There is only one exhibit left.
As the light thins, Henry and Addie hand over their blue rubber bands and step into a space composed only of plexiglass. The clear walls rise in rows. They remind him of the stacks in a library, or at the store, but there are no books, only a sign mounted in the air overhead that reads:
YOU ARE THE ART
Bowls of neon paint sit out in every aisle, and sure enough the walls are covered in markings. Signatures and scribbles, handprints and patterns.
Some run the length of the wall, and others are nested, like secrets, inside the larger marks. Addie dips a finger in green paint, and brings it to the wall. She draws a spiral, a single expanding mark. But by the time she reaches the fourth loop, the first has already faded, dropping away like a pebble in deep water.
Impossible, erased.
Her face doesn’t falter, doesn’t fall, but he can see the sadness before it drops as well, sinking out of sight.
How do you hold on? he wants to ask. Instead, he dips his hand into the green paint, reaches past her, but he doesn’t draw anything. Instead, he waits, hovering above the glass.
“Put your hand over mine,” he says, and she hesitates only a moment before pressing her palm to the back of his hand, ghosting her fingers over his own. “There,” he says, “now we can draw.”
She folds her hand over his, guides his index finger to the glass, and leaves a single mark, a line of green. He can feel the air lodge in her chest, can feel the sudden stiffness in her limbs, as she waits for it to disappear.
But it doesn’t.
It stays, staring back at them in that fearless shade. Something breaks inside her, then.
She makes a second mark, and a third, lets out a breathless laugh, and then, her hand on his, and his on the glass, Addie begins to draw. For the first time in three hundred years, she draws birds, and trees, draws a garden, draws a workshop, draws a city, draws a pair of eyes. The images spill out of her, and through him, and onto the wall with a clumsy, frenzied need. And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.
And then she dips his finger in the paint, and brings it to the pane of glass, and this time, she writes in halting cursive, one letter at a time.
Her name.
It sits, nested among the many drawings. Addie LaRue
Ten letters, two words. It is no different, he thinks, from the hundred other marks they’ve made—but it is. He knows it is.
Her hand drops away from his, and she reaches out, runs her fingers through the letters, and for a moment, the name is ruined, streaks of green against the glass. But by the time her fingers fall away, it is back, unmarred, unchanged.
Something changes in her, then. It rolls over her, the way storms roll over him, but this is different, this is not dark, but dazzling, a sudden, piercing sharpness.
And then she is pulling him away. Away from the maze, away from the people stretched beneath the starless night, away from the carnival of art, and the island, and he realizes she is not pulling him away at all, but toward something.
Toward the ferry. Toward the subway. Toward Brooklyn.
Toward home.
The whole way, she holds tightly to Henry, their fingers intertwined, the green paint staining both their hands, as they climb the stairs, as he opens the door, and then, she lets go, surging past him, through the apartment. He finds her in the bedroom, pulling a blue notebook from the shelf, scrounging a pen from the table. She presses them both into his hands, and Henry sinks onto the edge of the bed, folds back the cover of the notebook, one of a dozen he’s never used, and she kneels, breathless, beside him.
“Do it again,” she says.
And he brings the ballpoint to the blank page and writes her name, in tight but careful script.
Addie LaRue.
It doesn’t dissolve, it doesn’t fade, it sits there, alone in the center of the page. And Henry looks up at her, waiting for her to go on, to dictate what comes next, and she looks down past him, at the words.
Addie clears her throat.
“This is how it starts,” she says. And he begins to write.
