Page 13 of Truth in the Treme

“It was longer this time,” she said, when she could speak. She was not frightened. That was the strangest part. Her face was wet and wondering, lit from the inside. “I was gone longer because there was more of it. Bastien, it did not stop at one moment this time. It kept going.”

“Tell me.”

“It was a whole stretch of our life. Not a picture. A season.” Her fingers moved in his. “I came home from work to a boarding house with a green door, and I climbed the stairs, and I stood at the window watching the street for you because I knew your step before I could see you. And when you came up I had supper half-ruined and you did not care. We read in the evenings under one lamp because we were saving the oil, your shoulder against mine, and we passed the book back and forth when our eyes got tired. We talked about a future, and the future we wanted was so small. A little more room. A garden, maybe. Nothing anyone would write down.” Her voice thickened. “And I was happy. Bastien, I was so completely happy with an ordinary life. I could feel it running through all of it, this quiet, enormous contentment, the kind you only notice you had after it is gone.”

“There was a song,” she said, quieter. “The one from the kitchen. You hummed it over the washing-up, and I never asked what it was because I liked not knowing what it was. I only knew that hearing it meant you were home.” She opened her eyes and found his. “Tell me I have that right. Tell me there was a song.”

“There was a song,” he said, and kept his voice steadier than he had any right to.

He held her hand and let her give it all back to him, every evening of it, the green door and the saved oil and the book passed back and forth in the lamplight. He had lived that season. He had climbed those stairs to that window a thousand times to find her watching for him. She was not handing him fragments anymore. She was handing him a continuous thing, an unbroken length of a life, and as she spoke he understood that the pieces inside her had begun to find each other and link, one memory reaching back to take the hand of the one before it.

“There is so much of it,” she said, marveling, exhausted. “I did not know there was so much.” Her eyes drifted closed. “I want all of it. I want to remember every ordinary day.”

She was asleep before he could answer, which was a mercy, because he did not trust what his answer would have been.

He sat at the desk a long while before he opened the notebook, and longer still before he wrote.

He recorded the season she had given him, the green door, the window, the single lamp, the small future. He wrote it down so it could not be taken twice. When he finished he did not cap the pen right away. He looked at the pages behind this one, the growing record of a life returning to her in order, and he made himself follow the line of it forward to where it pointed.

She had begun with the dying. She had moved back into the living, the flowers and the dance and the green door. The memories were reaching backward through that life, link by link, toward its beginning, and they were not slowing. He had spent three days terrified that the episodes would take her from him. Tonight, for the first time, a different fear opened underneath that one, colder and quieter, and far worse. If they did not stop, if they kept reaching back through everything she had ever been, then sooner or later she would arrive at the rooms he had sealed and never meant her to enter. She would remember more than Delia. She would remember all of it. She would remember him as he truly was, and why.

He closed the notebook and sat in the dark with his hand flat on its cover, and for the first time since the smoke first took her, he found himself wishing the remembering would stop.

EIGHT

He had been rearranging the apartment around his fear, a little more each day. He kept the windows shut now against any smoke that might drift up from the street, so the rooms held the day’s heat long past dark. The box of kitchen matches had migrated to the top shelf, where lighting the stove meant asking him to reach it. He had taken to leaving a glass of water on every surface she might pass, set there by his own hand against a fire that was not coming, for a thirst that was really his. She had noticed all of it and said nothing, until this morning.

She caught him watching her over the rim of his coffee, and she did not let it pass.

“You have done it again,” she said.

“Done what.”

“Watched me instead of hearing me. I asked you the same question twice.” She tipped her head toward the shut windows. “You have closed us in here. I have to ask you to reach the matches like a child. You are watching me more than you are listening to me, and you have been at it for three days.”

He set the cup down. She was not angry. That was what made it land. She looked at him with a patience that had cost her effort, and he understood that his fear had begun to take up the room they used to share.

“I am sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I do not know how to do anything else right now. Every time you go quiet I think it is starting again, and I lose the thread of whatever you were saying because half of me is already bracing to catch you.”

“I know. I feel you do it.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “And I love you for the reason behind it. But I need you to hear this, because it matters. I am frightened too, Bastien. I wake up some mornings afraid to walk past the stove. But I am not going to spend whatever is left of my ordinary life sitting still, waiting for the next terrible thing to come and take me. If I do that, the terrible thing wins even on the days it never shows up.”

“I am trying to keep you safe.”

“I know that too. But there is a version of keeping me safe that is just a smaller cage with nicer bars, and I will not live in it, not even one you built out of love.” She squeezed his hand. “Watch me less. Listen to me more. I am still here. I would like to be talked to like I am still here.”

He turned her hand over in his and looked at it, the freckles, the short clean nails, the small scar on the knuckle she could not remember earning. She had handed him the exact shape of his mistake, gently, and asked nothing for it but his attention. He had spent two centuries certain that holding someone close enough meant holding them still. She was telling him that was not the same thing as loving them, and she was right, and the rightness of it stung.

“I will try,” he said. “I am not good at it. But I will try.”

“That is all I asked.” She lifted his knuckles, kissed them, and let him go. “Now. You were about to tell me what Maya wants.”

Maya wanted what she always wanted lately, which was an answer neither of them had.

“Task force convened this morning,” she said when he called her back. “Which means I now have a lieutenant, a press liaison, and four detectives, and not one of us can tell the city anything except that a person is doing this on purpose. The accelerant tied all three together. I have the link. I have the pattern. What I do not have is a face, a name, or a reason, and the longer I go without one, the louder it gets out there.”

“Three families on that street with nothing left,” she added, lower. “The last house had a grandmother who got out in her nightgown and stood at the curb watching forty years of her life go up. That is who I am working for, in case you ever wonder why I keep calling a man who tells me nothing. Find me my piece.”

“What do you need from me?”