Die for Me

by Amy Plum

  I shook my head and gave him a grateful smile.

  “You know I’m here whenever you need me,” he said, pulling his glasses back down to his nose.

  “Thanks, Papy,” I whispered, squeezing his hand before turning to leave.

  I could never tell him about my problems. Even if I had just broken up with a regular human boyfriend, Papy couldn’t really understand. He and Mamie lived in a perfectly functioning dreamworld. They were still madly in love and spent their time doing things they both enjoyed. They had a normal life. A stable life. They had everything I wanted.

  The café owner welcomed me back personally, seating me in the front corner of the room, where I would have some privacy. I sipped my café crème and ate a croissant as I lost myself in my book. It must have been a half hour later when I realized that the chair across from me was occupied. Jules sat in front of me with a wicked grin on his face, his chestnut eyes sparkling with humor.

  “So, Miss America, you thought you could pull a disappearing act and just abandon all of us. No such luck.”

  I almost laughed with happiness at seeing him again, but played it cool, asking, “What’s the deal with you dead guys? Are you following me, or what? Last night Charles, and now you!”

  “You saw Charles?”

  “Yeah, he was at this club I went to over near Oberkampf.” My voice slowed as I saw Jules’s amazement.

  “Which club?”

  “Honestly, I don’t even know what it was called. There wasn’t a sign or anything.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “No, I was just leaving when I saw him standing outside. Why?”

  Jules considered what I had told him, then shifted the conversation in a different direction. “So . . . when’re you coming back?”

  My smile faded. “I can’t, Jules.”

  “You can’t what?”

  “I can’t come back. I can’t let myself be with Vincent.”

  “How about being with me, then?” Seeing him wink flirtatiously, I laughed. “Can’t blame me for trying,” he said, grabbing my hand across the table and lacing his fingers through mine.

  I shot him an embarrassed smile and said, “You’re incorrigible.”

  “And you’re blushing.”

  I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling and said, “Being the young, dashing artist, Jules, I’m sure you have lots of girls just beating down your door.”

  “Yeah, we dead guys really score with the chicks.” He let go of my hand and sat back in his chair, wearing a cocky expression. “Actually, since you have so adamantly refused my attentions, I feel free to tell you that I have several girlfriends that I see on rotation, just to make sure nothing gets too serious.”

  “Is one of them the barely dressed model I saw in your studio that day?”

  “That is purely a professional relationship. Unlike what ours would be if you would just give me a chance.” He puckered his lips in a sexy kiss.

  “Oh, Jules. Stop!” I groaned and mock-punched him in the arm.

  “Ow!” he said, rubbing the spot with his hand. “Damn, you’re not just pretty, you pack a mean punch, too!”

  “If you’re going to sit here and torture me, then you can just get up and go back to that fancified mortuary you all live in,” I said.

  “Ooooh! She dares send the poor zombie boy away in shame! What if I bring news?”

  I looked up at him. “News of what?”

  “News that Vince is pining away for you. That he’s inconsolable.” Jules’s tone was serious now. “That he’s not only technically a ‘dead man walking’ . . . now he’s emotionally one too.”

  My stomach clenched, and I fought to keep my voice steady. “Look, Jules, I’m really sorry. I wanted to give it a chance, but after seeing Charles carried home in a body bag . . .” I paused. Jules was staring at me with challenge in his eyes. It gave me strength.

  “I can’t let myself fall for Vincent if it means having a constant reminder of death. I’ve had enough of that to deal with in the last year.”

  He nodded. “I know about that. I’m sorry about your parents.”

  I took a deep breath, and my aching heart hardened as I spoke. “Besides, I don’t think you’re being honest with me. I saw Vincent yesterday sharing a very tender moment with a gorgeous blonde.”

  Jules acted like he hadn’t heard me. Turning over his paper place mat, he took an artist’s charcoal pencil out of his shirt pocket and began doodling on it. He talked as he drew.

  “Vince wanted me to check on you. He doesn’t dare approach you himself. He says he doesn’t want to cause you any more agony. After seeing you sprint out of La Palette yesterday, he was afraid that you might have drawn the wrong conclusion. Which you obviously did.”

  I felt my temper flare. “Jules, I saw what I saw. How much more obvious could it have been?”

  Jules seized my gaze. “Kate, you’re obviously not stupid, so I’m assuming you must be incredibly blind. Geneviève is one of us. She’s an old friend who’s like a sister to us. Vincent’s in love, but not with her.”

  My breath caught in my throat.

  Satisfied that he had gotten my attention, he looked calmly back down at his paper, concentrating intently on his scribbling as he continued. “He’s trying to figure things out. To find a way around the situation. He asked me to tell you that.”

  Jules’s gaze flickered up at me and then back down at his place mat. “Not bad,” he said. He tore off a square and then, standing up, handed it to me.

  It was a sketch of me, sitting there in the café. I looked like a Botticelli Venus, radiating serenity and natural loveliness. “I look beautiful,” I said in awe, looking up from the drawing to his serious face.

  “You are beautiful,” he said, leaning over and kissing me softly on the forehead, before turning and striding out of the café.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  WHEN I GOT HOME THE NEXT AFTERNOON FROM another book-reading session at the Café Sainte-Lucie, Mamie was coming out of the apartment with a visitor. Most of her clientele—paintings dealers and museum curators—stopped by on weekdays during working hours. So if someone came on the weekend, you could be sure it was a private collector.

  The well-dressed man stood in the hallway with his back to me, holding a large, slender, brown-paper-wrapped package, watching Mamie lock our front door behind them. “You can take the elevator, and I’ll carry the painting up the stairs,” she was saying, when the man turned around. It was Jean-Baptiste.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. My body froze as my mind struggled over this head-on collision between my two worlds: the undead clan I had almost gotten mixed up with, and my own comforting mortal family.

  “My dear girl, I’ve frightened you. My apologies!” His voice came out smooth and monotone, as if he were reading a script. He was dressed as he was the first time I saw him, wearing an expensive suit with a patterned silk ascot at the neck, and gray hair carefully oiled and combed back from his aristocratic face.

  “Katya, dear, this is a new client of mine: Monsieur Grimod de La Reynière. Monsieur Grimod, my granddaughter, Kate. You got home at just the right time, dear. Could you carry this painting up the stairs to my studio? I’m afraid it’s too big to put on the elevator.”

  Jean-Baptiste continued staring at me in amusement while Mamie opened the door to the tiny elevator. I could feel my anger mounting as he lifted a smug eyebrow. His trespassing into my world felt like a violation.

  As in many Parisian apartment buildings, our elevator was tiny. It barely held two people standing side by side, but a third, or a large painting in this case, was impossible.

  I lifted the paper-wrapped painting carefully by the edges and began inching my way up the remaining three flights of stairs. The painting was about half my size in height, but the frame had been removed, so it wasn’t heavy.

  I got to the top of the stairs just as Mamie unlocked her studio door, chatting animatedly with Jean-Baptiste as they entered. I stared
at the back of his stiffly held form and wondered just what Vincent’s “uncle” was doing here in my house. First Jules, now Jean-Baptiste! I thought. How could I move on if Vincent’s “family” kept popping up in my life? My emotions had been in roller-coaster mode since talking with Jules, but I was determined to stick with my original decision—I was putting my heart at risk if I continued to see Vincent.

  As I stepped through the doorway, I breathed the comforting odor of oil paints and varnish deeply into my lungs. Mamie’s studio had always been one of my favorite places to hang out.

  Six maids’ rooms that took up the entire top floor of our building had been combined to make one large workspace, and most of the ceiling and roof had been knocked through to install frosted-glass skylights, which flooded the room with diffused sunlight.

  Mamie’s current restoration projects were scattered around the room on easels. A time-darkened old master painting of a herd of cows in a meadow sat across from a brightly colored Postimpressionist painting of cancan girls high-kicking their petticoats in a dance hall line, seemingly shocking a Spanish woman dressed in black, who prudishly held a fan in front of her lips on a nearby canvas.

  “Let’s have a look at this,” Mamie said, taking the package from me and laying it down on a large worktable standing in the center of the room. She carefully removed the paper, and then turned the painting over and held it up to inspect it. It was a life-size portrait of a young man from the waist up, wearing a dark blue Napoleonic-looking soldier’s uniform and a tall black plumed hat. The sitter was obviously Jean-Baptiste himself.

  “My, you can certainly see the family resemblance,” Mamie said in awe, looking from the painting to her client and back again.

  Leaning forward, he touched a small rip in the canvas, at the level of the man’s forehead. “The tear is here,” he said.

  “Well, it’s a clean slice, so it will be easy to repair. Just a patch to the back, and we may not even need to touch it up. What did you say made the incision?”

  “I didn’t say, but it was a knife.”

  “Oh,” exclaimed Mamie in surprise.

  “Nothing to worry about. Grandkids roughhousing, you know. They’ve been banned from playing in the study from now on,” he said, looking calmly at me as he spoke.

  “Well, if you could just wait here, I’ve left my receipt book down in the apartment. Kate, could you please make Monsieur Grimod a coffee?” She nodded toward a coffeepot set up on a corner table and bustled out the door, leaving it open behind her.

  The elderly revenant and I stood motionless until we heard the sound of the antique elevator lurching into motion. Then he took a step toward me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We must talk,” he said, his authoritative voice grating on my nerves. “Jules tells me you saw Charles. Please tell me where.”

  I decided that the sooner I told Jean-Baptiste what he wanted to hear, the sooner he would leave. “He was standing outside a club I went to near Oberkampf. It was Friday, around midnight.”

  “Who was he there with?” Although he seemed nothing but composed on the surface, I could tell from a twitch at the corner of his mouth that things were not well.

  “It looked like he had come there alone. Why?”

  He glanced toward the door as if calculating the time he had to speak.

  “I came here for two reasons.” He spoke softly and quickly. “The first was to ask you about Charles. He disappeared a few days ago after”—he glanced at his portrait with distaste—“boning up on his knife-throwing skills.

  “And the second was to pay an inconspicuous visit to your family. I needed to see where you were from.”

  My anger returned in a second. “What, you’re spying on me? What do you mean ‘where I’m from’? If my grandparents have money?” I shook my head in disgust. “Well, they do, but not as much as you. I don’t see why it matters anyway.” I began walking away from him, toward the door.

  “Stop!” he commanded, and I did. “Money doesn’t matter to me. Character does. Your grandparents are honorable. And safe.”

  “What, honorable enough to fix your painting?”

  “No. Honorable enough to take into my confidence. If the need were ever to present itself.”

  As the meaning of his words began to dawn on me, my back stiffened. He was spying on my family to see if I was good enough for Vincent. He must not have gotten the memo that it was definitely and definitively over. “There will never be a need. Don’t worry, Monsieur Grimod, I will not be intruding upon your precious home life again.” Appallingly, I felt a tear run down my cheek, and I wiped it angrily away.

  The sharp lines of his face softened. Touching my arm lightly with his fingers, he said, “But dear girl, you must come back. Vincent needs you. He is inconsolable.”

  I looked down at the ground and shook my head.

  Jean-Baptiste placed his perfectly manicured fingers under my chin and lifted it until my eyes met his. “He is willing to make extreme sacrifices to be with you. You don’t owe us—him—anything, but I would beg you to please come hear him out.”

  My resolve began to crumble. “I’ll think about it,” I whispered finally.

  He nodded, satisfied.

  “Thank you.” His voice cracked as his lips uttered words they must rarely speak. He walked rapidly toward the door and began making his way down the stairs, as I heard the elevator ascend.

  Mamie stepped out, looking down at her notebook, and then up at me as she came through the door. Glancing around the empty studio in confusion, she asked, “Well, where did he go?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  IT WAS RAINING. HARD. I WATCHED THE RAINDROPS hit my floor-to-ceiling windows with a force that made them ricochet into the pond that was forming on my balcony.

  I had been thinking about Vincent ever since Jean-Baptiste had talked to me a few hours before, comparing what he had said to what Jules had told me in the café. Vincent was trying to work things out. To find a solution. Should I give him a chance to talk, or would that just be opening myself up to the risk of more pain?

  What’s better, I thought, to be safe and suffer alone, or to risk pain and actually live? Although my head and heart were leading me in two different directions, I was certain that I didn’t want my life to resemble what it had for the last three weeks: a drab existence void of color, warmth, and life.

  I walked to the windows and peered out into the darkening sky, wishing the answer to my question could be printed there in plain letters across the rain clouds. My gaze lowered to the park below, and I saw the form of a man leaning back against the park gate. He was standing in the pouring rain, no umbrella, looking up at my window. I stepped out onto the balcony.

  A gust of cold air caught me, and I was immediately drenched by the beating rain, but I was able to see the upturned face, three stories below. It was Vincent. Our eyes met.

  I hesitated for a second. Should I? I asked myself before realizing I had already made up my mind. Ducking back into my room, I grabbed a towel from a chair and dabbed my face and hair as I searched for my rain boots. Pulling them from under my bed, I raced out into the hallway, bumping into Mamie outside the kitchen.

  “Katya, where are you going?” she asked.

  “Have to go out. I’ll call you if I’m going to be late,” I said as I threw my coat on and grabbed an umbrella.

  “Okay, darling. Just take care. It’s pouring outside.”

  “I know, Mamie,” I said, grabbing her and hugging her violently before I ran out the door.

  “What has gotten into you?” I heard her call as the door slammed behind me and I sprinted down the stairs.

  Once out the front door, I turned the corner of the building toward the park, and then came to an abrupt halt. There he was. Standing in the lashing rain, looking at me with an expression that made me stop in my tracks. It was an expression of dizzying relief. As if he had come across a pond of crystal clear water in the middle of a
desert. I recognized it because I felt exactly the same.

  I dropped my umbrella and threw myself on him. His strong arms wrapped around me, lifting me up off the ground in a desperate embrace. “Oh, Kate,” he breathed, nuzzling his head against mine.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked.

  “Trying to be as near to you as possible,” he said, kissing the raindrops off my cheek.

  “How long . . . ,” I began to ask.

  “It’s become a bit of a habit. I was just watching until I saw your light turn out. I never thought you’d see me,” he responded, setting me down. “But let’s get you out of the rain. Will you come back with me? Home? So we can talk?”

  I nodded. He picked up my umbrella and, holding it over our heads, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and held me close the whole way.

  As we stepped into the dappled light of the foyer, I faced Vincent and gasped. He was gaunt. He had lost weight, and his hollow eyes had dark circles beneath them. I hadn’t noticed that in La Palette, having other things (like a gorgeous blond revenant) on my mind. But standing here, a couple of feet away from him, his deteriorated state was unmistakable. “Oh, Vincent!” I said, reaching toward his face.

  “I haven’t been well,” he explained, catching my hand before I touched him and folding it into his. As soon as his skin touched mine, my insides turned into a warm gooey mess. “Let’s go to my room,” he said, and led me down the servants’ hallway and through his open door.

  The curtains had been flung open. Scattered embers glowed in the hearth, and the room smelled like a campfire. I stood and watched Vincent add some kindling to start the fire back up. He piled some logs on before returning to me.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s cold or nerves,” I admitted, and held out my hand to show him how I was trembling. He immediately reached out to take me in his arms. “Oh, Kate,” he breathed, kissing the top of my head. I felt him shiver when his lips brushed my hair.

  He took my head in his hands, and his words rushed out in a torrent. “I can’t tell you how I’ve struggled during the last few weeks. I tried to disappear out of your life. To let you go. I wanted you to be able to live a normal life, a safe life. And I was almost convinced I had done the right thing until I came to see you.”