Page 19 of Truth in the Treme

Nothing elaborate, just rice and beans gone soft and good on the stove, a thing she could have managed in her sleep, and she had set two places and lit the squat candle they never used and was waiting for him when he came up the stairs. The sight of it stopped him in the doorway. She had spent her own frightening days fighting for the same thing he was fighting for, an ordinary evening, a normal table, proof that the two of them still had a life that the fires and the stillness had not eaten. He had been so busy guarding that life that he had nearly failed to notice she was guarding it too.

“Sit,” she said. “Eat something that did not come out of a vending machine. And before you ask, yes, I feel fine, and no, nothing happened today, and I made it through a whole afternoon without my own head betraying me, so we are going to have a normal dinner and you are going to tell me one thing about your day that is not the case.”

“You are very managing tonight.”

“Someone has to manage you. You are terrible at it.”

They ate. He told her a story that was not the case, an old one, about a hurricane and a stubborn priest and a cathedral roof, and she laughed in the right places. Partway through she set down her fork and looked at him, and her face had gone serious in the candlelight.

“Can I say one thing about it,” she said. “Just one, and then we go back to the priest.” She waited for his nod. “Every memory that has come back to me has been about the life we had. Not the dying. The living. The flowers, the dance, the green door, you ruining supper. Even the worst one, the fire, the thing I keep grieving is the life, not the death.” She reached across and laid her hand over his. “I need you to not lose sight of that while you hunt for what is wrong with me. Whatever this is, it keeps handing me love. I am not afraid of it the way you are. And I do not want it to turn you into a man who only sees the danger.”

“I am trying not to be that man.”

“I know. I am only asking you to keep trying.” She squeezed his hand and let it go. “Now. The priest. Did the roof hold or not?”

It happened over the last of the wine, in the middle of nothing at all.

He was telling her the rest of the story, and he reached for the saying he always reached for when a thing came slowly and could not be rushed, the one his own mouth produced without consulting him. “Petit à petit,” he said, with a tired shrug. He had said it a thousand times, long before the city had a name.

“L'oiseau fait son nid,” she finished.

Little by little, the bird builds its nest. She said it lightly, in passing, reaching for her glass, and then her hand stopped halfway to it. The words caught up with her a beat after she had spoken them. She set the glass down very carefully and looked at him.

“I don't speak French,” she said.

“No.”

“Bastien. I don't speak French. I had two semesters of Spanish and I failed the second one.” Her voice climbed. “I knew the end of that. I didn't translate it. I just knew it, like I knew the mug, like I knew the waltz. It was already in my mouth before I heard you start it.” She pressed her fingers to her lips. “What is happening to me. How do I know a language I never learned?”

“You knew it once,” he said, before he could weigh whether he should. It was the most he had given her, and he watched her take it, and he hated that it was the truth and could not stop himself from offering her one true thing. “You knew it well. It was the language of half your life.”

He had not heard her speak French since a century before she was born. Delia had teased him in it, scolded him in it, murmured the smallest tender things in it against his shoulder in the dark. To hear that same tongue come out of this mouth, easy and unbidden, over a candle and a glass of wine, pulled loose a knot in his chest he had believed long since scarred shut. It was her. It had always been her. He had known it since the first night she hummed a song she could not name, and the language only drove the knowing deeper, into a place that had no guard left on it.

She did not ask the next question. He saw it form and saw her decide she could not carry the answer tonight, and she let it go, and reached for his hand instead of the wine. They sat with the candle burning down between them, and the proverb hung in the air, patient, finishing itself.

After she slept he stood at the board and fed both sides of it.

On the left he added what the archives had given him. Denied a grant. Buried in court. Two insurers and a fraud case. Above the three houses he wrote one word that had not been there before, and the word was list. On the right he added the French that had come out of her mouth without permission, beneath the mug and the waltz and the boarding house with the green door. Both columns had grown today. Both of them were longer and surer than they had been a week ago.

He stepped back between the two halves and made himself say the honest thing. Neither side explained the other. The list of grudges did not reach across the red string to touch the language rising up in her, and the language did not reach back. But he noticed, standing there in the dark, a thing that unsettled him more than the gap between them. The left side had begun to move. For days the fires had been a wall of contradictions, and now, since he had set the magic down and worked it as a human crime, it had started to give. Names. A pattern. A list. The human story had begun to move faster than the other one, and he was no longer the man best suited to chase it. He found, standing in the dark, that he did not much care. Whatever moved on the left side of that string, it was the right side that owned him, the woman in his bed speaking a language she had never learned.

THIRTEEN

The fourth one came on a Sunday, and the city had stopped pretending to be calm about it.

He knew before he answered the phone. By now the hour alone could tell him, and the cold drop in his gut told him the rest, and he had stopped being surprised by either. Maya's voice came tight and fast. A shuttered meeting hall off Claiborne, slated for the wrecking ball the month after its redevelopment money fell through, fully involved by the time the first truck arrived. Four fires in under two weeks. The morning shows had a name for the arsonist already, and the mayor's office had a statement, and none of it was helping the people who lived on the blocks where the houses kept burning.

“I have to go,” he told Delphine. “You are staying here.”

She did not argue. She set down her coffee and looked at him, and she asked the one thing he had no defense against.

“If this were happening to you,” she said, “would you stay home?”

He opened his mouth and closed it. He would not. He would have walked into every fire in the parish on the chance one of them held an answer, and she knew it, and she let the question do its work without saying another word.

“Stay beside Maya,” he said at last. “If it starts, you do not fight it and you do not wander. You find her and you let it take you where she can see you. Promise me that much.”

“I promise.” She was already reaching for her shoes. “Beside Maya. I can do that.”