Виктория Шваб - The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

She begins to pull away, but his grip tightens. “No.”

She sighs, fingers threading through his hair. “You’ve given me so much, Henry. But I need you to do one more thing.” Her forehead presses against his. “I need you to remember.”

And he can feel his hold slipping as darkness washes across his vision, blotting out the skyline and the roof and the girl folding herself against him.

“Promise me,” she says, and her face is beginning to smudge, the swipe of her lips, brown curls in a heart-shaped face, two wide eyes, seven freckles like stars.

“Promise,” she whispers, and he is just lifting his hands, to hold her against him, to promise, but by the time his arms close around her, she is gone.

And he is falling.

Title of Piece: The Girl Who Got Away

Artist:Unknown

Date:2014

Medium:Polaroid

Location:On loan from the personal archives of Henry Strauss

Description:Collection of six (6) photographs depicting a girl in motion, her features erased, obscured, or otherwise unreadable. The final photo is different. It features a living room floor, the edge of a table, a pile of books, only a pair of feet visible at the bottom.

Background:The subject of the photos remains a topic of intense speculation, given the author’s relationship to the source material. The flash has erased all meaningful details, but the medium is what makes the pieces remarkable. In standard photography, long exposure would make it possible to achieve the desired effect of motion, but the Polaroid’s fixed shutter speed makes the illusion of movement all the more impressive.

Estimated Value:Not for sale

All works currently on display at the Modern Museum of Art exhibit In Search of the Real Addie LaRue curated by Beatrice Caldwell, PhD, Columbia.

New York City

September 5, 2014

This is how it ends.

A boy wakes up alone in bed.

Sunlight spills through the gap in the curtains, the buildings beyond slick with the aftermath of rain.

He feels sluggish, hungover, still caught within the dregs of sleep. He knows he was dreaming, but he can’t for the life of him remember the details of the dream, and it must not have been very pleasant, because he feels only a deep relief at waking.

Book looks over the mound of the comforter, orange eyes wide and waiting.

It’s late, the boy can tell by the angle of the light, the sounds of traffic on the street.

He didn’t mean to sleep so long.

The girl he loves is always the first to wake. Shuffling beneath the sheets, the weight of her attention, the soft touch of her fingers on his skin—they are always enough to rouse him out of sleep. Only once did he wake first, and then he had the strange pleasure of seeing her, knees curled up and face tucked against the pillows, still beneath the surface of sleep.

But that was a rainy morning just after dawn, when the world was gray, and today the sun is so bright he doesn’t know how either of them slept through it.

He rolls over to wake her.

But the other side of the bed is empty.

He splays his hand over the place where she should be, but the sheets are cold and smooth.

“Addie?” he calls, rising to his feet.

He moves through the apartment, checks the kitchen, the bathroom, the fire escape, even though he knows, he knows, he knows, that she is not there.

“Addie?”

And then, of course, he remembers.

Not the dream, there was no dream, only the night before.

The last night of his life.

The damp concrete smell of the rooftop, the last tick of the watch as its hand found twelve, her smile as she looked up into his face, and made him promise to remember.

And now he’s here, and she’s gone, and there’s no trace of her left behind except the stuff in his head and—

The journals.

He’s up, crossing the room to the narrow set of shelves where he kept them: red, blue, silver, black, white, green; six notebooks, all of them still there. He pulls them from the shelf, spreads them on the bed, and as he does, the Polaroids tumble out.

The one he took that day of Addie, her face a blur, her back to the camera, a ghost at the edges of the frame, and he stares at them a long time, convinced that if he squints, she will come into focus. But no matter how long he looks, all he can see are the shapes, the shadows. The only thing he can make out are the seven freckles, and those are so faint he can’t tell if they’re really visible, or his memory is simply filling them in where they should be.

He sets the photograph aside and reaches for the first journal, then stops, so convinced that if and when he opens it, he will find the pages blank, the ink erased like every other mark she tried to make.

But he has to look, and so he does, and there they are, page after page written in his slanting script, shielded from the curse by the fact the words themselves are his, though the story is hers.

She wants to be a tree.

There is nothing wrong with Roger.

She simply wants to live before she dies.

It will take her years to learn the language of those eyes.

She claws her way up, and out, hands splayed across the bony mound of a dead man’s back.

This is her first. How it should have been.

She feels him press three coins into her hand.

Soul is such a grand word. The truth is so much smaller.

It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.

He picks up the next journal.

Paris is burning.

The darkness comes undone.

And the next.

There is an angel above the bar.

Henry sits there for hours against the side of the bed, turning through every page of every book, every story she ever told, and when he’s done, he closes his eyes, and puts his head in his hands amid the open books.

Because the girl he loved is gone.

And he’s still here.

He remembers everything.

Brooklyn, New York

March 13, 2015

“Henry Samuel Strauss, this is bullshit .”

Bea slams the last page down on the coffee counter, startling the cat, who’d drifted off on a nearby tower of books. “You can’t end it there.” She’s clutching the rest of the manuscript to her chest, as if to shield it from him. The title page stares back at him.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue .

“What happened to her? Did she really go with Luc? After all that?”

Henry shrugs. “I assume so.”

“You assume so?”

The truth is, he doesn’t know.

He’s spent the last six months trying to transcribe the stories in the notebooks, to compile them into this draft. And every night, after his hands had cramped and his head had begun to ache from staring at the computer screen, he’d collapse into bed—it does not smell like her, not anymore—and wonder how it ends.

If it ends.

He wrote a dozen different endings for the book, ones where she was happy, and ones where she was not, ones where she and Luc were madly in love, and ones where he clung to her like a dragon with its treasure, but those endings all belonged to him, and not to her. Those are his story, and this is hers. And anything he wrote beyond those last shared seconds, that final kiss, would be fiction.