Page 10 of Truth in the Treme

He waited until her breathing had gone slow and even. Then he went to the desk.

From the bottom drawer, under the case files and the spare cartridges and the things he did not look at, he took an old leather notebook, soft and dark with handling, most of its pages still empty. He uncapped a pen and he wrote. The square and the flowers. The bench and the coat and the man playing for coins. The ruined chicken and the dance with no music. He wrote them in her words where he could remember her words, and in his own where he could not, and he was careful with all of it, because a thing written down could not be taken twice.

He had not heard her stir. Her voice came soft from the doorway. “What are you doing?”

She stood with the quilt around her, watching him bent over the little book.

“I am writing them down,” he said. “All of them. The ones you bring back.”

“Why?”

He looked at the page, then at her. “Because I do not want either of us to lose them again.”

She came and read over his shoulder, and she did not ask how he had known the color of the flowers she had not described, and he did not offer it. She kissed the top of his head and went back to bed, and after a while her breathing told him she had gone under for good.

He stayed at the desk with the lamp low and read back what he had written. For more than a century he had been the only keeper of this, the single living record of a life two people had built and one fire had ended. He had guarded it alone because there had been no one to help him carry it. He turned a page and smoothed it flat under his hand. Piece by piece, in the worst possible way, by a road he could not explain and could not stop, she was finding her way back to the life they had lost. He did not yet know whether that was a mercy or the cruelest thing that had ever happened to either of them. Outside, the Quarter had gone down into its deep-night self, the tourists gone home, the lamps burning low, the city belonging for a few hours only to those who did not sleep and those who no longer could. He sat among them with the little book open under his hand, keeping his lonely watch over a life climbing back out of the grave, and for the first time it occurred to him to wonder what would become of the two of them on the day she finally remembered all of it.

SIX

The morning came easier than the two before it. He woke to find her already up and at the window, wrapped in his robe, watching the Quarter shake off its night, and the sight of her on her feet and steady loosened a knot in him he had not known he was holding. Outside the window the Quarter was doing its slow morning resurrection, hosing the night off the stones, folding the drunks and the ghosts alike back into the daylight hours when the city agreed to pretend it was an ordinary place. A mule cart went by below. A woman opened her shutters across the street and said good morning to a cat that had been dead, he was fairly sure, some thirty years. He watched Delphine watch all of it with her coffee and her borrowed robe, alive and steady in the gray light, and he let himself have the moment fully, because he had learned across a great many mornings that this was the whole of what he had ever wanted and never once been permitted to keep.

“You are awake,” he said.

“I am awake. I slept the whole night. No theaters, no smoke.” She turned and caught the look on his face. “And yes, before you ask, I feel fine. I felt fine when I woke, I felt fine when I made the bed, and I feel fine now that you are asking me for what is going to be the first of many times today.”

“I have not asked you once.”

“You have asked me with your eyes since you opened them.”

She was not wrong. He went to the kitchen to make himself useful instead of watchful, and he set the pan on and cracked the eggs and reached for the chicory, and at some point between one task and the next he began to hum.

He did not decide to. The tune came up out of him on its own, low and half-formed, an old melody worn so smooth by his memory that he no longer heard himself carry it. It was the one she had hummed in her sleep since the first night she stayed, the one she had never been able to name when he asked her where she had learned it. It had lived in him for a very long time, and it came easiest when his hands were busy and his guard was down.

Behind him, Delphine went still.

He turned at once, the fear already up in his chest. She was not gone this time. Her eyes were on him, present and wide, one hand pressed flat to the counter.

“You used to do that,” she said softly. “While you cooked. You always hummed that one while you cooked.”

Neither of them moved. The tune hung in the kitchen with nowhere to go. He waited for her to drop into the dark, braced to catch her, and she did not drop. She stayed, blinking at him, thrown by it, and he saw his own shock mirrored back in her face.

“It's gone,” she said. “Whatever it was. It came and it left. I just knew, for one second, that I had stood in a kitchen and listened to you hum that exact song.” She pressed her hand harder to the counter. “That has never happened standing up before.”

He turned the flame off under the eggs and crossed to her and took the hand that was holding the counter. He did not tell her it frightened him that the memories had learned to come without warning, without smoke, without the mercy of taking her under first. He did not tell her that the song was real, that she had stood in a real kitchen a hundred years gone and listened to him hum it over a real breakfast. He held her hand and he kept his voice level.

“I have been thinking about it,” she said into the quiet. “The fire I keep dying in. The theater.” Her thumb moved against his. “You told me once about Delia. That you loved her, a long time ago, and that you lost her in a fire.” She lifted her eyes to his. “It's her fire, isn't it. The one I keep ending up inside. I'm dreaming the night she died.”

He had known the question would arrive. He had not known it would arrive in his own kitchen with her hand warm in his, looking at him with so much careful sympathy for a grief she thought was only his.

“Yes,” he said, because she had earned that much, and because he had no lie left that he could stand to tell her. “The fire you keep seeing is the fire that took Delia.”

“And you were there.”

“I was there.”

Her face crumpled with a tenderness that nearly broke him. “Oh, Bastien. You have been standing here listening to me describe the worst night of your life back to you, over and over, and you let me. Why would you let me do that?”

Because it is your night too, he did not say. Because you were not describing her death to me. You were describing your own. “Because you needed to say it,” he answered. “And because I would rather hear it from you than have you carry it alone.”