I suppose in some ways you were right. I suppose,” he goes on slowly, “there is something to the idea of company.” It is the closest he has ever come to sounding human. “Do you miss me,” she asks, “when you are not here?” Those green eyes drift up, the emerald even in the dark. “I am here, with you, more often than you think.” “Of course,” she says, “you come and go whenever you want. I have no choice but to wait.”

“I hate war,” he says darkly. “I would have thought you fond of conflict.” “The aftermath breeds art,” he says. “But war makes believers out of cynics. Sycophants desperate for salvation, everyone suddenly clinging to their souls, clutching them close like a matron with her finest pearls.”

And she wonders what it was that drew her here the first time. Wonders if they are like magnets, she and Luc. If they have circled each other for so long that now they share an orbit.

EVERYWHERE, NOWHERE, 1952–1968 It is only sex. At least, it starts that way. He is a thing to be gotten out of her system. She is a novelty to be enjoyed. Addie half expects them to burn out in a single night, to waste whatever energy they’ve gathered in their years of spinning. But two months later, he comes to find her again, steps out of nothing and back into her life, and she thinks about how strange it is, to see him against the reds and golds of autumn, the changing leaves, a charcoal scarf looped loose around his throat. It is weeks until his next visit. And then, only days. So many years of solitary nights, hours of waiting, and hating, and hoping. Now he is there. Still, Addie makes herself small promises in the space between his visits. She will not linger in his arms. She will not fall asleep beside him. She will not feel anything but his lips on her skin, his hands tangled in hers, the weight of him against her. Small promises, but ones she does not keep. It is only sex. And then it is not. “Dine with me,” Luc says as winter gives way to spring. “Dance with me,” he says as a new year begins. “Be with me,” he says, at last, as one decade slips into the next. And one night Addie wakes in the dark to the soft pressure of his fingertips drawing patterns on her skin, and she is struck by the look in his eyes. No, not the look. The knowing. It is the first time that she has woken up in bed with someone who hasn’t already forgotten her. The first time she’s heard her ...

Well, fuck.

This is the last gift she can give him, these moments he will never have. And this is the last gift he can give her, the listening. And he wishes they could climb back into bed with Book, but they both know there’s no going back. And now that he’s up, he cannot bear the stillness. He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn’t enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be. That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one. And so they get dressed, and they go out, and walk, wearing circles into the block as the panic begins to win. It is a hand pressing against weakened glass, a steady pressure on spreading cracks, but Addie is there, her fingers laced through his. “Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”