Life Eternal (18 page)

“You might be right,” Noah said, his hand grazing mine as he passed the piece of paper back to me. “What do you think it leads to?”

I imagined following Miss LaBarge to a small house where she was in hiding. When she opened the door, my parents were behind her, their eyes watering as they ran to me and wrapped me in their arms. “What took you so long?” they asked. I thought of Dante, of meeting him out in the open, on the streets of Montreal. I imagined him pinning me against the wall of my dorm room and kissing me. I thought of us ten years from now, falling asleep next to each other, our chests rising and falling in unison. I thought of the way he would look when he was older; I could almost see it. I picked up a fig, twirling its stem in my finger. “Happiness.”

Noah studied me through his glasses, as if he could see a different side of me. Suddenly he said, “I like you.”

I was so taken aback that I didn’t know what to say. I loved Dante. He was my soul mate. “I’m sorry,” I said softly, “but I—”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, shaking himself out of the moment. “I just meant that I don’t know anyone else who would do this with me.”

I rested my cheek on my hand, not sure what he meant.

He leaned back on his palms. “Chase a woman around underground. Buy one of every item in a gourmet grocery store and eat everything straight out of the box, while sitting on the ground in a random courtyard. And then for dessert, show me a set of cryptic messages that might lead to the secret of the Nine Sisters.”

“I’ve barely eaten anything,” I said. “And you make it sound much more exciting than it is.”

Noah let out a laugh. “That’s definitely not true. I don’t know any girls who would break into a hospital through a private tunnel entry, sneak into a hospital room while someone is sleeping inside, and crawl under the bed to retrieve an engraving.”

I wanted to tell him that I had seen Clementine in the cemetery the other night, looking for the exact same thing I had been looking for, but for some reason I didn’t. Maybe it was because I liked the way Noah was looking at me, as if there were no one else in the world. It reminded me of what I could have with Dante.

“You know I don’t do this kind of thing every night,” I said. “Most of the time I’m in my room alone, wishing I had a different life.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m not doing this for fun.”

“What are you doing it for, then?”

Dante,
my heart cried. “A wild dream, I guess.”

I shivered. Noah took off his coat and draped it around my shoulders. “No, please,” I said. “I’m fine.” But he wouldn’t let me refuse. Touching its lapels, I pulled it around me. It was still warm from his body.

“You look good in that,” he said, gazing at me, his eyes like melting chocolate.

“Noah,” I said gently.

Before I could go on, Noah completed my sentence. “You have a boyfriend—I know, I know. But a friend can still give a compliment, no?”

“What about Clementine?”

The smile on Noah’s face faded.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I hadn’t mentioned her. “It’s private; I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No,” he said quickly. “It’s fine. It’s just hard to explain.”

Leaning forward, I hugged my knees. “I know the feeling.”

“When I first met her in class, I knew there was no one like her. She was this amazing sharp wit, and there was something about her that bit into me and wouldn’t let go. She would challenge me when I was wrong; she would always push me to be better, stronger, smarter. She’ll never settle for anything less than what she wants. I loved that about her.”

“Loved? Past tense?”

“I still love her,” he said. “But not in the same way. When we’re together she wants to do couples things. Watch movies, go out for expensive dinners. But she doesn’t want…
adventure.
She doesn’t want to have fun. That edge that she used to have, I only see glimmers of it now. We’ve been together for a year, and she only wants to work, to be the best.” He paused, picking at his spaghetti. “She always says that everything worth doing is hard.”

“She’s right,” I said, surprising myself.

“But should a relationship be hard?” Noah asked.

Around us, pigeons cooed from the tops of the buildings, but it just sounded like noise. The moonlight filtered through the water of the fountain, but no matter how long I stared at it, I couldn’t see its beauty. And the food that I’d thought I wanted now sat in front of me, untouched. Maybe things would be easier with another boy, but Dante was the only person who understood how delicate life was, how quickly it vanished. He didn’t care if I was the best Monitor in school, or if I was fun enough or wild enough; he just enjoyed my company. He knew how to make a single Latin word sound like poetry, how to make the past come alive and the present feel like it passed far too quickly. He made me
feel.
Without him, the world was nothing but a paper background.

I felt Noah waiting for me to respond, but I didn’t know how to tell him that I wasn’t looking for adventure; I was looking for a way for me and Dante to grow old together, so we could watch movies together, go out for expensive dinners. I yearned for the same things Clementine did; I just knew I could never have them.

I
DIDN’T REMEMBER GOING HOME THAT NIGHT;
I
JUST
remembered Noah. How he kept finding ways to brush his hand against mine. How our shadows angled together as we walked beneath the streetlamps. How if I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine that he was Dante.

Before I knew it, I was back in the darkness of my room, alone. I took off Noah’s blazer and draped it over the back of my chair. But in the dark it almost felt as though Noah was there, sitting with me. Even though I knew Dante couldn’t see me, I quickly tucked the coat into my closet, ashamed that I even had another boy’s blazer in my room. And pressing my back against the door, I shook Noah out of my head, picked up my towel, and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

But when I turned the knob, the door was locked.

“Occupied,” Clementine called out. Through the door, I heard a chorus of giggles.

I threw my towel on a nearby armchair, and was about to collapse onto my bed when I heard one of them mention Anya’s name.

Crouching by the door, I listened.

“I don’t even understand how she got into this school.” Josie’s voice was full of spite. “You should have seen her the other day, trying to find the dead animal in the river. She had no idea what she was doing.”

Josie chimed in. “She can barely speak French or Latin. She can’t sense a dead thing when it’s on her plate; she can’t dig a proper hole or even build a makeshift pyre; but she still ranked number four. Can you believe that?”

I glared at the door, but the truth was, they were right. If Anya had any talent as a Monitor, I hadn’t witnessed it either, and I had no idea how she’d ranked number four, or how she’d placed into the top Strategy and Prediction class.

Clementine’s voice rose above the others. “I heard she tried to commit suicide a couple of times. Obviously, it didn’t work. How is she going to kill the Undead when she can’t even kill herself?”

At that, I gave the door a firm kick and stormed out of my room, taking my towel with me.

Walking down the hall, I knocked on Anya’s door. I could hear heavy metal blaring from inside. I knocked twice more, louder, and eventually the door opened.

Anya stood before me in an oversized collared shirt, and shorts, a towel draped over her neck. Her hair was held up in all sorts of odd angles with pieces of tinfoil, and smeared with a reddish paste.

“Oh, hi,” she said, looking at me and then my towel.

Her sleeves were rolled up, showing the insides of her arms, which were covered with irregular white scars that looked like burn marks. They appeared to have been there for a while. I had never noticed them before; she always wore long sleeves.

Anya must have caught me staring, because she immediately rolled down the cuffs of her shirt.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she muttered, and looked down the hall.

“Can I use your shower? Clementine and her friends are in my bathroom.”

While Anya sat on the bed and flipped through a magazine, I shut myself in the bathroom and turned on the spigot, listening to Anya’s music blaring in the background.

Standing under the hot water, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Noah had said. Should relationships be hard? The question didn’t even seem to apply to Dante and me. It didn’t matter if it was easy or hard—with him gone, it felt like a piece of me had been carved away. Did that mean that I didn’t have a choice? Water trickled down my face, collecting on my lashes. What if Dante had lied to me about the cemetery? What if he had been there before, and in all of my visions I’d been seeing him? What would I do then?

As steam clouded the room, I pressed my eyes closed and tried to feel the warmth of the water, but the more I concentrated on it, the more tepid it felt. I turned the temperature up, letting it beat down on my back, and then turned it up again and again, waiting for something to happen as the water pooled about my feet and the skin on my fingers wrinkled.

By the time I emerged, Anya had changed the music to a mellow folk album.

“You were in there for a while,” Anya said as I sat next to her on the couch, the steam following me.

She was sitting cross-legged, stringing something onto a piece of twine. Her hair was still pressed in pieces of foil.

“What are you making?” I said, rubbing my head with my towel.

“A charm necklace,” she said. “For you.”

Beside her, a buzzer went off. She hit the top of it and stood up. “Time to wash the dye out,” she said, and threw the necklace into my lap. “Be right back.”

While she washed her hair out in the sink, I studied the necklace. The frayed twine was strung with dozens of different dried beans, some as small as a pea, some as large as a quarter. Most of them had a white spot in the middle, which made them look like eyes. In the middle of the necklace hung what seemed to be a white rabbit’s foot. I touched it. The fur was delicate and soft.

“So what do you think of it?” Anya said from the doorway.

“It’s—nice,” I said. “What’s it made of?”

“Mung beans, black-eyed peas, fava beans, kidney beans…They’re supposed to bring you health.”

“And the rabbit’s foot?”

“Oh, it’s not a rabbit. It’s a cat.”

Letting the necklace drop into my lap, I said, “What? Why? Where did you—”

“It’s from an herbal store I go to sometimes. It’s for protection. It’s supposed to give you nine lives.”

“Oh,” I said, examining the necklace again, trying not to feel queasy. “Thanks.”

“And here,” she said, picking up a mug from her night-stand and carrying it to me. “This is for you.”

The mug was warm when I took it from her, the liquid inside murky and a brownish-green. “What is it?”

“It’s tea,” she said.

I swirled the cup around, but the contents were so viscous that they barely moved. “Really? What kind?” I said with a grimace.

“Oh, it’s just an herbal thing. Good for the cold season.”

I glanced in her mug. The water inside was a pleasant peach color. A normal tea bag dangled from a string.

“Why aren’t you drinking any?” I asked.

“Oh, I already had some.”

“Right,” I said, taking a sip. It tasted like water from the bottom of a flower vase, and was oddly gritty.

She watched me, pleased. I told her about how I saw Miss LaBarge while I was with Noah, how she and my parents had died with gauze in their mouths. When I was finished, Anya’s forehead was furrowed, her wet red hair dangling over her shoulders, leaving water marks on her shirt.

“Maybe they found the secret of the Nine Sisters and became immortal,” I said. “Maybe that’s why I’m seeing Miss LaBarge everywhere—because she’s still alive. And maybe—maybe—”

“Your parents are still alive, then, too?” Anya offered, finishing my sentence.

I fiddled with the hem of my shirt, nodding.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right. Your parents were searching for the ‘lost girl’ when they wrote Miss LaBarge the letter, right? So that means they couldn’t have found the secret. They were probably just searching for it, like us. And after they died, Miss LaBarge took what they found a step further. She was looking for something having to do with lakes or water—”

“Which is kind of what we’re looking for,” I said, thinking about the saltwater riddle.

“Exactly. Which means she hadn’t found it either. And then she was killed.”

I spun the beans on the necklace, unable to accept what she was saying. Why couldn’t Miss LaBarge be alive? Why couldn’t immortality be real? Why couldn’t my parents still be alive? “But that doesn’t explain why I keep seeing Miss LaBarge.”

“You keep having weird visions,” she reminded me. “Couldn’t she be one of those, too?”

“But Noah saw her. Not just me.”

“He never met her when she was alive, did he? He could have been mistaken. It could have just been someone who looked like her.”

I sat back, frustrated. “Fine,” I said. “You’re right. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Does that make you happy?”

“It’s better this way,” she offered. “If your parents had been alive all this time, and hadn’t contacted you, that would be even more disturbing.”

I gazed at the lamp until it burned a yellow orb into my vision. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, she was right. If my parents were alive they would’ve found a way to contact me. And Miss LaBarge—maybe I had been seeing things. “You can’t know for sure, though,” I said. “The only way to be certain is to follow the riddles. Maybe they’ll all lead us to them.”

It could have been a trick of the light, but Anya seemed to grow uncomfortable. “Yeah…” she murmured, and took a sip from her tea. “Drink up,” she said, staring at my mug. “You’ve barely touched yours.”

I ignored her. “Noah thinks there’s one piece left of the riddle, the first piece, which will tie the clues together. We have to find it.”

“You told
Noah
about them? As in Clementine’s Noah?”

I shrugged. “He chased Miss LaBarge with me. What else was I supposed to do? Besides, he helped.”

“Barely,” Anya said, sipping at her tea. “You know, I’ve been thinking about the riddles, and we’re asking the wrong questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Sisters vowed to let their secret die with them. So why would they hide the riddles?”

“You already asked that,” I said. “And I still don’t know.”

“Well maybe we should figure it out. Think about it. The hospital room. The headstone. The riddles we’ve found so far haven’t been hidden in major historical landmarks or encrypted in pieces of art. They’re in places that would be important to an individual—a headstone, a hospital bed.”

I leaned back, crossing my legs on the couch as I considered what she was suggesting. “The ninth sister,” I said. “You think the ninth sister hid these in places that were meaningful to her.”

Anya nodded.

“But why?”

“I don’t know,” Anya said, tapping her nails on the arm of the couch. “But we can guess a few things about her. Judging from the portrait of the Nine Sisters, she had to have been around our age in the 1730s, when the other Monitors were killed. She had ties to Montreal, which we know because of the headstone. And she was associated with the Royal Victoria Hospital.”

As the first snow began to fall over St. Clément, dusting the shingles of the buildings in a thin layer of white, the wind blew through to my bones, rattling around inside me as if I were hollow. Anya and I searched for the ninth sister, going through as many records as we could in the St. Clément library, pulling dusty tomes out of the shelves one by one, and scanning every page. But before 1950, the information was slim and disorganized.

When that didn’t work, I took to wandering the streets of Montreal, hoping that something I saw would set off another vision; though, really, I was looking for Dante. I found traces of him everywhere—a used Latin book left on my usual table at the coffee shop, a note scrawled inside that read:
I’m searching
; a message traced into the frost on a window:
I miss you
; graffiti etched into a mailbox near the corner store:
Remember us.
Every time I saw one, my heart trembled in my chest, and I had to force myself to look away so that I didn’t draw attention to myself. Anya came with me at first, but as the holidays approached, her father asked her to help him at his store, which left me on my own. Sometimes Noah would join me, catching up with me after class, and together we’d walk down the snowy cobblestones, gazing up at the gargoyles that guarded the roofs. Every time I felt a cold breeze blow through an alleyway, I froze, staring at the empty street, waiting for Dante to appear. But he never did.

I didn’t realize what I was doing. I thought I was just filling the time while Dante was gone, but as the weeks passed, every day pulled us further apart. I didn’t know what was happening until I found myself looking forward to bumping into Noah, and then making plans to bump into him. When we were together, it felt like the pressure had been lifted from my chest. To be able to walk with someone and not talk about anything.

It was on one of the rare days when I wandered alone that I found myself on the waterfront, staring at the abandoned grain silos.

When the tourists had cleared, I approached the railing. Gazing across the water of the St. Lawrence River to the opposite shore, I cleared my throat. “Where are you?” I said, and without waiting to hear my echo, I continued. “Why do you always disappear? Why haven’t you come to find me?”

My voice cracked and I paused, pushing my hair behind my ear as I tried to compose myself. When my questions bounced back to me, they were jumbled and confused, the words laying themselves on top of each other, each question repeating itself and merging with the next into incoherent mush. Just like the way I felt.

“Where are you?” I heard finally, my voice fading as it bounced off the walls of the silo. “Where are you?”

Tired, I leaned against the metal railing, empty of questions, of answers, of energy to even ask any more, when I heard a voice. Not from the echo, but from behind me.