Until I Die by Amy Plum
My eyes closed of their own accord. Concentrate, I thought. Some things are more important than making out with your boyfriend at the Opéra. “Vincent,” I said, pulling back and fixing his eyes with my own. “I don’t want to ruin the amazing evening. But it can’t wait.” I saw him blanch and hurried to get the words out. “You promised not to hide anything from me, but it feels like that’s what you’re doing with your ‘business for JB’ or whatever you were doing yesterday. Passing it off like it’s not important makes me feel like you think I can’t handle it. And that, to me, feels really patronizing.” There, it was out. He couldn’t avoid it by getting all makey-outie now that the issue was on the table.
Vincent straightened. “Kate,” he said, pulling my hand to his lap and pressing it between his fingers. “It’s not a question of trust. And it’s not a question of not thinking you can handle it. I am in awe of your strength. It’s just that”—he hesitated—“I know you won’t like it. It’s an experiment. And since it might not even work, I was hoping to avoid having to tell you about it.”
“I can take it, Vincent. I can take anything.”
“I know you can, Kate.” His expression was imploring now. “Believe me. But I already hate anything about myself that freaks you out, and this—trust me—is freaky. I’m afraid I would lose your respect if you knew the details. Which is why I just wanted to try it, and check it off the list of possible solutions, and move on. If it actually worked, and that’s a really big ‘if,’ I wanted to present it to you in a way where you could actually see the benefits, weigh them against the distasteful side of it, and help me decide whether I should continue with it.”
He watched my face carefully.
“How long does the experiment take?” I heard myself ask, while kicking myself for not digging further.
“Gaspard says we should know after two cycles of dormancy. So just over a month … six weeks more.”
I looked into his eyes and saw his sincerity. His utter honesty. And his determination to do whatever he could to make us work.
I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed deeply. “Okay. I trust you. But please be safe.”
“Thank you, Kate,” he said, leaning back against the wall, but keeping hold of my hand. He focused on the ceiling for a few moments, before turning to me. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you about too. Totally different subject.”
I smiled wickedly. “I’m up for talking about anything.”
“Why have you cut all ties with your friends in New York?”
My smile disappeared. “Except that.”
“Kate, I totally get the fact that my friends are your friends here. I don’t blame you for not wanting to hang out with the kids from school. You say there’s no one interesting there, and I understand that you don’t want to get attached to people who will leave for their home countries after graduation.
“But your childhood friends—the people you grew up with. The way you’ve talked to me about them … it sounds like you were really close.”
“We were,” I said, my voice flat. “They even contacted Mamie after I stopped writing, but I had her tell them I wasn’t in the mood to talk. They probably all hate me now.”
“I think they’d all understand why you fell out of touch last year. It was an awful time for you. You’ll never get over your parents’ death, I’m not even suggesting that. But you’re doing better now. You’re coping with life.”
“Questionable, since I hang out with a bunch of dead people.” My eyes flicked quickly to his. I hadn’t meant it as a slam. And from his wry smile, I was relieved to see he hadn’t taken offense.
“Okay, you’re between worlds. But you’ve told me you never felt like you completely fit in anywhere. How did you say it? ‘Not completely American and not completely French.’
“But that doesn’t mean that you should just trash those relationships you had back home. They’re part of your past, Kate. We all need a past to root our present in. You can’t just live in the here and now.”
“Why not?” I snapped, surprising myself by the vehemence in my voice. “Do you know what the past holds for me, Vincent?”
“Death, Kate.” His voice softened. “So does mine.”
“Vincent, all my memories are built around my family. My parents. After leaving Brooklyn, every time I talked to my friends it dragged me right back into that old life. Everything they said reminded me of home. And it hurt so badly, you can’t even imagine.” My eyes flitted to his face as I remembered that his parents and fiancée had been murdered before his eyes. But he didn’t look angry. If anything, he looked more caring and supportive than ever.
“Okay, you can imagine,” I conceded. “But Vincent, I’m not a sadist. Inflicting unnecessary pain on myself on a consistent basis is not my idea of staying healthy and sane. I can’t be in touch with them. It hurts too much.”
Vincent looked down at his hands, weighing his words carefully before he looked back up at me. Without speaking, he traced my jawline with his finger, as if sketching my face’s topography. I reached up and grasped his hand, pulling it into my lap and holding it with both hands for comfort.
“I get it, Kate. Believe me, I do. But I just want to put something out there for you to consider. When I died the first time, it was announced in the papers. Everyone knew. I didn’t even have a choice about going back to my community—to the people I loved. And I missed that. For years, I practically stalked Hélène’s father and sister, making sure they were okay. I couldn’t ever show myself, but I watched them.
“I left anonymous flowers when Hélène’s dad passed away. And after Brigitte, Hélène’s sister, died giving birth to a son, I watched him. He and his family live in the south of France now. I have seen them. His daughter looks like her grandmother. And however weird it sounds, knowing they exist grounds me. Having a link to my past grounds me.
“But I would have given anything to have been able to stay in touch with Brigitte and her father and the other people from my past—no matter how many painful memories that contact would have stirred up. I didn’t have that choice. But you do. It might be too early, but I hope you will change your mind someday. I can tell whenever you mention your friends that you still struggle with it. But … being in contact with them might actually make you happier.”
Pain had been blowing up like a bubble inside me, and at that, it finally exploded. “I am happy, Vincent,” I growled through clenched teeth. He looked at me, a skeptical eyebrow raised. Realizing how ridiculous that had sounded, I pursed my lips, and then burst out laughing. I leaned forward into his arms, loving him more in that moment than I ever had. He cared for me. Not just because he wanted me for himself. He wanted me to be happy … on my own.
The curtains came up, but we didn’t move. We spent the rest of the performance kissing and laughing and peeking out at the ballet and then kissing some more.
That night when I got home, I slipped my laptop out of my desk drawer and turned it on. Using the email account I had set up to write to Charlotte, I sent a message to my three oldest friends. It’s me, Kate, I wrote. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I do love you all. But it still hurts too much to think about my past, and though you don’t mean to, you bring it back too clearly. I wiped a tear away as I typed in one last sentence and then pressed send.
Please wait for me.
THIRTEEN
FOR THE NEXT WEEK, VINCENT WAS TOO BUSY with his project to be able to spend much time with me. Previously, on the rare day we didn’t see each other, we had called to catch up at night, and he would give me a complete rundown of his day. But recently he’d begun to carefully skip over bits.
Now that we had talked, I didn’t feel as bad about it. And knowing that he had asked for my blessing—in a roundabout way—I felt more supportive of him. But I still worried. Because whatever it was, it was taking a toll on him. His skin’s healthy olive tone had begun to look sallow, and dark circles were appearing under his eyes. He was so
At the same time, I couldn’t complain about him being any less affectionate. Because he seemed even more so. As if he was trying to make up for everything.
“Vincent, you look awful,” I finally said one morning.
“It has to get worse before it gets better,” was all he would say.
After a week and a half of watching him rapidly weaken before my eyes, I was getting to the end of my rope. I didn’t want to force Vincent to give me more information … to put any more pressure on him. And Jules and Gaspard were obviously not going to spill the beans. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask Violette.
Since her Hitchcockian introduction to the cinema, Violette and I had been to several films, each time on her initiative. A couple of days after our first movie date, I received a bouquet of blue and pink flowers and a copy of Pariscope with a note attached telling me to look on page thirty-seven. Page thirty-seven was a list of movies. I dug my flower dictionary out of my bag.
The blue flower was monkshood, which meant “danger,” and the tiny pinkish flowers were nutmeg geranium: “I expect a meeting.” Danger … meeting? I looked at the movie listings again and saw, in the middle of the page, Dangerous Liaisons. This has got to be the first time in history that The Language of Flowers was used to encode movie titles, I thought, laughing to myself as I dialed her phone number.
Violette giggled through the whole film, remarking on how the costumes and mannerisms were all wrong, and drawing angry glares from the moviegoers around us. After I convinced her that it wasn’t okay to speak out loud in a cinema (“But this is a common entertainment—it is not as if we were at the opera,” was her initial response), she limited herself to chuckling and shaking her head at the offending scenes. When I commented afterward about the evilness of the characters, Violette laughed and said, “A perfect example of royal court politics!”
A few days later, the bouquet of bear’s foot (knight), lucerne (life), and asphodel (my regrets follow you to death) took me a whole half hour of looking back and forth between flowers and movie listings. When I finally figured out that Violette was using “knight” as a pun, my jaw dropped at the thought of the ancient revenant choosing Night of the Living Dead, the most famous zombie movie ever.
We fell into a habit of following up the movie with a café session. But instead of chatting, it felt more like we were trading information: Violette didn’t know how to relax. Her default setting was programmed to super intense, and she listened to everything I said with a concentration that intimidated me at first. I finally became used to it, and eventually got her to loosen up to the point where she could laugh about herself.
Violette couldn’t hear enough about me and Vincent, and after my initial hesitation, I could tell that it wasn’t from some kind of weird, voyeuristic jealousy. Obviously her crush was long gone. She explained that love between humans and revenants was so rare that it intrigued her, and apologized if it was intruding on our personal lives. But when I told her I didn’t mind, she enthusiastically dug for every single detail.
It was the way that Vincent and I could communicate while he was volant that seemed to interest her the most. She confessed that she hadn’t heard of contact between humans and dormant revenants, besides the very basic intuition that the rare married couples like Geneviève and Philippe developed after decades of living together.
“You know,” she said glibly, “that is supposed to be one of the qualities of the Champion.”
“What is?” I asked, my heart suddenly beating faster. I had forgotten that Violette was considered an expert on revenant history. Of course she would have heard of the Champion.
She paused, watching me carefully.
“Don’t worry, I know about the Champion,” I said, and saw her relax. “Vincent told me about the prophecy. Although he didn’t know much about it. What does him speaking to me when volant have to do with it?”
“‘And he will possess preternatural powers of endurance, persuasion, strength, and communication,’” she quoted. “That is a part of the prophecy.”
“Wait a minute … endurance? That must be why Jean-Baptiste thinks Vincent is the Champion. He was able to resist dying longer than other revenants his age. What else did you say?”
“Persuasion,” she said, “which Vincent has got in excess. He is the one Jean-Baptiste always sends to represent him when there are problems among our kind.”
I hadn’t known that, either. Although Vincent had mentioned projects for Jean-Baptiste, I had always assumed they were of the legal type.
“Then there is strength. Is Vincent very strong?”
“I’ve never seen him fight except in training, so I wouldn’t know,” I admitted.
“Well, the communication thing sure had Jean-Baptiste worked up. The fact that a revenant had volant speech that was strong enough to reach out to a human. When Vincent told him about it, Jean-Baptiste called me right away to let me know. To see if I had any further information on the prophecy that might help verify that Vincent is the Champion.”
“And what did you tell him?” I asked, feeling a bit shaken by the whole conversation. Truth be told, I didn’t want Vincent to be the Champion. Whatever that meant, it sounded dangerous.
“I told him that he was lucky to have such a talented young revenant living under his roof, but that I seriously doubted that, if there were to be a Champion, it would be Vincent.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons,” she said with a teasing glint in her eye. “There are several other stipulations spelled out in the prophecy. Conditions of time and location. And believe me … it is not here and it is not now. Honestly, the prophecy of the Champion is just one of many ancient prophecies. Most of them have not been fulfilled, and they are probably based on the ranting of oracles or questionable superstitions. Old guys like Jean-Baptiste lap them up like honeyed mead.”
I gave her a confused look.
“Fine, like vintage wine. That is a better comparison for Jean-Baptiste, anyway.” And then, with a wry grin, she launched into a story about how Jean-Baptiste once sent Gaspard on a wild-goose chase to find some ancient parchment that had never actually existed. She had me laughing so hard that I choked on my latte. The half a millennia she had spent on earth made Violette a veritable gold mine of good stories and juicy information.
One day, after an evening showing of one of my all-time favorites, Harold and Maude, we headed to the Café Sainte-Lucie. Over a shared platter of deliciously runny cheeses and a basket of crunchy sliced baguette bread, Violette told me about the old times, when there wasn’t as much animosity between numa and bardia. It was weird to hear her use the ancient term for revenants as if it was common lingo.
At that point, apparently, they considered themselves in the same line of work: the work of life. Preserving life, taking life … it all boiled down to the same thing. “It is all about a balance,” she said. “In our days, there was open communication between the numa and bardia.
“You know,” she continued, leaning forward confidentially, “Arthur has kept in touch with some of our ancient contacts in the numa world, and I am glad for it. My research would have suffered if he had not!” Seeing my shock, she said, “Kate, one cannot cut off a whole subset of our type just because they have gone out of style in recent centuries.”
“Your type? But you’re not even the same kind of creature!” I said, feeling a twinge of disgust at the comparison.
“Ah, but there you are wrong. We are exactly the same kind of creature. What has Vincent told you about how a revenant is formed? Or numa, for that matter?”
“That a human becomes a revenant after dying to save someone’s life. And a human becomes a numa when they die after betraying someone to their death.”
“Which is true,” she said. “But if you go back a step, bardia and numa are the same thing: revenants. Many, including me, believe that t
“But whatever our origin, everyone agrees that revenants are all born equal: human with a latency to become a revenant. Whether they become bardia or numa all depends on their actions during their human life. And if they are never cast into a situation where they save or betray, they just live out the rest of their lives clueless that they were different from anyone else.”
“So a human’s not born a numa or bardia?”
“Not unless you believe in the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination.” And once again, she sounds four times her age, I thought. “But we are not talking theology here. We are talking about human nature. In which case the only answer can be, ‘Who knows?’ What I do know is that the numa and bardia did not used to be the enemies they are today.”
“Yeah, Jean-Baptiste said that there used to be a lot more of both in Paris.”
Violette nodded and called the waiter to bring us some coffees. “As with most wars, during World War Two many revenants of both ilk were created. And since many held personal grudges against each other from their human lives, there was a massive war of vengeance between the numa and bardia. That all came to an end, though, a decade or so later. And there has been a type of cease-fire ever since.”
“Why?” I asked, intrigued by this new information.
She shrugged. “I have no idea. Like I said, Arthur and I have been holed up in our castle in the Loire. I have stayed away from Parisian politics.”
“Well, from what I hear, you’re the go-to person for anything revenant or numa related,” I said. “If anyone would know, it would be you.”
“Touché,” she said, laughing. “I do pride myself on having the inside information on pretty much everything. But I also pride myself on being able to keep a secret. So if I do not tell you something, there is probably a good reason.”