Addie wakes to someone touching her cheek.
The gesture is so gentle, at first she thinks she must be dreaming, but then she opens her eyes, and sees the fairy lights on the roof, sees Sam crouched beside the lawn chair, a worried crease across her forehead. Her hair has been set free, a mane of wild blond curls around her face.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” she says, tucking a cigarette back into its box, unlit.
Addie shivers and sits up, pulling the jacket tight around her. It’s a cold, cloudy morning, the sky a stretch of sunless white. She didn’t mean to sleep this long, this late. Not that she has anywhere to be, but it certainly seemed like a better idea last night, when she could feel her fingers.
The Odyssey has fallen off her lap. It lies facedown on the ground, the cover slick with morning dew. She reaches to pick it up, does her best to dust the jacket off, smooth the pages where they got bent, or smudged.
“It’s freezing out here,” says Sam, pulling Addie to her feet. “Come on.” Sam always talks like that, statements in place of questions, imperatives that sound like invitations. She pulls Addie toward the rooftop door, and Addie is too cold to protest, simply trails Sam down the stairs to her
apartment, pretending she doesn’t know the way.
The door swings open onto madness.
The hall, the bedroom, the kitchen are all stuffed full of art and artifact. Only the living room—at the back of the apartment—is spacious and bare. No sofa or tables there, nothing but two large windows, an easel, and a stool.
“This is where I do my living,” she said, when she first brought Addie home.
And Addie answered, “I can tell.”
She’s crammed everything she owns into three-quarters of the space, just to preserve the peace and quiet of the fourth. Her friend offered her a studio space at an insane deal, but it felt cold, she said, and she needs warmth to paint.
“Sorry,” says Sam, stepping around a canvas, over a box. “It’s a bit cluttered right now.”
Addie has never seen it any other way. She would love to see what Sam is working on, what put the white paint under her nails and led to the smudge of pink just below her jaw. But instead Addie forces herself to follow the girl around and over and through the mess into the kitchen. Sam snaps on the coffeemaker, and Addie’s eyes slide over the space, marking the changes. A new purple vase. A stack of half-read books, a postcard from Italy. The collection of mugs, some sprouting clean brushes, and always growing.
“You paint,” she says, nodding at the stack of canvases leaning against the stove.
“I do,” says Sam, a smile breaking over her face. “Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just— other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.”
Sam pours two cups of coffee, one mug green, as shallow and wide as a bowl, the other tall and blue. “Cats or dogs?” she asks, instead of “green or blue,” even though there are no dogs or cats on either of them, and Addie says, “cats,” and Sam hands her the tall blue cup without any explanation.
Their fingers brush, and they are standing closer than she realized, close enough for Addie to see the streaks of silver in the blue of Sam’s eyes, close enough for Sam to count the freckles on her face.
“You have stars,” she says.
Déjà vu, thinks Addie, again. She wills herself to pull away, to leave, to spare herself the insanity of repetition and reflection. Instead, Addie wraps her hands around the cup and takes a long sip. The first note is strong and bitter, but the second is rich and sweet.
She sighs with pleasure, and Sam flashes her a brilliant grin. “Good, right?” she says. “The secret is—”
Cacao nibs, thinks Addie.
“Cacao nibs,” says Sam, taking a long sip from her cup, which Addie is convinced now is really a bowl. She drapes herself over the counter, head bowed over the coffee as if it were an offering.
“You look like a wilted flower,” teases Addie.
Sam winks and lifts her cup. “Water me, and watch me bloom.”
Addie has never seen Sam like this, in the morning. Of course, she’s woken up beside her, but those days were tinged with apologies, unease. The aftermath of the absence of memory. It is never fun to linger in those moments. Now, though. This is new. A memory made for the first time.
Sam shakes her head. “Sorry. I never asked your name.”
This is one of the things she loves about Sam, one of the first things she ever noticed. Sam lives and loves with such an open heart, shares the kind of warmth most reserve only for the closest people in their lives. Reasons come second to needs. She took her in, she warmed her up, before she thought to ask her name.
“Madeline,” says Addie, because it is the closest she can get. “Mmm,” says Sam, “my favorite kind of cookie. I’m Sam.” “Hello, Sam,” she says, as if tasting the name for the first time.
“So,” says the other girl, as if the question only just occurred to her. “What were you doing up there on the roof?”
“Oh,” says Addie with a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep up there. I don’t even remember sitting down on the lawn chair. I must have been more tired than I thought. I just moved in, 2F, and I don’t think I’m used to all the noise. I couldn’t sleep, finally gave up and went up there to get some fresh air and watch the sun rise over the city.”
The lie rolls out so easily, the way paved with practice.
“We’re neighbors!” says Sam. “You know,” she adds, setting her empty cup aside, “I’d love to paint you sometime.”
And Addie fights the urge to say, You already have.
“I mean, it wouldn’t look like you,” Sam rambles on, heading into the hall. Addie follows, watches her stop and run her fingers over a stack of canvases, turning through them as if they were records in a vinyl shop.
“I’ve got this whole series I’m working on,” she says, “of people as skies.”
A dull pang echoes through Addie’s chest, and it’s six months ago, and they are lying in bed, Sam’s fingers tracing the freckles on her cheeks, her touch as light and steady as a brush.
“You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”
“And what kind of sky am I?” Addie had asked then, and Sam had stared at her, unblinking, and then brightened, and it was the kind of brightening she had seen with a hundred artists, a hundred times, the glow of inspiration, as if someone switched on a light beneath their skin. And Sam, suddenly animated, wound to life, sprang from the bed, taking Addie with her into the living room.
An hour of sitting on the hardwood floor, wrapped in only a blanket, listening to the murmur and scrape of Sam mixing paint, the hiss of the brush on the canvas, and then it was done, and when Addie came around to look at it, what she saw was the night sky. Not the night sky as anyone else would have painted it. Bold streaks of charcoal, and black, and thin slashes of middle gray, the paint so thick it rose up from the canvas. And flecked across the surface, a handful of silver dots. They looked almost accidental, like spatter from a brush, but there were exactly seven of them, small and distant and wide apart as stars.
Sam’s voice draws her back to the kitchen.
“I wish I could show you my favorite piece,” she’s saying now. “It was the first in the series. One Forgotten Night. I sold it to this collector on the Lower East Side. It was my first major sale, paid my rent for three months, got me into a gallery. Still, it’s hard, letting go of the art. I know I have to— that whole starving artist thing is overrated—but I miss it every day.”
Her voice dips softer.
“The crazy thing is, every one of the pieces in that series is modeled after someone. Friends, people here in the building, strangers I found on the street. I remember all of them. But I can’t for the life of me remember who she was.”
Addie swallows. “You think it was a girl?” “Yeah. I do. It just had this energy.”
“Maybe you dreamed her.”
“Maybe,” says Sam. “I’ve never been good at remembering dreams. But you know…” She trails off, staring at Addie the way she did that night in bed, beginning to glow. “You remind me of that piece.” She puts a hand over her face. “God, that sounds like the worst pickup line in the world. I’m sorry. I’m going to take a shower.”
“I should get going,” says Addie. “Thanks for the coffee.” Sam bites her lip. “Do you have to?”
No, she doesn’t. Addie knows she could follow Sam right into the shower, wrap herself in a towel, and sit on the living room floor and see what kind of painting Sam would make of her today. She could. She could. She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.
“Sorry,” she says, chest aching, but Sam only shrugs.
“We’ll see each other again,” she says with so much faith. “After all, we’re neighbors now.”
Addie manages a pale shadow of a smile. “That’s right.”
Sam walks her to the door, and with every step, Addie resists the urge to look back.
“Don’t be a stranger,” says Sam.
“I won’t,” promises Addie, as the door swings shut. She sighs, leaning back against it, listens to Sam’s footsteps retreating down the cluttered hall, before she forces herself up, and forward, and away.
Outside, the white marble sky has cracked, letting through thin bands of blue.
The cold has burned off, and Addie finds a café with sidewalk seating, busy enough that the waiter only has time to make a pass of the outside tables every ten minutes or so. She counts the beats like a prisoner marking the pace of guards, orders a coffee—it isn’t as good as Sam’s, all bitter, no sweet, but it’s warm enough to keep the chill at bay. She puts up the collar of her leather coat, and opens The Odyssey again, and tries to read.
Here, Odysseus thinks he is heading home, to finally be reunited with Penelope after the horrors of war, but she has read the story enough times to know how far the journey is from done.
She skims, translating from Greek to modern English.
I fear the sharp frost and the soaking dew together
will do me in—I’m bone-weary, about to breathe my last, and a cold wind blows from a river on toward morning.
The waiter ducks back outside, and she glances up from the book, watches him frown a little at the sight of the drink already ordered and delivered, the gap in his memory where a customer should be. But she looks like she belongs, and that’s half the battle, really, and a moment later he turns his attention to the couple in the doorway, waiting for a seat.
She returns to her book, but it’s no use. She’s not in the mood for old men lost at sea, for parables of lonely lives. She wants to be stolen away, wants to forget. A fantasy, or perhaps a romance.
The coffee is cold now, anyway, and Addie stands up, book in hand, and sets off for The Last Word to find something new.
