Life Eternal

by Yvonne Woon

  “Why do you always turn pink when I talk to you?”

  I felt my face grow hotter. “There, now I’m red,” I said with a self-conscious smile.

  He laughed. “Do you want to get a coffee?”

  “Oh, no,” I said quickly, pulling my backpack over one shoulder. “I’m really busy.” Even though my only plan was to go to the waterfront and wait for Dante.

  “Busy with what?”

  “Oh—um—it’s something personal.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, pulling out my chair with a little bow.

  I made my way into the hallway, Noah on my heels. After a moment I turned around. “You seem like you want to ask me something.”

  Noah was closer than I expected, his face inches away from mine. “Why do you say that?” His breath was warm as it tickled my nose. “Aren’t I allowed to walk in the hallway with you?”

  “Of course,” I said, caught off guard.

  “But you’re right,” he admitted, adjusting his glasses. “I wanted to talk to you. Is that so bad?”

  I tilted my head, giving him a suspicious look.

  “Okay, I’ll confess I do have an ulterior motive.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ll tell you over coffee,” he said.

  “I have a boyfriend, you know.”

  “And I have a girlfriend,” he said. “How presumptuous of you to think that I was flirting.”

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to figure out if he actually had been flirting, or if that’s just the way he was.

  “So we’re both taken,” Noah said. “Now that that’s understood, we can just be friends. And as friends, I’d like to ask you to have a hot beverage with me.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Okay.”

  Before I knew it, we were outside walking around the streets of the old port, just talking and laughing, something I hadn’t done in a while. Noah was from Montreal. He’d grown up in Outremont, a residential neighborhood on the other side of Mont Royal. His parents were professors and Monitors. “They’re very opinionated,” Noah stressed. “They love to argue about politics.”

  I didn’t tell him much about myself; only the pertinent details: I was from California; after my parents died I moved in with my grandfather in Massachusetts. I preferred listening to Noah tell me about his life, which sounded sunny, happy. It reminded me of the way mine had been, a lifetime ago.

  Listening to him talk about which café had the best coffee in Montreal, I realized that we didn’t have to talk about matters of life and death. I could shed that Renée, even if just for a few hours, and stroll down the winding streets and debate whether or not hockey was better than basketball or why Madame Goût insisted on calling Mr. Pollet Monsieur Po-lay.

  We were about to turn in to a bakery, when I saw the flash of a woman’s face across the street.

  I froze as Noah went ahead, the bells on the door ringing as he pushed it open. The woman now had her back to me. I watched as she walked down the sidewalk, waiting for her to turn around.

  “Renée?” Noah said from behind me. “Are you coming?”

  The cars stopped as the traffic light changed to red. Slowly, the woman turned, raising her face to mine.

  Stunned, I looked away.

  “It’s her,” I said to Noah, trying to control my voice.

  “Who?”

  “Annette LaBarge. My old philosophy professor from Gottfried. The one who died in August.”

  “What?” he said, letting go of the door. It swung shut, rattling the shade on the window.

  He followed my gaze up the street, where Miss LaBarge was disappearing into a crowd of tourists.

  “How could that be?” Noah asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said over my shoulder, rushing to catch up with Miss LaBarge.

  He ran after me. “But you’re certain it’s her?”

  “Yes.” I arched my neck to see over the crowd. Miss LaBarge was a few yards ahead of us, moving briskly through the city, her long skirt billowing around her ankles.

  “Did she see you?”

  “No. Or at least she didn’t seem to.”

  “Wait,” Noah said, stopping me just before I turned down the same deserted alley she was in.

  “What are you doing?” I said, yanking my arm away from him. “We could lose her.”

  “Think about it,” he said. “She clearly doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s here or alive, or else she would have contacted someone. Right?”

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  “Let’s just slow down. Keep our distance. See where she goes.”

  So that’s what we did. Staying a safe half block away, we followed her all the way to downtown Montreal, where it felt like we were moving forward in time. Instead of the quaint stone buildings of the old port, we were surrounded by big glass high-rises and expensive designer stores. Everyone on the street was wearing a suit, talking on a cell phone, and walking quickly.

  We followed her until she stopped in front of a large building. Tucked into the corner, near a bus stop, was a door covered with an accordion cage. Approaching it, she pulled the cage open, stepped inside, and shut it behind her.

  “What is that?” I said as I watched her press a button. A sliding door closed, and she began to move downward.

  “It’s an elevator to the underground,” Noah said as she disappeared beneath the street.

  “Then she definitely isn’t Undead. She has to be alive—I mean fully alive—if she’s going underground. We have to follow her.”

  “There’s another way down.”

  We ran into a family-run dépanneur. The store was a cramped place, its windows lined with boxed foods, cleaning agents, and a few bottles of cheap wine. Two Chinese women were working the counter, arranging plastic bags.

  “Hi, Mrs. Cho,” Noah said, rushing by them. “We’ll just be a minute,” he explained, a little out of breath.

  The older of the two women nodded.

  I gave them a grateful smile, but Noah pulled me along. “This way,” he said, winding through the aisles of cereal and dishwashing detergent and tea until we made it to the back of the store. At the end of the aisle was a fogged-over glass door, just like the ones in the freezer sections of grocery stores, except larger, and fashioned like a proper house door. It popped when Noah opened it, breaking its suction. “Get in,” he said, and closed the door behind us.

  The room inside was frigid. It was long and narrow, and filled with bottles and bottles of beer. The dim light reflected off their colored glass.

  “Where are we?” I asked, and then crouched by the door and rubbed a peephole in the condensation on the window to look out. The women at the counter were busy fiddling with the cash register and didn’t seem disturbed at all that we had just rushed past them and climbed into their freezer.

  Noah’s glasses were fogged. Taking them off, he squinted and wiped them on his shirt. “The beer refrigerator. A lot of deps have them. Come on.”

  There was a narrow walkway in between the rows of cases. Noah walked down it. “This one’s really good,” he said, pointing to a dark stout. “Oh, and this one,” he said, picking up a large red bottle with a corked head.

  At the back of the room was a steel staircase. Moving a few boxes out of the way, Noah cleared enough for us to walk down, and I followed him, the dust from the railing collecting on my hands.

  “Et voilà,” he said, gesturing toward the murky tunnel at the bottom of the stairs. “The underground.”

  A brief moment of unease took hold of me as I looked down at him and remembered my vision of the cemetery, and the suffocating feeling of standing in the hole. That couldn’t have been me, I thought. Shaking it off, I ran down the remaining steps.

  We searched the maze of tunnels for nearly an hour, weaving between businesswomen and men in suits, mothers pushing strollers, and teenagers slurping milk shakes; but we never found her.

  “You saw her, right?” I said to Noah, slowing to a stop. “I’
m not losing my mind. You saw her too.”

  “I saw someone. But maybe it wasn’t Annette LaBarge,” Noah said. “Maybe it was just a look-alike. That happens a lot.”

  “Maybe,” I said, gazing down the tunnel one last time.

  “I never met her in person,” he said. “I only saw the pictures in the papers. You’d know better than I would.”

  It was her, I thought. Or maybe it wasn’t. I wasn’t sure about anything anymore. After all, how could it have been Miss LaBarge? I had watched her casket sink at sea.

  Giving up, Noah led me back through a narrow tunnel to the St. Clément exit.

  It was nearing dinnertime when we made it back to school, but as we approached the gates, I slowed down. I didn’t want to go back yet. To what? My empty dorm room? To the library books stacked on my desk; the same ones I had been poring over all semester? Looking at the ground, I kicked a rock down the street and watched as it rolled into the sewer.

  “We never got that coffee,” I said, stopping before we reached the gates. “You wouldn’t want to get dinner with me, would you?”

  Noah grinned. “Yes.”

  He brought me to an Italian grocery store, a short distance from school. Inside, everything was tiny and packaged in little tins or paper wrapping tied with ribbon. The men behind the counter wore white butcher’s coats. There was an entire corner devoted only to ravioli.

  “What do you feel like eating?” Noah said, walking down the cramped aisles, a bounce in his step.

  I bit my lip, embarrassed to admit what I actually was craving. “Pie?”

  He gazed at me, a big grin spreading over his face. “Me too. And olives. Oh, and spaghetti,” he said, pressing his fingers against a glass counter of prepared foods.

  He zigzagged through the store, picking things off the shelves and piling them in my arms until I could barely see where I was walking. One hard salami. A wedge of cheese. A package of green figs. A container of premade spaghetti with pesto. And a slice of rhubarb pie from the bakery section, with a pint of vanilla ice cream to go on the side.

  I kept laughing and dropping things on the floor as he took the items from me and placed them by the register.

  While Noah joked with the cashier, I gazed out the window. The streetlamps were off, but as I watched, something pale emerged from the darkness, approaching the storefront. I leaned forward, squinting into the night. A car passed, its headlights wrapping around the silhouette of a boy, his shoulders shifting as he moved toward me.

  Slowly, the smile faded from my face. Dante, my lips mouthed as I watched the outline of his body, trying to make out his arms, his chest, his face.

  “Renée,” Noah said, leaning toward me.

  Dante must have seen him standing beside me, because he froze.

  The wedge of cheese slipped from my hands. No, I thought. Don’t go.

  As I made for the door, the figs slipped from my hands, but I didn’t even stop to pick them up. “I’m sorry,” I said to Noah as he bent over the fruit on the floor. “I’ll be right back.” And with that, I ran outside.

  “Wait!” I yelled, but when I reached the sidewalk, Dante was nowhere to be seen. Desperate, I ran into the middle of the street, looking wildly in either direction. He was gone.

  Through the storefront window, I could see Noah staring at me, confused. Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I walked back, when something caught my eye on the telephone pole next to where I had just seen Dante. A flyer was stapled to the post, its sides flapping in the wind. I flattened it out, my mouth dropping as I read the words scrawled in Latin over the advertisement in thick marker. I translated:

  WAIT FOR ME.

  “Are you okay?” Noah said as I stepped inside. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  “I think I did,” I said softly, my mind racing. Had Dante left that note for me to find? How many people wrote notes in Latin around the city?

  “Why did you run out there? What did you see?”

  I paused, trying to feel for Dante’s presence, but there was nothing; not even the slightest hint of him anywhere. Maybe it was just graffiti. Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe he had never even been there in the first place. “Someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

  Wait for me, the wind seemed to say as we stepped outside. Even if Dante hadn’t written it, I would wait.

  We walked to a stone courtyard nearby and sat on the ground, surrounded by skinny trees, barren, save for a few lingering yellow leaves. Behind us stood a fountain with a statue of a boy playing the flute, filling the night with the quiet sound of trickling water. What did a flute sound like? I tried to remember, but couldn’t.

  Noah loosened the knot of his tie, revealing a freckle on his neck, and handed me a fork.

  “Bon appétit,” he said, the streetlamps illuminating his face.

  As he poured me a glass of sparkling cider, I said, “At the end of class today you said you had an ulterior motive for asking me to coffee. What was it?”

  “I wanted to ask you what you were doing the other day in the hospital. With Anya.”

  “Oh.” Immediately, I regretted asking.

  I stared at my pie, which, despite my craving, still tasted bland. I could lie. I could tell him I was there visiting someone.

  “You weren’t visiting anyone,” Noah said.

  I clenched my jaw. Okay, that option was out. But I could still evade the question. Or I could just tell him the truth. I felt his eyes on me. He had just run across the city with me, chasing someone I thought was Miss LaBarge.

  Reaching into my pocket, I touched the piece of paper on which I had written both parts of the riddle. I told him about my visions of the hospital and the cemetery, how I had gone to each and found this riddle. I omitted Dante and Clementine. “The grave was there, just like I had seen it in my vision.”

  “You’re joking,” he said, his eyes searching mine.

  “No,” I said softly.

  “It can’t be,” he said, a glimmer of a smile masking his unease. “I thought the immortality part was just a legend.”

  Taking the paper with the verses out of my pocket, I handed it to him. He unfolded it and spread it out on the ground and read the inscriptions.

  to arrive there

  follow the nose of the bear

  to the salty waters beneath;

  here it is laid to rest

  where to only the best

  of our kind it shall be bequeathed.

  Noah didn’t say anything for a long while. “You really found these? You didn’t just make them up?”

  “Why would I make them up?”

  The smile fell from his face. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Inching toward him, I leaned over the paper. “I’ve been trying to figure out what it means, but I haven’t been able to get anywhere. It must mean somewhere in the cemetery, but there isn’t any water there except for a drinking fountain.”

  He held the verses up to the light, reading them to himself again, before turning to me. “But of course it isn’t buried in this grave. Look.” He pointed to the line: here it is laid to rest. “When this line is isolated on a tombstone, it would lead you to believe that the secret was literally buried in that plot. But when you put it next to the riddle from the hospital, its meaning changes.”

  “The tombstone isn’t marking anything,” I realized, squinting at the page.

  “Exactly,” Noah said. “It’s not buried in the cemetery. It’s a trick, done on purpose to make people searching for the secret to think it’s buried there. But it’s not. It’s in salt water. Maybe in the ocean. The problem is that you’re missing the last part, which I would guess is actually the first part, if you look at the punctuation.”

  “How do you know there’s only one part of the riddle left?” I asked. “What if there are more?”

  “I don’t think there are,” he said. “If there are three riddles, with three lines each, then there are a total of nine lines. One for each of the sisters.
All the tombstone riddle tells us is that the secret can only be found by Monitors,” Noah said. “The phrase the best of our kind must mean that only the best Monitor will find it.” Noah’s eyes fell on me. “That’s you.”

  Pulling my knees toward me, I shook my head. “No, I’m just ranked number one at St. Clément. There are lots of older, better Monitors than me. I couldn’t even figure out the riddle without your help.”

  “All Monitors work in pairs….” he said, his gaze resting on me.

  Blushing, I looked at my food, which I had barely touched. I should have felt flattered, but instead I was overwhelmed with guilt. “And you have Clementine,” I said softly.

  “Right,” he said, and we sat in an uncomfortable silence, Noah slicing more cheese as I glanced around the courtyard, wondering if, somehow, Dante was watching us right now.

  “What we have to do is start looking for a body of salt water with some sort of bear near it. One that only Monitors can find.”

  “Or alternatively, that the Undead can’t find. The Undead can’t sink in water,” I said, unable to meet his eye as I remembered the Dead Man’s Float lecture from gym class last year, and how we learned that once a person dies and reanimates, he floats to the surface. “It’s got to be buried underwater somewhere.”

  “You might be right,” Noah said, his hand grazing mine as he passed the piece of paper back to me. “What do you think it leads to?”

  I imagined following Miss LaBarge to a small house where she was in hiding. When she opened the door, my parents were behind her, their eyes watering as they ran to me and wrapped me in their arms. “What took you so long?” they asked. I thought of Dante, of meeting him out in the open, on the streets of Montreal. I imagined him pinning me against the wall of my dorm room and kissing me. I thought of us ten years from now, falling asleep next to each other, our chests rising and falling in unison. I thought of the way he would look when he was older; I could almost see it. I picked up a fig, twirling its stem in my finger. “Happiness.”

  Noah studied me through his glasses, as if he could see a different side of me. Suddenly he said, “I like you.”