بخش 3 فصل 8

VIII

“I take it back,” she says. “If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would be these fries.” Henry laughs and steals a few from the cone in her hand as they wait in line for gyros. The food trucks form a colorful stripe along Flatbush, crowds of people queuing for lobster rolls and grilled cheese, banh mi and kebabs. There’s even a line for ice-cream sandwiches, even though the warmth has dropped out of the March air, promising a crisp, cold night. Addie’s glad she picked up a hat and scarf, traded her ballet flats for calf-high boots, even as she leans into the warmth of Henry’s arms, until there’s a break in the falafel queue, and he ducks away to get in line.

Addie watches him step up to the counter window and order, watches the middle-aged woman working the truck as she leans forward, elbows on the sill, watches them talk, Henry nodding solemnly. The line is growing behind him, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice. She’s not smiling exactly; if anything, she looks on the verge of tears as she reaches out and takes his hand, squeezes it.

“Next!”

Addie blinks, gets to the front of her own line, spends the last of her stolen cash on a lamb gyro and a blueberry soda, finds herself wishing for the first time in a while that she had a credit card, or more to her name than the clothes on her back and the change in her pocket. Wishes that things didn’t seem to slip through her fingers like sand, that she could have a thing without stealing it first.

“You’re looking at that sandwich like it broke your heart.”

Addie looks up at Henry, cracks a smile. “It looks so good,” she says. “I’m just thinking of how sad I’ll be when it’s gone.” He sighs in mock lament. “The worst part of every meal is when it ends.” They take their spoils and stake out a slope of grass just inside the park, a pool of quickly thinning light. Henry adds the falafel and an order of dumplings to her gyro and fries, and they share, trading bites like cards in a game of gin.

Henry reaches for the falafel, and Addie remembers the woman in the window.

“What was that?” she asks. “Back there at the truck, the woman working, she looked like she was about to cry. Do you know her?” Henry shakes his head. “She said I reminded her of her son.”

Addie stares at him. It isn’t a lie, she doesn’t think, but it’s not entirely the truth, either. There’s something he isn’t saying, but she doesn’t know how to ask. She spears a dumpling and pops it in her mouth.

Food is one of the best things about being alive.

Not just food. Good food. There is a chasm between sustenance and satisfaction, and while she spent the better part of three hundred years eating to stave off the pangs of hunger, she has spent the last fifty delighting in the discovery of flavor. So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.

She wipes the grease from her fingers and lies back in the grass beside Henry, feeling wonderfully full. She knows it will not last. That fullness is like everything else in her life. It always wears away too soon. But here, and now, she feels … perfect.

She closes her eyes, and smiles, and thinks she could stay here all night, despite the growing cold, let the dusk give way to dark, burrow against Henry and hope for stars.

A bright chime sounds in his coat pocket.

Henry answers. “Hey, Bea,” he starts, and then abruptly sits up. Addie can only hear half the call, but she can guess at the rest.

“No, of course I didn’t forget. I know, I’m late, I’m sorry. I’m on my way. Yeah, I remember.” Henry hangs up, puts his head in his hands.

“Bea’s having a dinner party. And I was meant to bring dessert.”

He looks back at the food trucks, as if one of them might hold the answer, looks at the sky, which has gone from dusk to dim, runs his hands through his hair, lets out a soft and muttered stream of cursing. But there’s no time to wallow now, not when he is late.

“Come on,” says Addie, pulling him to his feet. “I know a place.”

The best French bakery in Brooklyn has no sign.

Marked by only a butter yellow awning, a narrow glass window between two broad brick storefronts, it belongs to a man named Michel. Every morning before dawn, he arrives, and begins the slow assembly of his art. Apple tarts, the fruit sliced thin as paper, and operas, the tops dusted with cocoa, and petit fours coated in marzipan and small, piped roses.

The shop is closed now, but she can see the shadow of its owner as he moves through the kitchen at its back, and Addie raps her knuckles on the glass door, and waits.

“Are you sure about this?” asks Henry as the shape shuffles forward, cracks the door.

“We are closed,” he says, in a heavy accent, and Addie slips from English into French as she explains she is a friend of Delphine’s, and the man softens at the mention of his daughter’s name, softens more at the sound of his native tongue, and she understands. She can speak German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, but French is different, French is bread baking in her mother’s oven, French is her father’s hands carving wood, French is Estele murmuring to her garden.

French is coming home.

“For Delphine,” he answers, opening the door, “anything.”

Inside the small shop, New York falls away, and it is pure Paris, the taste of sugar and butter still on the air. The cases are mostly empty now, only a handful of the beautiful creations lingering on the shelves, bright and sparse as wildflowers in a barren field.

She does know Delphine, though the young woman does not, of course, know her. She knows Michel as well, visits this shop the way someone else might visit a photograph, linger on a memory.

Henry hovers a few steps behind as Addie and Michel make small talk, each contented by the brief respite of the other’s language, and the patissier places each of the remaining pastries in a pink box, and hands them to her. And when she offers to pay, wondering if she can afford the cost, Michel shakes his head, and thanks her for the taste of home, and she wishes him good night, and back on the curb, Henry stares at her as if she’s performed a magic act, some strange and wondrous feat.

He pulls her into the circle of his arms.

“You are amazing,” he says, and she blushes, having never had an audience.

“Here,” she says, pressing the pastry box into his hands. “Enjoy the party.” Henry’s smile falls. His forehead rucks up like a carpet. “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.

They walk, arm in arm, as the evening goes from cool to cold.

“Is there anything I should know?” she says. “About your friends?”

Henry frowns, thinking. “Well, Robbie’s a performer. He’s really good, but he can be a little … difficult?” He exhales a hard breath. “We were together, back in college. He was the first guy I ever fell for.” “But it didn’t work out?”

Henry laughs, but the breath is shallow. “No. He dumped me. But look, it was ages ago. We’re friends now, nothing more.” He shakes his head, as if clearing it. “Then there’s Bea, you met her. She’s great. She’s getting her PhD, and she lives with a guy named Josh.” “Are they dating?”

Henry snorts. “No. Bea’s gay. And so is he … I think. I don’t actually know, it’s been the topic of speculation. But Bea will probably invite Mel, or Elise, whichever she’s dating now—it’s kind of a pendulum swing. Oh, and don’t ask about the Professor.” Addie looks at him, wondering, and he explains. “Bea had a thing, a few years ago, with a Columbia professor. Bea was in love, but she was married, and it all fell apart.” Addie repeats the names to herself, and Henry smiles.

“It’s not a test,” he says. “You can’t fail.”

Addie wishes he were right.

Henry winds a little tighter at her side. He hesitates, exhales. “There’s something else you should know,” he says at last, “about me.” Her heart stutters in her chest as she braces for a confession, a reluctant truth, some explanation for this, for them. But Henry only looks up at the starless night and says, “There was a girl.” A girl. It does not answer anything.

“Her name was Tabitha,” he says, and she can feel the pain in every syllable. She thinks of the ring in his drawer, the bloody kerchief knotted around it.

“What happened?”

“I proposed, and she said no.”

It is true, she thinks, some version of it. But Addie is beginning to realize how good Henry is at skirting lies while leaving truths half-told.

“We all have battle scars,” she says. “People in our past.”

“You too?” he asks, and for a moment, she is in New Orleans, the room in disarray, those green eyes black with rage as the building begins to burn.

“Yeah,” she says softly. And then, gently probing, “And we all have secrets, too.” He looks at her, and she can see it swimming in his eyes, the thing he will not say, but he is not Luc, and the green gives nothing away.

Tell me, she thinks. Whatever it is.

But he doesn’t.

They reach Bea’s building in silence, and she buzzes them in, and as they climb the stairs she turns her thoughts to the party, and thinks, perhaps, it will be okay.

Perhaps, they will remember her, at the end of this evening.

Perhaps, if he is with her—

Perhaps—

But then the door opens, and Bea stands there, oven mitts on hips, voices spilling through the apartment behind her as she says, “Henry Strauss, you are so late, that better be dessert.” And Henry holds out the pastry box as if it were a shield, but as Bea plucks the box from his hands, she looks past him. “And who’s this?” “This is Addie,” he says. “You met in the shop.”

Bea rolls her eyes. “Henry, you really don’t have enough friends to be getting us mixed up. Besides,” she says, flashing Addie a crooked smile, “I wouldn’t forget a face like yours. There’s something … timeless about it.” Henry’s frown deepens. “You have met, and that’s exactly what you said.” He looks to Addie. “You remember this, don’t you?” She hesitates, caught between the impossible truth and the easier lie, begins to shake her head. “I’m sorry, I—” But Addie’s saved by the arrival of a girl in a yellow sundress, a bold defiance of the chill beyond the windows, and Henry whispers in her ear that this is Elise. The girl kisses Bea and plucks the box from her hands, and says she cannot find the wine opener, and Josh appears to take their coats, and usher them through.

The apartment is a converted loft, one of those open floor plans where the hall runs into the living room and the living room runs into the kitchen, and it is all mercifully free of walls and doors.

The buzzer rings again, and moments later a boy arrives like a comet crashing through the atmosphere, a bottle of wine in one hand and a scarf in the other. And even though Addie has only seen him in photos on Henry’s wall, she knows instantly that this is Robbie.

He sweeps through the front hallway, kissing Bea on the cheek, waves at Josh and hugs Elise, and turns toward Henry, only to notice her.

“Who are you?” he says.

“Don’t be rude,” answers Henry. “This is Addie.”

“Henry’s date,” adds Bea, and Addie wishes she hadn’t, because the words are like cold water over Robbie’s mood. Henry must see it too, because he takes her hand and says, “Addie’s a talent scout.” “Oh?” asks Robbie, rekindling a little. “What kind?”

“Art. Music. All sorts.”

He frowns. “Don’t scouts usually specialize in something?”

Bea elbows him. “Be nice,” she says, reaching for the wine.

“Didn’t know I was supposed to bring a date,” he says, following her into the kitchen.

She pats his shoulder. “You can borrow Josh.”

The dining table sits between the sofa and the kitchen counter, and Bea sets an extra place as Henry opens the first two bottles of wine, and Robbie pours, and Josh carries a salad to the table and Elise checks the lasagna in the oven and Addie stays out of the way.

She is used to having all of the attention, or none of it. To being the brief but sunlit center of a stranger’s world, or a shadow at its edges. This is different. This is new.

“Hope you’re all hungry,” says Bea, setting lasagna and garlic bread in the center of the table.

Henry grimaces a little at the sight of the pasta, and Addie almost laughs, remembering their food truck feast. She is always hungry, the last meal nothing but a memory now, and she gratefully accepts a plate.