The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

But Addison dropped her nightlife and her spa days, too, when she sank into Project #53. Addison had always been a girl you could count on to stay out until the wee hours, every night of the week. And somehow she’d be fresh as a daisy tomorrow.

So one afternoon, I wanted to see how fresh she was when she didn’t go out all night. I stopped by Lincoln’s place, only to find out that Addison had just about taken it over completely.

“Check it out, Marie-Claire. My floor plans of the Whitney. I’m using this to recreate the space where my portrait is hanging. This is how we’re choreographing the film—don’t mind the mess!”

“Mess? That’s an understatement, Addison. You’re living in squalor,” I told her. “And you’re dragging poor Lincoln down with you.”

“Oh, please. You’re overreacting,” she told me.

“Marie-Claire’s just reacting,” Lincoln shouted over. Laughing it off.

But I’m telling you, the place was trashed. Half-eaten takeout in boxes, cans of Red Bull and bottles of vitaminwater, dirty paint smocks and notebooks, stacks of magazines, and heaps of clothing everywhere. That girl had such horrific habits.

Poor Lincoln was attempting to work. He was painting on the way other side of the loft—but I wondered how he could even concentrate, with so much Addison-osity sucking up the oxygen. And I also remember that Addison, uncharacteristically, didn’t seem to care much about what Lincoln was up to. It was as if something had shifted inside her. She was brimming with her own plans. I was curious about what Lincoln thought of all that disorder in his home—but he seemed quite sweet and good-boyfriend-supportive. So I kept my trap shut.

LINCOLN REED: She went deep. Really deep. She dropped Cheba for a while, which I appreciated. But she also got that heinous tattoo, which I didn’t appreciate.

LUCY LIM: There are things I wish I could do over. And telling Addison about Ida is one of them. At the time, right after she’d moved into Lincoln’s, I hadn’t considered how that information would affect her. But now, with the rest of my life to reflect on it, I have to wonder.

Over that winter break, I’d hunted down Ida. I’d been sleuthing, and finally, I found a name in a census poll, right outside Bristol in Dartmouth. Ida Grimes, 1899 to 1919. Dead by twenty. I didn’t have much else. No photograph, no cause of death. But I’d placed an Ida in Dartmouth, and that seemed worth mentioning to Addy.

So I did. I thought it would validate something for her, the way it had for me. Like, make her realize maybe it wasn’t all cooked up by mental illness? But why had I just assumed “Ida Grimes” would give Addy peace? Maybe because I’d always hated to think that she’d invented Ida. A poltergeist seemed so harmless, compared with all of those sharpened blades inside Addy’s own head.

What I didn’t know was that instead of closing Pandora’s box, it broke the lid off. Maybe it would have come off, anyway. But sometime that spring, Addy got someone at Sacred Tattoo to ink Ida’s name and dates to the back of her neck. I didn’t see it till spring break. By then, of course, I totally regretted I’d said anything.

LINCOLN REED: Lucy came to me with all her Ida guilt around the same time Addison had started Project #53. She’s such a good soul, and always alert to shifts in Addison’s moods. And Lucy was as good a friend to me as she was to Addison. We could text each other jokes, ways to share and shrug off our fears. When Lucy and I talked through anything Addison—her manic swings, her talent, her stunts, her heists, her random acts of tattoo—I felt straightened out. I could deal with Addison, as long as I had Lucy’s advice ringing in my ears.

LUCY LIM: Basically, I said to Lincoln, “Act like you’re happy she did it. Tell Addy that you see the Ida Grimes tattoo as a way of her making peace with Ida. Pretend you think this is Addy’s way of accepting that Ida Grimes is a guardian angel or a muse.” That was the baloney I was feeding myself, anyway.

DR. ROLAND JONES: No. I didn’t know about what she had tattooed onto the back of her neck. She kept that hidden from me. As a matter of fact, beginning with that spring and Project #53, Addison kept quite a lot hidden from me.

LINCOLN REED: The tattoo wasn’t a stand-alone gesture. Addison’s reach was competing with her grasp to get to Project #53. She got very spiritual and monkish that whole week before the big event, which was March 15, the Ides.

We decided to prep for it together. Which started out corny—but then turned serious. We created an ashram out of the loft. We decided not to speak out loud. No email, phone or texts, not that Addison had any presence online. She didn’t keep a Facebook account or Twitter or Tumblr. She thought all of those things were distractions, scrapbooks that blocked and disrupted your real life. We meditated, she went cold turkey off the junk food, and we limited our intake to staples like dark greens, nuts and fruits. We listened to Gregorian chants and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and we did Bikram yoga by sundown. No light except candles.

It was extreme, but I loved being in Addison’s skin with her—she was so purposeful and single-minded about #53.

She had created their Whitney blueprint design on vellum paper in addition to the copy on her hard drive, plus she had memorized the play-by-play she’d made with Cam and Dom. It showed everything that needed to go down once the Whitney’s alarm system was suspended. We studied it every night, the last thing we did before we went to bed.

That entire week we slept facing each other. Same breath, same pulse.

“Synchronicity empowers me,” Addison told me. She even wrote it on my bathroom wall, in this beautiful lettering over my medicine cabinet. I look at it every morning, though now of course, since she’s been gone, the message reads very differently.

On the last morning, we woke up and realized we’d been holding hands all night. Thoughts of failure—an unsuccessful break-in, getting arrested and becoming the punch line of the next day’s news, defeating her ego, destroying her reputation—we refused to think about that. We were on the tightrope, and we couldn’t look down.

DOMINICK LUTZ: Addison had made a replica of the plastic-encased museum card to replace what she’d exhibited. So instead of having a card that read, Addison Stone: Self-Portrait, it read, Film of the Theft of the Self-Portrait of Addison Stone. I always loved that touch. Addison could get the details so right, from restyling her T-shirt to that last stroke of the brush that jumped an image to life. She did nothing halfway.