Henry trails off, as the realization dawns.
He’d forgotten about Bea’s attempt at finding a new thesis, one quiet detail mixed into a very loud season, but now, it’s obvious.
The girl in the sketch, the painting, the sculpture, is leaning on the rail beside him, her face open in delight.
They are walking through Chelsea on the way to the High Line, and he stops, halfway through a crosswalk, realizing the obvious truth, the gleam of light, like a tear, in his story.
“It was you,” he says.
Addie flashes a dazzling smile. “It was.”
A car honks, the flashing sign gone solid in warning, and they run to the other side.
“It’s funny, though,” she says as they climb the iron steps. “I didn’t know about the second one. I remember sitting on that beach, remember the man with his easel, up on the pier, but I never found the finished piece.”
Henry shakes his head. “I thought you couldn’t leave a mark.”
“I can’t,” she says, looking up. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”
“But no photographs. No film.”
Her expression falters, just a fraction. “No,” she says, the word a shape on her lips. And he feels bad for asking, for drawing her back to the bars of her curse, instead of the gaps she’s found between them. But then Addie straightens, lifts her chin, smiles with an almost defiant kind of joy.
“But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”
They reach the High Line just as a gust of wind blows through, the air still edged with winter, but instead of folding in against him, sheltering from the breeze, Addie leans into the wild gust, cheeks blushing with the cold, hair whipping around her face, and in that moment, he can see what every artist saw, what drew them to their pencils and their paint, this impossible, uncatchable girl.
And even though he’s safe, both feet firmly on the ground, Henry feels himself begin to fall.
