Until I Die

Page 15

The image had been painted many centuries ago. Maybe even a millennium. I inspected it carefully, taking in every detail. The woman was old, her posture a little bent. And the man was gleaming with youth and health. I would have thought it was an old lady with her grandson, except for the way they stood hand in hand, their heads slightly inclined toward each other in a gesture of solidarity and affection.
I turned back to the title page. L’amur immortel, I read again, and then saw a subtitle written in spidery letters below. I could hardly make it out; the ink had worn with the centuries, and the old French was difficult to decipher. “A tale . . . love and tragedy . . . a bar . . . and . . . human . . .” My heart caught in my throat. Could the word be bardia? There was just enough space for it to be. And a human?
Oh my God, I had found something. My head spun and then cleared abruptly as the gallery’s doorbell buzzed. I got up, a bit wobbly, and raced into the gallery space. A familiar figure stood behind the glass door, tall enough to take up the whole windowpane. He cupped his eyes with his hands so he could see inside. I pressed the door release under the front desk.
“Vincent!” I exclaimed, feeling a twinge of guilt. “How did you know I was here?”
He strode into the gallery, hands in his pockets and an amused look on his face. After giving me a soft kiss, he released me and glanced curiously around the space. “I have my ways,” he said. Doing a Vincent Price voice and raising an eyebrow, he quipped, “I always know where you are.”
“No, really,” I prodded, laughing.
“Well, you see, there’s this thing called a text message,” he said, deadpan. “And I got one from your phone during your lunch break that told me you were gallery-sitting this afternoon.” A hint of a smile curved the corners of his lips.
“Oh, right,” I said, lamely shaking my head. This whole situation with Vincent’s undercover operations was messing with my mind. It was making me paranoid.
“So what are you doing here?” Vincent asked. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in the midst of gainful employ. Not that homework isn’t gainful.”
I was about to open my mouth to tell him the whole thing—to excitedly whip out the book and show it to him—when all of a sudden I hesitated. I didn’t want him to see it . . . yet. Not until I had actually figured out what it meant. Maybe it was my pride holding me back, but I wanted to see his face when I set the finished puzzle in front of him, complete with valuable information he couldn’t have found somewhere else.
“I was just feeling bored. Thought it would be fun to do something different for a change.”
“Bored?” Vincent looked astounded. “In the past week and a half you’ve gone to a total of four movies with Violette, and you and I have hung out . . . well, not as much as I’d have liked.” A flash of guilt crossed his face before he forced it to disappear.
“So what are you up to tonight?” I asked.
“The usual boring revenant stuff,” he replied, visibly squirming, and then he sighed and looked me in the eye. “Kate, you know what I’m doing.”
“Not exactly.” I couldn’t help the trace of bitterness in my voice.
Vincent pulled me close and said, “You want to call it off? You say the word.”
“No.” I shook my head, and Vincent wrapped his arms around me. “I love you, Kate,” he whispered. I closed my eyes and nestled in closer to him.
“We’re still on for tomorrow night, aren’t we?” he murmured.
I pulled back from him and smiled. “Pizza and a movie in our own private cinema? I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”
“Yeah, I try to go out in style. Can’t have you forgetting about me for the three days I’m dormant.”
“As if!” Pulling him to the door, I said, “Papy’s due back in a few minutes, and I wouldn’t want him to think I was slacking on the job.”
“Hey, your Papy loves me,” Vincent said.
“He’s not the only one,” I said, and opening the door, I pretended to push him out onto the street. Closing it securely behind him, I blew a saucy air-kiss through the glass. Laughing, he turned and headed up the avenue toward our neighborhood.
I sped back to the office, slipped the small book into my purse, and then carefully put the boxes back into their places in the storage closet. As I locked it, I heard the key turn in the front door and Papy’s voice calling to tell me he had returned.
“I’m in the back,” I called, my voice quivering in my panic. I still had the closet key in my hand. How could I get it back into the drawer without Papy noticing? I walked out to the main gallery, and composing myself as much as possible, I gave him a winning smile and asked how his meeting had gone.
“Top-notch property, ma princesse.” He bustled to the back to hang up his coat. “There’s another dealer bidding for it, though, so I’m not sure it’s mine yet,” came his muffled voice from behind the divider. I quickly peeled a piece of tape off the tape dispenser, pressed the key to the sticky side, slipped the desk drawer open, and reattached it to the spot I had found it. Just as I slid the drawer closed, Papy turned the corner.
“Anything exciting happen while I was gone?” he asked, coming to stand next to me behind the desk.
“Let’s see . . . the French president dropped by. Brigitte Bardot. Oh yeah, and then Vanessa Paradis came in with Johnny Depp. They bought a million-euro statue. You know, the usual.”
He shook his head in amusement and began scribbling in his appointment book. I kissed him good-bye and tried not to break into a sprint as I headed for the door.
FIFTEEN
AS SOON AS I GOT HOME, I THREW MY HOMEWORK on a chair and sat down on my bed with the book. In the beginning it was difficult. Like reading Beowulf in English—there were a lot of words I didn’t understand. But gradually, the magic of the story pulled me in, and I felt like I was right there with the characters: Goderic, a nineteen-year-old revenant, and Else, the girl he married just months before he died.
It was Else who was there when Goderic awoke, the day he was to be buried. She gave him food and drink, and he attained his immortality. They learned what he was from a seer who had followed his light.
Else and Goderic became transients, moving every time he died so that the locals wouldn’t become suspicious. As she got older, they had to change their story, claiming to be mother and son. After several years Else became sick. Goderic called a guérisseur to heal her, and the healer recognized what Goderic was by his aura.
Goderic pled with the man to find a way to let him age normally with his beloved—to resist the powerful desire to die. The guérisseur didn’t have that knowledge, but told him of another healer who had great power in the way of the immortals.
The next part was full of words I didn’t understand. It was phrased in a peculiar style—like a prophecy—but I tried to decipher it word by word. Still speaking of the powerful healer, the man told Goderic, “From his family will come the one to see the victor. If anyone holds the key to your plight, it will be the VictorSeer’s clan. He lives in a faraway land, among les A . . . . . . . . . . , and can be found under the Sign of the Cord, selling relics to the pilgrims.”
My heart skipped a beat. There was a word crossed out. An essential word. After the capital A, a thick line of black ink had obscured the rest of the word, making it impossible to know among whom the healer lived. Someone had purposely drawn through it. Someone who didn’t want the healer to be found, I thought.
I forced myself to keep reading, hoping that the word would recur later, but it didn’t. Goderic and Else began traveling north, but she contracted another illness along the way and died in Goderic’s arms. He was so distraught that he traveled to the city and hunted down a numa, who “delivered him from life.”
By the time I finished, it was two in the morning.
Who knew if there was even a grain of truth in the story? But if there was someone who could help me and Vincent, I wouldn’t stop until I found him. However, before I could, I had to locate another copy of the book—a copy that hadn’t been tampered with. And I knew just the place to start.
Although I slept only a few hours, I was wide awake as soon as my alarm sounded. I had set it early so that I could catch Mamie before she went up to her restoration studio and got lost in her work. But when I got to the kitchen, I saw I was too late: Mamie’s breakfast dishes were already in the sink, and the white work apron she wore while restoring paintings was missing from its hook by the door.
I sliced a baguette in half, cut it lengthwise, and then smoothed a chunk of salty butter along my bread. A little dab of homemade jam from the quince tree in my grandparents’ country garden, and I was holding a traditional tartine. Simple but delicious. I wrapped it in a napkin and carried it up the stairs with me.
Walking into Mamie’s studio was like entering another world—an oil-paint-and-turpentine-scented world—populated by the subjects of centuries of paintings. Young aristocratic mothers with perfectly dressed children and ribbon-festooned dogs playing at their feet. Mournful-looking cows, cud chewing in the midst of a fog-blanketed pasture. Tiny saints kneeling in front of a cross, with a jumbo-size Jesus hanging on it, bloody and twisted. Anything and everything was in Mamie’s world. No wonder I had spent my every free moment as a child up here.
My grandmother was brushing a clear liquid onto the surface of a time-darkened painting of Roman ruins. “Hi, Mamie!” I said, as I walked up behind her and plopped down onto a stool. I took a bite of tartine as I watched her work.
She carefully finished her brushstroke, and then turned, smiling brightly. “You’re up early, Katya!” She made a gesture that indicated that if her hands weren’t full, she would kiss me. I smiled. The all-important first-time-I-see-you-in-the-day cheek-kisses. I would never get used to letting someone get that near my mouth before having the chance to brush my teeth.
“Yeah. I had some stuff I needed to do before school. And I was just thinking about something I heard at the market the other day. I thought you could explain it.”
Mamie nodded expectantly.
“This woman was talking about finding a guérisseur. For her eczema, I think it was. And I’ve heard of guérisseurs —I know the word means ‘healer’—but I don’t really understand how they work. Are they kind of like the faith healers we have in the States?”
“Oh, no.” Mamie shook her head vigorously and tsked reproachfully. She placed her paintbrush in a jar of liquid and wiped her hands on a towel. From this enthusiastic response, I knew I was in for a good story. Mamie loved telling me about French traditions that I didn’t already know about, and the weirder the topic, the more she enjoyed it.
“Pas du tout. Guérisseurs have nothing to do with faith, although some claim that their healings are psychosomatic.” I laughed as I watched her become animated, warming up to her story. “But I, for one, know that’s not the case.”
Voilà! I thought. Trust Mamie to have information on such a bizarre topic. “What exactly are they, anyway?”
“Well, Katya. Guérisseurs have been around for centuries—from the time that there weren’t enough trained doctors to go around. They usually specialize in something, like the healing of warts or eczema, or even setting broken bones. The same specialized gift is passed from one family member to another, and once the gift is passed, the previous healer no longer bears the gift. There is always only one guérisseur in a family at a time, and each must consciously accept the responsibility in order to inherit it.
“Which is why there aren’t that many left. It used to be an honored profession. Now with modern medicine and rising skepticism, fewer people are proud to carry the gifts, and most of the younger generation refuse point-blank to accept it. And when that happens, the gift just disappears.”
“Sounds pretty awesome, actually,” I admitted.
“Even more awesome when you see it work,” Mamie said with a twinkle in her eye.
“You’ve met a guérisseur?”
“Why, yes. Twice, actually. Once was when I was pregnant with your father. I wasn’t even three months along, and an old farmer who lived near our country home asked if I wanted to know if it was a boy or girl. Turns out he was a guérisseur, and that was his family’s gift. That and curing nicotine addiction, if I remember correctly,” she said, tapping her lower lip and staring off into the mid-distance.
“And you didn’t think it was just a lucky guess?” I asked.
“Out of more than a hundred babies, he was never once wrong. And your own Papy wouldn’t have the handsome face he has today if it weren’t for another guérisseur,” she continued.
“Once, when he was burning a pile of leaves, the wind changed and the flames hit him right in the face. Burned his eyebrows and the front of his hair right off. But a neighbor rushed him straight to his mother, and she ‘lifted’ the burn. Strangest thing . . . she didn’t even touch him, she just acted like she was sweeping it off his face and then throwing it away, flicking it off her fingers. And it worked. He had no burns. But it took a while for his eyebrows to grow back.”
“Well, that one’s a little harder to dispute,” I admitted.
“There’s nothing to dispute. It works. These people have some sort of power. Just don’t ask why or how. It doesn’t make any sense. But a lot of important things in this world don’t.”
Her story complete, Mamie patted the front of her apron and came to stand next to me. “I have to work, dear. The Musée d’Orsay needs this by the end of the week.” She brushed my chin softly with her hand. “You know, Katya, you look more like your mother every day.”