The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

by Adele Griffin

  CHARLIE STONE: Have you ever talked to Lucy Lim about Green Hall? I’ve got my version. It was fall, I was thirteen, so Addison and Lucy must have been fifteen.

  Green Hall is one of the Rhode Island Mansion museums. There’s a mess of ’em over the Newport Bridge. The Elms, The Breakers, Green Hall, Marble House. A museum tour is not my idea of party time, but Mom was like, “I’ve got free promotional tickets. Let’s go.” Mom loved freebies. It was March, and it was cold. All we had to pay for was gas and restaurant lunch. Addison invited Lucy, and then Dad wanted in, too—mostly because he never liked it when Mom drove the car alone.

  When Addison finally jumped in the car, she was wearing black tights and a black T-shirt, like a burglar. I knew something was up. She didn’t talk at all, just mmmed under her breath, which she did when she was thinking crazy. Like last time she mmmed that way, maybe a year ago, she’d painted the word LAND in orange paint on our roof. She said she wanted to see if anything would land there.

  When we got to Green Hall, she disappeared.

  LUCY LIM: We kept looking around, but we couldn’t leave the tour group. I was annoyed that she’d slipped us. I mean, who wants to hang out with your friend’s weird family without your friend?

  Addy’s mom was scared, and I didn’t get why. Addy vamoosed a lot. Like we’d be watching TV at my house, and she’d say she was going up to get a glass of water, and an hour later I’d find her taking a nap in my bed, or in the kitchen gossiping with my mom, or out on our patio, making chalk drawings—Mom always kept a box of sidewalk chalk out there for fun.

  So no, I wasn’t panicking. I figured she’d ditched to grab some sleep in the car. That would have been a standard Addy move. She could nap anywhere. But Addy’s mom was more suspicious.

  Addison at the Lim house, making a chalk drawing, courtesy of Eve Lim.

  MAUREEN STONE: As the minutes ticked by, good Lord, yes, I became nervous. The tour was ending, and we were heading back from the bedrooms, down the sweeping staircase to the entrance hall. Addison liked to get lost; I knew that. The circus, the playground, a shopping mall. Then you’d find her splashing in the penny fountain or strolling near the animal cages. She was a mother’s nightmare that way.

  Once we were all in the main hall, and I heard the commotion from above, I had this dread, sixth-sense knowledge that it was Addison, and it was trouble.

  ROY STONE: Everyone gets the joke of Green Hall, right? That Errol Flynn once stayed in that mansion, and he was famous for swinging from the chandelier? Addison was recreating it. For laughs. End of story.

  LUCY LIM: Literally. Swung. From the chandelier. Two hundred pounds of lights and crystal, and Addy was just riding it like an electric horse. No harness, no rope. I remember she had on this purple stocking cap, like an elf hat. This was Addy, as insane and dangerous as I’d ever seen her. The noise was unbearable, too, a creaking, haunting groaning, and crystal prisms kept falling off and smashing to the black-and-white marble floor. If the cord hadn’t been strong enough, Addy would have smashed to the floor, too.

  Later I asked her, “Weren’t you terrified? Didn’t you think about how gruesome it would be to die that way?”

  And she said, “Lulu, you worrywart, I never think about death. Death just Is.”

  We watched the clip go viral on YouTube, and that was cool. The boingziest boingzjob, we called it. When Addy moved down to New York, she first got known as “Chandelier Girl.” Since then, truckloads of people have asked me, “What was that like, to see Addison do that live? To be in that instant with her?”

  You want the honest answer? It was like being drunk on fear.

  ZACH FRATEPIETRO: The chandelier video was my introduction to Addison Stone. I met Addison right when she first moved to New York, but I’d seen the clip before; everyone had. In the art world, it made a small splash. First time I brought Addison to dinner to meet my mother, Carine, that’s how I introduced her. “Presenting Chandelier Girl.” One of those rare times when my mother seemed impressed. Addison told me it was her tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. Her class was reading The Pit and the Pendulum. Pretty funny, right?

  MADDY MEYERS: My cousin liked to break rules. Whatever high-concept garbage Addison was selling about the chandelier episode, the Poe homage or the Errol Flynn reboot, please—she did it for the rush and the fame. Addison pulled that stunt, and any other stunt, because the one thing she believed in was No Rules, Ever. She thought people should always do exactly what they wanted. She did it to do it. She did it because it felt good. I will just say that after that day, nobody ever called her Allison again, even by mistake. Not even my mom, who’d always felt like if Addison couldn’t even call her “Aunt” Jen, then she sure wasn’t going to call her some new, self-adopted name. But the chandelier was like a baptism by fire. After that, we all realized that Addison was playing for a bigger theater than just friends and family. That was the day she became Addison, forever.

  LUCY LIM: Future Addy sprang into motion that day. Green Hall had everything that inspired her. It was shock and beauty and Addy at the center. It was Addy who got that video to go viral, too. She was controlling the hell out of her image, even back then, before she had an image to control.

  STEVEN JOHANNES: Addison listed an ad in the RISD classifieds, and she paid me cash, and I filmed it with my own camera—so it’s not copyright infringement. You hear that, Max Berger, you asshole? Berger sends me legal letters from time to time. He says that clip is part of the Addison Stone estate. It’s not and he can suck it.

  Chandelier Girl is still my most downloaded bit. People ask me about it all the time. I was thinking about doing something for the ten-year anniversary of it, especially with Addison becoming so famous since she died. No disrespect.

  Addison had specific instructions. She’d thought it all out ahead, which was another reason I hadn’t counted on her being a kid. I remember she texted something like, Be at the Green Hall mansion at 1 p.m., wait for me to show, we will meet briefly, then you will wait for me to give the signal to film. Cash up front. Half pay if security interferes. With a map of exactly where to meet. If I’d known I was taking orders from a teenager, I’d have never shown. Although she wasn’t “Addison Stone” yet, right? She was just some wacky chick.

  “So what’s your film?” I asked her when we met.

  “I’m riding the Green Hall chandelier.”

  “You test it yet?” I asked.

  “No. That’s the thriller part. It might not hold.” Then she asked if I was still in—since it wasn’t legal, what we were doing. Or even smart. Or sane. So there was all that risk. I was in. I was worried, but I needed the cash—and she had it.

  We set up the shot. It’d have to be one take, obviously.

  She said, “Keep filming even if it drops.”

  I was like, “If it drops, kiddo, you will die.”

  And she was like, “Exactly. And if I die, you need to make that death worth watching.”

  Who could forget a girl saying something as bleak as that?

  LUCY LIM: People think of Green Hall as the gateway stunt, right? Addy was transitioning from a round-eyed, “Look at me, I can sing and draw and paint and dance” art-room girl into the daredevil icon that we made into a T-shirt.

  That’s what I think is the deep-mineral core of all Addy’s messages. People can get into bigger thoughts, like BRKLN’s “Personal Exuberance of the Anarchist” article that came out a few years later. But Green Hall was a rush in her ears. It was the beginning of something.

  Except that the “exuberant anarchy” of Green Hall wasn’t the gateway stunt, after all. Because after that, Addy lost her mind and everything fell apart.

  “The Personal Exuberance of the Anarchist”: BRKLN magazine cover.

  III.

  “SHE LOOKED LIKE A SKELETON IN A T-SHIRT.”

  MAUREEN STONE: After Newport, I began to watch my daughter extra carefully. Goodness, I had to. I was a nervous wreck. She’d always been an unpredictable gir
l, but what she’d done that day wasn’t just a prank, or a teen being quirky. It was a wildness inside her. I couldn’t understand it.

  Addison never got caught, and so she never had to come clean about that day at Green Hall. But I was so relieved she’d lived through it, I couldn’t get up the energy to be angry about it. So I never punished her.

  In the video, her body looks as close to free as I imagine my girl ever got. But for years, I had a recurring nightmare where I saw Addison smashing from twenty feet onto a marble floor. I saw her broken neck and her twisted limbs. Over and over I woke up in a sweat from this terrible dream.

  And of course, in the end, she did die in a fall. It was as if my maternal instinct knew bits and pieces of her fate already.

  ROY STONE: People make too much about Green Hall. Want to know what I said to Maureen? Addison was on something. Meth? Ecstasy? Stoned? Hard to say. But I’d bet every gold filling in my mouth that she was high as a kite.

  The O’Hare home, Dartmouth, Massachusetts, courtesy of Nancy O’Hare.

  MAUREEN STONE: Addison’s father wasn’t around enough to see the real Addison. “Kids will be kids,” he’d say. As if that meant anything. And when Roy was watching, he only saw what he wanted. Green Hall wasn’t even the worst of it. The real darkness fell the next year—the summer before eleventh grade.

  MADDY MEYERS: The way I see it, Addison’s serious problems started on North Lyn. In July our moms always liked to go to our grandparents’ house, which is actually outside Bristol proper, up in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Not much fun. The whole time we’re out there, Mom and Aunt Maureen turn into these teenager versions of themselves. Mousy, obedient Irish Catholic daughters.

  Addison and I got along better there than we did anywhere else. We would talk about how spineless our moms could turn in that house. How they made us obey all the O’Hare house rules, no questions asked. “Get up, it’s time for mass! Make your bed with hospital corners! Finish your plate; children are starving in India!”

  Gran and Pops didn’t push Addison too hard. She had an ease with them, like she didn’t mind spending an afternoon bird-watching with Pops or learning how to make a homemade pastry crust with Gran. She was a natural at one-on-one. Sometimes I think it’s what made her good at doing people’s portraits. Her attentiveness, you know? So if she didn’t finish her broccoli, they were softer her, they’d look the other way.

  That summer, Charlie was up in New Hampshire at an all-boys’ camp, Camp Winnipsaukee. And my older sister, Morgan, was an au pair in Nantucket. So it was just us in the country, bored and relying on our moms to drive us places, not knowing anybody. Addison and I shared our mothers’ old room. Twin beds with lumpy mattresses that felt like you were sleeping on a pile of socks.

  Starting the very first night, she couldn’t sleep. “Gimme your iPad,” she’d say, because she didn’t have her own.

  Sometimes she’d get nightmares, and she’d squeeze into bed with me. Her skinny arms would be wrapped around me, tight as locking pliers. I kind of liked it. It meant we were still close, cousins-close, and if she needed to squeeze up to me to get sleep, I let her. It meant she needed me.

  Then one night it was different. She shook me awake—so hard her nails were biting my skin, and her voice was hissing.

  “Maddy, listen, listen! Can you hear it, too? Can you hear them? Can you hear the people in the wall?”

  I snapped on the lamp. I heard nothing. I told her she was freaking me out.

  “Come on! Can’t you hear it, Maddy?” she kept asking. “I’m listening through time! I’m hearing conversation leftovers from dead people.”

  “Stop it! Stop scaring me! There’s nobody in the wall, Addison!” I shoved her away.

  She started pacing. “Miss Cal is having soft-boiled eggs for lunch, and Douglas, he’s going into town later to fetch his boots; they were being re-soled. Ida wants him to bring her back a bag of butterscotch and some new paintbrushes.”

  I thought it was some prank she was playing. “Shut up!” I told her. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  But she didn’t stop. She kept on telling me what she could hear through the wall, repeating conversations she swore were real.

  Eventually I got it. These voices were real. To her.

  JENNIFER O’HARE MEYERS: My sister called in a shrink.

  I said, “Connect with somebody, do something. Do whatever it takes, Maureen. But don’t do this alone, and don’t get Roy involved. First he’ll say everyone’s overreacting. Then he’ll gripe about the medical bills.” That was my advice.

  DR. EVELYN TUTTNAUER: I took on Addison’s case immediately. I became her primary psychiatrist. I’d been referred through Maureen Stone’s general physician, Dr. Fergis, who contacted me in mid-July. He told me his patient, Maureen, was agitated about her sixteen-year-old daughter. According to his patient, Addison Stone was having chronic auditory hallucinations; she believed she could hear voices through the walls of her grandparents’ house.

  With no medical history, I assumed that the young woman wasn’t delusional but was just acting out. Sometimes patients, young patients especially, invent voices or outside forces as a means to express their own desires or needs. It’s hard to say, “Pay attention to me.” It’s easier to invent some monkey business that forces people to pay attention. And I knew her home life was troubled.

  I Skyped briefly with Addison. In spite of her exhausted and disheveled appearance, she didn’t strike me as someone suffering from any particular neurological disorder. My hunch was that she’d internalized some resentment for her brother, who she told me was having lots of fun at his sleepaway camp. This resentment was manifesting as a pseudo-hallucinatory syndrome. I noted after the Skype call that even in her bedraggled state, Addison Stone was charismatic and engaging, and that our call could have been a kind of inventive “notice me” performance.

  Still, I advised Maureen and her husband to keep strict watch over their daughter. I advised Addison to take vitamins, and I prescribed a gentle sleep aid. We scheduled a doctor’s visit at the end of July in my office in Providence.

  Of course if we’d met in person, I’d probably have recommended in-patient treatment combined with a course of antipsychotic medication. Unfortunately, I’m not psychic. I don’t regard myself as culpable for what happened in the ensuing weeks. One Skype session is not enough. If Addison’s mother was truly in a red-alarm state of worry, she should have brought Addison right to me.

  MADDY MEYERS: She was like a ghoul. She was listening at walls nonstop, keeping lights on all night. Addison had spent her whole life frightening me, but this was different. Because this time, she was frightened, too. But after the doctor said Addison was making up voices because she was jealous of Charlie—which made no sense—our moms treated it all like a prank, like what she’d done at Green Hall.

  “Are you sure you hear people talking, Addison? Or do you just want to liven things up around here?”

  Or “Will you tell the ghosts to be quiet? It’s after ten o’clock, time for bed, naughty ghosties!” That’s always been the problem with our moms—they’re Catholic schoolgirls. Obedient. If a priest or a doctor says it’s true, then it’s true.

  But Addison began to detach. Like, hiding her food in her napkin. Staring into space, pinching the insides of her arms, pretending to watch TV—when she was actually looking past it, waiting for voices from Miss Cal or Douglas or especially the girl who was our age, Ida. She told me all this creepy stuff. She said she could feel three time-layers of the same house crimped up together. She said every family was living here at once, only they couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them. Ida and Ida’s people were the loudest voices, she told me.

  Then Addison started drawing pictures of the “original layer,” as she called it. Ida’s layer. She said the dining room used to be half the size, because there’d been a pantry. She’d drink coffee and draw these ugly pencil sketches of Ida. She’d tape the drawings up to the fridge or to the m
edicine cabinet in our bathroom. I hated those pictures. I tore them all up. Now I wish I hadn’t, for all kinds of reasons.

  And you can imagine how well the “haunted house” idea was going down with our super-religious grandparents, right? They thought Addison was bringing something evil inside. Not intentionally, of course, but my grandparents are churchgoing people, and they couldn’t handle Addison’s “ghosts.” Luckily, Aunt Maureen was smart enough to pack Addison up and take her home before they asked them to leave.

  MAUREEN STONE: When Charlie got that sports camp scholarship, it was a wonderful thing. We all celebrated it. Addison, too. Addison adored her little brother. She’d never resent his success. His abilities were so different from hers. But I kept second-guessing myself. Maybe I wasn’t seeing everything straight? Maybe she really needed extra attention? The doctor seemed pretty sure that this was the root of Addison’s trouble.

  But Addison began to look sick. She stopped going outside, stopped bathing. She stopped brushing her teeth and hair, she lived in her pajamas. She never slept, either. She’d be up all night sketching this Ida, this specter, whatever you want to call it … I took a picture of her and showed it to her, and I asked, “Do you even recognize yourself, sweetheart? Do you see what you’re doing to yourself?” I felt so helpless. I couldn’t break through to her.

  Addison Stone, summer, Dartmouth, Massachusetts, courtesy of Maureen Stone.

  Ida was the ghost who controlled Addison’s imagination. She was this old-fashioned girl, always in this same dress, a “day dress,” I think they used to call them, with a soft tuck and pleat, lacework at the sleeve, and a pendulum necklace. Addison saw her so intensely.

  “Please stop drawing that girl,” I’d plead. “You’ve made yourself sick, drawing her.”

  “Ida wants me to draw her.” This was always Addison’s response. “She wants me to breathe the life back into her.”