This is how it ends.
A boy wakes up alone in bed.
Sunlight spills through the gap in the curtains, the buildings beyond slick with the aftermath of rain.
He feels sluggish, hungover, still caught within the dregs of sleep. He knows he was dreaming, but he can’t for the life of him remember the details of the dream, and it must not have been very pleasant, because he feels only a deep relief at waking.
Book looks over the mound of the comforter, orange eyes wide and waiting.
It’s late, the boy can tell by the angle of the light, the sounds of traffic on the street.
He didn’t mean to sleep so long.
The girl he loves is always the first to wake. Shuffling beneath the sheets, the weight of her attention, the soft touch of her fingers on his skin
—they are always enough to rouse him out of sleep. Only once did he wake first, and then he had the strange pleasure of seeing her, knees curled up and face tucked against the pillows, still beneath the surface of sleep.
But that was a rainy morning just after dawn, when the world was gray, and today the sun is so bright he doesn’t know how either of them slept through it.
He rolls over to wake her.
But the other side of the bed is empty.
He splays his hand over the place where she should be, but the sheets are cold and smooth.
“Addie?” he calls, rising to his feet.
He moves through the apartment, checks the kitchen, the bathroom, the fire escape, even though he knows, he knows, he knows, that she is not there.
“Addie?”
And then, of course, he remembers.
Not the dream, there was no dream, only the night before. The last night of his life.
The damp concrete smell of the rooftop, the last tick of the watch as its hand found twelve, her smile as she looked up into his face, and made him promise to remember.
And now he’s here, and she’s gone, and there’s no trace of her left behind except the stuff in his head and—
The journals.
He’s up, crossing the room to the narrow set of shelves where he kept them: red, blue, silver, black, white, green; six notebooks, all of them still there. He pulls them from the shelf, spreads them on the bed, and as he does, the Polaroids tumble out.
The one he took that day of Addie, her face a blur, her back to the camera, a ghost at the edges of the frame, and he stares at them a long time, convinced that if he squints, she will come into focus. But no matter how long he looks, all he can see are the shapes, the shadows. The only thing he can make out are the seven freckles, and those are so faint he can’t tell if they’re really visible, or his memory is simply filling them in where they should be.
He sets the photograph aside and reaches for the first journal, then stops, so convinced that if and when he opens it, he will find the pages blank, the ink erased like every other mark she tried to make.
But he has to look, and so he does, and there they are, page after page written in his slanting script, shielded from the curse by the fact the words themselves are his, though the story is hers.
She wants to be a tree.
There is nothing wrong with Roger.
She simply wants to live before she dies.
It will take her years to learn the language of those eyes.
She claws her way up, and out, hands splayed across the bony mound of a dead man’s back.
This is her first. How it should have been. She feels him press three coins into her hand.
Soul is such a grand word. The truth is so much smaller. It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.
He picks up the next journal.
Paris is burning.
The darkness comes undone.
And the next.
There is an angel above the bar.
Henry sits there for hours against the side of the bed, turning through every page of every book, every story she ever told, and when he’s done, he closes his eyes, and puts his head in his hands amid the open books.
Because the girl he loved is gone. And he’s still here.
He remembers everything.
