The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone (Page 43)

I’d texted her before, that I was in the neighborhood, and could I swing by? She texted back yes. Half an hour’s warning. She opened the door, and boom—it was as if nothing had happened between us.

“What’s up, Reed?”

“What’s up, Ads?”

Her smile lit her up. Like always. She was incandescent in that smile. “I want to paint you,” she said.

“I want to hold you,” I said.

“I want to keep you,” she said next, with a laugh.

She looked fragile, but lovely anyway, in one of the vintage smocks she always painted in, long and flowing, spattered, paint speckled on the backs of her hands and all over her beautiful long fingers.

We spent the afternoon together. It was going to happen from the first minute. We weren’t broken up. We’d never really broken up, as I saw it. We’d only moved too fast, that was all. We’d moved too fast, and then we’d jumped too far back from the flame. Now we would love and wrestle and pin this relationship back into its right place. We knew we could do it.

I remember being in bed with her, kissing her, staring down at her face. She was an apparition, a night angel, black hair swirled out on the pillow, her eyes—so twinkling and electrifying. I felt like I’d be burnt up in her heat.

“Let’s start over,” she said. “But this time, you move in here. With me.”

“No.” And it was one of the hardest things I ever said.

She just kept looking at me. Crushed.

“I want to see you, of course,” I told her. “But I was hurt badly by you. I have to figure out a way to handle us. And I can’t be the guy that you’re with because you don’t want to be alone. That’s not the role I see for myself in our life.”

She then became incredibly upset, blaming herself.

“Nobody wants to stay with me,” she said. “I’m too broken. People see my scars, my meds, and they run. I’m improving all the time, but my failure calls me back.” She was crying, and then she couldn’t stop. She seemed almost too bewildered. As if her own crying jag had surprised her, a storm that had rushed in without warning. I couldn’t have explained it exactly, but I didn’t know how to handle it.

I didn’t have any words that seemed right, so I just stayed with her, and I held her all night, and at daybreak she said, “It’s Lulu’s graduation from South Kingstown today. We could take off. Let’s drive up to Rhode Island.” I didn’t want to leave her, and I hadn’t seen Lucy in a while, and I’d never been to Addison’s home with her, and suddenly this whole day seemed very interesting. So we jumped in my car, and we drove to up to Peacedale.

LUCY LIM: That morning, I woke up to see that my phone was just lit up in texts:

“We’re on Route One!”

“We just stopped at Cumberland Farms for coffee!”

“We’re so close we can smell your mom’s pancakes on the griddle!”

Oh my God, I squealed! I had the joy dizzies. I’d never in a million years expected Addy to come to South Kingstown High School graduation. And I never in two million years thought it would be the last time that I’d ever see her.

CHARLIE STONE: When my sister came back to our high school that day, I could feel the whole school was almost, like—possessed by it. She didn’t look like anyone else’s sister. She didn’t look like a regular person. She had on this huge black straw sunhat, a little white dress, and this crazy purple scarf that twisted around and around and around her neck and then trailed down along the ground past her ankles. She and Lincoln were as big as two celebrities that we’d ever had. You’d have known they were stars even if you didn’t know who they were. Everyone could feel the buzz right from the first second.

After commencement, they were standing around on the school’s back lawn. People were shuffling and edging to get near them. And people who didn’t even know who my sister was kept holding up their phones, snapping pictures of her. You gotta understand, South Kingstown’s a tiny country school where up till a few years ago, the cafeteria doubled as the auditorium. Addison was the shit, the biggest thing that had ever happened, and all my friends—and even people I didn’t know—were all like, “Introduce me, introduce me!”

Addison took it really well. After a while, she stuck on a big pair of sunglasses. There was just too much fanzone up in her face.

“Are you okay?” I kept asking.

And I could hear Lucy whispering, “My jeep’s right around the corner, Addy. We can scoot anytime.”

But Addison was cool. She was signing autographs. Kids were downloading her picture, tweeting her, pawing her, needing to have their moment. She gave it and then some. Maybe it was because Lincoln was standing beside her?

I’d grown up around Addison’s ghosts and shadows, and I kept half-waiting for her to bolt. But she was Public Addison that day. She was polished and shiny. And then I stopped being worried for her. I was just proud of how extremely together she was.

We all stopped by the house afterward, so she could check in with Mom and Dad. She didn’t stay long. She and Lincoln were leaving to spend the night in Newport. She wanted to go back to Green Hall. She invited me—she really wanted me to come, and if I’d known this was my last time … Look, I thought I’d be seeing Addison my whole life. I’d already made plans to hang out with friends. She was a little jittery to be home, too. So I told her I’d come see her in New York. She kissed me goodbye and gave me three hundred dollars. Three mint-condition hundies. I wish I could say I still had ’em, but the next day I went out and bought beer and new basketball sneakers.

ROY STONE: The one who pays the bills is the one who calls the shots. We got a text from Addison that she’d stop by the house for twenty minutes. She didn’t want to stay longer. Of course that didn’t prevent her mom from running off to the grocery store and spending the whole damn morning slaving over a four-cheese lasagna. We wanted a family lunch. Was that so much to ask? We wanted to share some time with this Lincoln Reed kid, who we mostly knew about from the Internet, and from his interview on Face the Nation.

“I’m so sorry, but I can’t stay,” she said. “I’ve got stuff.”

“Your mother will be so disappointed, Addison.”

“Just be grateful for the time that I’m giving. This dump brings back nightmares,” she said. Her voice went real hard when she said it, too.