Life Eternal

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.”

I was so taken aback that I didn’t know what to say. I loved Dante. He was my soul mate. “I’m sorry,” I said softly, “but I—”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, shaking himself out of the moment. “I just meant that I don’t know anyone else who would do this with me.”

I rested my cheek on my hand, not sure what he meant.

He leaned back on his palms. “Chase a woman around underground. Buy one of every item in a gourmet grocery store and eat everything straight out of the box, while sitting on the ground in a random courtyard. And then for dessert, show me a set of cryptic messages that might lead to the secret of the Nine Sisters.”

“I’ve barely eaten anything,” I said. “And you make it sound much more exciting than it is.”

Noah let out a laugh. “That’s definitely not true. I don’t know any girls who would break into a hospital through a private tunnel entry, sneak into a hospital room while someone is sleeping inside, and crawl under the bed to retrieve an engraving.”