Page 28 of Truth in the Treme

There was a strange mercy in reading it this way. Fire by fire, each memory had come as a wound, a thing that dropped her and frightened him and had to be survived. Set in a line and read as a life, the very same memories turned gentle. A courtship. A season of small happinesses. A young couple who could not cook and could not afford a piano and had believed, with their whole foolish hopeful hearts, that they had every year in the world ahead of them. He had spent three weeks flinching from each of them as it arrived. This morning, in the plain kitchen light, he found he could sit with them and be simply, quietly grateful they had happened at all.

She caught him at it, mid-morning, and leaned in the bedroom doorway and studied him for a moment before she spoke.

“You look different,” she said. “Lighter. You have looked like a man carrying a piano up a staircase for three weeks, and this morning you look like you set it down.” She tipped her head. “Do I finally get my boyfriend back? The actual one? Not the one who lives inside a stack of paper and answers me two questions late.”

“I believe you may,” he said, and meant it, and watched the pleasure of it break over her face.

She took immediate and shameless advantage. She informed him that the afternoon was hers, that the notebooks and the boards and the arsonist could all keep until tomorrow, and that a man who spent his days reconstructing the life they used to have owed it to both of them to go out and add to the pile. Remembering the old life, she told him, was only half the work. They were meant to be making new ones too, so that a hundred years from now there would be more to remember than a green door and a burned theater. He had no argument for that. He was not sure he had ever heard anything truer. He closed the notebook, and this time closing it cost him nothing, and they went out into the day.

The Quarter had given itself over to a bright, forgiving afternoon, the heat gone gentle for once, a breeze coming up off the river to move the banana leaves in the courtyards. They walked without a destination, which was itself a small luxury he had forgotten how to allow himself. In Jackson Square the artists had their canvases hung along the iron fence and the tarot readers worked their tables and a cornet player leaned against the cathedral wall pulling a slow sweet line out of the afternoon. The square smelled of burned sugar and horse and the sweet green rot of the river. A child chalked a hopscotch grid across the flagstones. A saxophone answered the cornet from a quarter-block off, the two of them not quite playing the same tune and not quite playing different ones. The mule teams dozed in the shade. Among the living crowd the other citizens kept their evening habits early, a pale gentleman reading a newspaper a hundred years out of date on a bench no tourist chose to share, and Bastien tipped his head to him and walked his own warm, living woman on past.

A vendor near the corner was roasting pecans in sugar over a little burner, and the smell of them caught Bastien before he had decided anything, and his feet took him to the cart and his hand paid for a paper cone of them without any part of him consulting the rest. He held the cone out to Delphine. She took it without thinking, without a glance, the reflex of a hand that has been handed this same thing a thousand times, and got two of the warm nuts into her mouth before her own fingers seemed to surprise her.

She stopped walking. The smile came slow and certain and entirely unafraid.

“You always did this,” she said. “Brought me little things. After work. Not for any occasion, not because you'd done anything wrong, just because.” She looked into the cone of pecans as though it held the whole of it. “Fresh bread, still warm from the baker. A single flower off a cart. A twist of candied pecans, exactly these, in a paper cone exactly like this one. Small things. Every few days, some small thing, so I always knew I'd been thought about while you were gone.” She laughed, and her eyes were bright and wet at the edges and glad. “Apparently you spoiled me terribly.”

“I tried,” he said quietly.

He had. He had never once walked home to that green door empty-handed if he could help it, because he had learned early that the surprises meant more to her than anything grand he could not afford, and because a hundred years before anyone taught the word to a self-help shelf he had understood in his bones that love was mostly a matter of small things done faithfully, over and over, until a person never had to wonder whether she was loved. He had bought her a paper cone of pecans on a bright afternoon in a century she did not remember, and here she was in another one, tasting the sugar and remembering the whole of his devotion in it, and it was, he thought, the best money he had ever spent, then or now.

They did not hurry anywhere after that. They sat on the cathedral steps in the going light and made, on purpose, a memory of their own to set beside the old ones. She named the tourists' dogs as they passed, inventing the ones she did not know, giving a mournful basset hound a tragic history that had him laughing before she reached the end of it. She stole the last of the pecans out of the cone. She leaned her head on his shoulder and told him that this, exactly this, was what she wanted a hundred more years of, and he sat with the warm weight of her against him and the cathedral bells starting up over their heads, and thought that if he did nothing else right in the whole rest of his long life, he would spend it building afternoons like this one, so the pile she wanted to add to would never once stop growing.

Maya reached him in the late afternoon, while they sat on the cathedral steps sharing the last of the nuts, and her voice rose in acknowledgment that her case had turned another quarter-degree toward the light.

“I think I have been aiming at the wrong man,” she said. “The commissioner. I keep circling him like he is the target, and he is not. He is fine. He is retired and fat and untouchable, and nobody has laid a finger on him or his lake house. It is not about hurting him.” Paper shuffled on her end. “It is about everyone he touched. Every life his office broke on the way up. Whoever is doing this is not settling a score with one man. They are burning through everyone whose life got fed into that man's machine and came out ruined. He is not the victim and he is not the arsonist. He is the thing they all have in common. The wound, not the knife.” A pause. “I do not know yet whether that makes it bigger or smaller. It makes it personal, though. All the way down, it is personal.”

Bastien agreed, and told her she was right, and felt the human half of it settle another inch into focus on its own wall, a long way from him now, running down its own road toward its own end. He let it. It was hers. He had the other wall to work, and tonight that work did not weigh on him at all.

They made supper together that evening, badly and happily, the radio on, and it was an ordinary hour of an ordinary night, and he was entirely inside it. He did not glance once at the boards on the far wall. He did not reach for the old notebook. He let the case be a thing that lived in another room, and he chopped what she told him to chop and scorched what she left in his charge and let her laugh at him for it, and somewhere in the middle of it he understood that this was the work now too. Not only reading the old life. Living this one, all the way down, while he had it.

After supper he did a thing he had not planned. He took a clean notebook out of the desk drawer, a new one, unmarked, nothing in it yet. The old one was full of grief, the record of a death and everything the smoke had dragged up out of it, and it had done its work and could rest. This one would be different. He uncapped the pen and sat with it a moment, and then he wrote three words across the top of the first page, in the careful hand he saved for the things that mattered, and under them he began, slowly, to set down not the tragedy but the life. The Fridays and the flowers. The pecans. The green door. The whole of what they had built and were building again, kept now not as evidence of a wound but as the record of a love that two deaths and a hundred years had not managed to end.

Our Life Together.

He looked at the three words for a long time before he wrote another line beneath them. For three weeks the notebook in his desk had been a ledger of everything he had lost, opened each night to be added to, closed each night a little heavier. This new one weighed nothing at all. It was not a record of loss anymore. It had become, page by careful page, a record of a life come back to him. The old notebook he would keep, because grief was part of the truth too and he would not pretend it away. But this was the one he would read to her someday, when she could bear the whole of it, the entire life set down in his own hand, proof that it had been real and that he had never once stopped keeping it. He sat in the lamplight and wrote, and for the first time since the first fire he was not afraid of what the next page would hold. He was only glad to be the one who got to write it.

TWENTY-THREE

He spent the morning with the new notebook, the one that held the life instead of the loss, and he did with it what he could no longer stop himself from doing. He built the timeline. He set every recovered memory in its place along the line of a single vanished year, and he stood back from it, and he saw how nearly whole it had become. There were gaps still, months he did not have, small ordinary weeks she had not yet handed back. But the shape of it was all there now, beginning to end, or nearly to the end. A life he could read straight through. It astonished him, laid out like that. He had lived it once and mourned it for a century and had never, in all that time, been able to see the whole of it at once. She was giving him that. She was giving him back his own life in order, and she did not even know that was what she was doing.

He read the timeline through twice, and both times the same thing struck him hardest. It was not the drama in it, the fire at the end or the tragedy standing in the last pages. It was the plainness of everything before it. A whole life, and almost none of it remarkable. Suppers and Fridays and arguments about pianos, a green door and a saved dress and a hundred small faithful kindnesses done and returned. That was what a life turned out to be, laid end to end. That was what the fire had taken from them, not a grand destiny but a long ordinary happiness, and it was the ordinariness of it that undid him every single time.

He asked her about it over coffee, because he had been circling the question for days and could not leave it alone any longer.

“When they come,” he said carefully. “The memories. I need to ask you something, and you can take as long as you want with it.” He turned his cup in his hands. “Do they feel like someone else's life? Something you are watching, borrowed, happening to a stranger you can see very clearly. Or do they feel like yours?”

She did not answer quickly. She held the question and turned it over, giving it the honesty it asked for, and when she finally spoke she chose the words one at a time.

“At first they felt borrowed,” she said. “Like standing in a house that belonged to someone else and recognizing the furniture. It frightened me, that recognition. I kept thinking, this is not mine, I am wearing someone else's life.” She looked down into her coffee. “But that isn't how it feels anymore. Somewhere along the way it changed. Now when one comes, it doesn't feel like visiting a stranger's house. It feels like coming home to my own and finding a room I'd forgotten I had.” She lifted her eyes to his. “They feel like mine now, Bastien. Not borrowed. Not someone else's. Home.”

It went through him and rearranged a thing in him he had not known was still standing. He had spent all these weeks braced against a single fear he had never quite said aloud, that the memories were replacing her, that day by day Delia was coming back and Delphine was being pushed out, that he would look up one morning and the woman he had fallen in love with in this century would be gone, buried under a hundred-year-old ghost. It was not happening. It had never been happening. Delia was not returning to shove Delphine aside. Delphine was taking Delia into herself, the whole of that lost life, the joy and the grief and the ordinary devoted months, and becoming not less herself for it but more. She was not being erased. She was being completed. Whoever she had always been, the woman with the unexplained ache and the homesickness for a person she had never met, she was finally being handed the reason for it, and she was folding it into herself and coming out larger. He had been mourning a loss that was actually a homecoming, and he had almost missed it for grief.

He set his coffee down and came around the table and pulled her up out of her chair and held her, there in the morning kitchen, for no reason she could see. She laughed against his chest and asked what that was for, and he gave her as much of the truth as he could, that he had spent a long time afraid of losing her to this, and had only just understood he was not going to. She did not know the whole shape of what he meant. She held him anyway, patient with the parts of him he could not yet explain, and let it be enough that he had needed her to.

Maya's call came at midafternoon, and this time when he drove to the fire he did not go to hunt for magic in it. He had given that up. He went for the other reason now, the only reason left that mattered, and it was standing in the passenger seat with her hand on his knee. He went to watch her.

The ninth fire had taken a corner storefront in a neighborhood he did not know well, and by the time they arrived the working of it had become almost routine between him and Maya, an easy grim rhythm the two of them had built without ever discussing it. She took the evidence. He took the people, and today, in truth, he took only one of them. He stood Delphine well back and stationed himself at her shoulder and did not so much as glance at the burned building. He watched her face instead, watched the smoke drift toward them across the lot, watched for the exact moment the door in her opened, so that this time he might see it happen from the inside.