The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

by Adele Griffin

  LUCY LIM: I’ve probably spent a thousand hours thinking back on that last time I went down to New York. Looking for the signs. Combing for any clue I might have missed. The plan began lightheartedly enough. Exam week is a joke for seniors. So that’s why I decided to spend some real time with Addy in the city, from Wednesday through Sunday. To check in on her, see how she was really doing in 3D.

  “I’ll help you settle in,” I said. “We’ll paint your walls.”

  “Oh, fun! Slumber party! We’ll wear pajamas and jump on my new bed.”

  Even Mom wanted me to take that time off from school. What I can say for sure was that Addy was trying, but she wasn’t quite herself. And by trying, I mean that she was working to stay connected. She’d stocked up on my favorite foods. She’d bought me a fluffy robe and towels and all these sweet hotel-y guest things. She asked questions about family and friends. She listened to the answers. We went on walks and hung out in coffee shops and talked and talked.

  We also went out, to all these exclusive parties, and I knew she was making a giant effort to get out of her head, but also not to talk about how much she missed Lincoln, or how paranoid she was that Zach was back-stabbing her and blacklisting her from all of New York. She’d picked up smoking, and she was a touch thin, which unsettled me, but something else going on with her. A restless energy, an impatience in the way she’d pick up a fork or swipe her Metro card. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  “Addy, are you off your Z?” I asked her, just once.

  “What? No way,” she promised.

  “Okay, but what’s up with the cigarettes?” I asked.

  “It takes away my jitters,” she answered.

  I still counted out of her bottle in the medicine cabinet every night. But I couldn’t depend on that as proof. Addy’d have known that I’d count the pills, and she’d have dropped one in the toilet every bit as routinely. I was also concerned about the creative output. She seemed a touch manic. Canvases everywhere, mostly sketches and studies for her new thing, Bridge Kiss, taped up.

  She’d also taken to writing on the walls. Again, it seemed restless. All of these names of artists, with quotes, as well as questions to herself from herself. I remember a few, like, “Why do you use the human face?” “Do you think of your art as mainstream or outsider?” “What is your role as a painter, as a young person, as a female?” Scrawled everywhere in Sharpie. It was like she was her own preacher, asking herself the Big Questions. But no answers.

  I remember some of the artists’ names: Kiki Smith, Joan Jonas, Blek la Rat, and a dozen more at least. There were also stacks and stacks of books. Mostly art books. She kept books in the oven and her art supplies in the fridge.

  We went out with Cheba a couple of nights. He struck me as perfectly fine, he never seemed drunk or high, so I officially don’t believe what people say about him as her pusher—all I blamed him for was getting Addy started on those smokes. But I never saw him do one random thing; he never offered me drugs, nada.

  At night, Addy never seemed particularly happy to be anywhere we went. She was always checking her phone. One time, I got nosy and searched her browser history, and I saw that all she did was cruise the Internet for Lincoln intel. Where he was, what he was up to. I didn’t tease her. It seemed way too painful.

  When I was packing to leave on Sunday, she came into my room, and she sat on the floor and broke down.

  “I’m spinning, Lulu,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m spinning and spinning. My brain is like a big echoing train station filled with announcements I can’t hear, and I’m trying to decide which trains I should board, but I can’t make any decisions because it’s too noisy.”

  “You’re off it, aren’t you?” I said. “Just tell me. You need to pause, Addy. You need to step away. I’ll step with you. And you’ve got to let meds work for you. If the Z isn’t working, you need to find a new protocol. You need to call your doctors, or let me call them.”

  But she just shrugged me off. Swore she was still on the Z, that it was still working. Waving off my words with her hand. “Let’s go away for the summer, too. Maybe down to the Keys. I loved it there so much.”

  “Sure, yes, totally. As long as you call your doctors, and get yourself readjusted.” I meant it, too. If she needed me, I could trade a summer on Lake George for one down in Florida, no problem.

  I stayed that afternoon. She was in no shape. I fixed her tea and toast. We watched Titanic, which was one of our favorite classics. We loved to share a box of Kleenex and hope that maybe this time it would turn out different for Jack and Rose. And I took an evening Amtrak. But I couldn’t get that picture of her out of my head, Addy huddled like a lost bird in the middle of this empty loft. And all of that noise in her head that was also charging at her from every wall.

  The last thing I did was hug her.

  “I promise, I will come back in three weeks. I promise I will go wherever you go this summer. You just have to hang on. Go see your shrink, get your Z levels right, don’t put yourself in harm’s way, and hang on.”

  “Promise me again, Lulu,” she said.

  So I promised again. I promised her a thousand times. “I’ll be back here before you know it.”

  I was really planning to do it, too. One hundred percent. For days afterward, she’d call me on the phone, and make me promise all over again. But I never felt that she believed me.

  Last photo of Lucy and Addison, taken in New York, courtesy of Gil Cheba.

  MARIE-CLAIRE BROYARD: I went to live in Paris for a couple of months—my impeccable French and my lipstick collection are the only things about myself that I’d consider accomplishments. But I was back by June. I had an invitation to the Artful Awareness fashion show over at the High Line. It’s an annual fundraiser, and they’d asked Addison to model.

  Now Addison was byoo-tee-ful, but she wasn’t what I’d ever call a natural model—if you see her in pictures, she never loses her Addison-ness. She stared much too intensely at people. Especially if they were holding a camera. But she was a presence, God knows. And when she kicked down the runway in this punk-rock, deconstructed safari jumpsuit and fabulous scrunchy desert boots, everyone screamed with delight. To the untrained eye, Addison Stone was still that same smart, bold, transgressive, sexy girl. Even if you didn’t know her by name, you’d probably heard a story. And you could feel that she was New York.

  I was in the third row. She looked radiant, but afterward when I went backstage, the truth came out. Addison wasn’t the meatiest chickadee, but up close she looked, well … her bones were protruding, and she had this waxen sickliness in her skin. Maybe it took the fact that I hadn’t seen her in a while to know that I was seeing her clearest. Gil Cheba was backstage, too, hovering around her fame like a pesky bloodsucking mosquito. I had to wonder if they were together. I sincerely hoped not. But nobody’s ever had the real story on that, have they?

  Addison was acting odd. She was putting on this stage-y voice. “Oh, Marie-Claire, how was Paris? I have missed you sooo much! We’re going out after the show, right? Gil’s spinning at Bembe. We’ll go in through the side door and get the best table in the back!”

  “I’d love to.” But I was being fake as well. She wasn’t quite balanced. She seemed jumpy and her tone was strained. I assumed she was on all the wrong kinds of drugs. Cheba would have given her his last shot of heroin if she’d been inclined toward that vice.

  GIL CHEBA: Nobody wants to accept his or her smack on the arse. Nobody wants to take his or her portion of blame for Addison’s spiral that summer. Now I might not have heard her signals, but it’s a travesty to call me her pusher or her dealer, as all these righteous people will be trying to convince you. Had Addison been partaking of one or two purely social drugs at one or two carefully cultivated parties—well, who could blame her? She’d had a rotten spring. And there’s no doctor who can tell you any antipsychotic medication offers a cure-all.

  Zach Frat was still knives-out for Addison
. Every day he’d try to find a new way to humiliate her. I know he got her dropped off the lists of the Met’s Costume Institute Gala and the Visiunaire party down at Miami Basel. And he’d tell anyone who’d listen about Addison’s continued unhealthy obsession with him. Outright lies about her ringing him up in the middle of the night and weeping and begging to get back together. That sort of nonsense.

  Lincoln Reed was a wanker, too. He’d completely distanced himself from Addison. So I was never the enemy. I’ve heard tell all sorts of shit, that I was turning her onto meth or opium. Bollocks. I was a friend and a shoulder to cry on. Rumors can take the piss out, but they won’t define me. And in this instance, they simply aren’t even close to the truth.

  LINCOLN REED: I’d stayed away from her, until I was ready. But I was always in reach—if she’d needed me, I’d have been there. We were both giving each other space. But she sent me a note about Front Street, so I went to check it out one afternoon, sometime in June. It was right after I got back from ten days in Brazil, where I’d ducked off to finish a project. I’d been slightly off the grid. I needed to paint and clear my head. I hadn’t even seen Addison since late April—I’d heard she was working hard and partying harder. I also heard Cheba was sticking to her like a cheap suit. Look, I’d heard a bunch of things. I wanted to see her for myself.

  I’d texted her before, that I was in the neighborhood, and could I swing by? She texted back yes. Half an hour’s warning. She opened the door, and boom—it was as if nothing had happened between us.

  “What’s up, Reed?”

  “What’s up, Ads?”

  Her smile lit her up. Like always. She was incandescent in that smile. “I want to paint you,” she said.

  “I want to hold you,” I said.

  “I want to keep you,” she said next, with a laugh.

  She looked fragile, but lovely anyway, in one of the vintage smocks she always painted in, long and flowing, spattered, paint speckled on the backs of her hands and all over her beautiful long fingers.

  We spent the afternoon together. It was going to happen from the first minute. We weren’t broken up. We’d never really broken up, as I saw it. We’d only moved too fast, that was all. We’d moved too fast, and then we’d jumped too far back from the flame. Now we would love and wrestle and pin this relationship back into its right place. We knew we could do it.

  I remember being in bed with her, kissing her, staring down at her face. She was an apparition, a night angel, black hair swirled out on the pillow, her eyes—so twinkling and electrifying. I felt like I’d be burnt up in her heat.

  “Let’s start over,” she said. “But this time, you move in here. With me.”

  “No.” And it was one of the hardest things I ever said.

  She just kept looking at me. Crushed.

  “I want to see you, of course,” I told her. “But I was hurt badly by you. I have to figure out a way to handle us. And I can’t be the guy that you’re with because you don’t want to be alone. That’s not the role I see for myself in our life.”

  She then became incredibly upset, blaming herself.

  “Nobody wants to stay with me,” she said. “I’m too broken. People see my scars, my meds, and they run. I’m improving all the time, but my failure calls me back.” She was crying, and then she couldn’t stop. She seemed almost too bewildered. As if her own crying jag had surprised her, a storm that had rushed in without warning. I couldn’t have explained it exactly, but I didn’t know how to handle it.

  I didn’t have any words that seemed right, so I just stayed with her, and I held her all night, and at daybreak she said, “It’s Lulu’s graduation from South Kingstown today. We could take off. Let’s drive up to Rhode Island.” I didn’t want to leave her, and I hadn’t seen Lucy in a while, and I’d never been to Addison’s home with her, and suddenly this whole day seemed very interesting. So we jumped in my car, and we drove to up to Peacedale.

  LUCY LIM: That morning, I woke up to see that my phone was just lit up in texts:

  “We’re on Route One!”

  “We just stopped at Cumberland Farms for coffee!”

  “We’re so close we can smell your mom’s pancakes on the griddle!”

  Oh my God, I squealed! I had the joy dizzies. I’d never in a million years expected Addy to come to South Kingstown High School graduation. And I never in two million years thought it would be the last time that I’d ever see her.

  CHARLIE STONE: When my sister came back to our high school that day, I could feel the whole school was almost, like—possessed by it. She didn’t look like anyone else’s sister. She didn’t look like a regular person. She had on this huge black straw sunhat, a little white dress, and this crazy purple scarf that twisted around and around and around her neck and then trailed down along the ground past her ankles. She and Lincoln were as big as two celebrities that we’d ever had. You’d have known they were stars even if you didn’t know who they were. Everyone could feel the buzz right from the first second.

  After commencement, they were standing around on the school’s back lawn. People were shuffling and edging to get near them. And people who didn’t even know who my sister was kept holding up their phones, snapping pictures of her. You gotta understand, South Kingstown’s a tiny country school where up till a few years ago, the cafeteria doubled as the auditorium. Addison was the shit, the biggest thing that had ever happened, and all my friends—and even people I didn’t know—were all like, “Introduce me, introduce me!”

  Addison took it really well. After a while, she stuck on a big pair of sunglasses. There was just too much fanzone up in her face.

  “Are you okay?” I kept asking.

  And I could hear Lucy whispering, “My jeep’s right around the corner, Addy. We can scoot anytime.”

  But Addison was cool. She was signing autographs. Kids were downloading her picture, tweeting her, pawing her, needing to have their moment. She gave it and then some. Maybe it was because Lincoln was standing beside her?

  I’d grown up around Addison’s ghosts and shadows, and I kept half-waiting for her to bolt. But she was Public Addison that day. She was polished and shiny. And then I stopped being worried for her. I was just proud of how extremely together she was.

  We all stopped by the house afterward, so she could check in with Mom and Dad. She didn’t stay long. She and Lincoln were leaving to spend the night in Newport. She wanted to go back to Green Hall. She invited me—she really wanted me to come, and if I’d known this was my last time … Look, I thought I’d be seeing Addison my whole life. I’d already made plans to hang out with friends. She was a little jittery to be home, too. So I told her I’d come see her in New York. She kissed me goodbye and gave me three hundred dollars. Three mint-condition hundies. I wish I could say I still had ’em, but the next day I went out and bought beer and new basketball sneakers.

  ROY STONE: The one who pays the bills is the one who calls the shots. We got a text from Addison that she’d stop by the house for twenty minutes. She didn’t want to stay longer. Of course that didn’t prevent her mom from running off to the grocery store and spending the whole damn morning slaving over a four-cheese lasagna. We wanted a family lunch. Was that so much to ask? We wanted to share some time with this Lincoln Reed kid, who we mostly knew about from the Internet, and from his interview on Face the Nation.

  “I’m so sorry, but I can’t stay,” she said. “I’ve got stuff.”

  “Your mother will be so disappointed, Addison.”

  “Just be grateful for the time that I’m giving. This dump brings back nightmares,” she said. Her voice went real hard when she said it, too.

  Of course I was upset. That was just a tough thing for Maureen to hear. We owned that house free and clear, too. Plenty of kids can’t say that about the roof above their heads. I tried not to let the hurt show on my face. I wanted to protect Maureen. But it was a tough visit. Even with hugs all around just before she left.

  And then she was g
one.

  From: Addison Stone

  Date: Jun 16 at 3:45 AM

  Subject: xoxo

  To: Lucy Lim

  Lulu, wouldn’t it be great if every day could be like graduation?

  Seeing you graduate—you’re done! No more SK!

  Bestest day.

  I almost felt nostalgia when Dengler-berry hugged me. Almost.

  Not really.

  She is still such a flippin plastic fake squick.

  Whaddaya wanna bet she’s pregnant this time next year?

  All the glitter dust faded when we got back to the city.

  Lincoln dropped me off, and I wanted him to stay the night and he didn’t …

  And after he left, I didn’t want to be alone.

  Marie-Claire pulled me out to a party, and wouldn’t you just know it, but Zach was there?

  So yes.

  In answer to your question. What you’d read about online. It happened.

  Only it wasn’t half as bad as they’re making it out to be.

  I said stupid things and Zach said worse stupid things.

  Cheba tried to throw cold water on it, but I might have had a tiny tantrum.

  Wish I hadn’t.

  I definitely don’t regret throwing the plate.

  Everyone should throw a plate against a wall at least once in a lifetime.

  Zach brings out the worst in me.

  And I know Lincoln must have heard about what happened.

  He won’t answer my texts.

  I’m staying in tonight.

  No more going out for me for the rest of my life.