The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Page 2

  She kicks off her boots, and shrugs out of her jacket, tossing it onto the seat. Change rattles in the pocket as it lands, and something tumbles out. It hits the floor with a dull clack and rolls across the narrow changing room, stopping only when it meets the baseboard.

  It is a ring.

  A small circle carved of ash-gray wood. A familiar band, once loved, now loathsome.

  Addie stares at the thing a moment. Her fingers twitch, traitorous, but she doesn’t reach for the ring, doesn’t pick it up, just turns her back on the small wooden circle and continues undressing. She pulls on the sweater, shimmies into the leggings, zips up the boots. The mannequin was thinner, taller, but Addie likes the way the outfit hangs on her, the warmth of the cashmere, the weight of the leggings, the soft embrace of the lining in the boots.

  She plucks the price tags off one by one, ignoring the zeroes.

  Joyeux anniversaire, she thinks, meeting her reflection. Inclining her head, as if she too hears some private song. The picture of a modern Manhattan woman, even if the face in the mirror is the same one she’s had for centuries.

  Addie leaves her old clothes strewn like a shadow across the dressing room floor. The ring, a scorned child in the corner. The only thing she reclaims is the discarded jacket.

  It’s soft, made of black leather and worn practically to silk, the kind of thing people pay a fortune for these days and call it vintage. 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.

  Addie steps out of the little curtained booth.

  Across the boutique, the clerk startles, flustered at the sight of her. “Everything fit?” she asks, too polite to admit she doesn’t remember letting someone into the back. God bless customer service.

  Addie shakes her head ruefully. “Some days you’re stuck with what you’ve got,” she says, heading for the door.

  By the time the clerk finds the clothes, a ghost of a girl on the changing room floor, she won’t remember whose they are, and Addie will be gone, from sight and mind and memory.

  She tosses the jacket over her shoulder, one finger hooked in the collar, and steps out into the sun.

  Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

  Summer 1698

  III

  Adeline sits on a bench beside her father.

  Her father, who is, to her, a mystery, a solemn giant most at home inside his workshop.

  Beneath their feet, a pile of woodwares make shapes like small bodies under a blanket, and the cart wheels rattle as Maxime, the sturdy mare, draws them down the lane, away from home.

  Away—away—a word that makes her small heart race.

  Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow, and has begged for months to go with him to market. Begged until her mother swore she would go mad, until her father finally said yes. He is a woodworker, her father, and three times a year, he makes the trip along the Sarthe, up to the city of Le Mans.

  And today, she is with him.

  Today, for the first time, Adeline is leaving Villon.

  She looks back at her mother, arms crossed beside the old yew tree at the end of the lane, and then they round the bend, and her mother is gone. The village rolls past, here the houses and there the fields, here the church and there the trees, here Monsieur Berger turning soil and there Madame Therault hanging clothes, her daughter Isabelle sitting in the grass nearby, twining flowers into crowns, her tongue between her teeth in concentration.

  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.

  Now she looks up at Adeline, and waves as the cart goes by. They reach the edge of the village, the farthest she has ever gone before, and the cart hits a divot in the road, and shakes as if it too has crossed a threshold. Adeline holds her breath, expecting to feel some rope draw tight inside her, binding her to the town.

  But there is no tether, no lurch. The cart keeps moving, and Adeline feels a little wild and a little scared as she turns back to look at the shrinking picture of Villon, which was, until now, the sum of her world, and is now only a part, made smaller with the mare’s every step, until the town seems like one of her father’s figurines, small enough to nest within one calloused palm.

  It is a day’s ride to Le Mans, the trek made easy with her mother’s basket and her father’s company—one’s bread and cheese to fill her belly, and the other’s easy laugh, and broad shoulders making shade for Adeline beneath the summer sun.

  At home he is a quiet man, committed to his work, but on the road he begins to open, to unfold, to speak.

  And when he speaks, it is to tell her stories.

  Those stories he gathered, the way one gathers wood.

  “Il était une fois,” he will say, before sliding into stories of palaces and kings, of gold and glamour, of masquerade balls and cities full of splendor. Once upon a time. This is how the story starts.

  She will not remember the stories themselves, but she will recall the way he tells them; the words feel smooth as river stones, and she wonders if he tells these stories when he is alone, if he carries on, talking to Maxime in this easy, gentle way. Wonders if he tells stories to the wood as he is working it. Or if they are just for her.

  Adeline wishes she could write them down.

  Later, her father will teach her letters. Her mother will have a fit when she finds out, and accuse him of giving her another way to idle, waste the hours of the day, but Adeline will steal away into his workshop nonetheless, and he will let her sit and practice writing her own name in the fine dust that always seems to coat the workshop floor.

  But today, she can only listen.

  The countryside rolls past around them, a jostling portrait of a world she already knows. The fields are fields, just like her own, the trees arranged in roughly the same order, and when they do come upon a village, it is a watery reflection of Villon, and Adeline begins to wonder if the world outside is as boring as her own.

  And then, the walls of Le Mans come into sight.

  Stone ridges rising in the distance, a many-patterned spine along the hills. It is a hundred times the size of Villon—or at least, it is that grand in memory—and Adeline holds her breath as they pass through the gates and into the protected city.

  Beyond, a maze of crowded streets. Her father guides the cart between houses squeezed tight as stones, until the narrow road opens onto a square.

  There is a square back in Villon, of course, but it is little bigger than their yard. This is a giant’s space, the ground lost beneath so many feet, and carts, and stalls. And as her father guides Maxime to a stop, Adeline stands on the bench and marvels at the marketplace, the heady smell of bread and sugar on the air, and people, people, everywhere she looks. She has never seen so many of them, let alone ones she does not know. They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words. It feels as if the doors of her world have been thrown wide, so many rooms added to a house she thought she knew.

  Her father leans against the cart, and talks to anyone who passes by, and all the while his hands move over a block of wood, a small knife nested in one palm. He shaves at the surface with all the steady ease of someone peeling an apple, ribbons falling between his fingers. Adeline has always loved to watch him work, to see the figures take shape, as if they were there all along, but hidden, like pits in the center of a peach.

  Her father’s work is beautiful, the wood smooth where his hands are rough, delicate where he is large.

  And mixed among the bowls and cups, tucked between the tools of
his trade, are toys for sale, and wooden figures as small as rolls of bread—a horse, a boy, a house, a bird.

  Adeline grew up surrounded by such trinkets, but her favorite is neither animal nor man.

  It is a ring.

  She wears it on a leather cord around her neck, a delicate band, the wood ash gray, and smooth as polished stone. He carved it when she was born, made for the girl she’d one day be, and Adeline wears it like a talisman, an amulet, a key. Her hand goes to it now and then, thumb running over the surface the way her mother’s runs over a rosary.

  She clings to it now, an anchor in the storm, as she perches on the back of the cart, and watches everything. From this angle she is almost tall enough to see the buildings beyond. She stretches up onto her toes, wondering how far they go, until a nearby horse jostles their cart as it goes past, and she nearly falls. Her father’s hand closes around her arm, pulling her back into the safety of his reach.

  By the end of the day, the wooden wares are gone, and Adeline’s father gives her a copper sol and says she may buy anything she likes. She goes from stall to stall, eying the pastries and the cakes, the hats and the dresses and the dolls, but in the end, she settles on a journal, parchment bound with waxy thread. It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.

  She could not afford the pencils to go with it, but her father uses a second coin to buy a bundle of small black sticks, and explains that these are charcoal, shows her how to press the darkened chalk to the paper, smudge the line to turn hard edges into shadow. With a few quick strokes, he draws a bird in the corner of the page, and she spends the next hour copying the lines, far more interesting than the letters he’s written beneath.

  Her father packs up the cart as the day gives way to dusk.

  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.

  Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

  Fall 1703

  IV

  It is a Catholic place, Villon. Certainly the part that shows.

  There is a church in the center of town, a solemn stone thing where everyone goes to save their souls. Adeline’s mother and father kneel there twice a week, cross themselves and say their blessings and speak of God.

  Adeline is twelve now, so she does, too. But she prays the way her father turns loaves of bread upright, the way her mother licks her thumb to collect stray flakes of salt.

  As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.

  The church in town isn’t new, and neither is God, but Adeline has come to think of Him that way, thanks to Estele, who says the greatest danger in change is letting the new replace the old.

  Estele, who belongs to everyone, and no one, and herself.

  Estele, who grew like a tree at the heart of the village by the river, and has certainly never been young, who sprang up from the ground itself with gnarled hands and woody skin and roots deep enough to tap into her own hidden well.

  Estele, who believes that the new God is a filigreed thing. She thinks that He belongs to cities and kings, and that He sits over Paris on a golden pillow, and has no time for peasants, no place among the wood and stone and river water.

  Adeline’s father thinks Estele is mad.

  Her mother says that the woman is bound for Hell, and once, when Adeline repeated as much, Estele laughed her dry-leaf laugh and said there was no such place, only the cool dark soil and the promise of sleep.

  “And what of Heaven?” asked Adeline.

  “Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”

  At twelve, Adeline wonders which god she should pray to now, to make her father change his mind. He has loaded up his cart with wares bound for Le Mans, has harnessed Maxime, but for the first time in six years, she is not going with him.

  He has promised to bring her a fresh pad of parchment, new tools with which to sketch. But they both know she would rather go and have no gifts, would rather see the world outside than have another pad to draw on. She is running out of subjects, has memorized the tired lines of the village, and all the familiar faces in it.

  But this year, her mother has decided that it isn’t right for her to go to market, it isn’t fitting, even though Adeline knows she can still fit on that wooden bench beside her father.

  Her mother wishes she was more like Isabelle Therault, sweet and kind and utterly incurious, content to keep her eyes down upon her knitting instead of looking up at clouds, instead of wondering what’s around the bend, over the hills.

  But Adeline does not know how to be like Isabelle.

  She does not want to be like Isabelle.

  She wants only to go to Le Mans, and once there, to watch the people and see the art all around, and taste the food, and discover things she hasn’t heard of yet.

  “Please,” she says, as her father climbs up into the cart. She should have stowed away among the woodworks, hidden safe beneath the tarp. But now it is too late, and when Adeline reaches for the wheel, her mother catches her by the wrist and pulls her back.

  “Enough,” she says.

  Her father looks at them, and then away. The cart sets out, and when Adeline tries to tear free and run after the cart, her mother’s hand flashes out again, this time finding her cheek.

  Tears spring to her eyes, a vivid blush before the rising bruise, and her mother’s voice when it lands is a second blow.

  “You are not a child anymore.”

  And Adeline understands—and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up. She is so angry then that she wants to run away. Wants to fling her mother’s needlework into the hearth and break every half-made sculpture in her father’s shop.

  Instead, she watches the cart round the bend, and vanish between trees, with one hand clenched around her father’s ring. Adeline waits for her mother to let her go, and send her on to do her chores.

  And then she goes to find Estele.

  Estele, who still worships the old gods.

  Adeline must have been five or six the first time she saw the woman drop her stone cup into the river. It was a pretty thing, with a pattern pressed like lace into its sides, and the old woman just let it fall, admiring the splash. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving, and when Adeline ambushed the old woman—she was already old, has always been old—on the path home, Estele said she was praying to the gods.

  “What for?”

  “Marie’s child isn’t coming as it should,” she said. “I asked the river gods to make things flow smooth. They are good at that.”

  “But why did you give them your cup?”

  “Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”

  Addie. A pet name, one her mother scorned as boyish. A name her father favored, but only when they were alone. A name that rang like a bell in her bones. A name that suited her far more than Adeline.

  Now, she finds Estele in her garden, folded in among the wild vines of squash, the thorny spine of a blackberry bush, bent low as a warping branch.

  “Addie.” The old woman says her name without looking up.

  It is autumn, and the ground is littered with the stones of fruit that didn’t ripen as it should. Addie nudges them with the toe of her shoe. “How do you talk to them?” she asks. “The old gods. Do you call them by name?”

  Estele straightens, joints cracking like dry sticks. If she’s surprised by the question, it doesn’t show. “They have no names.”

  “Is there a spell?”

  Estele gives her a poin
ted look. “Spells are for witches, and witches are too often burned.”

  “Then how do you pray?”

  “With gifts, and praise, and even then, the old gods are fickle. They are not bound to answer.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “You carry on.”

  She chews on the inside of her cheek. “How many gods are there, Estele?”

  “As many gods as you have questions,” answers the old woman, but there is no scorn in her voice, and Addie knows to wait her out, to hold her breath until she sees the telltale sign of Estele’s softening. It is like waiting at a neighbor’s door after you’ve knocked, when you know they are home. She can hear the steps, the low rasp of the lock, and knows that it will give.

  Estele sighs open.

  “The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.”

  Adeline’s eyes narrow. “Will you teach me? How to call on them?”

  The old woman sighs, knowing that Adeline LaRue is not only clever, but also stubborn. She begins wading through the garden to the house, and the girl follows, afraid that if Estele reaches her front door before she answers, she might close it on this conversation. But Estele looks back, eyes keen in her wrinkled face.

  “There are rules.”

  Adeline hates rules, but she knows that sometimes they are necessary.

  “Like what?”

  “You must humble yourself before them. You must offer them a gift. Something precious to you. And you must be careful what you ask for.”

  Adeline considers. “Is that all?”

  Estele’s face darkens. “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.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”