Page 26 of Truth in the Treme

“Five minutes,” he said.

“An hour. But I will take five minutes as a starting position and negotiate up.”

They walked out into the Quarter with the coffees, and the afternoon had softened toward evening, the light turning honey-colored along the balconies, the day-crowds thinning and the night ones not yet arrived. She teased him the whole way, gently, about a man who had lived two hundred years and chose to spend this hour of it memorizing permit numbers. He admitted, out loud, that she was probably right, which pleased her enormously. Somewhere near Jackson Square she slipped her hand into his without ceremony, and he closed his around it without a second of the old hesitation, and he understood that she had done that, worn the hesitation out of him one ordinary afternoon at a time, until reaching for her had stopped being a thing he had to decide to do.

The square did its evening business around them. A tarot woman folded her cards for the day. A mule dozed in the traces of an empty carriage. On the cathedral steps a shade in a brown robe stood among the tourists none of them could see, a friar dead three hundred years who came out every evening to watch the living take their photographs, and he inclined his head to Bastien over the children's heads with the mild courtesy of the long dead. Bastien returned the nod and said nothing and kept his living woman's hand in his, and let the ordinary hour stay ordinary.

They ate at a little table set out on the flagstones, and it was while they were eating that the child came through. A girl of five or six tore across the square chasing a stream of soap bubbles some vendor was blowing off the cathedral steps, shrieking with the joy of a small person who wants a thing she can never quite catch. Delphine set down her fork and watched the girl go, and a soft, faraway smile came over her face.

“You always said you wanted daughters,” she said. “A house full of them. I asked you once why not sons, and you said sons would be no trouble at all, they would grow up dull and dutiful and break your heart being sensible.” She laughed. “You said daughters would encourage too much mischief, and that was exactly why you wanted them. A whole houseful of clever girls making trouble.” She watched the child catch a bubble at last and crow over the wet nothing left in her hands, and the smile turned wistful at its edges. “We used to talk about it. Not names. Nothing so definite. Just the hope of it. The family we were going to have.”

Then she blinked, and heard herself, and put her fingers to her mouth. “I don't know where that came from.”

He knew exactly where it came from. He had lain awake beside Delia describing a house full of clever, troublesome daughters, half joking and entirely in earnest, back when the future was a thing they were still allowed to plan. He said none of it. He watched the wistfulness deepen in her face, watched the memory begin to tip from the hope toward the knowing of how the hope had ended, and before it could carry her down into the grief he reached across the little table and turned her attention gently loose, asked her an easy question about the coffee, made her laugh, brought her back to the square and the sunlight and the perfectly ordinary afternoon. He memorized the whole of it first. The bubbles, the girl, the houseful of daughters they never had. Then he let it go, because some memories deserved to be kept and not opened, and he had learned, at last, the difference.

That evening he took the whole board apart and built it a fourth time, and for once the building did not help.

He had kept two columns before, the fires and the memories, split down the middle by a length of red string. Now he pulled it into four. The fire victims, with their ruined lives and their grievances. The political thread, the commissioner and the votes and the long revenge Maya was certain of. Delphine's memories, the green door and the waltz and the houseful of daughters, arranged now in the order of a life. And the supernatural, a column that had grown emptier the harder he worked it, a heading over a blank space where every theory he owned had died. He stood back to look at the four of them laid out clean, and the clarity he had wanted did not come. The opposite came. Split into its honest pieces, the case did not explain itself. It only showed him, in four neat columns, precisely how much of it he could not account for, how little he actually knew, how far he still was from the one thing that would make the four of them into one.

He stood in front of the crowded board a long time before he turned off the light. The human evidence had finally begun to tell a story, a clean hard story of a wronged man and a burning revenge. The memories had begun to tell another, a tender unbearable story of a life lived and lost and slowly returning. Two stories, laid side by side under the lamp, each of them almost whole now, and neither of them with any business touching the other. He did not know where they met. He no longer doubted that they did. Somewhere past the edge of everything he could see, the burning present and the buried past were the same story, and he was going to have to walk all the way into the dark to find the place they became one.

TWENTY

The eighth came in the dead middle of the night, and for the first time it did not burn empty.

Maya's call pulled them both out of sleep, and they drove into a scene already gone to chaos, the trucks doubled up and the hoses crossing the street and the whole block awake and spilling out onto their porches in their nightclothes. This one was not a vacant shell chosen for its emptiness. Someone still lived in it. He arrived to the sight of two firefighters carrying an old woman out through a wall of smoke, limp between them, and getting her clear of the gallery the very moment the roof let go behind them in a roar of sparks and falling timber. They laid her on the banquette and the paramedics folded over her, and for a long half-minute no one knew whether she had come out alive. Then she coughed, wet and terrible, and kept coughing, and the fear in Bastien's chest loosened its grip, because a living victim was still a victim but it was not yet a body.

While Maya worked the survivor and the witnesses, he searched the building, and he searched it on his knees, a man hunting through the ashes for a faith he had lost. He went through every room the fire had left standing. He put his hands on every doorframe. He knelt in the debris and sifted it, opened himself to the char and the smoke and the wet ruin until the effort rang in his skull, hunting a trace, a scar, a single thread of the unnatural in a place a woman had nearly died. He checked corners he knew could hold nothing. He went back over ground he had already covered and covered it again. He would not leave. He stood in the smoking wreck long past any use, refusing the plain fact the scene kept handing him, until the incident commander lost patience and had the building cleared of everyone, the strange gray-eyed consultant included, and made him walk out into the street with empty hands one more time.

For two hundred years his instincts had been the truest thing he owned. They had kept him alive through wars and plagues and the slow turning of a treacherous city. They had never once pointed him at a door that was not there. Standing in the street with the eighth fire dying behind him and nothing at all to show for the most thorough search of his long life, he began, for the first time, to doubt them. Not to believe they were wrong. He could not make himself believe they were wrong. He simply could no longer explain why a certainty he trusted more than his own name kept marching him up to a wall and insisting there was a door in it, when he had now put his hands over every inch of the wall and found it solid stone.

The smoke reached her while he was still turning that over, drifting across the street to where he had stood her well back, and it took her, and this one did not let go.

He had her before she folded, and he lowered them both to the curb and held her, and he waited, and the waiting ran on past every mark the other episodes had set. Longer than the fairgrounds. Longer than the kitchen. Longer than he had ever known the stillness to hold her. Her eyes stayed open on nothing and her breath came slow and even and she was gone so deep into the burning past that he could feel how far away she was. He did not panic. He had lost the ability to panic somewhere around the fifth fire, and he was not sure that was a mercy. He only bent his head to hers and talked to her, low and steady, through all the long minutes, knowing she could not hear a word of it. He told her the street was quiet. He told her the fire was out. He told her he was here, that he was not going anywhere, that he had never once gone anywhere. And under all of it, over and over, the same two words, the only prayer he had left in him. Come back to me. Come back to me. Come back to me.

She came back on the drive home, spent and silent, and she did not speak again until they were upstairs and he had gotten her onto the couch. Then she told him what she had seen, and it was the worst of them and the most beautiful, and it hollowed him out completely.

“You took me to see an apartment,” she said. “The one we were going to rent after we married. Two rooms over a courtyard, nothing to it, and you walked me through it like you were showing me a palace. It was empty. We could not afford a stick of furniture yet. And we stood in the middle of that empty room and argued about everything we were going to put in it, happily, for an hour.” She was crying and smiling at once, which was how the memories came to her now. “You said I deserved a piano. You were very firm about the piano. And I laughed at you and said I would rather have books, a whole wall of them, and you took my face in your hands and said we would have both. A piano and a wall of books and no money for either and you promised me both.” Her voice broke. “We sat down on the bare floor of that empty apartment, because there was nowhere else to sit, and we stayed there until it got dark, just dreaming it all up. The piano. The books. The children. All of it.”

He could barely hold still under it. He remembered the courtyard and the two bare rooms and the argument about the piano, remembered the exact weight of her face in his hands when he promised her the impossible, remembered sitting on that dusty floor in the failing light with everything still ahead of them and nothing yet taken away.

“How did it end,” he made himself ask. “The memory. What is the last of it.”

“You said we'd have time.” She wiped her eyes. “That was the last thing. It was getting late and I said we should go and you pulled me back down for one more minute and you said, we'll have time. For all of it. We'll have time.” She laughed, wet and unknowing. “And then it just stops.”

The words went into him and lodged where the old wound was and would not come out. We'll have time. He had said it on the floor of that empty apartment three weeks before a theater burned, believing it with his whole heart, and it had been the biggest lie he ever told her, and he had not known it was a lie. He sat with her now, a hundred years and more past the night the time ran out, and could not tell her that the man who promised her all that time had watched it end in a single hour and had been paying for the promise ever since.

“We were happy,” she said softly, wondering at it. “I can feel it, in every one of these. Whatever we were, however it ended, we were so happy. We were happy, Bastien.”

He could not answer at once. The yes was simple and it would not come, because the yes cost him everything, because she was asking him to confirm a joy he had buried alone for a century and had never once expected to hear named aloud by the woman who had lived it. He got there. He always got there, for her. “Yes,” he said, when he could. “We were. We were happy.”

She fell asleep against him not long after, worn all the way through, and he held her until he was sure of her breathing, and then he could not sit still inside his own skin any longer and he eased her down and went out onto the balcony to stand in the dark over Dauphine Street. That was where she found him, some time later, when she woke and reached for him and he was not there. She came out in his shirt with her hair loose and found him gripping the iron rail and looking at nothing, and she saw what was on him.

“I'm sorry,” he said, before she could speak. He had not meant to say it. It came up out of him on its own. “I am so sorry, Delphine. This is happening to you and I cannot stop it. Eight fires and I have found nothing, time after time I have stood in the smoke and watched it take you and I have not been able to do one single thing to keep it from you. I am supposed to be the one who stands between you and the dark. It is the only thing I have ever been for. And I cannot do it. I cannot even find the shape of the thing I am failing to fight.”

She did not tell him it was all right, because it was not, and she did not argue him out of the guilt, which would only have made him hold it tighter. She crossed the balcony and knelt down in front of him on the cool stone and took both his hands off the railing and into her own, and she waited until he looked at her.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You did not do this. You are not failing to stop a thing you caused. Whatever this is, it came for me on its own, and you have been the only good part of it from the beginning. Every one of these memories, even the ones that break me, even the fire, is handing me back a piece of a life I did not know I had lost. You are giving me my own life back, Bastien. That is not failure. I will not sit here and watch you turn a gift into a wound you carry.” Her thumbs moved over his knuckles. “You have carried me through every one of these. Let me carry you through this one. You are allowed. It is allowed to go both ways.”